robto

As far as the Fathers you mention, I agree with you. But, as you push back into the earlier layers of the NT, you find a Jesus who is LESS mythical, not more. Mt's Jesus is less exalted than John's, Lk's less than Mt's, Mk's less than Lk's, Q's less than Mk's. You can explain that pattern with an original HJ who accreted myths (as religious leaders tend to do). You can't explain that pattern with an original MJ.

Brother Daniel

(Emphasis added)

A question for you: If you were on a jury for a murder trial, and the defence team presented a solid alibi for the defendant, would you still find the defendant guilty on the grounds that the defence team had failed to present a "definite proposal" for who DID commit the crime?

I wouldn't. However "mushy" the speculations, the real question is whether those speculations are contradicted by the data. Proving things wrong is usually more important than proving things right.

I'm not familiar with Wells. But an acceptance that Q's Jesus was based on a real person is not an abandonment of the MJ position, unless that Jesus is also being identified with Paul's Christ Jesus. (One could argue that even that way of defining the MJ/HJ threshold is oversimplified, but that's another story.)

Brother Daniel

The trouble with this arises when you go back all the way to Paul. Would you consider Paul's Jesus to be "less exalted" or "less mythical" than Mk's? (Or even than Mt's or Lk's?) I wouldn't. Paul just screams MJ to me, though I admit that I read him only in English translation.

aa5874

You statement are not base on historical facts. 'Q' is an unproven hypothesis. gMark is not corfirmed to be history, gMatthew and gLuke appear to be derivatives of gMark and gJohn appears to contradict the Synoptics in many areas.

You have, in effect, developed your HJ just from your imagination, completely devoid of any recorded historical facts. You are an IJer, IMAGINATION JESUS.

robto

Yes. I disagree with your characterization of the NT (see above) but I agree that this is the big issue for HJers. I don't know of a completely satisfactory resolution, but I think Dunn has made a good start in Christology in the Making (or via: amazon.co.uk). (Anyone who hasn't read Dunn should be barred from discussing the MJ.)

I don't see what the problem is for the HJ. Guess I'm not worth arguing with....

robto

Among my crowd (physicists), General Relativity (GR) is the accepted theory of gravity. If you come along and say, "Here are some problems with GR, and here's a new theory to replace it," you damn well better have an explanation for the bending of starlight, gravitational redshift, the orbit of Mercury, the expansion of the universe, etc. If you don't, you'll be laughed out of the room.

If you want to replace a generally accepted theory, you damn well better have a more convincing theory to replace it - one that explains the data. Mushy could-have's don't cut it. Doherty's theory doesn't pass the laugh test.

Brother Daniel

And yet you seem to want MJ theories to be "completely satisfactory" (in precisely this sense) before you'll even consider them?
The traditional (canonical gospel) Jesus was (among other things) a perfectly good man who was crucified by the "rulers", within memory of people in Paul's day. In Rom 13:3, Paul denies that perfectly good people have anything to fear from "rulers". By the most straightforward reading, he is denying the existence of the traditional Jesus.

The epistles are full of things like that. Each one, individually, is not a big deal, perhaps. But cumulatively, it's a different story.

Brother Daniel

I have a physics background as well (though I've been out of the physics game for a dozen years). So you'd probably understand what I'm getting at with my references to Bayesian probability in post #32. Care to comment?
Quite right. But suppose I present, instead of a single alternate theory, an alternate class of theories, each of which explains those phenomena. Then suppose I expressed preference for one of the theories in that class, and that that preference is explicitly speculative, because I have no experimental basis for choosing one over another. Would you then use my speculation as grounds to accuse me of "mushiness", and then go on to toss out the entire class of theories?
All the specific versions of an HJ are full of mushy speculations as well. That's the nature of the subject matter; there is very, very little solid historical data about Jesus. I don't think we'll ever find a "good" theory about Jesus that can "explain" the data to the extent that we (rightly) expect of scientific theories like GR.

As I keep saying, the HJ/MJ question isn't so much a question of which side is "better", but rather which side is "less bad". And since most debates about Jesus are between different HJ variants, people are inoculated against noticing the difficulties that are shared by all the HJs.
At first glance, it doesn't. But this is where my "bag of stones" probability argument from post #32 comes in. Christianity is ridiculous, and in particular every theory of the origins of Christianity is ridiculous. Yet Christianity exists, and we have to account for it somehow. The real question is: Having lowered the standards of our "laugh test" enough to allow the HJ, does the MJ (whether Doherty's version or otherwise) now pass the test? In my opinion, a resounding yes.

Amaleq13

The HJ position is just as "mushy" and speculative with regard to details.

Wells has never held "the MJ line" if that is a reference to Doherty's thesis. IIUC, the only thing he has changed is how recently he believes the mythologized figure lived (ie from the distant past to the 1st century).

Amaleq13

Sure you can. Mark was an initial effort to historicize the central figure of Paul's mythology and "flesh" out the parts Paul skips but subsequent authors felt he overdid it.