The Jesus myth Part I

[drumdude]

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?

The Book of Mormon - Another Testament of Jesus Christ

[Kishkumen]

The Book of Mormon - Another Testament of Jesus Christ

[Res Ipsa]

The Book of Mormon - Another Testament of Jesus Christ

Yeah. Probably wins the internet today, so I should give up trying.

[huckelberry]

I am in favor of a mythologized Jesus, but I think the evidence of a particular Jesus who was executed by Pontius Pilate is strong enough to conclude he is a historical figure. In other words, the person Jesus is not a fiction.

In perfect line with this is Dennis R. MacDonald's massive amounts of information that many of the stories in the Gospels and Acts are created using Mimesis, that is imitating the Greek classics of Homer and Vergil. This entirely leaves room for a person named Jesus who actually existed, yet also confirms Carrier that stories are created which are just simply not history, nor are they meant to be. It is not history that is the arbiter for what is truth and true. MacDonald's overall case, with all his materials is quite convincing to me personally. And other scholars who have also contributed to this theme of mimesis and intertextuality (I'm thinking Allison, and Brodie, and Miller and Winn, among others) just adds to the serious probability we are simply not reading history in the New Testament stories. That does not have anything to do with their value. Because they are not history does not mean they are useless and a waste of time.

Philo, honest it is out of honest interest that I find myself questioning your meaning here. I checked Mimesis in Wikipedia and found it referring to a very general style or approach to storytelling. Hardly a point that says anything about the degree of factual accuracy in the gospels. I checked a bit MacDonald (a very small dip) it sounded he was concerned with style and the influence that Homer had on style of storytelling in that time period. Ok but that tells me nothing whatsoever about the degree of accuracy in the gospels. I first wondered if you meant creating stories patterned after the Iliad. I have read that book multiple times and linking that to Mark appears remote. Are we speaking of similarities like both Paul Jesus had trouble with a storm at sea? That is a theme to repeat. It is also a event that repeats in real life.

It is clear that some invention was necessary to construct the event series found in the gospels. The gospels share material but do not put them together the same , well except in broad outline. There is some art in the matter.

[Philo Sofee]

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.

Lol.....well Muraresku's own scene actually provides the snakes, the snake chariot found in Spain that is only supposed to be in Greece. So you want snakes, you got em....

[Philo Sofee]

In perfect line with this is Dennis R. MacDonald's massive amounts of information that many of the stories in the Gospels and Acts are created using Mimesis, that is imitating the Greek classics of Homer and Vergil. This entirely leaves room for a person named Jesus who actually existed, yet also confirms Carrier that stories are created which are just simply not history, nor are they meant to be. It is not history that is the arbiter for what is truth and true. MacDonald's overall case, with all his materials is quite convincing to me personally. And other scholars who have also contributed to this theme of mimesis and intertextuality (I'm thinking Allison, and Brodie, and Miller and Winn, among others) just adds to the serious probability we are simply not reading history in the New Testament stories. That does not have anything to do with their value. Because they are not history does not mean they are useless and a waste of time.

Philo, honest it is out of honest interest that I find myself questioning your meaning here. I checked Mimesis in Wikipedia and found it referring to a very general style or approach to storytelling. Hardly a point that says anything about the degree of factual accuracy in the gospels. I checked a bit MacDonald (a very small dip) it sounded he was concerned with style and the influence that Homer had on style of storytelling in that time period. Ok but that tells me nothing whatsoever about the degree of accuracy in the gospels. I first wondered if you meant creating stories patterned after the Iliad. I have read that book multiple times and linking that to Mark appears remote. Are we speaking of similarities like both Paul Jesus had trouble with a storm at sea? That is a theme to repeat. It is also a event that repeats in real life.

It is clear that some invention was necessary to construct the event series found in the gospels. The gospels share material but do not put them together the same , well except in broad outline. There is some art in the matter.

Yes, that is what mimesis is, emulating a story, and transforming it, doing some improvement to it like Vergil did with the Homeric epics. We find mostly Mark and Luke (but I have the book with John doing it also on the way, I shall have it next week) practicing it. Matthew went more with the Old Testament literature apparently. The links to Mark are many, though not all of the same value, of course not. Some are certainly stronger than others. MacDonald is the first to tell us that.
The kinds of similarities we are talking about is the actual scenes of using ships in the stories, and of Mark inventing the Sea of Galilee in order to make his emulation of some stories in Homer even more like it. He needs Jesus to be by a sea in order to emulate some of the stories, and he needs Jesus to have followers as in some stories in the Illiad, etc.

[huckelberry]

Philo, honest it is out of honest interest that I find myself questioning your meaning here. I checked Mimesis in Wikipedia and found it referring to a very general style or approach to storytelling. Hardly a point that says anything about the degree of factual accuracy in the gospels. I checked a bit MacDonald (a very small dip) it sounded he was concerned with style and the influence that Homer had on style of storytelling in that time period. Ok but that tells me nothing whatsoever about the degree of accuracy in the gospels. I first wondered if you meant creating stories patterned after the Iliad. I have read that book multiple times and linking that to Mark appears remote. Are we speaking of similarities like both Paul Jesus had trouble with a storm at sea? That is a theme to repeat. It is also a event that repeats in real life.

It is clear that some invention was necessary to construct the event series found in the gospels. The gospels share material but do not put them together the same , well except in broad outline. There is some art in the matter.

Yes, that is what mimesis is, emulating a story, and transforming it, doing some improvement to it like Vergil did with the Homeric epics. We find mostly Mark and Luke (but I have the book with John doing it also on the way, I shall have it next week) practicing it. Matthew went more with the Old Testament literature apparently. The links to Mark are many, though not all of the same value, of course not. Some are certainly stronger than others. MacDonald is the first to tell us that.
The kinds of similarities we are talking about is the actual scenes of using ships in the stories, and of Mark inventing the Sea of Galilee in order to make his emulation of some stories in Homer even more like it. He needs Jesus to be by a sea in order to emulate some of the stories, and he needs Jesus to have followers as in some stories in the Illiad, etc.

Philo, your example helps. I can see the possibility that the effectiveness of the sea shore imagery might link up with Homeric example. Previous story images become part of the memory of a writer and may influence a choice of how to present something in a new story. Of course the Sea of Galilee was already in existence so did not need to be invented. How its image fits into the gospel I can imagine being influenced by precedents. It is a strong image.

[Cat-o-Senine-Tails]

I'd like to point out that in his peer-reviewed work, Carrier assigns a 1/3 chance that Jesus was a historical figure (with 700+ pages detailing why). He doesn't say it's an open-and-shut case of ahistoricity.

[Physics Guy]

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

I don't know. That must mean there are none for which it's really certain, because I would have heard of them, but perhaps by a weaker standard of "confidently" there might be something.

I do seem to recall learning that the early Christian church tried hard to vet stories about Jesus by tracing them back to an apostolic source. I'm afraid I'm vague now on where I read this, or what exactly it even means. Who exactly was "the early Church", for example? And I certainly don't recollect what evidence was cited, if any, for that statement about the early Church, whoever it was.

I have a notion, though, that apostolic authority really was a big deal from quite early on in the Christian movement. The New Testament texts were clearly not collected for the coherence of their content; they were not distilled into a single official version, but preserved as the (ostensible) records of people who had known Jesus personally. Early Christians evidently found it plausible that they might have a text that had been written by Matthew or John, or written second-hand from the preaching of Peter or Paul (the traditional sources of Mark and Luke). If early Christians thought they had a bunch of such apostolic texts, furthermore, they felt obliged to preserve them as they were, however they were, without attempting to merge them into a single coherent document.

Paul practically invented post-Jesus Christianity, and yet he still had to base his claim to apostolic authority on a personal encounter with Jesus. He got away with the encounter being only a vision, but I think you can see in Acts and the Pauline epistles that he had an uphill fight. To me that confirms that there was a strong expectation among early Christians that anyone who spoke about Jesus, or in Jesus's name, should have known Jesus personally.

If such an expectation existed, that doesn't necessarily mean that it was always—or ever—fulfilled. Maybe people were deluded. It still seems to me, though, that it would be weird for a movement to develop a standard of personal acquaintance with the founder if it had been obviously impossible at the time to check claims of acquaintance with Jesus. To confirm that Matthew really wrote Matthew might well have been harder than early Christians appreciated. But it seems most likely to me that if there was a widespread expectation that apostles would sign off on Jesus stories, then that expectation probably developed through some actual apostles actually doing that.

[Kishkumen]

Thanks for expanding on your position, PG. You make an interesting point about the expectation that there be accounts of the life of Jesus from those who knew him. That is very likely an expectation that came from the literary culture of the time. As soon as Jesus literature started to come forth, it would be natural for a movement centered on an individual to have accounts of that person’s life written from the perspective of those who knew him.

Just last week I read excerpts of Chares of Mytilene’s account of Alexander the Great. Chares was Alexander’s chamberlain. Athenaeus quotes Chares in his section on luxury because Chares provided wonderful details of the life of luxury in Alexander’s court after he defeated the Persians. That kind of information is invaluable to historians—eyewitness accounts of Alexander’s life and activities.

There is a big difference between the possession of those kinds of accounts and the presumed eyewitness accounts handed down under names of uncertain accuracy. Who wrote these gospels? We do not really know. Did the authors know Jesus? Probably not.

Not so with Plato and Xenophon in their accounts of Socrates. We know Plato and Xenophon. They wrote copiously. We know a lot about their times and the other major figures of the age. We know that they knew Socrates and wrote about him from a position of personal knowledge.

This is why it would be completely kooky to suggest that Plato and Xenophon made Socrates up. This is why it is ridiculous to suggest that Jesus is as well attested as Socrates. It is not the number of texts that matters. It is the quality of the witness that matters, and those who are known to have known the people and events as eyewitnesses to the times are exponentially more valuable than later sources with no apparent direct connection to the people and events.

It is unfortunate that those who knew Jesus didn’t write about him, and those who wrote about him didn’t know him.