Layman

On what basis do you exclude the possibility of different names for the same person (not uncommon) or a changing membership (also not unlikely in a multi-year ministry)?

Toto

That's much too broad a topic for this thread, and I am about to go on vacation. You will find some old threads on all of these topics, or perhaps we can take it up later.

My point in all this is that we do not have attestation from outside Christian writings for most of what Layman claimed to be attested, so we don't know for sure what Christians invented and what they reported.

The Christians in Rome at the time of Nero may or may not have existed, but were probably a sect within Judaism - we do know that there were Jews in Rome. Peter's trip to Rome is the stuff of legends, and we don't know where history stops and legend starts.

I am well aware of all of the attempts to date Paul's letters, and the problems with them.

Amaleq13

Recognizing inconsistency in the description of the membership does not exclude either of the above potential explanations.

Paul's reference to Cephas as though he were separate from "The Twelve", for example, might be addressed by the second but not by the first.

Either way, we have little reason to assume that "The Twelve" should be understood as originally referring to the core disciples of Jesus' living ministry.

BK

I hope that your vacation is enjoyable.

And I will say that I certainly will be interested in reading your reasoning for that. From what little I know about the subject, I think that you are being entirely too skeptical about the desire of the early Christians to be honest and forthright in their accounts about Jesus. But, as you point out, that is probably too much for this post.

Interesting. I will look forward to seeing how you support the idea that Nero didn't persecute the Christians for the burning of Rome.

And I will be interested to see why you believe that it is "legend" at all.


BK

Toto

BK - you can start with this tread: The Historicity of Paul.

Layman

Yes you were not aware that Paul mentioned the Twelve?

Layman

That would surely come as a surprise to Tacitus.

Toto

I half rememberd a mention of the 12 in Paul, with something odd about it. I do not concede that Paul mentioned the 12

I don't have time to get into this now, but a decent argument can be made that the reference to Christians in Tacitus is a forgery by Sulpicius Severus in the fifth century. Even if it was not forged, Tacitus wrote about 115, and it is not clear how accurate he was.

One of the problems with thinking that Nero persecuting Christians was that the Christians were not known as Christians at the time (if there were any), and there was no marker that the Roman authorities could have used to separate Christians from Jews. So how could they have been persecuted? Tactius may have been reading his 2nd century experiences with Christians back to Nero's time.

There is more on Kenneth Humphries' site and in Remsberg.

Steven Carr

I wonder why Christians were willing to die for a lie (unless they did burn Rome?!?)

spin

1) The 12
==========
As dating is a problem for all gospels -- is there any reason why they couldn't have been written in the second century? (No, because no church father before Justin shows any specifically gospel information.)
The Epistle of the Apostles, apparently a second century work talks of an interesting selection of the 12, amongst other things there is a Peter and a Cephas.

The gospel of John supplies us with Nathaniel who was called just after Philip.

Then there are the traditional differences between the gospel lists, the differences are all supposedly explained away by double names. However, double names are just as easily evidence for conflation, so it cannot be used as a hypothesis, though maybe when supported by parallel passages such as the calling of Matthew and Levi (and one should conclude that these are the same person).

There are problems with the names included in the 12, if it needs to be discussed, as it has here. I think though that name differences are often illustrative of text redaction and will help us understand the composition of a text.


2)Tacitus
=========
Tacitus while attempting to write history is only as good as his sources allow him. At the same time, his text's preservation doesn't necessarily come to us intact. We know for example that Tertullian was versed in Tacitus's works, yet shows no knowledge of the persectution passage. This is argument from silence, though Tertullian scoured sources for usable references. As Toto points out it is not until the time of Sulpicius Severus that this passage appears. This suggests that the text was added after Tertullian's time.

It should be noted that, in other sources about the fire, it was Nero himself who was accused of starting the fire (to clear areas of Rome for other uses), yet Nero worked hard himself trying to overcome the fire. So, the first layer of blame regarding the fire was towards Nero himself. Nero's repute, which was formerly high in the people's eye, never recovered from the imputation. It seems unlikely that it was he that could have blamed and then persecuted the Christians.


3) Use of the old testament (ie the Hebrew bible)
====================================
I don't know anything about Doherty's position regarding use of the Hebrew bible, but for those people who so often ask, when confronted with the notion that Jesus may not have existed, how could we have such stories about a man who never existed? At this point it is very meaningful to indicate all the relations between gospel stories and ot materials. ot materials are not proof that Jesus didn't exist, as I see it; it shows that one needn't have a real Jesus to have the stories.


4) Dead Sea Scrolls
================
The notion of a messiah of Aaron in the scrolls is a very simple one which was not obtained from the ot. The high priest of the temple of Jerusalem was the anointed priest of yhwh, who alone had access to the presence of God, ie the holy of holies. "Messiah", as I'm sure you know simply means "anointed" in Hebrew. Every high priest is anointed in order to serve in the temple. This is a continuing tradition which needs no ot, for it was passed down by deed and tradition from generation to generation. At the same time the notion of a messiah of David was active from the time of writing of Zechariah, whenever that was (dating texts is always problematical). As the notion of the messiah of Aaron was independent of the ot, the messiah of David may also easily have been independent as well.

The scroll writers did use ot books quite regularly, especially when they wrote so-called commentaries, commonly called "pesharim" in the scrolls context, though these peshers were more a starting point for speculation about what was happening in the present and weren't very concerned about the significance of the text used to stimulate speculation. The use of ot in the scrolls is not comparable to that of the xians.

(The fact that the sons of Zadok were the leaders of the community described in the scrolls indicates an acceptance of heredity as a key issue to that community, as does mention of sons of Aaron, sons of Levi, and acknowledgement of the sons of the leaders of the community. However, the Essenes disavowed heredity, being by their choice celibate. One has to concllude that the Essenes had nothing to do with the Dead Sea Scrolls.)


spin