Did the Church Fathers / early Christians care about historicity?

[John T]

I will try one last time.
Paul indeed saw Christ as a divine being. Paul did associated Jesus as a historical person. The Church Fathers (Ante-Nicene) also saw Jesus as a real person. These historical facts may be contrary to what the mythicists would have you believe but the evidence says otherwise.
Those thoughts/questions by Jagd have been thoroughly explained by Bart Ehrman's in his book: Did Jesus Exist?
The concept of the Messiah predates Jesus by hundreds of years. The debate by the Pharisees and the followers of Jesus at that time was: Is this Jesus the messiah that the Essenes had predicted?

My apologies to Jagd if I completely missed his original intent.

[ABuddhist]

I will try one last time.
Paul indeed saw Christ as a divine being. Paul did associated Jesus as a historical person. The Church Fathers (Ante-Nicene) also saw Jesus as a real person. These historical facts may be contrary to what the mythicists would have you believe but the evidence says otherwise.
Those thoughts/questions by Jagd have been thoroughly explained by Bart Ehrman's in his book: Did Jesus Exist?
The concept of the Messiah predates Jesus by hundreds of years. The debate by the Pharisees and the followers of Jesus at that time was: Is this Jesus the messiah that the Essenes had predicted?

My apologies to Jagd if I completely missed his original intent.

With all due respect, and I write this as a non-mythicist,

1. Your words are not directly addressing the question of whether the Church Fathers / early Christians cared about historicity. Even assuming that they accepted this (which I think that they did), this does not mean that they necessarily cared about historicity. I mean, people may believe that certain things are historical (or not historical!) without caring about such matters.

2. The fact that you cite Ehrman's book as the definitive refutation of mythicism is evidence of how little you know about such refutations. Ehrman's book, after all, never passed peer review, has been criticized by many for its errors, and has been dissected at length by various other people, as you may read, for example, here: https://vridar.org/other-authors/earl-d ... sus-exist/ . Ironically, there have been more recent, peer-reviewed refutations of mythicism that would have been better for you to cite.

[ABuddhist]

It's quite clear that Paul saw Christ as a divine being of some kind, and even if he thought there was a historical person associated with that divine being, it was extremely unimportant when compared to the divine aspect. Am I mistaken in seeing this as true for the Church Fathers as well? The non-Christian sources often say that the Christians worship a man as a god, and the "man" part could just come from the Gospel character of Christ, not necessarily a historical person.

It appears that Christ was seen as a path to salvation or divinity (either through ritual or as example through the gospel narratives), and the historical personage was as unimportant as the historicity of Osiris for the Isiac initiates, or as inessential as the historicity of the Buddha for most ancient Buddhist practitioners (especially the Mahayana).

The Alexandrian early Christians seem to care much more about the incarnation of Christ as a divine being much more than him as a historical man. One of my friends just shared a quote from Clement, saying the Christ was neither male nor female lol.

As further elaboration about my points, you may find interesting the following blog-post, revealing that Ehrman and Doherty (accidentally!) agree with each other - and inspired my description of the division between average believer and philosopher/theologian: https://vridar.wordpress.com/2012/04/02 ... t-doherty/ .

[John T]

As further elaboration about my points, you may find interesting the following blog-post, revealing that Ehrman and Doherty (accidentally!) agree with each other - and inspired my description of the division between average believer and philosopher/theologian: https://vridar.wordpress.com/2012/04/02 ... t-doherty/ .

You have gone too far off topic. Perhaps you should start another thread on the errors of Dr. Ehrman regarding the myth making of the mythicists.
I will be happy to join you there.

John T

[GakuseiDon]

Paul indeed saw Christ as a divine being. Paul did associated Jesus as a historical person. The Church Fathers (Ante-Nicene) also saw Jesus as a real person. These historical facts may be contrary to what the mythicists would have you believe but the evidence says otherwise.

Yes, and I think that is a powerful factor in determining the strength of historicism over mythicism (using those terms broadly for a moment). No-one seems to have doubted that Jesus was a real person acting in history. No-one seems to have doubted that the written Gospels recorded at least some of the things that that real Jesus said and did. There were questions over the nature of the person (divine, man, phantom) and there were questions over whether the things recorded in the Gospels actually happened (by Celsus and the Emperor Julian, for example; as well as Origen). But the criticisms were all based on the acceptance of the existence of a real person.

But if there is any text from early writings that expressed the idea that Jesus wasn't someone that you could actually see and hear if you had a time machine and went back to that time, I don't know what it is. I wonder what the earliest writing is that included the view that Jesus never existed is? From memory, it is Count Volney in the late 18th Century.

Of course, heretical writings that might have referenced an ahistorical Jesus were unlikely to have been transmitted through the monk text copying system, so all we have are the apologists' reactions to such writings. But similarly, anything written about Jesus' life that were at odds to the Gospel portrayal also would have fallen afoul of the same (e.g. Papias).

[ABuddhist]

I wonder what the earliest writing is that included the view that Jesus never existed is? From memory, it is Count Volney in the late 18th Century.

According to an account of the Cathars during the 13th century, the Cathars believed in a heavenly saviour Jesus never active upon the Earth - although fascinatingly this co-existed with a belief in a historical Jesus:

"Further, in their secret meetings they said that the Christ who was born in the earthly and visible Bethlehem and crucified at Jerusalem was ‘evil’, and that Mary Magdalene was his concubine – and that she was the woman taken in adultery who is referred to in the Scriptures; the ‘good’ Christ, they said, neither ate nor drank nor assumed the true flesh and was never in this world, except spiritually in the body of Paul. I have used the term ‘the earthly and visible Bethlehem’ because the heretics believed there is a different and invisible earth in which – according to some of them – the ‘good’ Christ was born and crucified."

Peter. 1998. The History of the Albigensian Crusade: Peter of Les Vaux-De-Cernay’s Historia Albigensis. Translated by W. A Sibly and M. D Sibly. Woodbridge: Boydell.

[John T]

But if there is any text from early writings that expressed the idea that Jesus wasn't someone that you could actually see and hear if you had a time machine and went back to that time, I don't know what it is. I wonder what the earliest writing is that included the view that Jesus never existed is? From memory, it is Count Volney in the late 18th Century.

According to the noted theological historian Dr. Ehrman, "The first bona fide scholar of the Bible to claim that Jesus never existed was a German theologian named Bruno Bauer,..Bauer produced several books, including Criticism of the Gospel History of John (1840). pg. 16 Did Jesus Exist? Dr. Ehrman goes on to say in later interviews that the mythicists i.e. atheists, latched onto to this in a vain attempt to show "Christianity is completely bogus."

The early Christians cared deeply about the historicity of Jesus, so much that many died defending his historicity. It is only in the last century that atheists disguised as mythicists are trying to flip the script.

[ABuddhist]

The early Christians cared deeply about the historicity of Jesus, so much that many died defending his historicity.

With all due respect, though, they were not asserting his historicity against people believing the contrary, which your phrasing asserts.

Furthermore, your answer is overly narrow, since GDon was talking about the first people to deny historicity, rather than the first biblical scholars.

[GakuseiDon]

I wonder what the earliest writing is that included the view that Jesus never existed is? From memory, it is Count Volney in the late 18th Century.

According to an account of the Cathars during the 13th century, the Cathars believed in a heavenly saviour Jesus never active upon the Earth - although fascinatingly this co-existed with a belief in a historical Jesus:

Fascinating! Thanks ABuddhist. It sounds like they took the idea that the physical world and flesh as being evil and took it to its end point: any fleshly Jesus on earth must be evil as well!

[neilgodfrey]

The early Christians cared deeply about the historicity of Jesus, so much that many died defending his historicity.

They did? So the mythicists were the majority who were persecuting them?