aa5874

You don't seem to understand the difference between authenticity, fictional accounts and date of composition.

ALL the Pauline letters may be AUTHENTIC but may INCLUDE Fictional accounts and were WRITTEN AFTER the Fall of the Temple.

The Pauline writings do NOT contain any statement as to the DATE they were written.

You very well know that any date of composition for the Pauline letters BEFORE c 68 CE are Presumptions.

The Pauline writer did NOT state any date of composition for his letters and the author of Acts did NOT even claim Saul/Paul wrote any letters.

It is Apologetic sources which IMPLY that Paul was executed under Nero but still claim the Pauline writer was ALIVE AFTER gLuke was written.

In effect, Paul is claimed to be ALIVE AFTER c 70 CE.

You seem to have an EXTREMELY limited knowledge of Apologetic sources. Those very sources make it completely reasonable that the Pauline letters were likely to have been written AFTER gLuke was known to the Pauline writer.

None of the Canonized Gospels show any awareness of the Pauline Gospel of UNIVERSAL Salvation by the Resurrection.

spin

There is nothing in this that deals with what you were purporting to respond to.

:realitycheck:

No-one knows the date of publication of the works of Lucian of Samosata either, but you'd be laughed out of the hall if you tried this same argument.

Sheshbazzar

There cannot be any genuine consensus about "Jesus" when views on the character and the institution that has long trumpeted this name, span from those claiming to believe every word, to that view that I expressed in post #32.

Ultimately one either accepts or rejects what it is that the name "Jesus" has came to represent.

I and many others find this 'name', and all religious institutions that employ it, to represent the epitome of deception and institutionalized evil, the living fulfillment of the vision of John found in Revelations 17.
If you really have no personal preference, you can accord this view with status equal to that of any other.

I make no bones about it, the ends of our view is the complete discrediting of, and the total annihilation of the religion called Christianity and its living dead Zombie poked full of holes snake-on-a-stake fake gawd.

Rick Sumner

If that "historical person" was anything other than a Jesus in keeping with the gospel narrative, then "historical Jesus" is a meaningless term for him, for the same reason we don't have an "historical Alice."

But without any secure provenance, the gospel narrative exists in a sort of vacuum. It can never be anything other than a story. Literature on its own is not evidence. It's just literature.

You miss my point. What's betrayed isn't an agenda, it's what you think of when you think of an "historical Jesus." What you think of is defined by the gospel narrative.

Why, for example, is brother of James not on your list? The Lord's Supper? Teaching on marriage/divorce? These are the elements that exist in an early tradition outside of the gospel narrative, but not one of them appears on your poll.

I'm not saying you deliberately set out to let "historical Jesus" be restricted by the gospel narrative. I'm saying you don't have to do it deliberately--it's the only way the term has meaning, which is why it's what restricts your poll.

I'm not assigning an agenda to you. I'm pointing out that there is no "historical Jesus" that has any sensible meaning outside of the character in the story. But without a provenance for the writitngs, or an external reference for the story, they can never be anything more than a character in a story.

Which is why a "real" Jesus isn't the same thing as an "historical Jesus."

What you're misunderstanding is that this is a meaningless questiion. We don't have sufficient evidence for it to amount to anything more than arbitrary hand waving.

You are asking it without reference to anything outside the gospels, because it doesn't make sense to ask it any other way.

Diogenes the Cynic

First, I disagree that we don't have a"historical Alice" We do. Those stories were written about a real girl, she just didn't do anything attributed to her in those stories. I would argue that the "Historical Alice" is simply the real, historical person that Lewis Carol invented stories about, and that likewise a "Historical Jesus" can defined as a real person who early Christian writers made up stories about (or believed that they could divine information about in Jewish Scripture).

There is also the Chuck Norris internet trope, for example. Is Chuck Norris not a historical person because his internet character isn't real?

Secondly, your phrase, "a Jesus in keeping with the gospel narrative" is begging the question. How are you defining "in keeping with the Gospel narrative?" What qualifies as "in keeping with the Gospel narrative?" Does it mean exactly the same in every respect? Can it exclude supernatural aspects and still be "in keeping?" What are the minimum requirements for a real person to be ajudged "in keeping" with the Jesus of the Gospels? That is precisely the question I'm trying to ask in this thread.
My list wasn't intended to be comprehensive, and neither of those things is generally recognized as any kind of sine non qua for a definition of "Jesus."

I was basically just trying to find out how closely people would say that a real personality behind the first Jesus cult would have to adhere to the Jesus of the Gospels for mythicists to say there was a historical Jesus.
Sure it does. Like I said, it's indisputable the Christian religion had a beginning, and asking whether it started as a personality cult is a historical question.

JonA

Obviously false, since the historical Santa Claus didn't live at the north pole, didn't ride a sleigh carried by flying reindeer, and had operations limited to much less than the entire world.

Rick Sumner

This is walking you in to the trap.

The real Alice cannot be extracted from her adventures in Wonderland. If all we had was the literature, we would have no Alice, even though it is entirely possible that there was a real person in mind for the story. In this case, since we have the outside information, we know that it is not simply possible, but factual.

The real Alice is extracted from outside sources, but there is no historical Alice to take out of the novel. It's just a character. Without the provenance and outside referents, the story is just a story.

Armed only with Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, you have a possibility of a "real" Alice, in the sense that someone might have existed and been in mind, but absolutely no historical Alice, because no historical information can be extracted from your sources.

A Chuck Norris extracted from the internet trope isn't real. There is no "historical" Chuck Norris we can get from the character. If all that survived was that literature, we would have to conclude that there may or may not have been a Chuck Norris, and that nothing of historical worth can be extracted from the surviving evidence. So let it be with Jesus.

As noted above with Alice; an historical anything is something that can be extracted from the historical evidence. In the case of Jesus, there is no historical evidence. None. There is only literature. Which demonstrates the existence of literature, when it isn't demonstrating the creativity of the exegete. What it doesn't demonstrate is history.

Do you seriously think this is at all a reasonable question to pose to me?

And you're missing why it can't be answered.

On XTalk a few years ago a thread came up about the strongest piece of evidence for the historicity of Jesus. That Paul met his brother was pretty well the unanimous choice. It is the only thing in the surviving record that, if it means what it seems to on first blush, constitutes actual evidence.

And I'm saying that everything on your list is extracted from literature, not from historical evidence. Therefore asking about it is meaningless. It might make a fun excercise in the Ciceronian flavor of persuasive rhetoric. But that's it.

Except that nothing in your poll, or in anything you've said since, indicates that you're looking for a personality cult. That might have happened, there's just no evidence for or against.

What you're asking, and have made abundantly clear from the criteria appearing on your list, is what the minimum standard, extracted from the existing sources, constitutes an historical Jesus.

The reason it is meaningless is that the sources aren't historical sources. They're literature. That's all they are, and you can't make them more than that.

Diogenes the Cynic

I'm not trying to extract anything from the Gospels, I'm trying to find out whether the mythicist position requires any possible "Historical Jesus" to be defined only as magic Jesus or else he's not Jesus.

Some of these answers sound, frankly, evasive and obfuscatory. If you'rte going to deny that a historical Jesus existed, then at least clarify what you're saying never existed.

Sheshbazzar

How can one clarify something that never existed? It is a blank.

Jeebus is a figment, an imaginary zombie, there is nothing to clarify or describe beyond the imaginative crap that religionists made up.
You can examine or clarify that until hell freezes over, and it isn't ever going to produce the never-existent Jeebus.

Rick Sumner

Every single item on your list is extracted from the existing sources. It has to be, there are no other sources to use. The problem is that the sources you are using are not historical evidence. The only surviving material is literature, not historical information.

I'm not denying anyone existed. So perhaps it sounds evasive because you're making baseless assumptions. If anything it's rather amusing that you'd suggest I'm a mythicist. What I'm stating is that historical criticism can tell you exactly nothing when all you have are literary sources. The items on your poll mean nothing, because they are extracted not from historical evidence, but from a story.

What I am denying exists is a character that can be distilled from the surviving literature. That the items on your poll are meaningful. They aren't. They're items selected from a story.

What I stated explicitly is that there may or may not be a figure behind it--an Alice Lidell behind Wonderland. But we can learn exactly nothing about that figure from the surviving evidence. Your poll asks meaningless questions, because it asks if elements from literature would qualify as history. It's apples and oranges.