jjramsey

I was addressing what Clivedurdle said, "HJ makes far more sense as a character invented for the purposes of the story." If Jesus were invented, one would expect him to be a more natural fit to the categories assigned to him--but he's a bad fit to them. One should also at least expect an inventor not to promise what he knows he can't deliver, namely the end of the world.

Actually, they aren't obviously pure inventions. There is prophecy in the OT that any Jew could have construed as saying the Messiah would be born in Bethlehem, but nothing pertaining to Nazareth. So why bother with Nazareth at all? Why, indeed, do we have Jesus the Nazarene and not Jesus the Bethlehemite? And if his being a Nazarene had nothing to do with him being from Nazareth, isn't it an odd coincidence that there is a Nazareth from which Jesus could have come?

I don't. However, I don't assume that they were blithering idiots, either. It is a lot easier for a made-up personage to be made conformant to prophecy than it is to stretch prophecy to fit a real person.

jjramsey

Actually, this isn't true. Personages like Odysseus are probably mythical, but legends also grew up around real personages like Alexander the Great and various Roman emperors. Philostratus' Life of Apollonius is an account of the life of Apollonius of Tyana that is even more fanciful than the Gospels (which takes some doing!), yet more likely than not, it is about a real man who lived around the latter half of the first century. Given this, we cannot assume a story and its personages are wholly mythical simply because there are supernatural elements, or even a lot of them.

Spenser

From what I understand the Nazareth of today isn't the Nazareth of then. Maybe back then they used to call the shitty section of Bethlehem Nazareth Alley or something...

Clivedurdle

Why assume this?

It looks very much like it was written by a committee over the centuries! Oh we need to emphasise this aspect, chuck a story in about that. It evolved - that is too smooth a word - staggered, bits stuck to the story?

Look more closely at the psychology, the gnosis, the end of the world stuff. It has all been recycled from earlier stories. It hits the button about bringing together heaven and earth - the classic aim of alchemy, the philosopher's stone, eternal life!


Is there any doubt that the passion narrative is a play? The author may or may not be a Seneca or a Mary, but there are stage directions in there!

The reality is Arthur is more likely to have existed!

No Robots

Spoken like a true Englishman!

gstafleu

Agreed, and we could probably throw Pythagoras into that mix as well. That's why I made the point that we have to decide which Jesus model we are trying to see as historical. If it is some reduced itinerant priest version, sure, that is a reasonable proposition (whether it is true or not, that's a differrent issue).

But such a stripped down model is not what Christianity is about, and hence it is not what the HJ-MJ debate should be about. That debate should be about the historicity of the full-fledged wonder man, and such wonder men are generally supposed to be mythical.

It might be of some scholarly interest to figure out what the minimax Jesus is. By that I mean: what are the maximum number of attributes of a minimalist Jesus that the evidence can reasonably be seen to support. I think that is what the Jesus Seminar tried to do, so maybe the list of red sayings and the conclusion about the HJ on this wikipedia page give some idea of what a minimax (maximin?) Jesus could look like.

But that should be a different debate than the MJ-HJ debate. Primarily because a minimax Jesus cannot serve as a basis for Christianity. Secondarily because it stops the shifting of the goal posts from where they should be (whole wheat Jesus) to something that the evidence can perhaps support but isn't religiously relevant (Jesus lite), while still claiming, if only perhaps by unconcious implication, that it is religiously relevant. I suspect it is that shifting of the goalposts that makes the MJ-HJ debate so confusing at times, and firmly anchoring them where they should be should help the debate.

jjramsey

I think you must have misread or misremembered something. What are your sources?

In which case, you aren't talking about invention per se, but as you said, evolution. The problem is that the Gospels don't look like they evolved "over the centuries." If they did, I'd expect the Jesus of the Gospels to look more timeless, datable only vaguely within that range of centuries, rather than within the first three centuries of the first century, much as, say, Hercules is only vaguely datable to somewhere in the distant past.

Offhand, I'd say you are reading the "stage directions" into the text. Care to cite verses that are stage directions?

Spenser

Well, the Alley thing was a joke but doesn't the geography described in the bible not match that of Nazareth today? I'll try and find where I read this...

jjramsey

I think I know what you mean now. Nazareth is built on the slope of a hill, but it doesn't have the cliffs off of which someone could be easily pushed, so the geography described in verses 4:29-30 of Luke's story of Jesus' rejection at Nazareth isn't quite right. This isn't that much of a surprise, since if you compare Luke's version of the story with the one in Mark 6:1-6, you can see that Luke is being, to put it politely, "creative," so it's not so surprising that his geography is "creative" as well. Offhand, it looks to me like Luke was aware that Nazareth was somewhere on a hill, but overextrapolated from that.

Malachi151

An important thing to remember is that the Jesus story was written mostly by Greeks ("gentiles") and targeted towards non-Jews, which is why the story does not follow all of the Jewish lines of thought, especially the latter written books.