The Jesus myth Part I

[dastardly stem]

I'm personally happy to consider anything you want to put on the table for consideration. That is if a mythicist position misses the context and thus historic elements from the first century, then let's consider what that may be. From my readings it certainly does engage the history and context of the time. But, as I said, I'm happy to consider otherwise.

To be frank,.this is a discussion topic where I think a person who is interested will find the books on the topic that isn't engaging with or based in the mythisicm claims, and spend time in the plain history or they aren't as interested as they think they are. Kish mentioned a book by Ehrman upthread. I think most books on second temple Judaism would plant seeds of inquiry that would establish a context different than the Mormon-based understanding of the time period that by itself would illuminate issues with many premises you've shared coming from Carrier.

Sure. Paul seems rather dismissive of James and Peter. One would think if Peter and/or James actually knew Jesus in the flesh and were appointed by Jesus while he was mortal, Paul would be less dismissive of them. But, he's not. And if they really did live with him, walked with him and all of that, you'd think Paul would make mention of that. But instead he's really dismissive of them.

That's a bad reading of what I said. Paul is dismissive of James' views and teachings and he manipulates Peter. But he used them to build his own claims on which he established gentile churches throughout the Mediterranean. You don't have to look far in the present day to see people doing the very same thing, making claims of being the more correct and refined outgrowth that steals from something that came before effectively dismissing it's legitimacy while claiming it for its own. Mormonism does this very thing with Christianity. Politics is saturated in this process. It's all around you.

I'm not sure what you mean here.

The New Testament as we have it is a product of time that reflects certain choices and beliefs, most of which are founded in the myth you are engaging in dismissing rather than engaging the underlying history. Understanding that is critical to understanding why so far you don't seem to be interested in engaging with the actual historical Jesus so much as the Catholic mythology about him. But claiming that is all that's needed to dismiss Jesus as based on a historical person.

Perhaps. Do we have any evidence that Jesus lived from the 1st century? I've attempted to lay out where this discussion has taken us so far. I don't see much in the way of evidence. Do you know of any?

The fact we are talking about it eliminates the claim there is zero evidence else we wouldn't be. Otherwise, the mythology you are engaging is also evidence. After that, you seem pretty vested in the conclusion there wasn't a historical Jesus. And in the scheme of your life who is to say it matters or isn't for the best you hold to that rod? I don't know.

No one's claiming there is zero evidence he lived. The claim is the evidence presented is weak and not very convincing. Lay it out and there is plenty of room to suggest Jesus didn't really live. We factor in the history of the time, the plausible elements of what happened and it appears the mythicist position carries plenty of weight, in my mind. And I'd be happy to be shown otherwise.

This thread is not meant to be an exhaustive study on Jesus, per se. It's meant to be a collaboration for any interested party to discuss the history and evaluate any ideas and positions.

you mentioned a few things I asked questions not because I haven't considered the history but because I'd like to see things laid out for consideration. But if you aren't feeling it, fine by me.

[Manetho]

No one's claiming there is zero evidence he lived. The claim is the evidence presented is weak and not very convincing. Lay it out and there is plenty of room to suggest Jesus didn't really live. We factor in the history of the time, the plausible elements of what happened and it appears the mythicist position carries plenty of weight, in my mind. And I'd be happy to be shown otherwise.

In a situation like this, you can't just weigh evidence of one hypothesis in isolation. You have to weigh competing hypotheses. The texts about Jesus's life exist. If they don't derive in any way from the life of a real person, you have to explain what else inspired them. Why did a mythical Jesus come to be located in a very real and specific time and place? Why was he depicted as engaging in debates about Jewish belief and practice with factions of Jews (Pharisees and Sadducees) who really existed in that era? Why do the accounts of his trial reflect the divided nature of authority in that era? Note that that division of authority ceased to exist after the Great Jewish revolt from 66 to 73, and the factional divisions also died out as a result of the crushing of that revolt, though I'm less sure of the timeframe for that (modern Judaism is essentially descended from the traditions of the Pharisees). I've never seen a mythicist explanation of why a myth came to be set in such a particular period and fitted with so many period-specific details. Perhaps Carrier has an explanation that rarely comes up in secondhand discussions of his work like this one, but if he has an answer it needs to be discussed here.

The other problem is that no surviving ancient text unambiguously refers to a Jesus who did not exist in that period. Carrier argues that Paul does, but given those pesky passages of his letters that we've previously discussed, it's not an unambiguous case. The surviving texts about Jesus from later periods exhibit wildly divergent beliefs about who he was but all place him in the same era the canonical gospels do — Bret Ripley mentioned the docetists, who believed Jesus was a spirit but still believed he took on a human appearance in order to go walking and talking around ancient Judea. Proto-orthodox Christians catalogued numerous beliefs about Jesus that they considered heretical, yet no heresiologist whose works have survived mentions a form of Christianity that denied that Jesus went walking and talking around ancient Judea. The original, mythical variety of Christianity is a hypothetical construct, and I've never seen an explanation of why that original belief disappeared. Christianity as we know it is largely descended from the communities that Paul founded, so if Paul believed in a mythical Jesus, you would think that that would be the dominant strain of Christianity. Instead, it disappeared seemingly without a trace within a few decades of his death. That also requires explanation.

The case for Jesus's existence may rest on sparse evidence, but the case for the alternative is sparser still.

[dastardly stem]

Moving on:

Manetho suggests:

The texts about Jesus's life exist. If they don't derive in any way from the life of a real person, you have to explain what else inspired them. Why did a mythical Jesus come to be located in a very real and specific time and place?

I agree. We have to have good reasons to accept any state proposition. If we say Jesus, a famed teacher who upset the authorities and titillated the crowds, really lived, we have to have good reason to think he did. And if we say this mythologized god Jesus was really patterned after many others, then we have to have good reason to think so.

On speaking of a Savior-God mytheme, Carrier says (I'm taking most elements in this post from https://www.richardcarrier.information/archives/13890, because I don't want to transcribe from his book--which I think, makes it all a little better and more clear):

Not in ancient Asia. Or anywhere else. Only the West, from Mesopotamia to North Africa and Europe. There was a very common and popular mytheme that had arisen in the Hellenistic period—from at least the death of Alexander the Great in the 300s B.C. through the Roman period, until at least Constantine in the 300s A.D. Nearly every culture created and popularized one: the Egyptians had one, the Thracians had one, the Syrians had one, the Persians had one, and so on. The Jews were actually late to the party in building one of their own, in the form of Jesus Christ. It just didn’t become popular among the Jews, and thus ended up a Gentile religion. But if any erudite religious scholar in 1 B.C. had been asked “If the Jews invented one of these gods, what would it look like?” they would have described the entire Christian religion to a T. Before it even existed. That can’t be a coincidence.

So in the context of the time and place, developing a Savior-God, like Jesus was wholly expected, he claims.

Lets' consider:

The general features most often shared by all these cults are (when we eliminate all their differences and what remains is only what they share in common):

They are personal salvation cults (often evolved from prior agricultural cults).
They guarantee the individual a good place in the afterlife (a concern not present in most prior forms of religion).
They are cults you join membership with (as opposed to just being open communal religions).
They enact a fictive kin group (members are now all brothers and sisters).
They are joined through baptism (the use of water-contact rituals to effect an initiation).
They are maintained through communion (regular sacred meals enacting the presence of the god).
They involved secret teachings reserved only to members (and some only to members of certain rank).
They used a common vocabulary to identify all these concepts and their role.
They are syncretistic (they modify this common package of ideas with concepts distinctive of the adopting culture).
They are mono- or henotheistic (they preach a supreme god by whom and to whom all other divinities are created and subordinate).
They are individualistic (they relate primarily to salvation of the individual, not the community).
And they are cosmopolitan (they intentionally cross social borders of race, culture, nation, wealth, or even gender).

You might start to notice we’ve almost completely described Christianity already. It gets better. These cults all had a common central savior deity, who shared most or all these features (when, once again, we eliminate all their differences and what remains is only what they share in common):

They are all “savior gods” (literally so-named and so-called).
They are usually the “son” of a supreme God (or occasionally “daughter”).
They all undergo a “passion” (a “suffering” or “struggle,” literally the same word in Greek, patheôn).
That passion is often, but not always, a death (followed by a resurrection and triumph).
By which “passion” (of whatever kind) they obtain victory over death.
Which victory they then share with their followers (typically through baptism and communion).
They also all have stories about them set in human history on earth.
Yet so far as we can tell, none of them ever actually existed.

Listed as examples are: Osiris, Dionysus, Zalmoxis, Innana, Adonis, Romulus, Asclepius, Baal, and Hercules. None of these are said to have lived in history. But, significantly, each of them were given stories as if they did live. If Jesus were a "late to the party" addition to this list of mythical characters then it may be likely Jesus began as a mythical character just like the rest of these and then later given a life on earth story, just like his predecessors. It could be the Christians were special, or different, in their syncretic development of their cult and used a common man named Jesus, one who preached and gained a following. But it's not likely. And its even less likely considering the paucity of evidence to demonstrate a Jesus, this legendary teacher who upset the leaders and garnered significant public support.

[Manetho]

Listed as examples are: Osiris, Dionysus, Zalmoxis, Innana, Adonis, Romulus, Asclepius, Baal, and Hercules. None of these are said to have lived in history. But, significantly, each of them were given stories as if they did live. If Jesus were a "late to the party" addition to this list of mythical characters then it may be likely Jesus began as a mythical character just like the rest of these and then later given a life on earth story, just like his predecessors. It could be the Christians were special, or different, in their syncretic development of their cult and used a common man named Jesus, one who preached and gained a following. But it's not likely. And its even less likely considering the paucity of evidence to demonstrate a Jesus, this legendary teacher who upset the leaders and garnered significant public support.

This is exactly what Honorentheos has been objecting to: you focus on the mythical aspects of the story and not on the historical context.

You've been told repeatedly that myth-like stories were also applied to people like Alexander, Augustus, and Vespasian who unambiguously did exist. And like those people, but unlike the mythical figures you list, Jesus's story was set in a very specific period that was still within living memory when it was first written down; the Gospel of Mark was probably written about 40 years after the period in which it is set. So focusing on the mythical aspects of the Jesus story doesn't get you anywhere. If you want to argue for a mythical Jesus, you have to make the case for how a mythical Jesus came to be placed in the timeframe where the gospels place him, and how the belief in a mythical Jesus went extinct while leaving no unambiguous evidence behind.

[Philo Sofee]

Listed as examples are: Osiris, Dionysus, Zalmoxis, Innana, Adonis, Romulus, Asclepius, Baal, and Hercules. None of these are said to have lived in history. But, significantly, each of them were given stories as if they did live. If Jesus were a "late to the party" addition to this list of mythical characters then it may be likely Jesus began as a mythical character just like the rest of these and then later given a life on earth story, just like his predecessors. It could be the Christians were special, or different, in their syncretic development of their cult and used a common man named Jesus, one who preached and gained a following. But it's not likely. And its even less likely considering the paucity of evidence to demonstrate a Jesus, this legendary teacher who upset the leaders and garnered significant public support.

This is exactly what Honorentheos has been objecting to: you focus on the mythical aspects of the story and not on the historical context.

You've been told repeatedly that myth-like stories were also applied to people like Alexander, Augustus, and Vespasian who unambiguously did exist. And like those people, but unlike the mythical figures you list, Jesus's story was set in a very specific period that was still within living memory when it was first written down; the Gospel of Mark was probably written about 40 years after Jesus would have died. So focusing on the mythical aspects of the Jesus story doesn't get you anywhere. If you want to argue for a mythical Jesus, you have to make the case for how a mythical Jesus came to be placed in the timeframe where the gospels place him, and how the belief in a mythical Jesus went extinct while leaving no unambiguous evidence behind.

I understand your point here Manetho, but history does indeed demonstrate why a mythical Jesus could disappear. The State legalized Christianity. They destroyed their rivals. It's what we can read and do read. the literalists won the war... for now...

[honorentheos]

Stem,

The manuscript texts show evidence of a mythologizing of the person being described rather than an attempt to humanize a myth which you seem to believe.

The text evidence shows an erasure of Jesus being part of a family with biological parents and siblings. You suggest this worked the other direction despite the chronology of the text showing clearly Jesus was becoming more deified as time went on.

The text shows the original Jerusalem-based followers of Jesus did not share the same views as Paul, yet you give Paul priority because you do what New Testament believers do and assume a unified, underlying coherent gospel of sorts. The Jerusalem church, as it were, was largely Jewish in beliefs and Paul served to erase the very Hebrew nature of what was believed just based on the fragments that survived the attempts to censor the story to paint a picture of a coherent foundation story. Paul's conflicts involve Jewish customs, beliefs about the importance of adhering to the law, and the idea that anyone could be God's favored through faith, in particular in Jesus, rather than obedience and bloodline.

I don't know what else to say than you should read outside of this mythisicm canon and dig into the history that is agnostic about Jesus. Seeing the context, you'll see you are fighting a ghost/myth rather than debating the history itself. And isn't that the point? Yet it's odd to me the stuff you bring over from Carrier never seems to actually engage with the history but instead the Sunday School version of history you should realize from your LDS past isn't actually history.

[Manetho]

I understand your point here Manetho, but history does indeed demonstrate why a mythical Jesus could disappear. The State legalized Christianity. They destroyed their rivals. It's what we can read and do read. the literalists won the war... for now...

They documented their rivals in order to destroy them. Irenaeus, in the late second century, spent a lot of time rebutting the Marcionites and the Gnostics. Epiphanius of Salamis, in the late fourth, listed eighty heresies, some of which were probably already extinct in his time, in order to instruct orthodox Christians on how to rebut them. And they were only two of the more prominent figures to attack other forms of Christianity through rebuttal. Nowhere do we see a belief in a purely mythical Jesus. We only see wildly different interpretations of a guy who went walking and talking around ancient Judea.

[honorentheos]

This is exactly what Honorentheos has been objecting to: you focus on the mythical aspects of the story and not on the historical context.

You've been told repeatedly that myth-like stories were also applied to people like Alexander, Augustus, and Vespasian who unambiguously did exist. And like those people, but unlike the mythical figures you list, Jesus's story was set in a very specific period that was still within living memory when it was first written down; the Gospel of Mark was probably written about 40 years after Jesus would have died. So focusing on the mythical aspects of the Jesus story doesn't get you anywhere. If you want to argue for a mythical Jesus, you have to make the case for how a mythical Jesus came to be placed in the timeframe where the gospels place him, and how the belief in a mythical Jesus went extinct while leaving no unambiguous evidence behind.

I understand your point here Manetho, but history does indeed demonstrate why a mythical Jesus could disappear. The State legalized Christianity. They destroyed their rivals. It's what we can read and do read. the literalists won the war... for now...

The mythologizers won the war, you mean. Jesus, the historical person behind the myth, is as inconvenient to the Church as he is to the mythisists. One may claim the myth is actual fact (literally I guess) but they are the source for most of what it being debated by Stem that I've seen. It's not a wonder that the later is fighting with the former and declaring the underlying figure never existed in the first place. But it also demonstrates there is either a serious lack of understanding on the part of mythicists regarding history...or they are disingenuous.

[dastardly stem]

This is exactly what Honorentheos has been objecting to: you focus on the mythical aspects of the story and not on the historical context.

Hey what's up, Man [etho]. What I posted was in consideration of the historical context. In that era devising myth writing stories that were not historical, was common place. We have to consider that reality when determining history.

You've been told repeatedly that myth-like stories were also applied to people like Alexander, Augustus, and Vespasian who unambiguously did exist.

And why do we say they exist, unambiguously? Because there is really solid evidence for their lives. Not so with Jesus.

And like those people, but unlike the mythical figures you list, Jesus's story was set in a very specific period that was still within living memory when it was first written down; the Gospel of Mark was probably written about 40 years after the period in which it is set.

The Gospel of Mark can't be taken as serious history, thus it's terrible evidence. It's a writing by a fanatical believer making a number of fantastic unreliable and magical claims. And since life expectancy was around 48 years, I don't think living memory works. Mark, or whoever really wrote it, would have likely been a child, at best, when Jesus died and never claimed to know Jesus or anyone who knew Jesus anyway. That is in no way comparable to the evidence we have for Alexander or Augustus.

So focusing on the mythical aspects of the Jesus story doesn't get you anywhere.

I am clearly focusing on the non-mythical aspects. I'm asking for evidence to evaluate. And with that I"m showing there is all sorts of reason to think, due to the paucity of evidence, that myth was the historical context.

If you want to argue for a mythical Jesus, you have to make the case for how a mythical Jesus came to be placed in the timeframe where the gospels place him, and how the belief in a mythical Jesus went extinct while leaving no unambiguous evidence behind.

I don't think the latter proposed rabbit hole to run down is necessary to show mythicism is a better hypothesis than historicism. The former? Well that's the consideration here. How did mythicism come to be placed in the timeframe it was? Well, for one, believing mythical gods were the norm. (I suppose it always will be)

[dastardly stem]

The mythologizers won the war, you mean. Jesus, the historical person behind the myth, is as inconvenient to the Church as he is to the mythisists. One may claim the myth is actual fact (literally I guess) but they are the source for most of what it being debated by Stem that I've seen. It's not a wonder that the later is fighting with the former and declaring the underlying figure never existed in the first place. But it also demonstrates there is either a serious lack of understanding on the part of mythicists regarding history...or they are disingenuous.

My point, and I think Philo's point, on this would be to suggest the only source we have is from the majority--non-mythicists (aside from possibly Paul). My references to Paul is to demonstrate Paul is weak evidence for Jesus' historicity. He barely put in any effort to show he was human if he ever was, and the meager references one can point to for a historicity argument, amount to, at least to me, ambiguous rather than conclusive. History often amounts to a series of hints. You keep bringing up history as if no one's talking the history of the time. Sure we are. The whole point here is to discuss the history and determine what we can get from it.