Did the man "Jesus" exist?

[Robert Tulip]

If an academic holds that questioning the existence of Jesus Christ is ridiculous, there is no difference in principle between this stance and believing in Noah and the Flood. Both are examples of "true belief" arising from taking the Bible literally. We are conditioned to scoff at those who regard Noah as historical, while showing deference to those who regard Christ as historical. But the evidentiary basis for the two is equal - nil.

Academics like to say they have higher standards, but this issue of believing in Jesus is an example where emotional prejudice has crept in to distort rational thinking processes, such that conventional received opinion outweighs logic and evidence. There actually is evidence that academics working on Christian history are more likely themselves to be Christian believers. So there is a valid suspicion that religious sentiment is at play even among scholars, simply because people have so strongly internalised the idea that Jesus is so wonderful that they cannot imagine he is not real.

If I could give another current example, I recently read the book Black Athena by Martin Bernal, a Professor at Columbia University. He presents the controversial thesis that civilization in ancient Greece was heavily dependent on Phoenicia and Egypt. There are many academics who themselves are not racist, but whose opinions are conditioned by long exposure to ideas about the glories of classical Greece, and to earlier historical opinions that were overtly in service of colonial empires. Bernal argues, rightly in my view, that the conscious opinions of current scholars often do not fully reflect their real unconscious sentiments - which seem to exhibit a visceral emotional repugnance about the idea that Greece learnt a lot from Egypt.

We see a similar emotional repugnance at play in analysis of belief in Jesus. Just in this thread, ant has commented with disdain about such issues as the role of political conspiracy in the early church, and astrological factors in the original construction of Christian belief. If scholars approach such questions as matters for disdain rather than dispassionate objective analysis, they prejudice their ability to give due weight to alternative hypotheses, and lay themselves open to the charge of relying on assumed belief rather than sound evidence.

[ant]

Ant, you appear to be incapable of anything other than ad hominem fallacy in this thread.

An ad hominem fallacy, 'playing the man', is a failure to engage with a substantive comment, while dismissing it because of some other perceived attribute of the person making the claim.

Baloney, Robert.

You continue to harp on that I am doing nothing more than committing ad hominem fallacies when I highlight the importance of considering the authority of the author of a book rich in interpretation of events from antiquity (a highly complex and specialized field). Only a naive dullard would allow himself to be spoon-fed information without considering who is doing the spooning.

Analogous to this is if you and I presented our cases in a court of law:

You are allowed to call expert witnesses to bolster your claims that will remove any reasonable doubt that what you are attempting to convince a jury of is acceptable

I am allowed to question the reliability and authority of your expert witnesses to cast doubt on any and all claims of truth you are asserting. The examination of your witness' alleged authority is admissible. It is NOT considered to be petty, ad hominem tactics.

It's asinine for you to continue to hide behind such a shallow accusation. You would not be so aggressive with this maneuver if you were confident that the authority and credentials of this particular author was not in question. You can continue to email Doherty all you like. It makes no difference to me. Undoubtedly, his credentials do make a difference to historians that vociferously refute his conclusions. Are they all just Christians that will not accept anything short of Christ's unquestionable existence? Please back that claim with evidence.

Critically analyzing sources of information includes an appraisal of an author:

What are the author's credentials--institutional affiliation (where he or she works), educational background, past writings, or experience? Is the book or article written on a topic in the author's area of expertise?

and

Content Analysis:

Is the information covered fact, opinion, or propaganda? It is not always easy to separate fact from opinion. Facts can usually be verified; opinions, though they may be based on factual information, evolve from the interpretation of facts. Skilled writers can make you think their interpretations are facts.

Does the information appear to be valid and well-researched, or is it questionable and unsupported by evidence? Assumptions should be reasonable. Note errors or omissions

More related stuff here http://www.library.cornell.edu/okuref/r ... LinkReason

Reasonable questions have arisen regarding Doherty's credentials, educational background, and expertise. Perhaps I have yet to find where all this has been clarified. Please update me.

Regarding content analysis; my understanding is Doherty's latest book contains omissions of historical facts and errors of interpretation of facts. Recall that interpretation of historical works, in particular, those from antiquity, is involved and highly complex. It takes years of experience in the field. Scholars with the academic credentials signifying they have "paid their dues" are better equipped at performing this task than those that do not. This is a fact that I will no longer watch you toe dance around.

I'm certain Doherty makes some interesting observations, but further analysis is warranted before we crown mythicists like Doherty the new authority on the historical Jesus.

Now please stop with these impotent claims that all I am doing here is foaming at the mouth and attacking people.

[ant]

In your posts, Robert, you somewhat abuse the word 'believer.' When applied to Jesus Christ, the word clearly implies the lock-stock-and barrel belief of the religiously orthodox. There is no evidence presented that writers and researchers connected with scholarly journals and academic departments are these 'believers', though most of them may believe that Jesus emerged from history. Therefore the kind of prejudice you say is motivating the exclusion of mythicists may not exist. Prejudice is still a possibility, but it would not be a product of religious resentment. It could be simply resentment of those outside the academic establishment, of those who haven't paid their proper dues.

I agree

[ant]

The term ‘ontological’ is not loaded. It simply sets the historical evidence within a broader scientific framework. Ontology is the study of being.

Too easy to interpret that in some other manner. I dont see a need for adding fancy fixings to this.
The question is simple - did a man named Jesus exist or not.

[Interbane]

It is erroneous to refer to it as an "ontological" claim. The word "ontological" itself is loaded. It was not approached as an ontological claim. It is/was a historical claim.

You misunderstand what I meant. An ontologically positive claim is a type of claim, rather than a claim within a field such as the history of religion. It doesn't matter either way, my point was that the burden starts with the party making the claim.

Mainstream historical scholarship has concluded that the burden of proof has been met in the positive based on the available data and evidence.

Do you trust mainstream historical scholars to have concluded correctly? With a belief system with as many adherents as Christianity, how can you be sure the evidence has been weighted objectively? The truth is, you can't, even if you cite agreement from a handful of atheist scholars. We know from centuries past that anti-religious research has been suppressed. Do you think we've left behind all traces of such suppression not only in current scholarship, but in the references used by modern scholars as expert opinion?

I think that due to how much human error and bias plays into this discussion, the question of Jesus has to be asked again, from scratch. The evidence should all be re-examined. I have no doubt Jesus could have been a real person, and if proven true with new evidence, I would be happy that we've at least moved our knowledge forward. The problem is, the combined sum of evidence is not enough to convince me that he was a real person. I do not think that Jesus "does not" exist. That is also an ontologically positive claim, as it marks a change in the existing body of knowledge. In other words, I'm agnostic on the issue.

The issues I see with evidence such as Josephus' writings stand out, after I'd become familiar enough to understand what the problems actually were. If there is scholarly rebuttal to the issues, I'd like to see it. The issues are not difficult to understand and they make sense. I can't say that they are smoke and mirrors rather than actual issues; that is a rebuttal best left to the experts.

[Robert Tulip]

It makes far more sense to read the Gospels as cosmic myth than as literal history. Perhaps the best example to illustrate is the miracle of the loaves and fishes.

Freke and Gandy say in their excellent book The Jesus Mysteries: "Jesus surrounds himself with 12 disciples. This is usually taken to be symbolic of the 12 tribes of Israel. This notion of 12 tribes, however, is itself a symbolic reference to the 12 signs of the zodiac in Babylonian astrology, which the Jews adopted whilst in exile in Babylon. The zodiac was an extremely important symbol in the Pagan world. Osiris-Dionysis is symbolically represented as the still spiritual center of the turning wheel of change represented by the 12 signs. [...] [In] the Mysteries of Mithras 12 disciples surrounded the godman, just as the 12 disciples surrounded Jesus. The Mithraic disciples were dressed up to represent the 12 signs of the zodiac and circled the initiate, who represented Mithras himself."

A short essay by Vexen Crabtree,The Divine Number 12 - 12 Gods, 12 Disciples, 12 Tribes and the Zodiac is at http://www.humanreligions.info/twelve.html and includes the above quote. This essay also notes the precedent of the twelve gods of Olympus, and the pervasive Pythagorean focus on twelve as a symbolic number. I know some of this material is contested, such as the provenance of the idea that Mithras had twelve disciples, but nonetheless it shows that Mark was writing allegory that pointed to a deeper cosmic meaning which was broadly central to mystery religion as marking the natural cycle of the year as the basis of human identity.

It may be that Mark invented the carnalization of Jesus, expanding on Paul's concept of Christ as demiurge, but the myth itself of Christ and the twelve seems obviously to be central to a secret mystery tradition. This becomes most obvious in looking at how Mark explains the miracles of the loaves and fishes at 8:17-21.

"17 Aware of their discussion, Jesus asked them: “Why are you talking about having no bread? Do you still not see or understand? Are your hearts hardened? 18 Do you have eyes but fail to see, and ears but fail to hear? And don’t you remember? 19 When I broke the five loaves for the five thousand, how many basketfuls of pieces did you pick up?” “Twelve,” they replied. 20 “And when I broke the seven loaves for the four thousand, how many basketfuls of pieces did you pick up?” They answered, “Seven.” 21 He said to them, “Do you still not understand?”

Jesus is accusing the disciples of inability to see what is in plain sight. This comes immediately after he has told the Pharisees, amazingly, that this miracle is not a sign from heaven (8:11-12), directly stating that an allegorical reading is required. My reading is that Jesus is saying the 5000 are the stars of the sky, the five loaves are the planets, the two fish are the sun and the moon, the twelve baskets are the twelve months of the year, the seven baskets are the days of the week, and the cosmic abundance derives from the shift of the earth's axis into the signs of the loaves and fishes, Virgo and Pisces, the symbols of the Christian Age as archetypes of Mary and Jesus.

Mark tells us at 8:17 that Christ observes that the real meaning of this story is incomprehensible to those who are hard of heart. For the secret mystery tradition, the inability of broader society to understand the cosmic nature of human life was the central sin of the world. Mark's carnal historical fiction was a way of presenting the cosmic mystery in a way that was popularly accessible. The cosmic seers who wrote the myth hoped in vain that they would be able to retain control of this process, but the fall from grace was so massive that the seers were forgotten as gnostic heretics.

With the feeding of the multitude, the mystery of the absence of an explanation of the parable by Jesus matches with my observation that the loaves and fishes are really a foundation myth for the whole Jesus story, focussed on the cosmic identity of Jesus and Mary as natural poles of the age of Pisces-Virgo, as the true source of the 'miraculous' abundance that gives Christianity its direction and power. It seems the mysterious failure by Jesus to explain why the twelve motif in this miracle is important indicates that this real source must remain hidden. Why?

I'm not sure that the Evangelists were ignorant of the secret meaning, but they chose to keep it hidden in their Gospels. As far as the popular dissemination of Christianity was concerned, the inspiring astrotheological vision had to be carefully hidden. The Jewish rejection of nature worship was so intense that the popular Christian movement saw their vision of transcendence - God as beyond the visible heavens - as central to the ethical identity of the movement. The nature worship of paganism was so heavily associated with the imperial corruption of Greece and Rome that any mythic source for Christian symbols in 'the sun and moon and stars' had to be kept secret. And yet, because this real observation provided the spiritual dynamism, it is retained throughout the New Testament with the lightest of coverings to protect it from the ignorant.

The feeding of the multitude is the only miracle that is in all four Gospels, appearing six times in total, twice in Mark and Matthew and once in both Luke and John. And yet, the Jesus Seminar gave it one of their lowest pebble ratings in terms of their vision of what Jesus would actually have said. I think they got it completely wrong because of their flawed historicist assumption, and this miracle is the foundation story for the cosmic secret of the mythical Christ, while also showing that the allegory of the historical Jesus is purely fictional.

Jesus berates the disciples for their lack of vision, indicating that he is telling of a mystery that he cannot describe in public. This mystery of the miraculous abundance from the loaves and fishes is the identity of Christ as demiurge, seen in precession of the equinox, as the movement of the stars from one Zodiac Age and Great Year to the next, with the newly emerging Virgo-Pisces axis of the loaves and fishes. At Easter, precession meant that at the time of Christ the sun was shifting its position from Aries into Pisces while the full moon was precessing from Libra into Virgo. This astronomical fact had been known for centuries, if not millennia before Christ, and serves as symbol of both divine blessing and curse on humanity. The blessing is the story that our ultimate identity and salvation is cosmic, while the curse is that human life has so alienated itself from its cosmic roots that it will take thousands of years before the restoration of atonement between heaven and earth will be possible.

Seeing Biblical eschatology in the long cosmic time frame of precession accords with the idea from Psalms and Peter that a day is a thousand years for God, so the symbolic week of creation matches to a period of seven thousand years of the fall from grace, with the last thousand years imagined as the sabbath millennium of rest and repair. On this model, the Pisces-Virgo Age of the loaves and fishes matches to the two thousand years since Christ, and we are now entering the transformative liberational moment of the age of peace and healing. Recognising the mythic nature of Christ is central to this change, with the scales falling from people's eyes as we recognise the systemic error involved in treating the gospel as literal history. This is why Jesus said in Matthew 24 that the gospel of the kingdom had to be preached to the whole planet before the end of the Age could come.

[DWill]

Amateurs often disregard the crucial importance of field-familiarity, i.e. that one must have a long and deep acquaintance with a particular time and culture in order to make reliable judgments about the probable and improbable, the expected and unexpected, and all the other background assumptions necessary to understanding the significance of any particular fact or claim--in short, one must be cognizant not merely of the literary context of a statement, but its entire socio-historical context as well. And that is no easy thing to achieve.

This passage quoted by ant is the most significant comment I've seen related to this discussion. Those of us who don't have this experience of immersion need to be very careful about what we claim. I would not be able to judge whether Earl Doherty may be an amateur who is out of his depth. That's what Robert and ant are debating.

[Robert Tulip]

whether Earl Doherty may be an amateur

Frankly that idea is like saying Darwin was out of his depth in Genesis studies or Galileo was out of his depth in Ptolemaic astrology. These apologists are slandering a great scholar in order to conceal from the public the simple facts he explains in his books and on his Jesus Puzzle website.

I have explained and linked to sources on how Jesus is a myth, most recently looking at how gospel symbolism makes complete sense from a mythical viewpoint and none at all from a historical angle. Earl Doherty provides comprehensive analysis of his arguments with sources, for example examining the plausibility of the complete absence of Jesus from first century records. It is no response to say that this information has not been vetted by the very people whose interests it challenges, theologians whose careers have been built on an assumption that Jesus was historical.

Taking the analogy of the expert witness, an investigation has to ask what field of expertise is relevant. Sometimes a person’s expertise can be so narrow that it prejudices their ability to provide impartial assessment, giving them a conflict of interest. Christian theologians are far too narrowly trained to be impartial about the existence of Christ, but they dominate the scholarly field and have an obvious conflict of interest regarding the legitimacy of their paradigm. They do not know about comparative mythology, so a whole rich field of explanation of how the Christ Myth evolved is outside their expertise. They assume the truth of the point at issue, and thereby rule out their credibility and admissibility as experts.

Work on such unpopular topics requires dedication and effort, especially when fundamentalist trolls are spitting vexatious venom, as happens far too often in debate on these matters. I would not be surprised if the retirement of the assistant editor for Robert Price's journal in 2004 just made it too difficult.

[ant]

I'm being sincere when I say that the above makes for interesting discussion. Honestly, I would be open to reading Doherty's latest work, but right now I'm tied down with Structure of Revolutions and The Social Construction of Reality

Scholars favor the existence of H J, but also recognize that each gospel author added material evidently to prove separate theological points. However, that does not necessarily mean because there are inconsistencies throughout the gospels that we are okay to throw the baby Jesus out with his bathwater. That is a conclusion that would no doubt (and often is) be made by someone with an aversion to Christianity in general, or by someone unaware of the criteria used to determine the existence of a figure from antiquity.

Determining what happened in the past is not a matter of guess work. It is a matter of evidence. It is fair to say that you and I both agree with this reasoning.

When reading a detailed, vigorous examination of evidence, you have a right to see what that evidence is. Again, I think this is something we both agree on.

When examining available evidence to reconstruct the life of Jesus, we turn to the primary sources that give mention to his existence. Likening this to the investigation of a crime, we go to the scene of the crime:

1) The canonical Gospels and other writings in the New Testament

2) Gospels that did not make it into the New Testament (non canonical)

3) Pagan and Jewish sources (Josephus, Tacitus, etc)

The above sources available for direct examination are the only sources available. If someone claims something about Jesus that’s not based in any of the above sources, that person is simply making it up - PERIOD

Having said all that, look at what you wrote;

Freke and Gandy say in their excellent book The Jesus Mysteries: "Jesus surrounds himself with 12 disciples. This is usually taken to be symbolic of the 12 tribes of Israel. This notion of 12 tribes, however, is itself a symbolic reference to the 12 signs of the zodiac in Babylonian astrology, which the Jews adopted whilst in exile in Babylon. The zodiac was an extremely important symbol in the Pagan world. Osiris-Dionysis is symbolically represented as the still spiritual center of the turning wheel of change represented by the 12 signs. [...] [In] the Mysteries of Mithras 12 disciples surrounded the godman, just as the 12 disciples surrounded Jesus. The Mithraic disciples were dressed up to represent the 12 signs of the zodiac and circled the initiate, who represented Mithras himself."

[/quote][/quote]

What segments of the above are extracted from the available evidence we are working with?

What segments of the above are not included in the body of said evidence?

What segments of the above are simply conjecture? How about the claim "is itself a symbolic reference to the 12 signs of the zodiac"? This claim is "WHAT IF the 12 tribes of Israel is itself a symbolic reference to the 12 signs of the zodiac" conjecture.

The remaining portion of the above quote is entirely speculative. It is "what if" reasoning in its purest form, Robert. It makes for a fascinating story line but is not conducive to the examination of hard evidence to determine if Christ existed or not.

The essay by Crabtree is yet more of the same conjecture. It is not following a systematic approach to available evidence. It is more "what if" dressings.

I really have nothing further to add to the remaining portions of your post. I think you get my point here though.

Thanks

[DWill]

But again, Robert, you persist in saying these scholarly opponents of yours are generally only Christian theologians and apologists. Proof needs to be offered of this. You seem to be assuming that the identity is true just because they favor some historical origin for Jesus. If Bart Ehrman has argued for the historical Jesus, does that mean he's a theologian or apologist? You might have your own ad hom issues to deal with.