mountainman

And only in the LXX, the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible.

The most embarrassing thing is we have no Hebrew sources.

What's happening?





εὐδαιμονία | eudaimonia

Zeke_Piestrup

I sloshed through 10 pages of this non-rationalistic discussion.

The reason for the supposed embarrassment was an issue of rank. John is said to have baptized Jesus, not the other way around. Usually the person with spiritual authority is the one doing the baptizing. Meier's excerpt references this, but either y'all are blind and missed the leap-off point of the discussion, or I'm blind. And an idiot. But, there seemed to be all sorts of discussions about baptism, but none about the significance of John baptizing Jesus. Josephus certainly had much more to say about John than about Jesus. The defensiveness of "I should be baptizing you" fits the narrative that Jesus may have been just a bit player in His time.

But yes, (as others have mentioned) the criterions have been ditched. When conservative evangelical scholars, late to the party like Japanese hair metal, started using the same criterions and proved all sorts of wonderful fundamentalist stuff, it was time to carve out a new tool set. But, it's no reason to not know what they are, and how they were applied. The criterions are certainly more revealing than "comparing scripture with scripture."

First post, but you should be baptizing me.

aa5874

It is irrational to presume Jesus had rank before he was baptized in the fables of the Gospels.

Please, identify the rank of Jesus in the Gospels on the day he was claimed to be baptized BEFORE the Holy Ghost bird and the voice from heaven?

Mark 1:9 NAS Well, when Jesus met John the Baptist IN the Gospels there is no evidence that he had rank--Jesus of Nazareth was unknown to John the Baptist.

Toto

Hi Zeke - yes, we all know that, but you've walked in on the middle of a long running debate (longer than this thread.) The objection is not so much to the criterion as to the way it is used or misused to prove historicity. It's when people try to say no one would have invented a baptism scene like that therefore Jesus existed, that there's a real problem.

I liked your film. There's a thread on it somewhere. :wave:

rlogan

Yes, thank you for pointing that out. There are some text sources that are unfortunately lost to us too.

Of course, we don't have only Thomas and in that case it is very clearly a "Confucious Say" collection, not a Chronicling of events.


After you remove, say, sending two thousand pigs into the ocean, you have "a man was in Gerasene". Remove the turning water into wine and you have "a man was at a wedding". Etc. Remove all the midrash from the Hebrew Bible, and what's left?

This is an important methodology in my view that nobody has ever carried to completion. I started a thread once trying to do just that, and nobody came up with anything that was independent. That doesn't mean there is none, but it is something deserving close scrutiny. If you follow this methodology faithfully and end up with "there once was a man", then there is nothing for a religion to form around.

I respectfully disagree with the black hole in this case. I don't know why you are ignoring the two dozen Jesus' written about by Josephus or any other historian's accounting of real persons named Jesus, some of whom have no significance in shaping events. My favorite is the kook who was running around saying "woe is Israel" and gets killed by a Roman seige engine in the battle of Jerusalem.

I think that there is a pretense that we don't have all of this extrabiblical material that is pertinent, but we do. And it isn't just people named Jesus. It is all of the material surrounding how the Sanhedrin operated, how the Romans governed Judea, and thus how stupid the whole "trial" story and release of a murderer is, etc. Even astrological data - was there a star they were following? No.

Well, I just gave you a Jesus who has zero political significance, yet is written of in detail by Josephus. So that is an immediate proof by contradiction of any theory that "no political significance = won't be written about". And I know of no HJ theory that is absent the criterion of political significance because they all need him to be crucified.

If he is crucified for something other than political significance, we are talking about a criminal. So here again is all of this extrabiblical information available to us that is pertinent, not a black hole.

Just a junior varsity member here, coach.

We are in agreement here. What I am pointing out in contradistinction is that a WEALTH of extrabiblical evidence exists as pegs, far more than I am aware of, that I don't see you weighing here.

Yes, eagerly admitted to. I hoped to turn your skills to a more productive area than "nya nya nya" sniping from certain quarters. I have a great deal of respect for your background here and am pleased that you have responded.

Certainly, I concede there and thank you for pointing it out because what I mean to say is that once you can point to all the source material from text, and nothing independent exists as chronicling a person, then it is obvious to me from a statistics background that we have formal tests we can apply, called model selection criteria. Some here have used the terminology "argument from best explanation". You clearly don't adhere to such an approach where competing theories are directly tested against one another. You end it with either of them being possible, regardless of whether one is 99% likely and the other only 1%. The statistician in me wants a decisive test, dammit.


I couldn't agree more with the distinction you pointed out.

Zeke_Piestrup

I think we're talking two different languages, dude. And I did just drop in. But, I'm not presuming anything, I'm only trying to highlight how the criterion was used by scholars in relation to Jesus' baptism by John.

I'm not even talking about rank immediately before, nor shortly after the baptism. As the Jesus movement grew in size many years after the death of Jesus, the followers had to answer why John baptized Jesus, and not the other way around.

Saying as such, I have no clue what your post was about. Hopefully I've helped in sharing mine.

rlogan

Hi Zeke! welcome.

In reading through that you'll see the energizer bunny of red herrings, diversion, evasion, and logical fallacies was busy blowing great billowing clouds of smoke. A number of us tried to pin him down on what was embarassing, but it proved virtually impossible to do, and even when he did it wasn't on point.

Toto pointed out this is old ground being re-plowed, but I am happy to put my third-string response to the above here:

Scripturally, you need a herald for Jesus' coming. The voice in the wilderness, and he has to eat honey and locusts as per the Hebrew Bible.

So who? Strategically he needs to be a person of religious standing, yet it cannot be the Jewish Temple administration heralding the replacement of itself.

So let's look at John the Baptizer as a possibility. Looks good as a person of religious substance to say someone he isn't even fit to tie shoes for is coming. Someone who God opens up the sky for and says "this is the one, John".

But how do you arrange Jesus to meet John in the story? What is the ostensible purpose of their meeting? Baptism is important in this new religion and you can't very well have the head of the entire religion not being baptized. Is some lesser person than John the Baptizer to do it?

It is somewhat of a conundrum, no? The best you can do when you need Jesus baptized, and you need a notable person to say Jesus is better than anything else on earth is to have John the Baptizer do so, but with God opening up the heavens to tell us that Jesus is the superstar, the one John himself said was coming. It is quite sensible, and you have to ignore all of this context in order to interject this silly criterion of embarassment. If God himself is present at the Baptism, assuring us of Jesus' standing then how the heck can it be embarassing?

aa5874

I have merely exposed your problems with rationality. Your problems with rationality are easily observed in your language.

You implied Jesus had rank at the time he was baptized in the fables called Gospels and you did so without a shred of evidence in the very Gospels.

On the day Jesus was baptized in the fables called Gospels there were NO Jesus cult of Christians and Jesus was unknown to John the Baptist.

Now, you have fabricated events that are not found in the earliest story of Jesus.

There is NO story in or out the Gospels that "the followers had to answer why John baptized Jesus".

Please, read the short gMark, Jesus was REJECTED as a Blasphemer and his followers either betrayed, abandoned or denied Jesus. Later he was EXECUTED under Pilate.

Jesus had NO rank on the day he was baptized by John when he was just a SINNER if he was a mere unknown man.

You come across as an inventor of your own "history" based on imagination.

Please, again, show exactly where you get your stories from--they are NOT known even in the Church.

Zeke_Piestrup

I don't think I'm talking out of line in saying that most scholars believe:
Jesus was a follower of John
Gets baptized by John
John got whacked
Jesus started his own group (maybe before John gets whacked)

The criterion of embarrassment was used to say that it was historically likely that Jesus was baptized by John. As I understand it, the focus is on who was baptizing whom (as the "embarrassing" evidence) that helps to establish the historically likelihood of the physical event (Jesus getting baptized by John).

And that's why I don't understand the question about Jesus' rank at the time of before or immediately after the baptism. Perhaps something of a new cat on John's team, getting inspired by John's teachings? It is relevant to what?

Later Gospel writers had to answer for why John baptized Jesus. 'Cause the top dawg does the dunking, the man with the most God on his side. 35+ years after their man got executed, how should followers of this small group of Jesus is the Messiah Jews, answer to critiques that their main dude was a follower of a contemporary!?

How to spin it? "I should be baptizing you", boom, cue dove.

Traditions exist before Gospels. John baptizing Jesus is a tradition that had to be dealt with by next generation of believers and their narrative authors.

That's how I understand the argument.

andrewcriddle

Taking this FTSOA at face value as evidence of pre-Christian tradition; this is a claim that the Son of Man must suffer. It may be begging the question to assume that the Son of Man equals the Messiah.

Andrew Criddle