Toto

Well, this gets to the crux of it. How are you going to follow Jesus if you can't figure out who he really was?

Are you going to give away all your possessions and wander around preaching that the Kingdom of God is at hand, like the crazy street preachers?

Are you going to devote your life to helping the sick and the poor? (Note that the most effective way of helping the sick and the poor involves the use of science and medicine that Jesus never knew about, that won't be found in the Bible.)

Are you going to follow the Jewish rituals and keep all of the 613 commandments?

Or are you going to do what modern cafeteria Christians do, and adopt some watered down Christian ethics to keep your modern consumer life style from descending completely into meaningless materialism, without changing anything significant about how you make your living or spend your money?

If any of those choices constituted a meaningful life, why would it matter what Jesus did or said? Wouldn't the proof be in the benefits of the actual practices?

Toto

Neil Godfrey has a blog entry that seems pertinent: “Most critical scholars” confusing plot setting and character constructs with historical fact

Read more there.

bacht

I'm not going to go through all these points, others here are better at it than me. A couple of thoughts:

People have been "harmonizing" the gospels for over 1500 years. I guess that's okay if you believe in a magical messiah who appeared differently to different witnesses (one theory I've heard). Don't forget that the canonical gospels are only four among many that appeared from the 2nd C onwards.

If one doesn't believe in supernaturalism then what exactly is left in the New Testament? You've got a teacher who gets executed, and his friends create a new social organization tenuously connected to the old Jewish religion. One can argue that because Christianity developed into an important religious institution then there must have been something remarkable in its origins. This is not logically necessary.

Christianity allegedly started among Jewish apocalypticists, who psychologically seem to be fringe personalities. The credibility of such people is not high imo. This is another reason why the lack of external collaboration is a problem.

Kapyong

Gday,

It's funny how people get this sentence form wrong so often.

Clearly, aa actually means :
"not all scholars conclude JESUS was a figure of history"

But his sentence reall means :
"All scholars conclude JESUS was not a figure of history"
Which is obviously incorrect.


It's a very common mistake.
Note the emphasis on "NOT". If you heard him speak it, there would also be emphasis on "all".

Like so:
"But, ALL scholars do NOTconclude JESUS was a figure of history."

By emphasizing the "ALL" and the "NOT", the speaker imagines these two words are connected together, so that the meaning changes to:

"Not all..."

But it doesn't work that way.


K.

andrewcriddle

To say that the (limited) modifications of NT texts which have left evidence in the textual tradition support the existence of much larger modifications which have not left such evidence seems wrong.

In order for it to be plausible I think you would have to present evidence of systematic attempts by the church to get rid of manuscripts with a variant text. Outside of Syria there is little evidence of such attempts.

Andrew Criddle

ercatli

SNM, thanks for your responses. There is so much there, as well as so many other people to respond to, that I have to do some "triage". So I will concentrate on this, effectively your summary.

I agree with your comments here and elsewhere that history isn't certain. But that applies to both believers and disbelievers, and taken to a logical extreme, we'd all tend toward unbelief (which of course is not the same as disbelief), which is apparently your position. But we are both coming to conclusions and discussing them, so we each make the best of what we have.

I don't agree that it makes much difference that Jesus didn't write anything down. The arguments we see about authorship of the gospels, the doubts some people have about the authorship of Shakespeare, all suggest that the written word is not irrefutable. But again, we must make the best of what we have.

In the end, I think it is a choice that is based on things far away from the actual evidence. I'd be interested to explore this with you. From what you say here, you think we can know little so you prefer to conclude little. I guess logically you would disagree equally with those who hold strong positions of historical Jesus and Jesus myth?

I must be a somewhat different type of person, or have made a different choice somewhere along the line. I don't want to die wondering, as the saying goes. I want to make a choice, and live according to that choice, as whole-heartedly as I can. I think the choice is quite clear. The philosophical arguments about God and the historical evidence for Jesus lead me to conclude that the stories about him are more true than false, and so I am willing to jump to belief, because it is more reasonable than disbelief (for me) and more satisfying than sitting on the fence.

Do you agree with me, then that our respective conclusions are influenced by these aspects of our respective characters? if so, then the message would surely be that discussing the historical evidence will be unlikely to go anywhere, and the only profitable way forward, if at all, would be to discuss agnostic scepticism as a state of mind vs positive choice as a way of mind. (Not sure about those descriptions, but I'm sure you know what I mean!)

In light of those comments, I won't comment paragraph by paragraph, but just touch on a few points in the rest of your post.

I still don't think so, and an easy test can demonstrate this. If good archaeological evidence showed that Nazareth did not exist as a town/location at the time of Jesus, would not this lead some people, perhaps most people, to suggest this showed the gospels were historically inaccurate? (In fact, you know this is the case!) So then, if good archaeological evidence showed that Nazareth was indeed a town at the time of Jesus, this would stem those criticisms, and thereby show the gospels to be, relatively at least, more historically accurate.

I have commented on this many times here. I have read the historians outline their methods, as no doubt you have. I have my doubts about some methods (I think many NT historians are too sceptical, an opinion shared by non-NT specialists like Grant and others) - I think I'm more willing to accept the plain reading and reporting of a text - but I use their findings because they provide a lowest common denominator based on good expertise. No-one so far, on this thread or elsewhere, has offered me any good reason to do otherwise. Most people, frankly, seem to want to avoid the historical analysis for idealogical reasons. If that sounds too strong, think of how you would feel when a fundamentalist refuses the accept what historians say.

But enough, if we continue our discussion, I think the points I raised above about personal approach would be the most useful to explore.

Thanks and best wishes.

aa5874

Who are "these people" that get my sentence wrong?

Funny, you did not get it wrong.

Toto

I get tired of repeating myself, but this is FALSE.

If Nazareth did not exist in Jesus time, it is just one more historical inaccuracy on a minor point. Everyone except the strictest fundamentalist accepts these sort of mistakes; you yourself have no problem with some inaccuracies or metaphors. So if Nazareth did not exist, Jesus still might have.

And conversely, if Nazareth did not exist, this does nothing to show that the gospels are accurate on any other point. After all, we know that Jerusalem and Rome existed, but that does not prove the existence of Jesus, or Romulus or Remus.

What "others?" Why do you keep dragging Grant into this?

When have you ever indicated that you have any knowledge of historical methodology?

You've been given a lot of reasons, which you refuse to examine. Most of the people you call historians are not practicing history - they are theologians or literary critics.

aa5874

It would appear that you may be expecting a reward from your God for propagating an historical Jesus. You may want to go to heaven when you die to live with Jesus.

Now, how many so-called scholars want to go to meet Jesus and expect to be rewarded with eternal life in heaven?

I get the impression that you may very well think, and possibly be terrified, that you may burn in hell or be eternally tormented if you admit that Jesus was more than man, that is, he was a mythological man.

You appear to have a motive for your claim that Jesus did exist.

By the way, what do think will happen to you if you believed in the wrong God and found out after you died, if that is at all possible, when you were warned while you were alive?

gurugeorge

This seems to be similar to Robert Price's argument - if one after another of the tropes in the Jesus story can be found elsewhere as mythical elements in other stories, or can be shown to be internal midrashic necessities, how the hell can you decide that any of it can amount to evidence about some human being who actually lived?

i.e. Price says, what you have is this kind of situation: suppose you divide the Christ story into 3 parts, A, B, and C. Then:-

Scholar 1, specialising in A, decides that part A is mythical, but B and C are okay, are historical
Scholar 2, specialising in B, decides that part B is mythical, but A and C are okay, are historical.
Scholar 3, specialising in C, decides that part C is mythical, but A and B are okay, are historical.

Each is plowing his own furrow, specialising in one aspect, not noticing that if you take the totality of the scholarly work, some scholar somewhere has shown that just about every element of the story is mythical (in the broadest sense), and any historical human being has totally disappeared from the picture (not that this proves he doesn't exist, but that the mythological elements, taken together, TOTALLY OBSCURE any potential historicity).

Meanwhile, the irony is, it still looks, to the outside observer, like "the consensus is that he was a historical figure".