RE: For People Who Think There Was No Historical Jesus
February 23, 2013 at 4:34 pm
(This post was last modified: February 23, 2013 at 4:36 pm by Confused Ape.)
(February 23, 2013 at 4:21 pm)Rhythm Wrote: Getting to be an impressively beefy thread, the only thing that's missing.....a "historical jesus"
I don't think he's going to post anything in this thread.
Minimalist found an interesting article which he posted in another topic but I think it fits in this one as well. Did Jesus Exist by Emeritus Professor Philip Davies
Quote: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.
That's about the best we'll ever get where a real man is concerned. It's fun figuring out how Christianity could have got started with a purely mythic Jesus though.
Quote:We need not (and should not) trust everything S/Paul says or accept what he believes, but explaining Christian origins without him is even more difficult than explaining it without some kind of Jesus.
Who took the new cult to the Gentiles if Paul didn't exist either?
Where are the snake and mushroom smilies?
