tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21219785.post6906626350759362641..comments2023-12-01T18:05:24.875-05:00Comments on Debunking Christianity: Where is the 800 pound gorilla?Unknownnoreply@blogger.comBlogger181125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21219785.post-17541022990604397942008-03-25T12:02:00.000-04:002008-03-25T12:02:00.000-04:00Bart says:Paul's use of "Christos" may only mean G...Bart says:<BR/><BR/><I>Paul's use of "Christos" may only mean God's anointed. The concept of an anointed heavenly son, a savior, and the offspring of the Father and Sophia (the spirit, Wisdom) were certainly concepts extant in the first century within Diaspora Judaism.</I><BR/><BR/>Indeed we have textual evidence to support just this reading from Theophilus of Antioch, writing as late as 180 CE.<BR/><BR/>Here's <A HREF="http://www.earlychristianwritings.com/text/theophilus-book1.html" REL="nofollow">Theophilus</A>:<BR/><BR/><B>And about your laughing at me and calling me "Christian," you know not what you are saying. First, because that which is anointed is sweet and serviceable, and far from contemptible. For what ship can be serviceable and seaworthy, unless it be first caulked [anointed]? Or what castle or house is beautiful and serviceable when it has not been anointed? And what man, when he enters into this life or into the gymnasium, is not anointed with oil? And what work has either ornament or beauty unless it be anointed and burnished? Then the air and all that is under heaven is in a certain sort anointed by light and spirit; and are you unwilling to be anointed with the oil of God? <I>Wherefore we are called Christians on this account, because we are anointed with the oil of God.</I></B><BR/><BR/>Where's Jesus?Evanhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/14299188458940897810noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21219785.post-31667612670416639122008-03-24T12:16:00.000-04:002008-03-24T12:16:00.000-04:00Tim said,If the suggestion that in the synoptics J...Tim said,<BR/><BR/>If the suggestion that in the synoptics Jesus is definitely not God, then I think this is just false. We could start the argument with Matthew 9:6, Mark 2:10, and Luke 5:24. All I would concede here is that the case for a divine Jesus is easier to make from the fourth gospel and Paul’s epistles.<BR/><BR/>Yes, it certainly is easier to make the case for Jesus' divinity from John and Paul. Let's look at your synoptic proof texts above:<BR/><BR/>Mark 2:10 All this says is that the son of man has authority to forgive sins. You can make the case that forgiving sins is a godlike characteristic, but then again, letting a goat carry away sins into the desert didn't make the goat into a god. This can be understood as delegated power. The use of the "son of man" title (one of those curious omissions in Paul) is a synonym for "man" not to be understood as a divinity.<BR/><BR/>Matt 9:6 See above. Matthew simply copies Mark's son of man forgiving sins.<BR/><BR/>Luke 5:24 What a coincidence! Luke is copying Mark just like Matthew did. Nothing new here.<BR/><BR/>This isn't much of a case. I will continue to maintain that only the Johannine literature unequivocally marries the concept of Jesus the man and Jesus the divinity.<BR/><BR/>Tim wrote,<BR/>Although I am persuaded by the evidence in Paley, Smith, Hemer, and Kettenbach that Acts is basically a historical narrative and that it dovetails as well with the epistles as we can expect any narratives of secular history to dovetail with each other, I do not see that I am using this as an assumption in our discussion.<BR/><BR/>You are viewing the Paulines through the template of Acts, taking for granted such reports as<BR/><BR/>1. A protracted ministry of Jesus following the resurrection.<BR/><BR/>2. A miraculous infusion of the holy spirit to the dispirited disciples giving them clarity of thought in theology, resulting in mass conversions of a quarter of the population of Jerusalem.<BR/><BR/>3. The identification with the disciples with the apostles.<BR/><BR/>4. The murderous actions of the Jews in reaction to the claim that Jesus was the Messiah.<BR/><BR/>5. The identification of Paul with a Saul of Tarsus.<BR/><BR/>6. The miraculous conversion of Paul on the road to Damascus.<BR/><BR/>7. The violent reaction of the Jews against Paul's preaching.<BR/><BR/>8. The Jerusalem conference.<BR/><BR/>9. Christians being put out of the synagogues.<BR/><BR/>10. Opposition to Paul coming from Jewish Christians from Jerusalem.<BR/><BR/>None of these things are discernable in the Pauline epistles unless one is looking for them, first looking through the lens of Acts. The entirity of the story of the origin of the church as seen in Acts just isn't there in Paul. Conversely, Acts makes no mention of any Pauline letters and creates a Pauline theology at odds with those letters, but more in line with proto catholic orthodoxy.<BR/><BR/>Tim wrote:<BR/>The narrative of Acts is minutely circumstantial, and in the second part in particular it ranges quite widely in space and is therefore subject to cross checks from various sorts of evidence (archaeological, nautical, etc.). The result of these cross checks is that the narrative appears to be astonishingly accurate in dozens of details that we can verify. This provides a very strong case that it is an authentic travelogue.<BR/><BR/>I will take no issue with the details of geography. There is no reason to suspect that the writer of Acts wouldn't have had some knowledge of the location of Cyprus, Jerusalem, Antioch, Athens, Corinth, Rome, et al. The movie "Gladiator" put Russel Crowe's character into a historical and geographical context, but it didn't actually happen. <BR/><BR/>I had stated:<BR/>From Paul, it is not possible to infer a separate Christian identity from that of diaspora Judaism. <BR/><BR/>Tim wrote,<BR/>You cannot mean this literally. Diaspora Judaism practiced the Last Supper, talked about the messiah as come, proclaimed the availability of the Abrahamic promises to the gentiles, declared the law to be ended, maintained that circumcision was now optional, and referred to the resurrection of Jesus as authenticated by numerous witnesses? <BR/><BR/>Paul never suggests a sharp break between his followers and the synagogues. Judaism of the period was "evangelistic" in that they actively recruited gentile converts. Yes, these converts were accepted as those of the nations who were to be blessed "in Abraham" according to the promise. Obviously, these gentile God-fearers who converted were expected to be circumcized and follow the Torah (part of the point of my post). Paul's message claimed that they could be grafted into Israel without being circumcized and following the minutae of Jewish regulations. That was the point of contention between Paul and the Jews.<BR/><BR/>Judaism could and did have enough diversity in the first century to accommodate some eerily Christian sounding parallels. The DSS community, for instance, were ruled by a council of 12, called themselves "The Way" and "The Poor (ebion), proclaimed a new covenant, baptized, and celebrated a community ritualized mean of bread and wine. <BR/><BR/>Paul's use of "Christos" may only mean God's anointed. The concept of an anointed heavenly son, a savior, and the offspring of the Father and Sophia (the spirit, Wisdom) were certainly concepts extant in the first century within Diaspora Judaism.<BR/><BR/>Paul's few mentions of others having visions of the risen anointed savior are not substantively different from his own visions, nor at odds with the "heavenly son" concept within Judaism.bart willruthhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/15483899663294287019noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21219785.post-18169553633101581702008-03-23T12:58:00.000-04:002008-03-23T12:58:00.000-04:00Tim had stated: The slaughter of the innocents doe...Tim had stated: <I>The slaughter of the innocents doesn’t fit a “legend-building” agenda in any way that I can see.</I><BR/><BR/>In fact it does. In Matthew we see various kinds of legend-building going on. In some cases (such as the earthquake and resurrection of an untold number of saints upon Jesus’ death on the cross), embellishments are intended to make the attending event seem more impressive to the reader. Episodes of miracles are especially well suited for this (they seem to come into full flower in Matthew's passion sequences). In other cases, Matthew’s concern is to erect parallels between his Jesus narrative and OT themes. The slaughter of the innocents is an old legend which Matthew incorporates into his narrative for precisely this purpose. As Wells points out:<BR/><BR/><B>The story of this massacre is a typical tyrant legend, posthumously blackening the memory of a hated despot. It is not mentioned elsewhere in the NT (not, for instance, in Luke’s birth and infancy narrative), nor by any ancient historian – not even by Josephus, who recorded the history of Herod and his family and stressed its horrors. It is also typical of the stories of miraculous escapes from danger with which the infancy of a great man is credited (Oedipus, Moses). Matthew is here modeling Jesus, the second deliverer, on Moses, the first: in both cases, the birth of the child occasions uneasiness in the powers that be, followed by a consultation with wise men, a massacre of children and a miraculous rescue, with Egypt as the land of rescue.</B> (<I>The Jesus Myth</I>, p. 155)<BR/><BR/>Tim: <I>Matthew 27:51b-53 could fit that pattern, but it is quite an extrapolation from this to “numerous details.”</I><BR/><BR/>The numerous details which fit this pattern are not extrapolated from Matthew 27:51b-53; rather, Matthew 27:51b-53 is merely one of those many details.<BR/><BR/>Tim: <I>The stories in the first two chapters of Matthew, whether they are authentic and veridical or not, do not stand disconnected from the rest of the narrative like Matthew 27:51b-53 does.</I><BR/><BR/>That’s because the kind of legend-building Matthew uses in the first two chapters are intended to show a relationship between his portrait of Jesus and OT themes (see above).<BR/><BR/>Regards,<BR/>DawsonBahnsen Burnerhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/11030029491768748360noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21219785.post-20647591530519894952008-03-23T12:05:00.000-04:002008-03-23T12:05:00.000-04:00Regarding the source of Tacitus’ information, I ha...Regarding the source of Tacitus’ information, I had asked: <BR/><BR/><B>Now what is the alternative that you prefer, and what evidence do you have for that alternative?</B><BR/><BR/>Tim: <I>If Tacitus’s information came from interviews with Christians, it would be evidence only of what Christians believed when they were interviewed.</I><BR/><BR/>I would say this is correct. If Tacitus' information came from interviews with Christians, it would only confirm that the Christians he interviewed believed what is being reported in his statement. This does no damage to either the mythic theory or the legend theory.<BR/><BR/>Tim: <I>If it came from hearsay, it would be evidence for what was believed about Christians, which is wider in scope; if there were any dissent over whether “Christus” had been crucified under Pontius Pilate, this would lessen the probability that Tacitus would refer to it in so matter of fact a fashion. If it came from Roman records, then that closes the case on the mythic theory.</I><BR/><BR/>If it could be established that Tacitus' information in fact came from Roman records (something that no one, to my knowledge, has been able to do), I would tend to agree that it would put a capper on the mythic theory. But it would not put a capper on the legend theory. Recall that the legend theory allows that a real human being named Jesus existed and may even have been crucified at some point, and that the narratives we find in the NT about a man so-named are legendary tales that grew over time since his death on a cross under Roman rule.<BR/><BR/><BR/><BR/>Tim: <I>So there are several options here. (1) There is no hint in the passage that Tacitus has personally conducted interviews to gain this information; that is, I think, by far the least plausible hypothesis.</I><BR/><BR/>You are correct, Tacitus does not state that he gathered the information he is reporting from interviews that he personally conducted. In fact, he doesn’t make any statement identifying the source of his information at all. So far as what Tacitus does state, it is an open question. It’s not clear how we can conclude that the possibility that Tacitus did get his information from interviews with Christians is “by far the least plausible hypothesis.” But I do agree that you are free to think this. I had already pointed out that Tacitus was governor of Asia ca. AD 112-113 – around the time that the passage in question was written in fact. I quoted Wells pointing out that Tacitus could very well have had problems with Christians in his province similar to those that Pliny experienced as governor in neighboring Bithynia at the same time. Pliny tells us that he interviewed Christians. If he actually did do this, I don’t see why the possibility that Tacitus did the same is “by far the least plausible hypothesis.” No, that Pliny did confer directly with Christians does not mean that Tacitus did, but if it wasn’t beneath Pliny to have done so, why suppose it was in Tacitus’ case? No argument has been given to conclude as strongly as you indicate here that Tacitus would not have done this. <BR/><BR/>Tim: <I>(2) It could be that the information came from someone else’s interviews and/or torturings of Christians. This cannot be ruled out. But in that case, it matters a great deal for our discussion when this information was wrung from them. If it was after the gospels had achieved currency, then it likely reflects what they had read and believed; if it was earlier, it would reflect at least oral traditions; if it was much earlier, it would reflect teaching in a community where eyewitnesses were still living.</I><BR/><BR/>I don’t know how one would go about determining when the information – supposing it was gathered through interviews or torturings of Christians – was “wrung from them.” We do know that Tacitus was writing in the early part of the second century, and we also know that the Christian movement had been in existence for several decades before this. There is certainly nothing in the record to suggest that the information Tacitus was relating in the passage in question had been lying in wait, as it were, for 60 or 70 years.<BR/><BR/>Tim: <I>(3) It could be that it was a matter of common knowledge. This cannot be ruled out, and it would give stronger but not decisive evidence for the veracity of the facts Tacitus relates.</I><BR/><BR/>We have to be a little more specific here: what exactly is being proposed as “a matter of common knowledge” at this time (ca. 112-115)? That Christians lived in Rome? That Christians worshipped someone “called Christ”? That this Christ had been condemned some 85 years earlier by a “procurator” named Pilate in Judea? That the crucifixion of this Christ initially dampened the movement, but it proved resilient and sprang back with renewed vigor and spread from Judea “to Rome itself”? As we borrow into the elements contained in the Tacitus reference, we find an increase in specificity, and “common knowledge” is usually not very specific as this gets. That Tacitus was reporting common knowledge here seems to become more unlikely as each element he reports is introduced. But let’s say that much of this was, ca. 115, already common knowledge at least for Tacitus and his cronies. Tacitus was a learned and well traveled man, a historian who was penning histories. Was this common knowledge for such a person by this time? Perhaps, but this would need to be shown. And even then, it is not necessarily the case that this “would give stronger… evidence for the veracity of [what] Tacitus relates.” <BR/><BR/>Tim: <I>(4) It could be that Tacitus looked it up in Roman records or some other non-Christian source. This cannot be ruled out, and for this reason the Sanders quotation seems to me to be an overstatement. We know that Tacitus used official sources constantly in his work: the Acta Diurna (see Annals 13.31, 16.22, etc.), the speeches of Tiberius and Claudius, various collections of letters, the work of Pliny the Elder, etc. Significantly, Tacitus had access to Josephus’s works and mentions nothing about Jesus that could not have been found in Josephus.</I><BR/><BR/>I have already addressed the proposal that Tacitus got his information about “Christ” from Roman records. It seems quite implausible to me. I’ll run through some of the reasons why: (a) Tacitus refers to the individual in question as “Christ,” not as Jesus. “Christ” is a religious title which I highly doubt would have been recorded in a Roman record; (b) Tacitus refers to Pilate as ‘procurator’ which was the title of Pilate’s position in Tacitus’ day, but not during Pilate’s day, suggesting that, if he was consulting any kind of record, it was a contemporary record, not a record from the time in question; that Tacitus would consult Roman records and see Pilate’s title as ‘prefect’ and then call him ‘procurator’ in his own writing seems unlikely to me; (c) that Tacitus would take the time for a passing mention of Christ to consult Roman records from Judea aged some 80 plus years to add a brief explanatory note in his mention of Christians as Nero’s scapegoat for the fire which destroyed much of Rome in 64 AD seems quite fantastic to me; (d) that Romans in the remote province of Judea would have kept such meticulous records about condemned criminals at the time the gospels put Jesus’ crucifixion seems a bit of a stretch; the Romans crucified thousand upon thousands of condemned prisoners, and even if they did record Jesus’ crucifixion, it seems quite a stretch that they would have recorded his name as “Christ” (if it were recorded as “Jesus,” how would Tacitus have found it if he were looking for someone named “Christ”?), and if they did record it (even as “Christ” instead of, say, “King of the Jews” as the gospels indicate), the likelihood that they survived and made their way to Rome so that some 80 plus years later Tacitus could go into some great hall of records and spend perhaps days looking for such a reference, borders on wishful thinking at this point. So for these reasons, I would say that your (4) is the least plausible. As for Josephus, I have already discussed him as a source at length in previous comments.<BR/><BR/>Tim: <I>If his information came from such an early non-Christian source, the mythic theory is effectively eliminated.</I><BR/><BR/>But not the legend theory. The legend theory is compatible with the possibility that a cultic preacher named Jesus was condemned under a Roman official in Judea. That a man named Jesus was crucified in Judea is nothing remarkable. That legends sprang up in the memory of such a person is not at all impossible, especially if he was considered a martyr for a cause.<BR/><BR/><BR/>You gave your assessment of plausibility for each of these proposals:<BR/><BR/>Tim: <I>(1) is quite implausible since it is not represented in the passage. (Contrast Pliny.)</I><BR/><BR/>If the test of a proposal’s plausibility is whether or not “it is… represented in the passage” in question, then all four of your proposals are equally implausible, for none of them is represented in the passage in question. Apparently, but not clearly, you seem to agree, for you say:<BR/><BR/>Tim: <I>I do not think that there is a vastly stronger case for one of the options (2), (3), or (4) over the others.</I><BR/><BR/>Of all the proposals, (2) seems closest to having any staying power, though I would expand it to include conversations and discussions that Tacitus could have had with clerks and officials, such as Pliny, who had field experience with Christians, and perhaps even written reports about Christians and conflicts involving them in various provinces that may have found their way into his possession. Also, since Tacitus was himself governor of Asia (neighboring Pliny’s Bithynia at the same time he was having problems with Christians), the possibility that Tacitus learned about the Christ cult during his service in such a role seems quite strong to me. (2) seems more likely than (1) since it is broader; (1) requires that Tacitus himself interviewed Christian representatives; (2) allows that he learned about Christians through his colleagues. (2) may be stronger than (3) depending on what is taken as “common knowledge” (see my points above). And below you make a strong point against (3) yourself, which lessens its likelihood. I certainly think that (2) as I would characterize it is several times more plausible and more likely than (4), for reasons already stated.<BR/><BR/>Regarding proposal (2), you stated:<BR/><BR/>Tim: <I>Under (2), it tells us either nothing not in the gospels or else something about oral tradition prior to the gospels; this option makes the testimony of Tacitus either no independent evidence against the mythic theory or rather weak independent evidence against it – weak, since many of those oral traditions were probably incorporated into the gospels as we have them.</I><BR/><BR/>I agree: (2) would pose no threat against the mythic theory (and even less against the legend theory), but note that it is not because of this that I find (2) more plausible. You should see that this is where I think the evidence points after considering it.<BR/><BR/>Tim: <I>Under (3), Tacitus’s report tells us what was believed in the Roman world at large. Since it is improbable that this story would have undisputed currency among Romans if it were not substantially true, this option makes the testimony of Tacitus rather strong evidence against the mythic theory.</I><BR/><BR/>Your assessment here depends on specifically which element in Tacitus’ report is thought to be “substantially true.” Is it the part that Christians were already hated by Nero’s time? I don’t see how this speaks against the mythic theory (it certainly doesn’t speak against the legend theory). Is it the part that Nero scapegoated Rome’s Christians for the fire? Again, I don’t see how this vies against either the mythic or legend theory. So far both theories are in agreement that the Christian movement existed at the time in question. Is it the part about someone “called Christ” being the “founder” of the cult bearing his name at the time in question? Again, both the mythic and the legend theories are compatible with this. And so far, I don’t see how these parts being “common knowledge” would at all recommend the truth of the gospel portrait of Jesus. Is it the part about Christ being crucified under a Roman official named Pilate? I see no reason why the mythic theory would be incompatible with the possibility that Jesus’ crucifixion had taken place under Pilate could (I’ll be as charitable as possible here) by Nero’s time have been incorporated into oral traditions that were circulating about Jesus. And it certainly is not incompatible with the legend theory which grants that a cultic preacher was condemned to die by crucifixion under a Roman official. Would this part have been “common knowledge” in Nero’s day? I strongly doubt it, if by “common knowledge” we mean common to non-Christians as well as Christians. I suspect that most non-Christians of Nero’s day took little notice of Christians or their beliefs, unless of course they were in their midst and encountered conflicts with them. Most people were probably doing their best just to survive. Then again, Christians would have been just one of many different belief systems of the day. In the very passage under review, Tacitus characterizes Rome as “the great reservoir and collecting ground for every kind of depravity and filth.”<BR/><BR/>Tim: <I>But one fact that tells against (3) is that there does not seem to have been much common knowledge about Christians in the Roman world; witness Suetonius’s probable botch of Christ’s name and Pliny’s resorting to torture to satisfy his curiosity.</I><BR/><BR/>I think this is a strong, but less than conclusive point against (3). So far I think (2) (as I have nuanced it) is the strongest of the three options so far considered. But we have one more to consider:<BR/><BR/>Tim: <I>Under (4), the mythic theory is essentially ruled out.</I><BR/><BR/>I would tend to agree, so long as (4) could be established as it is herein conceived. But, significantly, it would not rule out the legend theory. As I have pointed out, the legend theory is compatible with an actual cultic figure, wholly mortal in his nature, being martyred under the Romans by means of crucifixion. So even if we could establish (4), the gains here for Christianity aren’t even meager in my view.<BR/><BR/>Tim: <I>If I had to pick just one specific hypothesis as the most plausible of the lot, I’d go with Harnack and say Tacitus was using Josephus, on the basis of close parallels between them in the recounting of information.</I><BR/><BR/>Then again, if close parallels are the deciding factor, it would be just as easy to suppose that Tacitus had reviewed reports from various Asian provinces about Christians and what they believed. I would put this under (2) as I enlarged it above. And again, even if we grant that the Testimonium, for instance, is authentically Josephan (I’ve already indicated that I don’t think it is), and also that Tacitus relied on it for his information about Christ (which even you admit is unprovable), this would not pose a threat to the legend theory, as I have indicated.<BR/><BR/>Tim: <I>But since this cannot be proved, only shown to be plausible, the best we can do in the absence of further evidence is to say that this passage of Tacitus offers some evidence against the mythic theory but that it is not decisive.</I><BR/><BR/>I can also say that it offers no evidence against the legend theory.<BR/><BR/>Regards, <BR/>DawsonBahnsen Burnerhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/11030029491768748360noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21219785.post-27383425746481901692008-03-22T21:32:00.000-04:002008-03-22T21:32:00.000-04:00I wrote: I think Wells puts greater weight on his ...I wrote: <B>I think Wells puts greater weight on his assessment of the situation because of the timeframe involved (Claudius' reign between 41 and 54 AD) in relation to the body of Christian literature extant at that time, and also the scant detail included in Suetonius' statement (for instance, Suetonius tells us nothing that isn't already present in Paul's letters).</B> <BR/><BR/>Tim: <I>Actually, the very oddness of Suetonius’s reference is excellent evidence that he isn’t getting his information from Paul’s letters. So it does provide independent evidence for the physical existence of Christ...</I><BR/><BR/>That Suetonius did not get his information from Paul’s letters (something I wasn’t suggesting anyway), does not make it independent testimony. Indeed, Suetonius refers to a “Chrestus” which you admit was a common name, so how can we be sure it was a reference to someone named Jesus? As I mentioned earlier, the Suetonius reference can be taken to mean that the individual who was prompting the offending disturbances was not only present (in Rome!), but also still alive. But I think you’ve missed the point that I was making above, which is: we already know from Paul’s letters that there were conflicts in Claudius’ day, and Suetonius’ passing reference to unspecified Jews making disturbances under the instigation of someone named “Chrestus” gives us no new information. As such, it may – in your mind – pose a threat to the mythic case (though even here I’m unpersuaded), it poses no threat to the legend case whatsoever. Why? Because the legend case is compatible with conflicts such as those to which Suetonius refers.<BR/><BR/>I wrote: <B>Again, I would agree with this move because the narrative details found in the gospels (such as the ones I included in my list) are not attested to during this timeframe. This is what Wells means by "the 'historical' Jesus" - i.e., a Jesus which was born of a virgin, who was an itinerant preacher, a moral teacher, a miracle-performer, a curer of diseases, etc.</B> <BR/><BR/>Tim: <I>Here we have a semantic juggle on Wells’s part. If there was a real itinerant Jewish teacher named Jesus, hailing from Nazareth, who delivered even many of the sayings and sermons reported in the gospels, who was crucified under Pontius Pilate, whose disciples declared him to have risen from the dead and founded the Christian church on account of their professed belief, then there was a historical Jesus even if the virgin birth never happened and the miracle stories were all late additions.</I><BR/><BR/>Wells puts “historical” in scare quotes to distinguish what Christians take as the historical Jesus from what he would consider an actually historical Jesus. Christians want to take the supernaturalism of the gospels and other NT texts seriously, as if they were truly historical. Wells does not consider these elements truly historical, hence the use of scare quotes. There’s no juggling going on here.<BR/><BR/>Tim: <I>Demanding that the secular evidence present him as a miracle worker if it is to count for his mere existence is demanding the unreasonable.</I><BR/><BR/>I’m not sure about this. Jesus is said to have entertained many large audiences, not all of whom became his follower. Someone could have observed Jesus engaged in some miraculous stuntwork, but assumed that he was like many magicians of the day. He could have easily attributed some supernatural gift to the fellow and thought his performances were indeed otherworldly, but he may have scoffed at the idea that he was “the son of God.” Indeed, as I imagine what I read in the gospels (they give the imagination quite a bit to play with), I could easily imagine such a situation. On the other hand, one could reasonably fathom that a non-Christian individual witnessed some miraculous event and never came to attribute its cause to a Christian religious hero. For instance, he could have seen a group of formerly dead people emerging from their graves and walking among the streets of the city, something that would seem truly miraculous. However, this same fellow may not have realized that the cause for these resuscitations was the death of some guy named Jesus outside the city walls. Indeed, why would he make such a correlation? <BR/><BR/>Tim: <I>Someone fully persuaded that Jesus worked miracles would in all probability have become a Christian, at which point his testimony would no longer be considered non-Christian evidence.</I><BR/><BR/>If he were familiar with the Christian teachings surrounding his identity, I would think so. This is one reason why I think the Josephus passage is simply unbelievable: I don’t think Josephus would surmise that Jesus was in fact the Messiah and yet remain a committed, non-Christian Jew.<BR/><BR/>I wrote: <B>Since Paul's letters already indicate that early Christianity experienced conflicts with Judaism, this "fit" that you mention is of no value in confirming the content of later narratives.</B><BR/><BR/>Tim: <I>I agree that the confirmation afforded by the Suetonius reference is marginal given the Pauline epistles. But as mythers usually have to put a strange spin on Paul’s epistles, the value of a reference that cannot plausibly be spun as derivative from Paul’s epistles increases.</I><BR/><BR/>I don’t think “the mythers” need Suetonius’ reference to derive from Paul’s epistles. My point about this above, which I explained, is that – at best – Suetonius’ reference points to something that we already know from the epistles, namely disputes among Jews. The Suetonius reference loses even more value as evidence if “Chrestus” is a common name that could refer to just about anyone (indeed, someone who has otherwise been forgotten by history) and that this someone was still alive and present in Rome, someone who was personally responsible for the instigating to which the Suetonius passage refers. I certainly don’t see anything in the Suetonius passage which suggests that the individual instigating the disturbances it mentions was crucified and later resurrected, for instance.<BR/><BR/>Tim wrote: <I>I am not arguing that the records must be true because they are uncontradicted: I am pointing out that large-scale fabrications are more difficult to pass off as genuine when the events they report are supposed to have taken place within living memory than when they are not.</I><BR/><BR/>I responded: <B>I'm not sure how difficult you suppose this to be, nor is it clear how one determines whether or not a fabrication is "large-scale." </B><BR/><BR/>Tim: <I>Under hostile circumstances, I’d say that it would be almost impossible within living memory to do more than insert a few isolated passages and twiddle with a few more.</I><BR/><BR/>I guess I’m just not persuaded here at all. It seems that anyone could write whatever they want, and if he tried to pass it off as history, it’s quite possible that someone out there is going to buy into it, especially if he were philosophically predisposed to believing in the supernatural. Many would just laugh, assuming they caught wind of it, which is what I expect many did. But there will be some who are either gullible or desperate, anxious for something to make them feel better, and these individuals will be susceptible to believing a lie, a fiction, a legend, a tale, even if it purported to take place within living memory.<BR/><BR/><BR/>I wrote: <B>If someone came up to me and said that some event happened 10 years ago, a time well within my memory, and I had never heard of it, on what basis would I dispute it? Indeed, I am not the owner of the claim that it happened, so as a hearer of the claim I have no onus to prove or disprove it. Nor am I obligated to accept it as knowledge, especially if the content of the claim contradicts knowledge that I have already validated. But still, how would it be "difficult" for a person "to pass off as genuine" a fabricated claim? Of course, the chances of him successfully passing off such claims would depend in part on the nature of what's being claimed as well as on the judgment or credulity of those who happened to learn of those claims.</B> <BR/><BR/>Tim: <I>If he claimed that the event was done in public and that there were living eyewitnesses of it, that would help his case.</I><BR/><BR/>It would be easy to claim that there were living eyewitnesses to the event in question, even if this were a complete fabrication. He doesn’t even need to name the alleged eyewitnesses, or say where the alleged event took place, or when it took place. He could, for instance, say “above five hundred brothers” saw this, and to make it seem real, he could say that some are now “asleep” (meaning apparently that they’re now dead), but never mentioning who these people were, where they could be found for purposes of inquiry, etc.<BR/><BR/>Tim: <I>If he told you that you should break with the religious group with which you have identified since birth, change your way of life, submit to new rules of conduct, and endure fierce persecution because this event took place, you would have to be crazy to accept it without strong evidence.</I><BR/><BR/>Tim, I have known a lot crazy people then. They’re called Christians. They have broken from their families, burned bridges with past friendships, and become almost unrecognizable, both in appearance and in character (some sprinkle their conversation with phrases like “the Lord willing” or “Praise Jesus!”, while others seem to have this feigned euphoric disposition going on). They go through all kinds of troubles in the world, like everyone else, and call them “trials and tribulations.” When they encounter differences of opinion, such as in the workplace or in some public venue, they call this “persecution.” I have seen pastors claim to have raised persons from the dead (such as at the scene of an accident in one case, another at a hospital, and yet another in an elderly home), and the entire congregation just believes it, because they have determined to put their trust in everything he says. After all, he’s the “man of God,” so they would rather undergo additional hardship themselves rather than be caught questioning the pastor.<BR/><BR/>I wrote: <B>Some people are readily willing to believe claims about allegedly supernatural personalities, even if they have no good reason for doing so. I've met persons like this myself. A recent visitor to my website recounted anecdotally his encounter with a Christian believer who declared, "I don't care whether Jesus existed or not, all I know is that He is always by my side, and no one can be happy without His love."</B> <BR/><BR/>Tim: <I>Let’s set a howling mob on his trail and burn a few of his fellow-parishoners in shirts dipped in wax for a garden party and then see how firm his convictions are.</I><BR/><BR/>Indeed. I wonder what a lot of internet apologists would do if faced with such threats to their persons. It’s easy to say “I would never disavow Jesus!” But until you’re faced with such a situation, how do you know? There have been some throughout history – in the past century we’ve seen Muslim suicide bombers, kamikaze pilots, Heaven’s Gaters, Jonestown, etc. – volunteer their lives for all kinds of baffling causes. They believed, and then they acted on it. They didn’t even wait for some howling mob as you describe to come chasing after them. On the contrary, they took the initiative toward their own demise. Then again, we have no idea what St. Paul did if he was tortured in Rome. Christians prefer to think he remained faithful until the end, as his torturers flogged him for the last time. The Christians of the day, of course, had they heard that Paul recanted, probably would not have recorded it, settling it in their minds as a lapse into weakness, or that he was a vessel which the Christian god used and discarded for whatever reason a god would do so.<BR/><BR/>I wrote: <B>I don’t see where you’ve established that the Josephus references (e.g., the Testimonium) are genuinely Josephan (thus allowing you to put them into the first century).</B><BR/><BR/>Tim: <I>We haven’t gotten into this discussion in detail, but I am persuaded by the same evidence that has persuaded the overwhelming majority of Josephus scholars that, although the Testimonium as it stands in most manuscripts has suffered interpolation, it was originally a brief and fairly neutral passage. The Agapius text confirms this – in fact, Maier uses the (uninterpolated) Agapius text as the basis for the translation he gives in his translation of Josephus, relegating the interpolated text to a footnote.</I><BR/><BR/>I see, you rest your position on an appeal to authority. That’s fine.<BR/><BR/>I wrote: <B>Even if we accept the Testimonium (in whatever form) as genuinely Josephus, it still would date from the last decade of the first century, at a time when at least a couple of the gospel narratives would have been in circulation and thus available to Josephus.</B> <BR/><BR/>Tim: <I>This will help you, in the sense that it will take away the value of the Testimonium as an independent non-Christian source of evidence for the existence of Jesus, only if you assume that Josephus is making use of the gospels.</I><BR/><BR/>If I make the stretch needed to allow the Testimonium to be genuinely Josephan, I see no stretch needed at that point to suppose that he could have made use of literature that was available in his day. Of course, he could have heard reports about what the gospels were claiming, and based his passage on this. Either way, if we grant that the Testimonium is genuinely Josephan, he had to get his information from somewhere, did he not? If he didn’t get it from gospel traditions, some of which by the last decade of the first century were already written, where did he get it?<BR/><BR/>I wrote: <B>The Testimonium, even at its best, tells us nothing that we do not already find reported in the gospels.</B> <BR/><BR/>Tim: <I>Right: but if it is an independent witness, then what it tells us corroborates the gospels, particularly when it comes to the historicity of Jesus. For that reason, it is necessary for mythers to explain it away as an interpolation en toto: nothing less will do.</I><BR/><BR/>I see no good reason whatsoever to suppose that the Testimonium is an independent witness. Scholars already have agreed – pretty much in consensus from what I’ve seen – that Josephus’ writings were tampered with by Christians, no one before Eusebius (4th cent.) makes use of the passage in question (even though many earlier apologists relied heavily on Josephus to argue for the truth of the gospels), and it tells us nothing that the gospels don’t already themselves tell us. <BR/><BR/>I wrote: <B>Tacitus dates from ca. 112, give or take, and again tells us nothing we don’t already find in the gospels. I find it quite unlikely that Tacitus was drawing from Roman records, for it is hard to believe that he would see Pilate registered in those records as a prefect and then mistakenly call him a procurator in his own writings (and even more difficult to believe that the Roman records would record him as procurator instead of prefect in the first place).</B> <BR/><BR/>Tim: <I>As I have pointed out, this mistake is found in Philo and Josephus as well; nor is Tacitus normally particularly accurate about titles in other contexts.</I><BR/><BR/>For the position that Tacitus got his information from Roman records, you need either that those records incorrectly recorded Pilate’s title, or you need Tacitus reading the correct title in those records and then making the mistake when he incorporates what he read in those records in his own writings. Both are possible (so is bowling a 300 game), but I don’t find it very likely. And again, there’s nothing in the passage in question to suggest that this is what happened. So in the final analysis, as “evidence,” the Tacitus passage is just not helpful.<BR/><BR/>I wrote: <B>Similarly I find it very unlikely - and statements you’ve made yourself support this – that Roman records would have referred to Jesus as “Christ.” </B><BR/><BR/>Tim: <I>I think you must have misunderstood what I have said about the Roman records.</I><BR/><BR/>That’s possible. I went back to find what I thought I recalled you saying on this point. Here’s what I think it was:<BR/><BR/>I had asked: <B>Would the Roman records have stated that ‘the Christ’ or ‘the Messiah’ was crucified?</B><BR/><BR/>You had responded: <I>The term would not have had this significance for the Romans.</I><BR/><BR/>I took this to mean – as I myself would think – that Romans would not record Jesus’ name as “Christ” in a record of his crucifixion. Perhaps you think they would record his name as “Christ” instead of Jesus, even though “Christ” is a religious title that, as you had stated, would not have the significance for Romans that it did for the early Christians.<BR/><BR/>Tim: <I>It is entirely plausible – in the case of Suetonius it seems actually to have been the case – that the Romans at some remove from Palestine thought that “Chrestus” was Jesus’s name, as “Chrestus” was a fairly common Roman name.</I><BR/><BR/>The appeal to Suetonius here is question-begging at best (see my points above). Indeed, if “Chrestus” was a fairly common Roman name, the Chrestus that Suetonius refers to need not be the Jesus of the Christians. I already gave reasons to suppose it could easily have meant someone else. <BR/><BR/>But the point in question here was in reference to Tacitus, not Suetonius. Without coming out and affirming it explicitly, it seems that you are suggesting that Roman records have “Christ” where I would think they’d have “Jesus,” even though “Jesus” was his name, and “Christ” was a religious title that the Romans would not have recognized. You say this by supposing they might have thought it really was his name. Do you suppose they might have thought “Lord” might have been his name as well? At any rate, it seems you need the Romans to have mistakenly recorded Jesus’ name as “Christ” in order for Tacitus to be an independent source. Meanwhile, I see no reason why Tacitus could not have gotten his information from someone like Pliny, from Christians themselves, from trials that he attended or learned about, from discussions with other officials who had field knowledge of Christians in their jurisdictions, etc., all of which would point to repeating what Christians believed and were preaching at the time.<BR/><BR/>I wrote: <B>The potential that these sources are merely relating what Christians at the time had already come to believe and were claiming is very real.</B> <BR/><BR/>Tim: <I>In the Josephus case I believe this is very unlikely, since the language of the passage (in the uninterpolated form) is not what a Christian would have written, does not use the phrases a Christian would have used, etc. You can find a good discussion of this in van Voorst.</I><BR/><BR/>This seems to confuse what Josephus would have written with what a Christian would have written. If we grant that the Testimonium is genuinely Josephan (even the version that you prefer), we would still be saying that Josephus wrote it, not a Christian. Then again, it wouldn’t be too difficult for a Christian interpolator to attempt to approximate Josephus’ voice in order to make the passage seem all the more authentic. In fact, I would expect as much (I’ve come across some exquisitely crafty Christians in my day).<BR/><BR/>I wrote: <B>If, for instance, Tacitus was simply reporting what he learned about what the Christians of his day believed - either through interviews he conducted with various of Christianity's representatives, from hearsay, from some written source that was itself based on such reports - then he's not an independent witness of a historical Jesus.</B><BR/><BR/>Tim: <I>As I acknowledged above. However, though this cannot be ruled out directly, the evidence does not seem to point that way.</I><BR/><BR/>I suppose we just see the evidence pointing in opposite directions. I believe I’ve given your viewpoint a fair hearing and have interacted with it as much as I can, given my limited time and resources. At best, it seems, there is nothing that conclusively recommends Tacitus or any other non-Christian source as firm evidence for the truth of the gospels. There are just too many holes here, too much potential implausibility (such as supposing that Tacitus got his facts mistaken or that the Roman records he consulted were, or that Josephus thought Jesus was the Messiah and yet remained a committed non-Christian Jew, etc.) to take these sources down the Christian path, a path that leads to supernaturalism which, as an adult thinker, I find absolutely unbelievable to begin with. In fact, it seems that, if there were a Jesus and the story of Saul’s conversion on the road to Damascus were at all historical, I’d wonder why that same Jesus doesn’t just appear to everyone else he wants to convince, just as he did for Saul. I remember asking a Mormon missionary this question once, and his response was, “Jesus wants us to have faith.” I then asked, “Didn’t Paul have faith?” He was stupefied in silence, and insisted on changing the subject. <BR/><BR/>I wrote: <B>I know of no compelling reason to suppose that Tacitus got his information from Josephus. The Testimonium names Jesus, and yet Tacitus refers to “Christ,” as if that were his name.</B> <BR/><BR/>Tim: <I>In Antiquities 20.200, just a few pages on from the Testimonium, Josephus refers to “Jesus who was called the Christ.”</I><BR/><BR/>Which is another passage which some scholars consider to be an interpolation. Some scholars have pointed out that Josephus is careful to avoid messianic language in his writings. As Wells points out, <BR/><BR/><B>Feldman has noted that Josephus mentions about ten Messianic figures in the last three books of the <I>Antiquities</I> without using the term ‘Christ’ or Messiah of them. That he avoided it is intelligible, since at that time it “had definite political overtones of revolution and independence,” and he was “a lackey of the Roman royal house.”</B> (<I>The Jesus Myth</I>, p. 218; Wells quotes Feldman, <I>Josephus and Modern Scholarship</I>, pp. 689-690)<BR/><BR/>So, although perhaps not conclusive, there is good reason to suppose the use of “Christ” or “Messiah” is out of character for Josephus. In fact, the use of the participle ‘legomenos’ (“to be named” or “called”) in the shorter Josephan passage is quite consistent with its use in several places in the gospels. France wants to suppose that Josephus was using the participle with negative implications (as “alleged” instead of “called”), and yet there are many places in the NT and even in Josephus’ own writings where it does not imply such negativity.<BR/><BR/>Interestingly, Josephus does reference John the Baptist, but he nowhere connects him with the Christian movement (see <I>Ant</I>. 18:116).<BR/><BR/>I wrote: <B>The analogy I gave is actually quite strong, ...</B><BR/><BR/>Tim: <I>I have already addressed this; what you say subsequently simply reiterates your analogy and takes no account of what I said, so there is nothing new here requiring response.</I><BR/><BR/>You offered what you considered to be a stronger analogy, but gave no indication why the analogy I gave for my point was bad. It appeared to me that you didn’t grasp its strength, which is why I stopped to point out the relevant points of comparison. You still apparently think it is a bad analogy, and yet you do not show why. The analogy that I gave (involving someone writing a bunch of letters praising Mozart and yet never mentioning that he wrote music or lived in the 1700s) encapsulates what the Christian position expects us to accept about Paul’s silences vis-à-vis the gospels’ portraits of Jesus. The gospels make it clear that Jesus was known for his marvelous works, his healings, etc., and yet it is of these things for which the gospels have him famous which Paul seems completely ignorant.<BR/><BR/>I wrote: <B>The passage does not indicate that there were Greeks in the audience;</B><BR/><BR/>Tim: <I>It simply doesn’t tell us much about the audience.</I><BR/><BR/>On the contrary, at Mark 10:2 it specifies the Pharisees and at 10:10 it specifies Jesus’ disciples.<BR/><BR/>I wrote: <B> ... in fact, Mark specifies that Pharisees are his audience.</B><BR/><BR/>Tim: <I>No: it specifies that the Pharisees are his target.</I><BR/><BR/>What’s interesting is Mark 10:10, which narrows Jesus’ audience, at the point where he issues his teaching about divorce that Paul is said to have “echoed,” to just his disciples: “And in the house his disciples asked him again of the same matter.” Were any of Jesus’ disciples Greek?<BR/><BR/>I asked: <B>Besides, if Paul were getting his “words of the Lord” from a prior source, what was his source?</B><BR/><BR/>Tim: <I>Most likely from the apostles, either directly or indirectly. Traveling with Luke would be a great way to find out a lot of information.</I><BR/><BR/>This would go against what Paul himself tells us. He tells us explicitly that he did not receive his knowledge of the gospel from other men, nor was he taught it, but that he got it “by the revelation of Jesus Christ” (Gal. 1:12). He also tells us that his time with the Jerusalem apostles was quite short and limited primarily to Peter and James (cf. Gal. 1:17-19). So if we take Paul’s word for it, he didn’t get these teachings from the apostles.<BR/><BR/>But you think otherwise:<BR/><BR/>Tim: <I>I think these passages are being overread. Paul, by his own account, was commissioned directly by the Lord, but nothing he says in Galatians or 1 Corinthians conflicts with the account in Acts that he spent time with the disciples at Damascus immediately after his conversion and baptism (9:19) and subsequently was with the disciples in Jerusalem (9:27-28).</I><BR/><BR/>Here’s what I read in Gal. 1:11-12:<BR/><BR/>“But I certify you, brethren, that the gospel which was preached of me is not after man. For I neither received it of man, neither was I taught it, but by the revelation of Jesus Christ.”<BR/><BR/>Here’s what he says a few verses later (vss. 17-19):<BR/><BR/>“Neither went I up to Jerusalem to them which were apostles before me: but I went into Arabia, and returned again unto Damascus. Then after three years I went up to Jerusalem to see Peter, and abode with him fifteen days. But other of the apostles saw I none, save James the Lord’s brother.”<BR/><BR/>Paul explicitly states that he was not “taught” the gospel that he took to the gentile mission, that he did not get it from other men, that it was given to him directly “by the revelation of Jesus Christ.”<BR/><BR/>But you would still prefer that we believe Paul got a teaching “of the Lord” from apostles, even though his own words strongly suggest otherwise. Okay. <BR/><BR/>I wrote: <B>Meanwhile, that the evangelist was taking a teaching that had already acquired currency among early Christians (such as in the early epistolary strata, as I have suggested) and putting it into Jesus’ mouth in the development of a narrative of an earthly Jesus, does not rely on these tactics, and fits (a word you found appropriate earlier) best with the legend case. It's not a stretch by any means.</B><BR/><BR/>Tim: <I>There are so many problems with this hypothesis that I cannot even begin to enumerate them all in a blog post.</I><BR/><BR/>I can appreciate this. At this point, instead of arguments supporting your contention here, you chose to list a number of questions. And while I am fascinated by all this, I am by no means an expert, so all I can do in my limited time is give it my best shot.<BR/><BR/>Tim: <I>Where did Paul get all these ideas?</I><BR/><BR/>For many of Paul’s teachings, he refers to the OT (and curiously not to an earthly Jesus). He apparently saw himself as opening the scriptures in a new light, having received a “revelation of Jesus Christ” which empowered him to impart a new message to the gentile world.<BR/><BR/>Again, Wells makes an interesting point here:<BR/><BR/><B>Any reader of Paul can see that all his important doctrines are buttressed by an appeal to the OT. But he very strikingly does not do what Matthew repeatedly does, namely cite it as foreshadowing incidents in Jesus’s incarnate life, such as his virgin birth, his settling at Capernaum, his teaching in parables, his triumphal entry into Jerusalem, and his disciples’ desertion of him at his arrest. Paul shows no knowledge of such incidents, nor of John the Baptist, whose preaching was, according to all three synoptics, foretold in the OT, and whom both Matthew (11:11) and Luke represent as Jesus’s forerunner and hence as greater than any ordinary mortal. Paul makes no mention of him because John the Baptist’s preaching had in fact nothing to do with Jesus or Christianity [Wells references Josephus here]...</B> (<I>The Jesus Myth</I>, p 77)<BR/><BR/>Wells also points out that “The influence of Jewish Wisdom literature on Paul is undeniable: statements made about Wisdom in this literature are made of Jesus in the Pauline letters.” (<I>The Jesus Myth</I>, p. 97)<BR/><BR/>Tim: <I>(The mystery religions “explanation” is beyond hopeless.)</I><BR/><BR/>I don’t think I’ve made this appeal, however I would note that Paul was no unlearned man, and he hailed from Tarsus where mystery religions had been thriving at the time. Paul himself even appeals to “mystery” on numerous occasions (see for instance <A HREF="http://www.biblegateway.com/keyword/?search=myster&version1=9&searchtype=all&bookset=10" REL="nofollow">here</A>). Again Wells: <B>The pagan environment of earliest Christianity cannot have been unimportant.</B> (<I>The Jesus Myth</I>, p. 99)<BR/><BR/>Tim: <I>What did Peter, James, and John have to say about his teaching?</I><BR/><BR/>I don’t think we have anything authentic from their hand.<BR/><BR/>Tim: <I>How did the actual beliefs of those pillars of the early church – to whom Paul himself refers in Galatians 2 – manage to disappear without a ripple?</I><BR/><BR/>Perhaps I’m just daft or tired, but I’m not sure what you’re asking here.<BR/><BR/>Tim: <I>Whence the materials in the gospels that could not have come from the Pauline epistles?</I><BR/><BR/>You mean like the virgin birth, the association with John the Baptist, a crucifixion under Pilate, the sayings attributed to Jesus? It is good that you admit that these elements are not present in the earliest strata of the NT. There are many plausible explanations for these. Some are the result of attempts to reinterpret the OT. Some are attempts to put Jesus into a historical context by associating him with genuinely historical places and people. There were collections of wise sayings (e.g., the Quelle) which were incorporated into certain Christian circles and put into Jesus’ mouth.<BR/><BR/>Tim: <I>How did the clever forgers manage so thoroughly to cover their tracks that there is no hint now of their existence?</I><BR/><BR/>Who says “there is no hint now of their existence”? And were they really “forgers”? Perhaps not in today’s understanding of the term. At any rate, there were many things in existence in those says the evidence for which did not survive unto today.<BR/><BR/>Tim: <I>How on earth did the undesigned coincidences get built in, so that things in one gospel that make no sense taken on their own are explained by passing references in others?</I><BR/><BR/>Unless you give me an example of what you mean, I’m not sure what I’m supposed to weigh in on here.<BR/><BR/>Tim: <I>How does one account for the undesigned coincidences between the epistles and Acts – things that could not plausibly have been written up on the basis of Paul’s epistles?</I><BR/><BR/>Again, I’m not sure what specifically you have in mind here.<BR/><BR/>Tim: <I>We have forgeries in history, and we know what they look like. This isn’t it. If the mythic theory requires this sort of retrojection of Paul’s epistles into the gospels and Acts, that simply puts more nails into its coffin.</I><BR/><BR/>I see. Well, I guess this is your vote in favor of the NT’s supernaturalism then. <BR/><BR/>Regards,<BR/>DawsonBahnsen Burnerhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/11030029491768748360noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21219785.post-86509715134988628422008-03-22T16:02:00.000-04:002008-03-22T16:02:00.000-04:00Bart,You write:Let us not hide behind a term like ...Bart,<BR/><BR/>You write:<BR/><BR/><I>Let us not hide behind a term like a "high Christology." In fact Paul's Christology was much higher than that of the synoptic gospels. His Jesus was divine. The Jesus of the synoptics was thought of as a prophet, perhaps Elijah or John the Baptist come back.</I> <BR/><BR/>If the suggestion that in the synoptics Jesus is definitely not God, then I think this is just false. We could start the argument with Matthew 9:6, Mark 2:10, and Luke 5:24. All I would concede here is that the case for a divine Jesus is easier to make from the fourth gospel and Paul’s epistles.<BR/><BR/><I>When we speak of Paul's high Christology, we are talking about Jesus being God. When you assert that a Jew with a high Christology could remain a part of Israel, you are assuming that he could believe Jesus the man is God, clearly at odds with the Shema and the Jewish conception of monotheism. I will once again maintain that the lack of conflict between Paul and his detractors over this issue indicates that he was not equating a man with God.</I><BR/><BR/>We’ll just have to agree to disagree, then.<BR/><BR/><I>When you suggest that believing that Jesus the man is God was one of the things which distinguished Christians from Jews, you again have to account for the lack of that conflict in Paul's congregations.</I><BR/><BR/>As I’ve pointed out several times, this would be the case only if you were right on the key point where we disagree.<BR/><BR/><I>One of the problems we are having in communication over this issue is that I am working within the Pauline corpus, and you are allowing the book of Acts to set its context.</I> <BR/><BR/>Although I am persuaded by the evidence in Paley, Smith, Hemer, and Kettenbach that Acts is basically a historical narrative and that it dovetails as well with the epistles as we can expect any narratives of secular history to dovetail with each other, I do not see that I am using this as an assumption in our discussion.<BR/><BR/><I>That is a larger subject that perhaps can be dealt with as a separate blog, but I will clearly state my position that Acts is a second century document written with the express purpose of establishing the concept of apostolic succession, apostolic authority, suppressing the freewheeling prophetic cacophony, and creating a "history" of the early years of Christianity. I see Acts as a hodgepodge of stories cobbled together from multiple sources such as the internal Pauline travel outline (but with contradictions), Josephus, OT stories applied typologically, and other unknown sources. In Acts studies, I find myself allied with scholars such as Crossan, Eisenman, and many others from previous generations which see it as legendary rewrites of the period.</I> <BR/><BR/>In this respect, Crossan and Eisenman are at odds with the best scholarship of the past century. <BR/><BR/><I>Most critical scholars openly denigrate Acts as history, but then many go on as though it were accurate.</I> <BR/><BR/>There is actually quite a lively fight on regarding the historicity of Acts, as you should know if you have read Martin Hengel’s works on the subject.<BR/><BR/><I>But without Acts, the entirity of the period of Paul's ministry and the alleged Jerusalem origins of Christianity would be unknown aside from Paul's epistles.</I> <BR/><BR/>We have ten or a dozen epistles that give us a window on the origins of Christianity. We also have a narrative in Acts that gives us a different point of view but can be reconciled remarkably well with the picture we get from the epistles. Your claim is that if we <I>didn’t</I> have these things, why, we wouldn’t know much from the first century about the origins of Christianity. Well, yes ... but what can you hope to derive from this?<BR/><BR/><I>That is, the book of Acts is a single source for the entirity of the story of Christian origins, ...</I> <BR/><BR/>I thought you just said that the epistles are also a source. Wasn’t that the point of your saying, “... aside from Paul’s epistles”? We could also get a bit of information from the Petrine and Johannine epistles, which I suppose you must also take to be forgeries.<BR/><BR/><I>... and it is deeply flawed.</I> <BR/><BR/>The narrative of Acts is minutely circumstantial, and in the second part in particular it ranges quite widely in space and is therefore subject to cross checks from various sorts of evidence (archaeological, nautical, etc.). The result of these cross checks is that the narrative appears to be astonishingly accurate in dozens of details that we can verify. This provides a very strong case that it is an authentic travelogue.<BR/><BR/><I>From Paul, it is not possible to infer a separate Christian identity from that of diaspora Judaism.</I> <BR/><BR/>You cannot mean this literally. Diaspora Judaism practiced the Last Supper, talked about the messiah as come, proclaimed the availability of the Abrahamic promises to the gentiles, declared the law to be ended, maintained that circumcision was now optional, and referred to the resurrection of Jesus as authenticated by numerous witnesses? <BR/><BR/><I>The context of the Pauline teaching and conflict would be seen as an intramural debate, not the birth pangs of a separate religion.</I> <BR/><BR/>This is not credible, for the sorts of reasons I have outlined above.<BR/><BR/><I>If we deal with the Pauline epistles on their own terms and identify the context as he describes it, it is simply not possible to find a book of Acts storyline underlying it. That is an imposition from a later time.</I><BR/><BR/>I couldn’t disagree more heartily. If the book of Acts did not exist, the many details in Paul’s epistles would force us to postulate something like it in outline.<BR/><BR/><I>So yes, I am conflating Paul's detractors with the Jewish fundamentalists sent out to police heresy within the synagogues. Paul's only sin, and from their point of view it was a bit one, was to allow gentiles to join the synagogues as Jews without submitting to the Torah. That's it. His enemies would have been happy if his converts were not being told that they didn't have to be circumcized and brought within the way of the law. That is quite evident from the epistles. If he had actually been teaching that a recently living Jew was God, the uproar over circumcision would have seemed like a firecracker compared to an atom bomb.</I><BR/><BR/>It was an atom bomb, and no one knew that better than Paul; see passages like 2 Cor 11: 24-26. But the explosion, just as we would expect, was the utterly understandable one of orthodox Judaism against nascent Christianity.Timhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/15786874834919065011noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21219785.post-51837885360513892012008-03-22T15:19:00.000-04:002008-03-22T15:19:00.000-04:00Dawson,You write:I have defended points which Well...Dawson,<BR/><BR/>You write:<BR/><BR/><I>I have defended points which Wells and Doherty have incorporated into substantiating their larger conclusions, yes. But I explained this when I pointed out that one can dispute their grand conclusion (e.g., that there never was a man named Jesus) while recognizing that they make solid points along the way. You asked for examples of this, which is a fair question. But given my time constraints and your own confession to have read Wells (and perhaps Doherty?) in the past, I would point you to their writings. If you do not have their books, both Wells and Doherty have published some of their material online and it is available free of charge. You should also note that both authors have interacted extensively with their critics.</I><BR/><BR/>I have read much of Wells’s earlier work, but less of Doherty’s. I have seen some of Wells’s responses to his critics online.<BR/><BR/><I>[Dawson:] I had quoted Wells: But no more about the ‘historical’ Jesus need have been included in this Christianity of Claudius’s day than what extant Christian writers (Paul and others) were saying before the gospels became established later in the first century; and this much does not confirm their portrait of Jesus as a preacher and wonder-worker in Pilate’s Palestine. (The Jesus Legend, pp. 40-41)<BR/><BR/>Tim: Between “need have been” and “probably was” there is a serious gap. Wells needs the reader to infer the latter from the former, more cautious statement. But he presents no evidence that would justify this further step.<BR/><BR/>[Dawson:] I think Wells puts greater weight on his assessment of the situation because of the timeframe involved (Claudius' reign between 41 and 54 AD) in relation to the body of Christian literature extant at that time, and also the scant detail included in Suetonius' statement (for instance, Suetonius tells us nothing that isn't already present in Paul's letters).</I> <BR/><BR/>Actually, the very oddness of Suetonius’s reference is excellent evidence that he isn’t getting his information from Paul’s letters. So it does provide independent evidence for the physical existence of Christ, though of course I would maintain that the gospels, Acts, and the epistles are far stronger evidence on this point.<BR/><BR/><I>[Dawson:] Again, I would agree with this move because the narrative details found in the gospels (such as the ones I included in my list) are not attested to during this timeframe. This is what Wells means by "the 'historical' Jesus" - i.e., a Jesus which was born of a virgin, who was an itinerant preacher, a moral teacher, a miracle-performer, a curer of diseases, etc.</I> <BR/><BR/>Here we have a semantic juggle on Wells’s part. If there was a real itinerant Jewish teacher named Jesus, hailing from Nazareth, who delivered even many of the sayings and sermons reported in the gospels, who was crucified under Pontius Pilate, whose disciples declared him to have risen from the dead and founded the Christian church on account of their professed belief, then there was a historical Jesus even if the virgin birth never happened and the miracle stories were all late additions. It is for this more minimal claim that the evidence of Suetonius, Tacitus, et al. is pertinent. Demanding that the secular evidence present him as a miracle worker if it is to count for his mere existence is demanding the unreasonable. Someone fully persuaded that Jesus worked miracles would in all probability have become a Christian, at which point his testimony would no longer be considered non-Christian evidence. <BR/><BR/>From this, my answer to the rest of your paragraph should be clear:<BR/><BR/><I>[Dawson:] The Suetonius passage recommends none of this, and I have seen no good reason put forth to suppose that anything more than what Wells suggests could be read into Suetonius here. As “evidence” for the “historical Jesus,” it is as flimsy as it gets.</I> <BR/><BR/>This is at best a confusion about what Christians who cite the Suetonius and Tacitus passages mean by “the historical Jesus.”<BR/><BR/><I>[Dawson:] But I realize that Christians have historically tried to make the most with at best flimsy evidence (it is better than nothing, I suppose), so I am not surprised by the persistence.</I><BR/><BR/>For my part, I realize that treating the Christian argument fairly would make it more difficult to answer, so I am not surprised by Wells’s misrepresentation of it. I am, however, disappointed to see that you follow him in this.<BR/><BR/><I>Tim: However, that reference fits together well with the account of the growth of the early church and the clashes with Judaism as recounted in Acts and the epistles.<BR/><BR/>[Dawson:] Since Paul's letters already indicate that early Christianity experienced conflicts with Judaism, this "fit" that you mention is of no value in confirming the content of later narratives.</I><BR/><BR/>I agree that the confirmation afforded by the Suetonius reference is marginal given the Pauline epistles. But as mythers usually have to put a strange spin on Paul’s epistles, the value of a reference that cannot plausibly be spun as derivative from Paul’s epistles increases.<BR/><BR/><I>Tim: I am not arguing that the records must be true because they are uncontradicted: I am pointing out that large-scale fabrications are more difficult to pass off as genuine when the events they report are supposed to have taken place within living memory than when they are not.<BR/><BR/>[Dawson:] I'm not sure how difficult you suppose this to be, nor is it clear how one determines whether or not a fabrication is "large-scale."</I> <BR/><BR/>Under hostile circumstances, I’d say that it would be almost impossible within living memory to do more than insert a few isolated passages and twiddle with a few more. The manuscript evidence for the gospels is extensive and indicates that this, plus the numerous but insignificant scribal errors one would expect, is about all that happened. <BR/><BR/><I>If someone came up to me and said that some event happened 10 years ago, a time well within my memory, and I had never heard of it, on what basis would I dispute it? Indeed, I am not the owner of the claim that it happened, so as a hearer of the claim I have no onus to prove or disprove it. Nor am I obligated to accept it as knowledge, especially if the content of the claim contradicts knowledge that I have already validated. But still, how would it be "difficult" for a person "to pass off as genuine" a fabricated claim? Of course, the chances of him successfully passing off such claims would depend in part on the nature of what's being claimed as well as on the judgment or credulity of those who happened to learn of those claims.</I> <BR/><BR/>If he claimed that the event was done in public and that there were living eyewitnesses of it, that would help his case. If he told you that you should break with the religious group with which you have identified since birth, change your way of life, submit to new rules of conduct, and endure fierce persecution because this event took place, you would have to be crazy to accept it without strong evidence. <BR/><BR/><I>Some people are readily willing to believe claims about allegedly supernatural personalities, even if they have no good reason for doing so. I've met persons like this myself. A recent visitor to my website recounted anecdotally his encounter with a Christian believer who declared, "I don't care whether Jesus existed or not, all I know is that He is always by my side, and no one can be happy without His love."</I> <BR/><BR/>Let’s set a howling mob on his trail and burn a few of his fellow-parishoners in shirts dipped in wax for a garden party and then see how firm his convictions are.<BR/><BR/><I>Others will simply find claims about allegedly supernatural personalities to be absurd, and many of them are not going to launch into research trying to refute such claims. Thus they go unchallenged, and this very fact can easily be recruited by the faithful as a corroborating point recommending them. And yet, they’re untrue all the same.</I><BR/><BR/>No doubt about this one: every such claim stands or falls with the evidence provided in its favor.<BR/><BR/><I>[Dawson:] I wrote: None of the non-Christian references are early. In fact, most are from the second century and later.<BR/><BR/>Tim responded: In the context of ancient history, Dawson, that’s awfully early. And the Josephus references are from the first century.<BR/><BR/>[Dawson:] I don’t see where you’ve established that the Josephus references (e.g., the Testimonium) are genuinely Josephan (thus allowing you to put them into the first century).</I><BR/><BR/>We haven’t gotten into this discussion in detail, but I am persuaded by the same evidence that has persuaded the overwhelming majority of Josephus scholars that, although the <I>Testimonium</I> as it stands in most manuscripts has suffered interpolation, it was originally a brief and fairly neutral passage. The Agapius text confirms this – in fact, Maier uses the (uninterpolated) Agapius text as the basis for the translation he gives in his translation of Josephus, relegating the interpolated text to a footnote.<BR/><BR/><I>[Dawson:] At any rate, your objection seems trivially semantic, and I’ve come to expect better from you.</I><BR/><BR/>Certainly not trying to be trivial.<BR/><BR/><I>[Dawson:] But to give you the benefit of the doubt, I'll rephrase my point for you: none of the non-Christian references antedate the gospel narratives, the only earlier source that we know these details are found in written form.</I> <BR/><BR/>No disagreement so far, but I can see one looming ...<BR/><BR/><I>[Dawson:] Even if we accept the Testimonium (in whatever form) as genuinely Josephus, it still would date from the last decade of the first century, at a time when at least a couple of the gospel narratives would have been in circulation and thus available to Josephus.</I> <BR/><BR/>This will help you, in the sense that it will take away the value of the <I>Testimonium</I> as an independent non-Christian source of evidence for the existence of Jesus, only if you assume that Josephus is making use of the gospels.<BR/><BR/><I>[Dawson:] The Testimonium, even at its best, tells us nothing that we do not already find reported in the gospels.</I> <BR/><BR/>Right: but if it is an independent witness, then what it tells us corroborates the gospels, particularly when it comes to the historicity of Jesus. For that reason, it is necessary for mythers to explain it away as an interpolation <I>en toto</I>: nothing less will do.<BR/><BR/><I>[Dawson:] Tacitus dates from ca. 112, give or take, and again tells us nothing we don’t already find in the gospels. I find it quite unlikely that Tacitus was drawing from Roman records, for it is hard to believe that he would see Pilate registered in those records as a prefect and then mistakenly call him a procurator in his own writings (and even more difficult to believe that the Roman records would record him as procurator instead of prefect in the first place).</I> <BR/><BR/>As I have pointed out, this mistake is found in Philo and Josephus as well; nor is Tacitus normally particularly accurate about titles in other contexts.<BR/><BR/><I>[Dawson:] Similarly I find it very unlikely - and statements you’ve made yourself support this – that Roman records would have referred to Jesus as “Christ.”</I> <BR/><BR/>I think you must have misunderstood what I have said about the Roman records. It is entirely plausible – in the case of Suetonius it seems actually to have been the case – that the Romans at some remove from Palestine thought that “Chrestus” was Jesus’s name, as “Chrestus” was a fairly common Roman name. <BR/><BR/><I>[Dawson:] The potential that these sources are merely relating what Christians at the time had already come to believe and were claiming is very real. </I><BR/><BR/>In the Josephus case I believe this is very unlikely, since the language of the passage (in the uninterpolated form) is not what a Christian would have written, does not use the phrases a Christian would have used, etc. You can find a good discussion of this in van Voorst.<BR/><BR/><I>Tim: The Tacitus reference goes further than the existence of Christians to the existence and crucifixion of Christus under Pontius Pilate, as does the Josephus reference (in uninterpolated form), which Tacitus may be following. <BR/><BR/>[Dawson:] They do not attest to these things if they are simply repeating in one form or another what Christians of the time had been claiming; in that case, they're just repeating what Christians are already on record as believing. In other words, it needs to be established that these sources are in fact independent of Christian reports. Otherwise, they carry very little if any weight.</I> <BR/><BR/>I agree. That is why Josephus scholars have looked into the question closely. <BR/><BR/><I>[Dawson:] If, for instance, Tacitus was simply reporting what he learned about what the Christians of his day believed - either through interviews he conducted with various of Christianity's representatives, from hearsay, from some written source that was itself based on such reports - then he's not an independent witness of a historical Jesus.</I><BR/><BR/>As I acknowledged above. However, though this cannot be ruled out directly, the evidence does not seem to point that way.<BR/><BR/><I>[Dawson:] I wrote: My point in my above statement was that Tacitus was essentially reporting what Christians at that time had come to believe. How specifically Tacitus learned it – whether through firsthand interviews with Christians, or from hearsay, etc. – is ultimately immaterial to the point I was trying to make.<BR/><BR/>Tim: I do not understand why you say this.<BR/><BR/>[Dawson:] I say this because, if Tacitus is merely repeating something he learned either directly or indirectly from Christian sources (i.e., is simply repeating what Christians were already on record as believing), then specifically how Tacitus learned this - whether through interviews he conducted with Christians, from hearsay, from trials of Christians that he knew of, etc. - is essentially irrelevant.</I><BR/><BR/>That depends on whether he learned it from an independent source.<BR/><BR/><I>Tim: If Tacitus learned it from Josephys, then Josephus contained a clear reference to Jesus centuries before Eusebius is supposed to have inserted it. That closes the loophole that both Wells and Doherty have tried to use to get rid of the Testimonium.<BR/><BR/>[Dawson:] I know of no compelling reason to suppose that Tacitus got his information from Josephus. The Testimonium names Jesus, and yet Tacitus refers to “Christ,” as if that were his name.</I> <BR/><BR/>In <I>Antiquities</I> 20.200, just a few pages on from the <I>Testimonium</I>, Josephus refers to “Jesus who was called the Christ.”<BR/><BR/><I>[Dawson:] Of course, if we are to believe that Tacitus got his information from Josephus, are we also to believe that got his information from Roman records as well?</I> <BR/><BR/>Either hypothesis would render the other superfluous, though it would not necessarily show that the supposition is false.<BR/><BR/><I>[Dawson:] As for Josephus, I simply find it very much a stretch to suppose that Josephus affirmed that Jesus was "the Christ" and yet remained a committed orthodox Jew.</I><BR/><BR/>In the uninterpolated <I>Testimonium</I> this phrase does not occur; in 20.200, Josephus says, not that he <I>was</I> the Christ, but that he was <I>called</I> the Christ – a designation he apparently expects his readers to recognize. Some distinguishing feature was necessary in any event in view of the twenty other Jesuses whom Josephus mentions in his works.<BR/><BR/><I>[Dawson:] I wrote: Imagine someone writing 10 letters heaping admiration for Mozart, and never once mentioning that Mozart wrote music or that he lived in the 1700s.<BR/><BR/>Tim scoffs: Bad analogy. <BR/><BR/>[Dawson:] The analogy I gave is actually quite strong, ...</I><BR/><BR/>I have already addressed this; what you say subsequently simply reiterates your analogy and takes no account of what I said, so there is nothing new here requiring response.<BR/><BR/><I>Tim: There are several holes in this argument. In some respects the simplest solution is that Mark, who is writing for a Roman audience, has added an explanatory sentence in verse 12 to cover the case. (Cf. Matt 19:9) This need not even have been an attempt to put words in Jesus’ mouth; the focus shifts after verse 12, so it could well be a gloss. Another possibility is that there were Greeks as well as Jews in the audience in Judaea and that Jesus elaborated the point for their benefit. In neither case does Wells’s attempt to cast doubt upon the obvious source of 1 Cor 7:10 succeed.<BR/><BR/>[Dawson:] The passage in Mark (cf. 10:2) makes it clear that Jesus is addressing Pharisees. If the evangelist added his own explanatory note, how is this not putting words into Jesus’ mouth?</I><BR/><BR/>Because verse 12 doesn’t start with ιησους ειπεν ...?<BR/><BR/><I>[Dawson:] This seems only to confirm Wells’ point, at least by degrees, which is significant concession enough.</I> <BR/><BR/>Sorry: I just don’t see this as a significant concession at all.<BR/><BR/><I>[Dawson:] The passage does not indicate that there were Greeks in the audience; </I><BR/><BR/>It simply doesn’t tell us much about the audience.<BR/><BR/><I>[Dawson:] ... in fact, Mark specifies that Pharisees are his audience.</I><BR/><BR/>No: it specifies that the Pharisees are his <I>target.</I><BR/><BR/><I>[Dawson:] Perhaps a good point to research is whether or not the law prohibiting a woman to divorce her husband was strictly a Jewish law (and thus meant only for Jews), or a secular law (and thus applicable to all inhabitants, including any Greeks that we want to put in the audience). I haven’t checked this out. Do you have any sources on this?</I> <BR/><BR/>No, I haven’t.<BR/><BR/><I>[Dawson:] However, as it stands, the “holes” that, according to you, plague Wells’ take on this issue either take the “it could be” stance (which isn’t entirely weak, but it doesn’t have the strength you seem to give to it), ...</I><BR/><BR/>If Wells is going to make a “could not” claim, he’s taking on a significant burden and is going to have to close those holes.<BR/><BR/><I>[Dawson:] ... consist of adding an explanation that most likely wouldn’t have made sense to the immediate audience (which seems to confirm Wells' point), ...</I><BR/><BR/>If the explanation were added for Mark’s audience, that would not really help Wells’s case that the event never took place (because Jesus never existed).<BR/><BR/><I>[Dawson:] ...or posit something that isn't stated in the text itself (such as the presence of Greeks, which smacks of ad hoc defensiveness).</I> <BR/><BR/>Again, Wells is making an extremely strong claim. All that is necessary to undermine it is that one or another of these suppositions be true. None of them is wildly implausible, and any one of them would suffice to undermine his claim.<BR/><BR/><I>[Dawson:] Besides, if Paul were getting his “words of the Lord” from a prior source, what was his source?</I><BR/><BR/>Most likely from the apostles, either directly or indirectly. Traveling with Luke would be a great way to find out a lot of information.<BR/><BR/><I>[Dawson:] Paul tells us in Galatians and elsewhere that he got his gospel directly from the Lord, not from other men, which suggests he didn’t get it from traditions that were already circulating.</I> <BR/><BR/>I think these passages are being overread. Paul, by his own account, was <I>commissioned</I> directly by the Lord, but nothing he says in Galatians or 1 Corinthians conflicts with the account in Acts that he spent time with the disciples at Damascus immediately after his conversion and baptism (9:19) and subsequently was with the disciples in Jerusalem (9:27-28). <BR/><BR/><I>Mark and the other gospels weren't written yet. So where did he get this teaching of the earthly Jesus if that’s the position you want to maintain? This remains unanswered.</I> <BR/><BR/>I have answered it for you now.<BR/><BR/><I>[Dawson:] Meanwhile, that the evangelist was taking a teaching that had already acquired currency among early Christians (such as in the early epistolary strata, as I have suggested) and putting it into Jesus’ mouth in the development of a narrative of an earthly Jesus, does not rely on these tactics, and fits (a word you found appropriate earlier) best with the legend case. It's not a stretch by any means.</I><BR/><BR/>There are so many problems with this hypothesis that I cannot even begin to enumerate them all in a blog post. Where did Paul get all these ideas? (The mystery religions “explanation” is beyond hopeless.) What did Peter, James, and John have to say about his teaching? How did the actual beliefs of those pillars of the early church – to whom Paul himself refers in Galatians 2 – manage to disappear without a ripple? Whence the materials in the gospels that could not have come from the Pauline epistles? How did the clever forgers manage so thoroughly to cover their tracks that there is no hint now of their existence? How on earth did the undesigned coincidences get built in, so that things in one gospel that make no sense taken on their own are explained by passing references in others? How does one account for the undesigned coincidences between the epistles and Acts – things that could not plausibly have been written up on the basis of Paul’s epistles?<BR/><BR/>We have forgeries in history, and we know what they look like. This isn’t it. If the mythic theory requires this sort of retrojection of Paul’s epistles into the gospels and Acts, that simply puts more nails into its coffin.Timhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/15786874834919065011noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21219785.post-82836006841334327912008-03-22T11:37:00.000-04:002008-03-22T11:37:00.000-04:00Evan,You ask:Do you not agree that the prophecy th...Evan,<BR/><BR/>You ask:<BR/><BR/><I>Do you not agree that the prophecy that the messiah would be born in Bethlehem is legend-building, and that the fact that he recreated the circuit of the house of Israel by going to Egypt and then returning also helps create a mythopoetic narrative? Especially since the flight to Egypt is set up by the slaughter of the innocents and is singly attested?</I><BR/><BR/>No. For legend-building you'd need something like you get in the Gospel of Peter.Timhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/15786874834919065011noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21219785.post-77256726999150022262008-03-20T20:07:00.000-04:002008-03-20T20:07:00.000-04:00I recently had a discussion with that went as foll...I recently had a discussion with that went as follows:<BR/><BR/>Bart,<BR/><BR/>You ask:<BR/><BR/>Are you suggesting that Paul's preaching was not done in the context of Diaspora synagogues?<BR/><BR/>No. But you'll note from the book of Acts how well Paul's message was received by those who remained Jews in those synagogues.<BR/><BR/>Are you suggesting that the Jews among Paul's followers no longer thought of themselves as part of Israel?<BR/><BR/>No. But this will do no work for you unless you add the assumption that no one could consider himself to be part of Israel unless he rejected a high christology. <BR/><BR/>Are you suggesting that Christianized Jews would have huge issues with matters of proper observance to the God of Israel, but would have had no issues whatsoever with the altered understanding of the Jewish concept and definition of the God who ordered those observances?<BR/><BR/>Yes, this seems most likely. That is one of the key things that distinguished them from non-Christianized Jews.<BR/><BR/>Below is my response to this conversation:<BR/><BR/>Let us not hide behind a term like a "high Christology." In fact Paul's Christology was much higher than that of the synoptic gospels. His Jesus was divine. The Jesus of the synoptics was thought of as a prophet, perhaps Elijah or John the Baptist come back. When we speak of Paul's high Christology, we are talking about Jesus being God. When you assert that a Jew with a high Christology could remain a part of Israel, you are assuming that he could believe Jesus the man is God, clearly at odds with the Shema and the Jewish conception of monotheism. I will once again maintain that the lack of conflict between Paul and his detractors over this issue indicates that he was not equating a man with God.<BR/><BR/>When you suggest that believing that Jesus the man is God was one of the things which distinguished Christians from Jews, you again have to account for the lack of that conflict in Paul's congregations.<BR/><BR/>One of the problems we are having in communication over this issue is that I am working within the Pauline corpus, and you are allowing the book of Acts to set its context. That is a larger subject that perhaps can be dealt with as a separate blog, but I will clearly state my position that Acts is a second century document written with the express purpose of establishing the concept of apostolic succession, apostolic authority, suppressing the freewheeling prophetic cacophony, and creating a "history" of the early years of Christianity. I see Acts as a hodgepodge of stories cobbled together from multiple sources such as the internal Pauline travel outline (but with contradictions), Josephus, OT stories applied typologically, and other unknown sources. In Acts studies, I find myself allied with scholars such as Crossan, Eisenman, and many others from previous generations which see it as legendary rewrites of the period. Most critical scholars openly denigrate Acts as history, but then many go on as though it were accurate. But without Acts, the entirity of the period of Paul's ministry and the alleged Jerusalem origins of Christianity would be unknown aside from Paul's epistles. That is, the book of Acts is a single source for the entirity of the story of Christian origins, and it is deeply flawed. <BR/><BR/>From Paul, it is not possible to infer a separate Christian identity from that of diaspora Judaism. The context of the Pauline teaching and conflict would be seen as an intramural debate, not the birth pangs of a separate religion. If we deal with the Pauline epistles on their own terms and identify the context as he describes it, it is simply not possible to find a book of Acts storyline underlying it. That is an imposition from a later time.<BR/><BR/>So yes, I am conflating Paul's detractors with the Jewish fundamentalists sent out to police heresy within the synagogues. Paul's only sin, and from their point of view it was a bit one, was to allow gentiles to join the synagogues as Jews without submitting to the Torah. That's it. His enemies would have been happy if his converts were not being told that they didn't have to be circumcized and brought within the way of the law. That is quite evident from the epistles. If he had actually been teaching that a recently living Jew was God, the uproar over circumcision would have seemed like a firecracker compared to an atom bomb.<BR/><BR/>Bartbart willruthhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/15483899663294287019noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21219785.post-6435092081095290122008-03-20T14:32:00.000-04:002008-03-20T14:32:00.000-04:00Tim: My confusion arose because you repeatedly def...Tim: <I>My confusion arose because you repeatedly defended Wells's and Doherty’s positions and arguments.</I><BR/><BR/>I have defended points which Wells and Doherty have incorporated into substantiating their larger conclusions, yes. But I explained this when I pointed out that one can dispute their grand conclusion (e.g., that there never was a man named Jesus) while recognizing that they make solid points along the way. You asked for examples of this, which is a fair question. But given my time constraints and your own confession to have read Wells (and perhaps Doherty?) in the past, I would point you to their writings. If you do not have their books, both Wells and Doherty have published some of their material online and it is available free of charge. You should also note that both authors have interacted extensively with their critics.<BR/><BR/>I had quoted Wells: <B>But no more about the ‘historical’ Jesus need have been included in this Christianity of Claudius’s day than what extant Christian writers (Paul and others) were saying before the gospels became established later in the first century; and this much does not confirm their portrait of Jesus as a preacher and wonder-worker in Pilate’s Palestine. (<I>The Jesus Legend</I>, pp. 40-41)</B><BR/><BR/>Tim: <I>Between “need have been” and “probably was” there is a serious gap. Wells needs the reader to infer the latter from the former, more cautious statement. But he presents no evidence that would justify this further step.</I><BR/><BR/>I think Wells puts greater weight on his assessment of the situation because of the timeframe involved (Claudius' reign between 41 and 54 AD) in relation to the body of Christian literature extant at that time, and also the scant detail included in Suetonius' statement (for instance, Suetonius tells us nothing that isn't already present in Paul's letters). Again, I would agree with this move because the narrative details found in the gospels (such as the ones I included in my list) are not attested to during this timeframe. This is what Wells means by "the 'historical' Jesus" - i.e., a Jesus which was born of a virgin, who was an itinerant preacher, a moral teacher, a miracle-performer, a curer of diseases, etc. The Suetonius passage recommends none of this, and I have seen no good reason put forth to suppose that anything more than what Wells suggests could be read into Suetonius here. As “evidence” for the “historical Jesus,” it is as flimsy as it gets. But I realize that Christians have historically tried to make the most with at best flimsy evidence (it is better than nothing, I suppose), so I am not surprised by the persistence.<BR/><BR/>Tim: <I>However, that reference fits together well with the account of the growth of the early church and the clashes with Judaism as recounted in Acts and the epistles.</I><BR/><BR/>Since Paul's letters already indicate that early Christianity experienced conflicts with Judaism, this "fit" that you mention is of no value in confirming the content of later narratives.<BR/><BR/>Tim: <I>I am not arguing that the records must be true because they are uncontradicted: I am pointing out that large-scale fabrications are more difficult to pass off as genuine when the events they report are supposed to have taken place within living memory than when they are not.</I><BR/><BR/>I'm not sure how difficult you suppose this to be, nor is it clear how one determines whether or not a fabrication is "large-scale." If someone came up to me and said that some event happened 10 years ago, a time well within my memory, and I had never heard of it, on what basis would I dispute it? Indeed, I am not the owner of the claim that it happened, so as a hearer of the claim I have no onus to prove or disprove it. Nor am I obligated to accept it as knowledge, especially if the content of the claim contradicts knowledge that I have already validated. But still, how would it be "difficult" for a person "to pass off as genuine" a fabricated claim? Of course, the chances of him successfully passing off such claims would depend in part on the nature of what's being claimed as well as on the judgment or credulity of those who happened to learn of those claims. Some people are readily willing to believe claims about allegedly supernatural personalities, even if they have no good reason for doing so. I've met persons like this myself. A recent visitor to my website recounted anecdotally his encounter with a Christian believer who declared, "I don't care whether Jesus existed or not, all I know is that He is always by my side, and no one can be happy without His love." Others will simply find claims about allegedly supernatural personalities to be absurd, and many of them are not going to launch into research trying to refute such claims. Thus they go unchallenged, and this very fact can easily be recruited by the faithful as a corroborating point recommending them. And yet, they’re untrue all the same.<BR/><BR/>I wrote: <B>None of the non-Christian references are early. In fact, most are from the second century and later.</B><BR/><BR/>Tim responded: <I>In the context of ancient history, Dawson, that’s awfully early. And the Josephus references are from the first century.</I><BR/><BR/>I don’t see where you’ve established that the Josephus references (e.g., the Testimonium) are genuinely Josephan (thus allowing you to put them into the first century). At any rate, your objection seems trivially semantic, and I’ve come to expect better from you. But to give you the benefit of the doubt, I'll rephrase my point for you: none of the non-Christian references antedate the gospel narratives, the only earlier source that we know these details are found in written form. Even if we accept the Testimonium (in whatever form) as genuinely Josephus, it still would date from the last decade of the first century, at a time when at least a couple of the gospel narratives would have been in circulation and thus available to Josephus. The Testimonium, even at its best, tells us nothing that we do not already find reported in the gospels. Tacitus dates from ca. 112, give or take, and again tells us nothing we don’t already find in the gospels. I find it quite unlikely that Tacitus was drawing from Roman records, for it is hard to believe that he would see Pilate registered in those records as a prefect and then mistakenly call him a procurator in his own writings (and even more difficult to believe that the Roman records would record him as procurator instead of prefect in the first place). Similarly I find it very unlikely - and statements you’ve made yourself support this – that Roman records would have referred to Jesus as “Christ.” Etc., etc., etc. The potential that these sources are merely relating what Christians at the time had already come to believe and were claiming is very real. <BR/><BR/>Tim: <I>The Tacitus reference goes further than the existence of Christians to the existence and crucifixion of Christus under Pontius Pilate, as does the Josephus reference (in uninterpolated form), which Tacitus may be following.</I><BR/><BR/>They do not attest to these things if they are simply repeating in one form or another what Christians of the time had been claiming; in that case, they're just repeating what Christians are already on record as believing. In other words, it needs to be established that these sources are in fact independent of Christian reports. Otherwise, they carry very little if any weight. If, for instance, Tacitus was simply reporting what he learned about what the Christians of his day believed - either through interviews he conducted with various of Christianity's representatives, from hearsay, from some written source that was itself based on such reports - then he's not an independent witness of a historical Jesus.<BR/><BR/>I wrote: <B>My point in my above statement was that Tacitus was essentially reporting what Christians at that time had come to believe. How specifically Tacitus learned it – whether through firsthand interviews with Christians, or from hearsay, etc. – is ultimately immaterial to the point I was trying to make.</B><BR/><BR/>Tim: <I>I do not understand why you say this.</I><BR/><BR/>I say this because, if Tacitus is merely repeating something he learned either directly or indirectly from Christian sources (i.e., is simply repeating what Christians were already on record as believing), then specifically how Tacitus learned this - whether through interviews he conducted with Christians, from hearsay, from trials of Christians that he knew of, etc. - is essentially irrelevant.<BR/><BR/><BR/>Tim: <I>If Tacitus learned it from Josephys, then Josephus contained a clear reference to Jesus centuries before Eusebius is supposed to have inserted it. That closes the loophole that both Wells and Doherty have tried to use to get rid of the Testimonium.</I><BR/><BR/>I know of no compelling reason to suppose that Tacitus got his information from Josephus. The Testimonium names Jesus, and yet Tacitus refers to “Christ,” as if that were his name. Of course, if we are to believe that Tacitus got his information from Josephus, are we also to believe that got his information from Roman records as well? As for Josephus, I simply find it very much a stretch to suppose that Josephus affirmed that Jesus was "the Christ" and yet remained a committed orthodox Jew.<BR/><BR/><BR/>I wrote: <B>Imagine someone writing 10 letters heaping admiration for Mozart, and never once mentioning that Mozart wrote music or that he lived in the 1700s.</B><BR/><BR/>Tim scoffs: <I>Bad analogy.</I><BR/><BR/>The analogy I gave is actually quite strong, given the vast differences between the Jesus of the Pauline epistles and the Jesus of the gospel narratives. The analogues here are, in the case of Mozart, the fact that he wrote music and lived in the 1700s, and, in the case of the gospel Jesus, the crucial elements that he was widely known throughout Palestine and neighboring regions as a miracle-performer and lived in the 1st century. Someone writing letters expounding on the greatness of Jesus while failing to ever mention that he performed miracles or lived in the 1st century is like someone writing letters expounding on the greatness of Mozart while failing to ever mention that he wrote music or lived in the 1700s. That Paul would write so much recommending Jesus, and yet nowhere credit his handiwork as miracle-worker, for instance, is comparable – in my mind, anyway – to someone writing a similar quantity recommending Mozart, but never mentioning that he wrote music. <BR/><BR/>Tim: <I>There are several holes in this argument. In some respects the simplest solution is that Mark, who is writing for a Roman audience, has added an explanatory sentence in verse 12 to cover the case. (Cf. Matt 19:9) This need not even have been an attempt to put words in Jesus’ mouth; the focus shifts after verse 12, so it could well be a gloss. Another possibility is that there were Greeks as well as Jews in the audience in Judaea and that Jesus elaborated the point for their benefit. In neither case does Wells’s attempt to cast doubt upon the obvious source of 1 Cor 7:10 succeed.</I><BR/><BR/>The passage in Mark (cf. 10:2) makes it clear that Jesus is addressing Pharisees. If the evangelist added his own explanatory note, how is this not putting words into Jesus’ mouth? This seems only to confirm Wells’ point, at least by degrees, which is significant concession enough. The passage does not indicate that there were Greeks in the audience; in fact, Mark specifies that Pharisees are his audience. Perhaps a good point to research is whether or not the law prohibiting a woman to divorce her husband was strictly a Jewish law (and thus meant only for Jews), or a secular law (and thus applicable to all inhabitants, including any Greeks that we want to put in the audience). I haven’t checked this out. Do you have any sources on this? However, as it stands, the “holes” that, according to you, plague Wells’ take on this issue either take the “it could be” stance (which isn’t entirely weak, but it doesn’t have the strength you seem to give to it), consist of adding an explanation that most likely wouldn’t have made sense to the immediate audience (which seems to confirm Wells' point), or posit something that isn't stated in the text itself (such as the presence of Greeks, which smacks of ad hoc defensiveness). Besides, if Paul were getting his “words of the Lord” from a prior source, what was his source? Paul tells us in Galatians and elsewhere that he got his gospel directly from the Lord, not from other men, which suggests he didn’t get it from traditions that were already circulating. Mark and the other gospels weren't written yet. So where did he get this teaching of the earthly Jesus if that’s the position you want to maintain? This remains unanswered. Meanwhile, that the evangelist was taking a teaching that had already acquired currency among early Christians (such as in the early epistolary strata, as I have suggested) and putting it into Jesus’ mouth in the development of a narrative of an earthly Jesus, does not rely on these tactics, and fits (a word you found appropriate earlier) best with the legend case. It's not a stretch by any means.<BR/><BR/>Regards,<BR/>DawsonBahnsen Burnerhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/11030029491768748360noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21219785.post-15727269259723433102008-03-19T00:09:00.000-04:002008-03-19T00:09:00.000-04:00Tim, I'm not capable of barn-burners like you and ...Tim, <BR/><BR/>I'm not capable of barn-burners like you and Dawson are going through but I do have a single question when you say:<BR/><BR/><I>The slaughter of the innocents doesn’t fit a “legend-building” agenda in any way that I can see.</I><BR/><BR/>Do you not agree that the prophecy that the messiah would be born in Bethlehem is legend-building, and that the fact that he recreated the circuit of the house of Israel by going to Egypt and then returning also helps create a mythopoetic narrative? Especially since the flight to Egypt is set up by the slaughter of the innocents and is singly attested?Evanhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/14299188458940897810noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21219785.post-82495466828120827892008-03-18T20:28:00.000-04:002008-03-18T20:28:00.000-04:00Dawson,Not to worry about breaking off the discuss...Dawson,<BR/><BR/>Not to worry about breaking off the discussion: I won’t assume that you’ve been convinced or that you’ve run out of things to say just because you no longer have time to pour into it. I’ve spent more time on it than I should myself. <BR/><BR/><I>Tim: I took you, I think naturally enough, to be siding with the mythers to this extent: that you disbelieve that there is abundant evidence that a real messianic teacher named Jesus, who stands behind the gospel accounts (whether they are legends or memoirs), existed in Palestine in the first quarter of the first century.<BR/><BR/>[Dawson:] I’m not sure how I could have been clearer than when I said the following of my position:<BR/><BR/>the stories we read in the gospels and the book of Acts are the product of legendary developments, regardless of whether or not Mark came first, regardless of whether or not there was ultimately a human being named Jesus which initially inspired sacred stories [of] messianic heroism.</I><BR/><BR/>My confusion arose because you repeatedly defended Wells's and Doherty’s positions and arguments.<BR/><BR/><I>Tim wrote: I’ve read Wells’s discussions carefully, and I’m completely unimpressed.<BR/><BR/>[Dawson:] I responded: If you’ve read Wells, then you should know that he bases many (if not most) of his points on conclusions and admissions made by many authorities in history and apologetics. One can hardly read a paragraph in one of Wells’ books without encountering a damning statement from highly respected sources.<BR/><BR/>Tim: Not on Josephus, as I recall.<BR/><BR/>[Dawson:] I’m sure your memory is a fine one, Tim, and that you do a lot of reading. One problem with reading a lot (I suffer from this myself) is that after a while it is sometimes hard to remember where you’ve read something that you remember reading. But I’ll give a for instance here. In his interaction with JP Meier’s criticisms, Wells, in his The Jesus Legend, quotes among others S. Mason (Josephus) several times (at length on p. 50, again on following pages), paraphrases a position maintained by JN Birdsall (p. 51), and RE Brown (p. 54). That’s just one of Wells’ books. The statements by these scholars which Wells cites are all favorable to his points in response to Meier.</I><BR/><BR/>My point was not that Wells lacks references but rather that they are not, taken collectively and in the context of wider Josephan scholarship, "damning" (your term). Mason, for example, contends (in keeping with the vast majority of modern scholarship on this issue) that the core of the <I>Testimonium</I> was present in the original but suffered later Christian interpolations which, however, we can identify, partly thanks to the uninterpolated text of Agapius. Birdsall’s critique depends on lexical arguments that the majority of scholars have not found persuasive; he represents the minority position, and there is a reason that it is in the minority.<BR/><BR/><I>Tim wrote: The Josephus denials are particularly weak in view of the discovery of the uninterpolated Arabic text of the Testimonium.<BR/><BR/>[Dawson:] I responded: I’m not sure what you mean by “Josephus denials” here, but even if we suppose that the Testimonium is authentic, specifically what value is it? <BR/><BR/>Tim: In the uninterpolated version of Agapius? Let’s see. It tells us that Jesus was a real Jewish teacher around the time of John the Baptist. It characterizes him as wise, says that his conduct was good, and indicates that he was known for his virtue. It tells us that many people from among the Jews and other nations became his disciples. It tells us that he was condemned to death by crucifixion by Pontius Pilate, that his disciples did not abandon their discipleship after his crucifixion, and that he was reported by his disciples to have appeared to them alive three days after his crucifixion. Not bad, eh?<BR/><BR/>[Dawson:] This is just a recap of what the Testimonium states. But I take this to mean that you think not only that the Testimonium is authentic, at least Agapius’ version, but also that what it states is true. Is that correct?</I><BR/><BR/>I think we are just using terminology differently here. By “authentic” I took it that you meant veridical. From this comment, however, it appears that you meant what I would mean by “genuine” – really the work of Josephus. However, we can go on, as it is my position that the <I>Testimonium</I> (in something like Agapius’s version) is both genuine and authentic: Josephus really wrote it, and he was not confused.<BR/><BR/><I>[Dawson:] This puts a two-fold burden on you. Although it dates from the tenth century, the version you specify is often taken to be authentic because it is supposedly less complimentary to Christians, and therefore less likely to be a Christian insert.</I><BR/><BR/>The case in favor of the Agapian text is more detailed than this. Your flattening it out this way may explain your next comment:<BR/><BR/><I>[Dawson:] That’s a pretty weak argument, so hopefully you have something better than this.</I> <BR/><BR/>For a fuller, but still compact, statement of the argument, I recommend the discussion in van Voorst, <I>Jesus Outside the New Testament</I>, pp. 81-104, and particularly the seven reasons adduced on pp. 95-99 for favoring a neutral reconstruction.<BR/><BR/><I>[Dawson:] Needless to say, the existence of Agapius’ version of the Testimonium or its downplayed tone does not undo the fact that the first Christian to quote it is Eusebius, in the fourth century. The Jewish biblical scholar S. Sandmel points out that “although Church Fathers quoted Josephus frequently, and this paragraph would have suited their purposes admirably, yet they never quoted it” (We Jews, p. 18). Feldman notes that several Fathers from the second and third centuries used Josephus’ works, but they “do not refer to this passage [the Testimonium], though one would imagine it would be the first passage that a Christian apologist would cite” (Josephus, p. 695). For these and many other reasons, the Testimonium is considered to be a Christian interpolation.</I><BR/><BR/>Again an argument from silence. This is mildly interesting but carries (as usual) little weight. Feldman himself does not consider the passage to be a wholesale Christian interpolation, so he obviously isn't as impressed with the argument as Wells is. The passive construction "is considered to be" should certainly not be construed to include Feldman. <BR/><BR/><I>Tim wrote: Does it bother you just a little bit that the attempts by the mythers to “deal with” these sources have been dismissed by every serious historian to have looked at the issue, including conservative Protestant, liberal Protestant, liberal Catholic, agnostic, and atheist historians?<BR/><BR/>[Dawson:] I responded: This is a common tactic on the part of apologists: assume that all “serious historians” are monolithic in their views and also in their condemnation of “the attempts by the mythers to ‘deal with’ these sources.” You say that [mythicists’] attempts “have been dismissed by every serious historian” who has looked into these issues, which is more than just a general statement. Where’s your support for this?<BR/><BR/>Tim: I did name a dozen sources early in this thread when I was interacting with Tyro on the subject. How many did you need?<BR/><BR/>[Dawson:] You said “every.” How many are there? Only a dozen? </I><BR/><BR/>I listed another dozen for you above. (The thread is getting abominably long, so I can understand how you might have missed them.) Yes, we’re going to run out of people eventually, simply because the mythic theory isn’t exactly the sort of thing to occupy the majority of serious scholars. I've given you two dozen; how many people can you find who meet the criteria I listed (earned doctorate in history, NT studies, or classics, academic affiliation) who hold the mythic theory? <BR/><BR/><I>[Dawson:] I asked: How can we take Suetonius’ reference to “Chrestus” as confirmation of the truth of the gospels’ portraits?<BR/><BR/>Tim: Indirectly: it places Jesus on the ground within a specified window of time, roughly 5 B.C. to 35 A.D.,<BR/><BR/>[Dawson:] Suetonius does not even name Jesus, but mentions a “Chrestus” in a passing comment, and his doing so does so much more than anything in all of Paul’s writings. Paul writes many letters preaching Jesus, and yet nowhere fits him in such a time range. This is dismissed by saying that Paul wasn’t writing memoirs about Jesus. Was Suetonius writing memoirs about Jesus?</I> <BR/><BR/>Whoa. The context for this exchange was your prior comment: <BR/><BR/><I>[Dawson:] Suetonius references a “Chrestus” in Rome during Claudius’ reign (AD 41-54), and many take this to mean the Jesus of the gospels.</I><BR/><BR/>I answered your question in the light of this prior comment: if Suetonius’s reference ot “Chrestus” does, in fact, pick out Jesus, then what I said follows. It forms no part of this contention that Suetonius knew much of anything about the details of Jesus’ life.<BR/><BR/><I>[Dawson:] I’m inclined to agree with Wells when he writes: The historian Suetonius may fairly be represented as saying that under the Emperor Claudius (who died A.D. 54) there were disturbances in Rome between Jews and Christians concerning the claim being pressed by Christians that Jesus was the Messiah.</I><BR/><BR/>Here, for once, I agree with Wells.<BR/><BR/><I>[Continuing quotation from Wells:] But no more about the ‘historical’ Jesus need have been included in this Christianity of Claudius’s day than what extant Christian writers (Paul and others) were saying before the gospels became established later in the first century; and this much does not confirm their portrait of Jesus as a preacher and wonder-worker in Pilate’s Palestine. (The Jesus Legend, pp. 40-41)</I> <BR/><BR/>Between “need have been” and “probably was” there is a serious gap. Wells needs the reader to infer the latter from the former, more cautious statement. But he presents no evidence that would justify this further step.<BR/><BR/><I>[Dawson:] Naturally I expect you to class this explanation into the group of “desperate” attempts to “explain away” what Christian apologists like to take as “evidence” for truth of the NT. And yet, I see it as stemming from a concern for, among other things, avoiding anachronism.<BR/><BR/>Consider: The statement refers to Jews (not “Christians”) in Rome during Claudius’ reign (AD 41-54), to a “Chrestus” (not to Jesus) who had influence over these Jews. Were these early Christians in Rome? Perhaps. What were they taught? Who knows. How long were they there? Who knows. Who missionized them? Were they worshippers of a recently crucified Jesus? If one wanted to believe the gospels’ portrait of Jesus, it would be easy to fill in these blanks with gospel-inspired answers. But is that warranted by what Suetonius actually writes? I’m not persuaded that it is.</I><BR/><BR/>I agree with you that by itself the Suetonius reference does not speak to most of these questions – nor did I say that it does. However, that reference fits together well with the account of the growth of the early church and the clashes with Judaism as recounted in Acts and the epistles. <BR/><BR/><I>Tim: This means that documents written about him within the next generation or two are less likely to be complete forgeries, as there were people who would have known the actual facts and been able to correct the misstatements.<BR/><BR/>[Dawson:] Isn’t this itself an argument from silence, Tim? It seems you’re arguing to the effect that, since we don’t have anyone coming forward and challenging the statement, we can rest assured that no one did, no one could have, or no one would have disagreed? Statements that a person writes are not suddenly broadcast – especially back in the second century – to everyone who might be interested as soon as they’re penned.</I> <BR/><BR/>No. I am not arguing that the records must be true because they are uncontradicted: I am pointing out that large-scale fabrications are more difficult to pass off as genuine when the events they report are supposed to have taken place within living memory than when they are not. <BR/><BR/><I>[Dawson:] I observed: However, he nowhere mentions a “Jesus,” <BR/><BR/>Tim asked: Why would you expect him to do so?<BR/><BR/>[Dawson:] I then responded: It’s not about what I expect of Suetonius, it’s about what he says and also about what he fails to say. “Christ” was a title indicating a station, “Jesus” is a name of a person. <BR/><BR/>Tim now asks: Why should this observation have weight?<BR/><BR/>[Dawson:] If “Chrestus” is supposed to mean “Christ” (and for all I know, it very well could have), it still only references a title, not a specific individual named Jesus. Paul himself, in his letters as I have pointed out, warned his congregations about rival gospels, rival Jesuses, rival Christs. Whether Suetonius thought “Chrestus” or “Christ” was a proper name seems irrelevant, for he was reporting what he had learned, and a misunderstanding – whether Suetonius’ own or one he inherited from his own sources – won’t help us here.</I><BR/><BR/>If I had claimed that we can infer a <I>lot</I> about Jesus from the Suetonius reference <I>alone</I>, then I would see your point. But I haven’t. So it seems that you’re attacking a straw man here.<BR/><BR/><I>Tim wrote: “Chrestus” is a known variant on “Christus,” which is the Greek term used to translate mashiyach in the Septuagint, so there is little room for doubt here. <BR/><BR/>[Dawson:] I asked: That’s fine. But again, what value is it as evidence? Evidence specifically for what? <BR/><BR/>Tim responded: For the existence, in the first quarter of the first century A.D., of the person about whom Paul was writing and about whom the gospel stories, whether true or false, were written.<BR/><BR/>[Dawson:] The way I read the passage in Suetonius, it could easily be taken to mean that the “Chrestus” under whose influence the Jews of Rome were causing unrest, was still alive, even present with them. Am I being outlandish here?</I><BR/><BR/>No, but you are changing the subject, perhaps because you have forgotten the context of our exchange. Just before the bit you’ve quoted came this bit:<BR/><BR/><I>[Dawson:] I wrote: ... and even if “Chrestus” is taken to mean “Christ” or “Messiah,” ...</I><BR/><BR/>So the question is not (as you are now making it out) whether Suetonius thought “Chrestus” was the Jewish messiah or whether he thought “Chrestus” was alive, but rather whether, if the guy whose name Suetonius got wrong was, in fact, “Christus,” the messiah, this reflects on the historicity of Jesus.<BR/><BR/><I>[Dawson:] I asked: What is so historically incredible about Doherty’s, Wells’ and others’ treatments of these references? <BR/><BR/>Tim: Aside from the intrinsic weakness of some of their arguments, particularly the arguments from silence, the problem is that they need to explain all of the secular data away. If any one of them is a genuine independent reference to the same person to whom the gospels refer, then the mythic theory is shot. Now, one or two might be explained away, particularly if they were both from one source and an argument could be made that this source was unreliable or derived information entirely from Christian writings. But every additional reference from another non-Christian source adds to the implausibility of the attempt to explain them away.<BR/><BR/>[Dawson:] I disagree.</I> <BR/><BR/>No surprise there.<BR/><BR/><I>None of the non-Christian references are early. In fact, most are from the second century and later.</I> <BR/><BR/>In the context of ancient history, Dawson, that’s awfully early. And the Josephus references are from the first century.<BR/><BR/><I>[Dawson:] The best of them only testifies that Christians existed, not that the miracle-working Jesus of the gospels was a real person.</I> <BR/><BR/>The Tacitus reference goes further than the existence of Christians to the existence and crucifixion of Christus under Pontius Pilate, as does the Josephus reference (in uninterpolated form), which Tacitus may be following.<BR/><BR/><I>[Dawson:] Also, I have reviewed Doherty’s and Wells’ interactions not only with the references in question, but also with apologetic treatments hoisting them up as evidence for a historical Jesus, and I do not find their explanations at all “desperate,” as you had indicated earlier.<I> <BR/><BR/>I never indicated that <I>you</I> would find them desperate; rather, my point is that professional historians who have bothered to look at myther works almost invariably find them so, as do I.<BR/><BR/></I>It could simply be that we have different contexts of judging the material in question, but from what you’ve provided, I’m unpersuaded that anything I’ve read in either of these two authors is really such a stretch.</I><BR/><BR/>Okay.<BR/><BR/><I>[Dawson:] I wrote: RT France, a respected NT scholar who is no friend of the mythicist position, calls Wells’ case for Tacitus’ reference to “Chrestus” as coming either form interviews with Christians or from hearsay about what they believed “entirely convincing” (The Evidence for Jesus, p. 23). In his The Historical Figure of Jesus, EP Sanders – another NT scholar – admits that “Roman sources that mention Jesus are all dependent on Christian reports” (p. 49), where Suetonius’ mention of “Chrestus” is taken to mean Jesus. <BR/><BR/>...<BR/><BR/>Tim: Second, a point of interpretation: I said that I couldn’t think of anyone who accepts the claim that Tacitus was reporting what he learned from Christians he had interviewed, which is what you said in the statement to which I was responding. France doesn’t quite say this: what he says instead is that it came either from interviews with Christians or from hearsay.<BR/><BR/>[Dawson:] Understood. My point in my above statement was that Tacitus was essentially reporting what Christians at that time had come to believe. How specifically Tacitus learned it – whether through firsthand interviews with Christians, or from hearsay, etc. – is ultimately immaterial to the point I was trying to make.</I> <BR/><BR/>I do not understand why you say this. If Tacitus learned it from Josephys, then Josephus contained a clear reference to Jesus centuries before Eusebius is supposed to have inserted it. That closes the loophole that both Wells and Doherty have tried to use to get rid of the <I>Testimonium</I>. <BR/><BR/><I>[Dawson:] But keep in mind that Tacitus was governor of the province of Asia ca. AD 112-113 and, as Wells surmises, “may well have had the same kind of trouble with Christianity that Pliny experienced as governor of nearby Bithynia at that very time.”</I> <BR/><BR/>Note the use of “may well have” here. That is acceptable if one is merely trying to establish possibility. But Wells needs much more than this: he needs to establish a high probability not only that Tacitus had trouble but that he derived his information regarding Christians at first hand from the Christians or, failing that in some other manner that does not allow for a non-Christian, first century source. For that purpose, he needs to cite strong evidence. But such evidence is not available; indeed, as I have suggested above, the most plausible explanation for Tacitus’s reference – and the only proferred explanation that directly explains his use of “procurator” as Pilate’s title – is that he was making use of the <I>Testimonium</I> in Josephus’s <I>Antiquities</I><BR/><BR/><I>[Dawson:] He notes Hengel’s statement that “Tacitus’ precise knowledge of Christians and his contempt for them are probably to be derived from the trials of Christians which he carried out when he was governor in the province of Asia,” ...</I> <BR/><BR/>I have very great respect for Martin Hengel, but in this instance I think he is mistaken.<BR/><BR/><I>... and concludes: “To decide from his ‘hostile tone’ that his information does not derive from Christians, is entirely unwarranted.” (The Historical Evidence for Jesus, p. 17; Wells quotes Hengel’s Crucifixion, p. 3).</I><BR/><BR/>The conclusion of this is from Wells, of course, not from Hengel. If Wells were right that this is <I>unwarranted</I> it would not follow that the information <I>does</I> derive from Christians, of course.<BR/><BR/><I>Tim: The Sanders quotation strikes me as an overstatement (how could he know this?),<BR/><BR/>[Dawson:] I think that’s a fair question, but as a respected source, don’t you suppose he has his reasons for making such a statement?</I> <BR/><BR/>Yes; in this case, however, I have a sneaking suspicion that he is simply following Schweitzer, who says almost exactly the same thing. Since Schweitzer’s analysis is somewhat dated, I am not inclined to place great weight on this point. But if Sanders has other evidence that he simply didn’t bother to state in his book, I would be interested to hear it.<BR/><BR/><I>Tim: but on the Tacitus question, both Sanders and France come down more on your side of this question than I had thought anyone responsible did.<BR/><BR/>[Dawson:] So there you have your answer.</I><BR/><BR/>I’m not sure what it’s an answer to, but I do try to acknowledge when you’ve brought forward some relevant evidence, even if I still disagree; hence my statement.<BR/><BR/><I>[Dawson:] I wrote: It’s not only that they fail to mention Jesus, who’s fame (according to the gospels) had spread quite far during his own lifetime, ...<BR/><BR/>Tim: I see we’re down from “an international reputation” to “quite far.” Actually, in his own lifetime Jesus was essentially a nobody from the standpoint of the Roman world.<BR/><BR/>[Dawson:] “International” does not by definition denote all nations; rather, it means involving two or more nations. And that is the impression I get from the NT passages I cited.</I><BR/><BR/>But that will not come anywhere near to underwriting your claim that because of that “international reputation,” Seneca and Philo should have taken notice of Jesus.<BR/><BR/><I>[Dawson:] I wrote: ... but also the slaughter of the innocents <BR/><BR/>Tim: Yes, assuming that the account in Macrobius is derivative from Christian sources – but again, as this amounted probably to only a small number of children, there is no particular reason to think it would be recorded in Roman sources; and as for Josephus, he has greater crimes in the same vein to lay to Herod’s account.<BR/><BR/>[Dawson:] So, there is admittedly no corroboration of the slaughter of the innocents – even in the NT (Matthew being the only one who mentions it) – but we can be sure it happened all the same, because Matthew includes it in his gospel. Got it.</I><BR/><BR/>No need to be snarky. Singly-attested facts are common in historical work; they are none the worse for that. Only the baleful influence of the argument from silence magnifies the fact of single attestation into a problem. As for “being sure,” did I say this? You’ve disavowed trying to bring this back to a discussion of inerrancy, but it seems that you can’t resist slipping back into the assumption that I am trying to defend every detail of every narrative.<BR/><BR/><I>[Dawson:] I wrote: or “a night of the living-righteous-undead” (as one commentator puts it), both of which only Matthew reports. <BR/><BR/>Tim: A baffling passage, I admit. But aren’t we slipping over here from a discussion of whether the gospels give a substantially accurate portrayal of Jesus to a discussion of inerrancy?<BR/><BR/>No, inerrancy is not where I was going with this. The point is that the gospel of Matthew is an excellent example of the kind of legend-building I’m talking about. There are numerous details in Matthew’s gospel that are so “baffling” (as you yourself put it) that they embarrass many believers. In my experience, Christian apologists don’t want to touch these points with a ten-foot pole.</I><BR/><BR/>The slaughter of the innocents doesn’t fit a “legend-building” agenda in any way that I can see. Matthew 27:51b-53 could fit that pattern, but it is quite an extrapolation from this to “numerous details.” The stories in the first two chapters of Matthew, whether they are authentic and veridical or not, do not stand disconnected from the rest of the narrative like Matthew 27:51b-53 does.<BR/><BR/><I>Tim: Paul isn’t writing volumes about Jesus: he is writing letters to churches.<BR/><BR/>[Dawson:] Paul is by far the most prolific writer of the New Testament. In terms of volume (i.e., quantity, as I intended the use of the term in my statement above), he produced the largest portion of writings concerning Jesus that the church saw fit to canonize.</I> <BR/><BR/>Yep.<BR/><BR/><I>[Dawson:] In that corpus of epistles, we do not find Paul ever characterizing Jesus as a teacher, ...</I><BR/><BR/>But we do find him citing Jesus’ teaching as authoritative.<BR/><BR/><I>[Dawson:]... a miracle-worker, a healer, ...</I> <BR/><BR/>But we do find him emphasizing the fact that Jesus rose from the dead.<BR/><BR/><I>[Dawson:]... an exorcist, as born of a virgin, etc.</I> <BR/><BR/>So: some things mentioned, others not. <BR/><BR/><I>[Dawson:] Imagine someone writing 10 letters heaping admiration for Mozart, and never once mentioning that Mozart wrote music or that he lived in the 1700s. </I><BR/><BR/>Bad analogy. It would be a little better (but still not very good) to say that Mozart is to music what Jesus is to <I>salvation</I>; and there is plenty of soteriology in the epistles. But there would be nothing surprising about someone’s writing letters in praise of Mozart’s music who doesn’t mention the circumstances of his birth, or his sayings (even about music), or his habits of composing. <BR/><BR/><I>Tim: We get what one might expect if the stories were known and the main purposes of the letters were practical and doctrinal rather than historical.<BR/><BR/>[Dawson:] Not if Paul had known of the teachings which the gospels attribute to Jesus. Had Paul known of these teachings, why didn’t he credit Jesus with them when he (Paul) pens them into his letters? Indeed, Christians are always trying to put the stamp of Jesus’ approval on the things they say. It is conspicuous by its very absence that he doesn’t do this.</I><BR/><BR/>As I’ve pointed out above, had Paul done so, we would have grounds for believing that he was writing to people who did not know the story.<BR/><BR/><I>Tim: In passing, he alludes to Jesus’ teaching on the sorts of issues that one might expect to come up in churches, including divorce (1 Cor 7:10; note the special stress he lays on this and cf. Matt 5:32; Mark 10:11; Luke 16:18)<BR/><BR/>[Dawson:] I Cor. 7:10 is probably the strongest citation you’ll be able to produce on behalf of your point. In it Paul attributes his charge to those who are married to “the Lord,”... </I> <BR/><BR/>So far so good, but our agreement terminates abruptly:<BR/><BR/><I>[Dawson:] ... which for Paul is the risen, heavenly Jesus, not a pre-crucifixion Jesus.</I> <BR/><BR/>This attempt to make ο κυριος refer strictly to the risen Jesus seems to me to be a real stretch. Why (over)read the phrase like that? Simply because Paul uses ο κυριος frequently in greetings, exhortations, etc.? I do not see a persuasive argument here against the allusion.<BR/><BR/><I>[Dawson:] So he doesn’t have the earthly Jesus we encounter in the gospels in mind here.</I><BR/><BR/>I’m sorry; this argument strikes me as a very serious stretch. This just isn’t compelling.<BR/><BR/><I>[Dawson:] Also, Mark’s use of this teaching is troublesome. Wells points out:<BR/><BR/>Jesus could not, as Mark alleges, have told a Palestinian audience that a wife should not seek divorce, since in Palestine only men were allowed to do so. But Paul could appropriately urge such a ruling on the Gentile Christian communities to which he appealed; and if he told them it was Jesus’ teaching, he would have meant (as many commentators admit) not a teaching of a Palestinian Jesus but a directive given by some Christian prophet speaking in the name of the risen one.... This would have been the obvious way of supporting a ruling on divorce which the Christians of Paul’s day were anxious to inculcate. At a later stage it would naturally have been supposed that Jesus must have said during his lifetime what it was believed the risen one had said through Christian prophets; and so the doctrine was, however inappropriately, put into his mouth as an address to a Palestinian audience by Mark. (The Historical Evidence for Jesus, p. 23)<BR/><BR/>So that Paul got this teaching from traditions about an earthly Jesus is problematic.</I><BR/><BR/>There are several holes in this argument. In some respects the simplest solution is that Mark, who is writing for a Roman audience, has added an explanatory sentence in verse 12 to cover the case. (Cf. Matt 19:9) This need not even have been an attempt to put words in Jesus’ mouth; the focus shifts after verse 12, so it could well be a gloss. Another possibility is that there were Greeks as well as Jews in the audience in Judaea and that Jesus elaborated the point for their benefit. In neither case does Wells’s attempt to cast doubt upon the obvious source of 1 Cor 7:10 succeed. <BR/><BR/>Best,<BR/>TimTimhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/15786874834919065011noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21219785.post-21894698909033195422008-03-18T14:45:00.000-04:002008-03-18T14:45:00.000-04:00Tim,I said,Please get out a map of Asia Minor in t...Tim,<BR/><BR/>I said,<BR/><BR/>Please get out a map of Asia Minor in the ancient world. Please note that Marcion hailed from Sinope on the shore of the Black Sea, just a short distance from the border of Galatia. His proximity to Paul's earliest congregations make it quite likely that his belief system grew out of that of Paul's actual teachings. <BR/><BR/>Then you responded,<BR/><BR/>You and I clearly have different standards for what it means for one thing to make another quite likely.<BR/><BR/>I now write,<BR/><BR/>Am I saying that Marcion perfectly reflected Pauline thought? No, but I'm not saying it didn't either. We simply don't know. <BR/><BR/>However, the region of Galatia borders on Marcion's home. His thinking didn't fall out of the air. And he used Paul as his theological source, believing that he alone understood the gospel. And Marcion didn't accept the idea that Jesus was a real man. It is more likely that Marcion grew out of authentic Pauline roots than that he came up with an independent Christology and gospel and just tried to impose it on Paul.<BR/><BR/>You must keep in mind that no example of Pauline Christianity can be found in any first century document, nor from the writings of the early second century fathers. In fact, Pauline Christianity emerged first through Marcion. Marcion claimed to be faithfully representing Pauline thought. <BR/><BR/>On what basis would you counter Marcion's claim? Prior to Marcion, where do you find any Christian clearly following the Pauline tradition?bart willruthhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/15483899663294287019noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21219785.post-83727472160660056122008-03-17T23:11:00.000-04:002008-03-17T23:11:00.000-04:00Tim,I've been busy all day with doctor appointment...Tim,<BR/><BR/>I've been busy all day with doctor appointments both for myself and for my daughter, so you'll have to forgive me for not responding to everything you wrote to me in your comment above. Had I the luxury of unbounded time, I would be happy to devote more to considering your points. For now, this is all I'll be posting at this time.<BR/><BR/>Tim: <I>I took you, I think naturally enough, to be siding with the mythers to this extent: that you disbelieve that there is abundant evidence that a real messianic teacher named Jesus, who stands behind the gospel accounts (whether they are legends or memoirs), existed in Palestine in the first quarter of the first century.</I><BR/><BR/>I’m not sure how I could have been clearer than when I said the following of my position:<BR/><BR/><B>the stories we read in the gospels and the book of Acts are the product of legendary developments, regardless of whether or not Mark came first, regardless of whether or not there was ultimately a human being named Jesus which initially inspired sacred stories [of] messianic heroism.</B><BR/><BR/><BR/>Tim wrote: <I>I’ve read Wells’s discussions carefully, and I’m completely unimpressed.</I><BR/><BR/>I responded: <B>If you’ve read Wells, then you should know that he bases many (if not most) of his points on conclusions and admissions made by many authorities in history and apologetics. One can hardly read a paragraph in one of Wells’ books without encountering a damning statement from highly respected sources.</B><BR/><BR/>Tim: <I>Not on Josephus, as I recall.</I><BR/><BR/>I’m sure your memory is a fine one, Tim, and that you do a lot of reading. One problem with reading a lot (I suffer from this myself) is that after a while it is sometimes hard to remember where you’ve read something that you remember reading. But I’ll give a for instance here. In his interaction with JP Meier’s criticisms, Wells, in his <I>The Jesus Legend</I>, quotes among others S. Mason (<I>Josephus</I>) several times (at length on p. 50, again on following pages), paraphrases a position maintained by JN Birdsall (p. 51), and RE Brown (p. 54). That’s just one of Wells’ books. The statements by these scholars which Wells cites are all favorable to his points in response to Meier.<BR/><BR/>Tim wrote: <I>The Josephus denials are particularly weak in view of the discovery of the uninterpolated Arabic text of the Testimonium.</I><BR/><BR/>I responded: <B>I’m not sure what you mean by “Josephus denials” here, but even if we suppose that the Testimonium is authentic, specifically what value is it?</B> <BR/><BR/>Tim: <I>In the uninterpolated version of Agapius? Let’s see. It tells us that Jesus was a real Jewish teacher around the time of John the Baptist. It characterizes him as wise, says that his conduct was good, and indicates that he was known for his virtue. It tells us that many people from among the Jews and other nations became his disciples. It tells us that he was condemned to death by crucifixion by Pontius Pilate, that his disciples did not abandon their discipleship after his crucifixion, and that he was reported by his disciples to have appeared to them alive three days after his crucifixion. Not bad, eh?</I><BR/><BR/>This is just a recap of what the Testimonium states. But I take this to mean that you think not only that the Testimonium is authentic, at least Agapius’ version, but also that what it states is true. Is that correct? This puts a two-fold burden on you. Although it dates from the tenth century, the version you specify is often taken to be authentic because it is supposedly less complimentary to Christians, and therefore less likely to be a Christian insert. That’s a pretty weak argument, so hopefully you have something better than this. Needless to say, the existence of Agapius’ version of the Testimonium or its downplayed tone does not undo the fact that the first Christian to quote it is Eusebius, in the fourth century. The Jewish biblical scholar S. Sandmel points out that “although Church Fathers quoted Josephus frequently, and this paragraph would have suited their purposes admirably, yet they never quoted it” (<I>We Jews</I>, p. 18). Feldman notes that several Fathers from the second and third centuries used Josephus’ works, but they “do not refer to this passage [the Testimonium], though one would imagine it would be the first passage that a Christian apologist would cite” (<I>Josephus</I>, p. 695). For these and many other reasons, the Testimonium is considered to be a Christian interpolation. <BR/><BR/><BR/>Tim wrote: <I>Does it bother you just a little bit that the attempts by the mythers to “deal with” these sources have been dismissed by every serious historian to have looked at the issue, including conservative Protestant, liberal Protestant, liberal Catholic, agnostic, and atheist historians?</I><BR/><BR/>I responded: <B>This is a common tactic on the part of apologists: assume that all “serious historians” are monolithic in their views and also in their condemnation of “the attempts by the mythers to ‘deal with’ these sources.” You say that [mythicists’] attempts “have been dismissed by every serious historian” who has looked into these issues, which is more than just a general statement. Where’s your support for this?</B><BR/><BR/>Tim: <I>I did name a dozen sources early in this thread when I was interacting with Tyro on the subject. How many did you need?</I><BR/><BR/>You said “every.” How many are there? Only a dozen? <BR/><BR/><BR/>I asked: <B>How can we take Suetonius’ reference to “Chrestus” as confirmation of the truth of the gospels’ portraits?</B><BR/><BR/>Tim: <I>Indirectly: it places Jesus on the ground within a specified window of time, roughly 5 B.C. to 35 A.D.,</I><BR/><BR/>Suetonius does not even name Jesus, but mentions a “Chrestus” in a passing comment, and his doing so does so much more than anything in all of Paul’s writings. Paul writes many letters preaching Jesus, and yet nowhere fits him in such a time range. This is dismissed by saying that Paul wasn’t writing memoirs about Jesus. Was Suetonius writing memoirs about Jesus? I’m inclined to agree with Wells when he writes: <B>The historian Suetonius may fairly be represented as saying that under the Emperor Claudius (who died A.D. 54) there were disturbances in Rome between Jews and Christians concerning the claim being pressed by Christians that Jesus was the Messiah. But no more about the ‘historical’ Jesus need have been included in this Christianity of Claudius’s day than what extant Christian writers (Paul and others) were saying before the gospels became established later in the first century; and this much does not confirm their portrait of Jesus as a preacher and wonder-worker in Pilate’s Palestine.</B> (<I>The Jesus Legend</I>, pp. 40-41) Naturally I expect you to class this explanation into the group of “desperate” attempts to “explain away” what Christian apologists like to take as “evidence” for truth of the NT. And yet, I see it as stemming from a concern for, among other things, avoiding anachronism. <BR/><BR/>Consider: The statement refers to Jews (not “Christians”) in Rome during Claudius’ reign (AD 41-54), to a “Chrestus” (not to Jesus) who had influence over these Jews. Were these early Christians in Rome? Perhaps. What were they taught? Who knows. How long were they there? Who knows. Who missionized them? Were they worshippers of a recently crucified Jesus? If one wanted to believe the gospels’ portrait of Jesus, it would be easy to fill in these blanks with gospel-inspired answers. But is that warranted by what Suetonius actually writes? I’m not persuaded that it is. <BR/><BR/>Tim: <I>This means that documents written about him within the next generation or two are less likely to be complete forgeries, as there were people who would have known the actual facts and been able to correct the misstatements.</I><BR/><BR/>Isn’t this itself an argument from silence, Tim? It seems you’re arguing to the effect that, since we don’t have anyone coming forward and challenging the statement, we can rest assured that no one did, no one could have, or no one would have disagreed? Statements that a person writes are not suddenly broadcast – especially back in the second century – to everyone who might be interested as soon as they’re penned. <BR/><BR/>I observed: <B>However, he nowhere mentions a “Jesus,”</B> <BR/><BR/>Tim asked: <I> Why would you expect him to do so?</I><BR/><BR/>I then responded: <B>It’s not about what I expect of Suetonius, it’s about what he says and also about what he fails to say. “Christ” was a title indicating a station, “Jesus” is a name of a person.</B> <BR/><BR/>Tim now asks: <I>Why should this observation have weight?</I><BR/><BR/>If “Chrestus” is supposed to mean “Christ” (and for all I know, it very well could have), it still only references a title, not a specific individual named Jesus. Paul himself, in his letters as I have pointed out, warned his congregations about rival gospels, rival Jesuses, rival Christs. Whether Suetonius thought “Chrestus” or “Christ” was a proper name seems irrelevant, for he was reporting what he had learned, and a misunderstanding – whether Suetonius’ own or one he inherited from his own sources – won’t help us here.<BR/><BR/><BR/>Tim wrote: <I>“Chrestus” is a known variant on “Christus,” which is the Greek term used to translate mashiyach in the Septuagint, so there is little room for doubt here.</I> <BR/><BR/>I asked: <B>That’s fine. But again, what value is it as evidence? Evidence specifically for what?</B> <BR/><BR/>Tim responded: <I>For the existence, in the first quarter of the first century A.D., of the person about whom Paul was writing and about whom the gospel stories, whether true or false, were written.</I><BR/><BR/>The way I read the passage in Suetonius, it could easily be taken to mean that the “Chrestus” under whose influence the Jews of Rome were causing unrest, was still alive, even present with them. Am I being outlandish here?<BR/><BR/>Here’s the Latin: “Iudaeos impulsore Chresto assidue tumultuantis Roma expulit.”<BR/><BR/>Here’s the English translation: “Since the Jews constantly made disturbances at the instigation of Chrestus, he expelled them from Rome.”<BR/><BR/><BR/>I asked: <B>What is so historically incredible about Doherty’s, Wells’ and others’ treatments of these references?</B> <BR/><BR/>Tim: <I>Aside from the intrinsic weakness of some of their arguments, particularly the arguments from silence, the problem is that they need to explain all of the secular data away. If any one of them is a genuine independent reference to the same person to whom the gospels refer, then the mythic theory is shot. Now, one or two might be explained away, particularly if they were both from one source and an argument could be made that this source was unreliable or derived information entirely from Christian writings. But every additional reference from another non-Christian source adds to the implausibility of the attempt to explain them away.</I><BR/><BR/>I disagree. None of the non-Christian references are early. In fact, most are from the second century and later. The best of them only testifies that Christians existed, not that the miracle-working Jesus of the gospels was a real person. Also, I have reviewed Doherty’s and Wells’ interactions not only with the references in question, but also with apologetic treatments hoisting them up as evidence for a historical Jesus, and I do not find their explanations at all “desperate,” as you had indicated earlier. It could simply be that we have different contexts of judging the material in question, but from what you’ve provided, I’m unpersuaded that anything I’ve read in either of these two authors is really such a stretch.<BR/><BR/>I wrote: <B>RT France, a respected NT scholar who is no friend of the mythicist position, calls Wells’ case for Tacitus’ reference to “Chrestus” as coming either form interviews with Christians or from hearsay about what they believed “entirely convincing” (The Evidence for Jesus, p. 23). In his The Historical Figure of Jesus, EP Sanders – another NT scholar – admits that “Roman sources that mention Jesus are all dependent on Christian reports” (p. 49), where Suetonius’ mention of “Chrestus” is taken to mean Jesus.</B> <BR/><BR/>Tim: <I>First, a point of fact: Tacitus uses “Christus,” not “Chrestus.”</I><BR/><BR/>Thanks for the correction – you can tell I’m multitasking like crazy to try to participate here.<BR/><BR/>Tim: <I>Second, a point of interpretation: I said that I couldn’t think of anyone who accepts the claim that Tacitus was reporting what he learned from Christians he had interviewed, which is what you said in the statement to which I was responding. France doesn’t quite say this: what he says instead is that it came either from interviews with Christians or from hearsay.</I><BR/><BR/>Understood. My point in my above statement was that Tacitus was essentially reporting what Christians at that time had come to believe. How specifically Tacitus learned it – whether through firsthand interviews with Christians, or from hearsay, etc. – is ultimately immaterial to the point I was trying to make. But keep in mind that Tacitus was governor of the province of Asia ca. AD 112-113 and, as Wells surmises, "may well have had the same kind of trouble with Christianity that Pliny experienced as governor of nearby Bithynia at that very time.” He notes Hengel’s statement that “Tacitus’ precise knowledge of Christians and his contempt for them are probably to be derived from the trials of Christians which he carried out when he was governor in the province of Asia,” and concludes: “To decide from his ‘hostile tone’ that his information does not derive from Christians, is entirely unwarranted.” (<I>The Historical Evidence for Jesus</I>, p. 17; Wells quotes Hengel’s <I>Crucifixion</I>, p. 3).<BR/> <BR/>Tim: <I>The Sanders quotation strikes me as an overstatement (how could he know this?),</I><BR/><BR/>I think that’s a fair question, but as a respected source, don’t you suppose he has his reasons for making such a statement? Or, is it the case that even scholars are capable of overstating their case?<BR/><BR/>Tim: <I>but on the Tacitus question, both Sanders and France come down more on your side of this question than I had thought anyone responsible did.</I><BR/><BR/>So there you have your answer.<BR/><BR/><BR/>I wrote: <B>It’s not only that they fail to mention Jesus, who’s fame (according to the gospels) had spread quite far during his own lifetime, ...</B><BR/><BR/>Tim: <I>I see we’re down from “an international reputation” to “quite far.” Actually, in his own lifetime Jesus was essentially a nobody from the standpoint of the Roman world.</I><BR/><BR/>“International” does not by definition denote all nations; rather, it means involving two or more nations. And that is the impression I get from the NT passages I cited.<BR/><BR/>I wrote: <B>... but also the slaughter of the innocents </B><BR/><BR/>Tim: <I>Yes, assuming that the account in Macrobius is derivative from Christian sources – but again, as this amounted probably to only a small number of children, there is no particular reason to think it would be recorded in Roman sources; and as for Josephus, he has greater crimes in the same vein to lay to Herod’s account.</I><BR/><BR/>So, there is admittedly no corroboration of the slaughter of the innocents – even in the NT (Matthew being the only one who mentions it) – but we can be sure it happened all the same, because Matthew includes it in his gospel. Got it.<BR/><BR/>I wrote: <B>or “a night of the living-righteous-undead” (as one commentator puts it), both of which only Matthew reports.</B> <BR/><BR/>Tim: <I>A baffling passage, I admit. But aren’t we slipping over here from a discussion of whether the gospels give a substantially accurate portrayal of Jesus to a discussion of inerrancy?</I><BR/><BR/>No, inerrancy is not where I was going with this. The point is that the gospel of Matthew is an excellent example of the kind of legend-building I’m talking about. There are numerous details in Matthew’s gospel that are so “baffling” (as you yourself put it) that they embarrass many believers. In my experience, Christian apologists don’t want to touch these points with a ten-foot pole.<BR/><BR/>Tim: <I>Paul isn’t writing volumes about Jesus: he is writing letters to churches.</I><BR/><BR/>Paul is by far the most prolific writer of the New Testament. In terms of volume (i.e., quantity, as I intended the use of the term in my statement above), he produced the largest portion of writings concerning Jesus that the church saw fit to canonize. In that corpus of epistles, we do not find Paul ever characterizing Jesus as a teacher, a miracle-worker, a healer, an exorcist, as born of a virgin, etc. Imagine someone writing 10 letters heaping admiration for Mozart, and never once mentioning that Mozart wrote music or that he lived in the 1700s. <BR/><BR/>Tim: <I>We get what one might expect if the stories were known and the main purposes of the letters were practical and doctrinal rather than historical.</I><BR/><BR/>Not if Paul had known of the teachings which the gospels attribute to Jesus. Had Paul known of these teachings, why didn’t he credit Jesus with them when he (Paul) pens them into his letters? Indeed, Christians are always trying to put the stamp of Jesus’ approval on the things they say. It is conspicuous by its very absence that he doesn’t do this.<BR/><BR/>Tim: <I>In passing, he alludes to Jesus’ teaching on the sorts of issues that one might expect to come up in churches, including divorce (1 Cor 7:10; note the special stress he lays on this and cf. Matt 5:32; Mark 10:11; Luke 16:18)</I><BR/><BR/>I Cor. 7:10 is probably the strongest citation you’ll be able to produce on behalf of your point. In it Paul attributes his charge to those who are married to “the Lord,” which for Paul is the risen, heavenly Jesus, not a pre-crucifixion Jesus. So he doesn’t have the earthly Jesus we encounter in the gospels in mind here. Also, Mark’s use of this teaching is troublesome. Wells points out:<BR/><BR/><B>Jesus could not, as Mark alleges, have told a Palestinian audience that a wife should not seek divorce, since in Palestine only men were allowed to do so. But Paul could appropriately urge such a ruling on the Gentile Christian communities to which he appealed; and if he told them it was Jesus’ teaching, he would have meant (as many commentators admit) not a teaching of a Palestinian Jesus but a directive given by some Christian prophet speaking in the name of the risen one.... This would have been the obvious way of supporting a ruling on divorce which the Christians of Paul’s day were anxious to inculcate. At a later stage it would naturally have been supposed that Jesus must have said during his lifetime what it was believed the risen one had said through Christian prophets; and so the doctrine was, however inappropriately, put into his mouth as an address to a Palestinian audience by Mark.</B> (<I>The Historical Evidence for Jesus</I>, p. 23)<BR/><BR/>So that Paul got this teaching from traditions about an earthly Jesus is problematic.<BR/><BR/>Well, Tim, I wish I had more time to respond to your many other points. Unfortunately I do not, so I’ll have to let things lie unless somehow I am afforded more opportunity to delve into these matters further.<BR/><BR/>Regards,<BR/>DawsonBahnsen Burnerhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/11030029491768748360noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21219785.post-80455832710892036622008-03-17T21:44:00.000-04:002008-03-17T21:44:00.000-04:00Tim, it leads to a skeptical attitude, and that's ...Tim, it leads to a skeptical attitude, and that's what I have. Why you don't have that same attitude surprises me, unless you're a teacher for a Bible College or Seminary, for then you won't allow yourself to do so.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21219785.post-9193067384881713382008-03-17T20:29:00.000-04:002008-03-17T20:29:00.000-04:00John,You write:I don't think you really appreciate...John,<BR/><BR/>You write:<BR/><BR/><I>I don't think you really appreciate the fact that how we see history depends on where we are in history and what we experience, which is my point. Have you ever taken a class in the philosophy of history? As smart as you are I would think you should before you continue arguing that your faith is built on the evidence of history. You have a strangely simplistic naïveté about this.</I><BR/><BR/>Thanks for the advice. I've actually taught such a course, even using some of the texts from Meyerhoff's little pale green volume. We'll have to agree to disagree as to where the naïveté lies. <BR/><BR/>Since we're into dispensing friendly advice, I'd caution you to be wary of employing this move; it could undermine the case for your faith. If you want to claim that the historical views of Christians are less rational than your own, you need to hold open the possibility of evaluating historical claims objectively. Relativism is truly a universal acid.Timhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/15786874834919065011noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21219785.post-18693018023428064292008-03-17T11:04:00.000-04:002008-03-17T11:04:00.000-04:00The traditional explanation is infinitely simpler ...<I>The traditional explanation is infinitely simpler and more natural.</I><BR/><BR/>Yes. It's infinitely simpler and more natural to think that a man who was God died and was resurrected and went up into the stratosphere by himself than to think it was a made up story.Evanhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/14299188458940897810noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21219785.post-53958945028036068662008-03-17T08:53:00.000-04:002008-03-17T08:53:00.000-04:00Dawson,I see that I left a word out in that last p...Dawson,<BR/><BR/>I see that I left a word out in that last post. Where I wrote:<BR/><BR/><I>But this is moot since several other writers, including Josephus, use . ...</I><BR/><BR/>the sentence should be completed "... procurator."<BR/><BR/>SorryTimhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/15786874834919065011noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21219785.post-64580805130644371902008-03-17T00:25:00.000-04:002008-03-17T00:25:00.000-04:00Dawson,When you wrote: Where Doherty may be regard...Dawson,<BR/><BR/>When you wrote:<BR/><BR/><I> Where Doherty may be regarded as a "mythicist," I can be regarded as a "legendist" - I think it's clearly the case that the stories we read in the gospels and the book of Acts are the product of legendary developments, regardless of whether or not Mark came first, regardless of whether or not there was ultimately a human being named Jesus which initially inspired sacred stories messianic heroism.</I><BR/><BR/>I took you, I think naturally enough, to be siding with the mythers to this extent: that you disbelieve that there is abundant evidence that a real messianic teacher named Jesus, who stands behind the gospel accounts (whether they are legends or memoirs), existed in Palestine in the first quarter of the first century. <BR/><BR/>This statement seems to reinforce that interpretation:<BR/><BR/><I> It really makes no difference to me whether Jesus was a myth or originally a real person. </I><BR/><BR/>Presumably if you thought there were strong evidence for it, you wouldn’t say this. Compare: “It really makes no difference to me whether Abraham Lincoln was a myth or originally a real person.” If someone said this, what should we infer about what he thinks of the evidence for the existence of Lincoln?<BR/><BR/>But now you’re telling me (aren’t you?) that you do <I>not</I> disbelieve this. That’s great! My mistake, then. Let’s move on.<BR/><BR/>You wrote to Harvey:<BR/><BR/><I>One can be skeptical of Doherty’s grand conclusion and yet recognize that he uncovers many damning facts in the process.</I><BR/><BR/>Like what?<BR/><BR/><I>Tim: My point was not that the tone of the attempts is desperate but rather that the arguments exhibit the sort of overreaching that indicates an inability to argue the case within the ordinary canons of historical investigation.<BR/><BR/>[Dawson:] Thanks for clarifying your statement. But still, you give no example of what you’ve charged against Doherty, Wells and others in the mythicist camp. As for “ordinary canons of historical investigation,” can you show us what you have in mind here, and where and how Doherty, Wells and other mythicists defy or flout these?</I><BR/><BR/>Canon #1: Arguments from silence are virtually always worthless in history. Examples have been given above. Did you need more? Why?<BR/><BR/><I>Tim: I’ve read Wells’s discussions carefully, and I’m completely unimpressed.<BR/><BR/>If you’ve read Wells, then you should know that he bases many (if not most) of his points on conclusions and admissions made by many authorities in history and apologetics. One can hardly read a paragraph in one of Wells’ books without encountering a damning statement from highly respected sources.</I><BR/><BR/>Not on Josephus, as I recall.<BR/><BR/><I>Tim: The Josephus denials are particularly weak in view of the discovery of the uninterpolated Arabic text of the Testimonium.<BR/><BR/>[Dawson:] I’m not sure what you mean by “Josephus denials” here, but even if we suppose that the Testimonium is authentic, specifically what value is it? </I><BR/><BR/>In the uninterpolated version of Agapius? Let’s see. It tells us that Jesus was a real Jewish teacher around the time of John the Baptist. It characterizes him as wise, says that his conduct was good, and indicates that he was known for his virtue. It tells us that many people from among the Jews and other nations became his disciples. It tells us that he was condemned to death by crucifixion by Pontius Pilate, that his disciples did not abandon their discipleship after his crucifixion, and that he was reported by his disciples to have appeared to them alive three days after his crucifixion.<BR/><BR/>Not bad, eh?<BR/><BR/><I>Tim: Does it bother you just a little bit that the attempts by the mythers to “deal with” these sources have been dismissed by every serious historian to have looked at the issue, including conservative Protestant, liberal Protestant, liberal Catholic, agnostic, and atheist historians?<BR/><BR/>This is a common tactic on the part of apologists: assume that all “serious historians” are monolithic in their views and also in their condemnation of “the attempts by the mythers to ‘deal with’ these sources.” You say that Doherty’s attempts ...</I><BR/><BR/>I did not say <I>Doherty’s</I> attempts: I said the attempts by the mythers, of whom there have been many. Doherty’s attempt seems to have attracted almost no notice; what little it has received has come only within the past year or so.<BR/><BR/><I>... “have been dismissed by every serious historian” who has looked into these issues, which is more than just a general statement. Where’s your support for this?</I><BR/><BR/>I did name a dozen sources early in this thread when I was interacting with Tyro on the subject. How many did you need?<BR/><BR/><I>Is the mark of a “serious historian” his dismissal of Doherty’s attempts?</I> <BR/><BR/>It is not a definition, though it might be a good criterion.<BR/><BR/><I>If so, then you offer a mere tautology. Is there something more substantial that you have to support your statement? I don’t know, for you don’t give anything to support it here.</I><BR/><BR/>Check out the list above. Maybe that wasn’t enough for you, so I’ll double it: Ernst Troeltsch, Adolf von Harnack, B. B. Warfield, Shirley Jackson Case, Albert Schweitzer, Rudolf Bultmann, F. F. Bruce, Robert van Voorst, I. Howard Marshall, James D. G. Dunn, R. T. France (on whom more below), and Martin Hengel. Now you have the names of two dozen professional historical scholars, past and present, conservative and liberal, who think that the “Christ myth” theory is ridiculous. Several of them have written books or articles or book chapters about it.<BR/><BR/>If you feel moved, you might want to compile a matching list of the scholars with earned doctorates in history or New Testament studies or Classics and a tenured or tenure-track position at an accredited academic institution in any western nation who have endorsed the Christ Myth position. If you reach two dozen, please do publish it here: I would be most interested to know.<BR/><BR/><I>[Dawson:] I wrote: Suetonius references a “Chrestus” in Rome during Claudius’ reign (AD 41-54), and many take this to mean the Jesus of the gospels.<BR/><BR/>Tim: And rightly so.<BR/><BR/>[Dawson:] How is that “rightly so”? How does a passing reference to “Chrestus” serve to indicate specifically the Jesus of the gospels?</I> <BR/><BR/>It is <I>evidence</I>, Dawson, not a proof. The identification explains several things well: the name, the disturbance, and Claudius’s action. It also dovetails rather well with the Nazareth Inscription, which is plausibly dated to Claudius’s reign.<BR/><BR/><I>How does a passing reference to “Chrestus” mean specifically someone who was born of a virgin, who was baptized by John the Baptist, who performed miracles and healed congenital blindness, who was the Son of God, etc.? These elements are part of the identity of the Jesus of the gospels.</I><BR/><BR/>Here you are simply misrepresenting the claim of those who see in Suetonius’s remark a reference to Jesus. Two people may use names to refer to the same third individual without sharing all of the information about that third individual. The subject of how names refer is a vexed one in the philosophy of language, but no one that I know of would accept your suggestion that a description theory requires that one intend all of the descriptive information meant by any other user; it is sufficient if the definite descriptions pick out the same individual.<BR/><BR/><I>How can we take Suetonius’ reference to “Chrestus” as confirmation of the truth of the gospels’ portraits?</I><BR/><BR/>Indirectly: it places Jesus on the ground within a specified window of time, roughly 5 B.C. to 35 A.D., and within Judaism. This means that documents written about him within the next generation or two are less likely to be complete forgeries, as there were people who would have known the actual facts and been able to correct the misstatements. <BR/><BR/>Such evidence is quite valuable in historical work. If we found evidence like that for William Tell, the entire nation of Switzerland would rejoice, even if it said nothing about the apple episode.<BR/><BR/><I>I wrote: However, he nowhere mentions a “Jesus,” <BR/><BR/>Tim: Why would you expect him to do so?<BR/><BR/>[Dawson:] It’s not about what I expect of Suetonius, it’s about what he says and also about what he fails to say. “Christ” was a title indicating a station, “Jesus” is a name of a person. </I><BR/><BR/>Why should this observation have weight? For what it is worth, Suetonius probably thought “Chrestus” <I>was</I> a proper name: Χρηστος (“good, excellent, kind”) was a common name among Graeco-Roman slaves and freedmen. See TDNT 9: 484-85. The phonological confusion of <I>eta</I> for <I>iota</I> in this word is well documented, even among Christians. Tertullian even makes an allusion to the common mistake and a play on the meaning of “Chrestus” (<I>Ad Nat.</I> 1.3.9). This helps to explain why Suetonius got the spelling wrong.<BR/><BR/><I>[Dawson:] I wrote: ... and even if “Chrestus” is taken to mean “Christ” or “Messiah,” ...<BR/><BR/>Tim: “Chrestus” is a known variant on “Christus,” which is the Greek term used to translate mashiyach in the Septuagint, so there is little room for doubt here. <BR/><BR/>[Dawson:] That’s fine. But again, what value is it as evidence? Evidence specifically for what? </I><BR/><BR/>For the existence, in the first quarter of the first century A.D., of the person about whom Paul was writing and about whom the gospel stories, whether true or false, were written.<BR/><BR/><I>[Dawson:] My point has always been the vast discrepancy between the early epistolary strata and the portraits we find in the gospels, Tim. So I’m not really shifting anything. In fact, I’m trying to bring the discussion back to my point.<BR/><BR/>Tim: Otherwise, you are going to have to make your case, and that will have to include, inter alia, giving a historically credible explanation of the non-Christian references.<BR/><BR/>[Dawson:] Why do I specifically have to do this?</I> <BR/><BR/>You don’t. Just agree that the mythers are going beyond the bounds of reasonableness, and you’re off the hook on this point as far as I’m concerned. But it looks like you don’t want to do that, as you continue:<BR/><BR/><I>[Dawson:] What is so historically incredible about Doherty’s, Wells’ and others’ treatments of these references?</I> <BR/><BR/>Aside from the intrinsic weakness of some of their arguments, particularly the arguments from silence, the problem is that they need to explain <I>all</I> of the secular data away. If any one of them is a genuine independent reference to the same person to whom the gospels refer, then the mythic theory is shot. Now, one or two might be explained away, particularly if they were both from one source and an argument could be made that this source was unreliable or derived information entirely from Christian writings. But every additional reference from another non-Christian source adds to the implausibility of the attempt to explain them away. <BR/><BR/>And that’s only the tip of the iceberg, as they also have to explain away the gospels, Acts, and the epistles. <BR/><BR/><I>You’ve asserted that they are overreaching, that “every serious historian” rejects them, that they are untenable or what have you, over and over again. But I’ve not seen anything specific here to suggest that Doherty and Wells in particular have gotten these things wrong. It’s not enough to claim that “every serious historian” rejects them. Such claims need ample substantiation, given their universality, and you’ve not even begun to take up this task.</I><BR/><BR/>Let’s start with the fact that the argument from silence, which is their stock in trade, is worthless. I have given you examples. If you know any history, you’ll be able to think of more for yourself. If you don’t, there’s no time like the present to start learning!<BR/><BR/>Now we come to a place where you present some evidence that really does have bearing on the scholarly consensus issue:<BR/><BR/><I>[Dawson:] I wrote: The relevant writings of Pliny, Suetonius and Tacitus all date from after the beginning of the second century, and it is already granted that by this time stories about a Jesus had been circulating. So when Tacitus mentions a “Christ who, in the reign of Tiberius, had suffered death by the sentence of the procurator Pontius Pilate,” he may very well have been reporting what he learned from Christians he had interviewed, thus reporting what Christians at that time had come to believe. <BR/><BR/>Tim: I have been unable to find anyone outside of the myther community who accepts this claim regarding Tacitus.<BR/><BR/>[Dawson:] RT France, a respected NT scholar who is no friend of the mythicist position, calls Wells’ case for Tacitus’ reference to “Chrestus” as coming either form interviews with Christians or from hearsay about what they believed “entirely convincing” (The Evidence for Jesus, p. 23). In his The Historical Figure of Jesus, EP Sanders – another NT scholar – admits that “Roman sources that mention Jesus are all dependent on Christian reports” (p. 49), where Suetonius’ mention of “Chrestus” is taken to mean Jesus. </I><BR/><BR/>First, a point of fact: Tacitus uses “Christus,” not “Chrestus.” Second, a point of interpretation: I said that I couldn’t think of anyone who accepts the claim that Tacitus was reporting what he learned from Christians <I>he had interviewed</I>, which is what you said in the statement to which I was responding. France doesn’t quite say this: what he says instead is that it came either from interviews with Christians or from hearsay. <BR/><BR/>The Sanders quotation strikes me as an overstatement (how could he know this?), but on the Tacitus question, both Sanders and France come down more on your side of this question than I had thought anyone responsible did. Let me add Schweitzer to the list, just to strengthen your case – though mythers will get no aid and comfort from him (or from Sanders).<BR/><BR/><I>Now what is the alternative that you prefer, and what evidence do you have for that alternative?</I><BR/><BR/>If Tacitus’s information came from interviews with Christians, it would be evidence only of what Christians believed when they were interviewed. If it came from hearsay, it would be evidence for what was believed about Christians, which is wider in scope; if there were any dissent over whether “Christus” had been crucified under Pontius Pilate, this would lessen the probability that Tacitus would refer to it in so matter of fact a fashion. If it came from Roman records, then that closes the case on the mythic theory. So there are several options here. <BR/><BR/>(1) There is no hint in the passage that Tacitus has personally conducted interviews to gain this information; that is, I think, by far the least plausible hypothesis. (2) It could be that the information came from someone else’s interviews and/or torturings of Christians. This cannot be ruled out. But in that case, it matters a great deal for our discussion when this information was wrung from them. If it was after the gospels had achieved currency, then it likely reflects what they had read and believed; if it was earlier, it would reflect at least oral traditions; if it was much earlier, it would reflect teaching in a community where eyewitnesses were still living. Of these three sub-possibilities under (2), the first two are of independent significance; the third shades off into (4), below, as the information would have had to be recorded. (3) It could be that it was a matter of common knowledge. This cannot be ruled out, and it would give stronger but not decisive evidence for the veracity of the facts Tacitus relates. (4) It could be that Tacitus looked it up in Roman records or some other non-Christian source. This cannot be ruled out, and for this reason the Sanders quotation seems to me to be an overstatement. We know that Tacitus used official sources constantly in his work: the <I>Acta Diurna</I> (see <I>Annals</I> 13.31, 16.22, etc.), the speeches of Tiberius and Claudius, various collections of letters, the work of Pliny the Elder, etc. Significantly, Tacitus had access to Josephus’s works and mentions nothing about Jesus that could not have been found in Josephus. If his information came from such an early non-Christian source, the mythic theory is effectively eliminated.<BR/><BR/>How much weight should we give to each of these alternatives? (1) is quite implausible since it is not represented in the passage. (Contrast Pliny.) I do not think that there is a vastly stronger case for one of the options (2), (3), or (4) over the others. Therefore, we have to try to take account of what would be the case under each. Under (2), it tells us either nothing not in the gospels or else something about oral tradition prior to the gospels; this option makes the testimony of Tacitus either no independent evidence against the mythic theory or rather weak independent evidence against it – weak, since many of those oral traditions were probably incorporated into the gospels as we have them. Under (3), Tacitus’s report tells us what was believed in the Roman world at large. Since it is improbable that this story would have undisputed currency among Romans if it were not substantially true, this option makes the testimony of Tacitus rather strong evidence against the mythic theory. But one fact that tells against (3) is that there does not seem to have been much common knowledge about Christians in the Roman world; witness Suetonius’s probable botch of Christ’s name and Pliny’s resorting to torture to satisfy his curiosity.Under (4), the mythic theory is essentially ruled out. If I <I>had</I> to pick just one specific hypothesis as the most plausible of the lot, I’d go with Harnack and say Tacitus was using Josephus, on the basis of close parallels between them in the recounting of information. But since this cannot be proved, only shown to be plausible, the best we can do in the absence of further evidence is to say that this passage of Tacitus offers some evidence against the mythic theory but that it is not decisive. <BR/><BR/><I>Many apologists take the unsupported position that Tacitus looked it up in Roman records. But why then would he refer to Jesus as “Chrestus”?</I><BR/><BR/>He doesn’t: he refers to him as “Christus.”<BR/><BR/><I>Would the Roman records have stated that ‘the Christ’ or ‘the Messiah’ was crucified?</I><BR/><BR/>The term would not have had this significance for the Romans.<BR/><BR/><I>Would the Roman records have inaccurately given Pilate the title “procurator”?</I><BR/><BR/>Perhaps. “Procurator” and “prefect” were titles that applied to governors in essentially the same capacities, so the distinction was a fine one. Tacitus makes small errors in these sorts of details of titles elsewhere. Philo uses the same term for Pilate (<I>Leg. ad Gaium</I> 299), as does Josephus (<I>Antiquities</I> 18.3.1). So it is by no means necessary that Tacitus have obtained the title “procurator” from a Christian source; and if he got it from a non-Christian source, it needn’t have been an official Roman source.<BR/><BR/><I>Tim: His description in Annals 15.44 is hostile, even contemptuous. It bears no sign of having been obtained from interviews of Christians.<BR/><BR/>[Dawson:] Either way, the very use of “Chrestus” – if this is supposed to refer to the Christian messiah – strongly suggests that Roman records were not the source of Tacitus’ information about a person being crucified under Pilate.</I><BR/><BR/>Not really: as I pointed out above, the word is “Christus” in Tacitus, and this title would have had no significance for the Romans.<BR/><BR/><I>[Dawson:] Also, giving Pilate the title “procurator” also speaks against this.</I> <BR/><BR/>Not really: as I pointed out above, Tacitus is not typically microscopically accurate in this, and we have no independent evidence that I am aware of to think that the <I>Acta</I> were moreso. But this is moot since several other writers, including Josephus, use . <BR/><BR/><I>[Dawson:] So, if not from interviews with Christians, or hearsay that he gathered from conversations with persons acquainted with what Christians believed by this time, what do you take as Tacitus’ source of information here, and why?</I><BR/><BR/>I’ve given you a breakdown of the alternatives as I see them.<BR/><BR/><I>[Dawson:] [U]ntil you present “the judgment of virtually every historian who has” not only “looked into the question,” but who has reviewed Doherty’s, Wells’ and other mythicists’ points on these non-Christian references, we only have your judgment that these references are “fatal to the mythicist position.”</I> <BR/><BR/>Since Doherty’s work is not likely ever to attract the attention of more than a handful of people with actual doctorates and academic affiliations in relevant fields, we will probably never have very many data points here. Eddy and Boyd are the only ones I know of. My comment referred, not to that vanishingly small fraction of the population of professional historians who have read Doherty, but to the somewhat larger set of professional historians who have read works of the “Christ myth” school and pronounced a judgment on them. I’ve listed two dozen of these already. This doesn’t reduce simply to my own judgment.<BR/><BR/><I>[Dawson:] These references are relatively late, well into the time when at least one or two of the gospels were in circulation, well into the time when the legend of Jesus had grown to the point of setting his crucifixion under Pilate.</I> <BR/><BR/>Your manner of phrasing this is question begging. Beyond that, the references are from people who lived a substantial part of their lives in the first century. Pliny was born around 62; Tacitus was a slightly older contemporary of his. Josephus was born around 37.<BR/><BR/><I>[Dawson:] So they certainly are not damaging to the legendist case that I would defend, ...</I> <BR/><BR/>I would have to see a canonical statement of your position before I could say how damaging they are.<BR/><BR/><I>[Dawson:]... so I don’t see how they would be damaging to the mythicist case either.</I> <BR/><BR/>Well, that’s a <I>non sequitur</I>!<BR/><BR/><I>[Dawson:] When Wells backed away from the mythicist case, it surely was not because of a passing reference to “Chrestus” in Suetonius.</I><BR/><BR/>My point has never been that that reference, or the Tacitus reference, or the Pliny reference, or the letter of Mara bar Serapion, or the reference in <I>Toledoth Jesu</I>, or the reference in the Talmud, or Lucian’s reference, is by itself strong independent evidence for the existence of a real Jesus. It is the fact that there are so many of them, each requiring to be explained away, that makes the case so strong. <BR/><BR/>The Josephus references, on the other hand, are very strong; the only hope for the mythers is to explain them away altogether as Christian interpolations. And if Tacitus was relying on Josephus for his information, then that seals the fate of the mythic theory.<BR/><BR/>When that is all done, we have still the gospels, Acts, and the epistles as evidence.<BR/><BR/><I>[Dawson:] I wrote: What’s interesting is that writers who would have been contemporaries of the gospel Jesus, like Seneca (4 BC – 65 AD) and Philo Judaeus (20 BC – 50 AD), never mention Jesus. <BR/><BR/>Tim: Here we have another common move of the mythers, the argument from silence.<BR/><BR/>[Dawson:] As corroborative evidence, argument from silence is not necessarily fallacious or invalid. In the proper context, it can be quite damning.</I><BR/><BR/>If there is a lesson to be learned about arguments from silence from a study of history, it is that such a context is almost never present.<BR/><BR/><I>Tim: Again, this will impress those with no firsthand knowledge of history, since they are likely to assume that a writer could not fail to mention such a person as Jesus had he really existed.<BR/><BR/>[Dawson:] It’s not only that they fail to mention Jesus, who’s fame (according to the gospels) had spread quite far during his own lifetime, ...</I><BR/><BR/>I see we’re down from “an international reputation” to “quite far.” Actually, in his own lifetime Jesus was essentially a nobody from the standpoint of the Roman world.<BR/><BR/><I>[Dawson:] ... but also the slaughter of the innocents</I> <BR/><BR/>Yes, assuming that the account in Macrobius is derivative from Christian sources – but again, as this amounted probably to only a small number of children, there is no particular reason to think it would be recorded in Roman sources; and as for Josephus, he has greater crimes in the same vein to lay to Herod’s account.<BR/><BR/><I>[Dawson:] or “a night of the living-righteous-undead” (as one commentator puts it), both of which only Matthew reports. </I><BR/><BR/>A baffling passage, I admit. But aren’t we slipping over here from a discussion of whether the gospels give a substantially accurate portrayal of Jesus to a discussion of inerrancy?<BR/><BR/><I>Tim: But the assumption is exploded by examples from secular history. Thucydides, for example, never mentions Socrates, though from our point of view Socrates was the principal character in Athens during the twenty years embraced in the History. No historian concludes from this silence either that Socrates did not exist or that Thucydides was inventing his history.<BR/><BR/>[Dawson:] I would be more impressed by this as an attempt to bolster your effort to downplay deafening Pauline silences if Thucydides had written volumes about Socrates but failed to mention that he was a teacher, a philosopher, a thinker, etc. That would be closer to what we find in Paul vis-à-vis the gospels: here we have numerous letters achingly preaching about Jesus, but nowhere do they speak of Jesus as a teacher, a miracle-worker, a healer, an exorcist, etc., etc., etc.</I> <BR/><BR/>Paul isn’t writing volumes about Jesus: he is writing letters to churches. We get what one might expect if the stories were known and the main purposes of the letters were practical and doctrinal rather than historical. In passing, he alludes to Jesus’ teaching on the sorts of issues that one might expect to come up in churches, including divorce (1 Cor 7:10; note the special stress he lays on this and cf. Matt 5:32; Mark 10:11; Luke 16:18) and the support of ministers of the gospel (1 Cor 9:14). 1 Cor 4:12 is probably an echo of the words of Christ recorded in Luke 6:28; 1 Cor 7:35 of the scene recorded in Luke 10:39-40; 1 Cor 13:2 a reference to the saying preserved in Matt 17:20. <BR/><BR/><I>[Dawson:] As the Jesus cult grew, ...</I><BR/><BR/>We’ve slipped over from evidence to a bit of preaching now. Which is fine – just noting it for the record.<BR/><BR/><I>[Dawson:]... so did the stories about who he was and what he did. That’s very characteristic of legend-building, and the pattern we find in the NT is precisely what we would expect to find if the gospels and later writings were the product of legend-building.</I><BR/><BR/>The pattern would be more impressive if the chronological ordering of the gospels could be established independently of the level of detail of the accounts. It would also be more impressive if it weren’t wrecked by the early creed embedded in 1 Cor 15, which puts the big miracle, front and center, right back in the first decade after the crucifixion, with names of witnesses no less, and those people named in the gospel accounts too.<BR/><BR/><I>[Dawson:] I wrote: And yet, it seems that if Jesus had indeed garnered the international reputation at the time that the gospels ascribe to him, ... <BR/><BR/>Tim: The gospels ascribe an international reputation to Jesus within his lifetime? <BR/><BR/>[Dawson:] Are you faulting me specifically for using of the word “international” here? </I><BR/><BR/>Yes – I think it’s quite misleading.<BR/><BR/><I>[Dawson:] The gospels speak of Jesus’ fame spreading throughout the region, from Palestine and Galilee and into Syria and other places (see Mt. 4:24; 9:26, 31; 14:1; Mk. 1:28; Lk. 4:14; 4:37; 5:15, et al.) My point is that Jesus’ reputation as a healer and miracle-worker, according to the gospels, reached far and wide during the lifetime the gospels give to him. Gospel passages which speak of Jesus’ fame in this manner are most likely the product of evangelistic exaggeration. Paul's Jesus, on the other hand, was "emptied" and lived in obscurity.</I><BR/><BR/>I’m sorry, but putting this together with your earlier use of the phrase “international reputation,” you seem to me to be misreading such expressions in a very serious way. Taken at face value, they indicate that he was a local phenomenon. Yet you invoked this “international reputation” to argue that Seneca and Philo should have taken notice of him – which wouldn’t follow even if he were known in Rome. (See the reference to Thucydides and Socrates, above) This stunner prompted my next question:<BR/><BR/><I>Tim: Dawson, have you ever read the gospels?<BR/><BR/>[Dawson:] Yes, both as a believer (in my misguided youth), and now as a non-believer. Glancing back at my 20’s, I now wonder, “What was I thinking?” whenever I look at the gospels. I know many others who have asked themselves the same question.</I><BR/><BR/>I’m very sorry to hear it; I hope you come to a better understanding of them, if nothing else, as you continue to read.<BR/><BR/><I>Tim: Yet again you are misrepresenting my position, a habit that you indulge sufficiently often that it is no wonder if sane people eventually abandon the attempt to have a discussion with you. I never said that Paul alludes to the details on your list.<BR/><BR/>[Dawson:] You are welcome to clarify what you meant by ‘allusions’ then. Recall that I had asked:<BR/><BR/>How can we know what details the immediately intended audiences of Paul’s letters (e.g., the congregation at the Corinthian church, etc.) knew about Jesus?<BR/><BR/>And you responded:<BR/><BR/>[Tim:] One good way is by looking at all of places where he makes allusions that they could not have understood unless they already knew the outlines of the story of the life of Jesus. <BR/><BR/>[Dawson:] I was hoping you could give examples of what you mean here.</I><BR/><BR/>The comments above indicate this sufficiently, I think.<BR/><BR/><I>Tim: By your own admission, you constructed the list to include details that were left out of the gospels.<BR/><BR/>[Dawson:] Huh? The details on my list (e.g., virgin birth, born in Bethlehem, the slaughter of the innocents, Jesus’ baptism, female witnesses, etc.) are taken from the gospels, not “left out of the gospels.” I think you meant to say “left out of Paul’s letters,” no?</I><BR/><BR/>Yes: my slip.<BR/><BR/><I>Tim: As I pointed out to you above, this renders your list worthless (unless you have been inadvertent) since it is very easy to construct a similar list for any letter or set of letters dealing with a real figure from history about whom we have extensive independent documentation.<BR/><BR/>[Dawson:] You’ve claimed this before, but I can think of no parallel situation to Paul’s letters preaching about Jesus.</I><BR/><BR/>The point is a methodological one and applies generally; there is no need to find a set of letters preaching about a savior in order to run a test. You don’t seem to be getting my point here, so I’ll try again to explain it. You claim that the Christ of the epistles is someone other than the Jesus of the gospels; I don’t see it. Your argument is that there are many, many details left out of the epistles that are found in the gospels. Well, what was the purpose of the epistles? Are they memoirs? Not at all. What, then, should we expect? That depends on whether the recipients knew who Paul was talking about. If not, he would have had to give at least a thumbnail sketch; if so, there would be no need for it. <BR/><BR/><I>[Dawson:] For Paul, Jesus was not just some person who existed in the past that he mentions in passing in a letter or two. Paul is preaching, and he’s preaching Jesus crucified and resurrected, ...</I><BR/><BR/>No disagreement so far, except that Paul is doing more than preaching, and his preaching is chiefly doctrinal.<BR/><BR/><I>[Dawson:] ... and the portrait he paints of Jesus is nondescript by comparison to what we find in the gospels.</I> <BR/><BR/>Just as we should expect them to be if he were referring to someone whose life and actions were already known to his audience.<BR/><BR/><I>[Dawson:] The silences we have in Paul are much harder to explain than supposing this is a common practice in secular writings. Paul repeatedly issues moral teachings, and while he nowhere attributes those teachings to the earthly Jesus, ... </I><BR/><BR/>Actually, he sometimes does, e.g. on divorce.<BR/><BR/><I>[Dawson:] ... we find in the gospels that evangelists have taken those teachings and thrust them into Jesus’ mouth, in order to give those teachings authority (apparently those teachings were not thought to be good enough on their own).</I><BR/><BR/>This is simply conjecture on your part. It runs afoul of the close correspondences between Acts and the epistles, on the one hand, and the undoubted sequence of Luke-Acts, on the other. Here the best sources are Paley and Hemer, references to which I have given above.<BR/><BR/><I>Tim: This variation on the argument from silence provides no evidence that the figure was not real: all that it establishes is the tautology that Paul did not mention the things in the gospels that he did not mention.<BR/><BR/>[Dawson:] As I have stated before, and apparently need to state again, whether or not there was a real man named Jesus at some point in history prior to Paul’s writings who originally inspired a cult of religious hero-worship, is really of no concern to me. I’ve gone on record more than once in this thread declaring that my position is that the gospel stories are the product of legend-building, not that Jesus never existed.<BR/><BR/>And Paul’s variant portrait of Jesus as compared to the gospels has much greater value than the mere tautology you grant here.</I> <BR/><BR/>If so, I have not seen the argument that convinces me of it.<BR/><BR/><I>[Dawson:] But the fact that you grant that Paul is silent on numerous details that are central to the portrait of Jesus given in the gospels, is sufficient admission for my purposes to confirm that my position has a valid basis.</I><BR/><BR/>It shouldn’t, since this is what we would expect if your position were false and the traditional one were true.<BR/><BR/><I>Tim: The only interesting question is whether there are sufficient reasons to identify the person of whom Paul speaks with the person of whom the gospels speak.<BR/><BR/>[Dawson:] And this is essentially the question I’ve been raising, Tim. If you go back and review the themes that I have been developing in my comments here and in my writings elsewhere, you’ll see that the question you mention here is quite topical.</I><BR/><BR/>But the problem, Dawson, is that you have been trying to argue for a negative answer to that question using a tool that cannot, in the nature of the case, do the job.<BR/><BR/><I>Tim: For that, Harvey’s list of allusions to features of the life of Jesus that are also depicted in the gospels gives you a good place to start.<BR/><BR/>[Dawson:] And I’ve interacted with Harvey already above. Harvey seemed unaware of my point that later evangelists were in the position to lift elements from Paul’s letters – such as the moral teachings I mentioned above – and incorporate them into their portrait of Jesus in the gospels. Over and over, the historicists seem unable to grasp this point, which I don’t think is that difficult to grasp.</I><BR/><BR/>It isn’t difficult to grasp, it’s just implausible to the point of absurdity. The whole problem of the transformation of “myth” into history of the sort we get in the evangelists is almost indescribably tangled. The gospels differ from each other in numerous ways. Were they all supposed to be filling out the epistles, just doing it on their own and in different ways? The gospels differ from the epistles on details where Paul is explicit, such as the list of witnesses in 1 Cor 15, which is not replicated in its entirety in any gospel. How did they miss that? Paul refers explicitly to numerous other people then alive, some of them personally known to the people to whom he addresses his epistles, who were in a very strong position to know the details of the life of Jesus: Cephas, James, John, Silas, Barnabas – what need, with a large cohort of people on the ground in a position to know, to flesh out the epistles in a legendary way? Or is the claim that they were all just figments of Paul’s imagination? The gospels contain abundant overlapping material not mentioned in the epistles. Where did it come from? Lucky coincidence is a non-starter: there is a real teacher back of that material, whatever else one says about it. But if so, then there is no need to suppose that the evangelists were lifting anything from the epistles. The traditional explanation is infinitely simpler and more natural.Timhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/15786874834919065011noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21219785.post-74610872559395443472008-03-16T15:43:00.000-04:002008-03-16T15:43:00.000-04:00I wrote: What evidential value do you think can b...I wrote: <B> What evidential value do you think can be found in Josephus, Pliny, Tacitus, Suetonius and Juvenal in regards to the claim that the portraits of Jesus in the NT gospels are historically accurate?</B><BR/><BR/>Tim: <I>You’re changing the subject, which is whether Jesus existed.</I><BR/><BR/>I see now where you’ve gotten yourself confused in this thread. If you review what I’ve been stating, I’ve been quite consistent in defending the position that the gospels are legends, not the view that Jesus never existed. I have nowhere presented an argument with the purpose of concluding that Jesus never existed. I made this clear early on in my comments in this thread when I wrote in response to a comment by Jessy:<BR/><BR/><B>Where Doherty may be regarded as a "mythicist," I can be regarded as a "legendist" - I think it's clearly the case that the stories we read in the gospels and the book of Acts are the product of legendary developments, regardless of whether or not Mark came first, regardless of whether or not there was ultimately a human being named Jesus which initially inspired sacred stories messianic heroism.</B><BR/><BR/>I think Doherty makes a lot of good points, even if one rejects his mythicist conclusions. And as I pointed out to Harvey, <B>One can be skeptical of Doherty’s grand conclusion and yet recognize that he uncovers many damning facts in the process.</B><BR/><BR/>So if you’re going to dialogue with me, Tim, you might want at least to get my position straight.<BR/> <BR/>Tim: <I>My point was not that the tone of the attempts is desperate but rather that the arguments exhibit the sort of overreaching that indicates an inability to argue the case within the ordinary canons of historical investigation.</I><BR/><BR/>Thanks for clarifying your statement. But still, you give no example of what you’ve charged against Doherty, Wells and others in the mythicist camp. As for “ordinary canons of historical investigation,” can you show us what you have in mind here, and where and how Doherty, Wells and other mythicists defy or flout these?<BR/><BR/>Tim: <I>I’ve read Wells’s discussions carefully, and I’m completely unimpressed.</I><BR/><BR/>If you’ve read Wells, then you should know that he bases many (if not most) of his points on conclusions and admissions made by many authorities in history and apologetics. One can hardly read a paragraph in one of Wells’ books without encountering a damning statement from highly respected sources.<BR/><BR/>Tim: <I>The Josephus denials are particularly weak in view of the discovery of the uninterpolated Arabic text of the Testimonium.</I><BR/><BR/>I’m not sure what you mean by “Josephus denials” here, but even if we suppose that the Testimonium is authentic, specifically what value is it? <BR/><BR/>Tim: <I>Does it bother you just a little bit that the attempts by the mythers to “deal with” these sources have been dismissed by every serious historian to have looked at the issue, including conservative Protestant, liberal Protestant, liberal Catholic, agnostic, and atheist historians?</I><BR/><BR/>This is a common tactic on the part of apologists: assume that all “serious historians” are monolithic in their views and also in their condemnation of “the attempts by the mythers to ‘deal with’ these sources.” You say that Doherty’s attempts “have been dismissed by every serious historian” who has looked into these issues, which is more than just a general statement. Where’s your support for this? Is the mark of a “serious historian” his dismissal of Doherty’s attempts? If so, then you offer a mere tautology. Is there something more substantial that you have to support your statement? I don’t know, for you don’t give anything to support it here.<BR/><BR/>I wrote: <B>Suetonius references a “Chrestus” in Rome during Claudius’ reign (AD 41-54), and many take this to mean the Jesus of the gospels.</B><BR/><BR/>Tim: <I>And rightly so.</I><BR/><BR/>How is that “rightly so”? How does a passing reference to “Chrestus” serve to indicate specifically the Jesus of the gospels? How does a passing reference to “Chrestus” mean specifically someone who was born of a virgin, who was baptized by John the Baptist, who performed miracles and healed congenital blindness, who was the Son of God, etc.? These elements are part of the identity of the Jesus of the gospels. How can we take Suetonius’ reference to “Chrestus” as confirmation of the truth of the gospels’ portraits?<BR/><BR/>I wrote: <B> However, he nowhere mentions a “Jesus,”</B> <BR/><BR/>Tim: <I>Why would you expect him to do so?</I><BR/><BR/>It’s not about what I expect of Suetonius, it’s about what he says and also about what he fails to say. “Christ” was a title indicating a station, “Jesus” is a name of a person. <BR/><BR/>I wrote: <B>... and even if “Chrestus” is taken to mean “Christ” or “Messiah,” ...</B><BR/><BR/>Tim: <I>“Chrestus” is a known variant on “Christus,” which is the Greek term used to translate mashiyach in the Septuagint, so there is little room for doubt here.</I><BR/><BR/>That’s fine. But again, what value is it as evidence? Evidence specifically for what? <BR/><BR/>I wrote: <B>... that this passing reference somehow confirms the portraits of Jesus found in the gospels seems more than a stretch (perhaps desperation?).</B> <BR/><BR/>Tim: <I>Here again you are misrepresenting my position and trying to shift the subject from the existence of Jesus to the accuracy of the gospels.</I><BR/><BR/>My point has always been the vast discrepancy between the early epistolary strata and the portraits we find in the gospels, Tim. So I’m not really shifting anything. In fact, I’m trying to bring the discussion back to my point.<BR/><BR/>Tim: <I>If you are giving up on the mythic theory, we can move on.</I><BR/><BR/>Can you find any statement of mine where I affirm the mythic theory? Again, you seem to have missed some of my own comments, and thus are not fully aware of my position. It really makes no difference to me whether Jesus was a myth or originally a real person. <BR/><BR/>Tim: <I>Otherwise, you are going to have to make your case, and that will have to include, inter alia, giving a historically credible explanation of the non-Christian references.</I><BR/><BR/>Why do I specifically have to do this? What is so historically incredible about Doherty’s, Wells’ and others’ treatments of these references? You’ve asserted that they are overreaching, that “every serious historian” rejects them, that they are untenable or what have you, over and over again. But I’ve not seen anything specific here to suggest that Doherty and Wells in particular have gotten these things wrong. It’s not enough to claim that “every serious historian” rejects them. Such claims need ample substantiation, given their universality, and you’ve not even begun to take up this task.<BR/><BR/>I wrote: <B>The relevant writings of Pliny, Suetonius and Tacitus all date from after the beginning of the second century, and it is already granted that by this time stories about a Jesus had been circulating. So when Tacitus mentions a “Christ who, in the reign of Tiberius, had suffered death by the sentence of the procurator Pontius Pilate,” he may very well have been reporting what he learned from Christians he had interviewed, thus reporting what Christians at that time had come to believe.</B> <BR/><BR/>Tim: <I>I have been unable to find anyone outside of the myther community who accepts this claim regarding Tacitus.</I><BR/><BR/>RT France, a respected NT scholar who is no friend of the mythicist position, calls Wells’ case for Tacitus’ reference to “Chrestus” as coming either form interviews with Christians or from hearsay about what they believed “entirely convincing” (<I>The Evidence for Jesus</I>, p. 23). In his <I>The Historical Figure of Jesus</I>, EP Sanders – another NT scholar – admits that “Roman sources that mention Jesus are all dependent on Christian reports” (p. 49), where Suetonius’ mention of “Chrestus” is taken to mean Jesus. <BR/><BR/>Now what is the alternative that you prefer, and what evidence do you have for that alternative? Many apologists take the unsupported position that Tacitus looked it up in Roman records. But why then would he refer to Jesus as “Chrestus”? Would the Roman records have stated that ‘the Christ’ or ‘the Messiah’ was crucified? Would the Roman records have inaccurately given Pilate the title “procurator”? <BR/><BR/>Tim: <I>His description in Annals 15.44 is hostile, even contemptuous. It bears no sign of having been obtained from interviews of Christians.</I><BR/><BR/>Either way, the very use of “Chrestus” – if this is supposed to refer to the Christian messiah – strongly suggests that Roman records were not the source of Tacitus’ information about a person being crucified under Pilate. Also, giving Pilate the title “procurator” also speaks against this. So, if not from interviews with Christians, or hearsay that he gathered from conversations with persons acquainted with what Christians believed by this time, what do you take as Tacitus’ source of information here, and why?<BR/><BR/>I wrote: <B>All these points have been considered and debated over and over again, <BR/>they certainly pose no threat to the mythicist or other critical positions, ...</B><BR/><BR/>Tim: <I>In the judgment of virtually every historian who has ever looked into the question, they are fatal to the mythicist position.</I><BR/><BR/>Well, until you present “the judgment of virtually every historian who has” not only “looked into the question,” but who has reviewed Doherty’s, Wells’ and other mythicists’ points on these non-Christian references, we only have <I>your</I> judgment that these references are “fatal to the mythicist position.” These references are relatively late, well into the time when at least one or two of the gospels were in circulation, well into the time when the legend of Jesus had grown to the point of setting his crucifixion under Pilate. So they certainly are not damaging to the legendist case that I would defend, so I don’t see how they would be damaging to the mythicist case either. When Wells backed away from the mythicist case, it surely was not because of a passing reference to “Chrestus” in Suetonius.<BR/><BR/>I wrote: <B>What’s interesting is that writers who would have been contemporaries of the gospel Jesus, like Seneca (4 BC – 65 AD) and Philo Judaeus (20 BC – 50 AD), never mention Jesus.</B> <BR/><BR/>Tim: <I>Here we have another common move of the mythers, the argument from silence.</I><BR/><BR/>As corroborative evidence, argument from silence is not necessarily fallacious or invalid. In the proper context, it can be quite damning.<BR/><BR/>Tim: <I>Again, this will impress those with no firsthand knowledge of history, since they are likely to assume that a writer could not fail to mention such a person as Jesus had he really existed.</I><BR/><BR/>It’s not only that they fail to mention Jesus, who’s fame (according to the gospels) had spread quite far during his own lifetime, but also the slaughter of the innocents or “a night of the living-righteous-undead” (as <A HREF="http://leoquix.blogspot.com/2008/03/wutherin-witherington.html" REL="nofollow">one commentator</A> puts it), both of which only Matthew reports. <BR/><BR/>Tim: <I>But the assumption is exploded by examples from secular history. Thucydides, for example, never mentions Socrates, though from our point of view Socrates was the principal character in Athens during the twenty years embraced in the History. No historian concludes from this silence either that Socrates did not exist or that Thucydides was inventing his history.</I><BR/><BR/>I would be more impressed by this as an attempt to bolster your effort to downplay deafening Pauline silences if Thucydides had written volumes about Socrates but failed to mention that he was a teacher, a philosopher, a thinker, etc. That would be closer to what we find in Paul vis-à-vis the gospels: here we have numerous letters achingly preaching about Jesus, but nowhere do they speak of Jesus as a teacher, a miracle-worker, a healer, an exorcist, etc., etc., etc. As the Jesus cult grew, so did the stories about who he was and what he did. That’s very characteristic of legend-building, and the pattern we find in the NT is precisely what we would expect to find if the gospels and later writings were the product of legend-building.<BR/><BR/><BR/>I wrote: <B>And yet, it seems that if Jesus had indeed garnered the international reputation at the time that the gospels ascribe to him, ... </B><BR/><BR/>Tim: <I>The gospels ascribe an international reputation to Jesus within his lifetime?</I> <BR/><BR/>Are you faulting me specifically for using of the word “international” here? The gospels speak of Jesus’ fame spreading throughout the region, from Palestine and Galilee and into Syria and other places (see Mt. 4:24; 9:26, 31; 14:1; Mk. 1:28; Lk. 4:14; 4:37; 5:15, et al.) My point is that Jesus’ reputation as a healer and miracle-worker, according to the gospels, reached far and wide during the lifetime the gospels give to him. Gospel passages which speak of Jesus’ fame in this manner are most likely the product of evangelistic exaggeration. Paul's Jesus, on the other hand, was "emptied" and lived in obscurity.<BR/><BR/>Tim: <I>Dawson, have you ever read the gospels?</I><BR/><BR/>Yes, both as a believer (in my misguided youth), and now as a non-believer. Glancing back at my 20’s, I now wonder, “What was I thinking?” whenever I look at the gospels. I know many others who have asked themselves the same question.<BR/><BR/>Tim: <I>Yet again you are misrepresenting my position, a habit that you indulge sufficiently often that it is no wonder if sane people eventually abandon the attempt to have a discussion with you. I never said that Paul alludes to the details on your list.</I><BR/><BR/>You are welcome to clarify what you meant by ‘allusions’ then. Recall that I had asked:<BR/><BR/><B>How can we know what details the immediately intended audiences of Paul’s letters (e.g., the congregation at the Corinthian church, etc.) knew about Jesus?</B><BR/><BR/>And you responded:<BR/><BR/><I>One good way is by looking at all of places where he makes allusions that they could not have understood unless they already knew the outlines of the story of the life of Jesus.</I> <BR/><BR/>I was hoping you could give examples of what you mean here.<BR/><BR/>Tim: <I>By your own admission, you constructed the list to include details that were left out of the gospels.</I><BR/><BR/>Huh? The details on my list (e.g., virgin birth, born in Bethlehem, the slaughter of the innocents, Jesus’ baptism, female witnesses, etc.) are <I>taken from the gospels</I>, not “left out of the gospels.” I think you meant to say “left out of Paul’s letters,” no?<BR/><BR/>Tim: <I>As I pointed out to you above, this renders your list worthless (unless you have been inadvertent) since it is very easy to construct a similar list for any letter or set of letters dealing with a real figure from history about whom we have extensive independent documentation.</I><BR/><BR/>You’ve claimed this before, but I can think of no parallel situation to Paul’s letters preaching about Jesus. For Paul, Jesus was not just some person who existed in the past that he mentions in passing in a letter or two. Paul is preaching, and he’s preaching Jesus crucified and resurrected, and the portrait he paints of Jesus is nondescript by comparison to what we find in the gospels. The silences we have in Paul are much harder to explain than supposing this is a common practice in secular writings. Paul repeatedly issues moral teachings, and while he nowhere attributes those teachings to the earthly Jesus, we find in the gospels that evangelists have taken those teachings and thrust them into Jesus’ mouth, in order to give those teachings authority (apparently those teachings were not thought to be good enough on their own).<BR/><BR/>Tim: <I>This variation on the argument from silence provides no evidence that the figure was not real: all that it establishes is the tautology that Paul did not mention the things in the gospels that he did not mention.</I><BR/><BR/>As I have stated before, and apparently need to state again, whether or not there was a real man named Jesus at some point in history prior to Paul’s writings who originally inspired a cult of religious hero-worship, is really of no concern to me. I’ve gone on record more than once in this thread declaring that my position is that the gospel stories are the product of legend-building, not that Jesus never existed. <BR/><BR/>And Paul’s variant portrait of Jesus as compared to the gospels has much greater value than the mere tautology you grant here. But the fact that you grant that Paul is silent on numerous details that are central to the portrait of Jesus given in the gospels, is sufficient admission for my purposes to confirm that my position has a valid basis.<BR/> <BR/>Tim: <I>The only interesting question is whether there are sufficient reasons to identify the person of whom Paul speaks with the person of whom the gospels speak.</I><BR/><BR/>And this is essentially the question I’ve been raising, Tim. If you go back and review the themes that I have been developing in my comments here and in my writings elsewhere, you’ll see that the question you mention here is quite topical.<BR/><BR/>Tim: <I>For that, Harvey’s list of allusions to features of the life of Jesus that are also depicted in the gospels gives you a good place to start.</I><BR/><BR/>And I’ve interacted with Harvey already above. Harvey seemed unaware of my point that later evangelists were in the position to lift elements from Paul’s letters – such as the moral teachings I mentioned above – and incorporate them into their portrait of Jesus in the gospels. Over and over, the historicists seem unable to grasp this point, which I don’t think is that difficult to grasp. <BR/><BR/>Regards,<BR/>DawsonBahnsen Burnerhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/11030029491768748360noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21219785.post-87192199453053352162008-03-16T15:02:00.000-04:002008-03-16T15:02:00.000-04:00Tim, now add to this discussion the claims of the ...Tim, now add to this discussion the claims of the miraculous in the historical past <A HREF="http://debunkingchristianity.blogspot.com/2006/02/lessings-ugly-broad-ditch.html" REL="nofollow">and your whole case vanishes</A>.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21219785.post-46482003444983322452008-03-16T14:55:00.000-04:002008-03-16T14:55:00.000-04:00Tim: My claim was not that there are no doubtful e...Tim: <I>My claim was not that there are no doubtful existence claims in history, but that there are some that are so clear that no amount of vaporing about "perspectives" puts them in serious doubt.</I><BR/><BR/>Yes, I agree with you. There was no Adam, Eve, Cain, Abel, Abraham, Israel, Joseph, King David, Judas Iscariot, nor Joseph of Arimathea.<BR/><BR/>In the cases of the first seven people mentioned above it is "so clear that no amount of vaporing about 'perspectives' puts them in serious doubt."<BR/><BR/>Do you disagree? Many people do.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21219785.post-34821083005062759872008-03-16T14:48:00.000-04:002008-03-16T14:48:00.000-04:00Tim, when it comes to who killed Kennedy I agree w...Tim, when it comes to who killed Kennedy I agree with the report produced by his brother who was US Attorney General at the time. But, am I required to know this such that if I'm wrong I'll be sent to hell? Hell no! I might be wrong on almost every historical question.<BR/><BR/>I don't suppose you're a black man either, for nearly 80% of black people in America think O.J. Simpson was framed by racist cops, since that has been their experience. As white people we don't have that experience so we tend to trust cops. And as white people who think the government does mostly right by us, we trust it when it tells us who killed Kennedy. But we haven't experienced some of the things that the conspiracists have with regard to what they consider oppressive policies and haphazard enforcement.<BR/><BR/>I don't think you really appreciate the fact that how we see history depends on where we are in history and what we experience, which is my point. Have you ever taken a class in the philosophy of history? As smart as you are I would think you should before you continue arguing that your faith is built on the evidence of history. You have a strangely simplistic naïveté about this.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21219785.post-66530919653312883202008-03-16T14:12:00.000-04:002008-03-16T14:12:00.000-04:00John,My claim was not that there are no doubtful e...John,<BR/><BR/>My claim was not that there are no doubtful existence claims in history, but that there are some that are so clear that no amount of vaporing about "perspectives" puts them in serious doubt.<BR/><BR/>But you're scaring me with this one:<BR/><BR/><I>Who killed President John F. Kennedy?</I><BR/><BR/>If you are prepared to defend a JFK conspiracy theory in order to bolster historical skepticism about Christianity, I think that's my exit cue on this discussion.Timhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/15786874834919065011noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21219785.post-38449869581343059852008-03-16T13:23:00.000-04:002008-03-16T13:23:00.000-04:00Tim, you are indefatigable!You want examples? Did ...Tim, you are indefatigable!<BR/><BR/>You want examples? Did Adam and Eve exist? Cain and Abel? Abraham, Israel, Joseph, or King David himself? How about Judas Iscariot, or Joseph of Arimathea? <BR/><BR/>Then too, what about King Arthur? Or the many figures in the Mormon Bible, including Moroni?<BR/><BR/>You want more examples about the lack of assurance in history?<BR/><BR/>How were the Egyptian pyramids made? Who made them? Why? Was Shakespeare a fictitious name for Francis Bacon? Exactly how was the Gettysburg battle fought and won? What was the true motivation for Lincoln to emancipate the slaves? What happened at Custer's last stand? Who killed President John F. Kennedy? Why? Who knew what and when during the Watergate scandal that eventually led to President Nixon resigning? Why did America lose the “war” in Vietnam? Did George W. Bush legitimately win the 2000 election? Did President Bush knowingly lead us into a war with Iraq on false pretenses? What about some high profile criminal cases? Is O.J. Simpson a murderer? Who killed Jon Bene Ramsey? Is Michael Jackson a pedophile?<BR/><BR/>History is a slender reed to hang one's hat on when it comes to metaphysical beliefs in general, especially one that reports the miraculous, which we do not experience in today's world.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.com