aa5874

No theory really needs 100% certainty. All that is needed is supporting DATA or evidence for the theory

If HJers ask for 100% certainty then how in the world can they argue for HJ? The supporting data for HJ is an embellished (fully-fictionalized) NT.

Fundamentalists and HJers believe all that is PLAUSIBLE in the NT about Jesus must be or most likely is true even without any external corroborative or credible sources..

GakuseiDon

Sure. I should have made it clear that my point wasn't against anything you said. I was in fact actually agreeing with what you were saying.

In the old days, Christians used to mine the OT to find 'prophecies' to show that Jesus was the Messiah, even though many of them were recognised as being a bit of a stretch. Nowadays, mythicists are doing the same thing to show that Jesus was ahistorical. Suddenly, what was considered a bit of a stretch is now considered as obvious cases of copying.

Toto

Bzzzt. Wrong.

Modern scholars have shown literary dependence between Mark's gospel and parts of the Hebrew Scriptures. Very few of these scholars admit to being mythicists.

aa5874

Your claim is NOT really true and extremely bizarre. Jesus believers in the "old days" did not recognise the so-called prophecies in the OT as "mining".

Hebrew Scripture or the Sepuagint is the fundamental basis for Jesus called the Messiah. Jesus the Messiah was fabricated almost entirely from so-called prophecies in Hebrew Scripture or the Septuagint.

Please name a Church writer in the old days who recognised that Jesus was not really a Messiah as found in Hebrew Scripture.

Kapyong

Gday,

Did you know that there are OTHER religious Jewish writings apart from the Tanakh? Such a belief could easily have come from many places other than the Hebrew Bible. Once again you seem to be arguing a false dichotomy - that it MUST be one of :
* a clear prophecy from the OT
or
* true history

Do you really believe they are the only possibilities?


But Matthew SPECIFICALLY says Jesus fulfilled a prophecy to be called a Nazorean.
Your own source specifically contradicts you. Will you address that point please?


You appear completely unable to grasp one of the KEY POINTS of Jesus mythicism - that the author was NOT "free to make up details". This is just your previous "made up from whole cloth" expressed in different words.

Will you ever get this point, Steve? An author CAN be constrained WITHOUT the constraints being historical. I keep bringing this up. You keep ignoring it. Why do ALL the Greek myths have Zeus living on Mt Olympus? Surely that's a sign of true history, right? If the stories of Zeus were fiction, he would be placed all over Greece, so the fact he is always placed on Mt Olympus clearly proves it was a historical fact.


But you just keep ignoring the fact that these are NOT independent sources.


In fact, your own source, the Gospel of Matthew specifially says that Jesus fulfilled a prophecy to be called a Nazorean.

Let's recap :

G.Matthew says :
Jesus fulfilled a prophecy to be called a Nazorean.
Steve says :
There is NO connection to a Nazorean prophecy.

You just ignore that Gospel evidence that shows you wrong.


Furthermore - it has been shown that the various referencs to Nazareth are NOT clear at all - many do NOT say Nazareth. You just keep ignoring that too.




Well, you have your eyes closed. Will you ever address the issues raised in this thread? We already know your beliefs.



Kapyong

Doug Shaver

To thoroughly understand my thinking, you need to read Earl Doherty's Web site. I don't agree with him in every particular, but I think the outline of his argument is cogent.

In a nutshell, I think the gospels were written, or at least reached their present form, sometime early in the second century, although using material some of which was probably circulating in the first. I believe the authors were writing some form of fiction, i.e. stuff that they knew was not historically factual and which they did not expect their readers to think was historically factual. But some Christians who read the books got it into their heads that they were factual accounts of their religion's origin, and over time this notion became Christianity's defining belief.

GakuseiDon

That's not what I mean. Take Matt 2:23:

"... that what was spoken through the prophets might be fulfilled, 'He shall be called a Nazarene.'".

Some think it refers to Judges 13:5:

"For, lo, thou shalt conceive, and bear a son; and no razor shall come on his head: for the child shall be a Nazarite unto God from the womb: and he shall begin to deliver Israel out of the hand of the Philistines. ".

Here is what Frank Zindler writes:
http://www.atheists.org/Nativity_-_T...Birth_of_Jesus

The first alleged OT prophecy of Jesus that I wish to consider is in Matt. 2:23. After claiming that Jesus and his family returned from Egypt to Nazareth instead of Bethlehem, Matthew comments, "this was to fulfill the words spoken through the prophet: 'He shall be called a Nazarene.'"

Unfortunately for our evangelist, there is no such prophecy to be found in the entire OT. In fact, the village of Nazareth is completely unknown before the writing of the NT. Now you might think that this would be very embarrassing to theologians and the makers of bibles. But in fact, such inconveniences don't seem to faze them at all. In the margin of my King James bible, right beside Matthew's Nazarene pseudoquotation, is a reference to Judges 13:5 -- allegedly the source of the quote.

Turning to Judges Chapter 13, what do we find? Do we find anything about Nazareth? Do we find anything about a Messiah? Do we find anything at all referring to the time of Jesus? You guessed it! The answer is "no"! We do, however, find a prophecy addressed to the barren wife of a guy named Manoah, telling her that despite her sterility, she is going to become the mother of Samson. The passage reads, "You will conceive and give birth to a son, and no razor shall touch his head, for the boy is to be a nazirite consecrated to God from the day of his birth."

Our evangelist either did not know that the Hebrew word nazir was unrelated to the Aramaic-Greek place-name Nazara or Nazareth, or he was dishonestly trying to fool his readers. A nazirite is merely a hippy-type ascetic -- devoted to god and the avoidance of alcohol and personal hygiene. A nazirite is not the same thing as a Nazarene.

So, for Zindler, the evangelist is either ignorant or dishonestly trying to fool his readers. But if the mythicist says that Matthew used Judges to make up a hometown for Jesus (like show_no_mercy did earlier in this thread), is he not doing the same thing? Why does it suddenly make sense when the mythicist does it?

Let's put it this way: If there really were a Jesus of Nazareth, would he have fulfilled the 'prophecy' of Judges 13:5? Either there is some logic behind using it (in which case Zindler is wrong and the evangelist is right) or there is no logic in using it (which weakens the mythicist argument about the source of Nazareth).

Doug Shaver

No, the argument now is not that he fits the OT texts.

The old argument, which assumed that the gospels were approximately accurate in their history, was that the gospel authors were mistaken in their belief that Jesus' actions fulfilled all those prophecies. The argument supposed that the authors got their history right, more or less, but screwed up their scriptural exegesis.

The new argument simply drops the assumption that they got their history right by dropping the assumption that they were trying to do any history to begin with. They just created a narrative that would fit their screwed-up exegesis.

gurugeorge

Acts is enough - it's the "true history" of the apostolic succession. What else needs to be forged?

The fact that the "mythical" writings (e.g. the proto-gnostic "Paul") were included points to their HAVING to be included because they WERE precisely what many would have been familiar with. They couldn't be tampered with too much, just hedged about, bits left out, a few interpolations here and there to ward them.

And the fact that "Paul" had to be included in the Canon speaks volumes - although the proto-orthodox were trying to establish (e.g. perhaps on the inspiration of people like Polycarp and his claim to have personally known Luke) links to the earliest pre-Diaspora apostles (remember, not IN REALITY apostles of a man they personally knew - except perhaps as imagined, in visions - but apostles of a "living idea"), everybody damn well knew that "Paul" was the main man, the real guy who every extant "heretical" church (esp. among gentiles) recognised as their founder.

Couple that with the early vagueness about Jesus' dates and places - there was a time when this was fluid, and the proto-orthodoxy simply latched onto a date that was just recent enough for (e.g.) someone like Polycarp to be able to claim to have personally known one of the earliest apostles, and then to insinuate that those earliest apostles had personally known the cult god-man.

All this is in the context: OF COURSE they all believed Jesus was historical (that is, after all, what Scripture told them); the novelty was in having his historicity be recent enough for a plausible lineage to be fabricated to bypass "Paul"'s authority (which was merely visionary). (Meanwhile, of course, the original lot in Jerusalem may have died during the 70CE events, or there were so few of them left - or perhaps a remnant of them were the people who formed the core of proto-orthodoxy.) And yet they had to include "Paul" - because, in reality, HE WAS THE ONLY AUTHORITY (or the only one whose churches were still a going concern - all those "heretics" the proto-orthodox found everyewhere they went).

Toto

Zindler is a mythicist. He is also an ideological atheist who likes to point out every problem in scripture. Matt had some creative readings of the Hebrew Scriptures that Jewish scholars would not agree with; but this does not mean that Matt did not actually use those creative readings to make up a hometown for Jesus.

The gospel of Luke states explicitly that

Luke 24:45 Then he [the risen Jesus] opened their minds so they could understand the Scriptures.

This indicates that Christians did not use any sort of literal, straightforward reading of the Scriptures.