Toto

I find this whole thread a bit confused.

I think Peter may have set up a straw man in his initial post. Most Jesus-Mythers do not base their case on the silence in Paul's letters regarding Jesus. To the extent that the argument from silence is used, it is based on the absense of a mention of Jesus in the secular historians or philosophers in the first century who might have been expected to mention him - assuming that the references in Josephus were inserted to remedy this silence.

I do find the comparison between Paul's letters and a selection of other letters to be problematic. Rutherford's letters were personal letters. Paul's letters were probably written as much for the public as for the recipients, and were selected and preserved presumably because they illustrated some principles that the early church thought was important, so they are not a random selection of correspondence. They must illustrate some principles that the early churches wanted to preserve.

In addition, I can accept that Paul's silence does not prove much, since the philosophical basis of thought back then accepted higher planes of existence, seven levels of heaven, etc., which our age now classifies as superstition or medieval obscurantism. If Jesus had been a real person, Paul might have even preferred to ignore his lowly physical vessel in favor of a spiritualized version.

But I think that this has been the basis of Christianity up until the modern age. It is only the post-Enlightenment moderns who have had their faith challenged by modern science, who have tried to reconstruct a real person behind the Christian legend. Some of these people are not Christians, or are "post-Christians." Some are modern evangelicals like Josh McDowell who feel the need for a historical record as a recruiting tactic for their religion. (This is the only reason I can think of that the JM issue generates so much emotional outrage on the part of the Nomad-Layman-Bede axis. If you can't say that all historians accept the existence of Jesus, you can't even begin to get your evangelical hooks into someone.)

Peter Kirby

I do not believe that I set up a strawman. I do not have statistics on whether they constitute a majority, but it is clear to me that some Jesus Mythers take "the silence in Paul's letters regarding Jesus" to be a part of their case. For example, here is what Doherty says:

"As astonishing as such a silence may seem, an equation such as 'Jesus of Nazareth was the Son of God and Messiah' is missing from all the early Christian correspondence. The Jesus of the epistles is not spoken of as a man who had recently lived.

"There are two passages in the epistles which present apparent exceptions to what has just been said, plus a third which could be claimed to fall into such a category, and I will deal with them immediately so as not to compromise the argument." (The Jesus Puzzle, p. 14)

Of course, I have never said that the silence of Paul is the entirety of evidences used by Jesus Mythers.

Do you think that we can make a good argument that Josephus never referred to Jesus, or do you simply think that arguments that he did can be refuted?

Even as a Jesus Myther, I always considered the argument from the silence of "secular historians or philosophers in the first century," excepting Josephus (if he is silent), to be extremely weak. The fact is that these writers didn't mention any of the people from the lower classes of Palestine or otherwise popular Jewish figures, such as John the Baptist or Honi the Circle-Drawer or Hillel or Gamaliel. And while there are persons such as Tacitus who do mention Christ, there are absolutely no non-Christian references to Paul the apostle, yet oddly Jesus Mythers today don't seem very interested in questioning his existence.

best,
Peter Kirby

MortalWombat

With all due respect, Peter, I kind of think you have.

It seems as if you are trying to compare one isolated case from modern times with one isolated case in the beginnings of Christianity.

But Paul is not an isolated case in the first century. His terminology is the rule rather than the exception in the 1st century, while Rutherford's is the exception in the 17th century.

Toto

But a silence in all surviving early Christian literature is a stronger argument than a silence in Paul's letters.

I think that it does little good to shift the burden of proof on the issue, as this formulation does. I think that either Josephus did not refer to Jesus, or that there were references that were so uncomplimentary that they were excised. But I see little hope of proving either of these (or disproving them.)

Josephus does seem to have mentioned John the Baptist.

If you consign Jesus to the lower class riff raff, I think the Jesus that you are talking about has to be sufficiently different from the Jesus of the gospels that it's not clear this would be the historical Jesus at all.

No one is that interested in making Paul out to be a mythological person. He has none of the characteristics of myth. His name appears to mean "runt," not savior. The persona that comes through in his letters is all too human, allowing people to speculate that he was a repressed homosexual or a hysteric. The persona in Acts is fairly different, but I assume that most people use the letters as prima facie evidence of Paul's existence.

The early questers for the Historic Jesus cast Paul as the bad guy in their drama of how the pure words of the true Jesus were corrupted by the institutional bureaucracy of the Catholic Church. The later JMythers still needed a person who could be described as the real founder of Christianity.

But this is not the only possibility. I imagine that the Dutch Radical school, which holds Paul's letters to be a second century invention, might describe him as mythologized. (I have not read enought of the Dutch Radicals to comment.) And there is this:

Ignatius, John and Paul: A Trio of Second Century, Hellenistic, Church Fathers

I have some more material on this that I am working on in response to Layman. But I will not be able to post it until next week.

Peter Kirby

I received a response to my initial essay from Jay Raskin on the JesusMysteries list. I quote:

"Taking one set of letters and finding no mention of an Earthly Jesus, simply proves that it is possible that Paul could have believed in an Earthly Jesus while mainly writing about a spiritual one. The next question is how likely is it? One could take 100 sets of letters by 100 different Christian authors and see how many refer only or primarily to a heavenly Jesus in their writings."

I think that this is a reasonable next step. However, I am mightily discouraged to pursue it based on the response I have received here. It seems that people here aren't interested in using comparands in order to determine how likely it is that a NT epistle would refer to an earthly Jesus. It seems that people are content to rely on their intuitions about what someone like Paul would write, without any attempt at using other literature in order to bring empirical data to the table.

(An exception may be Toto, who suggested that we look at the epistolary record of modern New Religious Movements, but such literature isn't easy to come by and besides there would still be niggling differences that would cause people to dismiss the exercise and stay secure in trusting their subjective sense of what a first century Christian would write in a letter.)

But, of course, it might still be worthwhile to pursue a project of examining other Christian epistles if there are at least some people who would find the results significant. If anyone here thinks that the results of looking at literature other than old Rutherford is worthwhile (I will count myself as one such), please reply so that I can consider whether I should devote time to such a project. And, hey, maybe someone else is interested in helping in such a project--if so, PM me!

best,
Peter Kirby

Peter Kirby

I have not shifted the burden of proof, as I am not arguing that Josephus mentioned Jesus. I suggest that a person who wishes to use Josephus as evidence for a historical Jesus would have to show that the belief that Josephus mentioned Jesus is reasonable. Likewise, I suggest that a person who wishes to use Josephus as evidence against a historical Jesus would have to show that the belief that Josephus didn't mention Jesus is reasonable.

I am not afraid of declaring that there was no historical Jesus under some definitions of what the existence of a "historical Jesus" would entail.

best,
Peter Kirby

Clutch

This is a serious misdescription of the reaction you've received, including my own. By and large your interlocutors have focussed on the question of the fit of the comparison. Disagreement about the appropriateness of the Rutherford analogue is hardly disagreement about the appropriateness of examining sound analogues, should any be available.

Clutch

And, for what it's worth, I am not a Jesus Myther. I have no fixed opinion on the matter, but incline towards some version of historicism just because the bar is set so low for it to be true. All you need, I think, is that there was a guy who served as referent of whatever stories were spun, however deviant the causal chain that attached subsequent descriptions to him.

My default assumption is that there's a historical Heracles as well, and probably Achilles too.

Peter Kirby

And what should we do if none are available?

best,
Peter Kirby

Clutch

Jeez, Peter, I don' t know: take poor comparisons and claim that they're good ones? Maybe there are no good ones, but if that's the case, it will be the world's fault, and not a function of your interlocutors' lack of interest in empirical approaches to history.