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Historical Jesus

joedad said:
Philos said:
Folks,

If Jesus is anything, he is historical.

A.
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The Jesus story is historical. The protagonist of the Jesus story? That's debatable.
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So is the story of Batman historical. It was written in time, but is it true history? Gotham City doesn't exist.
But what about HG Wells tale about a War of the Worlds. That's actually based in a real city. Does it mean it's historical?
 
ANGELO said:
There are no claims anywhere in the whole New/Testament of eyewitnesses to a Jesus of Nazareth! None!
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what? The gospels claim he fed 5,000 people, and preached to multitudes, and crowds turned out to witness his execution.

Hell, preaching the gospel is called 'witnessing.'
 
Sarpedon said:
ANGELO said:
There are no claims anywhere in the whole New/Testament of eyewitnesses to a Jesus of Nazareth! None!
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what? The gospels claim he fed 5,000 people, and preached to multitudes, and crowds turned out to witness his execution.

Hell, preaching the gospel is called 'witnessing.'
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Yes, but there is no "this is true because I saw it myself". It is always hearsay.
 
And Angelo thinks that the fact that no one who tells about Jesus claims to be an eyewitness strengthens his case?

And, isn't the fact that the Gospel of Matthew is so called a claim that it was written by Matthew? And wasn't Matthew an eyewitness?

The fact that no one NOW will claim that Matthew was an eyewitness account doesn't mean it isn't a claim. It's a claim that no one takes seriously anymore.
 
Sarpedon said:
And Angelo thinks that the fact that no one who tells about Jesus claims to be an eyewitness strengthens his case?

And, isn't the fact that the Gospel of Matthew is so called a claim that it was written by Matthew? And wasn't Matthew an eyewitness?

The fact that no one NOW will claim that Matthew was an eyewitness account doesn't mean it isn't a claim. It's a claim that no one takes seriously anymore.
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But the point he's making is that the authors don't make that claim. Later, vicarious claims are irrelevant; the text itself contains no such claim.
 
Sarpedon said:
And, isn't the fact that the Gospel of Matthew is so called a claim that it was written by Matthew? And wasn't Matthew an eyewitness?
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What would have to be changed in the Gospel of Matthew if it was written 60 years after the events it describes, by someone who had seen no miracles, and was later only 'attributed' to Matthew' by a church authority figure who didn't want to call it 'The Gospel Of Some Guy.'?

What elements of the gospel would have to be altered if this were true?
 
By calling it the gospel of Matthew, the claim was made. You are all correct to a point, but my point is that you can't pick and choose your criteria: The gospel is not scripture only when you want it to be and an ordinary written work when you want it to be. IF the gospel is divine writ, and IF the church fathers were divinely inspired when compiling it, Then Matthew is indeed claimed to be an eyewitness account. The instant you separate them and claim they contradict each other, you've already conceded the only point worth conceding.

Second, how can you separate the supposed 'author' of Matthew from the people who tinkered with the text afterwards? The whole text is an authorless collection. You had the people who told the stories the text was based on, then the people who embellished them, and then mixed them, and then the ones who wrote them down, and then how many editors after that? And somewhere along the line, someone called it 'Matthew.' How is that guy not as much of an author to the text as anyone else? To say that the text had an author seems just as phony as to say that author was Matthew.

In short, I've come to question the assumption: SomeONE wrote it.
 
Spam^ when you have to I guess
Lot's of down time in that video
But, you'd almost have to invent Paul or somebody might get killed
 
I originally found those videos when I googled 'Chrestianos', doing research for a thread at the Secular Cafe. One of them, 15D or 15E as I recall, has a lot of information about ancient manuscripts (including the Codex Sianaticus) which referred to 'Chrestians' instead of 'Christians'. I certainly don't have anything to do with their production, and I don't know the guy who makes them.

I do find them to be quite informative, and an excellent argument for mythicism.
 
Jobar said:
I originally found those videos when I googled 'Chrestianos', doing research for a thread at the Secular Cafe. One of them, 15D or 15E as I recall, has a lot of information about ancient manuscripts (including the Codex Sianaticus) which referred to 'Chrestians' instead of 'Christians'. I certainly don't have anything to do with their production, and I don't know the guy who makes them.

I do find them to be quite informative, and an excellent argument for mythicism.
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Great, good for you
If there is any thing relevant please bring it forth
Not interested in vague advertisements
If there is evidence betting it forth
Surely you can transcribe something relevant, something coherent
 
"Relevant"? That whole series of vids is relevant to a discussion of historical vs. mythical Jesus. Else I wouldn't have linked to it. And I see no point in 'transcribing' the whole thing here; that *would* be spamming.

But, OK, I can certainly mention something from there that I found interesting. I said that I was researching the use of the term 'Chrestian' and how it seemed to have frequently been used instead of 'Christian' in a great many early texts. TruthSurge, in video 15D, shows how the Codex Sinaiticus originally had 'Chrestians' instead of 'Christians' in the only 3 instances of the word's usage in the whole New Testament. In all three of those instances there was an attempt to make the 'e' into an 'i', but the change can clearly be seen.

I first started looking into this alternate spelling as a result of the well known passage from Suetonius- ""Since the Jews constantly made disturbances at the instigation of Chrestus, he [Emperor Claudius] expelled them from Rome." (Chrestus = 'the good or useful one'; Christos = 'the anointed one'.) But it appears that for several hundred years after the beginning of Christianity, the 'e' version was very common.

We know that spelling was not a precise art in those days; perhaps some scribes just used the 'e' instead of 'i'. But I'm intrigued by the suggestion TruthSurge made- that there may have been a very early sect of Jewish proto-Christians who worshiped 'Jesus the Good'. The earliest known inscription referring to Jesus is dated to 318, in the remnants of a Marcionite church in the Turkish town of  Deir Ali; The meeting-house of the Marcionists, in the village of Lebaba, of the Lord and Saviour Jesus the Good.

If Suetonius is actually referring to Christians, there's a problem- Claudius reigned from 41 to 54 CE. How could it be that there were enough Christians in Rome to raise enough hell to inspire their expulsion from the city? Not enough time had passed after the supposed death of Christ for the faith to have spread that far. Might there have been a Jewish sect worshiping a personalized version of Wisdom, known as 'Jesus the Good', which existed well before the dates attributed to the ministry of Jesus Christ?
 
https://sites.google.com/site/myste...ies/another-mystery-from-chrestus-to-christus
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This latter version with the word Chrēsto, not Christo, is what our earliest extant manuscripts relate. Contrary to what Christian apologist Josh McDowell and other fundamentalists assert, and despite the fact that the two words are evidently related through the roots χρίω and χράω, "Chrēsto," the ablative of Chrestus, is not an "another spelling of Christ." These terms represent Latinizations of two different Greek words that sound quite similar: Chrēstos, sometimes a proper name, means "good," "righteous" or "useful"; while Christos denotes "anointed" or "messiah." Hence, although an earlier generation of scholars believed that this Suetonian passage reflected the uprisings of Jews against Christians in Rome, we are not certain at all that this purported "reference" in Suetonius has anything to do with Christ and Christians

Scientific studies of Suetonius's extant works demonstrate that "Chresto" is the most common epithet in the manuscript tradition. As we will discover, Chresto or its Greek original, Chrestos, was commonly found in pre-Christian antiquity, and its presence in Suetonius most likely had nothing to do with any historical founder of Christianity called "Jesus the Christ." Rather, this commonly held title was one of the earliest applied to what is clearly a fictional composite of characters, real and mythical, styled "Jesus the Good."
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https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suetonius_on_Christians
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R.T. France says that the notion of a misspelling by Suetonius "can never be more than a guess, and the fact that Suetonius can elsewhere speak of 'Christians' as members of a new cult (without any reference to Jews) surely makes it rather unlikely that he could make such a mistake".
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I'm not sure if you are aware of interpolation at all, what it means
 
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Note the initial 'If' in my last paragraph. I know that the Suetonius quote likely has nothing to do with Christianity; but that has the effect of invalidating one of the most frequent claimants for secular testimony to the historicity of Jesus Christ.

And we're still left with the frequent use of 'Chrestian' instead of 'Christian' in a great many ancient manuscripts. Is it just an instance of the lack of standardized spelling in the old days, or is it more significant than that?
 
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