An agnostic's argument that Jesus did exist

[cbayer]

http://www.deseretnews.com/article/765589224/An-agnostics-argument-that-Jesus-did-exist.html

By Daniel Peterson, For the Deseret News
Published: Thursday, July 12 2012 5:00 a.m. MDT




Bart Ehrman is a respected New Testament scholar who holds a professorial chair at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Furthermore, in addition to his academic works, he's published four New York Times best-sellers.

Formerly a fundamentalist Protestant and biblical inerrantist, but unable to square that position with his studies, he moved during graduate school to liberal Christianity. Today, though, he reports, "I am an agnostic with atheist leanings," and his popular books have criticized basic traditional Christian views of Jesus and the Bible.

Given that background, it's likely that many nonbelievers, hearing that his newest book would pose the question "Did Jesus Exist?" expected him to answer "No." If they did, though, they've surely been disappointed. The subtitle to his book is "The Historical Argument for Jesus of Nazareth."

Ehrman says that he urgently wants to get to the topic of how Jesus came to be seen as divine, and promises that his next book will be devoted to that subject. Already in this volume, though, he offers some hints (scarcely surprising to those familiar with his work and similar New Testament scholarship) of what he'll argue — Daniel Boyarin's even newer book, "The Jewish Gospels," will serve as a nice counterpoint to Ehrman's views — but he says that, to his surprise, he's felt obliged to deal first with a more pressing prior issue: Before debating who Jesus really was, we have to decide whether he ever even lived.

more at link

[AnotherMcIntosh]

1. Some may be interested in knowing that Daniel Peterson is the founder of MormonScholarsTestify.org.

[cbayer]

2. I don't think that is accurate. I think the author of this article is the founder of that group.

Do you have any information that confirms what you are saying, because I couldn't find any.

[AnotherMcIntosh]

6. You're right. Mea culpa.

[Warren Stupidity]

3. "more at link" not really.

The substance of the article appears to be "did so".

The claim is that there is no good evidence for the existence of an historical Jesus. The article never bothers to either state or refute that claim. The consensus of biblical scholars is not a refutation, the vast majority of them are theists working for theist institutions.

Document the historical jesus or accept that the story is myth, which it obviously is, and not an historical account of real events. That does not mean there was no such person. It means the accounts in the NT are myths.

[Jim__]

4. Sounds like an interesting book.

I'll put it on my wish list.

[PATRICK]

5. Napoleon did not exist

The first modern version of this intriguing approach, which really is a sideways critique of what historical and historical literature tradition really is took place after only a brief time after the actual Napoleon. We know the media routine regarding "What is truth?" very well and still waste time getting our foot out of the muck.

In sheer paper, even if so much Christian book burning had not reduced the overwhelming heretical and pagan competition to ashes, the record of the "historical Jesus" is slim, the Gospels, slimmer, the man behind the Gospel writer/community interpretation(which had minimal interest in much of what we consider necessary) dismayingly slimmer. Thumbnail sketch, details, layering over with modern interests and even falsities, lack of chronology, physical details or context certainly lay the historical Jesus open to more scientific attack than the aforementioned Napoleon attack. Also that attack was an oblique early broadside against the divinity or even human existence of Jesus, even if the Napoleon nonsense was easily dismissed.

When you are a proscribed religion of mainly slaves at a time when letters also were expensive and for the educated what exactly was the interest? Josephus was the Jewish literary, historian, not a writer of religious texts. Stands out in his times. His religion remained legal even after the huge, bloody Revolt and centers of religious writing safely existed parallel. As illegal religionists underground with no center after the destruction of Jerusalem and Nero's Roman purge only missionary and liturgical documents existed. From that grew theology and philosophy. The destruction of fairy tale gnostic texts of hugely distorted gospels put a curb itself on touching the liturgical Gospel renditions.

Regardless of the arguments, yes it would be very good to have a lot more solid information for every reason. I am always amazed that despite the distance, the tenuous and edited legend of every necessarily thumbnail record of an individual, the words and actions and circumstances of a individual create some sort of intuitional connection. Is it biased in the mind of the hearer no matter all the info, societal reinforcements, critiquing? Yes, but still a kernel remains there curiously surrounded by our mistakes about interpreting the truth, ourselves, our own thought and experiences. That kernel somehow works like a twitch of a facial muscles, a pheromone, a word that establishes a contact of knowing between individuals far beyond what we consider scientific evidence.

And then we get to the brain/world barrier. So big a universe, so little personal time, so limited a knowledge.

[msongs]

7. Harry Potter has more books than Jesus, therefore Harry Potter is more real nt

[skepticscott]

8. And there is far more evidence

for the existence of Santa Claus.

[dimbear]

9. The Jewish gospels............

There's an important lesson to be learned to an open mind. The original Jewish gospels are all lost. Why? Because the western Christians couldn't be bothered to preserve them, or wanted them destroyed.

How much does that encourage you to think that the western Christians cared about truth?

[Act_of_Reparation]

10. Could you clarify what you mean by "Jewish Gospels"?

Authorship of the four canonical gospels hasn't been established. I'm not sure what you're getting at.

[dimbear]

11. OK, not a very well defined term, admittedly. I refer to the

Gospel of the Ebionites, the Gospel of the Hebrews, the hypothetical original Hebrew or Aramaic version of the Gospel of Matthew, and the Gospel of the Nazoreans. All lost works. We don't even know how many separate works that adds up to or whether some are identical.
Think of these as the written expressions of the early Christian church actually in Palestine.The important point is that the early western Christians couldn't be bothered to preserve them. There are smidgens here and there in the patristic literature. The legend is that a copy or copies existed at a late date in the library at Alexandria. Couldn't be bothered.

You can find writeups on all of these at Wickipedia or at

http://www.earlychristianwritings.com/

[Jim__]

12. Here is an excerpt from a fairly long interview with Ehrman on this book.

The interview covers 7 separate columns linked together (there is one break in the middle after the 3rd column, but if you follow the link from the 3rd, that link links to the 4th column). The first column is here.

An excerpt from the interview:

A. It is obviously important for a historian to look at all the evidence. To most modern people, it is surprising to learn just how little evidence there is for Jesus outside the Christian sources. He is not mentioned in any Roman (or Greek, or Syriac, or… whatever – any pagan [i.e., non-Jewish, non-Christian]) source of the entire first century. Never. That strikes people as surprising. He is mentioned a couple of times within about 80 years of his life by two Roman sources (Pliny and Tacitus; I’m not sure Suetonius can be used). And he is almost certainly referred to twice in the Jewish historian Josephus, once in an entire paragraph. But that’s it for the non-Christian sources for the first hundred years after his death. It’s not much. But it’s something, and since these are not sources that based their views on the Gospels (since these authors hadn’t read the Gospels), it shows that Jesus was indeed known to exist in pagan and Jewish circles within a century of his life.

The really compelling evidence, though, comes in the Christian sources. Mythicists write these sources off because they are Christian and therefore biased, but that is not a historically solid way to proceed. Christian sources do indeed have to be treated gingerly, but they are sources every bit as much as pagan and Jewish sources are. What I show in Did Jesus Exist? is that there are so many Christian sources that can be used by historians that there is really no doubt at all that Jesus at least existed. Just to give an example (so as not to repeat my entire book here): by any credible dating, the apostle Paul must have converted to believe in Jesus within two or three years of the traditional date of Jesus’ death. And Paul knew some facts about Jesus’ life; he knew some of his teachings; he knew his closest disciple Peter; and he knew his brother James. Personally! If Jesus didn’t exist, you would think that his brother would know about it. The historian can not simply ignore what Paul has to say since he was a Christian. Taking his biases into account, we can use his letters for information about Jesus. And among other things, they show beyond a doubt that Jesus existed as a Jewish teacher in Palestine in the 20s CE. Otherwise we cannot explain Paul or his letters. That’s just one important piece of evidence for the existence of Jesus. I’ll discuss more in some of my later answers.

...

A. In my view, to establish a tradition about Jesus as historical requires the rigorous application of historical criteria. The three most commonly used include the two you mention: multiple attestation and dissimilarity. The first indicates, as I pointed out in an earlier answer, that any tradition found independently in more than one source has a greater chance of being historical than a tradition found in only one source (since if it is in only one source, that source could have made it up; if it is independently found in several sources, however, none of them could have made it up, and so it must go back to a stage or a tradition antecedent to all three). The second criterion, dissimilarity, acknowledges that the early Christians were modifying and inventing traditions about Jesus, and if so, and if there is a tradition that seems to run *counter* to what the followers of Jesus would have wanted to say about him (e.g., from my earlier answer, that he was a messiah who got crucified), then THAT tradition is more than likely historical (because Christians would not have made it up).

Both of these criteria are what I would call “positive” principles, because they show us what probably is historical, rather than what is not. That is to say, if a tradition is found in only one source (e.g., the parable of the Good Samaritan is found only in Luke), that does not necessarily mean that it is not historical; it means that we cannot establish that it is historical using this criterion. So too, if a tradition about Jesus does coincide with what Christians would have wanted to say about him (e.g., that he was concerned about the poor and oppressed) that in itself does not mean that the tradition is not historical. It means that if you want to show that the tradition is historical, you cannot do so using this criterion.
The traditions about Jesus that are the most plausible are the ones that pass both criteria. Jesus’ crucifixion, for example, passes both; so does his having come from Nazareth; and his having been baptized by John the Baptist; and – well there are others.

[mmonk]

13. I took this journey decades ago.

I had many books, both pro and con, from scholars. I came to his conclusion and ironically, at the same time, more agnostic (as far as faith went). The compelling writing that convinced me was from Jewish sources though, not Christian or Atheists. When I was through, I threw most of the books away.