Did the man "Jesus" exist?

tat tvam asi · Fri Feb 10, 2012 9:06 am

I can't say that I disagree too much Dwill, but rivalry between factions is something touched on by mythicists. There's clearly a tension between the Samaritans and Jews. Some feel that Jesus was a creation of the northerly Samaritans as a response after the destruction of the temple for the savior that never came. There's tensions between Pharisee and Sadducee. But all in all, the writers are speaking from after the destruction of the temple as if it were foretold during the early first century and trying to provide reasons to explain why it was destroyed. That's where the Jesus myth steps in to try and provide such answers to diaspora audiences.

Briefly, the very life of Jesus is intentionally constructed and carefully crafted together by quote mining the OT and also appealing to popular pagan mystery type themes all at once. Here's a few good examples of a strictly OT method used by who ever started these myths in order to try and created a biography of Jesus' existence on earth:

The crucifixion is worthy of exploration. And obviously there's good reason to toss a vast majority of the biographical material as intentional fiction, midrash, or what-have-you.

And this comes back to the question of what did the gospel writers believe? If they were creating entire midrash accounts, well then the original writers or oral speakers (at the minimum) necessarily knew very consciously that they were not providing an actual literal history of real events. Generations later such a mistake could be made however. Something like the quote mine of Jonah was eventually taken as real history. But the whole thing is simply lifted from the OT - Jesus, the disciples as sailors, the boat, and all. It's necessary that the person responsible to the creation of this story intentionally pieced it together bit by bit.

Robert Tulip · Fri Feb 10, 2012 9:44 am

The artful construction of the Gospels displays astute political vision. Let's just remember the context. Rome's Jewish War led by Vespasian and Titus was the biggest war ever, on some accounts. Josephus, the main historian, says the Romans kept crucifying Jews until they ran out of trees.

Now, if the public documents of a new religious cult aimed at unifying Jew and non-Jew contained direct explicit attacks on Rome, such as a call for military resistance, that cult would have gone the same way as previous Jewish zealot movements. No, the Gospels and Epistles adopted a more nuanced and subtle approach. The New Testament attacks on Rome are aimed at its moral legitimacy, and also at building a long term ethical vision of non violent resistance. I listed some of these attacks above, such as the descriptions of Herod, Pilate, the cross, etc. The language is careful to maintain a plausible deniability, to reduce the justification for Roman suppression while maintaining their hatred of Rome.

Why did Jesus supposedly conflict with the Jewish authorities? John 11:50 says it was due to their political view that it was expedient that one man should die in order to save the state. The Jews viewed Jesus as a sacrificial ransom who they could throw to the Romans in order to maintain some power, rather like Chamberlain threw Czechoslovakia at Hitler as desperate appeasement. The entire context is that the Romans are the real power, and Jesus attacks the Jewish authorities for cozying up to the evil empire.

Robert Tulip · Sat Feb 11, 2012 4:58 am


	DWill wrote: Robert, if you tell me that as a reader of these small books, you see a greater sense of outrage shown against Rome than against the Jews who delivered Jesus for crucifixion, I have to accept that as your reading while saying that mine strongly differs. The Romans are portrayed largely as indifferent, amoral agents. If the Gospels were really a weapon of war against Rome, as you claimed, we would get a more frontal assault. The fact that it makes so much sense for the Jews to see the Romans as hated figures doesn't matter if such hatred isn't in the forefront in the literature.

Different traditions approach the Bible differently. My lens has always been through critical scholarship rather than piety. So, scholars like John Dominic Crossan and the liberation theologians of Brazil and Korea present a compelling picture of Christ, apart from the small matter of fact.

Crossan says the naming of Christ as Lord is subversive to empire. The Emperor was defined as the Lord, so to say there was another Lord in conflict with the emperor was treason. Some information on this approach is at http://www.johndominiccrossan.com/In%20 ... 20Paul.htm and http://nearemmaus.com/2006/12/29/christ ... -theology/

DWill · Sat Feb 11, 2012 7:15 am

You're now talking about interpretive traditions that have grown up. That seems a far cry from the claim you made about the instrumental purpose of the Jesus stories.

Robert Tulip · Sat Feb 11, 2012 2:10 pm


	DWill wrote: You're now talking about interpretive traditions that have grown up. That seems a far cry from the claim you made about the instrumental purpose of the Jesus stories.

Far from it.
The moral clash between early Christianity and the Roman Empire was the definitive framework for the definition of Christian faith. These traditions of defiance of empire are among the earliest themes in Christianity, as attested by Paul in the first century. I earlier cited Paul's moral critique in his letter to the Romans. The text below shows how Paul's identification of Jesus as Lord was a direct defiance of the authoritarian norms of empire.


	Quote: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jesus_is_Lord The saying "Jesus is Lord" serves as a statement of faith for millions of Christians who regard Jesus as both fully man and fully God.... The statement "Jesus is Lord" has been described as the most basic Christian creed in existence. Romans 10:9-13 of the New Testament Christian Bible says, "...if you confess with your mouth, 'Jesus is Lord,' and believe in your heart that God has raised him from the dead, you will be saved." ...During the first century, the phrase Jesus is Lord was used as a contrast to the popular greeting amongst Roman citizens—Caesar is Lord. Because early Jesus followers refused to swear allegiance to Roman empire (and its wars and merchants and kings),[Rev 12] the empire saw their refusal as a social, religious, and political threat. In the Roman world emperors encouraged an imperial cult following, proclaiming and deifying themselves Lord and 'sons of god' and they were not open to being challenged. Emperors viewed their rule as divinely authorized and protected. In first century social customs, honor must be proclaimed publicly, or it wasn't honor. For Judean-Christians to refuse to call Caesar 'lord' caused two problems for the empire. First, it was a public insult to the honor of the emperor and Rome. Worse, in proclaiming Jesus is Lord, these Judean-Christians were saying that their God deserved more honor than did Caesar who had beaten them in battle, destroyed Jerusalem (the seat of Yahweh the God of Israel), and made many of them slaves and refugees (see the First Jewish–Roman War). Second, it showed that the Judean-Christians believed Caesar did not rule by the power of the supreme God of the Cosmos (a form of patronage). In asserting 'Jesus is Lord' they were saying, instead, that Jesus (and YHWH) was the supreme God of the Cosmos, Jesus was the ultimate patron and redeemer, and Caesar was not. Today, the assertion that "Jesus is Lord" is sometimes cited in order to sanction political action by Christians. But there are many different Christian groups with differing ideas as to how political Christianity should be. In the first century, religion and politics were inexorably mixed: both Rome and the Kingdom of Judah were theocracies (see theocracy). To assert one's religious views, then, would have had a subversive impact on the political system at that time. But many of these early Judean-Christians had no desire to be political in the way we know it today. The works of Paul the Apostle entreat citizens to try to blend in and not make waves,1 Cor 11, and Jesus himself suggests the payment of taxes exacted by Roman Emperors (Mark 12:17). The statement that 'Jesus is Lord' was about which God you worshiped, not which political party you voted for. Would you "feed the hungry, care for the sick, clothe the naked, and release the captives" as Jesus and the Prophet Isaiah demanded,[Lk 4:18] or would you worship Caesar and gain power and authority through acts of empire?Rev 12 Proclaiming "Caesar is Lord" meant one was loyal to the power of the empire and was expected to reap its benefits through patronage. Proclaiming "Jesus is Lord" meant one was loyal to God who expects each of his followers to "love your neighbor." It was subversive, it was not about influencing the political process. It was about following Jesus Christ. As a worldview The apostle Paul wrote, "We do not preach about ourselves, but we preach that Jesus Christ is Lord and that we are your servants for Jesus."[2 Cor. 4:5] It is a mindset imperative not only in understanding Christianity, but the very nature of truth itself. Jesus is Lord goes beyond a mantra or political statement and represents a worldview. Christians believe that Jesus Christ represents ultimate truth, meaning and reality whether people choose to accept it or not. It embodies an anchor in a world that sets its mind on a postmodernist worldview.

DWill · Sat Feb 11, 2012 9:00 pm

Aren't you mixing in a bit too much history with mythicisim?

I can't understand why you want to ignore the kennel of historical truth in the bad blood between the Jews and the breakaway sect. The kernel is only that there surely was a brouhaha involving the groups, so in the biased point of view of the Christians, we get the Jews turning Jesus over for execution, when, if such a thing did happen, it could well have been the Romans who took the initiative in ridding the empire of one more rabble-rouser. There is a large measure of pay-back in the stories that were told by the Christians. The pay-back might not have been for any such incident as reported in the Gospels, but for many years of continued opposition.

Robert Tulip · Sat Feb 11, 2012 10:32 pm


	DWill wrote: Aren't you mixing in a bit too much history with mythicisim?

Mythicism is purely historical. The aim is to establish a narrative about how the faith evolved that is compatible with the historical facts. The conventional 'big bang' view of how the mighty faith grew like a tree from the little seed of Jesus fails to engage with the historical record at numerous points, most glaringly the failure of Paul to quote Jesus.

We are looking at what Christians believed, and by the second century that included a historical Jesus. It is far more ambiguous whether the 'Jesus is Lord' line in Paul is meant to be a historical individual. Christians could have held that their mythical eternal savior was Lord, and then only gradually filled in the historical blanks to make this cosmic figure into a fictional individual.

To consider an analogous diumvirate, Stalin extensively quotes Lenin in his book Principles of Leninism, because Lenin was the real founder of the Russian Revolution. If Jesus was the real founder of Christianity, then Paul would have quoted him, or at least mentioned some clear historical facts about him.


	Quote: I can't understand why you want to ignore the kennel of historical truth in the bad blood between the Jews and the breakaway sect.

Assuming we are not talking about a dog in the manger, I am not wanting to ignore anything. The situation here is that the hostility between Christianity and Judaism reflects a broader historical context, the emergence of the suzerainty of Rome, which you DWill have said several times is not relevant. If anyone is ignoring things here it is not me.

Christians and Jews had contrasting tactical responses to Rome. In the Gospels, the Jews can see that following Jesus as king and abandoning their own religious traditions would bring down the wrath of the empire upon them. In fact, this is analogous to what really happened, because the messianic sentiment in Israel with its refusal to acknowledge Caesar as Lord was the main cause of the Jewish War. The Gospels concentrate this sentiment into the 'one for all' figure of Christ, so that the trauma can be sublimated into a myth that all can accept. The continuing Jews don't accept it because it is so historically false, and their integrity brings the later calumny upon them.


	Quote: The kernel is only that there surely was a brouhaha involving the groups, so in the biased point of view of the Christians, we get the Jews turning Jesus over for execution, when, if such a thing did happen, it could well have been the Romans who took the initiative in ridding the empire of one more rabble-rouser. There is a large measure of pay-back in the stories that were told by the Christians. The pay-back might not have been for any such incident as reported in the Gospels, but for many years of continued opposition.

Okay, kernel not kennel

. What you are looking for is the main cause of the rise of Christianity, whether it lay in its divergence from Judaism or its critique of Rome.

Remember, Jesus said in the Sermon on the Mount that he had come to fulfill the Jewish law. That is not a statement made by someone opposed to Judaism.

Looking again at modern politics, we see that people bicker within their own side but come together for the main conflict with the opposing side. The bottom line is that Jesus was a Jew, and his critique constitutes a vision for messianic reform of Judaism, not any basic antagonism. What happened was that the Romans were able to twist and expand the bickering between Christians and Jews over whether Jesus was king into a fundamental divide in order to deflect attention from their own evil domineering ways. I'm sure Macchiavelli learned a lot from the early papacy.

Penelope · Sun Feb 12, 2012 2:18 pm

Robert Tulip wrote:

Quote:


	Quote: Quote: I can't understand why you want to ignore the kennel of historical truth in the bad blood between the Jews and the breakaway sect.

Assuming we are not talking about a dog in the manger, I am not wanting to ignore anything. .....

youkrst · Sun Feb 12, 2012 7:04 pm


	Penelope wrote: I can't understand why you want to ignore the kennel of historical truth in the bad blood between the Jews and the breakaway sect. Assuming we are not talking about a dog in the manger, I am not wanting to ignore anything. .....

yes that would bring a whole new layer of meaning to the term "genetic fallacy"

:lol:

i respectfully suggest we dont allow our dogs to see this thread as it might spark an uprising against homo sapien imperialism, my cat appeared to be raising an eyebrow as it passed by the monitor.

ant · Mon Feb 13, 2012 12:18 pm


	Quote: Heresy Does Not Equal Correctness They laughed at Copernicus. They laughed at the Wright Bros. Yes, well, they laughed at the Marx Bros. So what? Becoming a martyr does not mean you are right. Wilhelm Reich compared himself to Peer Gynt, the unconventional genius out of step with society, and misunderstood and ridiculed. until proven right.: "Whatever you have done to me or will do to me in the future, whether you glorify me as a genius or put me in a mental institution, whether you adore me your savior or hang me as a spy, sooner or later necessity will force you to comprehend that I have discovered the laws of the living." History is replete with chronicles and tales of the lone and martyred scientist working against his peers and in the face of opposition from the known doctrine of his own field of study. Most of them turned out to be wrong and we do not remember their names. For every Galileo shown the instruments of torture for exclaiming the truth, there are a thousand (or ten thousand) Walter Wananbees who's "truths" never pass muster with the powers that be. Can Walter really expect scientists to take the necessary time to test every fantastic claim that comes down the pike? No. If you want to do science, you have to learn to play the game of science. This involves getting to know the scientists in your field., exchanging letters, calls, faxes, and e-mails with your colleagues, presenting papers at conferences, publishing in peer-reviewed journals, and the like. Galileo paid his dues and learned to play the game. Walter Wanabee must do the same.

The Baloney Detection Kit - by Michael Shermer

youkrst · Mon Feb 13, 2012 1:44 pm


	ant wrote: The Baloney Detection Kit

i think the baloney detection kit is never more required than when someone is telling you that a guy really did literally walk on water and rise from the dead literally to save the world from it's "sins"

when someone tries to present symbolic allegory as literal history then the baloney detction kit will definitely come in handy.

muslims jews and christians and literalism what a combination, what a mess, what a world of suffering.

tat tvam asi · Mon Feb 13, 2012 5:05 pm


	Quote: Becoming a martyr does not mean you are right.

Isn't that the truth. I've heard too many Christian apologists ramble on about "why would people give up their lives for a myth?"

Simplest explanation is because they wanted to believe that a mythological afterlife is greater than actual life. So much so that they were willing to give their lives for it. That doesn't do anything to prove them right of course...

Robert Tulip · Mon Feb 13, 2012 6:24 pm

ant, Shermer's argument is good, and provides a useful baseline for skepticism about the Christ Myth Theory.

It is why I argue that the prima facie assumption in the debate should be that Jesus Christ really did exist. The weight of authority is simply so massive that contradicting it requires very strong argument.

But, my perception of the Christ debate, and how it differs in kind from normal intellectual debates, is that people who believe that Jesus was real have a strong emotional investment, even a sense of personal relationship with Jesus, that makes them resistant to simple logic and evidence.

If you compare it to other paradigm shifts, no one really cares about plate tectonics or Newtonian mechanics in the same way they care about religion. The Galileo and Darwin upheavals were so massive because they sapped the foundations of conventional faith. Calling Jesus Christ as a myth is an intellectual upheaval on a similar scale.

What we find now is that advocates of the Christ Myth Theory, which Earl Doherty has described as a persistent coherent scholarly strand on the margin of academic life for several centuries, are utterly shunned. They are not invited to speak in any public forum, they are not sought out by academics eager to co-write articles, they are not cited in media and mainstream journals except as figures of ridicule and abuse. It is very strange.

The explanation is not that scholars such as Earl Doherty, DM Murdock and Robert M. Price are cranks and crackpots. It is that too many Christians find their work viscerally repugnant, investigating a hypothesis that Christians have decided in advance is necessarily false. This advance decision is known politely as prejudice. It infects the whole climate of debate, with even undecided scholars affected by the severe intellectual reaction of the true believers into deciding this is a field of research where angels fear to tread.

I would take your citing of Shermer more seriously if you could point to any evidence of universities engaging in sustained critical dialogue about the Christ Myth Theory. Such dialogue is the prerequisite of peer review. It is not enough to say it has already been refuted, as that is either ignorance or a lie.

Universities love to present this heroic image of academics as courageous intellectual pioneers seeking to extend the frontiers of knowledge in pursuit of Nobel Prizes etc through innovative research. That is a myth. Academics, at least in fields related to this topic, are timid herd animals, followers not leaders. They are mostly very skittish and cowardly when it comes to conversation with anyone outside the blessed anointed magic circle of tenure. You cannot get tenure if you have different ideas, so the magic circle becomes an echo chamber for self-perpetuating dogma and prejudice.

tat tvam asi · Mon Feb 13, 2012 9:23 pm

As far as science is concerned:


	Quote: A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it. (Max Planck, 1920)

That seems to be the key. We debate Christian apologists and evemerist's online about the historicity of the gospel Jesus and a new generation is growing up that is familiar with the debate itself. I didn't grow up familiar with the debate, did anyone here grow up familiar with it?

There was no internet while I was growing up, no youtube, no forums. I had no exposure to any of it. Therefore I knew nothing about any of it due to lack of exposure.

This seems very new to most of us regardless of which position we prefer. That's precisely why there's so much shock and awe involved with the assertion that the gospel Jesus may have been completely mythological through and through. Previously most generations only considered that Jesus seems partially mythological but certainly partially historical too. That isn't nearly as certain nowadays, at least not to the up and coming generation and probably generations to follow. Newer scholars will be rising through the ranks of academia who will most definately be familiar with the debate and all of the uncertainty that goes along with the gospel myths.

In the days of Gerald Massey and such there was no wide spread exposure about mythicism. It was just something that a few people were getting into which had no way of reaching the masses. But it lasted long enough in small circles to eventually merge into the information age...

http://www.stellarhousepublishing.com/mythicism.html

Robert Tulip · Thu Feb 16, 2012 3:25 pm


	Richard Carrier wrote: Proving History! February 8, 2012 at 8:31 pm Richard Carrier My new book is finally done and available for pre-order at Amazon: titled Proving History: Bayes’s Theorem and the Quest for the Historical Jesus. Yes, that’s the one (or one of the two) that everyone has been asking me about. It’s been years in the making, and in the waiting, but we completed its academic peer review, I made all requested revisions, proofed the galleys, finished the index, and it’s all ready to go, at the printer’s being typeset now. It’s being published by Prometheus Books, my first sole-author title with them. more from Carrier's blog...

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