The Jesus myth Part I

[Kishkumen]

Jesus being a historical person is not nearly as interesting as how this all was crafted together to give us such amazing reading and interesting learning. Because one KEY is to read Homer's Iliad and Odyssey right along with the Gospels. And Vergil's Aeneid, as well as Euripides Bacchae. These, as well as the Jewish materials, most especially that of the Elisha/Elijah cycle in the Old Testament, for which the plot of Jesus' life is based upon. The New Testament is therefore based upon the greatest of the Greek epics, and the ancient Hebrew epic. It is this magnificent greatness that makes Jesus worth reading about because it is an updating, an upgrading, a deliberate re-contexting with tremendous meaning for every reader who approaches it in a manner more accurately than mere dry history, which bores more than instructs.

Very good insights, Philo. Yes, the myth part is what makes it exciting. It is what gives it depth and richness. And I would say that in the case of the Book of Mormon, we really do have something that is absolutely not history but is presented as being something like history, and like the Bible its richness lies in its continuation of past myths.

[Res Ipsa]

You typically see ideas swirling around in society, which come to fruition through a single or a few individuals. It's possible a group of Jewish people got together to concoct a story, to invent a completely new conception of God... but it's more likely that there was a real person at the center of that story that served as its basis.

The historical perspective of the New Testament is that over time as the gospels were written, Jesus slowly morphed from human teacher -> God. In your argument, they would have simply started by creating Jesus the Man-God from the beginning, since there was no actual man to start with. I think that is a much more complicated explanation to explain what happened.

I don't follow the premise of the argument being disproved by what actually happened. If Jesus was just a man, who made all sorts of promises which didn't come true, then his followers would need to begin to construct a story for WHY the promises he made didn't happen. Why their leader died and wasn't victorious. Those ideas would have been prompted by the death of the actual person, not invented by them from nothing.

I really don’t have a strong position either way. But there are certain premises or arguments that bother me. How do myths originate? Must every mythical figure be based on a real person? Was there an actual hook handed man that the well known urban legend was based on? Or an original Slenderman? Was there a tall woodsman named Paul with an ox named Babe that he painted blue?

Or how about Rainbow Woman? Corn boy? Pollen Girl?

Or, closer to home, how about Adam, Eve, Noah, Abraham, Moses? Are each of them patterned after an actual person?

Myths are stories. Why would we believe that human brains are capable of including all kinds of fantastical, improbable things and events, but that they somehow lack the ability to create a person that never existed as part of the stories?

As to the contradiction between the premise and the known facts, one can certainly invent a set of facts to explain away the contradiction. But that doesn’t make the premise valid. Does Ehrman or anyone else present evidence as to why and how Jesus’s followers mythologized his life. Any evidence they were making up excuses for perceived broken promises? Or are we just mind reading ancient Jews?

Start with what happened: a group of Jews invented a messiah that was not like David. Maybe it was based on some ordinary human or maybe the messiah was created as part of the myth creation. Regardless, they created a non-David Messiah. Given that fact, the blanket premise “Jews would not have created a messiah like David is false. It’s fallacious to use it to reject some, but not all, possible explanations for why and how it happened.

I don’t think it takes a conspiracy or any complex process to create an urban legend or folklore or myth. If we apply the version of Occam’s razor that says don’t multiply entities needlessly, do we actually need real guy Jesus? Or should the razor cut him away?

I don’t have any good answers or firm positions on the ultimate issue. But I am skeptical of several arguments used by New Testament Scholars like Ehrman (who is not a historian) in support of real guy Jesus. On the other hand, while I think Carrier does a good job of critiquing the evidence in favor of real guy Jesus, I’m deeply skeptical of his Jesus from outer space hypothesis (Symmacus has expressed this more eloquently than I could ever hope to).

I’m sympathetic with Kish’s view that the story fits well with the historical context. But is that because the story is built around a kernel of real events or because the story originated with people who lived at that time? I don’t know and have no idea how I could tell the difference.

I enjoy discussing this topic because, to me, it presents an interesting puzzle. And I have no stake in the outcome because I don’t believe in a divine Jesus. I just get to all a bunch of questions and see where they go.

[Physics Guy]

My father died 20 some odd years ago. If on record we had two stories about him, one from me and one from my sister, we'd have really good sources to suggest he was a real person having lived a real life. But as it happens the two sources could present a wildly contradicting person, so much so it'd be hard to know which divergent view was most representative of the person. The result may be a problem, much like you mention for Socrates, suggesting we don't know which he really was or if both are wrong or exaggerated. But the question is not can we accurately and consistently recreate the man. It is did he live? And on that question, I'd say without question the sources would be enough to say yes.

Sure. But the same kind of natural processes that produce divergent accounts of an ordinary person can produce mythical-sounding accounts of a real religious leader. And with this recognition most of Carrier’s case dissolves.

The quality and quantity of sources as described for the question did Socrates live dwarf the sources for Jesus. That's not to say Socrates lived and Jesus didn't, mind you. But it's a telling data point.

Is it really? Socrates is mostly known as the figure in Plato’s dialogs. And the Socrates figure in these is considered most likely, I believe, to be a literary mouthpiece for Plato.

[huckelberry]

Thanks. Sounds interesting.

Sure.
I got so enmeshed in it, I lost all track of time. A rather large book, but NOT small print, and it's a fantastic mystery - detective - travel guide - serious scholarly book, just very fascinating to read. This kid graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Brown University with a degree in Latin, Greek AND Sanskrit! His research and scholarship are seriously quite in depth and amazing. His experiences including GETTING INSIDE the Vatican super secret and impossible to get in hidden library (with permission and an escort of Catholicism who was helping him with his thesis!!!) is just eye popping incredible! Truly a great book. And he found what he was looking for! Seriously. I am in it again for the 2nd time already and I have only had it a week. And there is really new scientific ways of testing his evidence, they have done so, and he is right! Absolutely delicious to see how science has now truly legitimately come to rescue the ancient mysteries, both Greek and Christian ones. Kishkumen is gonna LOVE this book as well. And it isn't expensive.

philo, you could just for the sake of communicating with us tell us something more specific . He found a something which was what he was looking for, it was in the secret library, it was proven by science. Sounds like the script of a new movie thriller. I do not know how to begin to relate to this without some specifics about what you are talking about.

Mixing with mysteries? Considering second century Christian discussion such as Iranaeus it is clear there were a variety of groups with various combinations of such material. The catholic church kept what they understood to be most reliably primary and ended up with beliefs unlike the syncranistic groups. Modern writers more sympathetic to gnostic ideas complain Iraneeus was unsympathetic and did not really understand those groups. There is perhaps some truth to that but he is intelligent and does present a survey of the variety of beliefs and systems and contrasts them to Catholic understanding.

One or more of those groups took psychedelics? Perhaps. I know of no reason to think that impossible.

[huckelberry]

Locked in a vault under the floor of the sublibrary basement accessed by our hero is found a copy of Papias history of first century Christianity. When the guards find out what had been accessed and photoed they commenced a search and destroy mission taking us across three continents....

Somehow we need to fit in a scene with snakes.

[Res Ipsa]

Locked in a vault under the floor of the sublibrary basement accessed by our hero is found a copy of Papias history of first century Christianity. When the guards find out what had been accessed and photoed they commenced a search and destroy mission taking us across three continents....

Somehow we need to fit in a scene with snakes.

I’m not saying the secret is drugs…

But it’s drugs.

[drumdude]

I enjoy discussing this topic because, to me, it presents an interesting puzzle. And I have no stake in the outcome because I don’t believe in a divine Jesus. I just get to all a bunch of questions and see where they go.

I agree. I just tend to side with the experts first, who seem to have settled against the myth position, even though most of them are non-theists.

I haven't researched the topic nearly enough to be able to deviate from the consensus. And it seems, sadly, that since it happened so long ago we will likely never be able to say definitively one way or the other.

I'll echo the sentiment that the content of the gospels is equally if not more valuable, just like all the other magnificent ancient literary works. It gives me hope for humanity that we could produce such works.

[Manetho]

Does Ehrman or anyone else present evidence as to why and how Jesus’s followers mythologized his life? Any evidence they were making up excuses for perceived broken promises? Or are we just mind reading ancient Jews?

There is some evidence for it, in that other Jews practiced similar reinterpretations of texts, and that some of the texts Christians cited as prophecies don't actually match what happened to Jesus. From https://www.quora.com/How-do-atheists-o ... m-ONeill-1 :

Amongst the texts found in the Dead Sea Scrolls are several works of so-called pesharim — books of "interpretation" where the writer takes books, sections or various sentences from the Torah and the Nevi'im (the works which make up the Pentatuch and the Prophets in the Christian Old Testament) and "interpret" them to "show" how they actually refer to things that have happened in the writer's own time. So the book of Habbakuk was written in the mid to late Seventh Century BC in the context of the rise of the Neo-Babylonian Empire and its threat to Israel. Writing sometime in the First Century BC, the writer of the "Habbakuk Pesher" ("1QpHab" amongst the Dead Sea Scrolls) took this work and interpreted it to "show" that its prophecies had been "fulfilled" by the Roman occupation of Palestine and use it to "show" that Habbakuk was also referring to the "Teacher of Righteousness" and his opponent the "Wicked Priest" — the leader and the main rival of a sect responsible for much of the Dead Sea Scrolls material.

This kind of scriptural exegesis was common in the Second Temple period, ie the period in which the first Jesus sect and earliest form of what was to become Christianity arose. Jews in this period widely believed that their scriptures could be read on several levels and that the higher levels were ones where a second layer of meaning — often prophetic meaning — could be discerned by studying the text in the light of a later revelation or insight. In the case of the "Habbakuk Pesher" and many other pesherim in the Dead Sea Scrolls material, this insight was the fervent belief that their sect's "Teacher of Righteousness" had the true understanding of God and that this had been foretold in the scriptures. What his followers had to do was look at the scriptures with this understanding in mind and they would "see" how various texts, sentences and phrases could be interpreted truly to show that their leader "fulfilled" the prophetic level of meaning in these texts…

The first followers of Jesus, like the Dead Sea Scrolls sects before them and many other Jews of their time, performed this kind of exegesis as well, producing pesherim that they felt "proved" their leader had been prophesied throughout scripture…

One dilemma the first followers of Jesus had was how they could continue to claim Jesus was the Messiah given that he had been crucified. This was contrary to all expectations about the Messiah, who was supposed to cleanse, renew or liberate Israel and usher in the kingship of Yahweh over the earth, not die in humiliation on a Roman cross. The early Jesus sect turned to their scriptures to try to find texts that would "explain" this in a way that sustained their belief that Jesus had been the Messiah despite his death.

The main book they turned to was Isaiah, or rather to the section of it referred to a "Deutero-Isaiah" (ie Chapters 40-66) which is seen by most scholars as an addition to the original work. These chapters contain what are referred to as "the Suffering Servant Songs" — four sections in Isaiah about a servant of God who sacrifices himself for the good of Israel. At the time, the "Servant" figure was interpreted as a personification of righteous Jews generally (and that is how he is still interpreted by Jews today), but the earliest Jesus sect came to see the "Servant" passages as a prophecy of Jesus and his death. They looked at passages like this and read them as prophetic references to Jesus as Messiah:


But he was pierced for our transgressions,
he was crushed for our iniquities;
the punishment that brought us peace was upon him,
and by his wounds we are healed. (Isaiah 53:5)


It is important to note that these sections of Isaiah were not interpreted this way before and don't seem to have been seen as Messianic prophecies at all before the Jesus sect began to present them this way. This seems to be the origin of the idea of a dying Messiah — something not seen in Judaism before. The idea became that Jesus, as the "Suffering Servant" portrayed in Isaiah, had taken on the sins of Israel and died to purify the nation and prepare for the coming kingship of God. Already established ideas about the Messiah appearing at the right hand of God when the apocalypse came were now interpreted as Jesus returning in triumph when the epoch-changing event happened, which his followers still expected was "soon". All this salvaged their expectations about the coming apocalypse from the wreckage of the crucifixion and gave them a revived and renewed focus on their previous ideas.

Unfortunately not all the things expected of the Messiah that Jesus obviously did not fulfill could be relegated to this imminent "return". The part in Deutero-Isaiah where the Servant is said to live a long life and look on many of his children (Isaiah 53:10) obviously doesn't fit the Jesus story at all, since he died young and childless, so these parts of the supposed "prophecy" are ignored. The selective nature of pesher interpretation allowed this kind of cherry-picking of the texts.

[Res Ipsa]

Thanks! Very interesting.

[Kishkumen]

The quality and quantity of sources as described for the question did Socrates live dwarf the sources for Jesus. That's not to say Socrates lived and Jesus didn't, mind you. But it's a telling data point.

Is it really? Socrates is mostly known as the figure in Plato’s dialogs. And the Socrates figure in these is considered most likely, I believe, to be a literary mouthpiece for Plato.

Is there a single piece of writing about Jesus that can be confidently identified as the work of someone who personally knew Jesus?