Revised 'Mythicism'

Discussion about the New Testament, apocrypha, gnostics, church fathers, Christian origins, historical Jesus or otherwise, etc.
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Secret Alias
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Joined: Sun Apr 19, 2015 8:47 am

Revised 'Mythicism'

Post by Secret Alias »

I am not sure if we should argue that Jesus never existed.

The argument should be that there may never have existed the 'Jesus' described in the gospel.

Did the miracles happen? No. Did Jesus pretend he could perform miracles? That he was a magician? I really don't know. But the gospels say the miracles happened which makes them unreliable pieces of evidence just as hagiographies tell us of miracles and stupid things happening to saints. We don't take them as history.

If Papias says that Matthew was based on Mark and Mark was a disjointed serious of anecdotes that doesn't mean that there was a correct ordering of the same narrative or that the individual anecdotes were based on historical events. Papias may have been providing a description of the 'feel' or the sense of what the narrative looked/felt like to readers. Like the way Fellini movies or Woody Allen movies have a 'feel' to them.

If you strip the miracles and the talking gods from the narrative what do you have? A guy walking around Judea named Jesus or Joshua. Yeah there were a lot of those. I admit. That the gospels tell of a Jesus walking in Judea who was crucified is another matter. But does the existence of Jesus depend on whether he was crucified? That's how Jesus died. Not sure that we can ever know whether Jesus was 'really' crucified. The point is that the historicists use the crucifixion as a beachhead and then allow the sayings and the actions of Jesus to come like a storming of the beaches of Normandy.

But it's not that simple. If you start with the narrative and ignore the crucifixion there's very little reliable evidence. The crucifixion is a passive act. It was done TO Jesus if it was historical. But I am not sure that there were eyewitnesses to that event who later would have attested to his existence.
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