Advertisement
If you have a new account but are having problems posting or verifying your account, please email us on hello@boards.ie for help. Thanks :)
Hello all! Please ensure that you are posting a new thread or question in the appropriate forum. The Feedback forum is overwhelmed with questions that are having to be moved elsewhere. If you need help to verify your account contact hello@boards.ie
Hi there,
There is an issue with role permissions that is being worked on at the moment.
If you are having trouble with access or permissions on regional forums please post here to get access: https://www.boards.ie/discussion/2058365403/you-do-not-have-permission-for-that#latest
There is an issue with role permissions that is being worked on at the moment.
If you are having trouble with access or permissions on regional forums please post here to get access: https://www.boards.ie/discussion/2058365403/you-do-not-have-permission-for-that#latest
The Historical Jesus
-
12-05-2015 11:45am#1
Comments
-
-
-
-
-
-
Advertisement
-
-
-
-
-
-
Advertisement
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
Advertisement
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
Advertisement
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
Advertisement
-
-
-
-
-
-
Advertisement
-
-
Peregrinus wrote: »Well, we don't agree on everything, Paul. As for the events of Holy Week, leaving aside the resurrection, if we accept - and I think most do - that the early Christian community in Jerusalem was a historical reality, then the parsimonious explanation for the existence and beliefs of that community is that Jesus of Nazareth really was put to death in Jerusalem, by the Roman, with the connivance or support of the Temple authorities. While we don't have any contemporary accounts of that - as in, written at the time of the supposed events - we have several apparently independent accounts which were written at a time when many eye-witnesses to the supposed events would still be alive, and within the same time-frame and in the same city we have a community which predates those writings, but apparently shares the belief that the events occurred.
It requires an awful lot of completely unevidenced and fairly improbable assumptions to explain how this could be if, in fact, none of the events ever occurred. Many members of the Christian community would know that the alleged events had not occurred. More to the point, many opponents of the Christian community would know that, too. And yet we have no record, or memory, of anyone challenging the Christians over this. So, we have several first-generation accounts of these events and of the community that stemmed from them, and we have no first-generation (or later) accounts of anyone denying or disputing these events. If you think the original Holy Week would have been a significant enough phenomenon to be the subject of a surviving contemporary record, the early Christian community and its struggles with the authorities would have been a much more significant phenomenon, and if there was any denial of the Holy Week events, you'd expect that to be recorded too, wouldn't you?
Well we agree on something, P, and that’s a start. We agree that very little can be known about the historical Jesus, do we not? However, we now seem to be moving from discussing Jesus per se to discussing the historicity of Holy Week. I must admit, I find your arguments here to be somewhat curious.
The first point you seem to be making above is that the events of Holy Week must have been true, or else somebody at the time would have called them out on it. As pointed out above by our dear friend and correspondent oldernwisr, the Gospels were written well after the death of Jesus, and any hope of content in them being provided by ‘eye-witnesses’ is optimistic (to put it one way), and is also unevidenced.
As for non-Christian opponents of the Christian communities (and I use the plural: from what I have read, the range of beliefs that these communities had about Christos were quite varied, sometimes in ways that would have been quite unacceptable to contemporary mainstream Christianity), we do have some fragments of challenges to Christianity from early writers. We have Celsus in the second century launching a pretty comprehensive attack on the faith, and from what snippets we have of him, one can almost hear the sneer in his voice. We can’t read him directly, though, as his works have been lost (though I suspect not ‘lost’ in the way you would lose your car keys; it’s hard to imagine an anti-Christian polemic surviving centuries of Christian dominance of Western culture).
I also find it difficult to imagine a situation where early Christian communities could be persecuted without reference to the validity of their beliefs. I presume that any such persecution would also have been pretty comprehensive in its criticism.In fact I think your surprise at the lack of contemporary comment on the Holy Week events is misplaced. Passover happened every year, and trouble and strife at Passover time was not unusual, but so far as I know we have no contemporary accounts of any particular Passover from this time. There were no newspapers or chronicles, if Pilate or other Roman authorities were making reports to Rome none of them have survived, any record that might have existed in the Temple archives was lost when the Temple was sacked and burned. If an individual wrote a private letter mentioning the events it would be a freak if it survived; the fact that none has survived is not very telling.
A guy was crucified at the insistence of the Sandedrin. A notorious insurrectionist was released by the Roman authorities in his stead. On his crucifixion, there was an earthquake, and then the dead rose. Then the crucified guy rose, too.
Hardly a run-of-the-mill Passover.
At the time in question, there was already quite a wide Jewish diaspora. There were Jewish communities in Alexandria, for example, who were in regular contact with Jerusalem (I must beg your indulgence on this point, I’ve searched for a link but to no avail. The reader may take it on faith
). Yet there is no mention at all of such goings-on. From what I can recall reading, scholars have identified up to 42 individuals who may have been in a position to make comment about the events of Holy Week, but none do. Even allowing for anti-Christian zeal in arriving at the number of 42, we could still expect to see some hint of strange goings-on at this particular Passover, but there is none. I’ll concede that this is hardly conclusive, but it does leave a big question mark hanging over Holy Week for some commentators.I think mainstream historical opinion suggests that, more probably than not, Jesus of Nazareth was not only a historical figure but he was put to death by the Romans at Jerusalem some time the fourth decade of the common era, and this event forms the foundation of the accounts of the passion in the four gospels. There is nothing remotely supernatural, or even surprising, about this claim, and crucifixions are known to have been a commonplace event in Palestine at the time; very few (if any?) of them are the subject of any surviving contemporary documentation. What would be much more surprising is if the Christian movement became a significant problem for the Roman and/or Jewish authorities at a time when everybody knew that its foundational story was completely bogus and yet we have no record or memory of anybody every mentioning the fact.
Yes, mainstream historical opinion does agree that Jesus of Nazareth was executed by the Romans. But is this a question that can be resolved by an appeal to majority? I can accept the events of Holy Week as a traditional part of Christian belief, and the crucifixion and resurrection as core to the faith, but I have a hard time accepting them as history.
On a tangent, there is a question that is bothering me. In my previous post I wrote ‘in turn resurrected himself’. This doesn’t scan right to me. What would be a better way to put it, I wonder? Would it read better as 'in turn was resurrected himself'?0 -
Actually, we may not. It depends on what is meant by “very little”, and by “known”.Well we agree on something, P, and that’s a start. We agree that very little can be known about the historical Jesus, do we not?
I don’t think that knowing a historical fact is a simply binary. It's not the case that we either know something to be a historical fact or we do not; rather, we can be more or less confident of its historicity. I think there are a fair amount of things presented in the gospel account as “facts” which we think are probably, very probably or certainly not factual. I think there’s a smaller number of things which we think are probably, very probably or certainly factual - but some of them are key things. And we have a wide range of things which we probably can’t know to be factual or not factual, but (a) we can say they are more or less plausible, and (b) we can say that their factuality is more or less important.
I’d suggest we can accept at least the following as factual: Jesus of Nazareth is a historical figure who came from Nazareth. He had a mother called Mary, a brother called James and other brothers and sisters. He was an itinerant preacher in first century Palestine. He had a core group of followers whom we know as the Twelve Apostles, though there may not have been twelve of them, and membership may have fluctuated over time. And there was a wider group of followers, including some who financed his mission. He was put to death in Jerusalem by the Romans. After his death, he and his teachings were venerated by the group we know as the early Christians. His teachings are the foundation of the beliefs of that group - which is not to say that his teachings might not have been embellished, or that we can reliably identify which of the teachings ascribed to him are in fact his, and which are not, but we can do that in at least some cases. If you want to get specific, among his authentic teachings were the injunction to celebrate the eucharistic meal, and the condemnation of divorce (but this is not an exhaustive list of what we believe him to have taught). In general, we can reliably locate him and his teachings in the then-emerging pharasaic tradition of Judaism. And, while your mileage may vary, I would not describe all that as “very little”.
Unevidenced, but highly likely. Even accepting the later dates for the composition of Mark, it was composed about 30 to 35 years after the supposed events of Holy Week, so there would have been many living witnesses from the time and place concerned. And Mark, in any event, is not our earliest evidence. Paul is writing earlier, about twenty years after the events, and while he doesn’t go into much detail about holy week he does mention the crucifixion several times; in fact it’s one of his major themes and he expounds on its significance at length. Paul isn’t an eye-witness, of course, and doesn’t claim to be, but that’s all the more reason why he could have been authoritatively and convincingly contradicted if, in reality, the crucifixion had never happened.However, we now seem to be moving from discussing Jesus per se to discussing the historicity of Holy Week . . .the first point you seem to be making above is that the events of Holy Week must have been true, or else somebody at the time would have called them out on it. As pointed out above by our dear friend and correspondent oldernwisr, the Gospels were written well after the death of Jesus, and any hope of content in them being provided by ‘eye-witnesses’ is optimistic (to put it one way), and is also unevidenced.
Plus, of course, there’s nothing remotely implausible or improbable about the notion that someone perceived to be stirring things up might be crucified under Pontius Pilate. The pax romana was, ironically, quite brutal and even by its standards Pilate was regarded as one of its more savage practitioners. If there’s a historically implausible aspect to the gospel accounts of the crucifixion it’s that Pilate is presented as indecisive, reluctant to execute and manipulated by the Temple authorities. This is not the Pilate we know from other sources.
Which brings me back to the point I made earlier. Some of the events of Holy Week, or some details of those events, may be more readily taken as historical than others. This isn’t a simple binary, and there isn’t a one-size-fits-all position to be taken on every detail that appears in any of the gospel narratives.
We don’t have to imagine it; lots of anti-Christian polemic survives. We have, for example, texts which deny and ridicule Christian claims about the virgin birth.As for non-Christian opponents of the Christian communities (and I use the plural: from what I have read, the range of beliefs that these communities had about Christos were quite varied, sometimes in ways that would have been quite unacceptable to contemporary mainstream Christianity), we do have some fragments of challenges to Christianity from early writers. We have Celsus in the second century launching a pretty comprehensive attack on the faith, and from what snippets we have of him, one can almost hear the sneer in his voice. We can’t read him directly, though, as his works have been lost (though I suspect not ‘lost’ in the way you would lose your car keys; it’s hard to imagine an anti-Christian polemic surviving centuries of Christian dominance of Western culture).
If you mean “anyone who persecuted the Christians must be presumed to have denied every Christian belief”, I can't agree. It’s entirely plausible that critics of the Christians accepted the fact of Jesus’s crucifixion, and knew it to be a historical fact, while denying claims about his resurrection.I also find it difficult to imagine a situation where early Christian communities could be persecuted without reference to the validity of their beliefs. I presume that any such persecution would also have been pretty comprehensive in its criticism.
See, the earthquake and the dead rising are among the details that I would say are not historically well-attested at all - we have them only from Matthew, and you know how he loves the dramatic flourish. The Barrabas story is also problematic, mainly because it is said to be founded on a supposed custom for which otherwise we have no evidence, and because it does not gel with what we know about Pilate. It could be true, or have some basis in truth, but on balance I’d think not. But the reasons we would discount those claims do not apply to the claim that Jesus was crucified by the Romans, or to the claim that the Temple authorities were instrumental in bringing this about.A guy was crucified at the insistence of the Sandedrin. A notorious insurrectionist was released by the Roman authorities in his stead. On his crucifixion, there was an earthquake, and then the dead rose. Then the crucified guy rose, too.
Surely that argument cuts both ways? If we can identify at this remove 42 people who could have attested to the events of Holy Week, there were surely many, many more who could have been identified, and indeed who were still living, at the time Paul was writing, and even still at the later time that Mark was writing. Therefore, if Paul and Mark simply made up stuff out of whole cloth, detection and refutation was likely. Therefore, why would they do this? And, if they did, why would the Christian community take their easily-falsified claims so seriously? (Why, for that matter, did the Christian community even exist before Paul wrote? And, if it didn’t exist, who was he writing to, and who was reading his letters, and why would anyone take them seriously?)From what I can recall reading, scholars have identified up to 42 individuals who may have been in a position to make comment about the events of Holy Week, but none do. Even allowing for anti-Christian zeal in arriving at the number of 42, we could still expect to see some hint of strange goings-on at this particular Passover, but there is none. I’ll concede that this is hardly conclusive, but it does leave a big question mark hanging over Holy Week for some commentators.
I’m with you on the resurrection, but not on the crucifixion. On the resurrection - mainly because it is such a wildy extravagant claim - I don’t think we can say that it is historically established, or comes even close to being historically established. I think the furthest we could go is to say that it is historically established that there was a strong belief in the resurrection within the first generation of Christian believers - i.e. they believed it at a time when there would have been many living witnesses to the events claimed.Yes, mainstream historical opinion does agree that Jesus of Nazareth was executed by the Romans. But is this a question that can be resolved by an appeal to majority? I can accept the events of Holy Week as a traditional part of Christian belief, and the crucifixion and resurrection as core to the faith, but I have a hard time accepting them as history.
Are you concerned about grammar or theology?On a tangent, there is a question that is bothering me. In my previous post I wrote ‘in turn resurrected himself’. This doesn’t scan right to me. What would be a better way to put it, I wonder? Would it read better as 'in turn was resurrected himself'? 0 -
-
-
-
-
-
-
-
Advertisement
Advertisement