yin_sage

Hi again Earl,

I don't consider myself knowledgeable enough to opine one way or the other. My "bristling" response had more to do with surprise at the undiplomatic choice of words. (You may even notice I defended you a while back in this thread.)

Do you recommended your book as a good critique of the Farrer hypothesis? Or is there a more definitive resource you might point us towards?

I have no bias that I am not willing to cure. Thanks for your time.

aa5874

You seem not to understand that Jesus was NOT the origin of the word "Christian."

You also seem not to understand that the Logos was called the Son of God.

And further there were Christians who ONLY believed in ONE God not Jesus.

Once there were so-called HERETICS then there were Christians who simply believed in some other doctrine that may have nothing at all to do with Jesus as a MAN or SPIRIT.

It would be expected that Christians would have called each other Heretics once their doctrines were fundamentally different.

The passage in Tacitus Annals 15 only appears to make claims about Christians not about their actual belief.

aa5874

Justin Martyr did write that their Christian beliefs about Jesus was REALLY nothing different from what the Greeks believe.

Examine "First Apology" XXI Justin's JESUS was just as BELIEVABLE as the Greek MYTHS.

Even so-called Christians saw the CLEAR similarities with Jesus and Greek Gods.

And even the Marcionite SPIRIT JESUS was well ACCEPTED in antiquity even to the point where those who believed in the SPIRIT JESUS laughed at Justin.

Examine "First Apology" LXVI Jesus did NOT have be HUMAN for there to have been Jesus stories.

Marcion with his Marcionites demonstrated that people in antiquity could believe in a TOTAL SPIRIT JESUS.

EarlDoherty

That critique of the Luke-used-Matthew hypothesis may not be exhaustive, and it also draws on the arguments of a couple of other scholars, notably an article by John Kloppenborg, but as a summary presentation (it covers 12 pages) of the total picture of the case against the case against Q, including my own contributions to such, I could certainly recommend it. The main focus is on Mark Goodacre who is the most recent heir of Farrer.

Earl Doherty

aa5874

But, you may be a bit late with your recommendation.

mountainman

Why are we not discussing the actual evidence available? The evidence strongly suggests that the Historia Augusta was a commonplace "mockumentary" - ancient biographies about people who were fabricated. Over 160 "fake documents". Invented sources and even further invented sources fabricated to disagree with the earlier invented sources. This is the modus operandi of Eusebius in his othodox heresiological treatment of the "othodox" and the "vile Gnostic heretics", and the "orthodox" and the "pagans" (such as Celsus and Porphyry).

Eusebius was in charge of many professional scribes in at least one and possibly more, imperially sponsored scriptoria. We know that Eusebius was under the instruction of Constantine in the preparation of the 50 bibles. The Historia Augusta is likely to have been the output of Constantine in order to present a history of the Caesars along with a history of the new and strange church. The Historia Augusta is evidence of commonplace fabrication at the imperial level. Evidence must be explained.

Explicitly fourth century imperially sponsored scriptoria fabrications just like the "Historia Augusta".

"One Book to rule them all, One Book to find them,
One Book to bring them all and in the darkness bind them "

mountainman

“… the sacred matters of inspired teaching
were exposed to the most shameful ridicule
in the very theaters of the unbelievers.”

[Eusebius, “Life of Constantine”, Ch. LXI,
How Controversies originated at Alexandria
through Matters relating to Arius.]

This specific evidence above suggests that the common assumption (at this time) appears to have been that the Gospels were plainly and simply ridiculous.

Further evidence seems to suggest that this "most shameful ridicule" reaction to the Christ Myth and the Canon resulted in the Lord God Caesar ["Pontifex Maximus"] Constantine playing power politics by pronouncing Damnatio memoriae on specific authors of books.

aa5874

But, did not the author of gJohn claim to be a witness to Jesus himself.

Examine John 21.24 Now, if gJohn is true then many things in gLuke about Jesus is FALSE.

But, you ASSUMED, you SPECULATED, there were stories BEFORE the Gospels were written and then DEMAND that others "MUST ACCOUNT" for your presuppositions.

You are NOT making much logical sense.

Please FIRST ACCOUNT for YOUR Jesus stories BEFORE the Gospels were written.

Please STATE what you KNOW about your Jesus BEFORE the Gospels were written.

And even upto the middle of the 2nd century Jesus believers or Christians claimed Jesus was BORN WITHOUT SEXUAL UNION.

Jesus had NO human father according to Jesus believers.


Some atheist ACCEPT that the NT is fundamentally fiction/embellishments in relation to Jesus and still use the NT as a credible source for their HJ.

This is tantamount to using a person as a witness who has no credibility in a trial and during the trial the person admits that they are lying about everything except one or two occasions.

Doug Shaver

Yes, I know that, too.

But under what circumstances does that happen?

The key word is "celebrity." The fact that you (or I) have never heard of them doesn't mean they didn't do something to attract a lot of attention. After all, you can't tell any stories about a real person that you've never heard of.

Nobody is suggesting that there is. When we say that the historicist hypothesis is unparsimonious, that is not what were' talking about.

Devotees who could have had firsthand knowledge about him did not write anything at all.

Within the lifetimes of everybody who could have met him or could have known people who had met him, every last Christian reference to any "Jesus" or "Christ" is to an entity who is unmistakably divine -- a god or some being very like a god. What could Jesus of Nazareth have done to get that kind of attention and how do we know he did it?

Every scrap of gospel material that is prima facie credible is about a man who would never have been deified, at least not by any group of Jews.

Doug Shaver

[Note: I posted this before reading Earl's response. My apologies for not reading ahead.]

This is a point often raised by Christian apologists trying to discredit ahistoricity. And the answer is: No, none that we know of. And so the next question is, does this absence of evidence prove what historicists would have us think it proves? I think not.

The claim of Jesus' nonexistence would not even have been relevant until Christians began saying that the risen Christ had been raised from an earthly grave into which he had been placed after dying on a real cross in the real world, after an earthly ministry conducted in the real world, after being born of a real virgin in the real world. If Christians throughout the first century were saying none of those things, then their adversaries could hardly have been expected to say, "That's all a crock. He never even existed."

The gospel accounts of Jesus' earthly existence are not known to have been in wide circulation before the second century. By that time, there was no longer any living memory of anything going on in Galilee or Jerusalem a hundred or more years previously. Nobody was in a position to say "I don't remember anything like that," and practically nobody would have been told anything of relevance by forebears who might have been alive at that time and in those places. And so nobody to whom Christians were talking had any facts at their disposal to challenge any of the credible historical elements of the gospel stories. And, aside from the supernatural elements, there was nothing prima facie implausible about the stories. You had a charismatic preacher, either unjustly executed for being a nuisance or justly executed for being an insurrectionist, depending on your sympathies. Concerning the preaching and the execution, nobody was going to say "Prove it." Nobody could possibly have said "I can prove it didn't happen."

And neither did they need to. The only thing Christianity's adversaries needed to say by way of counterargument was, "Oh, he rose from the dead and he was the son of God? Get outta here."