Peter Kirby

No need to explain anything? "There was a man named Jesus, he had a few followers, and he was killed" hardly ensures a result anything remotely like early Christianity. There's plenty that needs explaining!

best,
Peter Kirby

freigeister

No one would say that, because his music shared common elements with that of his contemporaries, Mozart never existed. The power of genius is seen in how it transforms common elements.

Yuri Kuchinsky

There are hundreds of books out there that do all the explaining, Peter... or at least they try.

Obviously you don't expect me to explain everything in one paragraph?

Sorry, but I'm not playing the game this Dominus fellow wants me to play. Pretty soon he will manage to prove that without the benefit of "printing presses, videos, and other paraphenalia" no religion could ever emerge? Ergo, no religion had ever existed before the "printing presses, videos, and other paraphenalia"!

But my point is very simple, until the Mythicists start producing some _positive_ results, it'll always be little more than hot air.

To criticise is easy. Anybody can criticise anything till hell freezes over, given enough motivation. To produce positive results is hard.

How do you prove a negative, in any case? How does one prove that someone _didn't_ exist?

OTOH to try to make a case that something did happen -- in such and such a way -- is at least doable. Give me your positive case, then we talk.

Regards,

Yuri.

Dominus Paradoxum

This is not what I said. I am not disputing that religions can arise, only that they can arise from a single founder and spread throughout an empire in a relatively short time without benifit of mass media. And you have not addressed my points that 1) Jesus's teachings were not that revolutionary and 2) how such a mass of contradictory beliefs could have arisen concerning a historical figure in such a short time.

You can't prove they didn't exist, but you can't prove that they did either. There are no proofs in history, for the simple reason that history is not math. It is not necessary to have proof to accept somthing as reasonable.

freigeister

Look at mass media from the 1930's and see how many contradictory beliefs arose concerning historical figures alive at the time.

Dominus Paradoxum

Perhaps there was. But as you just conceded, there was a mass media at the time to help spread these beliefs. And the beliefs I referred to were all by those who considered themselves disciples of Jesus, who were supposed to have derived special instruction from him.

Peter Kirby

I thought you said that there was no need to explain anything? Obviously, I was befuddled. Even when we accept that there was a historical Jesus, that is just a factoid. It could be an element in an explanation. But it alone does not tell us why and how Christianity arose. That's why there are hundreds of books trying to explain that. Surely, if there were nothing worth explaining, there wouldn't be a need for all the attempts at explanation? I'm not sure how to interpret your previous statement now.

This is not a point that I am making (re: modern mass media).

I think it is clear that there is both positive and negative work that would have to be done in order for mythicists to get wider acceptance. And I agree already that the present need is for more emphasis on the positive aspect, on understanding the remains of early Christianity in accords with a mythicist hermeneutic and in placing this trace evidence, in some kind of narrative, against the backdrop of the first and second century Mediterranean world.

In respect of the first, a mythicist hermeneutic, plenty of ahistoricist reading strategies have been suggested for the Four Gospels. There are those of MacDonald, Spong, and Turton to name a few. Earl Doherty has focused especially on his interpretation of the epistles and tracts of early Christianity. If you have not noticed Doherty's work on interpreting this literature, you have not looked closely enough at all.

In respect of the second, a narrative, this is a weak spot for most any scholar who does not accept the narrative plotted by Luke-Acts (and paralleled in the other gospels in the life of Jesus). There is just almost no direct narrative in the sources besides that on the first years of the church. Without that light, we are in the dark. Even that light itself, by the amount of detail that it discloses about certain persons and incidents at given times, is suggestive about the vast amounts of dark areas of which we do not know: the many times that a Christian person was baptized, that a Christian person was executed, that a Christian gave a sermon, that a Christian went to the synagogue, that a Christian performed an exorcism, that a new city received an evangelist, that a Christian wrote a letter, or that a Christian met with another to pray, to argue, or to break bread. So much that we do not know, because we have only one source on earliest church history, and its accuracy is debated.

In respect of the third, the background, it is a formidable strength of some historicist scholars due to their enviable erudition in the ancient culture. Nevertheless, Doherty has attempted a sketch of the 'Middle Platonic' milieu of early Christian thought.

By the way, this sort of answers my question: what would go into a model of Christian origins? My answer: hermeneutic, narrative, and background.

When we're talking about a model for explaining the origins of Christianity, we want to know not only what happened--of which we have only a slice of choice events--but also why these things happened, in a general way. You spoke of hundreds of books that apply themselves to this question. Let's just pick a couple. Your pick. How does this book or few books manage to explain the origins of Christianity in its formative stage? (Prior to ~175 CE.) What are the questions that are answered? What kind of shape does the model take? What's involved?

best wishes,
Peter Kirby

Vorkosigan

Juliana, be serious. The situation has changed quite considerably since Bornkamm wrote those words in 1956. I suggest you pick up something like Ludemann's Jesus after 2000 Years which contains a life of Jesus that many NT scholars consider quite rationally-based. EP Sanders also makes a list of things considered reasonable in his works on Jesus' life. His The Historical Figure of Jesus contains a life of Jesus that is quite reasonable. John Meier has written a three volume study of the life of Jesus, A Marginal Jew. Reviews of the state of the scholarship are available in many articles, from Meier's optimistic review in Biblica, available online, to Porter's pessimistic one in his book on historical criteria. See also Crossan's review of the field in The Birth of Christianity. NT Wright, the conservative scholar, has also written a multi-volume study of Jesus' life. Finally, if you want an encyclopediac view, try Theissen and Merz's book The Historical Jesus.

So the answer is of course yes, many have written a life of Jesus. You didn't ask the right question. The correct question is "Has any life of Jesus gained widespread currency?" The answer to that question is "no." No particular life has become normative for the field.

Believe it or not, scholarship on the New Testament did not end in 1956. In fact, there has been an explosion in Historical Jesus scholarship in the last couple of decades.

Vorkosigan

Amaleq13

By that definition, Paul is arguably more of a genius than Jesus.

And I would have to accept that conclusion.

Juliana

This is how you want to present it. It has nothing to do with the facts. I seriously doubt that you or any of the other "judges" here, least the cockalorum who "is not a NT scholar", are qualified to appraise the matter correctly.
I strongly suggest you not only read 'Jesus was Caesar' but also Stephan Weinstock's 'Divus Julius' Oxford (1971) because you seem to have no idea who Divus Iulius was (perhaps because he was a pagan?). He was the highest God of the entire Roman Empire equated with Jupiter.
Stefan Weinstock had to emigrate to Oxford, in order to realize his Divus Julius which was finally published in English because he could not find support nor a publisher in German universities for his work.
The reason Carotta's great work is mostly being ignored so far is a similar one, I guess.