Ehrman is an embarrassment. He is forced to RELY on the same sources that he argues are not historically reliable.

This is Ehrman in a debate with William Craig.

...You have the same problems for all of the sources and all of our Gospels. These are not historically reliable accounts.

The authors were not eyewitnesses; they're Greek-speaking Christians living 35 to 65 years after the events they narrate. The accounts that they narrate are based on oral traditions that have been in circulation for decades. Year after year Christians trying to convert others told them stories to convince them that Jesus was raised from the dead.

These writers are telling stories, then, that Christians have been telling all these years.

Many stories were invented, and most of the stories were changed. For that reason, these accounts are not as useful as we would like them to be for historical purposes. They're not contemporary, they're not disinterested, and they're not consistent...

The HJ argument is useless.

logical bob wrote:Guys, I have to ask now, what the fuck? Are you seriously going to trawl every sentence in the entire of Josephus which introduces a new person? If you had a passionate interest in the linguistics of Greek historiography in the early Imperial period that would be one thing, but just for its bearing on one sentence so you can score a point in this endless debate?

As far as I know, none of you are Christians. Christianity won't collapse if you somehow "prove" that Jesus didn't exist any more than creationism is stifled by proof of evolution. So what's the point? It was fun for a while, but seriously...

Is there anything more going on here than a demonstration of the human capacity to be tenaciously bloody minded in the face of disagreement?

Logical Bob, in answer to all your questions here, I freely own up to having written the following remarks back in April of 2011, and I still stand by every word of them. --

Focusing on the human reality of a Jesus or a Socrates before their executions is worthwhile, because a few of us in this American experiment were naive enough to believe for many years that -- although nasty things were done by our government in our name in Vietnam and elsewhere -- this culture would never be brazen enough to support our worst abuses of power in broad daylight. We thought that, in public, the democratic Western consensus in the U.S. and elsewhere would still hold, keeping abuses like the tiger cages in South Vietnam or the massacre in Mylai as things not to be proud of, rather than cause for thumping our chest. Oh, they'd happen. But above all, there was lip service paid to the idea -- however hypocritical -- that even our worst enemies were still human, and that therefore we shouldn't be proud of occasionally stooping to their level in moments of extreme frustration. How they might act would surely have no bearing on how we might act. Surely. Surely............ Surely.....................................................

Government secrecy might be wildly out of control down to our present day, but things kept secret would be things that our culture would never stand for in public. Right? Right?............... Right?......................................

Well, wrong. The growing consensus for humane-ity in international law, codes like the Geneva Conventions, the U.N. Charter, and the U.S. Constitution, were supposed to confine such appalling lapses to moments of irresponsible frustration, not to cool policy. But it was cool and very, very public policy that gave us waterboarding and all the other appalling abuses that came from pure policy in this new century. I'm not naive enough to think it wasn't pure policy on our part before, on occasion. But it was not perpetrated in broad daylight because our democratic Western culture wouldn't stand for it in public. It was perpetrated in secret. But Bush Jr. didn't veto the application of the Army codebook rules to Guantanamo interrogations in secret. He did that in broad daylight, on March 8, 2008, a date that is seared in my memory, that I will never forget -- and our culture just yawned.

The future of humanity is at stake. When the most powerful country in the world becomes an outlaw in public -- and eventually boasts about the "enhanced interrogation" in public, as Bush and Cheney eventually did, to the overt and unashamed cheers of their supporters -- and when those publicly avowed -- and boasted yet!!!!!!!!!!! -- breaches of law are celebrated in public, one knows that lip service to the century-old notion of the same law for all as a goal, if not a reality, has been shat on for good. The Geneva Conventions has been shat on for good. The U.N. charter and the U.S. Constitution have been shat on for good.

Anything is possible, because shame is dead.

Two thousand years ago, a preacher said that we should love our enemies. There have been plenty of studies showing that 99.9% of the Jesus sayings were sophisticated developments of dicta already found elsewhere in ancient Jewish culture -- except "Love our enemies". "Love our enemies" is the one thing for which no scholar has ever found a precedent. And the practical application of that was the development of law in our own time governing our treatment of war prisoners, governing our treatment of civilians, etc. Did we follow these laws? Not all the time, no. Did governments fear them? Democracies usually did. They do so no more.

And there was nothing like that kind of legal safety net around combat until the secular compact of modern Western democracy. That secular compact of modern Western democracy is now crumbling in the cells of Guantanamo. And you and I and the whole world are threatened directly by that. And unless we renew our efforts to recover the true heritage of all the humanitarian thinkers of our entire history, those like Jesus and Buddha and Socrates, freeing them from the mystificating mumbo-jumbo of institutionalized religion and sectarian butchery and strife, you can bid your grandchildren's adulthood goodbye. There will be no world left for them to live in.

I am an unashamed humanist. There is one thing that is still sacred to me, and it's not religion. It's the history of the countless tries by big-hearted humans to expand human consciousness of one's neighbor, of the poor, of the widow, of the orphan, of the left-out -- even of the enemy.

Do you think it was so fucking easy for these ideas to gain traction, just because they happened to be already given lip-service years before you were born? Don't make me laugh. Nothing is forever. Any idea that stands in the way of raw power and raw selfishness is no stronger than the respect given it in the moment -- and in law. Nothing is broken more easily than a compact that holds the powerful to account.

And that's what thinkers like Jesus tried to do. They tried to hold the powerful to account. No wonder the greasy, greedy power-grubbers of religious quackery tried to co-opt the Buddhas and the Jesuses for themselves. They knew they had to muffle the ethical power of such thinkers in order to line their own nest and keep themselves cozy with the powerful.

Law may be often abused by the powerful. I'm not naive enough to think it isn't. But law is intended to hold the powerful to account. It may often do a lousy job of that because the powerful are -- duh -- powerful. But that's no reason to let it all go hang just because criminals like Bush and Cheney are walking the streets scot free. Times like these are exactly the times when decent people should renew the strength tenfold of the most humane ideas that humanity has ever generated. We know we're facing an ethical abyss. We know that not even lip service is paid any more to "a decent respect to the opinions of mankind". All the more reason to delve into humanity's very, very few shining moments when one decent thinker here or there dared to speak out and say "Did you visit those in prison?", or dared to stand in front of a tank, or dared to have a dream, or dared to renounce all violence, or dared us not to live unexamined lives.

I know very well the guffaws this post will cause. But a complacency at the notion that the real Jesus -- the Jesus that religion has stifled, has boxed in with its cheap conjuring tricks, has drowned in its sea of ludicrous stunts, has subverted -- can have no practical value to the historian who loves humanity, and who understands how precious the human heritage really is, becomes insufferable and is ultimately as destructive of the human spirit as religion ever was.

Stein

Stein wrote:....I know very well the guffaws this post will cause. But a complacency at the notion that the real Jesus -- the Jesus that religion has stifled, has boxed in with its cheap conjuring tricks, has drowned in its sea of ludicrous stunts, has subverted -- can have no practical value to the historian who loves humanity, and who understands how precious the human heritage really is, becomes insufferable and is ultimately as destructive of the human spirit as religion ever was.

Stein

Stein looks for the Unknown Jesus.

His Quest for the Historical Jesus appears to have come to nothing but frustration.

From my research Jesus of the NT was a LIE, A Hoax, the Anti-Christ of the Jews.

These are the words of the supposed earliest Jesus character in gMark.

Mark 4

And when he was alone, they that were about him with the twelve asked of him the parable.11And he said unto them, Unto you it is given to know the mystery of the kingdom of God: but unto them that are without, all these things are done in parables.......... lest at any time they should be converted , and their sins should be forgiven them....

Based on Tacitus, Josephus and Philo, the Jews were probably the ONLY people who VEHEMENTLY opposed the deification of Man even by offering their life yet in the NT the Jesus character did NOT ever one time admire the great courage of the Jews.

Jesus of the NT was a Myth Fable of the anti-Christ of the Jews.

Evan Allen wrote:

MS2 wrote:

angelo wrote:I must remind people here that the eminent historian Bart Ehrman specifically says in his works that having examined extra-bablicle sources, at least he comes to a conclusion that the extra-bablicle sources are useless in determining the HJ. The only sources we have in determining for or nay are the gospels. Now, we all know the credibility of those don't we?

Good grief. How many times are you going to tell this lie about Ehrman, be put right on it, then come back later and tell it again?

I really don't see that it's a lie. Here's Ehrman:

"What, then, do we learn about Jesus from the non-Christian sources of his day? Not much. ... if we want to know what Jesus said and did during his life, we have no choice but to turn sources produced by his followers."

"In sum, there does not appear to be much information about the historical Jesus outside the canon of the New Testament. I should stress that this conclusion is not based on a theological judgment about the supreme importance of the New Testament. It is a judgment that anyone who looks carefully at the historical record would have to draw, whether Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Buddhist, Hindu, agnostic or atheist! ... No matter how you slice it, you have to rely on the New Testament if you want to know about the life of the historical Jesus."

So if that is what Ehrman himself says, I fail to see how it can be a lie. This accusation ought to be retracted.

Yep, to a tee. I have that book right here. Although, I always research the background of these authors, and realise that he trained at a seminary, and would have been a priest had he not suddenly discovered that it's all balderdash. The N/T that is.

dejuror wrote:

logical bob wrote:Guys, I have to ask now, what the fuck? Are you seriously going to trawl every sentence in the entire of Josephus which introduces a new person? If you had a passionate interest in the linguistics of Greek historiography in the early Imperial period that would be one thing, but just for its bearing on one sentence so you can score a point in this endless debate?

As far as I know, none of you are Christians. Christianity won't collapse if you somehow "prove" that Jesus didn't exist any more than creationism is stifled by proof of evolution. So what's the point? It was fun for a while, but seriously...

So, what was the point for people to argue that Jesus existed?? It is like some kind of a Bright Light just flashed before you and all of a sudden you have become blinded.

It is EXTREMELY significant that people today, people of the 21 st century, debate whether or not the NT is an historical account of Jesus or an historical record of the Myth Fables people of antiquity believed.

Is the NT just like Plutarch's "Romulus" or Suetonius Life of the Twelve Caesars.

Well, it is clear that the NT is ADMITTED MYTHOLOGY as stated by Justin Martyr 1800 year ago.

Whether Christianity collaspses or NOT IS not the issue but that it has been EXPOSED using the abundance of evidence of antiquity that the Jesus story was a MYTH FABLE that people of antiquity Believed.

That is the VERDICT based on the Evidence.

The NT is merely a Compilation of Myth Fables that shows precisely how the MYTH EVOLVED from gMark to the Pauline writings.

From a sea-water walker that transfigured in gMark to the LORD and Savior, Creator of the Universe to whom every knee should bow in earth , heaven and hell in the Pauline writings.

Behold, the Evolution of Myth called Jesus. Behold the NT.

More like a Harry Potter tale actually. That 21st century man still thinks there may be something behind this tale is an example of the naivety of most of mankind. Josephus keeps getting dragged into this argument as to prove the historicity of the tale. Josephus also tells us about the creation and Adam and Eve. What, believe one and not the other because today we know Adam and Eve didn't exist because we have embraced evolution and are certain they never existed. Yet the HJ accept TF as been authentic. I think something stinks in Denmark and it's rotten cheese.

Stein wrote:The future of humanity is at stake. When the most powerful country in the world becomes an outlaw in public -- and eventually boasts about the "enhanced interrogation" in public, as Bush and Cheney eventually did, to the overt and unashamed cheers of their supporters -- and when those publicly avowed -- and boasted yet!!!!!!!!!!! -- breaches of law are celebrated in public, one knows that lip service to the century-old notion of the same law for all as a goal, if not a reality, has been shat on for good. The Geneva Conventions has been shat on for good. The U.N. charter and the U.S. Constitution have been shat on for good.

Anything is possible, because shame is dead.

Two thousand years ago, a preacher said that we should love our enemies. There have been plenty of studies showing that 99.9% of the Jesus sayings were sophisticated developments of dicta already found elsewhere in ancient Jewish culture -- except "Love our enemies". "Love our enemies" is the one thing for which no scholar has ever found a precedent. And the practical application of that was the development of law in our own time governing our treatment of war prisoners, governing our treatment of civilians, etc. Did we follow these laws? Not all the time, no. Did governments fear them? Democracies usually did. They do so no more.

Fashioning one's means to fit one's ends is how one got into that mess in the first place. Revising history to the 'true version' has never worked in the past. That's pretty much the lesson I take from history. Arguments such as yours seek to make Jesus into a cabinet minister, and I think the mullahs in Iran do something similar with Muhammad.

The future of humanity is at stake! Sound the alarm! Calling all patriots! Take your derail elsewhere! I'll tell you when shame is dead: It's when people start re-writing history in order to fabricate the moral backbone they say the church has stolen. We have a moral backbone because Jesus says so? And that's why we need the truth that Jesus is historical?

Stein wrote:I know very well the guffaws this post will cause. But a complacency at the notion that the real Jesus -- the Jesus that religion has stifled, has boxed in with its cheap conjuring tricks, has drowned in its sea of ludicrous stunts, has subverted -- can have no practical value to the historian who loves humanity, and who understands how precious the human heritage really is, becomes insufferable and is ultimately as destructive of the human spirit as religion ever was.

As you see, above. It's that damned dialectical materialism! Stop the cancer before it grows! Tradition does not necessitate moral backbone, Stein, it only necessitates tradition.

logical bob wrote:Are you really saying you'd get so fired up if someone cited Polybius or Liu Xiang to back up a claim you considered suspect, or misrepresented Josephus on Imperial tax policy?

This isn't necessarily a bad thing. The world is full of causes waiting to be embraced; I'm just curious as to why this one, especially when you won't acknowledge that it's a cause.

Stein wrote:

spin wrote:

Stein wrote:Time to make up your mind, buddy: Is "the brother of Jesus called Christ" marginalia that "wandered in", or is it a substitution for something else? Or was it in the original? Which is the more parsimonious answer?

You're a master of the wrong question. The right question is: why has James received the massive descriptor if he's so incidental?

And the process of development I've outlined is a simple one: the generic "a [man] named James" received a marginal comment which became "the brother of Jesus called christ named James" without the loss of anything of significance.

-- Which means you're claiming that this is a case of a substitution, not a simple insertion. You see, that wasn't so hard to (FINALLY!) say, now was it?

The words relating specifically to James Iakobos onoma autoi can be translated as “a man named James”:

'Ananus, therefore . . . called together the Sanhedrin and brought before them one whose name was James, together with some others, and accused them of violating the law and condemned them to be stoned.'

Makes perfect sense without the awkward and inexplicable 'Jesus Christ' introduction.

See, that's no hard to understand - is it?

Stein wrote:
When the most powerful country in the world becomes an outlaw in public -- and eventually boasts about the "enhanced interrogation" in public, as Bush and Cheney eventually did, to the overt and unashamed cheers of their supporters -- and when those publicly avowed -- and boasted yet!!!!!!!!!!! -- breaches of law are celebrated in public, one knows that lip service to the century-old notion of the same law for all as a goal, if not a reality, has been shat on for good. The Geneva Conventions has been shat on for good. The U.N. charter and the U.S. Constitution have been shat on for good.

Anything is possible, because shame is dead.

Two thousand years ago, a preacher said that we should love our enemies. There have been plenty of studies showing that 99.9% of the Jesus sayings were sophisticated developments of dicta already found elsewhere in ancient Jewish culture -- except "Love our enemies". "Love our enemies" is the one thing for which no scholar has ever found a precedent. And the practical application of that was the development of law in our own time governing our treatment of war prisoners, governing our treatment of civilians, etc. Did we follow these laws? Not all the time, no. Did governments fear them? Democracies usually did. They do so no more.

Just my opinion, but people are no more going to stop such criminal behavior because a 'failed apocalyptic street ranter' or a 'filthy socialistic hippie' said "Love your enemies" than they will when (supposedly) God's own Son and Co-Creator of the Universe said so.

If the principle is valid it doesn't matter if there was an historical Jesus who said it, or it was the product of a hellenic/judaic community committed to parchment by some nameless and forgotten scribe.

It seems to me the conventions regarding the treatment of POWs stems as much from the 'golden rule' - a universal human invention and not original to one man in Judea some 2000 years ago - as it does from 'loving one's enemies'.

...and I'm not so hot on Socrates either - arguably the philosophic father of fascism.

Stein wrote:

logical bob wrote:Guys, I have to ask now, what the fuck? Are you seriously going to trawl every sentence in the entire of Josephus which introduces a new person? If you had a passionate interest in the linguistics of Greek historiography in the early Imperial period that would be one thing, but just for its bearing on one sentence so you can score a point in this endless debate?

As far as I know, none of you are Christians. Christianity won't collapse if you somehow "prove" that Jesus didn't exist any more than creationism is stifled by proof of evolution. So what's the point? It was fun for a while, but seriously...

Is there anything more going on here than a demonstration of the human capacity to be tenaciously bloody minded in the face of disagreement?

Logical Bob, in answer to all your questions here, I freely own up to having written the following remarks back in April of 2011, and I still stand by every word of them. --

... becomes insufferable and is ultimately as destructive of the human spirit as religion ever was.

Stein

"Truth, justice, and the American way." Keep it real Stein.

Stein wrote:
Two thousand years ago, a preacher said that we should love our enemies. There have been plenty of studies showing that 99.9% of the Jesus sayings were sophisticated developments of dicta already found elsewhere in ancient Jewish culture -- except "Love our enemies". "Love our enemies" is the one thing for which no scholar has ever found a precedent. And the practical application of that was the development of law in our own time governing our treatment of war prisoners, governing our treatment of civilians, etc.

Actually 100% of the sayings attributed to the Jesus character have clear precedents in Jewish, Greek, Buddhist, and other world cultures.

As for the morality of "loving your enemies," it's clear in the context of the gospels that the "enemies" whom Jesus is referring to are the Pharisees, and, by extension (in the evangelists' warped imagination), Jews generally. It certainly isn't the Romans, whom Jesus actually praises.

Stein wrote:
And that's what thinkers like Jesus tried to do. They tried to hold the powerful to account. No wonder the greasy, greedy power-grubbers of religious quackery tried to co-opt the Buddhas and the Jesuses for themselves. They knew they had to muffle the ethical power of such thinkers in order to line their own nest and keep themselves cozy with the powerful.
Stein

So you've bought entirely into the myth that the Pharisees were the real persecutors of the uniquely wise and innocent sage Jesus. Just what the evangelists wanted you (and all readers) to do: empathize with the Jesus character, transfer that empathy toward them, and use that authority to assume power over others. The only "greasy, greedy, power-grubbers of religious quackery" in this situation were the Christians themselves.

spin wrote:

MS2 wrote:

RealityRules wrote:As far as "there does not appear to be much information about the historical Jesus outside the canon of the New Testament", this thread shows that the extra-biblical sources are extremely light-weight and dubious!!

Nobody has been able to show otherwise!

I agree with Evan Allen -

So if that is what Ehrman himself says, I fail to see how it can be a lie

Then like Evan Allen and Angelo it seems you are unable to distinguish an argument about evidence for existence and Ehrman's discussion of the sources for biographical detail. I guess that, unlike Angelo, you have not had it pointed out to you a number of times that quoting Ehrman as though he is discussing the former misrepresents Ehrman's views.

Another contentless metadiscussion. If you just want to stir the shit, MS2, as it appears you do, try doing it elsewhere. You know that nothing useful will come out of calling someone's statement a lie.

Whether something useful comes out of it depends on whether Angelo misuses the quote again in future. That I don't know, and nor do you.

Nice of you to impugn my motives by the way. I seem to recall you don't like it when others get close to that territory with you, and since it is not something I have ever done, I'm surprised you've seen fit to try it on me. I'm almost tempted to wonder why (but not quite!)

While you are here can I take the opportunity to point you to this request: http://www.rationalskepticism.org/post1 ... l#p1134466 (specifically my final 2 paras)

I note you haven't responded to it yet, or to a number of other posters who have made the same request.

Stein wrote:Two thousand years ago, a preacher said that we should love our enemies. There have been plenty of studies showing that 99.9% of the Jesus sayings were sophisticated developments of dicta already found elsewhere in ancient Jewish culture -- except "Love our enemies". "Love our enemies" is the one thing for which no scholar has ever found a precedent. And the practical application of that was the development of law in our own time governing our treatment of war prisoners, governing our treatment of civilians, etc. Did we follow these laws? Not all the time, no. Did governments fear them? Democracies usually did. They do so no more.

Thanks for such a comprehensive answer - certainly more than the shuffling of feet from the opposite side. Sure, a preacher said that we should love our enemies. Assuming that you don't believe that preacher to have been divine and hence to occupy a status not available to others based on the merit of their ideas, does it matter whether that preacher bore some resemblance to the character we associate today with the name Jesus or whether they were anonymous and putting their words into the mouth of another? In the latter case, does it matter whether that other really lived or not? Whichever way you slice it, the idea was out there and we're at most arguing about a 40-70 year disagreement in dating.

logical bob makes an interesting point: why does Jesus' existence, or similarity to the gospel portrayals, matter?

The answer can come simply, for the same reason that any other historical question matters. The past is worth studying, with the best explanation for events being found and described. You can say that it's worth studying 'cause it helps us understand the present, gives us info on the development of concepts and structures, or is just interesting, but the same reasons hold true for any historical question.

Part of the problem here is how the question is framed: a focus on the person of Jesus. This is biography, important yes, but far from the whole picture. Alternative models are: the birth of Christianity; the world of 1st century folk prophets; syncretism in the Roman sphere of influence; modes of resistance to imperial rule. Personally, I've found the material on 1st century Judaism to be the most interesting aspect of the Jesus quest. The Nazarene preacher-prophet is just one part of that.

Byron wrote:You can say that it's worth studying 'cause it helps us understand the present, gives us info on the development of concepts and structures, or is just interesting, but the same reasons hold true for any historical question.

What's the difference between that and providing an excuse, an apologetic for the way things are now? Because you say, "Oh, that's the way things really were in the past." Yeah, right. It's worth studying because we can declare how things really were in the past, which gives us a 'real' explanation for the status quo (you know, the present tense). If the past wasn't the way it was, then the here and now would not be like this. It's very trivially circular. Really. I should put the word 'us' in scare quotes, too.

Byron wrote:The Nazarene preacher-prophet is just one part of that.

A comforting sort of surety to take the place of The Big Guy's Guarantee, with nary an open thought for the shattering banality of smuggling in some essential residue, some last little literalisation of the xian tradition as regards its origins. Walter Cronkite said, "And that's the way it is." You calls 'em like you sees 'em. I call it reading your bible as if Jesus were historical. This is certainly permissible, but as an entertainment, a Charlton Heston film. Not, as you would have it, as a means of 'understanding the present'.

The HJ scenario reads like the film "Gone with the wind. " All the characters are there, the time frame is there, so is the civil war, and places in real historical time, Scarlet O'Hara is the heroine of the story, but is she for real ? Just like the myth of J H it's a story that's based on a historical time, but none of the characters are for real. They are fiction.

Byron wrote:The answer can come simply, for the same reason that any other historical question matters. The past is worth studying, with the best explanation for events being found and described. You can say that it's worth studying 'cause it helps us understand the present, gives us info on the development of concepts and structures, or is just interesting, but the same reasons hold true for any historical question.

Yes, I think what goes on in this thread is, to a large extent, people pursuing something which is interesting. Chess is interesting too, and there seems more than a little similarity between learning the naming conventions in Josephus and tools for reconstructing the original version from using Origen on the one hand and learning opening theory on the other.

A thread entitled 'What can we reasonably infer about early Christianity?' might be interesting. Is it too late?

On second thoughts, no, it's probably just as much of an intellectual tar pit.

Alternatively, here's Richard Carrier's review of Earl Doherty's The Jesus Puzzle. It was definitely a fascinating read, especially the level of depth they get into, but I'm sure that the actual book is even more fascinating. Has anyone here read it?

http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/ ... uzzle.html

What people believe to be true varies, that's what keeps people interested. I don't think we can know while some know damn well that Jesus existed and some know damn well that he didn't. We've been informed that the future of humanity is at stake, so whatever it is we are discussing, it's very important business.

logical bob wrote:

Byron wrote:The answer can come simply, for the same reason that any other historical question matters. The past is worth studying, with the best explanation for events being found and described. You can say that it's worth studying 'cause it helps us understand the present, gives us info on the development of concepts and structures, or is just interesting, but the same reasons hold true for any historical question.

Yes, I think what goes on in this thread is, to a large extent, people pursuing something which is interesting. Chess is interesting too, and there seems more than a little similarity between learning the naming conventions in Josephus and tools for reconstructing the original version from using Origen on the one hand and learning opening theory on the other.

But when you look at the ways in which people regard history as underpinning the present moment.... as if it were some sort of castle in the air without certain likelihoods...