Doug Shaver

OK, let's have a look . . . .
Can you provide some context to justify your apparent supposition that the antecedent of "he" is "the messiah"?

I've read the passage three times. I see no attribution of divinity to the messiah.

aa5874

Ted M attempts to do the most absurd. He tries to use gMark to show that Jesus was not well-known when the author of gMark did the complete opposite.

From the very first chapter of gMark the author established that HIS Jesus was NOT minimal at all but was WELL-KNOWN throughout the region.

Mr 1:28 - Ted M's minimal Jesus has gone up in smoke.

Next, Ted M makes another inherently ridiculous claim that the historicity of Jesus is more assured by more fiction or deviation from plausibility.

But amazingly he uses gMark which contains the LEAST quantity of fiction or deviation from plausibility.

The author of gMark did not make any claim that Jesus was the child of the Holy Ghost or was the Creator of heaven and earth and equal to God.

Ted M is obviously in a state of denial, confusion or is hallucinating.

GMark contradicts him totally.

TedM

'the Jews' admittedly is a vague generalization. I certainly didn't mean 100% of the people. I am under the impression that religious issues were of great importance to the avg Jewish person, that they were very unhappy about the state of their nation, and that they had a strong expectation for a Messiah to help them out of their predicament. My impression is not an assumption of my conclusion, as you keep saying. It is my conclusion based on my sense of the nation's people over history, and the preoccupation with the idea of a Messiah found in many of their documents, in the Bible and externally. It also comes from knowledge that their expectations for a king were not fulfilled as prophesied so there developed an interest in re-interpreting their own scriptures with regard to a Messiah in order for it to retain its authority. This mode of analysis would likely have been amplified when the temple was rededicated to the Olympian Zeus in 168BC.

In support of this is the following (which I had read prior to making my 'desperation' claim):


And, lastly, the large quantity of Messiah claimants surrounding the time of Jesus supports my view of both high expectation and desperation. See http://www.livius.org/men-mh/messiah...aimants00.html

So I do not admit that I am retrojecting my ideas onto the past. My conclusions are based on things I have read and the impressions they have given me.

aa5874

When I looked at the link you provided it does NOT confirm what you have written. It basically says that it is NOT really known if Judea was crowded with Messiahs.

Josephus mentioned one or two messianic rulers in the 1st century and they were Vespasian and Titus who would become Emperors of Rome. These Emperors were NOT "sage Messiahs".

They either directly or indirectly killed Jews or asked Romans and others to kill Jews.

And further it was not until around 100 years after Pilate that the Jews called Simon barKochba a Messiah. He too was not a "sage Messiah". He either directly or indirectly killed Romans or asked Jews to kill Romans. He was a "ruler/military Messiah.

In gMark, Jesus was a blasphemer and ordered his disciples not to say that he was a Messiah before he went before Pilate.

When did the Jews desperately need a "sage Messiah"?

Perhaps after the death of Simon barKochba.

TedM

It says they are likely candidates. Any comment on this?:

spin

Why? Because you can read the literature of a literate elite?

As I've already asked a number of times, any more so than people of any of the oppressed populations in the Roman Empire?

How many of them you keep referring to. Are you dealing with 5% or more or less? And how do you know?

Even this notion of "nation" is likely to be very modern.

"[M]any" is certainly an overstatement.

The latter parts of the Psalms of Solomon post-date the death of Pompey, so the notion of the royal messiah was alive and strong around 50 BCE.

Was there any speculation on a messiah before the time? Even Daniel which was mainly written at that time features a priestly messiah (long willfully misinterpreted by christianity), the prince messiah, leader of the theocratic state, such a person as Onias III, high priest, who was cut off when Antiochus IV removed him from office and eventually assassinated. The religion was wholly priestly until these events. Messiahship at this stage was based on the one chosen by god as demonstrated by his having been anointed, which had for a few centuries been the high priest.

So are you using Maccabean propaganda in a period which developed into relative well-being as a period of developing desperation?? By the time John Hyrcanus had gained independence from Antioch, Jerusalem was on the way way to a modest affluence. It was only with the arrival of the Romans that things would start hitting the fan.

How do you account for speights of teenage suicides in affluent America? Weltschmerz?

Sorry, I don't think you have a leg to stand on.




spin

TedM

spin you can continue in this mode all day long obviously. I have given you my reasons and with support, so there is no need to continue. Your refusal to see the connection between the needs and desires of their culture and the large number of messiah claimants says all I need to know about your methods of processing information.

Johnny Skeptic

Meaning what? What are you trying to prove? During the first century, Christians were only a very small, uninfluential group of people. Christianity was widely rejected. Most people considered it to be absurd. It has never been difficult to convince a few people to believe outrageous things. Even today, some people believe that the earth is flat, and that men did not land on the moon.

Many Jews were expecting a Messiah to eventually come, but what evidence was there at the time that a Messiah had come? Micah 5:2 says that someone would come from Bethlehem who would become ruler in Israel. Jesus did not become ruler in Israel. Surely most Jews expected a ruler to come in this life, not in the next life.

But we cannot be reasonably certain what Paul, the Gospel authors, and the other early epistle authors believed. No original first century Bible manuscripts exist, and non-biblical sources do not adequately tell us how and when Christianity started. There is a reasonable possibility that 1 Corinthians 15:3-8 is an interpolation. The identities of the Gospel authors are unknown. No one knows where the Gospel authors got their information from. We cannot be reasonably certain that Peter was speaking for himself. How and whenever Christianity started, it was widely rejected during the first century. As I have said before, it is frequently easy to convince a very small group of people to believe improbable things. Even today, some people believe that the earth is flat, and that men have not landed on the moon.

Historical records are not available merely for our convenience, and to satisfy our curiosity.

If you read Earl Doherty's lastest book, you might find some answers to some of your questions. Right or wrong, Earl is very intelligent and well-read, and he has spent decades studying the historical/mythical Jesus issue. I am not promoting the historical Jesus theory or the mythical Jesus theory, but I am willing to concede the existence of a historical Jesus for the sake of argument.

aa5874

And how do you show that "messianic speculations were abundant" when the very source stated that "we simply cannot know"?

You arguments are based on speculations that we cannot know.

spin

In other words, you were right a priori and you can see through my ruse of analyzing such things as evidence because you are committed to a viewpoint that an internet site supports. Now you add another claim: there was a "large number of messiah claimants". Our only important source doesn't call anyone a messiah, except possibly Jesus. What is this many claimants claim actually based on?

You cannot help yourself but multiply your levels of assumptions, such that you guarantee that you end up in mystification hinting at you being unable to say anything historically meaningful. Like a matrioshka doll, one take off one layer and there's another inside, until perhaps eventually you'll take off the last and find nothing. King Lear's Fool has advice for you:

"Speak less than thou knowest."

It's sage advice.


spin