mikem

And of course, if Jesus had been charged with, and found guilty of blasphemy, the punishment laid down by Jewish law would have been stoning. I am not sure though, having read different points of view on this... would the Jewish religious authorities still have jurisdiction to stone violators of the religious law while they were under Roman rule? According to John 18, Pilate told the religious leaders to punish Jesus acording to their laws, but they told him that they were not allowed to put anyone to death - is this right?

It does seem to be somewhat odd, that if this was the case, the High Priest seemed to go to such trouble to get Jesus to make a blasphemous statement if the only charge they could get a capital punishment on was a political one? On the other hand, if they did retain the right to stone blasphemers, why bother taking jesus to Pilate?

Whichever way you look at this trial, if it really happened, the jurors were not only acting illegally, but were also extremely incompetent! Personally, I find it hard to believe that a High Priest who lasted as long as Caiaphas did was anything other than a smooth operator when it came to dealing with threats to the status quo. The gospel accounts of the trial just don't stand up to scrutiny.

yalla

Well according to some sources,Richard carrier included IIRC, the Jewish leaders still had the right to execute until after the replacement of Pilate and one of those sources is Acts where they stone Stephen.
So the author of ''Luke''/Acts and the author of "John" don't agree about the right to execute.

I would love to get my hands on DOTM again to check Brown's spin.

God Fearing Atheist

It's probably best to decide what is and is not "spin" after (not before) consulting the data.

Just a thought.

yalla

Are you presuming that a god fearing catholic who spins stuff in other places is not potentially going to spin yet again?

yalla

For example in "Birth of the Messiah" Father Brown says on p 27:
"Since no one one of the 4 evangelists was himself an eyewitness of the ministry of JC....."
Note:
-the PREsumption that such a ministry by such a person actually took place
-the admission that we are NOT dealing with eye or ear witnesses.
So any treatment of what word was or was not used [ re blasphemy] at an alleged event as described by a admitted non witness is going to at least ever so slightly be subject to personal 'spin' by the current author [Brown] is it not?
Even if you colour it as "professional opinion" whatever.

It is standard operating procedure to understand WHERE an author is coming from and take that into account when looking at what s/he says.

Again, an example:
"I refuse to dismiss such an explanation [the historicity of the gospels' infancy narratives] simply on the grounds that the events described are supernatural, for a presupposition that miracles are impossible is unscientific".p188

Didymus

The point is not whether or not Jesus' crucifixion was actually unjust, only that it was believed to be so. It well could have been a perfectly "normal" crucifixion, which for unknown reasons came to be viewed as unjust.

I'm not sure why you have difficulty with the possibility that a particular crucifixion, coupled with some other events, could precipitate a folklore of martyrdom that would be perceived as a fulfillment of messianic prophecy.

That certainly seems to be the case, but that has nothing to do with the source(s) of the tradition, which, after all, is the concern of this thread.

Again, that tells us nothing about "what's historical in the gospels."

Regardless, the teacher is, as I said, presented as an earthly human being. And the Galilean section is pretty quotidian in my estimation. There's all sorts of walking and talking and staying here and staying there.

Good question, but the answer will be hard to come by. We have nothing about docetism until very late in the first century, and then our sources are mainly, if not soley, docetism's orthodox Christian opponents. Unlike MJ theory, docetism, like orthodox Christianity, had Jesus playing a human role in human history.

There are several versions of the illusive crucifixion adduced by docetism, but none that I know of - except Doherty's - have the crucifixion - or the illusion of a crucifixion - taking place on a sublunar plane. So I don't see how much that aspect of docetism can add to our understanding of historical vs. mythical origins.

Didymus

spin

Beside the fact that I don't assume the particular crucifixion actually happened, I have no problem with this.

I don't have difficulty.

You seem to have abandoned this claim: When we reject the consensus view, I think it's our obligation to propose an alternate hypothesis. Good show.

The comment you have responded to was aimed at removing the apparent assumption that there was a single author to the gospel of Mark, as the following seems to indicate:

there was a great deal more speculation on the part of the gospel authors, Mark in particular.

It tells you why it is hopeless to think that one can extract anything historical from the source.

It's called narrative glue.

I don't think an answer is necessary for its significance to have weight. We know that there was a species of christian thought which led to docetism. It did not arise outside christianity, so its development had to have been in a christian context aimed at dealing with a clarification of what was perceived as a difficulty which had emerged. Until the matter was perceived as a difficulty, the communities had no necessary conflict, and there would have been a time when the development was not perceived as any problem. It is only with the coming of the recognition of the difficulty and the exclusion of the docetic choice that the orthodoxy clarified its self-definition (at least with regard to the docetic development).

I don't support MJ. I just try to take a few small steps. Magic bullet solutions usually leave me unimpressed. However, we are necessarily looking at christian development without having access to the real beginnings: we don't know what the status quo ante was.

When one takes up the ball and runs, the runner is only interested in what is ahead, not where the ball has been. One makes what one can out of what one has. The docetists did that as others did. What came before and the thought behind it were probably not available. We don't know what christianity came from prior to docetism. It could have been a melding of various disparate traditions amongst which were flavours of proto-gnosticism. Some Pauline letters seem to touch on this latter concept, suggesting it was current.

I see no difficulty in a non-historical background to a Jesus which is not truly a mythical background. An example which I have used a lot here is of a certain Ebion who was according to Tertullian the founder of the Ebionites. Of course there was no such person, but Tertullian believed so, as did other church fathers. How can a non-entity become perceived as historical? This Ebion, who was eventually given a home town by the fathers, was perceived as interacting in this world, despite the fact that he never existed. However, once a non-entity has been brought into literary existence, what is there to stop the development of speculation on the non-entity?

We cannot get back to a Jesus. We cannot say where that literary existence came from, whether he was real or not.

Docetism shows us an early christianity, whose origins were similar to those of other christianities.

I'm not convinced about the dichotomy, "historical vs. mythical". The development of traditions is much more complex and indistinct. We find historical elements in non-historical contexts and we find mythological or other non-historical elements in historical contexts. A tradition is a heuristic system: it affects the bearers of the tradition who in turn affect the tradition which in turn affects the bearers, and so on. You see the way people justify ideas, as they have done on this forum (and I would rarely call this sort of justification historical or mythological). It sounds good to them, whether accurate or not, and it is incorporated into their system approaches to the traditions we deal with. This happened in the past and those augmented traditions were passed on. Historical or mythical??


spin

God Fearing Atheist

That Brown "spins" elsewhere (I personally find your cited examples perfectly reasonable sorts of statements) or has the potential to spin was not my point. I was merely suggesting that you withhold judgement, in this particular case, until you have access to all the information.

In other words, let the data shape your conclusions and not the other way around.

That is all.

yalla

I do.
But based on experience with christian writers in general and Brown in particular I am alert as to how they/he maybe/will spin his critique to come to an interpretation that is amenable with his prejudice, his bias, his world outlook and his religion.

Let's have a look at what that is for him.
He states that the gospellers were not witnesses.
OK.
So how do they know what happened , who said what? According to Brown that is.
Well he also notes [I can find a quote if you want] that they get a lot of their stimulus from the Tanakh.
Hardly supports historicity does it [unless you apply spin]?
So what does that leave as a source for the alleged events as described, along with alleged verbatim speeches [from non-witnesses remember]?

Lets try a hypothesis .
Let's exclude, temporarily, for the sake of argument, the hypothesis that oral tradition [itself largley unfalsifiable] was a source for the original gospel aka "Mark" conventionally and according to Brown.

What does that leave?

andrewcriddle

FWIW in his discussion of the compositiom of the trial narrative (DotM 548-560) Brown is agnostic to sceptical about whether Jesus was in fact formally accused of blasphemy by a Jewish court.

His earlier argument is more a defence of the verisimilitude of the Markan account (the sort of thing that could have happened) rather than a firm claim it actually did happen.

Andrew Criddle