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Historicity of Jesus. Now serving Atwil.
Comments
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tallaghtmick wrote: »Im starting to think Bannasidhe could disprove my existence......
Given the amount of records I have access too in my professional capacity I would be well impressed if there was no record of you.0 -
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Moderators, Science, Health & Environment Moderators, Society & Culture Moderators Posts: 60,173 Mod ✭✭✭✭
Join Date:Posts: 59101
Well first off E we have to compare scales here. Sparty was raising an army and successfully with it and bringing it to Rome's doorstep. This was a toga staining moment. He wasn't just a thorn, he was the whole fecking rose bush. Jesus if he was a rebel, was a very local one in a pretty far off province of empire. I'm quite sure if Jesus had rode through the gates of Rome on the back of an ass with locals gilding his path with palm leaves you'd have heard about it and in a big way. Plus chances are he wasn't a direct threat to Roman rule. Again it may well have been as oldrnwisr said a local religious issue dealt with by the locals, so Rome were pretty meh about the whole thing, until later on it started to spread by word of mouth and a religion kicked off on the back of it. Cue hungry lions, stage left.But that's my point precisely. According to records, Spartacus was a little known Thracian gladiator until his participation in the Third Servile War. He was a historical non-entity, yet as soon as he became a thorn in the side of the Empire, there are all kinds of written contemporary documentary evidence of him, and of his actions. Which coincidentally were of the same historical period as the writing of the gospels. How come this rebel was so carefully documented, and the 'King of the Jews', also a rebel of a sort and a thorn in the side of the empire was not?
Or... let's imagine for a mo that the texts are somewhat accurate and this guy did say stuff like "give all to Caesar that is Caesars" and my "kingdom is not of this earth"*. If that got back to the local Italians, it would have taken the heat off him straight away from that quarter. They had bigger ichthys to fry(see what I did there). "Ok Lucretius, to business, so we have all these local religious nutjobs, any we should worry about? Well yea Claudius, here's a list of the ones calling for our heads. Feckus! there's a fair few of them L. Hang on, who's this Galilean bloke? Oh yea, well he seems to not be too anti Rome TBH C. No death to Roman's guff, just your usual local fear god shtick. Ok L, stick him on the keep an eye, but meh pile".
That said, at least some of his followers were armed. Note the bit in the garden of Gethsemane when Peter in a precursor to Van Gogh lops off one of the arresting guards ears. Now JC stuck it back on so the story goes. You'd think something like that would have had the soldiers crap themselves and fall on their knees to him? Funny that.
Burn her. For verily she is a witch and we cannot suffer a witch to live. Plus coffee is of Saracen origin. Clearly a heretic.Bannasidhe wrote: »Can I have coffee instead? I don't like tea.
*it's just possible. Catchy phrases like that are the kinda thing that can survive well enough in oral histories. Reading the gospels it does seem like a collection of stories stitched together, with often very clumsy(and geographically awkward links), which may betray something of it's oral origins. Now we rightfully take a gimlet eye to oral history as reliable, but in non literate societies they can transmit stuff pretty well. Look at modern reciters of the entire Quran from memory without mistakes. Hell Julius Caesar notes this about the celtic bards he encounters and learns about and wonders at their prodigious memories. He slightly laments how memory can atrophy because of the otherwise brilliant invention of writing. On that note, I recall reading that the Our Father, a clumsy as fook prayer in English, actually rhymes in Aramaic. Must look more on that. If so it might indicate an origin in that general area. That said, I'm not so solid on whether Jewish culture of the time was as highly practiced an oral tradition as the Celts were, so... In other words, I'd more "trust" a Celtic "Christs" oral tradition story that was written down within 60 years, than I would a Jewish, or indeed Roman one.Rejoice in the awareness of feeling stupid, for that’s how you end up learning new things. If you’re not aware you’re stupid, you probably are.
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Quatermain wrote: »Jeez, all the nudity and adult situations he got himself into, no wonder people were lining up pretending to be Spartacus.
Can you imagine the bedlam at the local STI clinic -
Nursicus - we need to contact every who had sex with this bloke named Spartacus....here, help me with these scrolls. 0 -
Bannasidhe wrote: »Can you imagine the bedlam at the local STI clinic -
Nursicus - we need to contact every who had sex with this bloke named Spartacus....here, help me with these scrolls.
"Spartacuses one through 70, Asclepius will see you now."
What price glory, after all?0 -
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Cavehill Red wrote: »We're back to the problem we had earlier. It is of course a documented fact, insofar as anything is factual by virtue of documentation, since documentation relating to him exists. The exact locus of your problem seems to be with the non-contemporaneity of that documentation, and its apparently partisan authorship. Those are reasonable things to be concerned about if one is querying the depicted actions within the documents, but much less so in relation to querying the existence of the subject.
So again I ask, what exactly is your issue? Be assured I am reading your responses carefully.
OK, there are two problems here.
Firstly, the existence of Jesus is not a documented fact, it's not a fact of any kind. By fact, I am proposing to use Stephen Jay Gould's definition:
"something confirmed to such a degree that it would be perverse to withhold provisional consent"
Jesus' existence is indeterminate. We don't have writings by Jesus nor do we have contempraneous accounts (either biblical or extrabiblilcal). And this is not an argument from silence since we should expect to find such documents given the claims made in the sources that do speak of him (i.e. Luke 4:37). What we can say is that based on the evidence available (which is scarce) that it is likely that someone called Jesus existed and this is what the academic consensus is really saying. It's not saying that we know for sure but that we have a reasonable idea. However, this doesn't stop people (Christians mostly) from coming in here and claiming that the existence of Jesus is a fact. It's just not.
Now, secondly, there is another point to be made here about using documentation like the bible as proof of the existence of Jesus. Just because a book like the Gospel of Mark or 1 Corinthians mentions Jesus doesn't mean there was a Jesus. Take this book, for example.
Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon spans a wide time period and mixes historical figures with fictional creations. You have real people like Alan Turing interacting with characters like Lawrence Waterhouse. Furthermore, the characters and their backstories receive further development in Stephenson's Baroque Cycle as well as being mentioned in Disco 2000. So imagine in even 200 years trying to determine whether Lawrence Waterhouse actually existed. He's there mentioned alongside real people who we have evidence for but there's no writings of his own and little other evidence outside Stephenson's work. The same claims could be made about him as are being made about Jesus. Does his inclusion as a character in this book make his existence a documented fact? Of course not.0 -
OK, there are two problems here.
Firstly, the existence of Jesus is not a documented fact, it's not a fact of any kind. By fact, I am proposing to use Stephen Jay Gould's definition:
"something confirmed to such a degree that it would be perverse to withhold provisional consent"
Jesus' existence is indeterminate. We don't have writings by Jesus nor do we have contempraneous accounts (either biblical or extrabiblilcal). And this is not an argument from silence since we should expect to find such documents given the claims made in the sources that do speak of him (i.e. Luke 4:37). What we can say is that based on the evidence available (which is scarce) that it is likely that someone called Jesus existed and this is what the academic consensus is really saying. It's not saying that we know for sure but that we have a reasonable idea. However, this doesn't stop people (Christians mostly) from coming in here and claiming that the existence of Jesus is a fact. It's just not.
Now, secondly, there is another point to be made here about using documentation like the bible as proof of the existence of Jesus. Just because a book like the Gospel of Mark or 1 Corinthians mentions Jesus doesn't mean there was a Jesus. Take this book, for example.
Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon spans a wide time period and mixes historical figures with fictional creations. You have real people like Alan Turing interacting with characters like Lawrence Waterhouse. Furthermore, the characters and their backstories receive further development in Stephenson's Baroque Cycle as well as being mentioned in Disco 2000. So imagine in even 200 years trying to determine whether Lawrence Waterhouse actually existed. He's there mentioned alongside real people who we have evidence for but there's no writings of his own and little other evidence outside Stephenson's work. The same claims could be made about him as are being made about Jesus. Does his inclusion as a character in this book make his existence a documented fact? Of course not.
I would have gone with Stephenson's Baroque Cycle but your choice was good too.
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Frank Lee Midere wrote: »A good proportion of the New Testament may be made up, but there are indications a lot of it is true. It's certainly factual historically as far as we know; Pilate existed as the archaeological records shows. John the baptist has plenty of references. The political structure of then Palestine is described correctly - the relationships between Roman and Jewish authority, the fact that Herod Antipas was a Tetrarch not King and had jurisdiction over Galileans, and the fact that all of these groups would be in Jerusalem for passover, and only then. Then there are the lies which hint at the truth. Jesus probably wasn't born in Bethlehem ( necessary for the Messiah), however he probably did grow up in Nazareth. If he was made up circa 100 then you might as well have him be born and grow up in Bethlehem, it saves a trip. Hat-tip Chris Hitchens.
No. Just no.
You're wrong about this idea, badly wrong, for four reasons.
1. The Spiderman Fallacy
"Just because there's a New York doesn't mean there's a Spiderman". I've highlighted this idea not even twenty posts ago. Just because there are people whose existence we can verify doesn't mean that the events of the bible are accurate as described in the gospels. This is why I introduced Cryptonomicon. It's a novel but constructed using real events (WWII, the SE Asia tech boom) and real people (Alan Turing). However, the story contained in the novel is fictional. So pointing out that Pilate existed doesn't really get you anywhere in trying to verify the authenticity of the gospel narratives.
2. Contradictions
One of the biggest problems faced with analysing four stories telling the same story (which Christians would have us believe agree completely) is that contradictions between the different accounts make the process of historical verification incredibly difficult. The problem for Christians is that the gospels are replete with them.
For example:
"After Jesus was born in Bethlehem in Judea, during the time of King Herod, Magi from the east came to Jerusalem"
Matthew 2:1
"(This was the first census that took place while Quirinius was governor of Syria.)"
Luke 2:2
So, Matthew's gospel places Jesus birth no later than 4 BCE, while Luke places it no earlier than 6AD. So you've got a ten year gap (probably more) to resolve in figuring out whether this event happened and whose version (if any) is correct.
Staying with the nativity:
"Now Jesus himself was about thirty years old when he began his ministry. He was the son, so it was thought, of Joseph, the son of Heli, the son of Matthat, the son of Levi, the son of Melki, the son of Jannai, the son of Joseph,"Luke 3:23-24
"Azor the father of Zadok, Zadok the father of Akim, Akim the father of Elihud, Elihud the father of Eleazar, Eleazar the father of Matthan, Matthan the father of Jacob, and Jacob the father of Joseph, the husband of Mary, and Mary was the mother of Jesus who is called the Messiah."
Matthew 1:14-16
So they can't even agree on a family tree and it's not like they get the order mixed up, not even the names are the same.
OK, so if we're going to go through all the contradictions in the gospels, we'll be here all night so just a few more (without bible quotes) to reinforce the point.- In Mark 14, the Last Supper is described as the Passover seder, making the evening of the last supper Passover eve. In John 13, Jesus washes his disciples feet but on the evening before Passover eve. (This has important ramifications for the trial of Jesus later on)
- In Matthew 5, Jesus gives the famous Sermon on the Mount. However when describing the same event in Chapter 6, Luke describes the sermon as having been on a flat plain.
- In Mark 15, Jesus is crucified at the third hour (rougly 9am) and dies at the ninth hour (3pm). However, John 19 says that Jesus was only taken away to be crucified at noon.
- Jesus' last words according to Matthew is "My God, my God why have you forsaken me", while according to Luke it is "Father, into your hands I commend my spirit" while John goes with the short yet pithy "It is finished."
- Then of course there are the resurrection accounts. We have among other contradictions, the being who greets the women at the tomb. It changes from one young man to two men to one angel to two angels depending on which gospel you read. Also the number of women changes with each gospel too.
- Straying slightly outside the gospels for a minute, the gospel of Matthew tells us that in the aftermath of the trial and death of Jesus that Judas hangs himself in remorse having given back the money (Matthew 27). However in Acts 1, Judas buys a field with the money and then somehow, while walking across it, trips and his guts burst open (somehow).
3. Factual errors
This is the more important category since in every case above, one of the posited alternatives could be true. Not so here however. The first point to make here, which is something I will deal with in more detail in the last section, is that Mattew copies over 90% of his gospel verbatim from Mark with Luke also borrowing heavily although less than Matthew. So Mark will be the principal text dealt with here for this reason.
3a - Geography
The first point to be made is that Mark is woefully ignorant of Palestinian geography. This is something I mentioned before so I'll begin with this example from Mark 5.
"A large herd of pigs was feeding on the nearby hillside. The demons begged Jesus, “Send us among the pigs; allow us to go into them.” He gave them permission, and the impure spirits came out and went into the pigs. The herd, about two thousand in number, rushed down the steep bank into the lake and were drowned."
Now, the chapter opens by mentioning that Jesus and his posse have just landed in Gerasa (the land of the Gerasenes). So the demons who possessed the pigs run down the steep bank into the sea of Galilee.
As you can see on the map, Gerasa is quite far from the Sea of Galilee (about 30 miles to be exact), so that would have to be one massively steep hill.
Later in Chapter 7, Mark makes another criminal geography mistake:
"Then Jesus left the vicinity of Tyre and went through Sidon, down to the Sea of Galilee and into the region of the Decapolis."
Again, when we look at the map we see the problem:
"
Going from Tyre to Sidon means going almost completely in the opposite direction to the Sea of Galilee. Also, since there was no road between Sidon and the Sea of Galilee, this verse makes even less sense. It's also worth noting that older translations of the Bible make an even bigger mistake by having go through the Decapolis (a group of 10 cities SE of the Sea of Galilee) on his way to the Sea of Galilee from Sidon.
There are many more geographical errors in Mark but there's more to get through so let's crack on.
3b - Law
In Mark 10:11-12, he talks about Jewish divorce law saying:“Anyone who divorces his wife and marries another woman commits adultery against her. And if she divorces her husband and marries another man, she commits adultery.”
However, under Jewish law a woman would have had no such right.
Of course, throughout Mark Jesus and the disciples violate Jewish law all the time but whether that's ideological or out of ignorance of the author is debatable.
The biggest legal screw-up committed by Mark though is the trial of Jesus. This is described in detail in Mark 15.
The key problems with the trial are:- The trial would never have been held at night as it would have been contrary to Jewish law.
- The trial would only have taken place in the Hall of Hewn Stones in the temple and not in the home of a council member.
- The trial would never have been conducted so close to Passover (Passover eve in the synoptics)
- Sentences in such trials were not pronounced for 24 hours and not immediately in the case of Jesus.
3c - Historical/Chronological
Given that Mark is the shortest of the gospels and the earliest, it is also the lightest on detail so in some areas it doesn't stick it's neck out as much as the other gospels. However that isn't to say it's totally error free.
In Mark 6, we see the death of John the Baptist during the life of Jesus. In Josephus (Antiquities 18,5) John the Baptist's death is described as having taken place in 36CE, after Jesus' death.
Now, while I have mostly dealt with errors in Mark, errors which largely get incorporated into the later synoptics, that's not to say that Matthew and Luke are capable of some whoppers on their own. Take this one from Luke for example:
"In the fifteenth year of the reign of Tiberius Caesar—when Pontius Pilate was governor of Judea, Herod tetrarch of Galilee, his brother Philip tetrarch of Iturea and Traconitis, and Lysanias tetrarch of Abilene— during the high-priesthood of Annas and Caiaphas, the word of God came to John son of Zechariah in the wilderness."
Luke 3:1-2
Just one minor point, but Lysanias of Abilene died in 36BCE.
And then there's Matthew, poor Matthew. Matthew tries really hard in his gospel to craft a prophetic backstory for Jesus (virgin birth etc.) However he really sucks at quote-mining (or comprehension).
For example in Chapter 2 he references Hosea ("out of Egypt I have called my son"). Maybe though if he had read Hosea in more detail, he would have come across this: "When Israel was a child I loved him, and out of Egypt I called my son." See, not a reference to Jesus at all.
4. Plagiarism/Syncretism
There are two aspects of plagiarism to consider here, but neither should be associated with the kind of negative connotation that plagiarism usually carries. If anything it's more of a syncretic borrowing since the source work is still part of the bible.
The first aspect is the degree to which the synoptics (and to a much lesser extent John) copy from each other. While this does not have much of an influence on the objective authenticity of the accounts, it does pretty much rule out the notion that they are eyewitness accounts.
The second aspect of this plagiarism is a bit more damning from the whole "this all factually happened" point of view. Throughout Mark's gospel and the synoptics in general, many of the stories about Jesus and the miracles he performs are borrowed from older sources. Take this one for example:
"When Jesus had again crossed over by boat to the other side of the lake, a large crowd gathered around him while he was by the lake. Then one of the synagogue leaders, named Jairus, came, and when he saw Jesus, he fell at his feet. He pleaded earnestly with him, “My little daughter is dying. Please come and put your hands on her so that she will be healed and live.” So Jesus went with him. A large crowd followed and pressed around him. And a woman was there who had been subject to bleeding for twelve years. She had suffered a great deal under the care of many doctors and had spent all she had, yet instead of getting better she grew worse. When she heard about Jesus, she came up behind him in the crowd and touched his cloak, because she thought, “If I just touch his clothes, I will be healed.” Immediately her bleeding stopped and she felt in her body that she was freed from her suffering. At once Jesus realized that power had gone out from him. He turned around in the crowd and asked, “Who touched my clothes?” “You see the people crowding against you,” his disciples answered, “and yet you can ask, ‘Who touched me?’ ”
But Jesus kept looking around to see who had done it. Then the woman, knowing what had happened to her, came and fell at his feet and, trembling with fear, told him the whole truth. He said to her, “Daughter, your faith has healed you. Go in peace and be freed from your suffering.”
While Jesus was still speaking, some people came from the house of Jairus, the synagogue leader. “Your daughter is dead,” they said. “Why bother the teacher anymore?” Overhearing what they said, Jesus told him, “Don’t be afraid; just believe.” He did not let anyone follow him except Peter, James and John the brother of James. When they came to the home of the synagogue leader, Jesus saw a commotion, with people crying and wailing loudly. He went in and said to them, “Why all this commotion and wailing? The child is not dead but asleep.” But they laughed at him. After he put them all out, he took the child’s father and mother and the disciples who were with him, and went in where the child was. He took her by the hand and said to her, “Talitha koum!” (which means “Little girl, I say to you, get up!”). Immediately the girl stood up and began to walk around (she was twelve years old). At this they were completely astonished. He gave strict orders not to let anyone know about this, and told them to give her something to eat."
This is the story of Jairus' daughter which is a retelling of the story from 2 Kings 4:25-35 with Elisha below (I have highlighted the similarities).
"So she set out and came to the man of God at Mount Carmel. When he saw her in the distance, the man of God said to his servant Gehazi, “Look! There’s the Shunammite! Run to meet her and ask her, ‘Are you all right? Is your husband all right? Is your child all right?’”
“Everything is all right,” she said. When she reached the man of God at the mountain, she took hold of his feet. Gehazi came over to push her away, but the man of God said, “Leave her alone! She is in bitter distress, but the Lord has hidden it from me and has not told me why.” “Did I ask you for a son, my lord?” she said. “Didn’t I tell you, ‘Don’t raise my hopes’?”
Elisha said to Gehazi, “Tuck your cloak into your belt, take my staff in your hand and run. Don’t greet anyone you meet, and if anyone greets you, do not answer. Lay my staff on the boy’s face.” But the child’s mother said, “As surely as the Lord lives and as you live, I will not leave you.” So he got up and followed her. Gehazi went on ahead and laid the staff on the boy’s face, but there was no sound or response. So Gehazi went back to meet Elisha and told him, “The boy has not awakened.” When Elisha reached the house, there was the boy lying dead on his couch. He went in, shut the door on the two of them and prayed to the Lord. Then he got on the bed and lay on the boy, mouth to mouth, eyes to eyes, hands to hands. As he stretched himself out on him, the boy’s body grew warm. Elisha turned away and walked back and forth in the room and then got on the bed and stretched out on him once more. The boy sneezed seven times and opened his eyes."
In Mark's gospel we also see other stories being borrowed such as the loaves and fishes, the raising of Lazarus and the exorcism I previously mentioned in Chapter 5 (borrowed from Homer's Odyssey, no less).
Summary
In short, there is very little in the gospels that we can be confident about as far as the story goes. While we can verify the people and places, this doesn't help us with the narrative itself. What we have to go on are accounts which are not eyewitness accounts, written decades after the events they describe, full of contradictions and inaccuracies. How can we possibly begin to describe anything they contain as factual. Moreover, if we treat the gospels as a single source it gets even worse.
We have ways of verifying things like eyewitness testimony as these accounts purport to be. Things like this:
Federal Rules of Evidence
These rules give us guidelines which allow us to determine when an eyewitness isn't reliable. The rules above allow for impeachment of witnesses if any of the following conditions are met:- Anonymous
- Incompetent
- Hearsay
- Bias
- Inconsistent statements
- Untruthful
- Contradiction
There is no-one in this thread who has yet to propose that Jesus is a de novo myth, created from scratch. What I will say, however is that while Jesus probably existe, much of what we think we know about his life is a later invention. The only things that we can even begin to be confident about in relation to Jesus are scattered sayings (i.e. Q, Thomas) and the empty tomb narrative. Claiming anything beyond that about Jesus as if it were fact is either dishonest or foolish or both.0 -
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