John A. Broussard

I'm launching this thread because I find it very curious that so much is known about Jesus who lived 2000 years ago.

In contrast, Shakespeare lived 400 years ago and we know very little about him. Greenblatt's recent Will in the World is a case in point. While interesting, it turns out to be almost entirely speculation about the life of this author who has had a profound effect on the world--among both English and non-English speakers.

Jesus lived in a time when literacy was rare and writing practiced by relatively few. Shakespeare, instead, lived in a day when printing had been around for generations, literacy was spreading fast, and he was surrounded by a host of authors, playwrights and poets.

Given these differences in their cultural environments, we find that Jesus' life is retold in detail from descriptions of the manger where he was worshipped by shepherds, to his last words as he was dying--while we have raging arguments as to whether Shakespeare even wrote the plays and sonnets he is credited with.

The key difference between the two lives is, of course, the matter of divinity. Since Jesus was, and is, regarded by many as being god, then it would be expected--independently of all the higher criticism of the New Testament--that any and all vacant biographical spots would be filled in by "divinely revealed" truth. Shakespeare, lacking the mantle of a god, has had to struggle along with scholarly guesses about his life and remarkably unsuccessful attempts to fill in even major blanks in that life.

Is it then safe to assume that the fact we now know so much about Jesus is simply due to the embellishment of his life--made for the simple reason that the early Christian writers really knew very little about him and so had to improvise?

Chris Weimer

Well, I highly doubt that the writers of the books in the New Testament thought that they were inspired, at least for the most part. Matthew especially is writing his in story-form without real cares to "divinity" otherwise he wouldn't go into elaborate details about things that he knew never happened. He was merely comparing Jesus to Moses, not writing scripture. Secondly, Jesus wasn't really God until the council of Nicea where they voted on it. Even to this day it isn't really clear whether or not Jesus is God from the scriptures alone; that much is inherited. To me, that's the biggest problem for mythicists, is that Jesus was thought of as a person and later deified.

emphryio

You are assuming Jesus actually existed. Even that appears doubtful.

John A. Broussard

I'm back in my pulpit again.

Don't the scriptural New Testment manuscripts (and much of the Apocrypha) we have today either stress or imply Jesus' divinity? And aren't these almost entirely 4th Century or later?

What I'm saying is that the writings existing prior to the Council of Nicea were written by people who simply wanted to straighten out things, fill in the blanks, make it more understandable, etc. Except in rare instances, I rather imagine they didn't consider themselves divinely inspired, but later generations certainly regarded them that way.

I'm quite willing to accept your view that the scriptures, in general, do not indicate that Jesus was divine. Few theists would go along with us, though. And theists did all the scriptural writing. To transform him from a person to a god, as you say, takes a lot of filling in.

andrewcriddle

IMO all we can say is that we have more (reasonably early) stories about Jesus than (reasonably early) stories about Shakespeare because people were more interested in stories about Jesus than stories about Shakespeare.

Andrew Criddle

John A. Broussard

Jesus' non-existence makes the whole matter even more mysterious. I talked about filling in the blanks--you are proposing filling in one huge blank. So the question remains: "Why do we know so much about Jesus and so little about Shakespeare?"

What little evidence we have indicates that there were people writing about Jesus in some detail a few generations after he lived.

Even though printing was readily available and Shakespeare's plays were immensely popular, we have virtually no mention of his life during that time.

All very strange.

Avatar

On top of that, there is little to no information regarding Jesus's pre-ministry life. His birth is told with Lucasfilm special effects, but then we know next to nothing about the rest of his life. What must he have been like as a teenager? His early upbringing? His youth? Did he seem different to his neighbors or playmates?

I am reminded of a comedian who once asked: "Could you imagine what kind of a hell life must have been for Jesus' brother? Always being compared to him... 'Why can't you be more like your brother?'"

Strictly speaking, we don't know anything for certain about Jesus at all. Even if he did exist in the first place, everything we have today has been put through a wringer of mythology, metaphor, and symbolism that mean nothing like what they originally did to the people of the time.

Amaleq13

Even assuming a historical figure, we don't really know all that much about Jesus. We only know what several people, arguably (but not certainly) living in the 1st century, believed about Jesus. Even granting considerable historical reliability to the Gospel stories despite any compelling reason to do so, we are left with far more that is speculative than certain.

Vinnie

We know very little about Jesus but more in comparison to all his many nameless contemporaries. Even those who accept an HJ claim to know very little about him outside fundamentalist historians which are in a severe minority in scholarship today.

We know his hometown, some of his family members names, the general timeframe of his life, how he died, his hometown, that he started a movement and had followers and we can reconstruct a few sayings. Thats not much.

Aside from knowing bare things like his gender, hometown, parent's names and timeframe we know ZERO about Jesus' first ca 30 years of his life. We have no valid evidence for anything during this time frame. All we have are accounts of his alleged ministry which if accurate was short lived and encompassed only a small fraction of his life. SO even if we knew all about Jesus 1-3 year ministry (which we surely don't) we would only know about 5% of his life.

We know nothing of his clothing style, childhood friends, childhood episodes and stories, nothing of his direct personal thoughts, nothing about how tall he was, any potential wife, what he weighed, what types of clothes he wore, what he did for fun, his eye color, etc.

Historians will say they know a few facts about Jesus but 1) they don't know "the real Jesus" who is absent to us and can' ever be known and that they know very little in way of biographical material about Jesus.

Vinnie

Chili

That's about the time he needed to work out his own salvation and that is exactly what the Gospels are all about. Who he was is not important, nor is it important who Shakespeare was or he would have told us who he was. It is actually much better that we do not know anymore about them lest we begin to worship the person who we think they were.