aa5874

After going through all 60 posts so far, I have not seen any one put forward anything to show what is historical in the Gospels, except for the names like Herod, Pilate and geographical locations.

Some have tried to verify the meanig of the words 'evidence and 'history'. Others have tried to refute Doherty and others in the MJ circle, but the mode of operation remains the same; refute, refute, questions, questions, analogies, original text, knowledge of greek, latin, hebrew, context, anger and frustration, 'mainstream' and 'most scholars, however, as I have observed, at the end of it all, there is still nothing to show what is historical in the Gospels.

Isn't anyone, who advoctes the historicity of Jesus, capable of putting forward a simple comprehensive list or compilation of information to show the historicity of the Gospels?

No Robots

Well, as you know, Doherty's argument is meticulous, intricate, and detail-oriented. Why do you expect less from the other side? If you want to know why people believe there are sufficient grounds to assert Christ's historicity, you might want to start with Birger Gerhardsson, particularly his The Reliability of the Gospel Tradition (or via: amazon.co.uk). Gerhardsson makes an excellent case for the reliability of the oral antecedents to the written Gospels. You have recently made positive statements about the value of oral transmission in non-literate cultures, so you may be in a position to appreciate Gerhardsson's arguments.

spin

Given that you've decided much is "fictitious", what makes you think that if there were a crucifixion it was unjust? Do you think that if the law of the time were carried out, that it would have been unjust? Are you retrojecting modern standards?

Why make a decision when the evidence is insufficient either way? The only difference you seem to rely on is that one position is based on nearly two thousand years of organised apologetics, while the other is based on less than 50 years of apologetics. Surely there's a third position: c) reject both positions above as unsupported.

I don't adhere to a MJ position, but I can see the possibility that Paul had an intuition which led him to believe that the awaited messiah must have already come. This of course would have led to further speculation on his part.

The sketchiness of these historical references are as solid as those in the Satyricon, so would you look to find a minimal historical core in that work's narrative foreground as well??


spin

wiccan windwalker

The details of the crucifixion account seem to be historically authentic, and they seem to mirror the passover narratives of the jews (somehting counterintuitive to Christians whose leader was condemned by the Sanhedrin,).the details of the Sanhedrin seem to be historically accurate , the failure to find Jesus' body seems consistent with the account that the body was missing, the fact that the accounts of Jesus' life and ministry seem to resonate with first century palestinian jews certainly is circumstantial evidence of their historical consistency..... as many expert analysts have pointedout-if this was a true conspiracy fabricated out of whole cloth it was the most elaborate and succesful conspiracy in history...... success is nine tenths of the argument.

spin

On what evidence do you say that?

Again, what exactly would lead you to believe that?

Sanhedrinmeeting at night?? Naaa.

When did that story make it into the messianic tradition?

What facts in Jesus's life though? The fictitious birth narratives? Maybe the temptation by the devil? Perhaps the wandering around doing miracles? Perhaps the passion which can be constructed out of fragments from the Hebrew bible?

In the 50 years since Captain Elrond Hubbard kickstarted scientology believers have grown to at least 500,000 if not a million. Success is not a meaningful indicator in historical research.


spin

wiccan windwalker

spin, I see no historical research cited by you. And why wouldnt the Sanhedrin meet secretly at night if they were trying to conduct a kangaroo court to secretly betray one of their own jewish rabbis over to the Roman authorities? During the Nazi Kristallnacht violence the Berlin MIshra( a diasporic analog to the Sanhedrin) met hastily "at night" to try to plan a jewish strategy to deal with the violence and to protect Jewish business owners,etc. I have seen no historian demonstarte that the Gospel details of the crucifixion "protocol" deviated from standard Roman military practice(using the spear to hasten death was a military expedient, giving the body to relatives was reasonable given that it was not a revvolt with a large number of rebels that needed to be left on the public way as an example,etc), and messianic tradition had to have included the crucifixion very early on if it was to be transmitted via oral tradition and appeal to numbers is not always a logical fallacy....and it isnt in this instance, because the use of numbers here is to rebut the inference that the crucifixion of Christ and belief in his resurrection was not the basis for the early Christian church which clkearly began in Jerusalem and spread rapidly throguh first century Palestine.

RAFH

The Sanhedrin didn't have to meet in secret, they weren't betraying one of their own, but a threat to their system and culture.

The part about Krystalnacht is really unrelated, comparing strategic defensive meetings of a persecuted minority (for hundreds of years or more) by a state which had virtually declared them not only non-citizen but essentially non-human and in which they could not meet in any ordinary time and place without being arrested or simply shot on the spot to what the leaders of a society would do in their own country and with if not the blessing at least the tacit approval of their Roman overload. There is no comparison. In the one they had to meet secretly and in the other there was no need, indeed it would be against tradition which is what they were supposed to be holding up.

I'd like to see your copy of the Roman Legion Crucifixion Protocol. The soldiers would have no reason to spare the victim or his family. The whole point of crucifixion was to make a point of maximal pain and suffering.

gstafleu

A smell a false dichotomy here: I don't think you have to go as far as reading a quasi-Christian cosmology into Paul. It is sufficient to observe that (1) he doesn't mention the gospel Jesus, and (2) that what he does mention sounds very ethereal. Exact details of that etherealism can be forgone. Combine that with the fact that it is not just Paul but all early writers (according to Doherty) who don't mention the gospel Jesus, and you can assert that J was M at the time, simply because that is what all these writers tell you. I'm not sure how that is "never directly attested," it is what the texts say!

The problem is that such a reductionist HJ is not falsifiable, and hence methodologically invalid. You can, IOW, always explain away the fact that you have no evidence for him by saying he was so insignificant you cannot expect any evidence. So a reductionist HJ theory is not falsifiable and unfalsifiable theories, like great-aunts (obscure reference inserted to simulate erudition), don't count.

So let us for a moment take spin's position and be agnostic. We then have two theories for what is behind the Jesus story. (1) a diminished HJ, (2) an MJ. We start out by not pronouncing for either. But as long as your diminished HJ remains unfalsifiable he doesn't count, so all that's left is MJ and we pronounce for it by default. And yes, MJ is falsifiable: show an HJ just like you can show an HP (saucy abbreviation for Pilate).


Yup, that shows that the "authors" (there was a lot of oral stuff, so author is partly a misnomer) new the setting. To go back to Ian Fleming, the fact that London exists doesn't mean JB does. So the gospel writers put their fictional character in a realistic setting (it was a bit early for Science Fiction and Fantasy).

Gerard

Didymus

But, just to be sure we're on the same page, you do accept those as historical, right?

That's because most non-believers don't see much historicity in the Jesus stories, and there aren't that many believers on this forum. (Just for the record, I've given you two related Jesus events that I think are historical: a crucifixion and the subsequent "firestorm" of stories about post-crucifixion appearances. And I'll add a possible and highly speculative third: some contact with John the Baptist.)

Well, there's no shortage speculation on that subject, from Schweitzer's "Quest for the Historical Jesus" to the books generated by the Jesus Seminar.

Didymus

aa5874

When I say Jesus Christ and you say Jesus Christ, are we really refering to the same person? Just like, if I say George Bush and you say George Bush, how do we know if were are talking about the same person?

I just did some reading on Book 1, Irenaeus Against Heresies, and it is amazing how many versions of Jesus Christ were prevalent around the 2nd century. Irenaeus also claims Jesus was crucified when he was about fifty (50) yrs old and not at about the age of 30 yrs.

I find that Irenaeus, in refuting a number of heresies, have confirmed that the Jesus story is indeed a myth.

See www.ccel.org