What were Jesus and early Christians like?

[TimOneill]

For the most part I find your hypotheses about Jesus entirely reasonable, yet there are still a few things that seem difficult for me to swallow. I know you've repeatedly stated that this is not a field of research for anyone who is seeking high degrees of certainty, but I still can't seem to find the "historicist" framework for the Gospels to amount to much more than unjustifiable assertions about what one ought to grant as true or reliable amidst an account that appears anything but concerned with historical veracity.

See my response to Deist Paladin above. To repeat:

"The fact remains, as I have to keep reminding people when they want to sweep the gospels aside completely, that these texts tell us something very useful and highly pertinent: what their writers believed about Jesus. By comparing these differing views and trying to use textual analysis to peel back the layers of where they got their ideas from we can get closer to the historical Jesus. To try to dismiss the gospels altogether as potential sources to be handled (like all ancient sources) with due care is not just wrong-headed, it's pigheaded."

Why should we place an arbitrary value on which elements in the story are driven purely by theological explanation of the mystery in concrete terms as opposed to those that contain a kernel of historical truth beneath the layers of religious indoctrination?

Because it's not "arbitrary". Again, these texts are written a mere 40 to 90 years after the fact and some of them are based on texts possibly written a mere 20 years later. That's enough time for them to have taken on all kinds of theological accretions, given their religious and apologetic nature, but still close enough for them to contain elements that are historical. So when we see differences in them that seem to indicate them struggling to fit their theology around some of these historical elements, it makes no sense to simply not bother paying attention.

I still don't think I've heard a convincing explanation as to why many different members of a Messianic cult, with full knowledge of their leader's humiliating death, would suddenly proclaim that he had been resurrected in the flesh and walked among them post-Easter.

But did they claim this "suddenly" or did this evolve over time? The evidence indicates the latter. Paul's references to the resurrection put the "appearances" of the risen Jesus in the same category as his vision of Jesus. He makes no mention of any "empty tomb", even though it would help his argument in 1Cor 15 if he'd been aware of it, and then goes into a long exposition about how Jesus rose in a "spiritual body". There's no physical revivified Jesus offering to let people poke their fingers in his wounds there.

Skip forward 20 years and we get gMark's gospel, which ends abruptly with no physical risen Jesus there either, though with the new (and dubious) element of the empty tomb. A tomb which is in keeping with elements in the story that seem to be there more because they form part of a tapestry of Old Testament references (in this case, Isaiah 53:9) and conveniently provided by a previously unheard of deus ex machina character who pops up out of nowhere to produce this tomb and then disappears again.

Then we get the various contradictory accounts in gLuke, gJohn and the most elaborate (and unlikely) ones in gMatt, all of which seem to be working hard to bolster this idea of physical resurrected Jesus but contradicting each other left, right and centre in the process. Embedded in all this we have elements that indicate remnants of the earlier idea of visions of the risen Jesus which have solidified into this idea of a physical resurrection: Jesus appearing in a locked room or people "recognising" Jesus after thinking he was someone else, only to have him vanish.

All this indicates that the original encounters with this "risen Jesus" were visions, like Paul's. Keep in mind that his references are the only ones we have by someone who supposedly saw Jesus after his death. Bereaved people seeing visions of people who have died suddenly is a very common phenomenon. And end times cults that expect a spectacular vindication only to have their hopes dashed have been shown to then try to find ways to preserve as much of their original beliefs as they can in the face of the new reality - see Leon Festinger, Henry Riecken, and Stanley Schachter's classic study on this, When Prophecy Fails (1956).

So it actually makes perfect sense that a sect which thought it was going to see their leader usher in the apocalypse only to see him humiliated and tortured to death would try to find a way to salvage their belief in him. Given that the idea of a coming resurrection was in the air, visions of him to some of the bereaved (and probably not emotionally stable) followers would be interpreted as a sign that all was not lost. The idea that he was "risen" and would soon "return" when all his predictions of the coming kingdom came true follow from there. And then the "resurrection" begins to evolve as we see in the gospel accounts.

And we know this could have happened because we have evidence it had happened before in exactly this context. We have another apocalyptic preacher who was executed, whose sect survived and who was said to have risen from the dead - John the Baptist. See Mark 6:14-16 and Mark 8:27-28.

On a related note, what's your view of the apologetic method known as the "minimal facts approach"? How do you avoid giving them just enough rope to hang yourself with?

I'm not familiar with it. But Google just told me that it's something Habermas and Licona have come up with, which would explain why.

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A couple of things I've been wondering:
(1) Many scholars seem to assume that the early Christians were Jewish hillbillies from Galilee, and they deduce that some writings were not written by the early Christians for this reason. On the other hand, historians say that Galilee was very Hellenized. It seems to me that the scholars are making too much out of the gospel stories about fisherman.

Being able to speak enough Greek to sell some local Syrians your fish is not the same thing as being able to be literate in polished and clearly educated literary Greek. Though I've had fundies assure me that Peter and Co. were actually rich fishing magnates who went to night school. Seriously.

(2) Many scholars appear to disregard the likelihood that the NT writings were revised and elaborated over time. A single historical or cultural anachronism should not date the entire work IMO.

Fine, but you can't just assume a later addition to the text without reason. That's mistake the Mythers make all the time. Use that approach and you end up with everything being possible and nothing being likely, because you can chop up the texts any way you like.

(3) How did those margin notes work? The manuscripts I have seen don't have margins.

They don't? They have writing over every inch of the page? I've never seen a manuscript like that. See the margins filled with notes here? That's pretty typical. Most are less extensive than that though.

Personally, I don't buy the idea that the added elements in the TF are marginal notes. These elements seem to achieve a clear apologetic purpose - to counter objections raised against Christianity by Jews. Jewish critics argued that Jesus was not the Messiah and that he didn't rise from the dead. So what better way to counter that than by doctoring a text by a famous Jewish historian so it says that he was the Messiah and did rise from the dead. These interpolations were most likely deliberate.