Toto

Unfortunately, I can't be on line 24 hours a day, or I would have edited out the reference to holocaust deniers. But it seems to be too late.

Mr. Loftus, you are no expert. Before you mention that inflammatory topic again, you need to read Denying History (or via: amazon.co.uk) and Why People Believe Weird Things (or via: amazon.co.uk) so you understand what you are talking about. Holocaust Denial is not an example of extreme skepticism from an argument from silence, it is a pathological denial of real evidence, based on a political ideology.

dog-on

Toto, I though you were omniscient!!!

Toto

The topic of the historical evidence for Jesus has been a topic here for almost a decade. No one has yet produced a peer reviewed paper on the existence of Jesus that meets the standards of professional historians. Richard Carrier is in the process of writing such a book, and there is a new Jesus Project that is actually going to examine the question.

There are many theories of how the Jesus cult originated that are as likely as the doomsday prophet theory (yes, I have read Ehrman.) Jesus was Joshua son of Nun, who was to lead the Israelites out of bondage in Egypt. Jesus was a spirit in a mytery cult.

But you obviously don't know the first thing about historical methods or Holocaust Deniers.

Paul is not a good test. Someone wrote his letters, and you can call that person Paul, or you can speculate that the letters were forged in the name of an existing person. But it is quite possible that Paul did not exist, and it is overwhelming likely that one of the major sources of information about Paul, the Book of Acts, is fictional.

aa5874

But, according to Eusebius in Church History, there is a letter from Jesus to the King of Edessa.

Excerpts of the letter from King of Edessa to Jesus, Church History 1.13.7 The letter from Jesus to the King of Edessa, Church History 1.13.8 This is textual evidence, prima facie evidence, that Jesus was a God and ascended to heaven.

Toto

I'm definitely not omnipresent.

spin

Paul did not write Acts. You don't know when or why Acts was written.

You are trying to sell the apologetic reading of the data. There has been much discussion about Paul in Galatians here. Paul usually talks about Cephas. When Galatians 2:7-8 alone talks of Peter, we must be wary.

He doesn't need a mythical view. You're too busy dealing with shadows. It is sufficient that Paul hadn't met a Jesus, yet preached him. He simply didn't need a Jesus.

I don't support a mythical view. I don't support any view on the issue. You are just trying to shift the burden of proof.

Naturally, you are free to have an opinion, but you still seem to be confusing text with evidence, when you haven't done the work of verifying your sources. So stop assuming a position that you need to justify, ie that you have textual evidence. You don't. At least yet.

You may not have a strong grasp of the notion of the messiah. Jesus doesn't fit the bill. This should help you see that christianity was not a Palestinian based religion. The first gospel wasn't a Palestinian written gospel. Things are not what they seem.


spin

Ben C Smith

Indeed. In fact, yesterday ought to be inscribed into the IIDB annals as the day when Ben C. Smith actually (and barely) beat you to a link.

So not omnipresent, but perhaps multipresent?

Ben.

spamandham

Luke, Matthew, and John are derivative works of Mark. What they wrote is effectively worthless toward establishing whether or not there was a historical Jesus. Of the 4 canonical gospels, Mark is the earliest and the only one of any value to the discussion.

It is not so clear that Mark believed Jesus to be historical. Many parts of the story were obviously constructed from Josephus. Whoever did that could not have believed his own concoted history to be true.

But, Mark is generally categorized as a form of biography, though not a biography in the modern sense. The intent was not to simply pass on accurate information about the hero, the intent was to settle doctrinal issues. Several other very similar period biographies were written for individuals both mythical and historical, so the mere mere fact we have such a hero biography tells us nothing in regard to whether or not the hero was historical.

The NT has great historical value, but not in the sense Christian apologists like to pretend. It tells us a lot about the culture that wrote it. That said, to take a set of texts about a figure that is obviously either fiction or highly fictionalized, strip off the magical fantastic parts, and then declare the rest history, is not a valid form of analysis. I am unaware of a single case where an approach like this has been shown to be valid, and it's easy enough to consider tests to the approach using other legendary figures that show it is not valid.

Ben C Smith

As a statement of your own opinion on the matter, I am sure this is accurate, but surely you realize that most researchers into the HJ do not see Matthew, Luke, and John as worthless in this respect. Not even the MJ ones. Luke and Matthew, for example, are important at least for their Q material, which both mythicists (notably Doherty and Wells) and historicists (Theissen, Crossan, and innumerable others) use heavily in their reconstructions; some of the M material and (perhaps more so) the L material is also often singled out as important. And John is frequently suspected of preserving traditions that predate 70 and the writing of the gospel of Mark.

Ben.

spin

While Mark and M are obviously prior to Matthew and Mark and L are prior to Luke, there is no way to relate either L or M to Mark chronologically. Therefore you cannot conclude that they reflect earlier independent traditions. They may have developed between the writing of Mark and the other gospels and if so cannot be independent. This means you cannot act as if they were.


spin