LegionOnomaMoi

There certainly isn't an interest among non-historians. But the above claim is quite simply wrong. They debate over the historical Socrates goes back even farther than that over Jesus (and just as the debate over the historical Jesus has a special name, "the quest...", so to does that over socrates: "the socratic problem"). Garnier's Caractére de la Philosophie de Socrate was written in the 18th century. And we also have ancient sources for "the Socratic problem". Diogenes Laertius tells us that Socrates, upon hearing someone reading Plato, bursts out "By Herakles! How many times has that lad has lied about me!" (Ἡρά-
κλεις...ὡς πολλά μου καταψεύδεθ’ ὁ νεανίσκος). Since Garnier, an enormous amount of scholarship has been written about the historical Socrates, and with very few exceptions, scholars are not at all ready to accept that "the Socrates of literature is enough" for them "to analyze".



Again, though, the scholars who analyze the "literary" Socrates don't doubt he existed. They acknowledge that even if we can't extract the historical Socrates from the literature, this is because we can't tell what is fact vs. what is fiction, not because there is a possiblity that the entire tradition is fiction. The "literary creation" of the man exists only because the man did as well.


The example most often mentioned in HJ circles is Ned Ludd, a legendary worker who smashed machines and gave rise to the Luddites. Historians now think that he never existed, but stories with biographical details developed very quickly after the alleged events. William Tell never existed. Tertullian and Irenaeus believed in the existence of a man called Ebion, the founder of the Ebionites, and even supplied some biographical details.

And the same might be said of Buddha (although a good many historians do think he was historical). Yet none of these are parallels. Homer, King Arthur, even Pythagoras are more similar.

The differences are of extreme importance. Take King Arthur. Our earliest documents about him are centuries later. With Homer, we have epics said to have been written about him, but nothing else. Likewise with ancient Chinese philosophers. What this demonstrates is the capacity for humans to attribute existing traditions to people who they imagine lived centuries earlier. The Pythagoreans and the Homeridae could very well have dreamt of a founder to explain their name (unlikely in the case of Pythagoras).

All of these examples are qualitatively different. Humans do dream up stories to explain the origins of traditions or stories by creating legendary figures who lived centuries ago. That's not what the gospels are. If they are completely mythical, then we are dealing with something resembling ancient biographies which dreamt up a figure who lived in a specific time and place about 40 years before Mark. That's somthing quite different.

aa5874

That is precisely what people BELIEVE. People of antiquity and HJers TODAY believe what they read and hear about Jesus is history WITHOUT anyone having met Jesus or seen him when he was earth.

The character called Jesus did NOT have any role in the development in the Jesus cult in gMark, the earliest Canonized Jesus story.

It was the resurrected Jesus and the Holy Ghost on the day of Pentecost that DEVELOPED the Jesus cult of Christ.

See the Interpolated gMark 16 and Acts of the Apostles 2.

And even more devastating the supposed contemporaries of the Jesus character did NOT at any time claim that they are WITNESSES to his actual life on earth.

Paul BOASTED that he was a WITNESS of MYTH Jesus.

1 Corinthians 15:15 KJV Please, there can be no more devastating WITNESS to an historical Jesus.

The Pauline writer, the supposed contemporary, will also ADMIT that his Jesus was NOT human.

Galatians 1:1 KJV Even the supposed contemporay of the Jesus character DENY his origin as human.

Toto

That's why the example of Ned Ludd is of such interest to Jesus scholars. The time frame between the origins of the legend and the emergence of the biography is close to the time between the alleged death of Jesus and the earliest date that apologists can assign to Mark.

And a more realistic date for Mark would be closer to a century after the alleged events. Mark only needed to place Jesus in the now-destroyed city of Jerusalem ruled over by Pilate several generations back. Who's going to object?

So there is no qualitative difference. The phenomenon exists - people can dream up imaginary friends and convince themselves and others that they are real and that they lived some time ago.

hjalti

Gary Habermas? The inerrantist "professor of apologetics" at Liberty University?

LegionOnomaMoi

Yet, as you rightly pointed out when I posted an article comparing Haile Selassie to Jesus (mainly for a specific member here using a specific argument), this kind of comparison fails for a number of reasons. The same is true of the Luddites. In late 18th and early 19th centuries, during a period of unrest the labor class developed a framework spontaneously (it would appear), which nonetheless fit the literary templates of the time, through which they could produce a large number of pseudonymous letters, verses, proclamations, etc. and protect from themselves reprisals via anonymity. But this is no more help for understanding the gospel tradition than is Haile Selassie, who has more similarities to Jesus than the creation of the Luddites.

We are dealing with a highly illiterate population in which the dissemination of material was not easy (no printing presses), especially for lengthy texts. Moreover, the "genres" of the period were not easy to distinguish (with the possible exception of poetry, but as even epics and plays had similar meters here too boundaries were blurred). Plutarch distinguishes his biography from history, which wasn't history the way we think of it anyway. The author of Mark was hardly a literary genius. His Greek is subpar, and even worse is his ability to weave his material into a coherent narrative, which was the aim of history or any narrative accounts. That the author had the capacity to invent a new genre yet lacked the basic ability to write a story is implausible at best, and that's without getting into an explanation for the acceptance of this story as history.

Based on what?

People can write histories like R. L. Fox or any given historian, but it took millenia for the genre to develop. The fact that something can be done at one point doesn't mean it can at another.

Toto

Eh? Your cribbed essay on Haile Selassie is here. I criticized it because the fact that one actual historical person had been turned into a legend could not be used in reverse, to show that all legends have a historical person at the care.

Does this mean that you subscribe to the theory that Jesus was a member of royalty?

And why is Haile Selassie more like Jesus than the Luddites are like early Christians? Neither are identical matches, but the Luddite example shows that it is possible to create a historical person out of legends.

How is this related to the topic?

Michael Turton would disagree with you on the quality of Mark's literary output. As to Mark's "ability to weave his material into a coherent narrative, which was the aim of history or any narrative accounts" - maybe he wasn't trying to write history.


Mark is only dated to 70 CE to accommodate apologists and try to get the gospel close enough to the events to allow for some eyewitness input. But there are numerous anachronisms, and a few people see references to the Bar Kochba rebellion. Look up some old threads on this.

What's the point of genre? That's how a later observer classifies the work. Do you think that if Mark had something to say, he would have to throw down his pen because the genre of gospel had not been invented yet, and he would have to write Homeric poetry instead?

LegionOnomaMoi

Right. Just like the fact that a fictional person was created within the framework of 18th-19th century class struggles and within the literary framework of that time and even that conflict.



No. It's the messianic and mythic accounts which grew up around the guy, even in the modern period. For someone arguing that any mythical account must be complete myth, it's a convenient counter-example.

He isn't. Remember, I was addressing a specific argument.



If you come across an "ancient" drama that resembles Oscar Wilde, chances are it is a forgery. Literary genres don't just appear out of thing air, especially in an era where so few people could even read (including scribes). Drama evolved from the Greek chorus, "History" from myth, and so on. And not only was each of these limited in scope, you can tell how close they tend to be to what they evolved from and to one another. Even when romans stated writing their versions, the style remained as did the reliance on myth in histories/biographies.

The idea that Mark created some religious-novel-bio, which the audience then mistook for reality or history (despite a long tradition, if one follows the mythicist view, of belief in a non-earthly and purely spiritual Jesus), is incredibly implausible. The nature of Mark makes this even less than very implausible.



I read his page. Can he read Greek? It's hard to tell from his commentary and sources (one doesn't normally find analyses of the literary structure of just the translation, rather than the greek, if a translation is used at all). At any rate, having read a whole lot of greek spanning a period of about a thousand years, I agree with just about every other analysis of Mark here. How can the extremely poor, frequent, and infuriating "and suddenly" as a method of transition be considered the product of a talented writer?

Which brings us back to the ingenius construction of a novel genre. But even if he wasn't, he was writing a narrative, a story (which both "biographers" and historians and everyone who wasn't writing in meter did). His lexical usage, transitions, syntax, and stylistic techniques range from simplistic to just plain bad.


Not really. What are you basing this on?

Considering some of the theories I've seen expressed, rather than try to find one which addesses the arguments within scholarship for the standard dates, if you think there are one or two which do, I'd appreciate the links.

As has been pointed out over and over, ancient lives and the gospels are as similar to one another as they are dissimilar. The gospels aren't really a novel genre, just part of a very loose genre of narrative into which lives fall.

Again, forms of literature do not simply appear out of thin air, especially in the ancient world. Choral dancing to tragedies, tragedies to satyr plays, satyr plays to comedies, and eventually after hundreds of years somebody realized they could have multiple actors on stage at once. But somehow Mark, whose literary talent and greek is at best adequate, can take the Christ myth and invent a religious-historical-fiction which (despite appearing like a bunch of disparate traditions/stories/sayings/etc. strung together badly) somehow turns into a story everbody thinks is about a real person (and the Christ myth followers disappear into the sunset).

aa5874

Your posts are just so pathetic. It is like your trying to prevent a SUBMERGED vessel from taking in more water. Don't you understand that people here know about Greek/Roman Mythology???

Over 1800 years ago even an Apologetic source ADMITTED the Jesus story was like Greek/Roman Mythology.

Please, are you NOT aware that the author of gMatthew was part of the Audience of gMark???

The author of gMatthew AFTER having examined and Copied gMark's Jesus declared gMark's Jesus was FATHERED by a Ghost.

The author of gMatthew PUT the FACE of a Ghost to gMark's Jesus.

The author of gLuke was Part of the Audience of gMark and gMatthew and this Lucan author ADGREED that the FACE of the Jesus is like unto a Ghost.

But, what did the 2nd century Audience think of the Son of God who was in Capernaum in the 15th year of Tiberius??

Marcion and the Marcionites, a LARGE part of the Audience, DECLARED the Son of God had NO FLESH and NO Birth.

Now, you are in for a BIG SURPRISE.

The 2nd century Audience BELIEVED Marcion and LAUGH at those who believed Jesus had Flesh.

Jesus had FLESH??? That was a BIG Joke to the 2nd century audience.

First Apology Please, the Jesus stories are Myth Fables that Matched or Surpassed those Myth Fables of the Greeks and Romans.

It is completely IMPLAUSIBLE that the Greeks and Romans would accept a KNOWN dead Jewish man as a God and that the DEIFIED Emperor of Rome should BOW to a dead Jewish Man for Remission of Sins.

An Obscure HJ is absurd in any century.

Just ask Marcion!!!

Toto

It's not just like it.

You seemed to be arguing that one example of a historical person who was mythologized showed that all legends had a historical person at the core. This is clearly incorrect. The example of Ned Ludd shows that it is possible for a legend to lead people to believe that a historical person existed within a short period of time.

These are different statements. I am not claiming that every apparently historical person is really legendary.

No one argues this.

I admit that I'm having a hard time taking this genre argument seriously


It's' been too long since I looked at this. When I first read the standard scholarship on the dating of Mark, I was shocked at how thin it was.

Herman Detering's arguments are here.

You place too much emphasis on the quality of the Greek. That's an independent issue from the literary structure.

You keep repeating this claim about genre as if it were established fact. I don't think it is - it is Richard Burridge's hypothesis, which came to a convenient conclusion for a few others. But there are lots of differences between Mark and a bios, and lots of similarities with other forms.

Here's some previous discussion:

Vridar: questioning Burridge

Apostate Abe summarizes Ehrman

Differences Between GR Biography and Stories - A Case Study - "Mark" vs. Apollonius

What is the genre of Mark?

Is "Mark" Greek Tragedy?

LegionOnomaMoi

End and start? Do you know of authors of scholarship, whether book-length or just a paper, who start writing without knowing what they are going to say? Of course they start writing with the assumption of whatever they conclude. That doesn't mean they started researching with this assumption, but even if they did how does it matter? Everybody has biases. Some are less likely to skew one in a particular direction given a particular topic, but it really doesn't matter if the author of a book on the historical Jesus is an evangelical scholar, an ardent atheist (i.e., not one who doesn't believe in god although doesn't really care, but rather one who dedicates time and effort to convincing others, debating, etc.), or anywhere in between. The strength of their arguments is what matters, and if you haven't read these, then you can hardly write them all off as having "assumed" a historical Jesus without demonstrating the strength of this hypothesis (obviously you can, just not with any intellectual credibility or integrity). So I'll ask again: what have you read of those sources which seek to demonstrate first or even largely that Jesus was historical? Because I had assumed that you had read at least most of such works until your comment about secondary scholarship. You have attacked historical Jesus scholarship for not addressing this question over and over again, except it doesn't seem as if you have read those works which do. Or perhaps you've read a few (and, given what appears to be your proclivity for older works, perhaps you read Bultmann or Remsburg or something even older) and determined that no other arguments could be marshalled, and thus there was no point in reading anything else? Whatever the case, I honestly can't think of a good reason to state things like
and any number of similar comments about the "crap" historicists write and about their "assumptions" of a historical Jesus rather than any attempts to really deal with the question, when you haven't read the attempts you are asserting were inadequate and thus the question has never been adequately addressed within historical Jesus scholarship.