Toto

Hi Jeffrey - T.P Wiseman in Catullus and his World (or via: amazon.co.uk) disagrees with you, at p. 192

(footnotes not typed)

Antipope Innocent II

How dramatic!

The gospels. You know – “Matthew”, “Mark”, “Luke” and “John”.

So it’s not clear that the writers of the gospels believed that Jesus had been a real, living person?

Fine, but I was talking about the gospels.

Apart from the bit where he talks about having met the guy’s brother. But I realise the Dohertyites have a contrived argument to make that go away. No matter – I wasn’t talking about Paul either.

“More likely” fiction? What is there in Mark to indicate that its author didn’t believe this Jesus guy actually existed?

Except those sayings etc are in several gospels written by and for people who believed the guy who supposedly said these things existed. Read what I actually said again Toto. I said that we “have clear evidence that people believed that Jesus had been a real, living person just a few decades before they were writing about him”. I didn’t say we have clear evidence that they were right (because we don’t).

The question is whether the idea that they were right is more a plausible source of their belief than other explanations.

Mileage on this varies widely. Personally, I’ve yet to see any such explanations that manage to even squeak into “vaguely plausible” and I’ve seen many which fall squarely into “hilariously contrived and contorted exercises in pseudo scholarship and self delusion”.

Toto

Not clear at all, unless you want to believe it. We don't have a consistent date of birth or geneology, or other indicia of historical intent.

What's contrived about recognizing that "Brother of the Lord" doesn't translate to "Biological Brother of Jesus?" And what was the brother of a Galilean peasant-wisdom teacher doing heading up a church in Jerusalem? The biological brother explanation seems contrived to me. If you accept the gospels as history, you have James thinking his brother is nutso, and then there's a gap with no explanation, and suddenly James is a major leader. . . .

Oh - the lack of information on the birth, history up to age 30, etc.

I read that, and you still haven't identified anyone in the first century AD who clearly thought that Jesus was a real person.

You are entitled to your opinion. But most non-evangelical scholars think that there is little or no real history to be extracted from the gospels, which were written several generations at least after Jesus allegedly lived, and after the Jewish War which upset the region. How can you be so sure that the gospels were intended as straight history, or that those who heard them believed that they were history? I don't see where the confidence or the ridicule come from.

Jeffrey Gibson

I guess I am "guilty of unfounded hyperbole"!

But not so unfounded, nor so hyperbolic either, I think, since Wiseman himself -- of whom I was, along with Jay, I'm sure, unaware until now -- notes that he is pretty much the exception among scholars vis a vis the view of the separate identities Catullus the poet and and Catullus the writer of mimes. In fact, he calls his view on the matter a "heresy" (cf. p. ix).

[I do wonder, though, whether Wiseman's argument -- which goes on to assert that Catullus the poet was also Valerius, the author of the Phormio -- has been accepted, or regarded as having any merit, by other Catullus scholars].

So let's rephrase my claim to "as the overwhelming majority of Catullus scholars who have studied the mime and the references to it in Juvenal etc. note, the author of the mime is NOT the Roman poet Gaius Valerius Catullus,

Better?

In any case, do you think Jay was aware that anyone had ever questioned the identification of Catullus the poet with Catullus the author of mimes?

Jeffrey

Roger Pearse

This issue is new to me. Am I right in thinking that the main reasons to suppose that these are two different people are the statement of the scholiast, plus the absence of any statement that would indicate identity?

All the best,

Roger Pearse

Antipope Innocent II

What’s the fact that the (implied) dates of birth and the genealogies given in Luke and Matthew are inconsistent with each other got to do with anything? The fact remains that both do give specific times when Jesus was born, linked to known historical people and events. And both do give genealogies. These are indica of historical intent, as you say yourself.

It’s contrived because in other passages where Paul is clearly talking about fellow Christians he uses a different grammatical construction – “brother/s in [en] the Lord” (eg Romans 16:11 or Romans 6:8) whereas here he says “brother of [tou] the Lord”. This is a cognate with various other phrases in Greek, in the gospels, Josephus and elsewhere, where a direct familial connection is being indicated (eg Mark 3:17 or Antiquites II, 2, 4). So Doherty’s hand waving attempt at making this inconvenient reference disappear looks slightly less contrived in English, but Paul wrote in Greek.

What was this Galilean peasant apocalypcist doing leading his followers to Jerusalem? Unless, of course, that was precisely where an apocalypcist and his followers would want to be if they thought the coming kingship of God was directly immanent.

Yes, because no-one has ever changed their minds about their older brother in the whole of human history ….

We have a lack of information on the birth or history up to age 40 for the Rabbi Akiva as well. Does this mean the writers of the sources we have for him meant him as a fictional character?

You yourself said that giving birth stories and genealogies and stories from his childhood would be an indication of historical intent. We have all of those in Matthew and Luke.

Gosh, am I? Thanks!

And I’d generally agree with them on that. But we aren’t talking “extracting history” from the gospels, just whether their writers thought Jesus existed or were writing fiction. Leave those goalposts alone and stop trying to shift them around.

Jeffrey Gibson

I am not certain that these are the main reasons. But along with what is said by Juvenal in Satire 13 about "Catullus" and a particular writing of his about a runaway clown, they are among the ones given.

Jeffrey

Roger Pearse

The tendency to presume that two people about whom we know little living around the same time with the same name are in fact the same person is one that trips people up a lot. But on the flip side one must not multiply people unnecessarily.

youngalexander

In the first instance it means that both cannot be correct. In the second it is an indication that neither may be correct.
However, neither the 'times when Jesus was born', the 'known historical people', nor 'events' can be reconciled with known historical events. Indicating that the specifications are fabrications.
Conflicting genealogies.
Are they? They appear to be indica of invention.

Of course, I have missed the point, have I not. It matters not one jot what balderdash Lk & Mat concoct, according to you their hearts were in the right place and they thort that they were writing history. They would not have dreamt of such inventions, had Jesus not been a recent living person.

Do I really need to mention the circularity of this drivel?

Solitary Man

But they lived almost a hundred years apart - if we're not multiplying entities, we might as well say that George Bush and George W. Bush (there is some variant in the first name, coming out as George H. W. Bush) are the same person.

Martial was the first to mention the Catullus who wrote mimes. Later authors writing on Catullus, like Jerome, are unaware that he wrote any mimes at all.