Toto

I've been around this argument with GDon for years. His argument is superficially reasonable, if you ignore the data you don't like

Your insults are getting irritating. Doherty has a Masters in Classics and has pursued several other careers. He operates as an independent scholar.

Do you have an example of a recognized scholar at a real university who has actually written anything recent showing that Jesus was a historical figure? Just give me a name.

spin

I'd rather have a scholarly reference, eg

Johannes Blatworst, "The First Christian Burger", Journal of Meat Processing, 27 (1957), 324-351. See especially p.344.

I can check on that!


spin

stephan huller

I am coming at this late with no specific agenda.other than to state the obvious. Nevertheles in all fairness there aren't papers written proving George Washington was a historical figure or that Aristotle really lived in the age he did for that matter. I don't know what the percentages are but I would think that most people holding positions in a university assume that Jesus was a real person. That doesn't mean that Jesus should be taken to be a real person. I am just saying that just because rolls of toilet paper don't come with an instruction manual doesn't mean that there is ambiguity about how it's supposed to be employed. It's assumed that everyone is on the same page.

Petergdi

Did they believe that Jesus was fully God and fully human and performed miracles? Sure, as do I.

Did they believe that Jesus was part-human part-god and had super-powers. Nope.

Yes, but the evidence of the divinity of Christ is not especially in the miracles, but that he showed us what God is like in word and deed.

I don't think it particularly important if some sayings of Jesus, or something similar to them, were said by someone else before. The teaching was new and was received as new in antiquity. The wisdom of the Rabbis, Stoics and Cynics was not the way to become a child of God and an inheritor of the Kingdom. The way starts with the knowledge of divine forgiveness, and progresses through a change of heart through which you begin to value enemies and strangers over your friends and yourself.

I didn't say it was easy or that I was much good at it.

Peter.

Petergdi

Name a single one of these "modern Biblical archaeologists" who "now believe that the village of Nazareth did not exist at the time of the birth and early life of Jesus."

You can't, can you?

Peter.

GakuseiDon

I see. And what data might that be? The data that shows that spiritual beings can be "seed of Abraham" and "in flesh" and "from the tribe of Judah", etc? I haven't seen data that supports that, and I have both Doherty's books. Have you seen that kind of data?

"Anything recent". Right. Why would anyone write something recent like that? Has any recognized scholar tried to defend the historical existence of Julius Caesar? No. And that means what, exactly?

Personally, I think there is very little evidence to support the existence of a historical Jesus, and the question of whether he existed is a good one that needs to be addressed. But guess what? When one addresses it, the answer comes back that it is superficially reasonable. The next step is to show that it is not superficially reasonable. Maybe Carrier will do it, or maybe Price. Doherty has convinced a lot of Internet enthusiasts, but why should anyone care what they think? I'm quite happy sitting with the (at least) superficially reasonables.

aa5874

But, the NT refers to a CITY of Nazareth not a village.

Can you name a "modern Biblical archaeologists" who believe that a CITY called Nazareth did exist in Galilee in the 15th year of the reign of Tiberius?

Mt 2:23 - Please state exactly when an ancient CITY of Nazareth in Galilee was ever found.

gurugeorge

AAAARRRRGGGGHHHHH!!!!!

Not "someone historical" as in the Joe Bloggs obscure preacher that's required for a modern-day understanding of a historical Jesus, but "someone historical" in the sense of a frackin' GOD-MAN.

The GOD-MAN is the entity they considered historical.

But that is precisely what? That is precisely a MYTH.

Sure, a few educated rationalists of the day may have thought of the myth euhemeristically as many are doing now, but the stories themselves are about the historicity of a god-man, a fantastic, divine being with some sort of earthly aspect.

The references to earthly bits and pieces of biography are references to earthly bits and pieces of a biography about a god-man.

What we need, is something to pin down an ordinary man to be the euhemeristic root of this evident, obvious, blatant, and indubitable myth.

None of the stuff in Paul serves - none of it betokens any personal contact between any of the people he knew and a living human being. Far less the gospels (unless someone is prepared to undertake the really careful, subtle type of analysis that Ben C Smith used to talk about).

The question is not whether or not people thought Jesus historically existed: of course they bloody did. But the entity THEY thought existed was an entity like Hercules - a super-powered divine sort of part-man part-god (or whatever theological nicety one might want to admit, it's really irrelevant to the point in question), and probably an entity who had part of his being or spent part time in a "Buffy-like" realm. That's who the frackin' "biography" is ABOUT.

So we have to extract a man from it. There's no external evidence for a man who might answer to the human aspect of the Jesus story, so it has to be internal evidence - but that internal evidence has to be something that gives the game away that somebody knew somebody who KNEW this entity IN THE FLESH, who eyeballed him, talked to him, etc., etc.

So where is that evidence? We're not expecting miracles here, but some frackin' tidbit of personal knowing of a human being by somebody connected vaguely with the whole foofaraw would be nice. Some teensy bit of possible historical happening that can't also be found also in literature, in the OT, in Stoic or Cynic philosophy, other hellenistic myths, or a thousand other places - would be nice.

Toto

The indications of interpolations, the dodgy dating of Paul's letters, the positive indications that Paul gives that his Christ Jesus was not on earth.

If you are determined to believe that there was a historical Jesus, you can support your thesis.

Because no one has applied modern notions of historigraphy to the question, which is what Carrier is doing.

Doug Shaver

No, but there are plenty of papers referencing the evidence from which we infer his historicity. If anyone actually had any doubts about Washington's existence, and if those doubts were in fact due to their ignorance about that evidence, it would be a trivial exercise for them to find out why their doubts were unreasonable. They could find out, by reading the scholarly literature and checking the citations, exactly what evidence exists that leads everyone to conclusion that Washington was a real person who really commanded the forces of the American rebellion and really was the first president of the United States.

That is not the case with Jesus' historicity. The scholarly literature cites no evidence that is not available to anyone with an Internet account. Any lay person who knows how to do scholarly research can examine the same evidence that the scholars use and figure out whether it actually supports the consensus of Jesus' existence. From the mere fact that nearly all scholars assume that it proves his existence, it does not follow that it really does prove such a thing.

The scholarly consensus about Washington's existence does not prove anything either, by itself, but anyone who wants to find out why the consensus exists, and why no one questions it, can find out exactly why, if they want to go to the bother of doing the relevant research. Some of us have gone to the bother of finding out why there is such a consensus about Jesus, and what we have found strongly suggests that the consensus is mistaken.