What were Jesus and early Christians like?

[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.