Jesus myth theories

I was being sarcastic, since the lack of writings by the figure concerned are taken by atheist blogsters as a sure sign that the person is bogus.

Haven't you noticed. I outlined a 10-point case for the existence of Jesus, and have started to elaborate in subsequent posts.

But I have. And will.

 

There is no "undisputed evidence' for Jesus, just as there is no "undisputed evidence" that Obama was born in the United States,and there never will be, to the satisfaction of birthers and Donald Trump. There are active groups with a strong need to "dispute" Christianity, and no amount of evidence that anyone could put forward is likely to sway them. I wouldn't expect you to be impressed with any case for Jesus' existence that I'm in the process of developing. But it is interesting that most scholars with Ph.Ds , peer-reviewed publications and command of ancient languages consider the case for Jesus to be on a par with that for Socrates--and certainly stronger than the case for Pythagoras. I won't be proving anything to anyone, but I will be explaining why I believe Jesus was real and why it's not unreasonable for others to think so, too.

You provide a good deal of highlighted material, some of it obviously from scholarly sources. You mention Remsburg. Is he it? much of the material you quote seems questionable to me, e.g., the Roman records of Crucifixions in Palestine. Other respected scholars say there were none. BTW, where are they kept? I'll tackle the rest of the buckshot download later when I'm fresher. I must say the idea that people "should" have written about things they didn't doesn't seem very impressive, even if they were CNN reporters. Did they cover any trails of religious dissidents or crucifixions? If so, where can I find the records

The passage repeats the notion that the Romans who were admittedly good record keepers relative to the times kept records of trials and crucifixions of criminals in Judea and Galilee. If they did, where are they now kept? What are the names of some of the other persons crucified by the Romans during the period in question?

Bart Ehrman,a scholar of considerable reputation denuies that there are such records:
“I should reiterate that it is a complete “myth” (in the mythicist sense) that Romans kept detailed records of everything and that as a result
we are inordinately well informed about the world of Roman Palestine [Note: I’m talking about Palestine] and should expect then to hear about
Jesus if he really lived. If Romans kept such records, where are they? We certainly don’t have any. Think of everything we do not know about
the reign of Pontius Pilate as governor of Judea…” (p. 44) I go on to detail what we have no record of about Pilate from Roman records: “his
major accomplishments, his daily itinerary, the decrees he passed, the laws he issued, the prisoners he put on trial, the death warrants he signed,
his scandals, his interview, his judicial proceedings.” In talking about Roman records, I am talking about the Roman records we are interested in:
the ones related to the time and place where Jesus lived, first-century Palestine. It’s a myth that we have or that we could expect to have detailed
records from Roman officials about everything that was happening there, so that if Jesus really lived, we would have some indication of it. Quite the
contrary, we precisely don’t have Roman records – of much of anything – from there.http://ehrmanblog.org/fuller-reply-to-richard-carrier/


Philo of Alexandria naturally lived in Alexandria, Egypt, and was mainly absorbed in his philosophy. Why would you think that he, and Seneca the Younger, Gallio, Justus of Tiberias, Nicolaus of Damascus, should have written about Jesus or the events surrounding his ministry and-or crucifixion if they happened as told in the Gospels? Were they news reporters covering all events that happened in the Roman world? We're talking here about a routine execution of a relatively obscure Galliean peasant. Scholars are more intersted in loftier subjects. These were Romans living far from the scene and limited in what subjects they could cover. I must say, the dubious nature of the source makes me skeptical that Remsburg knows what he's talking about. Remsburg lived from 1848 to 1919, and was a self-educated militant atheist with no degrees, classical language skills, or background in religious studies or history. Is this the sort of stuff we must answer? When he says "if they happened as told in the gospels", he's probably thinking of all the miracles, but I suspect if any word about those happened to make its way back to Galilee, it would be treated by the educated elite like we treat reports of Elvis sitings.

How many historians in the United States today are covering sidewalk preachers in Oklahoma? We have a lot of them? How many were on top of the Heaven's Gate cult before the mass suicide? And that's now, when we have all the advantages of modern communication.

 

check out this link

http://www.probe.org/site/c.fdKEIMN...dence_for_Jesus_from_NonChristian_Sources.htm

seriously took me about 2 seconds in google to find a good article with historical references to the life of Jesus.

 

what about that article?

roman historian tacitus AD 64:

Nero fastened the guilt . . . on a class hated for their abominations, called Christians by the populace. Christus, from whom the name had its origin, suffered the extreme penalty during the reign of Tiberius at the hands of . . . Pontius Pilatus, and a most mischievous superstition, thus checked for the moment, again broke out not only in Judaea, the first source of the evil, but even in Rome. . . .

pliny the younger AD 112:

They were in the habit of meeting on a certain fixed day before it was light, when they sang in alternate verses a hymn to Christ, as to a god, and bound themselves by a solemn oath, not to any wicked deeds, but never to commit any fraud, theft or adultery, never to falsify their word, nor deny a trust when they should be called upon to deliver it up; after which it was their custom to separate, and then reassemble to partake of food--but food of an ordinary and innocent kind.

josephus, 1st century jewish historian:

About this time there lived Jesus, a wise man, if indeed one ought to call him a man. For he . . . wrought surprising feats. . . . He was the Christ. When Pilate . . .condemned him to be crucified, those who had . . . come to love him did not give up their affection for him. On the third day he appeared . . . restored to life. . . . And the tribe of Christians . . . has . . . not disappeared.

babylonian talmud (jewish book, not christian):

On the eve of the Passover Yeshu was hanged. For forty days before the execution took place, a herald . . . cried, "He is going forth to be stoned because he has practiced sorcery and enticed Israel to apostasy."

lucian, 2nd century greek satirist:

The Christians . . . worship a man to this day--the distinguished personage who introduced their novel rites, and was crucified on that account. . . . [It] was impressed on them by their original lawgiver that they are all brothers, from the moment that they are converted, and deny the gods of Greece, and worship the crucified sage, and live after his laws.

so there you have it, from the historical records of the greeks, romans, and jews.

 

"Blessed are the cheese-makers"

What about a solid oral tradition in Judaism? In oral societies there is an unspoken ethical duty to not change the text because it comes form "time immemorial".

Also, the epistles generally agreed to actually be by St Paul of Tarsus were written somewhere in the neighbourhood of 15 to 20 years after Christ (sure he didn't know him, but he met with people that did and depending on the narrative was commissioned by some of the inner circle). The earliest Gospel (Mark) was written as though they are recollections of someone that knew Jesus personally, traditionally St Peter in the area of AD 60-65.

 

I take no offense. I love it! I participate for the same reasons.

BTW to save needless effort, many of these objections are based on the sketchinesss of the items on my list, to provide a comprehensive overview. I'm in them process of elaborating them one by one in my compulsive manner, and have already done so for the first of them (post #97). I'm adding a few others (Posts#129,130,131,132). Check those out. Then I'll take up your objections.

 

Playing Devil's Advocate:

2nd Century is quite far off already considering how fast the cult spread. The Josephus quotation is often considered a Christian addition. Josephus would not have likely written about the Resurrection. Other copies of that word do not contain it.

Pliny's account is basically the Didache. He makes no reference to knowing people who spoke or walked with this figure who started the rituals he mentions. Didache: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Didache

Hardly new. Hardly conclusive. Very moot evidence.

 

The notion of a crucified god went counter to Jewish beliefs about the Messiah, and therefore would not be made up.
If we believe the mythicists, a bunch of Jews in the first century decided to make up a new god and give him the attributes that every pagan god and his dog already had. And this they hoped to sell to other Jews and to claim that this was the Jewish Messiah. Big problem: The god they were selling was a man who had just been crucified. The expected Messiah of Jewish prophecy was to be person of grandeur, a military figure or great priest who would deliver the Jewish people from bondage, and establish God’s Kingdom on earth. Instead, they got a low born ex-day laborer and itinerant cult leader from the sticks of rural Galilee who preached against the establishment and was executed like a common criminal. Specifically, they had to contend with a passage in Deuteronomy 21:23 that anyone who hung from a tree is cursed. That was the challenge that the early Christians faced, and they rose to it admirably and made lemonade out of the lemons, but it’s doubtful that if they made up the character of Jesus in the first place, they’d have given Him those attributes. Ehrman says it would be trying to convince people today that David Koresh was the son of God. And after all, there were so many of those pagan god models to choose from, none of whom (Kersey Graves to the contrary) had been crucified

 

The notion of a Jewish Messiah who was baptized by John the Baptist was inconsistent with the notions that (a) Jesus was superior to John and (b) Jesus was born without sin; the fact that this is reported in the gospels and strenuously explained away suggests that it was real. If Jesus was really baptized, it seems likely he did exist
Next to the crucifixion, the fact about Jesus that has the widest scholarly acceptance is his baptism by John the Baptizer. And why is this? Because it’s so embarrassing that Christians would be unlikely to make it up. Why did Jesus need to be baptized? And why would John be baptizing him?
I contrast to “Anup the Baptizer, who is unknown even to Egyptian mythology (Gerald Massey made him up) , it seems that John the Baptizer was a real person. That there was such a person as John the Baptizer is attested to not only in all of the gospels but also by Josephus in Antiquities of the Jews. Josephus presents John not as a warm-up man but as a religious leader in his own right who had a large following “excited to the utmost” by his stirring rhetoric. That, according to Josephus, is why Herod Antipas had him arrested and executed, because, according to Robert Webb, a leading expert on the man: The people around John were excited to a fever pitch and ready to do anything.”(John the Baptizer and Prophet, p. 269). Interestingly, a gnostic sect today, the Mandaeans, still claims John the Baptizer as their prophet and regards Jesus as an interloper. Their clergy are called Nazerenes, as were the early followers of Jesus.
[FONT=&quot]Anyhow, the authors of the gospels felt compelled to raise the issue of the baptism and try to explain it away because many people at the time thought that John the Baptist was the Messiah. The gospel of John is the most emphatic of the four gospels in explaining why John couldn’t have been the Messiah: he wasn’t the light, Jesus pre-existed him, he never did “signs”, etc. R.E. Brown comments: It is reasonable to suspect that some of the negations about John the Baptist in the Fourth Gospel were intended as refutations of claims that the sectarians of John the Baptist made about their master.”[/FONT]

 

Paul refers to his meetings with Peter and James the Just, the brother of Jesus. Both men were thought to have been close to Jesus, and affirmed his existence first hand
Of course, this begs the question: Did Paul exist? We have thirteen letters under his name, seven of which are considered authentic by scholarly consensus, and five of which have been determined by computer analysis to have been written by the same person. (See A.Q.Morton and J. McLeman, (1966) Paul, the Man and the Myth . We could quibble about the methodology (they count the number of times the Greek word καί (“and”) appears in each of Paul’s epistles), but let’s give them the benefit of the doubt that only five of the epistles are written by one person calling himself Paul, instead of someone else pretending to be Paul. It seems unlikely that a person writing five such eloquent epistles would attribute them to an imaginary person, or that the pseudonomynous authors of the other eight letters would be impersonating said person if he didn’t exist and wasn’t important. Paul is mentioned in other books of the New Testament, especially Acts and 2 Peter 3:15. Outside of the NT, Clement of Rome, whom Paul mentions in one of the letters, mentions Paul in his own letter to the people of Corinth; and the Act of Thecla and Paul, celebrate his missionary work. He is claimed as founder by several churches in Greece and the Near East. Eusebius of Caesarea reports that Paul was beheaded under Nero in either A.D. 64 or 67. ‘Nuff said.
Anyhow Paul (aka,Saul) started persecuting Christians shortly after Jesus’ crucifixion in 30 C.E. (indicating that there were followers of Jesus around at the time), but in 32 or 33 C.E. he underwent his famous conversion. Three years after his epiphany, he went to Jerusalem to visit the head honchos of the sect he had been persecuting: Peter, Jesus’ right hand man, and James, whom Paul refers to as “the brother of the Lord”. Both had first-hand contact with Jesus. So unless they were all in on a conspiracy to concoct a mythical Messiah, this is some evidence that Jesus existed. And since this happened not long after Jesus’ death, eyewitnesses would be around who would be able to call them out if they were inventing an imaginary friend.

 

Josephus confirms the role of James the Just as brother of Jesus. Ergo, there presumably was a Jesus
In Jewish Antiquities (190 C.E.) Josephus Flavius, a Jewish historian, mentions Jesus in two passages. One is the Testimonium Flavioum, generally believed to have been doctored by Christians in the third century. But the other, describing the assassination of James the Just, is considered authentic and reliable by almost all scholars. (Boulton, Who on Earth Was Jesus? (p. 151.) Josephus refers to James as “the brother of Jesus who is called Christ”. The clear inference is that Jesus existed, since if a person’s brother exists, we can assume the person himself existed.
Robert Eisenman’s James the Brother of Jesus argues persuasively that there are more extensive sources for James than for Jesus, but that uncovering the historical James brings us face-to-face with his brother Jesus. The evidence for James he considers include Josephus, Acts, the Clementine Recognition and Homilies, the Apostolic Constitution , Eusebius, the two James Apocalypses from Nag Hammadi, and even the Dead Sea Scrolls, on which he did pioneering work (although I’m skeptical re the Scrolls). Paul also confirms the existence of James. (Supra)

 

The existence of Jesus is corroborated in a sizeable number of independent or semi-independent first century sources, including Paul’s letters, the canonical gospels, the Q-gospel, the L and M sources, the Gospel of Thomas, the non-Pauline epistles, and the oral traditions .


Bart Ehman, professor of religion at UNC Chapel Hill and an avowed agnostic has become notorious for his critical approach to the Christian canon and his uncovering of the wide diversity of non-canonical versions of Christianity that never made it into the New Testament. Yet there is agreement in all of these writings and traditions that Jesus was a real historical figure. The canonical gospels were the culmination of oral traditions that, while contradictory in various respects, attest to this belief. Ehrman comments: “We are talking about a large number of sources, dispersed over a remarkably broad range of geographical expanse, many of them dating to the years immediately after Jesus’ alleged life, some of them from Palestine itself..” He concludes: “on the basis of this evidence alone, it is hard to understand how Jesus could have been ‘invented’. Invented by whom? Where? When? How could there be so many independent strands of evidence?” How, indeed?

 

I believe that Jesus existed. There is too much evidence otherwise, both in secular and religious reasonings. Matthew and John traveled and preached with him and recorded his teachings and happenings in detail. Also making sure to provide specific leaders and places of the time to prove validity.

 

This is your best argument for non-biblical corroboration!

 

The only problem with that argument, from the standpoint of convincing skeptics, is that the four gospels were aonymous. The names Matthew and John, both apostles, were assigned to them. Many Bible scholars outside fundamentalist circles think that whoever wrote them, it probably wasn't Matthew or John or anybody else with first hand knowledge of Jesus.

 

The most amazing idea about all this fact of Jesus in the midst of the existing Roman Empire is the Liebnitzian passage of day-to-day dogmatic of Days being referenced to the newly developing calendar of Caesar Augustus. Mythologically It should not have to progress from the earlier Julian Calendar. But that's the presumption of truer accuracy with respect to the movements of the solar system.

We'll say that progress is Science. Science was about a mean tax collector and a mean census.

 

I don't think there is such a thing. Even science is tentative, and where ancient history is concerned, the best we can hope for is substantial evidence--enough to show that an opinion is reasonable in light of the available evidence.

I'm simply trying to explain why I believe in the existence of a Jesus in history who was a walking, talking person instead of an imaginary one. I agree that scholarly consensus isn't necessarily evidence, but really if you read all of the points I've been making so far, they don't rest on scholarly consensus. In fact I'd agree that the point about consensus is one of the weakest on my list, but one that I think deserves some consideration. Some people are impressed by solid scholarship, while others prefer the tabloids. BTW, I agree that scholars can be victims of groupthink (that goes for natural scientists as well), but they at least are subject to the discipline of the peer review process, and have to be equipped with the tools for critical analysis of ancient texts. That would include knowledge of ancient languages, observance of professional norms of footnoting and separating personal opinions from fact. Bart Ehrman is a good example of someone whose views are way out of step with mainstream Christian views of scholars in his field, but he gets published because of the demonstrably solid scholarship of his work. There are scholars in the "Jesus myth" circles who clash with scholarly consensus on the existence of an historical Jesus--Robert Price and Richard Carrier come to mind. I read what they have to say, and learn from it, even though I disagree with it. Murdock is an illustration of what can happen when these scholarly norms are not observed. She has no degree beyond an undergraduate bachelor's in classics, and it shows. On the Zeitgeist documentary, for which she was the principal consultant, and in her book The Christ Conspiracy, she gives us such absurdities as equating "son" with "sun"--and defending it when challenged. Most of her case concerning Horus is based on the dated 19th century work of Gerald Massey, poet and amateur archaeologist, noted for wild free association, such as concluding that reapers in a mural are Horus's disciples, that Horus was "baptized" by the non-existent "Anup the Baptizer", and that King Herod, the well-documented king of Judea, was based on the Egyptian serpent legend of Herrut. If it sounds the same, it must be connected. We can take the position "whatever", but we do so at the price of intellectual integrity and basic rationality. She's the Sarah Palin of Jesus mythology.

I agree with the quotation, whoever said it. BTW, who did? Tim Windowfield, isn't it? In his article in Vridar, Musings on Biblical Studies,etc. Funny Vridar, of all bloggers, should bring this up--like the proverbial pot calling the kettle black. These are the atheist Jesus Mythicist equivalent to Donald Trump and the Birthers in policitcs. Vridar is the bastion of mythicist true believers, who would naurally feel threatened by a scholarly consensus that challenges their un-scholarly one. Historian R.Joseph Hofmann said of Vridar:"Serious discussion on the Vridar site is always drowned in point-scoring come-backs as though scholarship was an endless slanging match. Attempts to correct, explain, amplify or inform are slapped down by a cult so hysterically self-righteous that they must spend the time they don’t use making mistakes (limited, to be sure) high-fiving each other for insult. It is less like a meeting place for serious debate than an animal house food fight. "

The same issue comes up in discussions of evolution, climate change, and sexual orientation. Of course, these matters should be decided by the evidence. But is it relevant to non-scientists like me to know that some positions on these subjects are accepted by a majority of experts in the relevant fields, while others are confined to a people on the fringes of their disciplines? For example, should we be impressed by the fact that the American Psychiatric Association and the American Psychological Association no longer regard homosexuality as a mental illness, or should we say that's just their opinion. National Association of Research Therapy on Homosexuals (NARTH), consisting largely of Catholic, Evangelical, Jewish Orthodox, and Mormon shrinks says they're sick and in need of "reparative therapy". I try to keep an open mind, but since I'm not an expert, I tend to give some weight to the professional consensus--i.e, that global warming and evolution are real, that NARTH is a fringe group, and that gays are no sicker than anybody else. and opinions on these subjects make a difference in public policy.

As I've explained, I'm not trying to prove anything to you or anyone else. I'm explaining the basis for my beliefs and why I think they're reasonable. So this covers my point about consensus. Thanks for brining it up, because I got it out of the way and can turn to a quick wrap-up of the other points. I've decided to drop one of them: #8. " Many of the details of Jesus’ life presented in the earliest writings and traditions are plausible, mundane, and utterly unlike the life stories of pagan gods." While I think it's true, I also think I'd have a hard time explaining and defending it. So we're down to the last two points. Light at the end of the tunnel