Did the man "Jesus" exist?

[lady of shallot]

Debate between Bart Ehrman and a fundie.


I have not watched it, but from the commentary it seems that Erhman's argument for the historical Jesus is like an entry ticket, as no one who disagrees with this item of faith would be listened to by any public audience in the USA. .

Robert, do you really believe that one who disagrees with a historical Jesus will not be listened to by any public audience in the USA? There are very many linked videos on this very thread that do indeed go to lectures (many held in religious colleges/universities) at which both and/or HItchens and Harris spoke.

[ant]

it seems that Erhman's argument for the historical Jesus is like an entry ticket, as no one who disagrees with this item of faith would be listened to by any public audience in the USA.

I'm sorry, Robert,

Please watch the debate before you comment on it.
What you've said is a total misrepresentation of both what Ehrman's stance is and the debate itself.

If I've misunderstood you in some way regarding the above quote, please explain further.

[Robert Tulip]

LOS - Neither Harris nor Hitchens to my knowledge have argued that Jesus did not exist. It is an argument that is outside the pale.

Ant, Ehrman has argued that the early church is riddled with fraud and lies but nonetheless that Jesus exists. It looks to me like he defers to believers on this question. So I have not misrepresented him. If you disagree you should explain why.

[lady of shallot]

LOS - Neither Harris nor Hitchens to my knowledge have argued that Jesus did not exist. It is an argument that is outside the pale.

I will have to re-watch some of the videos. They certainly say God does not exist.

[tat tvam asi]

Robert, I watched the video and it looks to be Ehrman in debate with some type of opposing liberal. The opponent grants Ehrman that the NT is errant in various ways, but contends that the gospels are still reliable historical accounts nonetheless.

Ehrman had to contrast by asking the opponent if he considers the gospel of Peter a reliable historical account of the life of Jesus. The opponent replies that in certain ways he feels there is some history in Peter, but not fully true history as a whole. Ehrman then chimes in and makes his point that Mark, Matthew, Luke, and John are the very same as Peter for the very same reasons. It's funny because the debate more or less represents a divide - semantic or otherwise - between an active liberal Christian believer and an Agnostic former believer.

[youkrst]

They certainly say God does not exist.

isn't that supposed to be jesus' dad?

ie. if the father doesnt literally exist neither does the son literally exist?

what a confusing mess literalism makes of a beautiful metaphor.

[Robert Tulip]

it looks to be Ehrman in debate with some type of opposing liberal

Okay, as I said, I was just going off the blog comment. But in my book anyone who says the Bible is historically accurate is a fundamentalist.

With the God issue, many people who reject the existence of God believe in the existence of Jesus Christ, eg Hitchens and Dawkins. This thread is about Jesus, not God. Public debate on the existence of Jesus is very scanty.

[DWill]

I think your last sentence should be absolute--it will not be possible to achieve objective knowledge. My point has been that to be as objective as possible, it helps to avoid a kind of embedded judgment that I see in your language. "Religious fantasies," "deliberate effort to promote," etc.--this is polemical, as much as to you it seems plain as day that one can call it true.

There is a lot of objective knowledge. History has abundant attested facts, for example the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 AD by Rome, and the numerous corroborated details from books and archaeological records. Absolutely, we have objective knowledge of the lives of historical figures.

Wow, your post is long, Robert, though it's not prolix. I might not be able to comment on all of it. I was thinking of our appraisals or interpretations never reaching the status of objective knowledge. Almost by definition, on this level we don't have to do with that far side of the continuum that we label objective. I guess these are not really details, some of which we might be able to know.

But there is a continuum from certainty through uncertainty to falsehood, as Plato describes in his allegory of the divided line. With Biblical details, there is massive controversy about where they sit on the line. True believers think it is absolutely certain that Jesus died on the cross and miraculously rose from the grave, and will fix you with a steely eye if you doubt the substitutionary atonement. Liberal Christians generally agree that our universe is governed by the laws of science, and interpret miracles as imaginative parables, while accepting that Jesus was a historical figure. Then we have the more polemical view that I am promoting, that to assert that Jesus Christ was a real person makes no sense and conflicts with the best reading of the evidence we have.

I wouldn't call polemics a "view", in the same class as the first two you mentioned. It's an intent whereby the speaker decides that dispassionate argument isn't going to carry the day, so he takes a more aggressive approach. I enjoy a good polemic, but it's so hard to this well, without merely asserting what would need to be proved, and sometimes flirting with name-callling.

In the examples that DWill disputes here, I think it is obvious that the church engaged in "deliberate effort to promote" implausible stories, especially all the miracles. Only fundamentalists now think these stories are plausible. The "massive historical success of these religious fantasies" is attested by the fact that questioning the Apostles Creed would put you in a very difficult spot over the centuries of Christendom. I have linked to the creed, and stand by my assessment that objectively speaking it is fantasy. Jesus Christ was not born of the virgin Mary, and he is not sitting at the right hand of the Father. These credal visions are myth, not fact.

Remember that we're talking about those shadowy origins of Chrisitianity, and that as far as I know historical correctness isn't something we need fear. What the church did in the centuries after the first A.D., is different from alleging manipulation by elites right off the bat. I think, as well, that what the Catholic Church promoted was the central Christ myth as reported in the Bible. The Church wasn't particularly known for its detailed fundamentalism. The Bible wasn't even supposed to be read by the people, and several Catholics I've known say they were never encouraged to read it. The point is that ironically, reformed Christianity was mostly responsible for fundamentalism.

The debate around myth depends on how it is interpreted. If myth is seen as symbolic, that is okay. If myth is seen as literal fact, that is psychosis, or at least neurosis. I have a soft spot even for the Apostle's Creed, but only as myth, not as fact. My dispute is with the fundamentalists who assert that mythic fantasy is objective reality. And that includes the myth of God.

But how can we give God some symbolic truth yet be required to reject him intellectually? I don't have that kind of split mind. I'm not even sure I know what you mean when you say the Apostle's (singular or plural?) Creed appeals to you as a myth. Maybe it's me. Here's another thought, that what you respond to in myth is best classified as beauty, as aesthetics. Maybe in all of our discussions of religion we omit the importance of beauty. Could this also be, essentially, what you feel a total reliance on science deprives people of? Not that I would agree that science and beauty are at all in opposition (nor would you, I think).

I think you have misread me on this one DWill. A while back we discussed the Chinese Whispers process, whereby a story that was known to be fiction gradually mutated into a story believed to be fact, without any deliberate deceptive intent at any point in the chain of transmission. We could even assume good intentions on the part of the Church Fathers who burnt the Library of Alexandria and destroyed classical learning on the grounds that everything except the Bible was Satanic. They had a vision of God in which evidence and logic simply did not fit. Did they deliberately manipulate? I think you have to conclude that yes they did manipulate, even if they held the deluded view that their fantasy was fact. The effort to suppress heresy was orchestrated by armies and bishops over many centuries. It was not just an accident of oral history.

Again, we have to talk about the formative times early on. Of course the Church, when it had become the Church, exerted plenty of heavy-duty control over the message. In the many decades of formation, though, something much less directed must have been going on. And it doesn't seem likely that things start with a story known to be just a story--for purposes of entertainment, supposedly? It seems more likely that people's need or desire to believe shapes the story in particular ways. From all indications, it was from more to less tethered by reality as the stories evolved. If you can consider just as a hypothetical this scenario: some fervent followers of a messiah-like figure face the shock of their savior's ignominious execution. What might their states of mind cause them to think is true? Could hysteria lead them to begin, right then and there, the myth that became Jesus Christ? Your scenario of Chinese whispers begins with a group of stories, all supposedly transmitted orally, that everyone takes as metaphorical. Is that likely to be the case with an oral tradition? Isn't is always a coterie of elites that diverge with an esoteric interpretation? Chinese whispers also doesn't sort with coming to believe over time that stories are true rather than symbolic. That phenomenon is only about mistakes being introduced along the way.

No, but your statement "That few or none of them might have happened, ... seems not to indicate that the purpose of the writings was to be mythic and allegorical" does open up some wiggle room around whether the Gospels were intended as fact or myth. The stated purpose was to record "the things that have been fulfilled among us" (Luke 1), even while Jesus also said he concealed his real teachings for secret initiates and that everything said to outsiders was parable(Mark 4). This seems to imply that even his own existence was parable.

If we take the gospels more in their entirely instead of picking one or two embedded scenes or sayings, I do think that attesting to facts is the prime motive behind their writing.

We have a binary either/or logic here. Either the Gospel authors believed Jesus lived or they did not. Christians regard the intensity of the Evangelist's belief as evidence of its factual truth, suggesting that invention on such massive and systemic scale is implausible. Logically, acceptance of intensity as evidence commits the fallacy of argument from authority, but it does have real weight.

Here I disagree, but it's partly in your favor. If we consider the kind of literature that the gospels are, we can make room for distance between the beliefs of the authors and the content of the works. It doesn't have to be binary because these writers were doing a large amount of assembling and transmitting; their personal imprint on the works, and their attitudes, can be difficult to assess, because even though the four are different, we might suspect that each was reporting a different variant, not making up the variations. While healings, exorcisms, and loaves and fishes aren't necessarily reported because the authors believed in them all literally, the fact that in our scientific, post-magic age millions do, points to the high likelihood that the multitudes back then always did, too.

In the interests of historical accuracy, the big question here is the direction of memetic mutation of the Christ myth. Were literal miracles the original belief, which has since been watered down by modern allegorical reading, or was an allegory actually the original intent, which was watered down into literal story for popular consumption in the Gospels? My view is the latter. The resurrection started as a cosmic myth of the annual fertility cycle of the seasons, and then had the carnal details of the Jesus story added as part of a messianic construction.

I agree that this is the crux of the matter.

To speak of "real" meanings with such archetypal material is very difficult. Much of the "real" meaning was in the subjective fantasy of believers regarding Jesus as a personal lord and savior. This personal 'reality' has psychological meaning, but is not scientific.

I only meant how the writings would be received. Of course you are right that we can't speak about meanings as being real or not.

This is the debate over evemerism, the claim that the Gospels elaborated fiction around a real person, Jesus Christ. My view is that evemerism is unlikely for several reasons. The meaning of the title Jesus Christ, Anointed Savior, suggests a widespread yearning in the early common era, with the idea of the Christ emerging at the same time in different places. The trauma of the destruction of Jerusalem produced a need for a 'one for all' figure who could sublimate the evil and unite the good in a message of perfect love. So the primary source, like the emotional resonance of a pop song, was mythic. The idea that people wanted to believe was the one that gradually emerged. Components that resonated with the popular desire were kept, while those that did not resonate were discarded. The psychology is very complex, so it is often hard for us to say why which stories made the cut. But the main context is the psychology of dealing with the massive suffering and destruction inflicted by Rome.

If there was a model for a ur-Christ, this isn't the Jesus Christ that resulted from all the accretion over the decades. There doesn't have to be, and of course there likely wasn't, any Jesus Christ who lived. As for the second temple trauma, that was no doubt crucial, and it is likely that Jews reached pretty far back to gather around them the most comforting parts of history and myth. Whether they recognized the difference is again key. By this time they did have an interesting mix to draw on, a combination of Jewish historical-sounding narrative and the myth and religion of Greece and the Middle East.

[youkrst]

With the God issue, many people who reject the existence of God believe in the existence of Jesus Christ, eg Hitchens and Dawkins.

is that a kind of evemerist position?

ie. yahweh isn't god and jesus isn't his son sent to save the world but there was "a jesus" who was doing cool stuff and got crucified but he couldn't literally walk on water and didn't literally rise out from among the dead?

(gadzooks it's so bloody obviously a metaphor if you're familiar with the symbols)

[youkrst]

the title of the thread "Re: Did the man "Jesus" exist?" begs the question.

which one?

the literalist jesus
the evemerist jesus
the cosmic christ
the mythical composite jesus

the mormon jesus
the JW jesus
the SDA jesus
the jewish jesus

the islamic jesus

seems to me like there are many interpretations and versions of jesus so in order to ask the question "did the man jesus" exist you first have to describe which jesus you mean.