Amaleq13

Your question seemed to me to be a non sequitur in that it does not appear to follow from my comment that Q does not portray Jesus as the messiah.

My reply attempts to address the apparent assumption underlying the question (ie Q disciples = Jerusalem group) but I think it is obvious that my answer is "no".

There is a difference between existing leadership of a group and a collection of sayings attributed to an alleged founder.

Attonitus

• The premise is erroneous being applied to a divine entity as Jesus. According you the Paul's statements about Jesus as a preexisting being are polemical embellishments and fabrications constructed decades later?
  Quote:

  Are you not, by conflating the issue of historicity and the issue of divinity, simply constructing a strawman?

No. Are you who refers to a strawman in your exposition. Soon, the Synoptics are the evemerization of the mythical being described by Paul.

Jayhawker Soule

There is no "premise ... applied to a divine entity". The question is straight forward: How can the likelihood of historicity of someone circa 30CE be a function of polemical embellishments and fabrications constructed decades later?

Attonitus

The likelihood of historicity of someone circa 30CE it is in function of reliables historical sources, none in the Jesus case. You are satisfied?

Jayhawker Soule

Actually, I believe that I used the term "suggest" rather than "necessitate". In any event, I am slowly coming to the same conclusion. I was surprised to find Schiffman argue that the Teacher of Righteousness was a later addition to Qumran. Damn! I could become a mythicist yet.

I should think that the question is always relevant. Given that I'm the novice here, how would you characterize the Jerusalem church, and what would you conjecture as to its origins and evolution?

Jayhawker Soule

To be honest, I consider the response to be purposely evasive. That's OK. I seem to be having productive discussions elsewhere. Take care ...

spin

I think agnostic would be more realistic. It's functionally the same as a mythicist in that you don't accept the historicity, but you don't need to go into the grey area of needing to do the dastardly difficult task when required of showing that a possibly artificial construct doesn't exist. It's sufficient that you cannot assume the positive and anyone who does so is basically not making sense because they are talking about a construct that they can't know anything about.

The Qumran texts do talk of leader figures including the paqid and the mebaqqer.

I attempted to show you why not. For me, it contains an assumption which doesn't seem to be valid, the equation of the leader of the Jerusalem-based messianic movement with Jesus (or a Jesus believer).

What happens if the three pillars of Paul were simply leaders of the Jewish messianic movement? You can understand why Paul wouldn't get a good reception in such a case. We just package them as xian leaders because we place Paul's letters after the events narrated in the gospels and accept Acts as reflective of reality, for which there is no need.

I still have to come up with a reason that all the gospels were all clearly written in Greek, ie probably outside a Palestinian, Jewish context.


spin

Tristan Scott

Yes, but I refer to the gospels only as a very general reference, they said that Jesus played to the "multitudes". Just how many were there in the "multitude"? 50? 150? 1000? This is the first century, even if Jesus was a smash in Galilee, so what? Word of mouth was the principle means of communication. News was spoken, not written. Any events surrounding Jesus would have most likely been chronicled by word of mouth, and written much later, and only then to fulfill the needs of a religion.

Jayhawker Soule

Thank God!

I am familiar with paqid and maskil, not mebaqqer.

I would consider the existance of an early cult leader crucified by the Romans a reasonable conjecture. Tell me, do you find a wholly fictive Acts to be the more plausible alternative?

If one were to engage in speculation: the Gospels were not "all clearly written in Greek", only those of the victorious Gentile mission, while the Jewish Christians had the Torah supplemented by a host of other writings ranging from the Isaiah to Enoch.

If one were to engage in wild speculation: There is always the Peshitta and the Aramaic primacy argument.

Al Kafirun

Well, that in itself requires great faith. Just because something isn't beyond the realm of possibility doesn't make it worthy of belief. George Washington (tired example, yes) had mythos attached but he also had criticial record, and widely recognized actions associated with him. Thus, the evidence in favor of his existence is made more compelling by this tradition.