Bobzammel

One element of Jesus's life that's missing in the gospels is about 90% of it.

We are informed of Jesus's birth and perhaps a bit of his toddler years, and Jesus's episode in the temple, but strangely most of his life remains a total blank except for his last few years.

Question is, what did Jesus do in the meantime? I know there are some apocryphal "infancy gospels" but apart from that, can the Gospels really be considered proper biographies if they lack so much information...

godfry n. glad

Why is it that you think "he" did anything? Is it not possible that only the parts of the narrative found "necessary" were invented and the rest ignored as unneeded? Is it not possible that there was no life to relate in a "biography"?

The canonical gospels look like variant versions of a foundation myth to me, rather than "biographies."

Maybe the reason we have so little of Jesus' life documented is the same reason we have so little in the way of Paul Bunyan's life documented....?

godfry n. glad

Answerer

Thats why people here are arguing whether Jesus truly existed or not.

lpetrich

In general, it is common for biographies to state relatively little about their subjects' childhoods, but what is unusual here is to discuss someone's infancy in detail and then slack off about further details.

It's part of Lord Raglan's "Mythic Hero" profile, that I'd discussed in some now-archived threads. Roughly, Jesus Christ's biography closely parallels those of several other mythical heroes:

Moses
Oedipus
Perseus
Romulus
Hercules
Krishna
Buddha

and not those of people generally known to be real.

Peter Kirby

I am curious: how much do we hear of Octavius (Augustus) between birth and manhood? I know that we have birth stories about him (from Suetonius for example) and that "The Deeds of the Divine Augustus" (which he composed) begins, "In my nineteenth year."

Also, if the story of Jesus was invented after the pattern of the divine hero, why is it that the putatively earliest gospel of the four (Mark) has nothing to say of the birth?

And there are apocryphal attempts to give flesh to the child Jesus, but they are rightly derided as mythical. Would we really give more credence to the four gospels if there were more stories like the one about the 12 year old Jesus teaching in Jerusalem as told by the author of Luke?

best,
Peter Kirby

Toto

I assume that the stories of Jesus teaching in the Temple at the age of 12 are about as mythic as the stories of him striking his playmates dead and bringing them back to life.

Uta Ranke-Heinemann in Eunuchs for the Kingdom of Heaven states that Jesus must have been married. (There is some speculation that the wedding at Cana was Jesus' wedding.) If he were the observant Jew that the gospels claim, he had an obligation to get married and procreate as soon after puberty as he could, and to be unmarried at the age of 30 would be so unusual that it would be mentioned if it were true (the way a woman's marital status is always mentioned in our present society). But we don't hear anything about this part of his life.

What would a young Jewish man do in those years if he did not get married? We hear nothing about marriage or any of the alternate paths that young men take - presumably a monastic life of some sort.

Clara Listensprechen

Ipetrich, take Buddha off that list. Buddhas were real people, teachers. The Great Buddha made famous by all those statues/statuettes was a real man named Gautama. Buddha is a title, not a name. Gautama is the name of a real person, who was one of many Buddhas, and remembered as the greatest one of them all.

It was annoying ancient habit to take real people, mainly rulers, and write unreal glorifications of themselves by the writers they hired (Arab habit was paid poets, so most of their ancient history tends to be florid poetry, literally). It's entirely possible that the people in question actually existed, but the godlike attributes were added in mandatory tribute.

godfry n. glad

Perhaps you'd like to provide us all with some uncontrovertible evidence that Guatuama Siddartha was an historic individual.

If my memory serves, the evidences supporting the historicity of Guatama Siddartha are as thin, if not thinner, than those for Yeshua ben Yusef.

You are right that "Buddha" is a title - a title very much like "Christ".

The ancients' "annoying habit" of euhemerism may indeed have been a frequent occurrance, but I challenge you to provide us a mechanism for determining which stories are euhemeristic embellishments, which are legendary accretions and which are complete mythic fabrications. I don't think you can do it.

So... the Buddha stays. And, I'd say you should distinctly add Lao Tsu and possibly even Kung-fu Tsu to the list.

godfry n. glad

Ted Hoffman

Kung-fu Tsu ? We have something/ someone like that and I dont know?
The way I love Jet Lee and Donnie Yen and Chow Yun Fat?
Hmmm...

godfry n. glad

Kung-fu Tzu = Confucius

godfry