No Robots

Paul's problem was that he was trying to establish his credibility as an apostle who had never actually met Jesus. Of course he is going to minimize the importance of fleshly connections against spiritual insight. And, of course, he was quite right to do so.

jjramsey

Yet much of the Gospel of Mark is built from the kind of short, self-contained stories that are easily orally transmitted.

This is not quite true. Paul refers to Peter and James as if who they were was common knowledge to the Galatians and the Corinthians, and the Pillars themselves are in Jerusalem. That is a fair bit of geographical spread. The Pillars are also central leaders of the movement. Given this, it is unlikely that the Pillars were unfamiliar to most Christians.

Not if doing so was a blatant anachronism, which it would be if Jesus were in the distant past. Even if you want to quibble about "distant past" versus "misty past," a misty past implies a time in the past that is hard to pin down but still thought of as being long ago.

That would only be a glaring omission if it were reasonable to expect that Paul should bring that up.

gurugeorge

Yeah, but how many people are buying into that? Do those movements look like they have legs?

Given jj's original point about an HJ being the best explanation for the movement, the point of the comparison is between the respective likelihoods of, on the one hand, an obscure preacher being deified in a Jewish context and that movement spreading, or on the other hand, a Jewish version of the then-common personal-salvation God-Man motif (based on the Messiah figure, natch, because Jews didn't have godlets like the pagans) spreading and accruing pseudo-historical details as it goes. Granted the same level of human stupidity in both contexts, which is more likely?

I should add here that which you think is more likely probably partly depends on what you understand about religion in general, and what you've experienced of what religious cults are like. In my younger, more religiously and sociologically curious days, I investigated all sorts, from scientology to UFO cults. There are thousands of cultlets around today, many (probably most) of which are originated in someone getting a "message" of some kind from a purported discarnate intelligence. That's how it's always been, that's (mostly) how people do religion. Islam is like that, many ancient Greek cults were like that (e.g. the Oracles). Even Buddhism has it (e.g. the Vajrayana), even Daoism has it (e.g. the origins of the Celestial Masters sect). When you look at how prevalent this mode of religious origin is, it makes the MJ hypothesis by far the most likely starting hypothesis (especially granted the undecidability of which HJ of the many possible HJs is supported by non-partisan evidence).

Amaleq13

Has that been confirmed by actual studies of oral traditions?

It is my understanding that lists have been shown to be the most easily and reliably transmitted orally but stories tend to change quite a bit.

Amaleq13

I hope not though there is the natural selection factor benefit to consider.

Scientology is probably a better example of sheer nonsense demonstrating sustainability over time despite being sheer nonsense.

An HJ is certainly easier to imagine but I'll leave assigning probability statements to Carrier who will apparently be doing just that when he writes his book in a few years.

jjramsey

This isn't quite correct. The initial exaltation was certainly in a Jewish context (and had the treatments of Moses and Enoch as precedents), but as I noted before, even Paul seemed to regard Jesus as second-in-command. (You seem to keep ignoring 1 Cor. 15:28.). Full deification seems to occur later. It is not as if an HJ requires that the original disciples deify Jesus.

The crucial objection to this is that such a motif could have been imposed on a pre-existing person as part of the process of embellishment and exaltation. It is not, strictly speaking, correct to pit this against an HJ in the first place. On top of this, the evidence for such a "personal-salvation God-Man motif" is lacking; a lot of game-playing and cookery gets involved in the "pagan Christ" stuff.

The real question is which is more likely: That Jesus was portrayed as a crucified first-century Galilean from Nazareth because he existed and had those not-so flattering or messianic characteristics, or that an originally mythical Jesus had these characteristics added onto him even though they were of dubious utility?

I didn't say the traditions were transmitted reliably, only that they are in the kind of "packaging," in this case a self-contained story, that we would expect from oral tradition. Oral tradition tends to keep the outline but mutate in the details, as Goodacre pointed out in his somewhat tongue-in-cheek article "The Tale of Theresa Banyan," and we certainly see that phenomenon in the Gospels. The feedings of the 5000 and 4000 are variants of the same story, as are the stories of the healing of the centurion's servant and the healing of the son of the Syro-phonecian woman. My point was that the Gospels show signs of having been built up from oral tradition.

Amaleq13

I didn't say you did and reliability wasn't part of my question which I note you did not actually answer.

The point of my question is to determine whether you have any scholarly basis for this claim or if it simply a subjective opinion.

Are you aware of any reliable methodology that allows one to identify whether a text or a portion of a text was derived from oral tradition?

J-D

I can understand that. I hope you can understand that, without disrespecting Carrier's scholarship, I am not currently disposed simply to allow his judgement to guide mine. But I'm not going to argue that you shouldn't, if that's how you feel.

J-D

And likewise if those earlier records were unflattering, not necessarily to Jesus, but to the doctrinal conceptions of later Christianity about Jesus himself and on other subjects. In other words, if the Christian movement was hijacked by Paul and others as a vehicle for propagating doctrines significantly different from the original doctrines of Jesus and his earliest followers, they would have a clear motive for not preserving full and accurate original accounts.

J-D

But the question 'was there a real King Arthur?' is a reasonable one, and the answer 'Yes' is not obviously impossible. There may have been a real King Arthur, although obviously most of the legends about him can't be true.