Posted: Oct 08, 2015 12:36 pm
proudfootz wrote:Moonwatcher wrote:Just for my own interests, with possibilities of what it and is not authentic flying back and forth and perhaps, for myself, wanting to get back to something more basic: what precisely constitutes a Historical Jesus?
By definition, all religions and, indeed, just about any human endeavor, have a history. How much of a basis in reality does Jesus need to have in order for there to have been a Historical Jesus?
We all agree the final product we see in the Gospels is a fantasy.
Does such a person have to have generally taught the sorts of things the Jesus of the mythology taught?
Does he have to have been crucified?
Does he have to just, in some vague and small way, have said and done something that just remotely resembles the mythology in the minutest way?
Between the extremes of "There was this guy who did 90% of the non-magical stuff and said most of the stuff attributed to him" and "There was not ever in the remotest way a historical person and the whole thing didn't even get made up at all at all until the 3rd century", there's a vast in-between where most opinion falls.
I just wonder where people fall on that scale. I'm not asking anybody to prove their opinion is true. I'm just asking where people think they fall on the scale.
I was asking the same question a thousand or so pages ago.
Clearly we have about zero idea about anything the fellow ever did or said. In my opinion, of course. For me it's inadequate to simply draw a line through the miracles and accept anything left over that's possible as being factual, or even probable.
Here's Carrier's definition:1. An actual man at some point named Jesus acquired followers in life who continued as an identifiable movement after his death.
2. This is the same Jesus who was claimed by some of his followers to have been executed by the Jewish or Roman authorities.
3. This is the same Jesus some of whose followers soon began worshiping as a living god (or demigod).
This has some good features - one of which is that it is not a requirement that the actual man who inspires the movement needs to have been executed, only that this is something claimed by members of the movement.
Just as it isn't required that he really rise from the dead, that is only a claim.
Me, I'm not sure I would even require that the fellow be named Jesus.
So I set the bar pretty low for what would be required for an "historical Jesus'.
I have no disagreement with any of this.
I have no "requirement" that the person did every non-magical thing or even most of them. For a HJ to have existed, it need merely be a real person who was partly the basis for the religion while there were clearly many other things that were involved. That he was named Jesus is just about impossible as I understand it as that's an extrapolation into later languages.
I think that has a lot to do with it, that there is no agreed upon standard as to what constitutes a Historical Jesus. My bar is also pretty low. If a real person who actually lived is in there anywhere, I think of that as a HJ. It may well be that many people count as MJ what others would call HJ.