Ted Hoffman

Philadelphia Lawyer,
You are doing a great job in challenging Weimer's fallacious argument and false analogy. Keep up the good work.
I am sure Chris is reevaluating his stand on the matter as we speak. Just stick to the arguments like you are doing.

TH

Chris Weimer

Because many people think Jesus is significant today does not mean that many found him significant then. And why not narrow it down to when he was supposed to have existed? No opinion in the present should have an affect on how he was perceived then. And furthermore, he probably wasn't thought of as truly God until well later. Mark certainly doesn't have Jesus as God, and Matthew appears ambiguous, and this is 40-50 years after his supposed death.

As for writings before Paul, we really should expect none. As anyone can tell you by perusing the NT, most of the early Christians, and I would even extend this to nearly all, thought that the parousia was imminent. To them, life was going to end soon, thus they needed to get the word out to as many people as possible, thus making the early religion evangelical. The fact that we don't see any writing until a starkly different message preached from a radical appears is telling.

Well, Paul mentions actually meeting Cephas and James, and also tells us of the third pillar John and then the Twelve, probably a group of people who stood for the twelve tribes of Israel. Beyond that, we really don't know much about the apostles, having not survived antiquity.

As you can tell from his most recent post, Ted seems to have nothing further to say.

Chris Weimer

As usual, Ted chimes in with the worthless comment. Like I said - what can I expect...

Ted Hoffman

Come on Chris, be nice now...

jjramsey

Are you suggesting that the Synoptic gospels were written to counter Paul?

Chunk

From the view point of someone outside of this arguement, your posts do seem very angry and aimed personally at Chris.

It seems more like you are trying to attack what Chris is saying, rather than reply to his points.

I have no reason to side with one of you over the other, thats just the feeling I get when reading this thread.

Ted Hoffman

Chuck,
Now that Chris has lost the argument, tell him to try to be nice - huh?

Llyricist

ummmm where are his points if not contained in what he is saying? Or did you mean to say something else?

GakuseiDon

Hi Phil. I'm afraid I have to tell you that Ted Hoffman is agreeing with you -- always a bad sign, and perhaps an indication that you may need to have another look at the issue.

I also think you are misunderstanding Chris's point. It isn't an argument for historicity, but against an item that Spenser brought up, i.e. that we need to know "where Jesus went and what he actually did". Chris used his example about his grandfather against that point, and not to prove historicity.

The argument can be made as a number of questions:

1. Do we know much about Chris's grandfather?
2. Are we reasonably sure that he lived?
3. From that, can we say we need to know where Chris's grandfather went and what he did to establish historicity?

If your answers are: no, yes (via logical deduction), no, then you agree with Chris.

The parallel to Jesus:

1. Do we know much about Jesus? No.
2. Are we reasonably sure that he lived? Chris (and me for that matter) say 'yes' from the hints provided in Paul.
3. From that, can we say we need to know where Jesus went and what he did to establish historicity? No.

I know you may disagree with (2), and that is where arguments for historicity come in. But note that Chris isn't arguing for historicity in this example, it's just to address a minor point by Spenser. IMHO, to make it sound like Chris is using this to show historicity makes it into a strawman.

The Bishop

Hello everyone. My real nom-de-forum is Silas, but that didn't appear to be available here. I don't know if name changes are available or anything. Anyway, think of The Bishop from Monty Python, because I'm not actually a Christian or any kind of religious believer.

Wow. This issue seems to be a whole lot more complicated than the discussions I was having on sciforums which led me to join this place! A whole lot too complicated, maybe. Earl Doherty's speculations about Paul's supposed view of what heavens there were, and what "realm" the events of Jesus's life were supposed to have taken place in, look just like the hallmarks of the "pet theory". You can't argue with them because there's no evidence in favour or against, but I myself prefer to disregard what is purely speculation, when trying to determine the truth. If you say to yourself "There was no Jesus Christ. So how do we interpret Paul's writings?" then you could easily come up with that hypothesis. But then your hypothesis is always going to meet the conclusion you are trying to get to. If the truth of the matter was that Jesus was a historical person that Paul knew about from, at the very least, oral tradition, then Paul's beliefs about Heavenly beings becomes irrelevant - which in my view disqualifies it as any kind of "evidence" for the MJ hypothesis. But I hasten to add that I'm not nearly well enough read in the subject yet.

I accept the likelihood of an HJ because it's simply so much likelier than a mythology-made-human and turned into at least one biographical account written well within the lifetimes of people contemporaneous with Jesus - not something that can be said about any stories genuinely held to be mythological, whether it's Moses and Abraham, or King Arthur and Robin Hood.

Well, not to put too fine a point on it, it wasn't the world of the celebrity biography, where you can read a book detailing the "life achievements" of someone barely out of their twenties! What is reasonably certain is that the apostles were telling the story of Jesus orally in order to make their converts. Paul knew the stories from when he persecuted Christians, but he did not himself become a Christian because of the stories, he had an hallucination during an epileptic attack. Paul seems (in his eyes) to have spoken to the Risen Jesus speaking to him (inevitably) straight out of Heaven - Paul's own Christianity then had no need of the Gospel stories of Jesus's life, because as far as he was concerned he had already seen the proof of everything that was claimed about Jesus.

That the tales grew in the telling is hardly surprising, whether Jesus was historical or not.

As to the reliability of the Gospel tales, I personally hold a great many more of them as possibly being based in truth than the run-of-the-mill atheist, skeptic or other non-Christian. We can easily dismiss the Virgin birth, and the inconsistent Nativity tales. Other than that we can dismiss the Ascension (a story also, crucially, missing from Mark). Everything else, however - being due to autosuggestion, placebo effect and of course selective reporting - is perfectly possible, up to and including the "Resurrection" - if Jesus never died in the first place.

I actually don't see this at all? It seems to me that it's not an uneducated rabble (elitist!) that found Jesus's philosophical and theological ideas to be attractive, but rather those who were in fact intelligent and moderately well read, particularly in Jewish scriptures and teaching. Jesus was a radical thinker, not a rabble rouser.

"Did the apostles exist?" This seems to me to be a question about who the founders of Christianity were. I mean, obviously Christianity exists - therefore it had a beginning - therefore it was founded by somebody. It is not clear to me why the "reasonable" viewpoint holds it equally likely that the founders of Christianity were the real people being written about, or that the "real" founders of Christianity made up a lot of fictional people and then told stories about them. It seems much likelier to be the former, so why not hold that as the rational opinion? Not forgetting that the time lapse between the tales of their doings, in Paul and in the Acts, is even less than that between Christ's crucifiction and the writings. Paul's writings about the Apostles, in contrast to the Gospel accounts, were very far from hagiographic, indeed he records having serious disagreements with Peter and James. Which I can imagine they must have found galling, this bloke telling them what the nature of Jesus was really when they were the ones who knew Jesus!

There are a lot of questions that say, "How is it that details of the Gospel tales only appear after the Gospels are well known?" - well, I for one wouldn't expect any different. You only make reference to something specific (particularly in a Scripture-driven religion) when ones interlocutors (heretic churches let's say) can check the accounts for themselves, and also when a large enough period has passed so that people's primary source for the Gospel tales are the written accounts in preference to oral tradition. Otherwise, they are not concerned with the actual events of Christ's life, but what his life meant for personal salvation. Paul, specifically, was clearly more interested in what Jesus was - Son of God, promise of redemption and eternal life through faith in Him - rather than who he was, as a Jewish teacher who was crucified after having criticised the Jewish authorities. And like I say, his faith came through personal revelation (or delusion if you wish) rather than having heard the Gospel story from Christians and having been convinced by it.

I'm not suggesting, by the way, that because the early Church fathers and Paul were not concerned with the specific events in order to proclaim their message, that that increases the evidence for Jesus's existence. My point is to show that those apparent lacunae do not really bolster the myth position, and that consequently the belief in his existence is left neutral from that point of view. I still say, however, that the creation of a fictional person on which to hang an astonishing philosophical and theosophical turnaround - and to set that fiction well within the lifetimes of people who supposedly knew the events (or their non-occurrence) first hand, is simply far less likely than the idea that a real man Jesus, Galilean carpenter turned itinerant preacher and healer, and crucified or hanged for sedition, really existed and affected the lives of real people some of whom survived into the late 1st Century and could talk to "historical researchers" like Mark and Luke.