Toto

A very perceptive post, whatever your position:

Landon Hendrick's blog

mountainman

Cites Avalos at the end ...

mountainman

Some classic formulations / pronouncements of the historical jesus postulate.
This reminds me of salesmanship.

ApostateAbe

I think that point may be the greatest source of assurance for Jesus-mythers. If they believed that Jesus was an outer-space alien explorer, then Christians who believe in a magic Jesus would be in no position to ridicule them.

Steven Carr

Jesus mythicism is as crazy as believing that Popeye never existed, when scholars have found the very person that Popeye was based on.

GA Wells believes (believed?) that Paul thought of Jesus as an obscure Jew who nobody of the time noticed, and who had been crucified.

Suprisingly, Wellsian Jesus mythicism is now the default position of people on this board who claim that mythicism is false.

Mythicism of the Wells type is now virtually mainstream , and used to refute mythicists.

PhilosopherJay

Hi Steven,

Good points. The fact that so much time is spent saying that mythicism is not worth the time to contemplate is quite hilarious. The case for mythicism has grown over the last decade because the simple historical facts to refute it are not there.

One argument underlying the belief in an historical Jesus is the idea that the popularity of Christianity must have been due to an actual historical person. Only an actual historical person could produce events that people would remember and influence people so deeply. Yet a look at the top twenty grossing movies of all times belies the idea that popularity of character and story has anything to do with historicity.

Avatar

Titanic

The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King

Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest

Toy Story 3

Alice in Wonderland

The Dark Knight

Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone

Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows – Part 1

Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince

The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers

Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace

Shrek 2

Jurassic Park

Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire

Spider-Man 3

Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides

Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs

Only one is based on a real event, "Titanic." The lead characters are fictional, although many of the minor characters are historical.
Only one has an historical lead character - "Alice in Wonderland," yet every bit of the plot is fictional.

The popularity of a character and/or story is independent of its historicity.

Given the lack of contemporary historical evidence for both the character and the natural/supernatural events described, an historicist can only fall back on the idea that people believed in Jesus as being historical in antiquity, while nobody believes the popular characters of today like Harry Potter are real. While contemporary people are largely able to distinguish fictional and non-fictional characters, it is due only to our superior information technology, not due to natural human abilities to do so. The people in ancient Rome did not possess such information technology, such as the internet, to do so.

Thus the Roman Historian Livy believed that it was an historical fact that Hercules visited Pallantium, the future site of Rome (Livy Book 1.7). He places his visit in the time of King Evander, a King who helped Aeneas after the Trojan War. Thus the most educated historian of the First century world believed that Hercules was a real historical person who existed about 1200 years before his time. He was unable to distinguish history from mythology.

Warmly,

Jay Raskin

ApostateAbe

Huh. I don't doubt that Jesus was an obscure figure, but it seems strange that the evidence for that would be Paul. Paul wrote that Jesus appeared resurrected to more than 500 witnesses.

bacht

...none of whom bothered to record this cosmic event - maybe they thought the end was near?

JonA

Well, belief is different from knowing.

Every claim needs investigating.

I think we are as equipped to investigate claims that the Jesus miracles are historically verifiable as we are to investigate the claim that there never was an historical Jesus.

They have so far all been found lacking.

But I'm all for giving folk a fair chance to explain their beliefs and support their claims.

Jon

Steven Carr

As soon as Jesus was no longer 'a historical person', Paul says that lots of people saw him.

What Paul doesn't have is Jesus doing anything before his death, apart from telling cult members how to conjure up his body to 'remember' him by. (As though they would have forgotten who he was)