Historian explains why Jesus ''mythers'' aren't taken seriously by most Historians

[abaris]

The Jewish priesthood had influence over Judea on a purely religious sense; hence if Jesus threatens them, then the Priests will get worried, and what happens when they get worried? They contact the Romans.

What's so hard to understand? They were a Roman administrative body.

[TheMessiah]

The Jewish priesthood had influence over Judea on a purely religious sense; hence if Jesus threatens them, then the Priests will get worried, and what happens when they get worried? They contact the Romans.

What's so hard to understand? They were a Roman administrative body.

When did I deny that?

I'm aware that they were an administrative body; I admitted as much - however Jesus as a preacher was more appealing to the poor, his version of Judaism was more radical and thus a threat to the reactionary priests. This wasn't really within Roman interests unless the Priests made it so.

[Cato]

Tell me if I'm missing something. The claim boils down to accepting that there may have been (probably if you prefer) a Jesus that roamed around Judea preaching a message that garnered a small following. So what?

The character named Jesus as portrayed in The Bible is assuredly mythological so even if the above statement is accurate it amounts to very little. 

[TheMessiah]

Tell me if I'm missing something. The claim boils down to accepting that there may have been (probably if you prefer) a Jesus that roamed around Judea preaching a message that garnered a small following. So what?

The character named Jesus as portrayed in The Bible is assuredly mythological so even if the above statement is accurate it amounts to very little. 

That's the point - Jesus in historical context was actually, very little.

He was just a dude who preacher, had a following and died a disgraceful death. The historical evidence needed to verify that isn't much; more evidence exists for him than other great historical figures.

Historically, what's more interesting is how this obscure preacher became the official religion of the Roman empire; and then recognized by 2.2 billion people; the history of the rise of Christianity is more interesting than the actual figure, who was actually, quite typical.

[abaris]

I'm aware that they were an administrative body; I admitted as much - however Jesus as a preacher was more appealing to the poor, his version of Judaism was more radical and thus a threat to the reactionary priests. This wasn't really within Roman interests unless the Priests made it so.

Yeah, so we're back at base one. If he was appealing to the poor and in fact inciting them against the authorities, he was a threat to Roman authority and all the historical fallacies of how he was dealt with, kick in with a vengeance.

[TheMessiah]

I'm aware that they were an administrative body; I admitted as much - however Jesus as a preacher was more appealing to the poor, his version of Judaism was more radical and thus a threat to the reactionary priests. This wasn't really within Roman interests unless the Priests made it so.

Yeah, so we're back at base one. If he was appealing to the poor and in fact inciting them against the authorities, he was a threat to Roman authority and all the historical fallacies of how he was dealt with, kick in with a vengeance.

There aren't ''historical fallacies'' - the Romans typically killed people. In fact, that supports the argument; The Romans didn't truly see him as a threat, only the Priests did.

It was the priests who pushed for his death, and the Romans who ultimately, and reluctantly, carried it out.

There was a Jewish ''messiah'' years after Jesus who actually was a threat to Roman rule, because he was a fighter who attempted a militant uprising; the Romans disposed of him like dog-meat, that's not the case with Jesus.

Pontius finding no fault in a man who is non-violent is probably quite accurate to a degree, that's a testament to how desperate the priests were.

[abaris]

There was a Jewish ''messiah'' years after Jesus who actually was a threat to Roman rule, because he was a fighter who attempted a militant uprising; the Romans disposed of him like dog-meat, that's not the case with Jesus.

Pontius finding no fault in a man who is non-violent is probably quite accurate to a degree, that's a testament to how desperate the priests were.

So assuming he lived, what gives you the impression he wasn't disposed like dog meat? The gospels? Bible proving bible?

Read up on Roman history. Non violent doesn't figure in the Roman equation. Trouble maker does. And if he was a trouble maker, who according to the bible even said to Pilates face he was the king of the jews, the dog meat treatment is the only possibility. Not only for Jesus to be clear, but for all of his followers and family.

[TheMessiah]

There was a Jewish ''messiah'' years after Jesus who actually was a threat to Roman rule, because he was a fighter who attempted a militant uprising; the Romans disposed of him like dog-meat, that's not the case with Jesus.

Pontius finding no fault in a man who is non-violent is probably quite accurate to a degree, that's a testament to how desperate the priests were.

So assuming he lived, what gives you the impression he wasn't disposed like dog meat? The gospels? Bible proving bible?

Read up on Roman history. Non violent doesn't figure in the Roman equation. Trouble maker does. And if he was a trouble maker, who according to the bible even said to Pilates face he was the king of the jews, the dog meat treatment is the only possibility. Not only for Jesus to be clear, but for all of his followers and family.

He was ''disposed'' in the way that he was crucified - we know he wasn't slaughtered like a militant Jew because the death of Christ via Crucifixion is an event which is well-attested to; both via historical reference from Tacticus (who also hated Christians, but acknowledged his cruxification) and on a logical level.

Lol, I've read up on Roman history - but perhaps you are misunderstanding me. Jesus being a ''trouble maker'' doesn't mean that he caused trouble towards the Romans; his ''trouble'' was on a purely religious level, due to his interpretation of Jewish scripture, the Romans were reluctant and both not interested in such Jewish matters. He was not a threat to Roman rule, and his claim of being ''King of the Jews'' was equally as insignificant to Pontius because he had done little to start a revolution.

He was in other words, a hippie - he was no threat to Roman rule; just ''problematic'' for priests.

[Simon Moon]

Tim O'Neill, An atheist who has studied the scholarship on the historical Jesus, his Jewish socio-religious context and the origins of Christianity for over 25 years.

I wonder what Tim O'Neil has to say about this?


The 'Oxford Classical Dictionary', one of the foremost authorities on the Greco-Roman world, does not have an entry for Jeshua Ben Yusef?


http://debunkingchristianity.blogspot.co...alify.html


"The 3rd. ed. continues the title:  The Oxford Classical Dictionary: The Ultimate Reference Work on the Classical World includes more than 6,200 entries, but again fails to provided any entry on Jesus nor has it any use for the New Testament as a historical record.  Although the entry on Josephus is expanded in the newer editions, the Dictionary dismisses the Testimonium Flavianum account on Jesus as reliable history in just one sentence: “The famous testimonium to Jesus is partly or even wholly an interpolation.” (p. 798)

Likewise, there are no entries on Gospels, New Testament, nor does the Dictionary list a single reference  to any Biblical book under its section: Abbreviations Used in the Present Work   A. General  B. Authors and Books in its 75 pages."


I don't believe Oxford are in the 'fringe', are they?  

[TheMessiah]

Tim O'Neill, An atheist who has studied the scholarship on the historical Jesus, his Jewish socio-religious context and the origins of Christianity for over 25 years.

I wonder what Tim O'Neil has to say about this?


The 'Oxford Classical Dictionary', one of the foremost authorities on the Greco-Roman world, does not have an entry for Jeshua Ben Yusef?


http://debunkingchristianity.blogspot.co...alify.html


"The 3rd. ed. continues the title:  The Oxford Classical Dictionary: The Ultimate Reference Work on the Classical World includes more than 6,200 entries, but again fails to provided any entry on Jesus nor has it any use for the New Testament as a historical record.  Although the entry on Josephus is expanded in the newer editions, the Dictionary dismisses the Testimonium Flavianum account on Jesus as reliable history in just one sentence: “The famous testimonium to Jesus is partly or even wholly an interpolation.” (p. 798)

Likewise, there are no entries on Gospels, New Testament, nor does the Dictionary list a single reference  to any Biblical book under its section: Abbreviations Used in the Present Work   A. General  B. Authors and Books in its 75 pages."


I don't believe Oxford are in the 'fringe', are they?  

Did you read the post or not? I'll take the relevant information, but this was clearly addressed.

There are two major historical references to Jesus from the greco-Roman world.

Many Christian apologists vastly overstate the number of ancient non-Christian writers who attest to the existence of Jesus. This is partly because they are not simply showing that a mere Jewish preacher existed, but are arguing for the existence of the "Jesus Christ" of Christian doctrine: a supposedly supernatural figure who allegedly performed amazing public miracles in front of audiences of thousands of witnesses. It could certainly be argued that such a wondrous figure would have been noticed outside of Galilee and Judea and so should have been widely noted as well. So Christian apologists often cite a long list of writers who mention Jesus, usually including Josephus, Pliny the Younger, Tacitus, Suetonius, Lucian, Thallus and several others. But of these only Tacitus and Josephus actually mention Jesus as a historical person - the others are all simply references to early Christianity, some of which mention the "Christ" that was the focus of its worship.

If we are simply noting the existence of Jesus as a human Jewish preacher, we are not required to produce more mentions of him than we would expect of comparable figures. And what we find is that we have about as much evidence for his existence (outside any Christian writings) as we have for other Jewish preachers, prophets and Messianic claimants of the time. The two non-Christian writers who mention him as a historical person are Josephus and Tacitus.

Josephus

The Jewish priestly aristocrat Joseph ben Matityahu, who took the Roman name Flavius Josephus, is our main source of information about Jewish affairs in this period and is usually the only writer of the time who makes any mention of Jewish preachers, prophets and Messianic claimants of the First Century. Not surprisingly, he mentions Jesus twice: firstly in some detail in Antiquities of the Jews XVIII.3.4 and again more briefly when mentioning the execution of Jesus' brother James in Antiquities XX.9.1. The first reference is problematic, however, as it contains elements which Josephus cannot have written and which seem to have been added later by a Christian interpolator. Here is the text, with the likely interpolations in bold:

"Now there was about this time Jesus, a wise man, if it be lawful to call
him a man; for he was a doer of paradoxical deeds, a teacher of such men
as receive the truth with pleasure. He drew over to him both many of the
Jews and many of the Gentiles. He was [the] Christ And when Pilate at the suggestion of the principal men amongst us, had condemned him to the cross,
those that loved him at the first did not forsake him; for he appeared
to them alive again the third day; as the divine prophets had foretold
these and ten thousand other wonderful things concerning him. And the
tribe of Christians, so named from him, are not extinct at this day."

There has been a long debate about what parts of this reference to Jesus are authentic to Josephus or even if the whole passage is a wholesale interpolation. Proponents of the Jesus Myth hypothesis, naturally, opt for the idea that it is not authentic in any way, but there are strong indications that, apart from the obvious additions shown in bold above, Josephus did mention Jesus at this point in his text.

To begin with, several elements in the passage are distinctively Josephean in their style and phrasing. "Now (there was) about this time ..." is used by Josephus as a way of introducing a new topic hundreds of times in his work. There are no early Christian parallels that refer to Jesus merely as "a wise man", but this is a term used by Josephus several times, eg about Solomon and Daniel. Christian writers placed a lot of emphasis on Jesus' miracles, but here the passage uses a fairly neutral term παραδόξων ἔργων - "paradoxa erga" or "paradoxical deeds". Josephus does use this phrase elsewhere about the miracles of Elisha, but the term can also mean "deeds that are difficult to interpret" and even has overtones of cautious scepticism. Finally, the use of the word φῦλον ("phylon" - "race, tribe") is not used by Christians about themselves in any works of the time, but is used by Josephus elsewhere about sects, nations or other distinct groups. Additionally, with the sole exception of Χριστιανῶν ("Christianon" - "Christians") every single word in the passage can be found elsewhere in Josephus' writings.

The weight of the evidence of the vocabulary and style of the passage is heavily towards its partial authenticity. Not only does it contain distinctive phrases of Josephus that he used in similar contexts elsewhere, but these are also phrases not found in early Christian texts. And it is significantly free of terms and phrases from the gospels, which we'd expect to find if it was created wholesale by a Christian writer. So either a very clever Christian interpolator somehow managed to immerse himself in Josephus' phrasing and language, without modern concordances and dictionaries and create a passage containing distinctively Josephean phraseology, or what we have here is a genuinely Josephean passage that has simply been added to rather clumsily.

As a result of this and other evidence (eg the Arabic and Syriac paraphrases of this passage which seem to come from a version before the clumsy additions by the interpolator) the consensus amongst scholars of all backgrounds is that the passage is partially genuine, simply added in a few obvious places. Louis H. Feldman's Josephus and Modern Scholarship (1984) surveys scholarship on the question from 1937 to 1980 and finds of 52 scholars on the subject, 39 considered the passage to be partially authentic.

Peter Kirby has done a survey of the literature since and found that this trend has increased in recent years. He concludes "In my own reading of thirteen books since 1980 that touch upon the passage, ten out of thirteen argue the (Antiquities of the Jews XVIII.3.4 passage) to be partly genuine, while the other three maintain it to be entirely spurious. Coincidentally, the same three books also argue that Jesus did not exist."

The other mention of Jesus in Josephus, Antiquities XX.9.1, is much more straightforward, but much more of a problem for Jesus Mythicists. In it Josephus recounts a major political event that happened when he was a young man. This would have been a significant and memorable event for him, since he was only 25 at the time and it caused upheaval in his own social and political class, the priestly families of Jerusalem that included his own.

In 62 AD the Roman procurator of Judea, Porcius Festus, died while in office and his replacement, Lucceius Albinus, was still on his way to Judea from Rome. This left the High Priest, Hanan ben Hanan (usually called Ananus), with a freer reign than usual. Ananus executed some Jews without Roman permission and, when this was brought to the attention of the Romans, Ananus was deposed. This deposition would have been memorable for the young Josephus, who had just returned from an embassy to Rome on the behalf of the Jerusalem priests. But what makes this passage relevant is what Josephus mentions, in passing, as the cause of the political upheaval:

Festus was now dead, and Albinus was but upon the road; so (the High Priest) assembled the Sanhedrin of judges, and brought before them the brother of Jesus, who was called Messiah, whose name was James, and some others; and when he had formed an accusation against them as breakers of the law, he delivered them to be stoned.

This mention is peripheral to the story Josephus is telling, but since we know from Christian sources that Jesus' brother James led the Jesus sect in Jerusalem in this period and we have a separate, non-dependent, Christian account of James' execution by the Jerusalem priesthood, it is fairly clear which "Jesus who was called Messiah" Josephus is referring to here.

Almost without exception, modern scholars consider this passage genuine and an undisputed reference to Jesus as a historical figure by someone who was a contemporary of his brother and who knew of the execution of that brother first hand. This rather unequivocal reference to a historical Jesus leaves Jesus Mythicists with a thorny problem, which they generally try to solve one of two ways:

(i) "The words "who was called Messiah" are a later Christian interpolation" -

Since it is wholly unlikely that a Christian interpolator invented the whole story of the deposition of the High Priest just to slip in this passing reference to Jesus, Mythicists try to argue that the key words which identify which Jesus is being spoken of are interpolated. Unfortunately this argument does not work. This is because the passage is discussed no less than three times in mid-Third Century works by the Christian apologist Origen and he directly quotes the relevant section with the words "Jesus who was called the Messiah" all three times: in Contra Celsum I.4, in Contra Celsum II:13 and in Commentarium in evangelium Matthaei X.17. Each time he uses precisely the phrase we find in Josephus: αδελφος Ιησου του λεγομενου Χριστου ("the brother of that Jesus who was called Messiah"). This is significant because Origen was writing a whole generation before Christianity was in any kind of position to be tampering with texts of Josephus. If this phrase was in the passage in Origen's time, then it was clearly original to Josephus.

The name 'Yeshua' is just a translation of Jesus.