For People Who Think There Was No Historical Jesus

[Confused Ape]

These days I personally subscribe to the view that Jesus started off as a mythical character who later got made into a historical character. Earl Doherty proposes this hypothesis in the Jesus Puzzle.

Does Earl Doherty suggest how Christianity got started round a mythical character? People who heard the myth and believed in it must have formed a religious sect. Where was the original sect and when was it formed?

I looked Earl Doherty up and found this - (I'm quoting it because of who said it.)

Doherty on the other hand has received strong criticism for his work. Bart Ehrman, an expert on textual criticism of the NT and Early Christianity, has dismissed Jesus, Neither God nor Man as "filled with so many unguarded and undocumented statements and claims, and so many misstatements of fact, that it would take a 2,400-page book to deal with all the problems...Not a single early Christian source supports Doherty's claim that Paul and those before him thought of Jesus as a spiritual, not a human being, who was executed in the spiritual, not the earthly realm."[19]

Because as I have stated earlier this reaction is because these people know all very well (unless they are idiots) that the historical evidence for the existence of Jesus, let along attesting to the events in the New Testament is sparse and of dubious reliability.

According to wikipedia, most modern scholars seem to think there was a real man behind the myth and so they dismiss the pure myth theory. What I'm trying to do is track down some of these modern scholars to see if they could have an agenda for taking the attitude that Jesus wasn't a myth. Bart Ehrman, for example, has written books on New Testament forgeries and contradictions as well as books where he says there was an historical Jesus. I can't help wondering if he's someone who analyzes texts to suit whichever book he's writing at the time.

It's the same with the question of whether the Pliny/Trajan letters are authentic. I've come across arguments for them being forgeries and a couple of good arguments in articles for them being genuine. The real problem is finding neutral analyses because Christians want them to be authentic while people like Kenneth Humphries want everything to be a fake. They're as bad as each other in my opinion.

As the Minimalist has pointed out time and time again the references to Jesus in the works of Josephus and Tacitus may well have been later forgeries. Which would mean the earliest attestations to Jesus existing are in the later part of the 2nd century or more than 100 years after Jesus supposedly died.

I haven't looked into Josephus because I'm still on the trail of that Tacitus passage. People who say it's a forgery talk about chrestianos being changed to christianos and how Severus's account of Nero's spectacle is very similar but nobody I've found, as yet, has tackled the insulting comments that Tacitus supposedly made about Christians. It's like they have a blind spot where that part of the passage is concerned.

Maybe the insults are authentic because, in the original text, Nero fastened the guilt on the Christians, confiscated their property if it hadn't been lost in the fire and then banished them. This would tie in better with Suetonius's report of Christians being punished in an unspecified way.

Then there's the arguments themselves. Christian writers not referring to Nero's spectacle is suspect. High ranking pagan Romans not going on about it as if was the sensation of the age isn't suspect in my opinion. I found a biography of Pliny The Younger

Domitian was impressed, and allowed Pliny to become praetor (a juridical function) without the the prescribed year's interval. This was a new sign of imperial favor.

Later, Pliny would call the year of his praetorship and the following years the most difficult of his life.

Pliny felt that he was in a very difficult position. Some of his friends belonged to the stoic opposition, but he himself had to serve the emperor.

At the end of 93, Domitian acted against the opposition. Herennius Senecio and several others were rounded up and killed, others were sent into exile. Besides Herennius, two of Pliny's friends were put to death, and four banished.

A decade later, he wrote:
I stood amidst the flames of thunderbolts dropping all round me, and there were certain clear indications to make me suppose a like end was awaiting me.

Why would men like Pliny regard stories of Nero killing low ranking Christians as being more important than their own experiences during Domitian's reign?