spin

You can exclude the book of Enoch because the text talks about "the prophets". But do you know of any of the Matthean references to prophecies in the form "spoken through" (eg "spoken through Isaiah", "spoken through the prophet", etc) that is not a biblical passage? All seem to be, as seems to be the case with Mt 2:23. If it is biblical as it appears, why look elsewhere? Besides, we have all the major Pseudepigrapha and nothing in them appears similar.


spin

Juststeve

Toto:

As I suggested above I don't think we can really know what the original followers of Jesus thought after his death. We don't have anything they wrote to tell us. In the early years we have Paul who was not a follower and the Gospels none of which was written by a follower or even soon enough to be approved by a follower. What you call the “usual claim” simply assumes more about the original followers than I am willing to assume.

What I think we know is that before the end of the first century the Christian community believed Jesus had risen bodily from the dead. Doug Asked me an interesting question, how do I think that belief arose given that I don’t believe it really happened. To generalize the question, how do a lot of people come to believe something that isn’t true? Its always been a question that interests me, with regard to religions and a lot of other things, and it’s a hard question to answer. With regard to the resurrection of Jesus I can offer only conjecture and I’m not married to that.

Steve

aa5874

"Paul" did NOT write that he saw HJ of the city of NAZARETH alive.

"Paul" did NOT claim he MET HJ of the city of Nazareth.

"Paul" wrote that he SAW MJ (the resurrected Jesus).

There is ZERO INTERNAL OR external source that claimed to have met HJ alive or SAW HJ alive in the city of Nazareth or anywhere else. ZERO.

This is the passage where "Paul" SAW MJ (the resurrected Jesus)

1 Cor.15.3-8 "Paul" is a WITNESS to MJ.


But, the Pauline writings are GOOD EVIDENCE for MJ. You have no credible EVIDENCE for HJ of the city of Nazareth.

The author that claimed Jesus was from the city of Nazareth also described Jesus as MJ, as the offspring of the Holy Ghost.

You do not understand that the written statements from the NT Canon and Church writers demonstrate that Jesus of the city of Nazareth was an MJ or just like Greek/Roman mythology which MJ eventually replaced in the 4th century.

Nonsense. Speculation resolves NOTHING. Speculation clarifies NOTHING.


The speculation from Bishop Spong is just total unsupported imagination. The bishop may want to go to heaven after MJ REMITS his sins.

You simply cannot argue that Jesus was from or lived in the CITY of Nazareth when the author of gMatthew wrote that it was MJ, the offspring of the Holy Ghost, that lived in the city of Nazareth.

NO MJ ever lived in a CITY called Nazareth.

And, it is simply NOT true that the descriptions of the resurrected Jesus become further removed from the event the resurrection is described in more physical terms.

The Christian Marcion in the middle of the 2nd century claimed Christ had NO FLESH or that Christ only APPEARED to be Physical but was NOT.

And further, it is claimed that Marcion's MJ came down from heaven to Capernaum not a city of Nazareth.


You MUST admit that HJ of the city of Nazareth is just Total Speculation and MJ is based on the WRITTEN evidence of antiquity supplied by the NT Canon, Chyurch writers, and non-apologetic external sources.

Uncertainty and speculation cannot account for the growth of the belief about an unknown Jesus.

And if we do not have the followers' accounts then WHY in the WORLD are trying to claim Jesus was from the CITY of Nazareth?

Please state exactly who claimed and when it was claimed in gMatthew 2.23 that the offspring of the Holy Ghost, in the very Matt.1.18, lived in the city of Nazareth.

So, there is only ONE writer in ALL of antiquity that wrote that he SAW Jesus AFTER a non-historical resurrection.

And that one single writer did NOT even say the his resurrected Jesus lived in the city of Nazareth.

None wrote that they SAW Jesus BEFORE he died and ONLY one wrote that he SAW Jesus in a non-historical state.

Where do you speculate that the Pauline resurrected Jesus "lived" before he went to heaven?

Not even "Paul" claimed his Jesus lived in the city of Nazareth.

You cannot argue history based ONLY on speculation and your imagination. There is just NO external corroborative written source for Jesus of the city of Nazareth. ZERO.

Kapyong

Steve -

So, you cannot actually name ONE SINGLE NT scholar who is an atheist - after claiming there were many.

Like I said - your 'serious scholars' all have reasons to believe in Jesus, being believers or working in a Christian establishment.

An obviously biased view.


K

No Robots

Perhaps unexpectedly, the University of Regina’s new religious studies’ assistant professor, William Arnal, is a professed atheist.--URegina News

In the case of critical scholarship on the New Testament, earliest Christianity, and especially the historical Jesus, things have been improving for the last thirty years or so. Beginning in the 1970s and continuing to the present, numerous studies have appeared which not only acknowledge his identity as a Jew, but which emphasize it, and make it central to their reconstructions…. Thus is it a normal feature of the recent works emphasizing Jesus' Judaism that they tend to normalize him, make him an understandable and more ordinary figure among his contemporaries, comparable to other Jewish figures from the same time and place.--The Symbolic Jesus: Historical Scholarship, Judaism, and the Construction of Contemporary Identity / William Arnal. (p. 15-16)

Juststeve

Robots:

Arnal doesn't count. Kapyong will tell you why.

Steve

Oh, and by the way, how did you search for him? I'm sure there are others but I don't go around with a list.

aa5874

But, you need written evidence of antiquity that your Jesus lived in the city of Nazareth.

The Jesus in gMatthew 2.23 was the offspring of the Holy Ghost.

Who was your Jesus?

Your Jesus is the product of fiction and your imagination.

The author of gMatthew claimed a non-historical entity lived in a CITY of Nazareth because PROPHETS claimed he was to be called a Nazarene.

Not one single prophet in Hebrew Scripture made such a claim.

How does gMatthew 2.23 help the Credibility of the author?

Didn't the author of gMatthew realize that people of antiquity would have KNOWN he was a LIAR or a fiction writer?

Now, please SHOW ME where the author of gMatthew claimed that anything in the Gospel did actually occur.

What is the basis for your belief that there was a Jesus who lived in the city of NAZARETH when you CANNOT determine the actual intention of the author of gMatthew 2.23?

ALL that is known and confirmed is that NO prophets in extant Hebrew Scripture or Septuagint wrote anything ABOUT the city of Nazareth and Jesus as a Nazarene as found in gMatthew 2.23.

Ferryman to the Dead

Its all symbolic and allegorical. Again the question remains did they write what they knew or what they imagined?

Toto

I am sure that there are atheists studying the historical Jesus, who believe in a historical Jesus. But they are a small minority. The economics of the profession are that job prospects are limited, but are better if one is a minister or can teach at a seminary. The job prospects for a young scholar who suspects that Jesus did not exist are much improved if he keeps his doubts to himself and confines himself to literary analysis of texts.

Right now, it seems that the historicity of Jesus is just conventional wisdom. It has been an assumption of the field for so long that no one thinks about it, or wants to think about it.

But let's not get sidetracked on another theme that has been discussed to death here. The original idea of a [merely] human Jesus was the product of the Enlightenment, of people like Thomas Jefferson who rejected the supernatural aspects of the gospels. It is somewhat ironic that Christian apologists have taken over the preaching of a historical Jesus who is still not merely historical.

spamandham

Arnel counts, but it is not at all clear that he accepts the idea of a historical Jesus. He appears to be agnostic to the idea and sees it as a distraction, saying that we should abandon the quest altogether

The Symbolic Jesus

"Not because scholars cannot agree on their reconstructions; lack of agreement may only indicate that further -- and more rigorous -- work needs to be done. Not because the investigation has been biased; bias is unavoidable, here as elsewhere... But because, ultimately, the historical Jesus does not matter, either for our understanding of the past, or our understanding of the present.

source