Toto

I see this as not about Jesus. It is about the sociology of religion - do religious movements or social progress require a super-hero near-god on earth like Jesus to get going? Or are they a product of ordinary humans?

thedistillers

Why should historians expect letters from Jesus if it's likely he was illiterate?

aa5874

I think you are completely mistaken, it's the apologists and christians who are likely to make such acknowledgements without any external evidence.

To them Jesus must exist regardless of the evidence, their spiritual life will be shattered without him.

spin

Yes, one's nominative and the other accusative. Quite different.


spin

spin

This statement is the result of the simplistic thinking that I have pointed out several times on this list. Everything seems to be in binary taxonomies. Either you are a believer in the exact correctness of the bible or you think it's full of crap. Either you believe in the historical Jesus or you are a mythicist. There are no alternatives in many people's minds. It's easy to think that way and stupid. Simple is good, but not simpler than necessary.

This is a cop-out. Probability has nothing to do with epistemology. You need to say how you know, not that you think that something is arbitrarily probable.

If you read Tertullian, Hippolytus and Epiphanius, you'll know that they talk about the founder of the Ebionite movement, ie Ebion and you learn what he thought and even where he came from. The one thing you won't learn is that Ebion didn't exist. A slavish reading of the fathers would give you the wrong idea. You cannot just accept because something is in a text that it is basically true. It may be, but you don't know -- just from the text.

There is a vested interest in christian literature to bring Jesus to potential proselytes. Paul did this and he never knew a real flesh and blood Jesus. You hypothesize that someone told him about Jesus, but that's not what Paul says. He received the gospel as a revelation (Gal 1:12) not from men. Whether Jesus existed or not, Paul didn't need him, just the revelation. That was good enough for his converts as well and good enough for christendom.


spin

spin

You are tainting the text. Paul doesn't say anything about the beliefs or knowledge of the "pillars". You just assume it, as everyone else has done.

(Not Peter, Cephas. The text of Gal 2:7-8 is an interpolation, the only place where Paul doesn't use Cephas, and a passage which contradicts what comes immediately after it. It is the three who were for the circumcized, not Peter.)

Starting from what Paul says in Galatians, his special knowledge came from revelation. Wanting to check what he knew and to get backing, he went to Jerusalem to be sorely disappointed in what he learnt from those he disparagingly calls "the so-called pillars", one of whom he gloatingly tells us later couldn't even keep to the praxis of Judaism, a praxis which separated him from the pillars.

I don't think Paul's interactions with them were a complete fabrication at all. I think that they have been misunderstood for a very long time. There have been almost two millennia of mystification of the texts, the accreted mess of apologetics rather than exegesis. It is not understanding of the text per se that is important, but how the text helps belief and how it is coherent. The word of god is perfect.


spin

youngalexander

I think that is the crux of the matter.
As a further emphasis, 'if not jesus, then someone else'!

It was the idea whose time had come.

aa5874

The words of the writers of any epistle cannot be used to confirm the veracity of the very same questionable letters. External sources are needed.

The revelations of trhe letter writers called Paul must be corroborated before they can be deemed to be crediblle.

Just believing that a letter writer interacted with some people that he named is almost irrelevant when there is no way of verifying that the belief is true.

The revelations do not even appear to be credible, if as the letter writer claimed he met the brother of Jesus, this would indicate that Jesus was human, too, and Peter, James and John would have known that the revelations of letter writer from Jesus in heaven was fiction. And further, Peter, James and John could also claim that they had revelations from Jesus in heaven to counter or contradict the revelations of the letter writers.

The revelations of the letter writer from Jesus in heaven appear to be bogus, if Jesus was just human. Peter , John and James the brother of Jesus would have known that the revelations were a farce.

On what basis can the letter writers be believed? Why did the Church writers not know there were more than one person called Paul, or did they know?

spamandham

Are you prepared to argue for the historicity of Aeneas, since Virigil writes about him as historical in the Aeneid, and stories about him flourished much like Jesus stories? He is also mentioned in the Iliad, so that doubles the liklihood he was historical, right?

I can understand Christians putting blinders on and pretending that these hero biographies prove Jesus was historical, but when nonChristians do it - and simultaneously realize the absurdity of such an argument in favor of the historicity of the Greek/Roman heros, well.... :banghead:

spamandham

The Gospels record him writing on the ground, though they do not say what it was he was writing. So what do you base the liklihood that he was illiterate upon?