Petergdi

A Tacitus expert would have to be someone known for writing conference papers, journal articles or academic monographs on Tacitus aimed at classicists and/or historians or someone recognised by such a person as a fellow expert. There must be more than a hundred such people in the world today. Darrel Doughty does not appear to be one of them.

People don't regularly "endorse" things which are not controversial in their field, but I suppose you could count anyone who has edited the text of the Annals for publication unless you somehow find one in which the passage is marked as doubtful.

Peter.

ph2ter

Because for that actual man we have no any evidence that he really lived. The older the text about Jesus, the Jesus is more and more the heavenly being and less and less some Galilean preacher. In reality it should be the opposite. For example, Paul lacks any specific detail about Jesus life. And what is more important, Paul does not transmit the message of Jesus. He preaches the message about Jesus and builds theology around that character. He does not owe to Jesus anything. For him Jesus is only an object necessary for the salvation. And all what he says about him is taken from the Scripture or from his own revelation, meaning his own imagination. His lack of interest for the preaching and the earthly life of Jesus is inexplicable. Why he or any other epistle writer from the first century does not show that interest, contrary to the later Christians?

The crucifixion of Jesus is not something for what the Christians of the day had to feel shameful. The death of the son of the supreme god is mandatory for every contemporary surrounding mythology. The bones of Tammuz are crushed in a mill and his body scattered over the hills in the same way as The Didache says for the broken bread of Jesus. Women wept for dead Tammuz every spring there. The lamentations for dead god Dumuzid you can find already in the ancient Sumer. And crucifixion of Jesus is presented in the same way as for example, Josephus presented the hanging of Hamman. Christians of the forth century have often mistaken the execution of Hamman for the crucifixion of Jesus. So, the crucifixion of Jesus had inspiration in surrounding mythologies and even in the Jewish customs observed at Purim. The Gospel account of crucifixion is modeled with the sacrifice ritual of the two goats of the Day of Atonement in mind.
I do not find prophecies about Jesus so tenuous and strained as you do. Only read what the prophet Isaiah has to say about the Suffering Servant and all should be clear.

I do not find that possibility very probable. Christology of the day certainly has not fallen from the heaven, but was rather the result of studying the Scripture.

spamandham

*Some* of the recorded Christology certainly comes from the scriptures. But where does the raising of Lazarus come from? From whence comes the idea of bodily resurrection, or sanctification of gentiles? You can find OT passages to support these things (and the Gospel authors did that), but they come off as contrived quote mining - a snip from here, and another from there.

In contrast, the passion is easily seen as derived almost wholly from Psalm 22 (with a bit of other Psalms thrown in), and Jesus even utters the beginning of Psalm 22 as his last words just in case the readers had missed the connection.

bacht

There could've been two stages: Apocalyptic or mystic Jews "discovered" the Christ in scripture, then the passion and gospel narratives were fleshed out for the HJ, possibly by gentiles like Mark.

spamandham

Agreed. I don't think it's as simple as "jesus is derived from scripture" or "scripture was quote mined for Jesus".

IMHO, it's clear that both are going on, and the simplest explanation of that in my mind, is that Jesus was originally constructed from scriptures (Psalm 22 and Isaiah 53 primarily), and after being later historicized, scriptures were quote mined to add support to the idea that he had been historical. Further, a history was invented for him and placed at a precise symbolic 40 years prior to the destruction of the temple. The later catholicizing movement then invented a faked up history of apostles and popes to support the idea that Jesus' authority had been passed to them via succession. This is conjecture on my part of course, but I think it best fits the evidence we have.

bacht

Seems reasonable. Obviously we're speculating, but I like the idea of the HJ arising after the initial MJ, this seems to follow the literary record as we have it: mystical epistles and apocalyptic for the enlightened followed by mundane gospel history for a mass audience under "the big tent"

Doug Shaver

He wrote a book and said it came from God, and people believed him. And we know he did it that way because we have contemporary documentation.

What did Jesus say during his lifetime that made some of his followers come to believe, after he died, that (a) he was alive again, (b) he was the son of God and (c) he was the Messiah?

ph2ter

I agree.
But the other possibility, that Jesus was an actual man and that scriptures were quote mined to support his divinity does not look very probable to me.
The main facts about Jesus stem from the Scriptures. These are the miracle birth, doing the miracles, the crucifixion and the resurrection. Excluding impossible facts about him like the miracles and the resurrection, we are left only with the crucifixion. But that alone cannot characterize him sufficiently to be the inspiration for his later divinization. Knowing that the crucifixion is heavily constructed from the Scripture and that the killing of the son of a supreme god is mandatory for every contemporary surrounding mythology, we can safely suppose that the impulse for that fact did not come from an actual man.
Someone can say that his preaching was the impulse for his divinization, but that idea falls down when we closely look at Paul. For in his work is not possible to find even the single trace of the preaching of Jesus. Paul divinized Jesus not knowing anything about his earthly life or his preaching, except crucifixion. And he explicitly says in 1 Corinthians 15:3-4 that his source for the death and the resurrection of Jesus is the Scriptures:
...I delivered to you first of all that which I also received: that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, and that He was buried, and that He rose again the third day according to the Scriptures.

ph2ter

Returning to the oracles of Matthew, it is interesting that in the "Introduction to the New Testament. By EVERETT F. HARRISON." the idea that the oracles of Matthew are actually the collection of Old Testament prophecies about Jesus Christ is also expressed, but in a way which presuppose HJ:
"The attempt to get at the meaning ot Papias centers in the discussion of the two words "oracles" (logia) and "interpreted" (hermeneusen). In the New Testament and the Fathers logia is a synonym for Scripture. If the oracles could be thought of as testimonia, that is, collections of Old Testament prophecies fulfilled in Jesus Christ, then the sense would be that each person sought to set forth the fulfillment from his knowledge of the facts of gospel history.
If 'hermeneusen' is construed in terms of interpretation rather than translation, which is possible linguistically, then the passage may reflect the feeling of the church in Asia Minor that the gospel story was not easily understood, being in fact a kind of mystery."

The key word here is "interpreted", which clearly testifies that the document in question very probably contained the collection of Old Testament prophecies about Jewish Messiah. Maybe that collection was in front of Paul and all other apostles like him in the beginning of Christianity. Maybe also the writer of the gospel according to Mark used the same document.

Vinnie

Before there were gospels, there was Paul.

Vinnie