How does the mythical Jesus thing hang together?

Discussion about the New Testament, apocrypha, gnostics, church fathers, Christian origins, historical Jesus or otherwise, etc.
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gmx
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How does the mythical Jesus thing hang together?

Post by gmx »

Responding to the argument from silence.
Jesus wasn't historical, certainly not in the way described in the gospels, because Paul and other NT writers mention nothing about his life on earth.
This theory requires that our NT has an alternative genesis and developmental history from the one described by the church and mainstream Christian scholarship. But doesn't the argument from silence apply equally well to this alternative history? That history (if it existed) has also left very few fingerprints for modern scholars to dust. Hence the mythical / historical debate -- it exists because of history's silence. Who are the communities that produced these writings, believing Jesus to be a purely celestial deity? Why is history silent on them? Christianity sprung up and spread quickly, but left few markers of its true historical origins. To my way of thinking, that silence doesn't lend weight to either the historical or mythical argument.

Some other questions re: mythicism
If the epistles are unaware of Jesus' life of earth, because it hasn't been invented yet, then:
  • Who wrote the deutero-Pauline epistles and why? What was the purpose of pretending to be Paul in the pre-historical-Jesus/pre-Gospel era? Or are we saying that there was genuine Paul, then Gospels, then deutero-Paul, and deutero-Paul was so expertly forged as to resist the temptation to include "evidence" from the gospels?
  • If Paul's "Lord Jesus Christ" was a purely celestial being, why doesn't he make that clearer to his audience? Why does he keep dropping hints about flesh, being crucified, being born of woman, being of the tribe of Judah, etc? If the answer is that his audience understood that Jesus was purely celestial, why can't we point to the historical proof of that? (another argument from silence?)
  • I am confused when mythicists speak of Pauline or Petrine doctrine, or what have you. Surely if Jesus is a literary device, the whole genre is just 50 Shades of Pray. Why then, would anyone think there was an historical Peter? Surely you'd throw the baby out with the bathwater and start from scratch trying to understand the origins of this religion!
  • If there are fake letters of Paul, and a phony historical Jesus, and an invented Jerusalem church, and a hundred faked romanticised Acts of Brian, there seems to be more faking than a reality TV show. Perhaps the reality is that none of it is fake, or phony, in its original intent, but was all honest and genuine according to its original intended purpose, which we have lost visibility of?
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Giuseppe
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Re: How does the mythical Jesus thing hang together?

Post by Giuseppe »

Strictly speaking, Jesus is mythical even in the Gospels and in the books of the Fathers of the Church, in the books of heretics as Marcion and the Gnostics, since in all these books you have a hero who does miracles.

Strictly speaking, who talked about Jesus in exclusively human terms are:

1) Tacitus (if not interpolated)

2) Lucian

3) Celsus

4) the ebionites.


Tacitus and Celsus and Lucian heard about a historical Jesus from the Christian ebionites (the latter being the only Christians who talked about Jesus as a fully human being and not divine) or they did what already learned Pagans did with their gods: they euhemerized him out of despise of him and his cult.

But who did the ebionites hear about the historical Jesus from?

From themselves, since they were in absolute terms the first Christians who did need of a historical Jesus (i.e., the only Christian euhemerizers of the mythical Jesus):

viewtopic.php?f=3&t=3885#p82788
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arnoldo
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Re: How does the mythical Jesus thing hang together?

Post by arnoldo »

Giuseppe wrote: Sat Feb 10, 2018 6:10 am Strictly speaking, Jesus is mythical even in the Gospels and in the books of the Fathers of the Church, in the books of heretics as Marcion and the Gnostics, since in all these books you have a hero who does miracles.
So if someone alive today performs a miracle they are mythical?
Giuseppe
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Re: How does the mythical Jesus thing hang together?

Post by Giuseppe »

arnoldo wrote: Sat Feb 10, 2018 6:56 am So if someone alive today performs a miracle they are mythical?
in the Gospels there are a lot of miracles. It is a bit embarrassing even to call their authors as euhemerizers, since true euhemerizers remove the miracles.
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arnoldo
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Re: How does the mythical Jesus thing hang together?

Post by arnoldo »

Eres o te haces? Anyway, Lucian of Samosata is not associated in any way with miracles yet that doesn't automatically make him historical wouldn't you agree?
http://www.earlychristianwritings.com/lucian.html
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MrMacSon
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Re: How does the mythical Jesus thing hang together?

Post by MrMacSon »

gmx wrote: Sat Feb 10, 2018 5:33 am
The [mythical Jesus] theory requires that our NT has an alternative genesis and developmental history from the one described by the church and mainstream Christian scholarship. But doesn't the argument from silence apply equally well to this alternative history?
.
No, it doesn't apply equally. The history of early Christianity is does not have a good foundation or scaffold for how it developed into what we are told it developed into in the 4th century. Silence is part of the argument for the alternative mythical Jesus theory (which may well also be described as a mythical early-Christianity theory).


gmx wrote: Sat Feb 10, 2018 5:33 am The history [of the development of narratives about a Jesus who was mostly if not all mythical, if that happened] has also left very few fingerprints for modern scholars to dust.
Perhaps it has left fingerprints. I think the writings of some or most of the so-called Church Fathers may well be isolated contemplations of a not-yet concrete theology. Several seem to be convincing themselves of the need for Jesus to have flesh.


Who are the communities that produced these writings, believing Jesus to be a purely celestial deity? Why is history silent on them?
I think there are various indications there were communities that believed Jesus or Christ or Christ Jesus to be a celestial deity.

Later writings included notions of an earthly life. That doesn't mean the people who wrote those notions had evidence themselves. They may have just been embellishing earlier writings.


Christianity sprung up and spread quickly, but left few markers of its true historical origins.
Did it?


Some other questions re: mythicism

If the epistles are unaware of Jesus' life of earth, because it hasn't been invented yet, then:

Who wrote the deutero-Pauline epistles and why? What was the purpose of pretending to be Paul in the pre-historical-Jesus/pre-Gospel era?
Those are interesting questions.


Or are we saying that there was genuine Paul, then Gospels, then deutero-Paul; and deutero-Paul was so expertly forged as to resist the temptation to include "evidence" from the gospels?
There are several possible scenarios.


If Paul's "Lord Jesus Christ" was a purely celestial being, why doesn't he make that clearer to his audience? Why does he keep dropping hints about flesh, being crucified, being born of woman, being of the tribe of Judah, etc? If the answer is that his audience understood that Jesus was purely celestial, why can't we point to the historical proof of that? (another argument from silence?)
".. hints about flesh, being crucified, being born of woman, being of the tribe of Judah .." could well be allegorical.


I am confused when mythicists speak of Pauline or Petrine doctrine, or what have you. Surely if Jesus is a literary device, the whole genre is just 50 Shades of Pray. Why, then, would anyone think there was an historical Peter? Surely you'd throw the baby out with the bathwater and start from scratch trying to understand the origins of this religion!
Was there a historical Peter?


If there are fake letters of Paul, and a phony historical Jesus, and an invented Jerusalem church, and a hundred faked romanticised 'Acts of Brian', there seems to be more faking than a reality TV show. Perhaps the reality is that none of it is fake, or phony, in its original intent, but was all honest and genuine according to its original intended purpose, which we have lost visibility of?
Perhaps the faking was 'genuine' ie. those that ended up selecting the texts for the NT believed the romanticised narrative.
Last edited by MrMacSon on Sat Feb 10, 2018 9:22 pm, edited 2 times in total.
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neilgodfrey
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Re: How does the mythical Jesus thing hang together?

Post by neilgodfrey »

arnoldo wrote: Sat Feb 10, 2018 6:56 am
Giuseppe wrote: Sat Feb 10, 2018 6:10 am Strictly speaking, Jesus is mythical even in the Gospels and in the books of the Fathers of the Church, in the books of heretics as Marcion and the Gnostics, since in all these books you have a hero who does miracles.
So if someone alive today performs a miracle they are mythical?
If someone "alive today" walked on water or could command the weather with a word and could be killed and rise again from the dead, then yes, we are witnessing an illusion of some kind. The person/events are indeed not real.
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neilgodfrey
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Re: How does the mythical Jesus thing hang together?

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gmx wrote: Sat Feb 10, 2018 5:33 am This theory requires that our NT has an alternative genesis and developmental history from the one described by the church and mainstream Christian scholarship. But doesn't the argument from silence apply equally well to this alternative history? That history (if it existed) has also left very few fingerprints for modern scholars to dust.
There is indeed evidence (not silence or absence of evidence) for the sources of the gospel narratives of Jesus' life and sayings. We can see the literary origins of many of the stories in the Old Testament. I think there is very little doubt that the miracles of Elijah, Elisha, Moses and others are the sources of many of the stories about Jesus. The evidence that the gospel Jesus was invented is on a par with the evidence that Rome's Aeneas was invented out of the stories of Homer.

Historians of ancient times have certain methods for establishing historicity of persons and events. They rely upon the provenance and authorship of their source material and a study of its genre and literary aspects in order to assess its value as a historical source. They also rely upon source material's claims being independently corroborated.

That's not complicated. It's fundamentally the same method used by crime investigators to solve crimes, by courts to decide guilt or innocence, by everyday folk to decide what is true and what is not out of all the things they hear.

Historians have reasonable grounds for believing Socrates existed. That's because the sources about him are by persons who knew Socrates personally. One instance we have is by a person who may not have known him personally but lived during his time.

The different sources are by people who lived at the time of Socrates and they are clearly independent of each other and in different ways they corroborate the evidence of each other.

In the case of Jesus all our sources are arguably ultimately from "Christianity" itself -- they are not independent, they do not always corroborate each other even though not independent, and they are by unknown persons written for unknown reasons to unknown audiences. What we read in Tacitus is consistent with other details we read in Tacitus that we know he repeated based on popular rumour, not historical research. Historians of ancient history do not rely upon records that derive from generations after the events unless they can establish a clear line of evidence that shows the author was relying ultimately upon much earlier sources.

The evidence for Jesus simply does not meet the minimum standards of historicity according to the reputable methods of historians. This is why they are not used by biblical scholars in arguing for the historicity of Jesus and the gospel narratives and devise, say, "criteria of authenticity" instead. Yet no reputable ancient historian I know relies upon those criteria of authenticity in the absolute sense that biblical scholars do in order to determine what is "historical" or not.
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arnoldo
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Re: How does the mythical Jesus thing hang together?

Post by arnoldo »

neilgodfrey wrote: Sat Feb 10, 2018 1:53 pm
arnoldo wrote: Sat Feb 10, 2018 6:56 am
Giuseppe wrote: Sat Feb 10, 2018 6:10 am Strictly speaking, Jesus is mythical even in the Gospels and in the books of the Fathers of the Church, in the books of heretics as Marcion and the Gnostics, since in all these books you have a hero who does miracles.
So if someone alive today performs a miracle they are mythical?
If someone "alive today" walked on water or could command the weather with a word and could be killed and rise again from the dead, then yes, we are witnessing an illusion of some kind. The person/events are indeed not real.
From a materialistic perspective this makes sense.
Adler wrote: The fundamental thesis of materialism is that nothing exists in reality except atoms and the bodies composing them. . . Another way of stating the fundamental thesis of materialism is that nothing exists in reality that is not a body, elementary or composite, or waves, or fields of energy. . . the dogmatism involved in this, or any similar statement by a materialist, lies in the negative assertion that the immaterial- the incorporeal, the nonphysical-does not exist. . .But the denial that the immaterial exists cannot be proved. Therefore when it is asserted it is sheer dogmatism
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neilgodfrey
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Re: How does the mythical Jesus thing hang together?

Post by neilgodfrey »

arnoldo wrote: Sat Feb 10, 2018 3:15 pmBut the denial that the immaterial exists cannot be proved. Therefore when it is asserted it is sheer dogmatism

Oh my goodness. No, you are quite correct. I cannot prove to you that there are no fairies at the bottom of my garden. Sheer dogmatism on my part.

It's not about "proving" anything. It's about testing and falsifying and riding with what we have provisionally been able to establish and that works -- until we find new tests and falsifications lead us to new hypotheses.
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