mountainman

I take it that you are not really impressed with the
process of using Carrier's criteria for historicity and
its application in gauging an approximate relative
historicity between any two, or more, figures?




Pete

spin

A lot rides on the word "relative" and I would reword it "approximate relative likeliness of historicity". Historicity for me is not a scalable idea.


spin

andrewcriddle

The issue with Ebion and the Ebionites is that it started of with the Ebionites and a fictitious Ebion was invented for them to be followers of.

In the case of Christ and Christians it seems clear that followers of Christ come first and they are only some time afterwards called Christians.

Andrew Criddle

Ben C Smith

Also, does anybody with even a fair shot at being close to contemporaneous with the alleged Ebion speak of Ebion? Tertullian and Hippolytus are the earliest, right? I have not examined Hippolytus (unless his statement is confined to pseudo-Tertullian, Against Heresies, in which Ebion is said to be a successor of Cerinthus). Tertullian does not locate Ebion in space and time, does he?

Ben.

mountainman

Is historicity then to you something which is switched on to YES
from the state of NO once a certain level of evidence has been
accumulated against the item, and stays that way thereafter?

What do you mean otherwise by "not scaleable"?



Ta

spin

That of course doesn't change the fact that a tradition developed around a non-existent figure, does it? We therefore can have a developing tradition based on an non-existent entity. This is half the issue that needs to be confronted. Traditions held to be true representations of this world don't need any reality to back them up. The job of historical Jesus research is to get to a real Jesus to show that the figure is different from one like Ebion. It is not simply to assume the existence and work out what one can about it.

The reasoning behind the development of a tradition can obviously be manifold. Back-formation supplies the answer for Ebion from Ebionite. It was a logical inference, though baseless. (I think that's where Nazara comes from as well, a back-formation from Nazarene.)

Messianic speculation is sufficient to beget messiahs. People who accept the speculation and therefore accept the messiah need no reality to back that messiah up.

If your point here is to say that traditions don't need to start the same way, then I have to agree, but I don't see how your post has added to clarifying the topic of getting to a historical core. That's what the thread is about: being able test a historical core to the start of christianity. If we can't get back beyond the undatable gospels and ancilliary materials, how can we test that historical core, well, that core?


spin

spin

Is this an argument from silence aimed at jockeying your tradition candidate into a better position in the historicity stakes, Ben?

We have no dating for the gospels, though those who would like Luke to have used AJ, put the writer in the second century. We have no dating for Paul's letters. We only have the gospels as they emerge from the prior silence to supply historical information, but much of that historical information stems from the later gospels of Matt and Luke. Mark gives three things: Pilate, Herod & Herodias and John the Baptist. Paul knows none of these, unless you want to rehabilitate 1 Timothy. But then Paul tells us that he got his information about Jesus from a revelation, so he doesn't need historical information, nor any any direct Jesus contact. He also says that he got nothing from those messianists, the pillars. He was susceptible to visions, he tells us.

The differences in the purposes of these two traditions of Jesus and of Ebion help explain how well each tradition is preserved. Ebion had no followers, so there was no-one to go to bat for him. The Ebionites didn't believe in Ebion. For that matter neither did Tertullian, though he did believe in his existence.

I don't see how noting the differences in treatment of the two traditions will help us get any closer to a testable core for the Jesus tradition. Ebion, however, is a prime example of a tradition that had no historical core and should be sufficient to push you to find a means of testing the historical core of the Jesus tradition, as I gather you have some commitment to that tradition.

As things stand at the moment, I'm inclined to agree with Vork:


spin

Ben C Smith

Maybe. :blush:

Actually, however, contemporary records are the first thing I look for regardless of the candidate.

I am not firmly committed to putting Luke after Josephus, but it is attractive.

I thought Andrew Criddle and Stephen Carlson made some strong points in placing Paul, even without the help of Acts, 1 Clement, or Ignatius, on that thread you started.

I understand that you are skeptical about the dating of virtually every piece of early Christian writing, and that is fine, but if we were able to show that Paul wrote at least the Hauptbriefe in the middle of century I and that the gospel of Mark (at least) was written in the sixties or seventies (that is, if we were able to defend the majority viewpoint on these texts), then I think what we have with Jesus is a pretty far cry from what we have with Ebion, so far as contemporary or near contemporary evidence is concerned.

I agree, of course, in a hypothetical sense that the development of the Jesus material could potentially be parallel to the development of the Ebion material. The differences will lie with the quality of the material.

Deciding just how contemporary the evidence is for a figure is pretty important to me.

I intend to look for the means to do so, and am doing so at present. I intend to start from the presumption that Jesus is pure legend and see what kinds of contradictions or suspicious coincidences crop up. I am not promising anything, though I think that to show that Paul was thinking of a contemporary goes a long way to showing that this contemporary was historical.

Ben.

S.C.Carlson

We also don't have any testimony from actual Ebionite about Ebion, just statements from (proto-orthodox) heresiologists whose ideology wanted to attribute heresy to identifiable individuals outside of apostolic succession.

Stephen

neilgodfrey

Apologies if I've missed it but would someone like to explain exactly what is meant by "historical core"? And how might it be recognized when it is found?

Thanks
Neil Godfrey
http://vridar.wordpress.com