AmbiguousGuy
Well-Known Member
Three or four years ago my attention was drawn to the question of the historicity of Jesus. I'd overheard some debates and I began to join in and ask questions. All my life I'd thoughtlessly followed the cultural assumption that Jesus actually existed around 30CE, so I was pretty surprised when I saw that the most powerful evidence seemed to be against Jesus. It slowly dawned on me that he was most probably a fiction. Since that time, I've floated my opinion around, wondering if anyone could batter it into a different shape, but so far I've heard little evidence or argument for the historical Jesus (HJ). Certainly none that has shifted my position.
Of course, it's just my opinion. What else could it be? But, curiously, I began to see that my opinion angered some people. Which perplexed me at first. I'd thought that we were mostly beyond being angered by Jesus opinions one way or the other. But apparently there are real things at risk here. Jobs, ministries, entire academic fields, career reputations... maybe even souls?
But that's all digression. I'm sure we'll see no such anger here in this thread.
The reason we are here, now, is that my friend LegionOnomaMoi has agreed to a one-on-one debate with me regarding the (non)historical Jesus. Pretty exciting. I tried to rent the Goodyear blimp to do some promotional advertising, but it was tied up. Tell all your friends to come and watch. If it goes well, we might do T-shirts.
I'm happy to be called 'Ambig' or 'AG' and I hope the LegionOnomaMoi is OK with 'Legion.'
So. Here are a couple of issues which I find to be powerful arguments against the HJ -- by which, again, I mean a Jesus of 30 CE Judea.
1) The Synoptic Gospels: Matthew, Mark and Luke. I write a little fiction, so I know what a pile of revisions looks like. For every story I've written, there is a box or an efile full of versions which look quite a bit like the finished story. Each one contains blocks of text which track, verbatim, blocks of text in the other versions. Just as we find with the synoptic gospels.
I'm crafting my story, improving it, dramatizing it, finding new details which make it work better. No, I don't like the stone already rolled away from Jesus' tomb. Let's have an angel come and roll it away, right in front of the women! Etc....
I've seen such revisions with non-fiction work, though not nearly so much, but I have never seen two different writers making revisions of a third writer's work. In today's world, of course, gMatthew and gLuke could not be published. They'd be quickly sued by Mark for plagiarism.
So I conclude that Matthew and Luke are not any sort of arm's-length storytelling. Instead, they are revisions of Mark's original and probably-fictional story. Would you revise a guy's diary entry? Would you revise a news article? Probably not. You'd just write your own version of events.
But you might revise an exciting new theological/fictional work, especially if you lived 2,000 years ago and gospel-writing were all the rage.
I consider all other gospels, including John, to be hopelessly distant in time from the supposed HJ. I take John no more historically than I take the Book of Mormon, so far as evidence of the HJ. (I also think Mark is suspiciously distant in time. I can see no reason to wait 40 years to write about a messiah, not if he were actually historical.)
2) Paul's silence. By all accounts, Paul was a fanatic. He loved the Christ during every millisecond of his waking life. He was downright infatuated.
And everyone seems to agree that Paul was in Jerusalem, meeting with members of Jesus' entourage, shortly after 30 CE. So we know for a certainty that Paul would have sucked them dry for every last detail of Jesus' earthly ministry. He would have known everything about Jesus life and probably four or five versions of every major incident.
And yet. And yet Paul does not speak of Jesus' life.
Have you ever preached a sermon? I haven't, but I've listened to a bunch, sometimes listening to their rehearsals from distant rooms in the house. And I can tell you that preachers are always taking incidents from real life as the kernels of their sermons. If the dog bit the mailman, well, there's a way to use that in the Sunday morning sermon.
So why doesn't Paul go on and on talking of the historical Jesus? As he speaks about the storm threatening his ship, why doesn't he say, "As the angry and chaotic mobs came for Jesus, so did the thunder and wind come for me."
Why does he seem unaware that a physical man was being claimed to have lived during his own lifetime? Well, because he wrote his letters before Mark came up with his story about a real man who lived just a few years earlier. That seems the most reasonable explanation.
I could go on and on. By now my view of the HJ is turning into an actual theory. There are still lots of holes in it, of course, but that's the main reason I continue to debate it. Maybe I'm missing something.
If so, I'm sure Legion is just the guy to set me straight. Let's see.
Of course, it's just my opinion. What else could it be? But, curiously, I began to see that my opinion angered some people. Which perplexed me at first. I'd thought that we were mostly beyond being angered by Jesus opinions one way or the other. But apparently there are real things at risk here. Jobs, ministries, entire academic fields, career reputations... maybe even souls?
But that's all digression. I'm sure we'll see no such anger here in this thread.
The reason we are here, now, is that my friend LegionOnomaMoi has agreed to a one-on-one debate with me regarding the (non)historical Jesus. Pretty exciting. I tried to rent the Goodyear blimp to do some promotional advertising, but it was tied up. Tell all your friends to come and watch. If it goes well, we might do T-shirts.
I'm happy to be called 'Ambig' or 'AG' and I hope the LegionOnomaMoi is OK with 'Legion.'
So. Here are a couple of issues which I find to be powerful arguments against the HJ -- by which, again, I mean a Jesus of 30 CE Judea.
1) The Synoptic Gospels: Matthew, Mark and Luke. I write a little fiction, so I know what a pile of revisions looks like. For every story I've written, there is a box or an efile full of versions which look quite a bit like the finished story. Each one contains blocks of text which track, verbatim, blocks of text in the other versions. Just as we find with the synoptic gospels.
I'm crafting my story, improving it, dramatizing it, finding new details which make it work better. No, I don't like the stone already rolled away from Jesus' tomb. Let's have an angel come and roll it away, right in front of the women! Etc....
I've seen such revisions with non-fiction work, though not nearly so much, but I have never seen two different writers making revisions of a third writer's work. In today's world, of course, gMatthew and gLuke could not be published. They'd be quickly sued by Mark for plagiarism.
So I conclude that Matthew and Luke are not any sort of arm's-length storytelling. Instead, they are revisions of Mark's original and probably-fictional story. Would you revise a guy's diary entry? Would you revise a news article? Probably not. You'd just write your own version of events.
But you might revise an exciting new theological/fictional work, especially if you lived 2,000 years ago and gospel-writing were all the rage.
I consider all other gospels, including John, to be hopelessly distant in time from the supposed HJ. I take John no more historically than I take the Book of Mormon, so far as evidence of the HJ. (I also think Mark is suspiciously distant in time. I can see no reason to wait 40 years to write about a messiah, not if he were actually historical.)
2) Paul's silence. By all accounts, Paul was a fanatic. He loved the Christ during every millisecond of his waking life. He was downright infatuated.
And everyone seems to agree that Paul was in Jerusalem, meeting with members of Jesus' entourage, shortly after 30 CE. So we know for a certainty that Paul would have sucked them dry for every last detail of Jesus' earthly ministry. He would have known everything about Jesus life and probably four or five versions of every major incident.
And yet. And yet Paul does not speak of Jesus' life.
Have you ever preached a sermon? I haven't, but I've listened to a bunch, sometimes listening to their rehearsals from distant rooms in the house. And I can tell you that preachers are always taking incidents from real life as the kernels of their sermons. If the dog bit the mailman, well, there's a way to use that in the Sunday morning sermon.
So why doesn't Paul go on and on talking of the historical Jesus? As he speaks about the storm threatening his ship, why doesn't he say, "As the angry and chaotic mobs came for Jesus, so did the thunder and wind come for me."
Why does he seem unaware that a physical man was being claimed to have lived during his own lifetime? Well, because he wrote his letters before Mark came up with his story about a real man who lived just a few years earlier. That seems the most reasonable explanation.
I could go on and on. By now my view of the HJ is turning into an actual theory. There are still lots of holes in it, of course, but that's the main reason I continue to debate it. Maybe I'm missing something.
If so, I'm sure Legion is just the guy to set me straight. Let's see.