The best case for Jesus's historicity: Mark Craig

[MrMacSon]

But does literature prove the characters therein are NOT about or were based on real persons.

I also addressed this in a recent post on this thread -

Christianity is founded on the documents of the New Testament, NOT on the persons IN the New Testament documents.
It's literature, not history.

So you seem to think a group of anonymous writers got together and wrote a bunch of gospels and epistles, with all characters in them totally fictitious, and these documents became the foundation of Christianity.

Not necessarily as a one-off, combined event. It was likely, as the Catholic Encyclopedia says, that -

.
'The formation of the New Testament canon (A.D. 100-220)'

"The idea of a complete and clear-cut canon of the New Testament existing from the beginning, that is from Apostolic times, has no foundation in history. The Canon of the New Testament, like that of the Old, is the result of a development, of a process at once stimulated by disputes with doubters, both within and without the Church, and retarded by certain obscurities and natural hesitations, and which did not reach its final term until the dogmatic definition of the Tridentine Council."

http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/03274a.htm

How do you know that Jesus & Paul, Cephas/Peter, John the Baptist, etc are fictitious?

There are no primary, contemporaneous sources that verify these obscure theology-related and theology-inspired characters.

• eta: Antiquities 18.5.2 / 116-119 does mention 'John called the baptist [the dipper]' but that could just have been the basis for the NT narratives about the NT character of the same name.
  
  Josephus refers to the killing of JtB by Herod as a pre-emptive measure by Herod to quell a possible uprising;
  
  The gospels present this as a consequence of the marriage of Herod Antipas and Herodias in defiance of Jewish law (as in Matthew 14:4, Mark 6:18)
  
  Some have questioned the authenticity of Antiquities 18.5.2 / 116-119 -
  
  • Whiston & Maier (1999) 'Flavius Josephus' in The New Complete Works of Josephus. Kregel Acad. ISBN 0-8254-2948-X; pp. 662–63.
    
  • Feldman, Louis H. (1992). "Josephus", in Freedman, David Noel. Anchor Bible Dictionary 3; pp. 990–1.
    
  • Rothschild, Claire (2011). ""Echo of a Whisper: The Uncertain Authenticity of Josephus' Witness to John the Baptist", in Hellholm, D; Vegge, T; Norderval, Ø; et al. Ablution, Initiation, and Baptism: Late Antiquity, Early Judaism, and Early Christianity. Walter de Gruyter, ISBN 978-3-11-024751-0; pp. 257–258.
    
  • Evans, Craig A. (2006). "Josephus on John the Baptist", in Levine, Amy-Jill; et al. The Historical Jesus in Context. Princeton Univ Press. ISBN 978-0-691-00992-6.
    
  • Nir, R (2012) Josephus’ Account of John the Baptist: A Christian Interpolation? Journal for the Study of the Historical Jesus 10; 32–62
    
  • Godfrey, Neil (2011) 5 reasons to suspect John the Baptist was interpolated into Josephus

What questions? about the historicity of Jesus? Why not: a Jew called Jesus was put at the center of the Christian religion. That's very legitimate (more: necessary) to define his historicity.

That's illogical. A non-sequitur. Just because a Jewish character called Jesus was put at the center of the Christian religion does not make him historical or 'more necessary' for him to be historical'.

Jesus seems to have been a character developed over time - 'fleshed out' [ie. humanised] to give human meaning to the sacrifice of the deity.

Even the mythicists have to explain how that Jesus (historical or not) would have been retrofitted in these Christian documents.

He wouldn't have been retrofitted into Christian documents. He is likely to have been, as the Catholic encylcopedia says, "..the result of a development, of a process at once stimulated by disputes with doubters, both within and without the Church, and retarded by certain obscurities and natural hesitations..".

[Paul the Uncertain]

Neil

There is no single "postmodernist" approach.

That's a relief to me, a suspected postmodernist extremist.

I see your "no single approach," and raise you "an oxymoron so poorly defined as to have no specific meaning." At least that is so in your use, in my opinion.

Every detective, judge and jury wants to see corroboration for any and every claim.

And when they don't get what they want to see, does every detective, judge and jury drop the matter?

On the contrary, judges and juries in American civil cases decide cases on the basis of "preponderance of the evidence," a low-confidence criterion. Other legal systems derived from English law are similar, I am told.

Now, scholars do not need to be decisive the way civil law needs to be. Academic questions can remain open forever. However, any rational person may opine under the qualification "If I had to decide the matter here and now." Elective provisional decisiveness may be attractive to those who wish to write a book that others will read, for example.

In which case, the person might reasonably behave as civil judges and juries do, perhaps using the "anytime" quality of modern (not postmodern, but modern) domain-independent standards of rational uncertainty management. If in addition, the person were educated, then the result of their chosen course of behavior would be exactly educated opinion.

[hakeem]

Christian writings that make references to the Epistles admit that Jesus was the son of God born of a virgin without a human father, the Logos God Creator. It is simply quite absurd to suggest that Jesus was only human when that is precisely what the Epistles argue against.

The claim that Jesus was only human was heretical and is not supported at all in the Epistles and all Christian writings that use the Epistles.

See the writings attributed to Ignatius, Tertullian, Irenaeus, Origen, Eusebius, Lactantius, Jerome, Clement of Alexandria, Augustine of Hippo and others.

In P46 it is stated Jesus is the son of God--the Lord from heaven--a Spirit--the first born of the dead--the Creator.

The Epistles are without historical corroboration with regards to Jesus and associates.

Jesus was always a product of belief--never a product of history.

[andrewcriddle]

Hi Neil

On comparing your article with that of Tim Widowfield, I noticed that IIUC you are both doubtful about whether 'the Lord's brother' is original in Galatians but with rather different scenarios. Tim appears to be suggesting a 1st century CE gloss or interpolation while use seem to be suggesting a late 2nd century addition. (At least I can't see how the non-citation by Tertullian is relevant to an argument that the phrase is not original but a very very early addition.)

Both arguments have difficulties but rather different ones and they can't both be true.

Very early interpolations have to be argued for entirely on internal evidence, and without solid grounds for doubting whether the text is something that the author would have written, we should be reluctant to accept them. However in 1 Corinthians 9:5 Paul says

Do we not have a right to take along a believing wife, even as the rest of the apostles and the brothers of the Lord and Cephas?

i.e. 'brother of the Lord' is a phrase that Paul uses, leaving us without good internal evidence to doubt the authenticity of the phrase in Galatians.

A later interpolation can in principle be supported by external evidence. I'm not sure whether the non-citation by Tertullian is good evidence. One place where Tertullian might have used the phrase but doesn't is in his work against Marcion. However, it is likely that Marcion's Galatians omitted most or all of 1:18-24 and hence Tertullian would have avoided making use of material from this section in this work. My main problem however, is that the idea that the phrase is a late 2nd century interpolation seems highly unlikely given the absence of any surviving early manuscript that omits it.

Andrew Criddle

[Giuseppe]

However in 1 Corinthians 9:5 Paul says

Do we not have a right to take along a believing wife, even as the rest of the apostles and the brothers of the Lord and Cephas?

i.e. 'brother of the Lord' is a phrase that Paul uses, leaving us without good internal evidence to doubt the authenticity of the phrase in Galatians.

There is the concrete possibility that the manuscript read by Porphiry didn't have "brothers of Lord" in 1 Cor 9:5.

viewtopic.php?f=3&t=2614

[andrewcriddle]

However in 1 Corinthians 9:5 Paul says

Do we not have a right to take along a believing wife, even as the rest of the apostles and the brothers of the Lord and Cephas?

i.e. 'brother of the Lord' is a phrase that Paul uses, leaving us without good internal evidence to doubt the authenticity of the phrase in Galatians.

There is the concrete possibility that the manuscript read by Porphiry didn't have "brothers of Lord" in 1 Cor 9:5.

viewtopic.php?f=3&t=2614

Thanks for that Giuseppe.

The Porphyry passage (possibly by a follower of Porphyry but this is not relevant)

Moreover, the same is true of his taking about a wife, for this is what Paul says : " Have we not power to take about a sister, a wife, as also the rest of the apostles, and Peter?" . And then he adds , "For such are false apostles, deceitful workers."
ἔτι δὲ καὶ γυναῖκα περιάγεσθαι, Παύλου καὶ τοῦτο λέγοντος· Μὴ οὐκ ἔχομεν ἐξουσίαν ἀδελφὴν γυναῖκα περιάγεσθαι, ὡς καὶ οἱ λοιποὶ ἀπόστολοι καὶ Πέτρος; εἶτα ἐπιλέγει· Οἱ γὰρ τοιοῦτοι ψευδαπόστολοι, ἐργάται δόλιοι.

Seems to be conflating the rest of the apostles and Peter from 1 Corinthians 9:5 with false apostles, deceitful workers in 2 Corinthians 11:13. mention of the brothers of the Lord would get in the way of this parallelism.

The tendency of Clement and Tertullian to quote/allude to the verse in more than one form makes it difficult to draw conclusions about their underlying text.

Andrew Criddle

[hakeem]

There is simply no historical corroboration for any claim in any Epistle about Jesus and the Apostles by any accepted writings of antiquity. The argument that Jesus existed is based on pure speculation and assumptions.

The Epistles are propaganda in an attempt to historicise the resurrection.

Christian writings from antiquity present the belief in a non-historical resurrected Jesus--God's own son.

The Jesus story was a post 70 CE invention .

[Bernard Muller]

He wouldn't have been retrofitted into Christian documents. He is likely to have been, as the Catholic encylcopedia says, "..the result of a development, of a process at once stimulated by disputes with doubters, both within and without the Church, and retarded by certain obscurities and natural hesitations..".

It's about the selection of Christian texts to be declared as sacred. Sure that took centuries. That does not mean the Catholic Encyclopedia says these texts were manufactured along these centuries. Actually, it thinks that by 100 CE, they all had been written (which I do not agree: as late as 130-150 for me).

The whole of Antiquities 18.5.2 is an interpolation. I stated my reasons here: http://historical-jesus.info/appe.html

Just because a Jewish character called Jesus was put at the center of the Christian religion does not make him historical or 'more necessary' for him to be historical'.

I did not say that. I said: "What questions? about the historicity of Jesus? Why not: a Jew called Jesus was put at the center of the Christian religion. That's very legitimate (more: necessary) to define his historicity."
I meant the historicity of Jesus (yes, no, how) has to be investigated because Paul made such a fuss about him being crucified as Christ. If you want to describe the very origin of Christianity you have to decide about Jesus' historicity, because, according to Paul, that's from Jesus' crucifixion that Christianity started.
I did not say Jesus had to be historical because Paul had him being the origin of Christian faith.

Cordially, Bernard

[Bernard Muller]

to Neil,

What I believe the historian should work with is the Paul on his or her desk. That is the Paul written in the letters and in Acts and elsewhere. That is the Paul we know and for whom we have evidence of some sort -- though see my recent post above in response to you.

Ditto for Jesus. I believe the historian is justified in working with the Paul and Jesus that we have with us today -- the literary Paul and the literary Jesus. If one day we find independent corroboration for these figures outside the texts, then that would be great. But till then, I don't know how to justify removing them from the texts in which we find them.

Well, I can agree with that. As for corroboration for Jesus/Christ from non-Christian sources, there are Tacitus' Annals & Josephus' Antiquity 20 (which of course has been challenged my mythicists).

You've done a pretty amazing amount of work on your site, Bernard, and have made quite a lot of interesting observations. You do indeed exercise a critical spirit in your approach to the documents.

There is one thing that leaves me slightly perturbed when I read your page, however. What concerns me is that you have done so much work, and you have spent a lot of effort to find ways to make all the different pieces of the jigsaw pieces of data fit, testing which pieces are genuine and which are fake, etc, to arrive at a model that makes the best sense of all the data, etc.... so much so that you express your conclusions with a confidence that borders on dogmatic.

Oh, I was not expecting that! but next it got sour:

I worry about the "making all the pieces of the jigsaw fit" approach because it is a way of working with evidence that relies upon assumptions that are scarcely ever questioned. It is a question-begging approach that is all the more convinced of its "truth" (think "confirmation bias") as it finds more and more neat fits for the different pieces.

I never assumed anything in my reconstruction (which by the way is full of destructions, in part due to my rejection of assumptions).

It is too easy to overlook the fact that we are working with manuscripts whose partial content can only be confirmed generations after the the time and place they purport to belong to. It is also easy to overlook the fact that our documents were born at a time when forgeries and interpolations were the rule rather than the exception. (Even the ancient librarians of Alexandria were dedicated to attempting to restore original texts of the "classics" in their own day! If they were working on Christian documents by the same standards they applied to the "classics" many today would accuse them of being nihilistic hyper-sceptics seeking to destroy Christianity.)

I took great care to flesh out the interpolations on the most critical texts (for my reconstruction) emanating from early Christianity. And it is all explained on my website (which? why?).

Cordially, Bernard

[hakeem]

The claim that Jesus died is no different to the claim that Romulus died.

The Jesus story is the same as Greek/Roman mythology.

There is no corroborative historical evidence of any actual characters called Jesus and the Apostles.