Triple Six

I voted insufficient data though I lean towards the mythical Jesus. The gospels are obvious myth, but deep down there may have been a minor league rabble rouser who the stories have been hung on. I don't think we will know for sure either way.

In the end I don't think it matters, the feats claimed in the gospels are clearly untrue.

Chili

There has to be some figure that they hung this thing on and that same figure was crucified by the Romans (is reason) and was convicted by the Jews in effort to set this Galilean free from religion. That is an absolute necessity but it was not a physical event. The argument with the pharisees was real and so was his expulsion from their midst. It is the final argument with Judaism that wrought him clean.

DBT

Don't the catholics claim a continuous history to their St Peters basilica site, from the point that Peter was crucified?

I think the story goes that his immediate followers built a small chapel on the site shortly after the event and that it was succesively built upon.

If that's true wouldn't it give some credibility to there being a historical 'Jesus'?

Epictetus

I would be very careful swallowing ANYTHING proposed by an attorney. In fact, it is probably good advice to take the opposite viewpoint, no matter what it is, if an attorney tells you something.

sodium

I'm fairly convinced that there was a Christian movement, probably even a Jesus movement that predated the idea of the historical man-god. But then there are two possibilities. Either some sect for reasons of temperament of theology decided to create a story of a historical existence for a Christ figure, or else some sect decided to attach the pre-existing theology to a particular martyred leader of their sect. I doubt that at this point there is any way to tell which happened.

Doherty might say that the sect would have had to be Jewish, or operating in a Jewish milieu, and therefore would have been loathe to make a historical man divine. But I kind of doubt the Jewishness of the early Christians. I think its quite likely that the early Christians have a similar relationship to Judaism that a New Age spiritualist might have to Native Indian beliefs. They are familiar with Judaism, but not necessarily devoted to it in the spirit in which it was intended. Rather, they use it for the needs of their own culture.

Another problem is that the Christians seem to have eliminated the actual biography of the man they deified. Shouldn't there have been a greater desire to maintain an accurate record of the words and deeds of so important a figure? But it might have been that the temptation to deify a man had become so great that the individual didn't matter a great deal. And the ancient mind just doesn't seem to have been well-suited to accurate record keeping.

show_no_mercy

That's what I think as well. It should also be noted that the Judaism of today is slightly, if not moreso, different than the Judaism of circa 1 CE.

norma98026

I'm interested several issues you brought up, sodium:
1. Were the early followers of Jesus Jewish?
2. Is it likely that Jewish people would claim that a man was divine?
3. How accurate were the Jewish scribes at copying the manuscripts?

According to the NT, most of the early followers were Jewish and openly so, e.g. Matthew, Mark, John, Peter, Nicodemus, and Paul. The followers observed Jewish customs and holidays such as Passover and Chanukkah, and they brought up points of the Jewish Law in discussions. Jewishness was such an important part of their lives that the early church leaders had a meeting to decide if it was okay for nonJews to become Christians without converting to Judaism first.

No, Jewish people would NEVER have claimed that a man became God. However, they could and did believe the reverse --> that God could become a man, because God can do anything he wants, as long as it doesn't violate his nature. Isaiah predicted that a son would be born who was Almighty God, the Everlasting Father.

Lastly, you said, "...the ancient mind just doesn't seem to have been well-suited to accurate record keeping."

Another view is that the scribes painstakingly copied and handed down manuscripts of the Hebrew Bible (OT), going so far as to keep a count of the letters on each page. The Dead Sea Scrolls and more recent discoveries support the accuracy of the OT. I got to see part of the book of Isaiah at an exhibit of the Dead Sea Scrolls loaned to the Pointe-ê-Callière, Montreal's museum of archeology and history, by the Israel Museum in Jerusalem about a year and a half ago. According to a CBS news report (http://www.cbc.ca/stories/2003/06/16/scrolls030616),
"Archeologists believe the scrolls were written around the time of Christ. They're considered the largest and oldest body of manuscripts relating to the Bible."

So also were the NT manuscripts handled with care. Jewish leaders from antiquity to today have never suggested that the NT writings are not accurate, nor have they purported that Jesus did not exist. In addition, historians such as Will Durant and Kenyon, the curator of the British Museum, testify to the authenticity of the NT manuscripts.

Gotta run. Thanks for the discussion.
Norma

Chili

That might be true but some(?) of their saints were even fictional characters. Who cares, really, if the historical Jesus doesn't count in a living faith where the hierarchy is in charge of its own destiny.

Diogenes the Cynic

If there was a Jesus then his followers were Jewish. They were not, however, Christians. Just disciples of a Jewish preacher.
No. And they didn't.
Very, but the NT (except for Paul) was not written by Jews.
None of the direct followers wrote anything. "Mark" is a legendary creation. Paul decided to dispense with the law.
Not true. Not remotely true. Sorry.
This is an incredibly specious tack. There is absolutely nothing in pre-Christian Jewish literature (or post-Christian, for that matter) that would suggest that Judaism had any belief in the possinility of human incarnation. It was extremely common in Greek tradition, however. Coincidence? Nope.
No he didn't.
What do you mean by "authenticity?" I don't understand what you think your point is. The Gospels were not written until a half century or more after the crucifixion and they were not written by anyone whoever clapped eyes on Jesus. In all likelihood, they were not written by anyone who even met anyone else who knew Jesus. The accuracy of the copiers is immaterial. They are not eyewitness accounts. Period.

sodium

As far as I know, and I'm not saying I am sure I won't be proved wrong here, but as far as I know the situation could be more accurately put as follows. If we take the NT as a fairly accurate record of an actual ministry, then we'd probably expect that his followers were Jews, and therefore would follow Jewish customs and observe Jewish holidays. But the NT doesn't, for example, actually mention that anyone observed Chanukkah. This is along the lines of people who claim that Jesus must have been married, because he was a Rabbi, and Rabbis had to be married. But this isn't really in the text.

I think it's pretty clear that the early Christians did see Jewish Law (Scripture) as important in some way, although there seems to be doubt about whether it should be followed as a code of conduct. The existing NT texts never seem to come down on the side of observance, although the Epistles suggest that an alternate view existed among Christians at one time. There's no doubt that the writers of the NT were extremely well versed on Hebrew scripture, though, just as many Christians are today.
I think the conventional wisdom is that these statements should be taken as names, not accurate titles.
I'm willing to accept that ancient people could accurately preserve a text. What is more questionable is whether they always chose to do so. The different versions of the NT, the scholarly consensus that large parts of it are additions, suggest that this wasn't the case with the Gospels. Matthew and Luke appear to be variations on Mark, with additional material from another document, which scholars called "Q". Matthew and Luke both use Mark and Q, but neither reproduces either document with great accuracy.

Furthermore, as jonesg points out, even the ancient historians whom we have some reason to trust can make significant mistakes.

Of course, there's a difference between preserving a text and preserving history.
Claiming that the NT writings are not accurate, in the sense of not being accurate reproductions of earlier writings is a pretty subtle criticism and would involve a lot of in depth knowledge of the movement. You'd have to be keeping better records of the Christians than they were keeping of themselves, or you would have to use modern techniques for analyzing texts.

My understanding is that the Jews had no particular way to know if Jesus existed, and probably found it more effective or satisfying just to make up an unflattering version of the Christian's tale. But what early Jewish works critical of Christianity are you thinking of that might contain this criticism? We know early Jews didn't all become Christians, but we have no record that I'm aware of that tells us why in their own words.

[added]
By "early" Jews, I of course meant Jews from the early days of the Christian religion, not Jews from the early days of the Jewish religion.