spin

I've been told that does happen occasionally.

Diogenes the Cynic

I am asking a question about the way we communicate with each and what we collectively mean when we say "historical Jesus."

Since it isn't clear, my extractions from the Gospel narratives were meant to inquire how closely mythicists insist on defining Jesus as equivalent to Bible Jesus. If they want to argue that only Bible Jesus is Jesus, That's fine (and it ironically puts them in alliance with the fundies), but it does not actually exclude the possibility of Christianity of arising from a historical personality cult, and that possibility is, quite honestly the best supported, most plausible and most parsimonious explanation for why a 1st century cult would say they revered a dead person.

My question is whether that person is per se "Jesus" just by virtue of being the object of a genuine founding cult, or whether mythicists would say he also has to walk on water.

outhouse

You wont get a straight answer because like the fundy's their minds are made up and shut tight.


the biggest mistake I see them make is completely ignoring the FACT hellenistic romans deified mortal men all the time and gave them magical attributes.


this was normal, but the real problem is that we have cross cultural deification, and the early movement was buried by the romans who stole this movement for their own.


had this movement stayed within judaism, we could much more historical knowledge. IF the movement lasted.

Diogenes the Cynic

One of the ironies of this debate, I think, is that I believe a historical Jesus is much more devastating to Christianity than a mythical one.

maryhelena

Perhaps getting rid of the name *Jesus* might shift the focus here - shift the focus from the gospel JC story to history. After all, is not that name *Jesus* supposed to mean something relevant to 'salvation'? i.e that name is relevant for the gospel salvation 'history' and is not necessarily the name of any historical figure that was important to the early christian writers. (and name changing was quite a big deal in that NT story....)

That the whole christian phenomena started from 'Paul's' imagination is not something that I find convincing. History mattered, historical events mattered, to those early christian writers. The gospel JC story is how they chose to convey the meaning, the relevance, they found within their historical environment.

Rick Sumner

Hi Andrew,

We have a context for Plato, Xenophon etc. that we don't have for the gospels. They have a provenance in a sense that the gospels do not.

Constructing a biography of Socrates is difficult, and you get a lot of "perhaps" and "maybe" and "possibly" when you read one. Which is a fun way of raising possibilities, but ultimately the amount most biographers claim to truly know is scant indeed.

If that difficulty was compounded by an inability to ground our sources--if they just sort of appeared in the ether--I'd say that constructing an historical Socrates was impossible.

I've adopted what I think of as the Thompson principle, since I lifted it more or less wholesale from Thomas Thompson: If anyone can reasonably doubt what you have is evidence, it's not, and you can't ask questions of sources that aren't evidence, no matter how little that leaves you.

Better to say too little than speculate too much.

Diogenes the Cynic

The name has no necessary meaning at all except as a placeholder for the hypothetical object of a founding personality cult behind Christianity.

Diogenes the Cynic

The key word here is "reasonably."

Rick Sumner

Absolutely. That's why I put it there.

mountainman

There are many people here who would reject your 1st century cult as being imaginary, since there is no evidence at all from the 1st century.

When you replace in your schema of discussion 1st century cult, with 2nd century cult, there is a change in historiographical context.


The mythicists who support a 2nd century origin for the cult would point out that the cult was invented or perhaps arose via scribal manuscript worship in the 2nd century. In the canonical texts the story of the 1st century did not originate in the first century. What does that make jesus?