Evidence: The Gathering

[TheRocketSurgeon]

Rocket-

I consider your remarks above to be good news...you accept the passage from Tacitus as being genuine. You might also consider that scholars also accept the Testimonium to be genuine IF the obvious additions are removed. And even after trimming them out, the TF is quite supportive of the existence of the historical Jesus.

No wonder Ehrman, O'Neill and all competent scholars reject the views of the Jesus Mythicists such as Fitzgerald and Carrier.

Unfortunately, this forum is chock-full of folks for whom mythicism is the lazy man's way out of dealing with the strong arguments of Christianity...if Jesus never existed, then no need to even TRY to come up with an explanation of the Five Minimal Facts, for example.

I don't think the evidence of Jesus from Tacitus and Josephus (even if you include everything that isn't clearly interpolation) is so clear as you're making it out to be, or as Christian theologians like to make it out to be, but I do accept that there likely was an historical Yeshua ben Yosef, son of a carpenter who became a traveling rabbi, though I'm much less certain about the crucifixion narrative. Reading it all for myself, the clearest conclusion I could come up with is that T&J were citing from Christian witnesses and relaying the accounts verbatim, rather than working from what we'd think of as official or historical records, and I think the other tales in the gospel stories just stretch belief a bit too thin on things we'd have definitely gotten reports of from neutral sources, had they happened. Pay close attention to Ehrman's explanation of the timeline in which the things we (you) now take for granted as canon, because they were not the original point of view.

Nothing specific. I just thought you might be interested.

BTW, one or two of the members of this forum are in the habit of posting the Chrestianos/Christianos image found at Wikipedia as if they have discovered the smoking gun or something. Rives suggests that there is nothing to that.

I was definitely interested. Thank you!

And I agree that, given the context, it seems unlikely that he was referring to someone else, despite the commonplace name of Chrestianos. It's the source of the information and what it "proves" that I quibble with.

I'll give it a look. In return, here's a Catholic Apologist's review of the book: http://www.catholic.com/blog/trent-horn/...cal-review

And btw, thanks for your courteous dialogue.

Will do. And if you watch the interview, Ehrman addresses his critics, as you'll see (well, hear), including pointing to some of the best counter-arguments from people he calls "good scholars" (or something like that), as well as a response book he is in the process of generating. He also discusses it on his blog.

And you're welcome.

I'm personal friends with the former head of the University of Kansas Religious Studies department, Dr. Paul Mirecki, another agnostic Biblical historian similar to Ehrman. He was kind enough to let me audit his course on The History of the Bible, even though I wasn't a KU student.

This is one of his books. He also helped to translate some of the Gnostic gospels found at Nag Hammadi. Most of my views come from discussions with Dr. Mirecki, and are why I'm so close to Ehrman's position, I suspect.
http://www.amazon.com/The-Bible-Context-...1626615292

I don't mention it just as a way of name-dropping, but by way of explaining that A) this is how I know these things, and not from reading internet forums, as has been suggested in one of these recent threads, and B) as a way of pointing out that, once I learned a lot more about first- and second-century culture/history in that region, I was surprised that I ever was able to look at things the way I did while I was a Christian.

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Okay, I finished reading the article. I really need to read the whole Ehrman book, instead of the excerpts, interviews, and external discussions I've been relying on, because everyone keeps summing up his position differently. I'd be especially curious to know why he doesn't think the disciples thought he was God in human form until after the resurrection, given that even his enemies kept asking Jesus if he was God. Clearly, if we're to take any information from the Gospel narratives as valid, then at least some people were of that opinion during his lifetime! Please keep in mind that I am discussing these events under the presupposition that the crucifixion reported to J&T are real, and that we can lend at least some credence to the earlier Gospels of Mark and Matthew, which is all we need to presume for this idea. John is so different in tone that I think it's clear evidence of the rate at which the myth built upon itself (not the myth of Jesus' existence, but of his divinity, miracles, and claims) from its early stages in Mark. In other words, what has to be answered is what Jesus thought when he answered (in Mark) that he was indeed the Messiah and the Son of God, did he mean what that same phrase meant by the time of John. Is it more likely that Jesus thought he was the earthly Messiah, from Isaiah, and a Son of Adam (son of man; adam=man) as well as the Child of God. (Even you might refer to yourself as such, as a way of saying you are a Christian, just as you refer to God as your Father. That doesn't make you God or Jesus.) Thus it is critical to look at the progression of the idea through time, and while I applaud Ehrman's efforts in doing so, I think his entirely historical approach, leaving out all theology and only looking at the history, doesn't give the full picture needed to complete the puzzle. It's a topic I'd love to discuss with him over a long lunch.

The author of that article does a poor job of separating out the "when" of each of the books he's citing, as though he's looking back through a lens of the whole canon at once from the present, rather than considering each in its yearly context. If we were discussing this issue at the Christian church in Jerusalem, just before the Romans razed everything, we certainly wouldn't be discussing the items in the Gospel of John, for instance. And while he raises some good points about Ehrman's conclusions about "getting the ideas up the ontological totem pole", I don't think Ehrman has reached the right conclusion on that point, either. So I guess I don't agree with E as much as I thought... I suspect strongly that some of the Disciples thought Jesus was just the earthly, Jewish version of the Messiah, but I'm sure others vehemently argued that he was not just the earthly Messiah, and taught their audiences that he was always God incarnate. His claims like the ability to forgive sins, which Isaiah says only God can do, would have bolstered that idea in the minds of his followers, but then again, a lot of things only God can do are done in the Old Testament by prophets like Elijah... which is likely why Jesus is also compared to him.

Since Jesus' execution (even with resurrection/ascention) put the kibbosh on the hypothesis that he was the earthly, warrior-king Jewish Messiah--thus Pilate's execution for rebellion, since he wouldn't say he was not King of the Jews, as they put on his cross, according to the story--that left only those who had always argued that he was God after all, even though Jesus never says that (except in John, which as I pointed out, comes much later). So it's not a huge "ontological totem pole" to climb, but a matter of elimination. The ones who thought he was God got the last say because the ones who thought he was the Jewish Messiah (as I think Jesus himself did) and heir to Elijah were silenced crushingly by the death. This is a good reason to invent the resurrection and appearance stories out of whole cloth, as well.