What were Jesus and early Christians like?

[DeistPaladin]

There is nothing in the evidence compelling me to think that they made this guy up.

To the best of my knowledge, nobody has suggested that anyone made this guy up.

Take away the miracles from the synoptics' accounts and you're left with the story of an apocalyptic preacher who did some exorcisms.

Take away Zeus and the other Greek gods from the Iliad and you have a war between two states. You could simply remove the supernatural from the Iliad and claim we have a historical account of the war that destroyed Troy. Indeed, the relatively recent movie starring Brad Pitt did just that, make a secular version of the Iliad (as well as change a number of things like Paris surviving for no apparent reason but don't get me started on that topic). Does that mean we regard the Iliad as a "historical document" that tells us anything reliable about the Trojan War?

The Gospels are, at best, religious propaganda and, at least, mythology, hardly anything that any rational society should put any stock in. No doubt, if the Greek gods had prevailed in theology and become the dominant religion, scholars would combing through the Iliad and the Odyssey trying to find grains of truth in the sacred scriptures.

But I do get a smile every time I hear an apologist or a historist holding up the Bible and saying "historical documents". It reminds me of that Tim Allen movie where an alien race sees and Earth TV show and thinks the same thing.

[watchamadoodle]

...
Vermes' reconstruction seems pretty likely to me:

About this time there lived Jesus, a wise man . . . For he was one who performed paradoxical deeds and was the teacher of such people as accept the truth gladly. He won over many Jews [and many Greeks?]. He was [called] the Christ. When Pilate, upon hearing him accused by men of the highest standing among us, had condemned him to be crucified, those who had in the first place come to love him did not give up their affection for him . . . And the tribe of the Christians, so called after him, has still to this day not disappeared.

I was thinking about the TF:
Assume Josephus actually described Jesus as: "a wise man . . . For he was one who performed paradoxical deeds and was the teacher of such people as accept the truth gladly."
Wouldn't this be evidence against the theory that Jesus was an apocalyptic prophet or a revolutionary? This description would seem to support the theory that Jesus was a Jewish teacher, Jewish holy man, or Cynic philosopher IMO.

[Mudhammam]

---

Perhaps. Take someone like Herodotus. His reconstruction of the Persian War on Greece is littered with obvious falsehoods, which we can check with other sources or archaeology, contains nothing short of miraculous and mythical tales, some of which Herodotus disavows for lack of evidence and some of which he believes. His patriotism clearly influences his story-telling. Yet, despite all of this, disregarding his speeches as paraphrases of what people remembered, accurately or not, it's still clear that Herodotus is aiming to write a historical account, even if his idea of what constitutes history is quite different than what we might consider good criteria today. He goes through pains to stress his research and evidence-gathering.

Thucydides is an even better example, the "father of scientific history," who, once again, despite many shortcomings and corruptions, still reads as though his agenda is to give an accurate account of the facts as best as possible.

I'm not saying that the gospels are exactly like works like those of Herodotus and Thucydides. We have a clear difference in genre to begin with. What I'm noting is that the idea that Herodotus and Thucydides are straight history with some (to us) "supernatural elements" in them while the gospels are something totally different is a very modern idea. The ancient world view was utterly permeated by unquestioning belief in what we term "the supernatural" that it is hard for us to grasp. The whole distinction between the "natural" and the "supernatural" is a very modern idea that the ancients would find alien to the point of being incomprehensible.

So Herodotus and Thucydides are not straight history with a bit of "supernatural" while the gospels are something else and much more "supernatural". All these works are by people for whom what we call "supernatural" phenomenon were part of their everyday world view.

I'm not saying the man who Jesus came to represent could not have existed, and in fact, probably did; but the attempts to humanize Jesus seem secondary to the message, which is that Jesus was very much not human, and given the lengths they go to make this point I find it difficult to say their credibility is on par with someone like the Greeks I've mentioned---even when the work, such as that of Herodotus or Plato, is far from being strictly driven by a reverence for accuracy.

Is the message that he was "very much not human"? There is zero in the synoptics that make any claim that he was anything other than a man given special status by God and having some miraculous powers as a result. Other than that, its mainly the story of a preacher who did some faith healing. It's only later, in gJohn, that it becomes the story of a semi-divine being. As I say above, I'm not saying that the gospels are exactly like Herodotus and Thucydides' works. But this atrificial distinction between "this is history and can be taken seriously" and "this has magic in it and so can't be accepted as having any history in it at all" is classifying things in ways that Herodotus and Thucydides would find weird.

Could there have been a theological motive to humanize the man who lived and---perhaps over much greater lengths of time than represented by the Gospels---came to represent the Christ, and so they created the man Jesus to do so, placing characters in the narrative that would have been relevant to what Christians were dealing with then?

Lots of things are possible I suppose. I just can't see anything in the evidence that makes this scenario a more parsimonious one than the much simpler idea that they said they were talking about a recently deceased preacher because ... they were.

Isn't that at least a possibility to consider, as a framework by which we can do away with psychoanalyzing hallucinations and visions that apparently came to 500 people at one time, whom they believed was a bodily resurrected man that they had watched die only years earlier, and to two people as diametrically opposed as Peter and Paul, who then came to believe in pretty much the same bizarre faith?

I can't see the problem with those beliefs arising out of reactions to the sudden death of a preacher who these people thought was the Messiah. There is nothing in the evidence compelling me to think that they made this guy up.

---

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. We should, I suspect anyhow, first and foremost understand Christian literature as expression of certain mysteries and the context they're placed in as little more than the vehicle by which the characters and stories come alive, as truth, for a largely uneducated group of vulgar and superstitious adherents. There almost seems to be a Herodotean conception of history involved, which is to say the Gospel writers consider of less importance what events actually occurred but rather how they came to be remembered in the collective minds of their people, and perhaps more critically, how they came to effect the current situation---with the unfortunate mixture that they express none of Herodotus' scrupulousness in their investigations about what people outside of their specific religious sect actually believed. 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? 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. This makes much more sense to me, if their visions followed the belief---the belief they acquired the same way other myths develop and come to be accepted over time---rather than the belief following their visions.

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?

[TimOneill]

There is nothing in the evidence compelling me to think that they made this guy up.

To the best of my knowledge, nobody has suggested that anyone made this guy up.

You should have a chat to Minimalist then. Though I'll admit it is pretty hard to work out exactly what his incoherent thesis is through all the shouting.

Take away the miracles from the synoptics' accounts and you're left with the story of an apocalyptic preacher who did some exorcisms.

Take away Zeus and the other Greek gods from the Iliad and you have a war between two states. You could simply remove the supernatural from the Iliad and claim we have a historical account of the war that destroyed Troy.

And a lot of people believe that's actually what we do have in the Illiad. The difference being that the story we find once we take away those elements from Homer is so remote from any possible historical events that, as historians, we can't do anything much with the remainder except say it may preserve some memory of a Bronze Age war. The Jesus stories, on the other hand, are written down between 40 and 90 years and seem to depend on material written down as early as the 50s or even 40s AD. By ancient standards, that's very close to the events. That's why this approach has more validity here.

Does that mean we regard the Iliad as a "historical document" that tells us anything reliable about the Trojan War?

See above - apples vs oranges.

The Gospels are, at best, religious propaganda and, at least, mythology, hardly anything that any rational society should put any stock in.

Many of our ancient sources are things that no "rational society should put any stock in". But historians have to work with the material they have, not the material they'd like but don't have. 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.

But I do get a smile every time I hear an apologist or a historist holding up the Bible and saying "historical documents". It reminds me of that Tim Allen movie where an alien race sees and Earth TV show and thinks the same thing.

As much as I like that movie, that's a worse analogy than your Illiad one.

---

I was thinking about the TF:
Assume Josephus actually described Jesus as: "a wise man . . . For he was one who performed paradoxical deeds and was the teacher of such people as accept the truth gladly."
Wouldn't this be evidence against the theory that Jesus was an apocalyptic prophet or a revolutionary? This description would seem to support the theory that Jesus was a Jewish teacher, Jewish holy man, or Cynic philosopher IMO.

It would be evidence against him being a revolutionary, since Josephus took a dim view of them as opposed to preachers like Onaias or John the Baptist. But why would it argue against him being an apocalyptic preacher? There's strong evidence that John was an apocalyptic preacher as well, and Josephus gives a fairly neutral account of him.

Josephus is less neutral about people who seem to be apocalyptic preachers - like Theudas or the Egyptian Prophet - who stir up large crowds and mobilise them in a threatening manner. He doesn't depict John that way, though he says Antipas feared he may do this and says that's why he was executed. So Josephus doesn't seem to have a problem with end times preachers, though he is less impressed with ones who lead thousands of armed followers on Jerusalem.

[watchamadoodle]

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

[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.

---

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.

[Mudhammam]

Thanks Tim, I will definitely check out that work. I think you answered my concerns adequately.

[DeistPaladin]

You should have a chat to Minimalist then. Though I'll admit it is pretty hard to work out exactly what his incoherent thesis is through all the shouting.

I admire his posts and find him quite eloquent. To the best of my knowledge, he hasn't suggested someone just made up Jesus one day. That's a straw man used by historists and apologists.

The Jesus stories, on the other hand, are written down between 40 and 90 years and seem to depend on material written down as early as the 50s or even 40s AD. By ancient standards, that's very close to the events. That's why this approach has more validity here.

The time of publication isn't my point. My point is that religious propaganda is to be viewed with greater suspicion than even the most sleazy of political propaganda.

Consider, let's say I'm stranded on a desert island and my only source of information on what was going on in the world was Fox "News". How that works, I'll leave to the imagination but, for some reason, I have a functioning and fully powered cable TV that only tunes into Fox. My information is going to be, to say the least, heavily biased and laced with lies and spin. Nonetheless, I wouldn't be completely uninformed. I would know that Obama was President. I would know our consulate was attacked in Benghazi. I would know conservatives were outraged, outraged I tell you, about it but I wouldn't quite understand why.

Bottom line: Even the most sleazy, deceptive, spin-happy political propaganda is based, however loosely, on actual events.

Let's say on my desert island, I get to change the channel and now I can get the 700 Club. Oh joy. I'm now watching one of Pat Robertson's stupid videos on how some guy's life was a mess and then Jesus worked miracles in his life. Frankly, I'm not even going to believe what the guy in the video tells me is his name, never mind put any stock in anything he claims in the video.

Is that "pig headed" of me? I don't think so. Why? To put it kindly, "consider the source".

Religion, by its nature, is about magical, invisible, undetectable agents that supposedly are doing things but all that needs to be believed without evidence and defended against all evidence. It's a con job. The whole thing. Lock. Stock. Barrel.

Bottom line: Religious propaganda is about supernatural bullcrap. While political propaganda must, by its nature, be about real world events, religious propaganda has no such limitation.

Therefore, the Bible could tell me "water is wet" and I'd need outside confirmation. If you want to call that "pigheaded", then it may be time for us to agree to disagree.

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.

Wrong. It only tells us what we think that they claimed to have believed about Jesus. There's no reason to trust they weren't flat out lying. There's little reason to assume that what we have is faithfully preserved from its originals.

We know of at least one major alteration to Mark and pseudo-epigraphy and interpolation abounded at that time with theological writings. Theological writings are even more prone to these problems because, once again, religion is a con job.

Matthew, or whoever wrote that Gospel, is a known serial liar. He makes numerous claims about what the OT says that turn out ridiculously false.

Luke, the "historian", couldn't even get straight when Herod the Great was ruler of Judea, or else Mary had a 10 year pregnancy with Jesus!

John was obviously such a late addition with its advanced theology and reference to "the Jews" as a separate group. The nature of the propaganda is so over-the-top that were he writing a Jesus fanfic, he'd be accused of creating a Marty-Stu story. Jesus kicks John the Baptist. John the Baptist replies, "thank you, Jesus, may I have another." This is to say nothing of its inconsistencies with the Synoptics. You and I can agree to disagree on whether or not it constitutes a complete rewrite.

Paul I have deep suspicions about. Scholars believe that half of his letters are "inauthentic". I've already expressed my questions why Marcion would promote a prophet that preaches a Jesus directly opposed to what Marcion believed. And let's not forget the man claimed to be seeing things and hearing voices and believed he was on a special mission from God. Either he was a liar or he was schizophrenic.

As much as I like that movie, that's a worse analogy than your Illiad one.

Well, we may be at the stage where we need to agree to disagree. I think anyone who holds up the Bible and think that it proves anything needs to be laughed out of the room. That may not happen now but I hope some day that will be the standard.

[Pizza]

I think probabilistic hairs are being split here. All DP is saying is the likelihood is not very high. That would make sense given the nature of ancient history. I don't understand what Tim is claiming. How likely does he think all this is?

[TimOneill]

I admire his posts and find him quite eloquent.

Really? So far I've found them virtually impenetrable.

To the best of my knowledge, he hasn't suggested someone just made up Jesus one day.

I'll take your word for that. I've tried to untangle some stuff he said a few pages back about how there were Christians/"Chrestians" who weren't Christians and then in the mid second century some Christians who were Christians appeared, complete with a complex story about how they had been around since the first century even though they hadn't (or something), but in the end I had to give up. We must have different ideas of "eloquent".

The Jesus stories, on the other hand, are written down between 40 and 90 years and seem to depend on material written down as early as the 50s or even 40s AD. By ancient standards, that's very close to the events. That's why this approach has more validity here.

The time of publication isn't my point. My point is that religious propaganda is to be viewed with greater suspicion than even the most sleazy of political propaganda.

And of course we have to take the biases of religious polemics into account. But historians assess the biases of any source and take them into account - it's part of what historians do. The "time of publication" is pertinent here, however, because the closer they are to the events in question the more likely it is that they contain potentially discernible historical elements.

Is that "pig headed" of me? I don't think so. Why?

Because it doesn't make sense to completely dismiss a source on the grounds that it has a discernible bias. ALL historical sources have biases. It's the nature of the game to deal with sources that are biased to one extent or another.

Religion, by its nature, is about magical, invisible, undetectable agents that supposedly are doing things but all that needs to be believed without evidence and defended against all evidence. It's a con job. The whole thing. Lock. Stock. Barrel.

It's actually usually a delusion rather than a "con job". People tend to fool themselves far more readily and easily than they set out to deliberately deceive others. And in doing so they can unknowingly leave behind traces of how they have done so and how their mistaken ideas have developed over time. Those traces can be discerned in the gospels via the methods historians use to discern all kinds of things from biased sources.

Bottom line: Religious propaganda is about supernatural bullcrap.

So you keep saying. But I think that rather emotional reaction is getting in the way of your ability to objectively look at these texts as historical artefacts and examine what they can tell us about the people who wrote them and where their beliefs came from. You seem to emotionally motivated to just throw them out the window.

Therefore, the Bible could tell me "water is wet" and I'd need outside confirmation. If you want to call that "pigheaded", then it may be time for us to agree to disagree.

Again, that's emotional - not rational.

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.

Wrong. It only tells us what we think that they claimed to have believed about Jesus. There's no reason to trust they weren't flat out lying.

Maybe they were. But as I note above, we know that it is far more common for people to sincerely believe silly things and sincerely convince others that these silly things are true than it is for people to deliberately set out to knowingly deceive. So while we can't rule out the idea that they were all flat out lying, that's not somehow something we can just assume. I can't see how that fits the evidence, so you'll have to make a detailed case that they were rather than just saying that they might have been and using that mere maybe as an excuse to not bother examining some obviously pertinent source material.

Theological writings are even more prone to these problems because, once again, religion is a con job.

Lots of writings are prone to these problems. The whole process of winnowing "true" scripture from apocryphal or pseudepigraphical texts was adopted by the early Christians from the Greek philosophical schools, for example, because they had the same problem with later additions and false provenances. Blurting "religion is a con job!" is not a good enough reason to reject a whole set of texts that, handled the way historians handle all kinds of ancient texts, have the potential to tell us about the past. Again, your reaction seems emotional, not rational.

Matthew, or whoever wrote that Gospel, is a known serial liar. He makes numerous claims about what the OT says that turn out ridiculously false.

Or you're reading gMatt as a modern post-Enlightenment rationalist and not the way a Jewish exegete would read midrash. Which would be the less anachrongistic and therefore more objective and rational way to examine this text, do you think?

Luke, the "historian", couldn't even get straight when Herod the Great was ruler of Judea, or else Mary had a 10 year pregnancy with Jesus!

Or gLuke was written with zero knowledge of the alternative infancy story and so its writer had no conception of any problem.

John was obviously such a late addition with its advanced theology and reference to "the Jews" as a separate group. The nature of the propaganda is so over-the-top that were he writing a Jesus fanfic, he'd be accused of creating a Marty-Stu story. Jesus kicks John the Baptist. John the Baptist replies, "thank you, Jesus, may I have another." This is to say nothing of its inconsistencies with the Synoptics. You and I can agree to disagree on whether or not it constitutes a complete rewrite.

It isn't a "rewrite" because, as I've noted before, the writer of gJohn had no knowledge of the synoptics. So what we see in gJohn is a later iteration of another set of traditions about Jesus, some of which are shared by the synoptics but which aren't dependent on them. Instead of shouting and throwing them all out the window, it's more rational and objective to note these differences and similarities and analyse what they may tell us about how these stories arose and evolved.

Paul I have deep suspicions about. Scholars believe that half of his letters are "inauthentic". I've already expressed my questions why Marcion would promote a prophet that preaches a Jesus directly opposed to what Marcion believed.

And I've already noted several examples of people reading the same Pauline epistles and "seeing" completely opposed things in them. So this is not a mystery at all.

And let's not forget the man claimed to be seeing things and hearing voices and believed he was on a special mission from God. Either he was a liar or he was schizophrenic.

I know people who have had religious experiences including hearing voices. These are people I know very well and I can attest they are not liars and they are definitely not insane. To pretend that "liar" or "schizophrenic" are the only two possible options here is patently silly.

I think anyone who holds up the Bible and think that it proves anything needs to be laughed out of the room. .

Where have I ever used the word "proves"? I'm trying very carefully to explain how you can use these sources to assess the possible origins of some of their stories and then try to make an assessment of likelihood. This is nothing more or less than what historians do. That is not saying something that "needs to be laughed out of the room", it's being calm, rational and objective. How is that a bad thing?

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I think probabilistic hairs are being split here. All DP is saying is the likelihood is not very high.

The likelihood of what, exactly?

That would make sense given the nature of ancient history.

The nature of ancient history is that our sources make certainty difficult to impossible. We can still assess likelihood. Though with greater or lesser degrees of difficulty, depending on the sources.

I don't understand what Tim is claiming. How likely does he think all this is?

What does "all this" mean in that sentence? If we're asking about the likelihood that Jesus was God in human form who walked on water and rose from the dead I'd say the likelihood was low to zero. If we're asking about the likelihood that the stories of this magic Jesus have their origin with a first century Jewish apocalyptic preacher from Galilee who got crucified by Pilate I would say that is by far the most likely explanation of those stories and the other evidence we have.