mountainman

I respect the scholarship of Grant provisional conclusion, because after all is daid and done, any conclusion in the field of history (even Grant's) is both hypothetical and provisional. New evidence may be suddenly and unexpectedly discovered by which Grant might revise his provisional conclusion. Do you accept that this is the case?


Your statement above is also very revealing.

Would you mind expanding upon the logic behind it?



Not so long ago all mainstream scholars believed the sun orbited the earth, and that Moses personally authored the Hebrew Bible. People were executed for thinking otherwise. I think that it is terribly important to stress this point. People were executed for thinking otherwise. The fact that all mainstream scholars accept the historicity of jesus does not make it a transcendentally true fact. The field is history, not logic or maths or science.

The HJ (or the MJ) is simply an historical hypothesis that is shared. The HJ is a hypothesis assumed to be true for most people. If you provisionally accept the bare fact of an HJ, you are provisionally accepting a hypothesis, not a fact. Ditto for the hypothesis of a MJ.

Grog

Vork's objection to naive positivism noted here at the outset of what I am going to say.

First, we can flip this: what would be the null hypothesis for jesus historicism? There seems to be none. It is an unfalsifiable position. We have documents from Paul, accepted by historicists, that falsify the Jesus to Christ myth which requires the development of the divine Christ to have taken place some time after the fall of Jerusalem. Yet here Paul has jumped the gun. No matter. Historicists ignore or offer ad hoc explanations for why Paul believes what he believes well ahead of his time.

Second, someone mentioned that a TF that could somehow be authenticated would do the trick. Unfortunately, this isn't the case due to the fact that Josephus could have learned the story from Christian sources, so it wouldn't be independent confirmation of the story. [The chances of the TF in whatever truncated version historicists dream up being authentic are negligible. The James phrase is based and depends on the very part of the TF that truncated TF advocates want to conveniently excise from the TF. So strike that (even though you will find "few who object to its authenticity"). Norden "demonstrated" according to Theissen that the TF is interpolation based on the seam alone. Conveniently, truncated TF advocates ignore Norden, etc. I could go on for a long time on this.]

Third, the discovery of a contemporary account. An early inscription. graffiti...there are many conceivable items that would go a long way toward establishing the historicity of Jesus. It is all those things that we can conceive of that we don't have. A contemporary Roman account, a letter, anything. We have nothing.

What we have is what we expect from a mythicist explanation:
--early christians expressing Jesus beliefs devoid of any reference to a recent earthly ministry
--early christian documents referring to revelatory experiences with Jesus, but none claiming to have known the man Jesus.
--pre-christian beliefs that anticipate the Jesus story (wisdom of solomon, Isaiah 52/53, writings of Philo, Apocalypse of Adam)
--confusion about details of Jesus' life among later believers when these facts should have been well-established

There is virtually nothing that strays from the mythicist explanation (Galatians reference to the brother of the Lord is one, but I think dealt with). The historicist case has much more to explain. (Paul's cosmic Christ, Romans 13, 1 cor 2:8, etc)

I have to go. These are my thoughts for now.

Vorkosigan

For those who are not Smeat, as any number of people have pointed out, those 'same criteria' do not apply to the gospel writings. In fact recent scholarship in HJ studies has lead to the collapse of criteria-based investigation of the gospel and NT materials. See Ludemann's Jesus after 2000 years, Crossan's The Birth of Christianity, Stanley Porter's book, and the new edited work on methodology by Keith.

Vorkosigan

Vorkosigan

Yes, the "Historical kernel" thesis is the major position, and it is a complete faith statement.

Diogenes the Cynic

I already tried this by asking for a definition of Historical Jesus, and got nowhere with mythicists. Since mythicists are the one who deny that a historical Jesus existed, I think it's incumbent to explain what they're saying never existed.

There really is no such thing as "Jesus Historicism," any more than there is such a thing as "Augustus Caesar Historicism." The historicity of Jesus is default assumption based on prima facie evidence. It could be falsified, hypothetically, if a letter by Eusebius were discovered where he admitted he invented Christianity himself.

What would make mythicism false? What is the most categorical, non-negotiable claim made by mythicists?

If the mythicist position is that the character of Jesus was a complete invention with no historical reality or inspiration at all, then would proof that the original movement stemmed from the veneration of a crucified Jewish preacher named Yeshua falsify mythicism?
This is not true. All of the earliest literature and discernible pre-canonical tradition places Jesus as a human on earth. Even Paul, even though he has almost no interest in Jesus qua Jesus, but only in his own peculiar fixation on the the perceived resurrection event, still says Jesus was Jewish, born of a mother, "poured himself out" as a servant on earth, etc.

Thomas shows Jesus pretty much as a wisdom teacher without calling him God, or even "Christ." There is no divine Jesus in Q either. Jesus is clearly differentiated from God by Mark. Jesus didn't get promoted to Godhood until the 2nd Century.
We would not expect to have writings from people who were illiterate.
Nothing about the Jesus story is remotely anticipated by a single word of Hebrew Scripture. You cannot create Jesus from the Old Testament. He's photoshopped into the LXX, by Paul and the Gospelers, not drawn out.
Why do you think they should have been well established?

The Gospels were written in a different country, in a different language, 40-70 years after the alleged crucifixion. The authors of the Gospels had no way to access any historical information about Jesus. Jerusalem had been destroyed. They didn't know anybody who ever knew Jesus. Jesus had been obscure even in his own country. Why do you think it would have been easy to verify biographical information about an obscure Galilean peasant casually executed 40 years ago in a city that didn't exist any more, no access to anyone who had known this peasant, or even access to anyone who knew anyone ELSE who met Jesus.

HJ doesn't have to explain anything but very genesis of the Jesus movement. if a real Jesus died on the cross, and this Jesus was the object of a personality cult converted to by Paul, then that is the historical Jesus.

Diogenes the Cynic

It is simply better supported than the alternative.

I think it takes something akin to faith to declare a priori that no historical kernel is possible. Why not? Personality cults happen regularly and frequently in human history. There is nothing inherently implausible about the bare model exemplified in Tacitus. That is not only the best attested explanation of the origin of Christianity (at least 7 independent attestations before the end of the 1st century), it's also got a plethora of comparable parallels, prior, contemporaneous and subsequent, but we have no historical exemplar (that I'm aware of) of any other God being synthesized from pure myth and historicized - certainly not in a manner claiming such recent and tangible historical context.

What makes a real crucified cult leader so impossible?

mountainman

Diogenes, the HJ is an hypothesis in the field of ancient history. The MJ is simply the antithetical hypothesis. Even employing Popperian falsifiablity, there is as yet insufficient evidence to establish which of these two antithetical hypotheses is the one which is historically true. Evidence is required, and evidence is conspicuous by its absence.


Was Vivekananda a mythicist?

While travelling from England to India in January 1897, on board the ship Prinz-Regent Luitpold, the venerable sage Vivekananda told Nivedita about his dream of an old bearded man named Therapeutae, (Theraputra - son [putra] of an old monk [thera]) who had asked:

"Do ye come to effect our restoration? I am one of the ancient order of Therapeutae The truths preached by us have been given out by Christians as taught by Jesus; but for the matter of that, there was no personality by the name of Jesus ever born".

- Extracted from Vivekananda's autobiography. Cited by Timothy Freke and Peter Gandy; and Narasingha Prosad Sil

Does this make Vivekananda a mythicist? And if Vivekananda is not a mythicist, how do you intend to classify his comments in his biography in relation to the so-called historical jesus?

smeat75

Very very interesting, thank you very much for posting that for me to read, I found it quite fascinating. I'm afraid it doesn't change my mind at all though in fact the article has reinforced my confidence that Tacitus in particular is reliable testimony to the existence of Jesus.

This article doesn't actually say much about Michael Grant or his book "Jesus: An Historian’s Review of the Gospels" except that Grant notes that the position that people here call "mythicist" has been "annihilated" by "first rate scholars" and references people that Doherty does not think have annihilated anything at all. One that Grant references is Oskar Betz, "What Do We Know About Jesus?" who includes "a paragraph outlining “non-Christian sources” which “permit no doubt as to the actual existence of Jesus of Nazareth.” They include, of course, Josephus, Tacitus, Pliny the Younger and Suetonius".
All of these are quite scornfully dismissed by "mythicists" as forgeries or worthless or both, but here's a serious scholar who says they "permit no doubt as to the actual existence of Jesus of Nazareth".
Then Doherty says "Grant himself, not a New Testament scholar, is prey to the same restricted and simplistic thinking that refuters of the myth theory often themselves betray."
The fact that Grant was a secular classical historian and not a NT scholar is the very reason why I trust and accept what he wrote. He came to the subject of Jesus with no theological bias, he was not teaching at a seminary or holding a position in theology at a university or similar, he could not lose his job or be black-listed from journals etc for coming to the "wrong" conclusions. Grant wrote excellent books about many people from antiquity, Julius Caesar, Cleopatra, Herod the Great, many many books on Roman history and applied the same methods to his book on Jesus.
Then the Doherty article goes on to a long discussion of the work of Maurice Goguel "Jesus the Nazarene: Myth or History?" and describes how Goguel came to the conclusion that "“But one fact is certain, and that is, Tacitus knew of a document, which was neither Jewish nor Christian, which connected Christianity with the Christ crucified by Pontius Pilate. The importance of this observation does not require to be emphasized.”
Since this book was published there have been quite a few passages in Tacitus identified that show that he did have access to, and consulted, official Roman archives. Tacitus was a senator and this presumably gave him this privilege. The passage Doherty quotes from Goguel does not say a word about the Tacitus passage being a forgery, or an interpolation, or saying "procurator" instead of "prefect" or "Chrestians' instead of "Christians". And Doherty doesn't say any of those things either, he seems just to complain that Goguel isn't being logical.
Anyway, thanks again Toto, I enjoyed reading it!

mountainman

There is everything implausible about it. Tacitus as evidence does not serve the HJ in any positive fashion once the negative aspects of this evidence are known. The Tacitus reference was first made known in the late 15th century, and at no age earlier. The 15th century extra Tacitus publication was met with claims of forgery. It is NOT evidence of a 1st century HJ. It is far too late. The canonical books cannot be externally corroborated as 1st century narratives by using what may well turn out to be a 15th century forgery of Tacitus. Have you at least read Drews on Tacitus?

Vorkosigan

Who declared anything a priori? Quit with the accusations of bad faith, please.

The historical kernel is a faith statement because it is maintained despite explanations that robustly explain every detail of a passage without a necessity for a historical figure.

Ehrman in his opening chapters refers to raising of the dead in Mark 5.

synagogue ruler falls at Jesus' feet
woman grasps Elisha's feet

only daughter is dying
only son is dying

word reaches Jesus the child is dead
word reaches Elisha the child is dead

only a few disciples follow Jesus to see miracle
Elisha alone with child

Jesus touches child and it awakens
Elisha touches child and it awakens

parents are ecstatic with great ecstasy
mother is ecstatic with all this ecstasy (IV Kgs LXX)

That sequence is created entirely out of literary paralleling + the larger paralleling that is going on (the writer is following the career of Elisha) and (I suspect) the Passion sequence (the writer is signaling/paralleling future miracles in the Passion story).

Yet Ehrman appears to think something historical underlies this. The "history" will simply shift as the need to preserve the "kernel" responds to the ever growing explanatory models available to exegetes.

There are not "7 independent attestations before the end of the 1st century."

Certainly, if you can't think of another example, it must be impossible. This is because if there is no previous exemplar, it surely must be impossible to have a new one.

Anyway, who was John Frum? Was Manco Capac a real person? It's not difficult to expand such a list. How about the Hidden Imam, who is often thought to be a real person but whose existence is often questioned?

No one said it was impossible. Please do not make this claim in the future. It's just not the position supported by the evidence.

Vorkosigan