rlogan

Certainly an interesting question. Outside of Luke and Acts you can't say much - and what can we say about these?

At least insofar as their 1st century "Jewishness" goes, that seems reasonable.

How we get to the 2nd century Christian version of Jesus would nearly require a destruction of the Temple and a scattering of the cult, eh?

Tristan Scott

Justifiable? This thread is asking what the case is for an HJ. Without the gospels there is no case. My only point here is that it was the oral tradition that would have had to be included in the gospels that is the best evidence (as weak as it may be), and that given a first century perspective it should not be surprising that there was no other writings to verify the existence of the Jesus figure.

Amaleq13

How do you identify the "oral tradition" underlying written texts?

The appeal to alleged "oral traditions" is entirely specious unless accompanied by a systematic approach based on observed patterns in written texts based on known oral traditions. To my knowledge, Dominic Crossan is the only scholar who has tried to do so in any systematic fashion. In The Birth of Christianity he described specific patterns in the written versions of existing oral traditions in Irish funeral laments. He was unable to find anything approximating those patterns in the Gospel accounts.

There is no question, however, that a collection of sayings are, by definition, derived from an oral tradition but whether any given saying was actually spoken by a specific individual is an entirely different issue.

Clivedurdle

I think AN Wilson in "Jesus" comments that the phrase "verily verily I say unto you" is a personal comment that evidences a recording of what someone said. Any thoughts about this?

Amaleq13

IMO, it is either utterly naive or deliberately misleading. How did he support that claim? Even if it can be established that this was a common practice, how does he eliminate the possibility that the author of GJohn didn't deliberately imitate this practice to create that impression?

Since the doubled "verily" only occurs in GJohn (25 times), I'm going to guess Wilson made this claim while trying to argue for the historical reliability of that particular text.

spin

That's why there is a lot of implicit special pleading.

It's also why I don't see any chance of extracting a historical Jesus with the materials we have available to us at present and I can't see those materials changing.

I don't think most arguments about oral materials can get very far. We only have written texts, and what came before them may have been other written texts (redactional activity), oral traditions or just plain authorial invention.


spin

Tristan Scott

Me? Don't you mean, how do I identify the "oral tradition" underlying the written texts?

Well the parables attributed to the Jesus figure would be an example. If Jesus existed roughly as described in the gospels, a messianic teacher with a relatively modest following, his sayings and parables would have been passed on through an oral tradition. Later, when the Jesus figure was made to be the focal point of this new religion and someone decided to write things down these sayings and parables would have had to have been included in order to retain the followers with the oral tradition. Of course it would have been difficult to have altered the sayings to adhere to the particular dogma chosen for the religion, however adding interpretation to the parables and even putting the interpretations in the mouth of the Jesus figure could take care of that.

Tristan Scott

I guess I missed the "special pleading", whatever the hell that is. All I see is the usual pretentious posturing and pompous pontificating that seems to be the norm from the internet scholars that frequent this board.

True, that.

I don't really argue that they will get very far. All I'm doing, is all anyone can really do and that is speculate. Either Jesus was a total fabrication, a likely possibility given the propencity for ancient people to layer their spiritual writings with mythological events and characters. Or he was a real person who was later mythologized.

Jayhawker Soule

No doubt. Furthermore, I suspect that the process would have been experienced as virulent, wrenching, and accompanied by a significant loss of life.

spin

You must have missed out on the whole "historical jesus" movement, which thinks it can extract history from the gospels.

If you don't know what terms like "special pleading" mean, it might be difficult for one to take your alliterations seriously.

I'm not particularly interested in speculation, for it is part of the problem as well as a method for generating possible means of dealing with the problem. I do a lot of speculating, but tend to talk mainly about what we have evidence for, saving the poor reader thousands of unnecessary ideas to digest or, as often as not, not to digest. It is better to cut down on the signal to noise ratio, so I don't post much of what I consider speculation.

Evidence is a good rule of thumb: if you want to say something, it's better to do so with a little evidence to back it up.

Or Jesus was the son of God as claimed by the literature we are trying to deconstruct.

However, for the everyday management of people's lives it is sufficient to know that either Jesus is what they say he is or not. If he cannot be shown to be what they say, then there is no reason for most people to pursue the matter. What happens, though, is that some people put forward illogical arguments of the type "if he isn't who he is claimed to be, how come we have such incredible claims?" with this rhetorical question intended to put the onus on the doubter to explain how we have those incredible claims. The respondent replies, "don't be absurd; how ideas come down to us is irrelevant to the historicity of the events narrated and their having been part of the past." And the uncommited, still agog from the initial rhetorical question and not aware of notions of evidence, sees the respondent's logical response as "pretentious posturing".

People have made more claims in this world than there are sands on most beaches, but, for each to be dealt with, what those claims are based on must be laid bare, and there is not enough time in our lives to do that. Most claims do not have a basis of evidence worthy enough to be laid bare, so should we waste time speculating on them all? What we can do is weigh up the evidence ourselves when confronted with a challenge from such a claim, in order to see what basis it rests upon and if no real-world basis can be found, then it can have no claim on us.

Everyone is free to, and should, speculate: that's how we generate ideas. However, when presenting such ideas in public, shouldn't they be presented in such a way as to give other people a reason for contemplating them, ie shouldn't they have some evidential basis to tell those other people that there is some reason for entertaining the idea?

This forum is about biblical criticism and history. It is squarely based on the notion of claim and evidence. Speculation is foreplay.


spin