Steven Carr

All Messiahs are 'invented' Messiahs, as there is no such thing as a real Messiah.

I think Ehrman is claiming that people did invent Messiahs who were supposed to be conquering heroes, and these people really did exist. For example, the Egyptian who led a revolt.

But they failed in their attempts to overthrow Rome.

So Ehrman has it back to front. People who were supposed to be conquering heroes really did exist. They were not 'inventions'. A conquering hero was not the Messiah you would invent, as there were enough real people who wanted to play that role.

If you were to invent somebody who did not exist, you would find somebody in scripture, who then come and establish the Kingdom of God.

Even Ehrman has the honesty to concede that 1 Thessalonians has no talk of a second coming of Jesus, as Ehrman has to put the word 'second' in brackets when he writes about how Paul expected Jesus to appear. Even Ehrman couldn't find any second coming in Paul's letters.

Steven Carr

Jesus was a messianic claimant was he?

I thought he was supposed to be an apocalyptic prophet - an obscure person with a handful of followers.

The trouble with the historical Jesus is that there were so many of them, and different Jesus's get presented to us at different times, depending upon which hole in the historicist product needs to be papered over.

maryhelena

Indeed, a crucified man is "folly"; a crucified man is a disaster. Crucifixion of a flesh and blood man has no value whatsoever. So, 'Paul' went with the idea of an intellectual, a spiritual or philosophical 'crucifixion'. A change of context that allowed the idea of 'crucifixion' to be viewed as having a value. However, this idea of 'Paul's' does not negate, does not rule out, the very real possibility that the crucifixion of a flesh and blood man was very relevant to 'Paul's thinking. The Jerusalem 'above' is a reflection of the Jerusalem 'below'.

Indeed, such an earthly, physical, crucifixion of a man is an abomination - and has no value whatsoever. However, while it does not have any value - it can certainty have consequences.
Both, Earl, both. Scripture and history. History is the history of the last King and High Priest of the Jews, Antigonus. Bound to a cross, flogged and slain in 37 b.c.

Scripture? Daniel. Antigonus was killed 483 years (69 weeks) from the 2nd year of Darius in 521 b.c.

And so does your argument Earl; it falls down on this issue because you are only supporting a sub-lunar crucifixion scenario. History mattered to those early christian writers. It was not all pie in the sky.

outhouse

ah yes but only one died on a cross due to fighting against the roman infection in the temple and over taxation, and was made a martyr after his death

outhouse

jesus second coming was a later addition

it has nothing to dod with HJ or what he taught about the kingdom of god.

the kingdom of god is still debated on actually meaning and how it was preached.


we are talking about a time in which jews knew they could be wiped off the planet at any given time since they were a conquered people living in poverty while being heavily oppressed.

MrMacSon

Galatians 1 supports the premise that Paul & Co. were .. 'discovering' in scripture [the proposed Christian-messiah], through perceived revelation.

It is possible scripture was changing and evolving over several generations in several different locations.

ApostateAbe

Isaiah 53 was never apparently a messianic prophecy before Christianity, and it can be interpreted as a messianic prophecy only with considerable creativity--the suffering of the servant is in past tense, which Jews generally knew refers to the affliction of the nation of Israel at the hands of a foreign empire. When the passage switches to future tense, the myths of Jesus force him to fail at least one of the prophecies. Jesus never saw his offspring, because he never had any (verse 10). This is a big problem. A pure myth is expected to fulfill all of the prophecies, not just some of them. The myths they gave us are expected if Isaiah 53 was a passage that Christians had to scrounge around looking for and force-fit to Jesus. It was apparently not the starting point for the myth of Jesus.

Nevertheless, of course Isaiah 53 had a foundational effect on the Christian myths of Jesus, and it may have been exclusively responsible for the myths of the resurrection and the doctrine of sacrificial atonement.

ApostateAbe

I suspect that Jesus himself did not claim to be the messiah (he spoke of the "son of man" in third person), but I use the label of "messianic claimant" loosely. There is little relevant historical difference between someone who claims to be the messiah and someone who is claimed to have been the messiah by a movement he spawned.

Duvduv

Abe, that's exactly the point. People can be creative any way they like to find what they happen to be looking for. Whether that be Psalm 53 or anything else. They can pick and choose which prophecies they prefer. They can interpret things as they wish. Rabbinic Judaism has specific traditions for messianic prophecies, but obviously the early sects, including DSS disagreed.

Thus, in the case at hand, they could easily predict their suffering servant Messiah, which is why I don't understand Bart Ehrman's logic, aside from any empirical issues involved.

ApostateAbe

I think plausibility is important. We can either believe that Christianity followed typical patterns of the period or we can believe that Christianity was invented with many incredible strokes of ingenuity. If they started with a belief in a crucified messiah and they needed to fit him with "messianic" prophecies, then Isaiah 53 is strongly expected to be the passage that they would turn to, even if most of it is in past tense, the passage is not traditionally messianic, and their messiah did not have offspring. On the other hand, if instead they needed any sort of messiah, then Isaiah 53 would NOT be expected to be the passage they would turn to, and we know largely because Paul tells us explicitly, as Earl Doherty pointed out, that a tortured messiah was "a stumbling-block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles" (1 Corinthians 1:23). Slain messiahs were a periodic occurrence in first-century Palestine, and they were actual human beings, not mere myths.