GakuseiDon

Paul knows Jesus from a vision. How many spiritual plane entities can you name that are referred to as "born of a woman" and "seed of {someone}" without actually appearing on earth?

"Hebrews" is often used as evidence for an MJ. "The tribe of Judah" is from there. The rest are Paul's.

No disagreement there.

GakuseiDon

Jesus was "born of a woman, born under the law" as the heir of Abraham, to contrast with gentiles who weren't "born of a woman, born under the law". But through Christ, the gentiles could receive the adoption as sons, and share in the inheritence of the promise to Abraham.

Amaleq13

I have no idea where you got all this "switching" from what I've written. In the context of both MJ and HJ, it is more an evolution of a belief system than "switching" back and forth. The sacrificed and resurrected Messiah is given a historicizing "life story" which is, over time and a few rewrites, embraced as literally true and central to the faith of those who worship the sacrificed/resurrected Messiah. The only difference, IMO, is whether there was an actual guy or an idea of a guy at the beginning. Both conceptions of the religious movement start out focusing on what happened after he was dead. Both conceptions acquire a historicizing story about the central figure and both conceptions involve that story eventually being embraced as literally true and fundamental to the faith of the group.

Didymus

Please explain how the loose parallelism is better accounted for by unintentionality than by the deliberate use of implied meaning.

If they are largely inaccurate, the gospels are based either on an ahistorical Jesus or on a semihistorical, fragmentary, virtually mythical Jesus.

When you extract:

-- all the contextual filler and assumptions (...crowded with Jews who are chafing at the irony...)

-- the dubious suppositions and conjectures ("...engages in some behavior that could potentially start a riot," ...in their roles as liasons between the Jewish populace and the Romans)

-- the stuff about what others did (...the Jewish authorities see this...)

Here's what Jesus would look like:

• A preacher who starts his own ministry and gathers some followers,then goes to Jerusalem where he is executed by Pilate.

Now do you know?

Why would such a stick figure attract marvelous tales of astonishing feats? A non-divine Jesus is no Jesus at all. It's hard to imagine folk tales being told about him, let alone his being revered as a god and redeemer of mankind.

Didymus

J-D

Exactly. Italics added.When I originally read it I did not have the benefit of what you now indicate was your intended emphasis. My interpretation took note of phrase which you don't now emphasise: 'To the contrary'. You don't emphasise that now, but you said it. What could it mean? To me it meant that the the ben Pandera legend is the 'contrary' of evidence that Palestinian Jews knew 'who Jesus was supposed to be': in other words, it is evidence that they didn't. If that's not what you meant by the phrase 'to the contrary', what did you mean by it?First, whenever it was that the ben Pandera legend first circulated in Palestine, it looks to me like possible evidence that by that time, if no later, the Jews who circulated it had some knowledge of the Gospel story. Second, if there was a Jewish Christian community in Palestine before the third century (I don't know what you mean by 'thriving'), then what evidence of it would you expect to find?In other words, the ben Pandera legend is evidence of knowledge of the Gospel story, just as I suggested, although not evidence of how that knowledge was acquired.'Divine' and 'miracle working' are not the same thing, but never mind. If there was a Jesus whom a small number of Palestinian Jews believed to have worked miracles, but whom most Palestinian Jews did not believe to have worked miracles, what sort of archaeological, palaeographic, or epigraphic evidence would you expect to find?And I am canvassing the possibility that they 'rejected Jesus' because they didn't believe that he had performed miracles--or, that if he had, they were not divinely empowered miracles. I am not insisting that this is a better explanation for 'rejection' of Jesus, only that it is a possible one.That Christianity early became a Gentile religion is indisputable.
What do you mean, in this context, by 'messianic Jews', and who are the 'messianic Jews' of which you speak?Then why did you think it was relevant to refer to the absence of earlier churches in Palestine? I think disagreement with Gospel beliefs is at least as good an explanation.

jjramsey

Because someone intentionally making a parallel would tend to make the parallel tighter, or insert an obvious textual cue. For example, the number forty makes clearer the connection between Jesus' purported days of temptation in the wilderness and Israel's years in the wilderness. If the account of the recruiting of the fishermen as disciples were a more intentional parallel with the calling of Elisha, one might expect to see, say, Jesus throwing his cloak or mantle at the fishermen.

This is a gross shifting of the goalposts. A Jesus who was really a first-century crucified Galilean Jew from Nazareth is not what the MJers have in mind.

Let's see now. Credulous disciples follow someone who has some personal charisma. He does "miracles" via the placebo effect. They, like the fans of Sylvia Brown or John Edward, remember the hits and forget or explain away the misses. Now he gets killed. His followers could go home and admit that they wasted their lives and acted embarassingly on behalf of someone who wasn't all that he said he was, or they can engage in wishful thinking (i.e. the resurrection) and find a way to believe that it wasn't all a waste. The Jesus that they then preach is Jesus as they remembered him--but their memory is distorted by what they want to believe. The Jesus that they preach further attracts stories of astonishing feats.

None of the irrationality that I described above is particularly atypical for those in cults or millenial movements.

Didymus

I thought I answered that question before. Just in case you missed it:

Authentic ossuaries with Christian markings (like those discovered near the Mount of Olives, except the markings would be verified as Christian, not just believed to be Christian by the faithful), Christian codices or fragments of codices such as were found in Egypt, plaques with incriptions marking holy places, lamps or talismans with Christian markings, chalices and other liturgical items, and so on. This list is probably a little too exhaustive, but you get the idea.

The question is, of course, why didn't they believe that he had performed miracles? Surely they, and their parents and grandparents, were in the best position to know whether he did or didn't do all those things. Christians think all that doesn't matter, that Jews rejected his divinity out of their own hardheartedness, etc.

I agree. But I think it is more likely that they didn't know who the heck the Christians were talking about. Nowhere, of course, is there any early Jewish literature that says, in so many words, "We remember that guy, but he didn't do all that stuff."

Once again, though, we mythicists must resort to arguments from silence, as must be the case, of course, when one is trying to disprove a claim.

[QUOTE]That Christianity early became a Gentile religion is indisputable.
What do you mean, in this context, by 'messianic Jews', and who are the 'messianic Jews' of which you speak?

It is the earliest archeological evidence of Christian activity in Palestine. In making the point that there was no earlier evidence, should I have mentioned something later, like the Church of the Holy Sepulcher? Or a crusader castle? :huh:

Messianism was a major factor in Judaism at the turn of the era. Judaism had been repeatedly subjected to foreign domination, first by the Greeks, then by the Romans. There was a wave of hope that a savior would appear who would restore Israel to its former glory. Jewish messianism still exists; the Lubavitchers believe that Rebbe Menachem Mendel Schneerson, the now-desceased rabbi of a synagogue in Queens, N.Y., is/was the long hoped-for messiah.

Didymus

No Robots

Are you sure Schneerson isn't just a myth, invented by neo-Platonicians and given a veneer of Judaic messianism?

J-D

I find two interesting aspects to the material at the link that driver8 posted, both the material driver8 quoted directly and the rest.

Firstly, we have there a list of people attested from records of the time, or not long after, each of whom either: claimed to be the Messiah; or, acted as if he thought he was the Messiah; or, was believed by his followers to be the Messiah; or, attracted followers who behaved as if they though he was the Messiah. So, clearly, in first-century Palestine the putative Messiah was not a unique phenomenon. I can see two possible lines the argument could go from there. One is to say that putative Messiahs attracted attention and got written about, so the ones who are written about would be all the ones there are and we can disregard the possibility that there were others who left no contemporary or near-contemporary record. The other is to say that if there were a number who got written about, the chances are that there were numbers more who didn’t get into the records, or of whom the contemporary or near-contemporary records have been lost. I favour the second point of view, and that seems to me to add to the plausibility of the idea of a historical Jesus as a putative Messiah.

Secondly, the material driver8 didn’t quote discussed the Nazarenes and the Ebionites. It seems to me that the existence of these sects is easier to explain on the hypothesis of a historical Jesus. They would represent the lineal succession from the earliest followers of Jesus, adhering more closely to the original doctrines of the group, before the distorting influence of Paul and possibly others. I don’t see how their existence can be easily explained under the Jesus Myth hypothesis.

Iasion

Interesting.
Do you have any details?
Or a cite?

Iasion