TedM

Hi Jake,

Did you really mean to write "prove"? Isn't the real objective to determine what scenario is most "probable"? IOW, if I'm not writing about a supernatural Jesus, but still one that resembles the one in the gospels, or one that was simply BELIEVED to have been supernatural by others, is the criteria of "proof" really required?

ted

jakejonesiv

Hi ted,

Point well taken.

Thanks!
Jake

Toto

I see that we should add a third category, Jesus as a remote but historical person. If "Jesus" actually lived 100 years "BC" and Paul thought he met an appearance of that remote historical person, it is hard to say that this Jesus was the historical Jesus.

jakejonesiv

Right, this would fit with GA Wells and Alvar Ellegard.

KSchilling uses a HJ taxonomy that I find useful.

1. the HJ is the Christ of Scripture (LT Johnson)
2. the HJ is behind and rationally retracable from the Christ of Scripture (JS Spong)
3. The HJ is positively different from the Christ of Scripture (JD Crossan)
4. Scripture is too much distorted by Christian Tradition to retrace the HJ rationally from there (R Price)
5. no such thing as an HJ (E Doherty)

Wells would fit into category 4 above.

jake Jones IV

Spenser

I think #5 might be split into two.

5. No such human existed, the myth started with a HJ
6. No such human existed, the myth strated in the high planes and evolved into a HJ

No Robots

In fact, this is self-evident. If mythicists come to accept the historical fact of Jesus, all their work could help enormously in charting the growth of the myth.

jakejonesiv

On the 1-5 scale below, which category of Historical Jesus do you consider "fact"?
Jake Jones

Doug Shaver

Yes, quite a few, actually. They would include most if not all of the pre-Socratic Greek philosophers, for just one collective example.

No Robots

I'll take door #2, Jake:

2. the HJ is behind and rationally retracable from the Christ of Scripture

This (or via: amazon.co.uk) is the book that I think does the best job of rationally retracing the authentic man from Scripture.

gstafleu

Interesting taxonomy. Let me try something. There are two hypotheses: 1) the scripture Jesus was historical (SHJ), and 2) some other jesus was historical (OHJ).

Then we have:

1) SHJ can be verified.
2) SHJ cannot be verified, but OHJ can, from the bible.
3) SHJ cannot be verified, OHJ cannot be verified from the bible but he can be verified from somewhere else. Ot alternatively, OHJ can in fact be verified from the bible, but he turns out to be substantially different from the SHJ.
4) Neither SHJ not OHJ can be verified from the bible.
5) SHJ can be falsified (and maybe some versions of OHJ can also be falsified).

Some remarks.

3) and 4) are similar, Price just doesn't bother to look outside of the bible (I don't mean this to sound deprecatory).

1) and 5) are obviously the strongest claims (in the sense that they claim the most).

In 2), exactly which part of SHJ constitutes OHJ needs to be specified, but we have a starting point in the bible.

In 3) OHJ needs to be defined more or less from scratch. Even if we take the second interpretation (OHJ from bible, but different than SHJ), we still need to state the differences, which are stated to be major (so calling this a from-scratch-Jesus is not unreasonable). That is of course doable, but it has to be done in such a way that there is some connection between OHJ and SHJ, or at least between OHJ and (the development of) Christianity. Otherwise you are just showing the historicity of some random Jesus.