Reconstructing the Historical Jesus

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How can you argue for a historical jesus and NOT think xtianity is true? IF jeebus existed in the context the bible paints him, xtianity IS the one trve religion and all that.

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The same way that I can argue for a historical D'Artagnan, while thinking that The Three Musketeers is fiction. And there WAS a historical D'ArtagnanThe same way that I can argue for a historical Arthur without believing Malory.Christian churches don't accept that Jesus was just another cult leader, no more divine than David Koresh or that he was a failed wanna-be Messiah. So how is arguing for that, arguing for Christianity?Edited by PaulK, : No reason given.

Most of the others also weren't alive when jesus is meant to have lived, so Jon's use of the word 'common' is unfounded.
(His list only had 60 messiah claimants over ~2000 years. Considering how many people have lived and died in the past 2000 years - 60 seems like an infrequent occurance.)So, when Jon claims:
"'Messiahs' were common; almost all of them ended their lives executed by the Romans."
he doesn't have any evidence that there were messiahs or that messiahs were common or that messiahs were mostly executed by Romans.Your very simple question: "where did you get this information?" was answered with a lie. The correct answer is: "Jon made it up." Why would someone just make up a lie to cover their lack of knowledge..........
*cough*religion*cough*

Okay; no position. I get it. And no interest in honest discussion either, it would appear.Jon

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Love your enemies!

But that's not what I asked, is it? If you are granting that jesus was just some dude and the bible is not telling an accurate depiction, then what is the point? That's just pointing to more proof that it's all a big fairy tale.

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"Why don't you call upon your God to strike me? Oh, I forgot it's because he's fake like Thor, so bite me" -Greydon Square

The point is, as the thread title tells us, to reconstruct the historical Jesus.If you don't think this a worth-while endeavor, then that's fine; but it's the reason the rest of us are here.Jon

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Love your enemies!

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But that's not what I asked, is it? If you are granting that jesus was just some dude and the bible is not telling an accurate depiction, then what is the point? That's just pointing to more proof that it's all a big fairy tale.

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Well you said that accepting a historical Jesus - which means accepting that there was a real person behind the stories, not believing those stories - meant accepting Christianity.
If you didn't understand the concept, maybe you shouldn't have jumped into the conversation.

What's the point in seperating the historical Mohammed from the folk-tales and religious claims about Mohammed?What's the point in seperating the historical George Washington from the apocryphal folk claims made about him?What's the point of history?

Do they? What's the evidence that there are any more "sources" for the Jesus mythology than what's in the Bible?That's kind of what I'm getting at. An independent, not-Biblical source of knowledge about Jesus that isn't just a credulous repetition of Christian claims. Only because Christians do. Tacitus isn't any kind of independent source for the existence of Jesus; he's just credulously repeating Christian belief that Jesus was somebody who existed.Tacitus had no idea whether Jesus really existed or not; he simply took claims of existence at face value. Tacitus is no more evidence for the existence of Jesus than you are, Paul. Also wrong. Again, Josephus is nothing more than a credulous repetition at face value of Christian claims of the existence of Jesus. It's quite clear from the context. The Gospel writers didn't make up Jesus, PaulK. They wrote down Jesus mythology that they already accepted as true. Therefore their motivations and agenda are irrelevant and can't be used to refute the mythical Jesus position.The origin of the Jesus mythology is clearly stories and legends that spread via word of mouth long before they were written down by the Gospel authors. That's clear from the text. Nobody here is suggesting that the Gospel writers did anything but elaborate on existing, widespread myth. Yes, there's abundant difference: being someone who makes up a story is common and mundane. Being somebody who forms the historical basis for a religion of a billion adherents is extraordinary. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Ordinary claims - "somebody made up a story" - do not. Historical Jesus proponents have never even tried to rise to their extraordinary burden of evidence. Instead, like you, they prefer to obfuscate with invective.

Arriving at the best picture of the past we can develop with what evidence is currently available to us.That's a project I'd like to see historical Jesus defenders get on board with. Instead they insist on violating Indiana Jones' most important precept: "we cannot afford to take mythology at face value."

Historical Jesus reconstructionists do not make that error. They appreciate the documents they have to work with are biased, and filled with myth. They attempt to extract from them kernels of truth generally using the following criteria (taken from wiki):Multiple attestation:- The criterion of multiple attestation or independent attestation is an important tool used by scholars. Simply put, the more independent witnesses that report an event or saying, the better.
The gospels are not always independent of each other. There is a possibility that Matthew and Luke copied contents from Mark's gospel. There are, however, at least four early, independent sources.Embarrassment - The criterion of embarrassment, also known as criterion of dissimilarity, is an analytical tool that Biblical scholars use in assessing whether the New Testament accounts of Jesus' actions and words are historically accurate. Simply put, trust the embarrassing material. If something is awkward for an author to say and he does anyway, it is more likely to be true.The Criterion of coherence (also called consistency or conformity) can be used only when other material has been identified as authentic. This criterion holds that a saying and action attributed to Jesus may be accepted as authentic if it coheres with other sayings and actions already established as authentic. While this criterion cannot be used alone, it can broaden the database for what Jesus actually said and did.And so on. When these criteria are employed a very limited historical Jesus emerges.

Except for when it comes to the historical existence of Jesus. Then, all of a sudden, myths are taken completely at face value and bias is assumed not to be present.How else to explain the recurring fact that the source of the claims for the existence of Jesus - the Gospels - has several times been put forth as evidence of those claims? Not present in the case of the historicity of Jesus. What we have is one source that claims the existence of Jesus, and then several sources that repeat the claim of the first source. This is identical to the state of "multiple attestation" for documents about Jesus Malverde and John Frum, also mythical figures. Agreed. And there are no "independent witnesses" that report the existence of Jesus. Not a single one! The Gospels simply claim that the ministry of Jesus was witnessed. That's not at all the same thing. That's a claim for which there is no evidence and would be entirely trivial to fabricate. It's the easiest thing in the world to say "oh, a hundred people must have seen me at the mall yesterday". That, unfortunately, is not even a single example of a real eyewitness. A good liar knows this and learns to embarrass himself as part of the lie. I learned this in third grade when I learned to fabricate B's instead of A+'s. If I could know how to exploit the "doctrine of embarrassment" at the age of eight, then it's reasonable to assume that adult mythmakers in the first century knew how, too. The problem is, there's nothing to be coherent with. All we have of Jesus is a single cluster of interdependent sources making claims, and then others repeating those claims at face value. There's no "coherence" argument that defends the historicity of Jesus, there's only post-hoc explanations that cram a contorted historical Jesus into the diminishing hole left for him in history's documentary lacunas.The historical Jesus model is little more than the kind of alternate or secret history story where (for instance) a writer exploits Agatha Christie's unexplained three-day absence to conclude that she battled enormous alien insects in early 20th century England and then had her memory wiped by Doctor Who. It's not an attempt to seek historical truth. It's an attempt to take Christianity at face value while not running afoul of the real historical record. It's an attempt to exploit historical ignorance and craft post-hoc explanations for how a man could be the seed of a major world religion and yet leave no other mark on history whatsoever. When these criteria are employed nothing emerges at all. Because that's what there is to "historical Jesus" - absolutely nothing.

No. Saying that Mohammed exists is not the same as accepting the myths about Mohammed such as his flying around on a horse. So you say. But there are plenty of historians that disagree with you. I believe it was worded that embarassing claims are more likely to be true than non-embarassing claims, not that they are to be taken as absolute proof.

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Do they? What's the evidence that there are any more "sources" for the Jesus mythology than what's in the Bible?

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That's kind of what I'm getting at. An independent, not-Biblical source of knowledge about Jesus that isn't just a credulous repetition of Christian claims.

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You're asking two different questions there. There is reason to believe that the Gospel authors used sources lost to us. If 'Q' existed, it would be one. That doesn't mean that those other sources weren't credulous - but then the mere existence of other sources says nothing about the credulity of their authors.

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Only because Christians do.

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That is what I believe, although it can't be proved. However the point was to give the lie to you false assertion that Tacitus did not make such a statement and that I was taking it out of context.

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Also wrong. Again, Josephus is nothing more than a credulous repetition at face value of Christian claims of the existence of Jesus. It's quite clear from the context.

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It can't be "also" wrong because you admitted that I was right about Tacitus. However, it is you that is wrong. You appear to be referring to the so-called Testamonium Flavian which - as we have it - is TOO Christian to be plausibly written by Josephus. The possibility you have to deal with there is that a genuine Josephan reference was corrupted - perhaps by the mistaken incision of Christian marginalia. This is certainly a plausible possibility, and it is hard to argue against.

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The Gospel writers didn't make up Jesus, PaulK. They wrote down Jesus mythology that they already accepted as true. Therefore their motivations and agenda are irrelevant and can't be used to refute the mythical Jesus position.

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Well we are getting a little more meat to your proposal. So, who did make up the story, and how do you know that they didn't have a real person to hang their fictions on ?

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Yes, there's abundant difference: being someone who makes up a story is common and mundane. Being somebody who forms the historical basis for a religion of a billion adherents is extraordinary. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Ordinary claims - "somebody made up a story" - do not. Historical Jesus proponents have never even tried to rise to their extraordinary burden of evidence. Instead, like you, they prefer to obfuscate with invective.

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Well that's a pretty silly argument. The religion exists. Someone must have started it. Why you think that the founder is far more likely to be lost and forgotten rather than remembered by his followers is something you need to explain.And it is pretty clear who prefers to obfuscate with invective.

This could be an endless list of 'turtles all the way down'.Since the jesus myth seems to be based on the horus myth and/or the mithra myth, I doubt we will ever be able to answer that question.
If there is a real person that those myths are based on, then he was around a long time before jesus was meant to be alive.Edited by Panda, : No reason given.

'Fraid so. I've never claimed that it is. But the fact that the Qu'ran exists and claims the existence of Mohammed isn't evidence for the existence of Mohammed, no more than a post of me claiming that Claudia Schiffer is standing in my kitchen is evidence that Claudia Schiffer is standing in my kitchen.Invariably the "evidence" for Christ is nothing more than taking the claims of the Gospels at least partially at face value, and offering the claims of the Gospels as evidence for themselves. You did it, Modulus. When asked what the evidence for the existence of Jesus was, you replied:

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The five Gospels and Paul.

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I mean, did that not happen? (By my count it happened twice.) But the "Gospels and Paul" can't be evidence for the claim that Jesus existed because the "Gospels and Paul" are the claim that Jesus existed. Absent the first gospel there's none of the others. Absent the Gospels, there's no Paul. And absent the Gospels and Paul there's nobody claiming the existence of Jesus Christ.A claim can't support itself (except trivially, when the claim is "I am making a claim.") That's an incredibly basic point of evidence that Historical Jesus proponents like yourself have repeatedly attempted to turn on its head. They disagree on the basis of no evidence, as I've demonstrated. Then you've made a trivial claim. Perhaps the difference is merely a 1% difference in likelihood of veracity between embarrassing claims and self-gratifying claims. In that case the principle of embarrassment is no guide at all to what is most likely true or false, since we're not comparing an embarrassing claim with a non-embarrassing claim. We're comparing mythical Jesus to historical Jesus. (Or, more accurately - mostly mythical Jesus to all mythical Jesus.)