RE: Did Jesus Even Really Exist?
November 23, 2011 at 10:35 pm
(This post was last modified: November 23, 2011 at 10:37 pm by Angrboda.)
Pardon me if this has been mentioned, as I'm skipping a few pages of comments to add my two cents worth.
That aside, you ask two completely different questions, A) did Jesus exist, and B) did the Jesus of the Gospels exist. These are two radically different questions, and I would feel no qualms about answering no to the second but not the first. I think the gospels are mistakenly placed into the genre of historical narrative, and analyzed with that genre's hermeneutic principles without particularly strong evidence for doing so -- and there are elements of the gospels which, if not necessarily removing it from that genre, indicate it crosses the boundaries of multiple genres, and an analysis of it on the assumption that it is strictly historical narrative and that alone is wrong headed.
I don't believe the Jesus of the Gospels existed, but I'm willing to maintain agnosticism with regards to whether the Jesus of the Gospels is not a reaction to real events, either of an individual, or individuals, or possibly even a social movement. I think, personally, that the Jesus of the Gospels is a) possibly based on a real, existing apocalyptic rabbi or rabbis, or a composite of them, combined with b) an evolution of the needs of social movements within the larger Jewish and Gentile communities of the time, akin to the aphorism that, "when the student is ready, the teacher will arrive." I think, along the lines of, "If God didn't exist, we would have to invent him," the Jesus movements satisfied a real need, stemming from years of oppression, the cognitive dissonance between the Jewish myths of being the chosen people and the reality that they were often the chosen victims (See Dever's work on the Exodus), the collapse of the Hasmonean empire, the failure of Jewish apocalypticism to deliver, and the change in leadership and governance with the waning of the Hellenic influence and the eclipsing by that of the Romans, who had a quite different attitude altogether.
Anyway. Pick which question you meant to ask, and discuss that (if you haven't already -- again, mea culpa otherwise).