PhilosopherJay

Hi Diogenes the Cynic,

Yes, he does use John the Baptist as well as Paul to prove Jesus was an apocalyptic preacher. It is not this argument about Jesus that I am interested in. It is the contradictory use of Pauline Text in two different arguments that interests me.

His use of contradictory criteria - multiple attestation and the principle of disimiliarity - to support his Euhemeristic Apologetics is what is interesting.

His support for John the Baptist baptizing Jesus as an historical event is absurd in its own way. It is like saying that Bruce Wayne must have been a wealthy person who existed because Alfred the Butler must have been working for someone wealthy all those years and the text describes Bruce Wayne as being wealthy, ergo Bruce Wayne was wealthy. It is simply a silly argument, not an interesting one like the use of Pauline text.

It isn't the minor coin and card tricks that need to be exposed, it is the pulling the rabbit out of hat trick that I'm looking at.

Warmly,

Jay Raskin

andrewcriddle

IMO there is no real inconsistency here.

Argument 1 claims that multiple attestation in early Christian sources of some teaching is evidence that it goes back to Jesus.

Argument 2 claims that if some teaching is found in sources with a less developed Christian theology but not in sources with a more developed Christian theology then this is evidence that it goes back to Jesus.

Both arguments are potentially valid. (IMHO Ehrman's use here of argument 1 is rather strong but his use here of argument 2 is rather weak. Matthew or his tradition may have modified a pre-Christian Jewish apocalypse and put it in the mouth of Jesus.)

Andrew Criddle

Diogenes the Cynic

That's not what he's doing, though. He's using Paul only as one piece of evidence for what post-Jesus Christians believed, not for what Jesus believed.

The argument is not "Paul said X therefore Jesus must have said it," but "Paul said X therefore Pauline Christians believed it. That in itself would mean nothing, but he pairs it with John the Baptist to create a sandwich of both pre-Jesus and post-Jesus acocalypticists, then says this sandwich is evidence that Jesus was apocalyptic.

JBap - Apocalyptic
Jesus - ???
Pauline Christians - Apocalyptic

Ehrman is arguing it's more likely that the Jesus movement was apocalyptic too than that the movement went from apocalyptic to non-apocalyptic then back to apocalyptic.

Without JBap there is no case, and he's not arguing from Paul to Jesus but from Paul to Pauline Christians.


I think Ehrman's weakness here is that he does not really establish that JBap was apocalyptic, and since Josephus does not say that he was, then I think it's still an open question. His baptism, all by itself, could have been a successful populist and anti-Temple establishment movement, and a hypothetical Jesus could have continued and expanded on that with healing and exorcisms without necessarily being apocalyptic himself.

PhilosopherJay

Hi andrewcriddle,

Thanks for the reply.

Do you think Ehrman postulates a more or less developed Christian theory for Paul?

I assume that Paul's writings represents a more developed Christian theology for Ehrman, since he uses it that way in the second argument. He argues that because it disagrees with some less developed gospel Jesus passages it must prove these passages are from the Historical Jesus.

Since he admits that Paul's writings represent a more developed Christian theology, this suggests that it does not attest to anything that the historical Jesus said. How can he then use this as part of a multiple attestation to what the Historical Jesus said in his first argument? Rather than attest to Jesus being an apocalyptic preacher, this can only attest that these passages in the gospels showing him as an apocalyptic preacher came along with a more developed Christology.

On the other hand, we can take it that Paul represents a low Christology and therefore does provide evidence of Jesus as an apocalyptic preacher.

However, first we have declared Paul's writings early with a low Christology, its disagreement with Jesus offering concern for the poor can only mean that this idea was not part of the historical Jesus corpus.

If, as Ehrman suggests the writings of Paul are both early and late and contains a low and high Christology, it is quite useless for proving anything about the historical Jesus. It is useless because by calling it early-low or late-high, we can prove any passage did or did not come from the historical Jesus.

Warmly,

Jay Raskin

Steven Carr

And these 'sources with a less developed Christian theology' are the same '
'sources with a more developed Christian theology', as Ehrman uses 1 Thessalonians 4:13-5:12 as the 'source with a less developed Christian theology', and Ehrman uses 1 Thessalonians 4:13-5:12 as the 'source with a more developed Christian theology'

The exact same passage gets used as 'similarity' on page 303 , and dissimilarity on page 312.

Steven Carr

It is magic, isn't it?

Didn't Bart have any graduate students available to read through his work , just to check for these sorts of things?

andrewcriddle

IIUC Ehrman regards Paul as representing a more developed Christian theology than do the parables in Matthew.

This still allows Paul to be evidence for the Historical Jesus if the material in Paul is paralleled in the synoptic Gospels. (Assuming traditional dates for the NT writings and that Paul did not know the Gospels and the Gospel writers did not know Paul then material which is in both Paul and the Gospels must be very early.)

Andrew Criddle

andrewcriddle

Ehrman regards the material in 1 Thessalonians as both chronologically very early and as more specifically Christian than the parable in Matthew. This seems very probably correct although it may not establish as much as Ehrman thinks it does.

Andrew Criddle

aa5874

What?? Both argument 1 and 2 are hopelessly absurd.

Multiple attestation cannot be confirmed at all in any Christian writing when the accounts of Jesus in Christian sources are not known to be historically reliable and it is not known when and how the Christian sources were produced.

Christian sources that claim Jesus was born of the Holy Spirit do NOT at all attest the teachings of Jesus, the Son of a Ghost.

Ehrman himself admits the New Testament is filled with discrepancies and contradictions both large and small. See Did Jesus Exist?

aa5874

Ehrman PRESUMES that the Pauline writings were early WITHOUT a shred of evidence.

Ehrman's Presumptions are wrong.

Not one author of the NT Canon ever corroborated that Saul/Paul wrote any letters to Churches before c 62 CE--None.

In fact, there is ZERO attestation in the NT Canon for early Pauline letters before c 59-62 CE.

Why does Ehrman Presume the Pauline letters were early when there is zero attestation???