dastardly stem wrote: ↑Mon Jun 26, 2023 3:00 pm
PseudoPaul wrote: ↑Mon Jun 26, 2023 2:48 pm
You've got it exactly backwards. The vast majority of New Testament scholars agree that there is a historical person behind the Jesus in the gospels, although the self-identity and history of that person is very different from what the evangelists portray.
Mythicists are just a few cranks on the fringes of academia who have yet to deal effectively with the historical evidence for Jesus of Nazareth. It's flat earther conspiracy theory nonsense.
Nah...you misunderstand the situation. It may be that if we surveyed all scholars who could be said to be included as having relevant work related in some way to this topic of historical studies about Jesus or the religion, we'd see the majority say Jesus really did live. But, of course, most of those would be Christians anyway (this in fact highlights the big problem with that Habermas guy's work). The problem with that is we have no idea if these scholars have fairly evaluated the question or the data or the scholarly arguments. Its just opinion that may or may not have credible backing. But...if we survey the scholarship--the works being produced by scholars under the rubric of peer review--we see the majority of such scholarship to be mythicism. Historicity needs to enter the arena of these ideas. I think it will one of these days. Until then, I'm happy to concede many scholars assume historicity.
Whoever told this to you was lying to you. There are only a handful of mythicist and they are considered to be cranks.
https://ehrmanblog.org/the-gospels-and- ... -of-jesus/
The Gospels and the Existence of Jesus
October 27, 2016
If you have only thirty minutes to build a case that Jesus of Nazareth really existed, how do you do it?
That was the problem I was confronted with this past Friday at the Mythicist Milwaukee conference, in my debate with Robert Price. Rather than mount a lot of arguments and say very little about each one of them (what we used to call “the shotgun approach” when I was in high school), I thought it would be better just to make a few points and pack them up with evidence and reasoning.
The first and most obvious point, to me, is this. Jesus is one of the two best attested Jews living in Palestine in the entire first century. There were hundreds of thousands of Jews in some way connected with Palestine at the time Only one is better attested than Jesus (with a proviso, which I’ll explain). That one is the Jewish historian Josephus. The reason he is better known than Jesus is because he has left us a large number of writings – a twenty-volume history of the Jewish people, for example, a six-volume discussion of the Jewish War against Rome, and an autobiography. Now *that’s* a lot of documentation for a person! Jesus, so far as we know, didn’t write a thing, and so we have nothing like that from him. Or for any other Jew at the time and place.
But if you look simply at external documentation – that is, references to and discussions about a person by other sources – Jesus in fact is much better documented than Josephus. By an enormous margin.
We have four biographies of Jesus written by different people from the next generation. Four biographies?!? About how many people in all of antiquity do we have four biographies???
I’m not – I am decidedly not – saying that the four Gospels are unproblematic, that they are free from error, contradiction, and bias. As I pointed out during the debate, I have more or less made a career out of evaluating their errors, contradictions, and biases. But we cannot overlook the fact that we have four narrative accounts of the things Jesus said and did. Four lengthy narratives. Written by different people at different times and in different places.
How many (non-self-authored) narratives do we have about the words and deeds of Josephus? None. How many narratives do we have of Caiaphus, the most highly placed Jew of Jesus’ day? None. How many narratives do we have of the words and deeds of the Roman governor Pontius Pilate, the most powerful man in all of Palestine in Jesus’ day? None. How many narratives do we have of any of the hundreds of thousands of people living or even visiting in Palestine from the first century, apart from Jesus? None.
And so for Jesus, we have a wealth of material…
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And so for Jesus, we have a wealth of material at our disposal, far more than for anyone else living at the time in Palestine. Of course, we have to use these sources critically in light of the problems they present us (errors, contradictions, and biases). But when we do, we can indeed discover valuable historical information.
It is important to stress: these are four different accounts. Mythicists often argue that we have only one account, Mark, who made everything up, and the others got their information from Mark. This is wrong on every score.
To begin with, yes it is true that Matthew and Luke (but not John! That’s important) got many of their stories from Mark. But Matthew and Luke are much longer than Mark, and that’s because they got a good bit of material from sources other than Mark. It is widely known that Matthew and Luke shared a source for many of their sayings of Jesus (e.g., the Lord’s Prayer, the Beatitudes, many of their parables and isolated sayings). Scholars call this source Q (from the German word Quelle, which means “source”). Q and Mark were completely independent of one another.
Moreover, Matthew has a number of stories/sayings not found in any of the other Gospels. Scholars refer to his sources of information for this material (on the assumption, that has good reasons for it, that Matthew was not simply inventing these stories himself) as M (Matthew’s special source or sources). Luke too has material found in no other Gospel. Scholars refer to his sources as L (Luke’s special sources).
In addition, there is no hard evidence (for example, the kinds of word-for-word agreements you get between Matthew, Mark, and Luke) that John depended on the other three for any of its stories. That means that John had his own sources. Scholars who have studied John for a living have argued that John had several sources of information available to him: a collection of Jesus’ miracles (the “signs source”); two or more accounts of Jesus’ discourses; and a passion narrative. If this view is right, then John is dependent on at least four earlier accounts from which he has borrowed.
Just in terms of probably (almost certainly) *written* sources, then, within a generation of Jesus’ life we have Mark, Q, M, L, and four sources for John. That’s eight written sources of information about Jesus. Within forty of fifty years of his life. Luke begins his own Gospel by pointing out that “many” had written accounts of Jesus before him (he is explaining why he wants to add yet another written account to the collection). Based on an analysis of the Gospels themselves, he appears to be completely right about that.
The information in the Gospels about Jesus is not from a single source. It’s from at least eight (probably more, since there is no reason to think M and L were only a single source each). Eight that did not depend on each other or even know each other.
Moreover, there are very solid reasons for thinking that these sources all go back to oral traditions that had been in circulation for decades before being written down. That is the subject of my book Jesus Before the Gospels, if you want to read a fuller account of these traditions (and even if you don’t).
The result – even without taking oral traditions into account – is that we have different people in different parts of the world with different backgrounds and different perspectives and different views and different theologies all – independently — telling stories about the man Jesus. How is that likely if the man never existed? If these sources are independent of one another, how did they all manage to tell such stories about Jesus – in many instances, very similar stories (for example, that he came from Nazareth ,that he was baptized, that he had brothers, that he had twelve disciples, that he talked about the kingdom of God, that he told parables, that he used agricultural imagery in his teaching, that he was crucified by Pontius Pilate, and on and on)?
If all we had was a single source, you could say he made it up. But we have way more than that. And there are even more important considerations, which I will start getting to in my next post.
