What is Reddit's opinion of The Historical Figure of Jesus?

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> It is harder to say positively what Jesus meant by 'kingdom of God'. Intensive efforts over the last hundred years to define the phrase have left the issue more confused rather than clearer. There are, however, two meanings that would have been more or less self evident given standard Jewish views. One is that God reigns in heaven; the 'kingdom of God' or 'kingdom of heaven' exists eternally there. God occasionally acts in history, but he completely and consistently governs only heaven. The second is that in the future God will rule the earth. He has chosen to allow human history to run on with relatively little interference, but someday he will bring normal history to an end and govern the world perfectly. Briefly put: the kingdom of God always exists there; in the future it will exist here. These two meanings are perfectly compatible with each other. Anyone could maintain both at the same time, and in fact millions still do.

• The Historical Figure of Jesus

So... the bible was written hundreds of years after Jesus. It's fan fic.

Most of this picture is pretty OK if you want to interpret it historically.

If you want to rage-type about fan fiction written 1800 years ago, then, go ahead. You're just as guilty of bullshit interpretations of the bible as mormons and evangelicals - note: they're all bullshit.

The Historical Figure of Jesus by E.P. Sanders was my first introduction to historical Jesus studies. I found it very informative, easy to read, and not overly biased in any way.

If anyone's wondering, that's E.P Sander's The Historical Figure of Jesus and it's a fantastic read in my opinion. It deals with the historical Jesus, assuming the gospels offer insight into the matter. Whether or not you accept this doesn't really matter, as it still provides insight as to who the Jesus of the gospels is without the varnish of faith.

E.P. Sanders book is a great read The Historical Figure of Jesus

The apocryphal Gospel of Thomas is considered significant for the historical Jesus (e.g. by EP Sanders, who considers other apocrypha mostly pointless).

The book of Tobit is also just a great read.

https://www.amazon.com/Historical-Figure-Jesus-P-Sanders/dp/0140144994

No doubt, Christians were horribly scapegoated for Nero's failings, but I am going back before that. Yes, early Christians strongly believed and were killed in the Roman's arenas, and probably didn't have much chance to recant. I will grant those points. But I find them to be both out of the relevant point in the timeline and unconvincing. Firstly, while they did not have the opportunity to recant, they could have easily stopped their worship of God upon seeing those being slaughtered without the opportunity to recant. Instead they continued. But I am not talking about those Christians. Those Christians could have fallen into the hypothetical category of those who died but were deceived into believing the lie. While I find their sacrifice convincing, they are not the ones I am talking about.

I am talking about the Apostles who said they literally walked and talked with Jesus. They said they saw his miracles. They said they saw him die and then risen again. They said they saw him ascend to heaven. Those disciples and the many who were with them before the persecution of later believers all claimed this, and died claiming it. They not only died claiming it, they lived in poverty and rejection from their families and culture. This was not easy to believe. That was a very different situation than those who died without being able to recant at Roman hands. Their own people killed them for these beliefs. There are atheist, Muslim, Bhuddist and countless other anti-biased scholars which attest to the historicity of their belief. I am not saying they attest to the truth of their claims; these scholars attest to the fact that these men and women truly and strongly believed what they claimed to have seen.

For instance. E.P. Sanders says that it is an "equally secure fact... They saw him (in what sense is not certain) after his death; as a consequence they believed he would return to found the kingdom". There is also Bart Erhman and Josephus and many others. You are speculating that they couldn't have recanted, in the fact of clear historicity that they believed this knowing they could and would face death. Peter was told he would die for this, and even included in his epistles that he knew he was going to die for it, and he still kept teaching it. The "no possiblity of recanting" argument doesn't really hold water with me.

>Yahweh of the Old Testament fits perfectly with the kind of tribal war god that was common among a pantheon of gods in that region

I think this statement is made in ignorance and is being quoted from others who claim it. Any careful study of those other gods shows a distinct difference between them. Of course there are some similarities because of the age and culture of the people at the time. Additionally, if what the God of the Israelites and the Christians said was true, then there would be false gods who would attempt to deceive others by being similar in some way. But focusing on the similarities and ignoring the differences shows the inherent bias of those arguing against Yahweh. Distinct differences include the rejection of human sacrifice. The rejection of offerings to idols. The rejection of appeasing the gods as opposed to the invitation to love that God. The use of weak and unpredictable subjects to bring about the greater plan. The desire to enter into covenant relationship, and the distinct requirements of that God to be a part of his elect. These distinctions and dozens more paint an entirely different picture of God than the other war gods of the time. There is something far different about Yahweh than there is about Molech, Ashera, Anubis, and Zeus.

>When something is rigorous we do various checks and evaluations of it, and from those one typically gets statistics, and those generally look like numbers of some sort.

I somewhat agree, but I think that reducing human actions to a mathematical model can be a bit dubious at times. For example, a lot of the models that you see in economics try to do exactly that, with mixed results. We have issues calculating the probability of how people will act now, so it's even more difficult to apply models to people hundreds to thousands of years ago.

Bayes theorem has also been applied on two separate occasions (to my knowledge) to Jesus. Richard Swinburne applied Bayes theorem and found that there was a high probability that Jesus was resurrected and Richard Carrier uses Bayes theorem that shows there is a low probability that Jesus even existed. I don't believe that either of these men are trained mathematicians, but it shows that the likelihood of an event is only as good as the information that is put into the model.

>One kind could be checking whether old conclusions still hold when new information comes to light.

I'd say this is pretty par for the course for any academic field.

>Another kind would be doing practical experiments, such as finding witnesses of some prominent event, interviewing them immediately, 5, 10 and 30 years after the fact and seeing how well they agree with each other, how much their retellings change over time, that sort of thing.
>
>In fact, experiments of the sort have been done, and show interesting things like that memory isn't like a videotape, but something that encodes meaning, and depending on the situation can get corrupted and simplified into something that makes sense to the person. This already doesn't bode very well for eyewitness evidence, not to speak of the reliability of reports of things that happened decades ago, were witnessed by we don't know who and then made to an historian by unknown means.

Biblical scholar Bart Ehrman has written a book on this topic shown here and he has posted about it multiple times on his blog. One example is shown here.

Additional reading I would recommend is as follows:

The Historical Figure of Jesus by EP Sanders

How Jesus Became God by Bart Ehrman

Did Jesus Exist? by Bart Ehrman

Also the debate between Robert Price and Bart Ehrman is very good shown here.

I know that you might be suspicious that I recommended Bart Ehrman a few times, but this is partially because he is one of the few scholars that interacts with the mythicist position. It's sort of like how Richard Dawkins is one of the few academics that interacts with creationists. I'm not bringing this up as an ad hominem, but please keep in mind that there are only a handful of academics that push the mythicist position. Ehrman is also an agnostic atheist (and one of the most notable biblical scholars alive today), so he his not an evangelical trying to prove Jesus as some sort of religious conviction.

> Okay so tell me how you can construct the Gallilean aramaic oral tradition which gave rise to all these various christian documents?

E.P. Sanders gives a great overview of Nascent Christianity in "The Problems of the Primary Sources", from The Historical Figure of Jesus. Here he divides the oral tradition into four stages:

1. Units used in homiletical or pedagogical contexts
2. Collection of related units into groups of pericopes (perhaps circulated on individual sheets of papyrus)
3. Proto-gospels
4. Our gospels

The basic timeline of events was probably something like the following:

• After execution, followers fled or hid.
• They settled down in Jerusalem and/or Galilee to wait for Jesus to return.
• They did not sit together, collectively search their memories, and write a biography of Jesus as they thought he would soon come back and the question of how best to preserve knowledge of his life for future generations did not arrive.
• While waiting they tried to convince others that their master was the Messiah of Israel and that he would soon return to establish the kingdom of God.
• They would do so by sharing orally what Jesus said and did.
• The sayings of Jesus best remembered were probably his aphorisms and parables, his most characteristic forms of speech.
• Debates with Jewish teachers provided a third context for surviving traditions.
• It was preserved in a form that was valuable to Jesus' followers in their various activities; Jesus' words and deeds were pulled out of their original context (in his own career) and thrust into another context, the disciples' preaching and teaching.
• Years passed and Jesus still hadn't returned.
• In their evangelistic and pedagogical work, they began to cite individual incidents from the lifetime of Jesus in set short forms - i.e. small units of material referred to as pericopes.
• At some point these small units were written down and collected into larger groupings, usually on the basis of subject matter.
• As pericopes ("the word literally means 'cut around'), the beginning and end can be cut to be moved around.
• It appears that groups of pericopes dealing with similar sheets of papyrus copies, and circulated among various Christian communities.
• Next, these groupings were put together to form what we now call proto-gospels - works that told a connected story, but not the whole story.
• Finally, the first gospel as we have it was written (Mark). Subsequent authors used Mark and incorporated other materials, such as proto-gospels or topical collections that the author of Mark had not included. The final gospels as we have them were probably composed between the years 70 and 90.

Sander's concluding remarks emphasis the point I've been trying to make regarding what we can and cannot know.

> We do not know that this is precisely how the gospels originated. We infer the process from the finished product. We note that the synoptic gospels (Matthew, Mark, and Luke) consist of movable pericopes We know that the final authors moved pericopes, because some units are in one context in one gospel and another in another. We infer that this had been the case for some years, and probably for some decades. We do not know that there were once 'fly-sheets', brief topical collections. We infer their previous existence from the fact that some material is now arranged topically. Similarly some scholars have inferred the existence of proto-gospels by analyzing our present gospels, where they find signs of earlier arrangement that has been altered. For instance, there is no reason to think that any of the authors knew precisely when Jesus uttered the statement about being childlike (Matt 18.1-4), or the particular circumstances that triggered it, for they each place it at different points in the narrative. Moreover, Matthew's phrase 'at that time' sounds like a biographical statement. Matthew has taken one passage from an otherwise unknown source (the pericope about the Temple tax) and inserted it before a passage from Mark (the pericope about a child).

Okay, so how do we find out which pieces of these traditions are most likely authentic? Again, it goes back to historical criteria which I think you need to reconsider the power of. Multiple attestation gives us reason to believe that Jesus was interested in women, the poor, and social outcasts. It also highly supports the consensus that Jesus' teaching emphasized the kingdom of God; outside of that, his eschatological sayings echo Jewish apocalyptic literature and is sandwiched between two close apocalyptic thinkers - the Baptist (Matt 3:1-2, 3:10; cf. Matt 4:17, 7:19) and Paul (1 Thess 4:15-17; cf. Matt 16:27-28). The embarrassment factor is also to be reminded. Again, why would someone make up Jesus' baptism, his inability to heal those in his home town, his alleged reputation as a drunkard and a glutton, his refusal to be called good, etc.? Such traditions stuck because they were largely known. Later, communities tried to cover them up, and we clearly see this in the redaction of our sources.

> There are 100% absolute facts we can identify like Jesus was a jew, but to claim you know certain events in his life are I believe untenable due to limited nature of hisrorical method.

I'm a bit surprised to see you say that. How do you know with 100% certainty that he was a Jew if our Gnostic gospels clearly say he wasn't? By your logic, why should the NT tradition overrule the Gnostic tradition? And if we can say for a fact that he was a Jew, why the heck not certain events? Scholars all agree that at the very least we can be sure that (1) Jesus was a member of the Baptist movement prior to his mission, (2) he called disciples, (3) he taught in the towns, villages, and countryside of Galilee, (4) he preached the kingdom of God, (4) he created a disturbance in the Temple area of Jerusalem, (5) he was arrested and executed. (Some scholars would include the empty tomb as number six but I agree with others who believe that Jesus probably wasn't given a proper burial). Moreover, we know that shortly after his death his followers came to believe that he had risen from the dead and would soon return; otherwise there would be no Christianity. Do you contest any of these historical facts?

> Almost all of them? It's not a lot of research. Krishna was born when Vishnu implanted himself in a womb. Buddha had 12 disciples. Dionysus died and was resurrected; some writings say it was 3 days. A handful of pagan gods were crucified.

The way you put it at first made it sound like every religion has all of those elements. And these examples don't seem to be very accurate—the Buddha had ten principal disciples, and much more than twelve altogether, and as usual with dying-and-rising gods, Dionysus' death was not a particular event in history but something that happened every year as a symbol of the cycle of the seasons. What is the significance of these superficial and isolated parallels with Christianity in far-flung cultures supposed to be? It seems like the atheist equivalent of seeing the Virgin Mary on a grilled cheese sandwich.

> You can look into it some more. There's tons of pre dated parallels. I know people like to use Horus and a lot of that is unproven but there's miles of other gods who all had something similar to Jesus and it was before Jesus was supposedly alive. Also, outside of the bible, there's little to no proof that Jesus (of David) was a real person, but bc a book held by a religion that believes he's god, says he's real, then we all are supposed to believe he's real. There's other writings referencing him well after he died. There's also nearly 20 gospels that were rejected, essentially bc the stories didn't jive with M, M, L, & J. It's all awfully suspicious and if that was our understanding of, let's say Washington, we wouldn't be speaking his praises in schools. "Well the book of the U.S. says he was the greatest general ever, but there's 4 times as many other books that were written around the same time that doesn't necessarily agree but we're going with a fifth of the information available to us as opposed to the other 80% of the information bc it fits our needs better."

The sources are really very good, and this conspiracy theory about Jesus not existing isn't accepted by anyone working in the field of ancient history. When you look at these apocryphal gospels, you find that they're really much later in date and don't contain any credible historical information that isn't found in the canonicals—they may help us understand the diversity of Christianity in the Second and Third Centuries, but not the historical Jesus or the early Church. If you want to know how historians approach the subject of who Jesus was, I recommend reading <em>The Historical Figure of Jesus</em> by E. P. Sanders and/or <em>Jesus: Apocalyptic Prophet of the New Millennium</em> by Bart Ehrman (who has also produced an edition and translation of <em>The Apocryphal Gospels</em>).

Don't forget Josephus.

The Christ myth theory is a joke in academia. I'm inclined to have more faith in people who spend a good chunk of their lives looking through the evidence than people who have an ideological motive to claim he never existed cough*SamHarris*cough.

If you genuinely want to investigate arguments for his existence I recommend The Historical Figure of Jesus, written by a 'skeptic' and widely agreed to be the best starting point for any serious academic research on the subject.

Fine, but if you want to support your position with stern pronouncements about how "historical academics" work and what evidence "most credible historians" rely on, maybe you should read actual historians like Ehrman and Sanders rather than fringe writers with an agenda.

This book I found was pretty good in summing up the political and social climate of Jesus http://www.amazon.com/Historical-Figure-Jesus-P-Sanders/dp/0140144994

Can someone say why this was downvoted, it seemed like a good book, the Straight Dope used (which is where I heard of it from) is the guy like a Nazi or something?