Sheshbazzar

But all of that Dated and Documented information and evidence is very inconvienent to the HJ theory, so must all be discounted and discarded by the HJ theorists to give their theory any semblence of traction.

Tom Sawyer

Ya, that's not in anyway related to what I'm talking about. By an HJ position, I mean that the stories about Jesus are based on a real person with all the mythological crap added on. There was some guy and the stories about him were souped up over the years to turn him into a messiah figure, but the basis of them was a real person as opposed to the story being wholely fictional from the start.

The easiest parallel is the King Arthur stories. There are some who say that Athur was a Roman general in England and the stories about him were changed and altered over the years to what we have today and even though the current incarnation of the character is wholely unrelated to the real person, there was an actual historical figure from whom the character was drawn and there are some decent rationales to accept this. That would be a Historical Arthur position as compared to a Mythical Arthur position whereby someone just wrote a story that took off. The fact that he never had a magic sword, was never a king, never had the Knights of the Round Table, never went looking for the Holy Grail, etc doesn't change the fact that there is a historical basis for the character and Arthur actually existed.

It's the same thing with the Historical Jesus position. That doesn't mean that one takes the Bible as a factual or even partially factual account. If there was a historical basis to the Jesus character and people started adding fictional elements to it and changing the story to make him into an Osiris-like being who sacrificed himself for the sake of the world and they worked a Roman trial into it to give the story that element, then you've got yourself an HJ. Not even Christians think that Jesus's name was actually Jesus and some or none of the actual events in his life could have made it into the story we have today. All you need is a real person at the beginning and you have yourself a HJ.

Horatio Parker

Or Jay's post about Barnabus/Dracula/Jesus

Sheshbazzar

Arthur did not perform much in the way of extraordinary miraculous feats, and his claim to fame does not rest primarily upon extrordinary inhuman and unatural miraculous feats.

A better parallel is the Pecos Bill mythos. If you extract all of the fantastic and mythical elements of Pecos Bill, can you arrrive at an individual real cowboy that was the basis of all of the mythology?

Tom Sawyer

Ya, but that's overextending the analogy. The point is that that there's a real person with fictional elements added on. It doesn't matter if those fictional elements took off more in the later versions of the story to the point that they completely subsumed the historical elements and the story became unrecognizable as compared to what actually happened.

Sheshbazzar

By similar rationale one would likewise have to accept that Zeus, Jupiter, Baal, Quetzaquotal, and a thousand other imaginary deities were once actual livng persons.

arnoldo

IMHO, the parallel argument would be regarding the person of Julian the Apostate.


Adam, perhaps the only consensus possible is that that the message of the cross is foolishness (Corinthians 1:18 ) whether this message began in the first century or later. . .

Tom Sawyer

Not really. I fail to see how those would be relatable.

Sheshbazzar

You postulate a real Jebus must have existed based upon the fact that the mythology exists.
A similar argument would equally hold for any other mythlogical figure.

Tom Sawyer

Right, but in the case of Jesus we have a story where a guy is living in the time and place where the stories about him come from. In the case of Zeus and Baal, you have personifications of forces of nature. There's no reason to tie them back to mortal men and no aspects of their stories which suggest that it could be the case. The argument could, of course, be made but it's not anywhere near even the same ballpark as the arguments about a Historical Jesus.