Any Evidence For A Historical Jesus?

[Cyberman]

And Bible followers have been going round in circles ever since. Ever-decreasing circles, finally disappearing up their own arguments.

[Minimalist]

Stim, over at JNE I asked Ken for the backup on his assertions about Nazareth.

He referred me to Eusebius and I looked up the references and found that he was correct. In Life of Constantine, Eusebius duly recounts the church building exercises of Constantine in Palestine and momma Helena's trip. "Nazareth" does not merit a mention at all. In his Onamasticon, Eusebius does mention Nazareth as a "village" (this in the 4th century) .

I also went looking for something which Dever had written and after a brief search found it. Unfortunatley, the only thing I can find on the web is a Google Books review of "Who Were The Early Israelites and Where Did They Come From" which cannot be copied and pasted...so I took screen captures of the relevant pages - which fortunately were part of the preview - and pasted them below.





And moving on to Moab:





What we have here are two examples of more or less modern religiously-based expeditions which went out to dig for backup for their fairy tales and instead not only found the exact opposite but, showing a great deal of scholarly integrity, published their results anyway.

Now, these two observations are important because they demonstrate that not all theists who dig in the dirt are frauds, like the Ron Wyatts, Bob Cornulkes and Simcha Jacobovicis of the world. Moreoever, we can be charitable towards the early "bible in one hand and spade in the other" crew of the early 20th century which went out and with a certain obvious confirmation bias pronounced every rock they dug up as something that Moses had pissed on. With no pottery shard database of any value and no dating techniques at all they can be forgiven for allowing the zealous imaginations to run wild in favor of their holy "guidebook."

But such forgiveness cannot be extended to those who cling to fairy tales and insist they are inerrant because to believe otherwise would mean throwing their god in the shitter because "god" can't be wrong.
Well, to such people I say that if you hadn't put your "god" on such an impossible pedestal in the first place you wouldn't now be facing the dilemma of having to admit your mistake or alternatively look like fools. This problem is of your own making and if the Seventh Day Adventists and friggin' Southern Baptists can figure it out then you have no excuse at all.

[Minimalist]

Dever has outlined another instance of scholarly integrity by a religious archaeologist. In discussing the excavations at Ai.... another of the unoccupied cities allegedly destroyed by fucking "joshua" he writes:

Between 1965 and 1972 Joseph Callaway, an American archaeologist and Southern Baptist Theological Seminary professor who had studied method with Kenyon, reopened the investigation. And he confirmed Marquet-Krause's results beyond doubt. To his credit, he acknowledged the excavations of Ai as a major blow to the "conquest theory." He put it this way in 1985":

For many years, the primary source for the understanding of the settlement of the first Israelites was the Hebrew Bible, but every reconstruction based upon the biblical traditions has floundered on the evidence from archaeological remains....(Now) the primary source has to be archaeological remains.

Moreover, Callaway -- a southern gentleman of great moral character-- took early retirement from his very conservative seminary rather than risk being the cause of theological embarrassment.

Apparently, theological embarrassment is more important to fundies than truth.

[DeistPaladin]

Apparently, theological embarrassment is more important to fundies than truth.

Such is the very essence of faith. Those that actually value truth deconvert.

[Minimalist]

It seems that all it takes to put the fundies to flight is a little hard archaeological evidence that their holy book is horseshit.


I'll have to remember that for next time!

[Cyberman]

They prefer their logical athletic games, they're easier to define into existence. Real hard evidence has to be rationalised away.

[Minimalist]

This ought to piss them off.

Philip R. Davies, one of the more respected Minimalist Old Testament scholars has a new essay at Bible and Interpretation in which he can't resist weighing in on the historical jesus routine.

http://www.bibleinterp.com/opeds/dav368029.shtml

The new collection of essays Is This Not the Carpenter represents something of the agenda I have had in mind: surely the rather fragile historical evidence for Jesus of Nazareth should be tested to see what weight it can bear, or even to work out what kind of historical research might be appropriate. Such a normal exercise should hardly generate controversy in most fields of ancient history, but of course New Testament studies is not a normal case and the highly emotive and dismissive language of, say, Bart Ehrman’s response to Thompson’s The Mythic Past shows (if it needed to be shown), not that the matter is beyond dispute, but that the whole idea of raising this question needs to be attacked, ad hominem, as something outrageous. This is precisely the tactic anti-minimalists tried twenty years ago: their targets were ‘amateurs’, ‘incompetent’, and could be ignored. The ‘amateurs’ are now all retired professors, while virtually everyone else in the field has become minimalist (if in most cases grudgingly and tacitly). So, as the saying goes, déjà vu all over again.

If I have any complaint it is that WE are not the ones insisting that fucking "jesus" was real. I think the evidence for jesus is even less compelling that Davies, does...and he doesn't think much of it. But we do retain the right to blast the living shit out of those fundie morons who show up here insisting that he was.... in all his miracle-working glory.

[EGross]

I have seen that discussion of Nazarite, Nasorean, Nazareth, too. It's interesting but I don't know how you actually prove it. The Greeks and Romans had a tendency to say "Joe of somewhere" while the Jews used the patronymic form "Joe son of Shlomo" for example. As has been pointed out repeatedly, if someone had said "jesus of nazareth" to a first century jew the answer would have been "jesus of where?"

When the story tellers were doing their myth making, they took 3 similar sounding names "Nazir" (someone who doesn't cut hair or drink wine), "Netzer" (literally a "branch" but is also a messianic reference), and "Natzri" (a dweller of Nazareth), and the word for Christians would eventually become "Notzrim"). So you get a long haired guy with designs on being the messiag from Nazareth. Or maybe the fiction was the result of the words.

As far as "of nazareth" goes, it was not unheard of for Jews to take the name of their birthplace rather than their father's name. After all, Jesus didn't have a Jewish father (and so the problem with being a Levi, Cohen, or Messiah, all of which require a Jewish father), so taking the name of his town would have been normal (Yose the Gallilean from the Talmud comes to mind). While rare, there is an occasion use of the mothers name when the father was executed for some evil deed, or some other reason that he wanted to forget him.

[Minimalist]

"Jesus" was allegedly a Galilean, too. And Galilee was a part of the country which was forcibly converted to Judaism by Alexander Jannai at the very end of the 2d century BC. Less than 40 years later, Pompey the Great liberated the area so who knows how deeply any Jewish customs would have sunk in in such a short period of time?

When Antipas rebuilt Sepphoris it included baths and a forum and Greco-Roman temples. Hardly a "Jewish" town. Not to mention they told Josephus to go fuck himself when he and his rebel army showed up at the gates. They then admitted a Roman garrison. Such historical realities cannot be dismissed because xtians find them inconvenient.

[Confused Ape]

Philip R. Davies, one of the more respected Minimalist Old Testament scholars has a new essay at Bible and Interpretation in which he can't resist weighing in on the historical jesus routine.

http://www.bibleinterp.com/opeds/dav368029.shtml

Interesting article because I think he's taking a sensible approach.

But one should not argue from these, as do Thompson and Verenna, that Jesus was invented. The use in this particular case of such mythic types ought to have been provoked by something,and the existence of a guru of some kind is more plausible and economical than any other explanation—which, by the way, does not necessarily make it the right one, but historian’s rules apply: plausibility and economy are the trump cards. How quickly stories about a guru can be manufactured, and how the outline of a possibly historically figure can be obliterated by all kinds of creative ‘memory’ is clear from the Qumran allusions to the ‘Teacher of Righteousness’. Awareness of such types and tropes should inform the historian how easily traces of historical reality can be painted over in the colours of myth and the conventions of storytelling.

So, there might have been a real man who was mythicized. We'll never know anything about him if he did exist, though.

I found one of the reader comments rather interesting.

The whole "Jesus is a myth" vogue is simply the ultimate extension of the anti-Jewish tendencies in Bible scholarship. Our scholastic pseudo-elite would rather have no historical Christ at all than a merely human, ie. purely Jewish, Christ.

If I have any complaint it is that WE are not the ones insisting that fucking "jesus" was real. I think the evidence for jesus is even less compelling that Davies, does...and he doesn't think much of it. But we do retain the right to blast the living shit out of those fundie morons who show up here insisting that he was.... in all his miracle-working glory.

I wonder why so many Christians think atheists are dreadful people.