Weighing up the evidence for the ‘Historical Jesus’

[outhouse]

We don't stop trying to understand the past because the evidence trail decreases. It means your skills set has to be sharper, and you have to rely more on cultural and physical anthropology because you cant even begin to squeak out anything plausible based on limited evidence. Now this is a fact and not up for debate. Sorry you feel that way.

[Leucius Charinus]

The Jesus of cultural anthropology is a modern chimera. We can call him the Anthropological Jesus if you like.


LC

[neilgodfrey]

We don't stop trying to understand the past because the evidence trail decreases. It means your skills set has to be sharper, and you have to rely more on cultural and physical anthropology because you cant even begin to squeak out anything plausible based on limited evidence. Now this is a fact and not up for debate. Sorry you feel that way.

You just made up that fact. Clever.

Anthropology is a tool for interpreting "facts", not finding them. It cannot "find" anything that is not known (or believed) to exist already.

[neilgodfrey]

Civil war history relies more on proof, as there is evidence that can be used to prove history.

Biblical history lacks evidence for proof, and relies on more on plausibility.

Exactly. In the absence of "facts" to work with plausibility is nothing other than creative mind-games. Anything you want to be true can be made to be true if it is plausible. That's why Crossan said all the contradictory results of historical Jesus studies are such an "embarrassment".

[neilgodfrey]

Actually the anthropology of Claude Levi-Strauss when applied to the evidence of the Gospels can show us how the Jesus story is an adaptation of earlier myths. I know one anthropologist is working on that thesis right now.

[arnoldo]

https://theconversation.com/weighing-up ... esus-35319
Raphael Lataster Tutor in Religious Studies at University of Sydney

• Did a man called Jesus of Nazareth walk the earth? Discussions over whether the figure known as the “Historical Jesus” actually existed primarily reflect disagreements among atheists. Believers, who uphold the implausible and more easily-dismissed “Christ of Faith” (the divine Jesus who walked on water), ought not to get involved.
  
  Numerous secular scholars have presented their own versions of the so-called “Historical Jesus” – and most of them are, as biblical scholar J.D. Crossan puts it, “an academic embarrassment”.
  
  From Crossan’s view of Jesus as the wise sage, to Robert Eisenman’s Jesus the revolutionary, and Bart Ehrman’s apocalyptic prophet, about the only thing New Testament scholars seem to agree on is Jesus’ historical existence. But can even that be questioned?
  
  The first problem we encounter when trying to discover more about the Historical Jesus is the lack of early sources. The earliest sources only reference the clearly fictional Christ of Faith.
  
  
  ////
  
  
  
  The methods traditionally used to tease out rare nuggets of truth from the Gospels are dubious.
  
  The criterion of embarrassment says that if a section would be embarrassing for the author, it is more likely authentic. Unfortunately, given the diverse nature of Christianity and Judaism back then (things have not changed all that much), and the anonymity of the authors, it is impossible to determine what truly would be embarrassing or counter-intuitive, let alone if that might not serve some evangelistic purpose.
  
  The criterion of Aramaic context is similarly unhelpful. Jesus and his closest followers were surely not the only Aramaic-speakers in first-century Judea.
  
  The criterion of multiple independent attestation can also hardly be used properly here, given that the sources clearly are not independent.
  
  
  ////
  
  [CONCLUDING REMARKS]
  
  So what do the mainstream (and non-Christian) scholars say about all this? Surprisingly very little; of substance anyway. Only Bart Ehrman and Maurice Casey have thoroughly attempted to prove Jesus’ historical existence in recent times.
  
  Their most decisive point? The Gospels can generally be trusted – after we ignore the many, many bits that are untrustworthy – because of the hypothetical (i.e. non-existent) sources behind them.
  
  Who produced these hypothetical sources? When? What did they say? Were they reliable? Were they intended to be accurate historical portrayals, enlightening allegories, or entertaining fictions?
  
  Ehrman and Casey can’t tell you – and neither can any New Testament scholar.
  
  Given the poor state of the existing sources, and the atrocious methods used by mainstream Biblical historians, the matter will likely never be resolved. In sum, there are clearly good reasons to doubt Jesus’ historical existence – if not to think it outright improbable.

LC

[cienfuegos]

We don't stop trying to understand the past because the evidence trail decreases. It means your skills set has to be sharper, and you have to rely more on cultural and physical anthropology because you cant even begin to squeak out anything plausible based on limited evidence. Now this is a fact and not up for debate. Sorry you feel that way.

Who said anything about stopping? My point is that you overstate the strength of what you can conclude based "on limited evidence." The strength of your conclusion is only as strong as your evidence, which as you admit is weak. Therefore, you can only make very tentative, cautious conclusions. You don't do that. I have seen both you and toejam claiming "sound historical conclusions" while refusing to apply standard historical methods. Instead you apply methods that are able to uncover facts from fiction. That's a problem with your argument.

[Bernard Muller]

Your analysis should begin with source criticism.

I have been doing that a lot.

I see you are using mostly Paul, but also Mark. I support your use of Paul on the grounds that it is a first person account and we can get some idea about the nature of Paul based on his multiple writings. Unfortunately, he gives us little historical context to assess his reliability.

Paul gave little historical context, true, but certainly enough to ascertain the past existence of a human Jesus, with some attributes (which cause problems for mythicists).
http://historical-jesus.info/6.html

We also do not have contemporaries who comment on Paul or who he is. We are pretty much reliant on internal analysis to assess Paul. Now when I say that, it's important to note that we still have to evaluate assertions in Paul individually.

Well, we can learn a lot about Paul by reading his epistles. What he wrote about an earthly human Jesus is against the grain relative to his great savior & Son of God.
If we had contemporaries who commented on Paul (and wrote about it in surviving writings), they certainly would see him very differently from each others. Some would be enthusiastic about him, other would hate him, depending if they were Pauline converts or enemies (and he had both of them). As a result we would not know anything about him for sure because of the very different opinions.
Furthermore, Paul gave many indications in his epistles on how he was seen by contemporaries and that was not often roses, but rather negative.

I do not see where you establish a foundation for using Mark as a source for historical data. The writing is of unknown origin. We do not know the purpose, biases, or general reliability of the author. We don't really know the context in which this writing was created nor the audience. If we are going to apply historical methods, we have to agree that no solid historical data can be culled from the Gospel of Mark.

Historians have to work with writings of unknown origin many times. Furthermore, because of the many added embellishment and fiction, the author was certainly not going to reveal his name and provide the date of writing. However, that does not mean there is not a backbone of truth in his gospel. And we can do that by default, by eliminating most of his words, for reasons which can be explained.
By reading carefully the gospel, we can in a large measure figure out the context, the biases, the original audience with its doubts, disbeliefs, concerns that the author was trying to answer favorably (in order to keep these Christians in the flock).
I am not a fan of whatever is called historical method (which has been "interpreted" & misused a lot). I rather see my inquiry as investigating a crime scene, looking for contexts (historical & religious & social), multiple various clues & dissimulated evidence, in order to minimally reconstruct the birth of Christianity and find the culprits.

Cordially, Bernard

[Bernard Muller]

Bernard, you may be more up on the literature than I. Ray Brown said that I Thess was the first epistle, written around 52. But a good number of people, according to Wikipedia, put Galatians around 50 or even 49.

Ray brown was one (Christian) scholar among many, who for superficial and dubious reasons, give/gave a multiplicity of dating for Galatians. The very conservative NIV bible gives a dating for Galatians as late as 57 CE. The same NIV gives a dating of spring 57 for Romans. Theories abound on when Galatians was written, but I think I am on solid ground with mine, in view of the many similarities with Romans (which are not found in other Pauline epistles).

Anyway, the Criteria have to do with the attempt to pull "nuggets" out of the gospels. So far, your allowances for Markan invention or fictionalization or whatever we call it seem to undermine the status of that gospel as a source for authentic info about the disciples (and Jesus), since we don't have a way of getting behind Mark's authorial portrayal.

What I drew from gMark (and the NT generally) are certainly not "nuggets", but things which go against the Christian faith big time (as against what "Mark" tried to prove).

As for your examples, I also have mines favoring my case:
Rosa Parks & the Civil Right Movement, Gravilo Princip & World War 1 and (my thanks to Carrier) Haile Selassie & the Rastafari religion.

Cordially, Bernard

[outhouse]

We don't stop trying to understand the past because the evidence trail decreases. It means your skills set has to be sharper, and you have to rely more on cultural and physical anthropology because you cant even begin to squeak out anything plausible based on limited evidence. Now this is a fact and not up for debate. Sorry you feel that way.

You just made up that fact. Clever.

Anthropology is a tool for interpreting "facts", not finding them. It cannot "find" anything that is not known (or believed) to exist already.

Context is key when the evidence dries up, and one still would like to know the most likely events that took place.

Facts can develop from anthropological findings, correlated to such.