Re: Why Paul never quotes Jesus
Posted: Sun Jan 16, 2022 10:08 pm
all the passages where Paul reports "the words of the Lord", obviously.
Investigating the roots of western civilization (ye olde BC&H forum of IIDB lives on...)
https://earlywritings.com/forum/
all the passages where Paul reports "the words of the Lord", obviously.
Yes, I argue the same. The issue is that many people see the "historical Jesus" as synonymous to the "Gospel Jesus", or what I call "the newspaper reporter Jesus". That is, they strawman that, if there was a historical Jesus, it meant that there had to have been people walking around behind Jesus, writing down what he said and what he did, like a news reporter.Philologus wrote: ↑Sun Jan 16, 2022 11:42 amMy argument was not that Jesus literally never said anything. I meant to say that he never taught anything new. His significance to his early followers had absolutely nothing to do with any new teachings, but rather his role in an apocalyptic movement that ended with him being executed. As such, the idea of Jesus being a wisdom teacher who had many clever things to teach and routinely impressed his audience and humiliated his opponents seems like a wholesale invention by later generations.
I understand. That seems intuitive, but I am not sure it's necessarily the case that Jesus, specifically, was an irreplaceable component. For instance, the answer to the question "Why not Judas the Galilean?" may largely consist of many factors having nothing to do with Judas or Jesus, and everything to do with timing, circumstances, other individuals (such as Paul), etc.Giuseppe wrote: ↑Sun Jan 16, 2022 10:07 pmI think that it is a rational question, to ask: why just Jesus ? Why not Theudas? Why not Judas the Galilean? Why not Jesus b. Ananias? Etc...Philologus wrote: ↑Sun Jan 16, 2022 1:08 pm
Why did Jesus have to have original teachings to be different or unique? What would that explain?
I thought the 'newspaper reporter Jesus' was a Superman reference, where Christ is Superman and the historical Jesus is Clark Kent, the average man who worked at a newspaper.GakuseiDon wrote: ↑Sun Jan 16, 2022 10:25 pm But it's obvious that the Gospels are literary devices, with a lot of the sayings based on the OT. So why assume a "newspaper reporter Jesus"? It's like the argument is that the less Gospel material that can be pinned to a historical Jesus, the less likely a historical Jesus existed. But that's simply not true.
How do you explain that?But, as I've said many times, the wider scope is that Paul rarely quotes anyone directly, not just Jesus; and Paul rarely gives time and place about anything, not just Jesus (whether earthly or celestial).
It's in the alternate version of Matt 16:Philologus wrote: ↑Mon Jan 17, 2022 12:10 amI thought the 'newspaper reporter Jesus' was a Superman reference, where Christ is Superman and the historical Jesus is Clark Kent, the average man who worked at a newspaper.GakuseiDon wrote: ↑Sun Jan 16, 2022 10:25 pm But it's obvious that the Gospels are literary devices, with a lot of the sayings based on the OT. So why assume a "newspaper reporter Jesus"? It's like the argument is that the less Gospel material that can be pinned to a historical Jesus, the less likely a historical Jesus existed. But that's simply not true.
It's not quite that. It's that some people -- certainly some mythicists -- while acknowledging that the historical Jesus position might allow that the miracles didn't occur, nevertheless must contain an assumption that Jesus was an itinerant teacher who said many of the things in the Gospels. I see it in mythicists like Doherty and rgprice, where they note the lack of a Gospel saying in Paul and find it a problem for the historicist position. Of course, it's only a problem for the position that holds that the Gospel saying actually goes back to a Jesus, which is usually the province of apologists.Philologus wrote: ↑Mon Jan 17, 2022 12:10 amAnyway, I think people have a "plausibility bias" where they are less likely to accept that Jesus walked on water, but more likely to accept that he said, "Love your enemy." While it's true that miracle stories are less likely than sayings and parables, if we know the gospels are manufacturing all the miracle stories, it seems reasonable to consider the possibility that they also manufactured all the sayings and parables.
I can't explain it within Paul. But the problem is much wider than Paul's literature. Doherty has a light-bulb moment in his "Jesus: Neither God Nor Man" but it never strikes him what the significance of it is. As far as I am aware, I'm the only one who ever argued the point with him on this topic. He wrote:Philologus wrote: ↑Mon Jan 17, 2022 12:10 amHow do you explain that?But, as I've said many times, the wider scope is that Paul rarely quotes anyone directly, not just Jesus; and Paul rarely gives time and place about anything, not just Jesus (whether earthly or celestial).
is this a profession of Jesus's agnosticism, i.e. the idea that the historical Jesus could even be absent (i.e. not-existent), the evidence we have is however equally expected under the mythicist paradigm ?Philologus wrote: ↑Sun Jan 16, 2022 11:58 pm I understand. That seems intuitive, but I am not sure it's necessarily the case that Jesus, specifically, was an irreplaceable component.
That may be a stronger hypothesis. Why do you think it's only partial?GakuseiDon wrote: ↑Mon Jan 17, 2022 1:21 am A partial explanation might be a process of self-selection. The more information about Jesus and the early church in an epistle, the more chance it might run afoul of later orthodoxy and so not be selected to being copied and transmitted on. That seems to be what happened to Papias's five books of oracles by Jesus, which probably didn't make it past the Fifth Century CE. So we are left with works that contain generalised content. But as I said it is only a partial explanation.
If you really believe in even a shred of Jesus then we'll be done very quickly. Naturally, Thomas created the parables just as JK Rowling created Harry Potter: there never was any Jesus to go along with the text.Philologus wrote: ↑Sun Jan 16, 2022 1:13 pmI'm assuming you must agree that someone did in fact make up the parables. It's only a question of who.
Scholars agree that many of the parables do not go back to Jesus himself. So it is conceivable that none of them do. There seems to be an agreement that later Christian communities invented parables, teachings, and sayings that they attributed to Jesus. There's nothing extraordinary about this thread's hypothesis.
It doesn't fully explain the pattern on what we see over a range of material over the first few centuries. A few years ago I created a thread here called "New Testament -- which are the mythicist texts? Analysis of Carrier OHJ", here: viewtopic.php?f=3&t=4753 There is little difference between texts that are marked 'historical' and 'mythical', with the 'historical' texts often containing just one statement of 'historicity'.Philologus wrote: ↑Mon Jan 17, 2022 9:30 amThat may be a stronger hypothesis. Why do you think it's only partial?GakuseiDon wrote: ↑Mon Jan 17, 2022 1:21 am A partial explanation might be a process of self-selection. The more information about Jesus and the early church in an epistle, the more chance it might run afoul of later orthodoxy and so not be selected to being copied and transmitted on. That seems to be what happened to Papias's five books of oracles by Jesus, which probably didn't make it past the Fifth Century CE. So we are left with works that contain generalised content. But as I said it is only a partial explanation.
I have never understood why this fact (you insist continually on) would be a point going against Carrier. If you have just called "indifference about a historical Jesus" the partial absence of historicist details in the post-pauline writings, then accordingly you should call "ignorance about a historical Jesus" the total absence of historicist details in the pauline epistles.GakuseiDon wrote: ↑Tue Jan 18, 2022 1:24 amAccording to Dr Carrier, 2 Peter was a forgery by later historicists. But take out that one passage, and it reads pretty much like nearly all the rest of the literature of the time: lack of details, not just about Jesus, but about everything else as well