Peter Kirby

Great! We have very similar outlooks.

This is indeed a significant list of differences. I had not even thought of the fact that Rutherford was writing to individuals, while the letters of Paul are addressed to whole churches. This could explain why Rutherford expected his recipients to pick up on allusions to Jesuine sayings, for example. However, the same might still be true for Paul -- especially when we consider that a large part of writing for many people (such as mystical or spiritual people) is not so much to explain things for the recipients as to provide a creative outlet for the writer. In other words, sometimes I am reading a letter of Paul, and I think I must be reading our friend Amos.

It is going to be impossible to find a person who wrote extant letters in the exact same situation as the historical Paul. What I think that my little exercise does is to put the ball in the court of the person who holds firmly that Paul et al. disbelieved in any earthly Jesus. How can one be sure of that, when a person who does believe in an earthly Jesus can write in a similar manner? That is the insight that I had to share.

best,
Peter Kirby

Gregg

Peter,

Is this post a joke? It's not April Fool's Day yet!

To reach this conclusion based on 17th century writings is absurd. 17th century Christians, like Christians today, really WOULD have had the luxury of "assuming" Jesus' earthly existence to the point that they rarely if ever referred to it as they went off on their mystical tangents. Everyone truly did "know all that" in the 17th century.

The 1st century Christians were facing a very different set of circumstances. For example, they had other "Christians" going about saying Jesus was never crucified or even killed, or actually denying that Christ had come "in the flesh," or arguing against belief in the resurrection of the dead. They had controversies within the faith on such issues as whether Christians had to follow Jewish dietary laws. They were also faced with people (Jews and neo-Platonists) who would have been extremely skeptical, to say the least, of claims that a crucified criminal had been (for all intents and purposes) God, or that a human being had been elevated into the Godhead, or that such a being deserved being worshipped like God. They had lots and lots of new converts to the faith, who, even if they'd already been told every single detail of the gospel story, surely wouldn't have been hurt by hearing some of it again (you know, the way it HAS been told and retold and retold ever since the gospels became canon), particularly since many of them evidently weren't fast learners and needed constant re-instruction in the particulars of the faith.

The early Christians simply didn't have the luxury of living in a society where Christianity had been the overwhelmingly dominant faith for over 1,000 years and every schoolchild knew the gospels by heart, leaving them free to virtually ignore the historical Jesus while glorifying their Cosmic Christ. Even if none of the early Christian writers had the slightest bit of interest in the historical Jesus, circumstances would have forced them to make some direct, explicit references to his life, teachings, trial, crucifixion, and death.

(Edited to add: There's also the issue of early Christians believing that the "end of the age" was imminent. This would have provided yet another motive for making clear why people should believe that a man recently crucified outside Jerusalem was the incarnate, divine savior of humanity.)

But, Peter, I suspect you were aware that someone would make these counter-arguments, and put up your post in order to generate discussion.

(Edited again to add: Well, I see you did explain your reasons for your post...to put the ball in the mythicists' court. I think I've taken a pretty good whack at it.)

Gregg

Ted Hoffman

And if the writer uses "historical" language like Herod and Pilate and Jerusalem and Census?

What do you suppose inspired Mark to take sudden (assuming it was very fashionable to be silent on historical details) interest in historical details of Jesus' birth, life and death?

The fact is Paul, whether or not he met a historical Jesus for a fact, uses "mythological" references concerning Jesus. We can simply conclude that the figure historical Jesus can not be gleaned/ constructed from his writings.

This supports a mythicist position because we wouldnt expect historical details about a mythical figure anyway.

Or are you saying we must seek negative evidence to support a mythicist position - like the unrealistic example Carrier provided?

We can simply cut the chase by you stating what would constitute positive evidence for the mythical nature of Jesus.
What you would expect us to have.

We must have premises - as you once told me.
State the premises upon which you base your argument.

People who knew a historical Jesus would be more relevant, OR people who knew such people.
We can't just pick any Galilean ignoramus that "believes" and say: "there, see?".

To be sure, we would have to ask him now wouldn't we?
Setting up such demanding goals doesnt seem objective. Considering the paucity of info on Jesus.

We can simply examine his letters and conclude that he doesnt seem to have believed in a historical Jesus. Why would anyone need the OT(cant remember the verses) while telling others about a historical person?

1. You dont know that he knew such details. Its more probable that he did not. Just like his correspondents. They were believers.
Believers believe. They dont research, they dont examine. His letters are "feel-happy" letters, uncritical, not logical and "dreamy".

2. You do not know whether he found it necessary or not. Lets stick to what can be argued here.

Paul "met" Jesus in a "revelatory" manner. He never saw a historical Jesus. He had no historical life story concerning Jesus. He stuck to what he knew and believed.
That is what he wrote.
And none of it is historical.

You would have expected him to write that he did not believe in a historical Jesus? But to him, Jesus existed - just in another realm - the sublunar one.

Actually, that was the question I meant to ask you. If u answer in the negative (ie they werent interested in facts - hence "writers" just wrote myths and shadowy stories), then you have a case.

So please answer it.
If your answer is in the affirmative, then well...I neednt say it.

If you cant answer, then you cant explain the reason they omitted the historical details and hence have no basis of making your argument.

It does not apply because they supposedly had no other "myths" to rely on (Jesus only lived once) because they were the mythmakers - so we would expect more historical info from them since they "supposedly" had them. But there is dearth of historical facts.

They had no rational reason to write in mythical tones yet they had the historical facts - unless you want to argue for gnostic leanings and mystery cults. If they attempted to write genealogies (bringing him "down" to earth and giving him roots), they must have been interested in historical facts too.

But it seems they lacked that.

Your only other explanation would be that people preferred to write in mythical terms about historical people those days.

Genealogies, Pontius Pilate, sea of Galilee? Census? Herod?

Not historical huh?

Hence the ""<quotes> around the word testimony.

I am afraid I disagree:

1. They are writing centuries apart
2. NT epistles were written early after the life of Jesus.
3. Rutherford was writing to (close) friends Paul wrote to groups of people - among whom no doubt were Judaism adherents.
4. The letters would only serve to reinforce the notion of a spiritual christ, always alive, huggable against ones breast, dies multiple deaths etc.

Is the argument questionable because of the existence of Rutherfords letters?

Or is its very construction questionable?

You can provide a basis of your questioning without this example - surely?

How so?
How would we then know that they were interested?
If they wrote about myths, they had, and were interested in myths.

This is like arguing that although someone who had coffee was interested in taking cofee, he chose to take tea.
How would you then argue he was interested in taking coffee?

Unless you can demonstrate that they had good reasons (inquisitions? mystery?) for leaving out historical facts, we have no reason for believing they had historical facts.

Huh, huh.

Was the life of Jesus a fact then? - I mean, from the epistles?

This sounds more like Q ie. Sayings etc.

There is plenty of mention about Jesus in the epistles however. Only, not in historical terms.
But that makes a lot of sense.

Because Jesus was not historical.


'proves too much'? And is that good or bad - from your position?

Are you saying he is overstating his case?

Is that a joke?

Yeah, yeah, the controversial Celsus. Iaison (Quentin) was tackling that recently with layman?
Maybe he can comment further on this - I am rusty on Celsus.

Gotta go.

Clutch

I had written:Peter, you replied: I cannot see where the "only if" comes from, here. Why would only some positive doubt be grounds to mention any actual historical details about the person whose divinity is being proclaimed? Surely the ignorance of one's interlocutors would be a powerful reason to share such details in the course of witnessing to them!

Now, your claim that Paul was not in fact preaching to the unconverted in the epistles is another story, and if sound would go some ways towards explaining the lack of detail. (Though even here it is to some degree surprising that neither Paul nor his audience would be very interested in the personal history of, well... God.) But the epistles are oriented at least in part towards counselling their recipients on how to present the nascent religion. So the absence of allusion to the historical details of Jesus' life is again rather surprising, given the intuitive persuasive force of such details if the original doctrine to be preached was historical in character. Are we to assume that Paul, and his correspondents, and everyone they met as well, already believed in the existence of a historical Jesus, so that the otherwise suasive force of the historical details was simply never called for?

This assumption, of course, does apply in the case of Rutherford.

GreggLD1

Come on, Peter. I don't know you that well, but I know you better than this. Citing one author from the 17th century, when Christianity had been the dominant faith of the West for over 1,000 years and the gospel was in the very air people breathed, the food they ate, and the water they drank, doesn't "disprove" anything, and you know it. I'm sure we can find plenty of other 17th century authors who discuss "historical and biographical" details of Jesus' life at considerable length.

You're playin' with us, aren't you?

Greg2003

Peter,

I found your post interesting and a little frustrating. While it is true that some JMers argue solely from the argument of silence, most of the JMers here seem to have a more sophisticated position.

First, it isn't just that Paul is silent on historical details, but rather that the language that he uses corresponds with Gnostic and neo-platonic ideas that posit an existence at a higher level above the earth. In this sense Paul JMers can hold that Paul believed that Jesus really existed, just not down here on earth. His crucifixion and resurrection really did happen, just not here on earth a few years before Paul's ministry.

It isn't the silence alone that testifies to this, but it is the fact that Paul is using the same language as those (namely the Gnostics) who clearly state that Jesus existed on a higher plane and made his redemptive sacrifice there. Please take a look, if you haven't already, at Kurt Rudulph's Gnosis: The Nature and History of Gnosticism. He clearly establishes that the other worldly redeemer figure in Gnosticism predates Christianity and that the language used to describe him is similar to the language Paul uses.

Second, Paul does seem to indicate that Jesus revealed himself to the world in a recent historical context. But he equates that revelation to the apostles in Jerusalem with his own spiritual revelation. Thus making it impossible for us to distiguish a historical revelation of a man calling himself the Christ from a purely spiritual revelation that did not involve an actual man on earth named Jesus.

The fact that HJ writers since the time of ancient christianity use mythical or mystical language to describe Christ is not really relevent to discerning what Paul may have believed since all of Western Civilization has been drawing upon both the historical fiction of the gospels and Paul's mystical language for the last 2000 years anyway.

Jayhawker Soule

I'm not at all sure. Assuming Jesus:

• if my only contact with the guy was by way of some hallucinatory event on the road to Damascus,
• if my efforts were directed toward building a base among a bunch of gentiles, and
• if my authority and legitimacy stood counterposed to that held by some folks in Jerusalem, folks who had been part of the in crowd for some time

I might very well de-emphasize Jesus-in-the-flesh and focus on a more esoteric relationship, one in which I need not take 2nd place to anyone.

Clutch

Well, what do you mean by "contact"?

If your only real knowledge about Jesus was through such an event, then of course your not divulging any further information is unsurprising. But Peter seems concerned to argue that it would be unsurprising for someone in Paul's circumstance to have knowledge, perhaps quite extensive knowledge, of the personal details of Jesus, without mentioning them.

If you mean simply that Paul never met Jesus personally, I don't see how that weighs at all in favour of his not mentioning any historical details that he knew. (Though it's the end of the day and I might be missing something!)

Jayhawker Soule

Sorry, I was being a bit facetious. What I meant was, if Paul's knowledge of Jesus was second hand, and if he was in competition with the Jerusalem cult, he may well have de-emphasized those areas where he was at a disadvantage. If what's important is what can be learned from Jesus' life, folks like James and Cephas may well have an advantage. If, however, what was important what what could be learned on a more esoteric level, Paul could claim to be on equal footing with the best of them. Just speculation ...

Peter Kirby

Are you implying that anyone who doubts that Paul et al. disbelieved in an earthly Jesus is not to be taken seriously?

I understand that you are arguing that Paul necessarily would have made explicit references to details in the life of Jesus (under the hypothesis that Paul believed in an earthly Jesus) because you believe the following to be true:

1. First century Christians would not have had the luxury of assuming Jesus' existence.

2. Some first century Christians were claiming that Jesus was not crucified.

3. Some first century Christians were arguing against the belief in the resurrection from the dead.

4. There was controversy over whether Christians had to follow Jewish dietary laws.

5. Jews and neo-Platonists would have objected to worshipping Jesus like God.

Let me take each claim in turn.

1. Among apologetical types, there is an argument from silence that is commonly used to argue for a historical Jesus. This argument from silence is that the early critics of Christianity do not appear to have claimed that Jesus was a complete myth. I would agree with the Jesus Mythers in saying that this argument from silence is unsound. People such as Lucian or Celsus probably just took it for granted that the Christian movement traced back to some troublemaker called Christ. Seeing as I agree with this criticism, I do not believe that it is justified to expect that first century Christians would have to deal with doubts about the existence of some guy named Jesus. There is no good evidence to suggest that such basic existence wasn't taken as given.

2. The Apocalypse of Peter tells the story of the Laughing Savior. In this story, Jesus himself is not crucified but rather some sort of subsitute. However, this tale presupposes the Gospel narrative which it is subverting, and in any case is typically dated to the third century (e.g. by James Brashler). There is no evidence that there was a dispute about the historicity of the crucifixion of Jesus in the first century.

3. There were indeed some Christians in the first century who were disputing the idea of resurrection from the dead; some of them held that they had undergone a (spiritual) resurrection already. As I have mentioned, the idea of bodily resurrection was deemed to be grotesque in Greek culture, as is evident from the later apologies produced by Christians which defend the idea of a resurrection. Here, however, we find no need for epistle writers to appeal to details in the life of Jesus on earth. They could, and Paul did, appeal to the example of the death, burial, and resurrection of Christ--claiming that the human believer would experience the same at the general resurrection. But these Christians, such as the authors of 1 Corinthians and 1 Clement, also used generally "philosophical" arguments in defense of the idea of the resurrection of the believer in the future. Plausibly the opponents already had a different conception of the resurrection of Christ or denied the identity of the post-mortem fate of Christ and the Christian.

4. There was indeed a dispute over whether Christians had to follow the Jewish dietary laws, as well as other customs such as circumcision. What is noteworthy here is that the New Testament positively represents only one half of that debate--the victorious group which denied the need to follow Jewish law. Many scholars have concluded that the Gospel sayings in which Jesus "declared all foods clean" must be made up, on such grounds as that the author of Acts reveals that this was still unresolved later, when Peter receives a vision in the story. If Jesus was a typical Jew, it is not surprising that writers such as Paul would not have wanted to draw attention to the princeps of Jesus on following Jewish customs.

5. I would agree that it is probable that contemporaries of Paul (including but not limited to Jews and neo-Platonists) would have objected to the degree of reverence with which Paul treated Jesus, a man who had been executed as a criminal. This may be reflected in the statement of Paul, "we proclaim Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles" (1 Cor 1:23). However, I am at a loss to figure out why you believe that this would make Paul more likely to dwell on details of the human career of Jesus.

Looking over this list, I can't help but think that you have grasped at anything that you could think of to describe a difference between the time of Paul and the time of Rutherford, without giving adequate thought to whether it would make a substantial difference in whether Paul et al. would have discussed the life of Jesus in more detail. There is nothing wrong with brainstorming, but I would like to discuss what you think shows more definitely that Paul would have described in detail the life of Jesus on earth in his letters to other believers.

There is an argumentative gap here: at one point you say that the recipients simply "wouldn't have been hurt by hearing some of it again," yet you end with the conclusion that "circumstances would have forced them to make some direct, explicit references to his life, teachings, trial, crucifixion, and death." It is this last claim that I doubt. The first claim also applies to the recipients of Rutherford's letters--they would not have been hurt by hearing a detail in the ministry of Jesus--but it seems clear that this doesn't imply that the writer would have mentioned such detail, as the writer did not.

If it is the case that the writers of the NT epistles would have to have mentioned some explicit details about the life of Jesus, wouldn't it be the case that there were some particular details which the writers knew that the readers would have needed to hear? In that case, what are the details in the life of Jesus that you expect e.g. Paul to write in his letters?

When I made my initial post, I did not suggest any particular explanation for the alleged silence of the NT epistles on the earthly Jesus. You have assumed that the explanation must be that the recipients would have already known the story. While that point may be true, I do not have enough knowledge to claim that it is. There are other possibilities, such as that Paul wrote more for himself than for the recipients, as Stevan Davies has suggested. My point was a simple one, with no explanation attached. The collected religious letters of a person who accepted that Jesus was the name of a human being could be bereft of references to the earthly Jesus.

The people who received the NT epistles had already accepted that Jesus was a savior in some sense. These were not apologies written for outsiders. I do not understand the logic of the argument re: imminent end, and why that would make a person more likely to relate narratives of Jesus in his life on earth, so perhaps you can lay it out in terms of premises and deduction.

I did not anticipate most of your objections. Naturally I did expect discussion. But my post was not a joke as you suggest.

Are you a believing mythicist? I thought that you had the intention of doing more study in this area.

best,
Peter Kirby