Toto

You have not answered the OP. The OP asks whether Jesus was one of three possibilities. You have not given us any reason to pick one over the other, and you have not explained how historical method would work to do this.

Instead, you have repeated a post that you inserted into these boards in the early part of this year, with some quotes that say that Jesus existed.

And you do not seem to be willing to discuss this. You just want to repeat that "experts agree that Jesus existed." You have not responded to the discussion about how the experts arrived at their opinion and why there might be reasons to go beyond this apparent consensus.

I call this a factoid because it is true, but irrelevant. It misrepresents the actual state of expert opinion.

Toto

But you didn't demonstrate that they were the best scholars, did you? And you didn't take time to actually read and respond to the discussion.

This is incorrect. We have taken notice, and noticed where these scholars might be wrong.

Part of evaluating evidence is recognizing the biases that scholars bring to their work. Do you agree?

I think you need to look up what "poisoning the well" means, because you are misusing the term. When scholarship is out of date, that is a relevant consideration.

You actually don't know what you are talking about. You have not produced a peer reviewed work on the historicity of Jesus.


I don't think you got involved. You are what we call a "drive by." You posted more that the average drive by but you do not seem to have absorbed any new information

spamandham

Probably once a month or so, people come to BC&H claiming that the consensus among mainstream scholars is that there was a historical Jesus. You seem to be doing the same thing, so I'll issue my usual response to this claim:

Where may we find the meta-study from which this conclusion has been drawn?

squiz

I hope that this doesn't mean that you will totally stop contributing. Although I'm not sure that I agree, I think the points that you are raising are important and should be discussed.

There is some merit to the argument that amateurs should defer to the authority of experts. It is all too easy as an amateur to get sucked in by the latest fad theories, without having the breadth or depth in background knowledge to make a balanced judgement. When I was young, I too was convinced by some fad theories and believed that all the experts had it wrong, but with time I learned that it is wise to distrust my own convictions and to be a little more respectful that the experts just might know a little more than I do.

Nevertheless, I am becoming more and more sceptical of the experts in this strange world of biblical studies. When I see people like N. T. Wright claiming that by applying his own historical method, he can historically prove the resurrection, I wonder about the validity of his other conclusions based on this historical method. I was recently pointed to the criticism of Ehrman by a respected biblical scholar Ben Witherington here:http://benwitherington.blogspot.com/...cism-bart.html. But then I find that this guy believes that biblical studies departments at secular universities should be in the business of nurturing student's faith. Now I find that he is a strong believer in the Shroud of Turin too. This all makes me sceptical regarding any of his other conclusions.

The more I look, the more I see strong believers in this field, some of whom have learned to hide their strong belief behind a mask of apparent objectivity. The response that the critical sholars are also biased, is not valid in this case IMO, as it is rare that their whole world view is dependant on accepting the basic historical validity of these documents, whereas this is the case for most Christians.

I am not yet prepared to jump out on a limb and say that all the conclusions of mainstream scholarship are bunk, but I will say that I am becoming rather sceptical. This is all rather disappointing to me, because I see it all as a fascinating historical puzzle and I am starting to despair at ever finding a satisfying solution.

show_no_mercy

Wait... what?

Care to point out some of this "expert evidence" that people here are avoiding? In the evolution/creationism debate, something like Endogenous Retroviruses will be pointed out by a biologist. A Creationist will multiply assumptions to make that datum fit their preconceived worldview, whereas the biologist has a neat and clean explanation for the same evidence.

In the end, the biologist's explanation wins because it is the most pragmatic and doesn't need a bunch of auxiliary hypotheses to support a preconceived idea (creationism). What, exactly, is the analogous situation in this exchange? Where is the "Jesus" version of Endogenous Retroviruses? This supposed "expert evidence"?

History, and the study of history, has no such smoking gun for historiography. Your "experts" aren't privvy to any secret information that a lot of the regulars here haven't read. Really, all it takes is a lot of reading and understanding how historical analysis is done -- which doesn't take the same level of study that understanding how/why Endogenous Retroviruses happen, and why they are explained by common descent.

All you seem to have done is appeal to popular consensus in a field that's mired by theology. On the other hand, biology is populated by people in various backgrounds and religious environments. Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, Christians, Jews, etc. who are biologists will almost all agree about general explanation for ERVs.

Looking at the same exact evidence that NT scholars read, there really isn't much we can say about any sort of historical Jesus, if at all. He's a character in highly theological writings. From there we have to ask ourselves what methodology they're using to separate the theology from the biography. This is where we start to get the "everyman" Jesus that seems to come about every time an inquiry into the "historical Jesus" turns up -- all due to each one of these historians multiplying hypotheses to account for their conclusion.

Really, the only thing you might conclude from all of the evidence was that there might have been some guy named Jesus who was crucified. What he was like and what his philosophy or his religion was is all based on the assumption that the gospel narratives have authentic sayings of this Jesus person. It's not really much different than the relationship between Socrates (Jesus) and Plato (Mark)... and possibly Aristophanes (John). How do we know we're reading the sayings of Jesus and not the sayings of "Mark"? What if Mark is the apocalyptic prophet using one of the most popular names in 2nd Temple Judaism as his mouthpiece?

But at the end, there really doesn't seem to be much of an uproar about the historical existence of Socrates.

No Robots

Look, there is no doubt that Christ employed apocalyptic rhetoric, standard within Jewish culture, as Dale C. Allison makes clear:

In most respects the eschatology of Jesus must be regarded as conventional. The nearness of the consummation, the coming of judgment, and belief in the general resurrection were all things handed to him by his tradition. What was new was the connection he made with his own time and place.--"The Eschatology of Jesus" / Dale C. Allison. In The Encyclopedia of apocalypticism / Stephen J. Stein, ed., p. 299.

What Allison misses, though, is that Christ is not connecting apocalypticism to his time and place, but to himself: he is the apocalypse (revelation, in its Jewish sense). To call him an apocalyptic prophet is to reduce him to the literary tropes of his time, whereas in actual fact he used these tropes to reveal himself and his Father.

aa5874

And, once there are EXPERTS who do not agree that Jesus was human while he was supposedly on earth then it is not logical to expect everyone to accept the views of those who believe that Jesus was human.

aa5874

The HJ is based on the false assumption that Jesus could have only been derived from a single character.

It is high time the HJ be abandoned.

Jesus of the NT may have been fabricated from MULTIPLE characters who were NOT even contemporaries of each other.

On the other hand, there is Matthew 1.18, Luke 2.35, Mark16.6. John 1, Acts 1.9, Galatians 1, Revelations 1 and the Church writings where Jesus was described as a Supernatural Divine creature.

And it is the very description of Jesus that have given SPARK to the mythicist. Nothing else.

lpetrich

Or, for that matter, within a few centuries of its origin.

There are similar arguments about how much we can know for sure about the likes of Pythagoras and Socrates, and some people have argued that King Arthur was a myth.

Which ones? Do they take it for granted that he existed?

That was a speculation of who a historical Moses might have been.

Seems like more religious-apologist grasping at straws.

What reasons? Some sort of perverse denial that anyone can have superior powers of literary and conceptual creation?

No Robots

Like I said, the Wikipedia article on Moses has a list for further reading in which you will find works that deal with Moses as a historical figure.

I haven't done a lot of work on the historical Moses, nor with the historical Shakespeare, nor with the historical Homer. Yet, from the little I know, I have no doubt of the historicity of these individuals. Someone truly great said, "Hear, Israel: Being is our god, Being is One" (Deut. 6:4). Someone truly great forged a nation based on the idea of universal oneness. Someone originated the idea of the nation as being of the people, for the people and by the people. I call this man Moses.


Freud was no religious apologist, and he wrote a study of Moses.

Yep, among others. There is definitely a popular rejection of the great man theory of history, of the idea of the hero. People just sort of assume that "heroic" and "mythical" are synonyms.