NOGO

So you take it as an historical fact that Jesus thaught that the Kingdom of God was imminent.

That should disqualify him as a prophet, son of God, God and everything else that Christians believe.

Llyricist

Oh, you mean like Paul's writings regarding Jesus? Which afterall, is the Mythicist position, i.e. it STARTED as a mythos without time or place then later was placed into history, probably gradually orally then written down in MANY versions, and only the four that seemed to agree the most were kept. the rest mostly lost or destroyed.

I should remind, I'm an agnostic regarding HJ, but so far the Mythicist position seems to carry a little more weight. Though I understand that an actual archetype did exist in Palestine at the time. So it's just possible the historicizing was based in part on actual person/people. But the "Historical Jesus" IS a phantom in ANY case, since we can never tell what in the gospels, if anything, represents the actual human called Jesus today.

Vinnie

Why is that?

Vinnie

Clutch

Why would it mean that? Goliath doesn't seem to be a Christian, yet he holds that divinity is an essential property of anything's counting as Jesus. I have said nothing to the effect that Jesus cannot have been a man; so I don't know why you're confabulating this. What I've said is that it's an open question whether his being at least divine is an essential feature of any candidate referent of 'Jesus'.The question is whether the existence of a man named 'Jesus' and coming from Nazareth is sufficient for the truth of "Jesus was a historical figure". I mean, trivially it is sufficient in one sense, if we take the two occurences of 'Jesus' to be coreferential. But the question is whether that name would be the name 'Jesus' as it is used relative to Christianity.
You're babbling.

Yes, I am aware of this. Just as you are of course aware that Christians also believe Jesus to have been divine. Fully man and fully god, right? So, then: if there was only a spirit flitting about, never incarnated, would that suffice for the truth of "Jesus was a historical figure"? Plausibly, no -- that just wouldn't be the Jesus of the gospels. Mutatis mutandis, then...

Vinnie

Common sense. I am not going to waste time arguing against the notion that the historicity of Jesus is a supernatural claim. That is nonsense. This is the best I am willing to offer you right now:

Towards the end of the first third of the first century A.D. there was a Jewish figure from Nazareth named Yeshua. He had a brother named James and was baptized by John the Baptist. He spoke about the kingdom of God. He talked in parables, his ministry was to the Jews and he was a movement founder. He was seen as a miracle worker, and he was crucified in 30 ad but his followers were not.

Those are some of the more solid historical facts discernable from the literary data that we have,

Vinnie

Jayhawker Soule

How did "a Jewish figure from Nazareth" get elevated to one of the "more solid historical facts". I would think that the Nazareth connection would be view as highly dubious.

Vinnie

I am not aware of Nazareth as the hometown of Jesus being highly dubious. My understanding is that virtually all critical scholars accept Nazareth as Jesus' hometown. Bethlehem is what is disputed.

Vinnie

Jayhawker Soule

You may well be correct. I know only that, in Matthew 2:23, we read

• And he came and dwelt in a city called Nazareth: that it might be fulfilled which was spoken by the prophets, He shall be called a Nazarene

There is, of course, no such prophesy, and the reference to Narareth seems to have the same stretch marks as the earlier reference to virgin birth.

But, be that as it may, when/how did "a Jewish figure from Nazareth" get promoted to a "more solid historical fact"? Given Matthew, is it not more likely that Nazareth was fabricated to fulfill a misunderstood reference to Nazarites?

Toto

There is some dispute over whether Nazareth was inhabited in the first century (archeologists have found some graves there, but no firm indication of a town, although there might be some more recent discoveries.) Some scholars suspect that Jesus and James and others were members of a political / religioius faction known as Nazorites, and later story tellers changed this to Nazareth to downplay Jesus' connection to political extremism. I think that even some strong HJ'ers doubt that Jesus was actually from Nazareth.

One of these threads references a web page that claims that the Biblical descriptions of Jesus' home town match the geography of Capernum, not Nazareth. I think it is this: http://spazioweb.inwind.it/bravo/qum...s/naza-eng.htm

If you search, you can find some old threads:

http://www.iidb.org/vbb/showthread.p...light=nazareth

http://www.iidb.org/vbb/showthread.p...light=nazareth

http://iidb.org/cgi-bin/ultimatebb.c...=6&t=000458&p=

http://www.iidb.org/vbb/showthread.p...light=nazareth

Clutch

It's your right to demur, of course. But wheezing about sense, common or non-, is just noise. If you have no argument, fair enough.