Historical Jesus

[lpetrich]

I also added Richard Carrier's extensions: the hero

1. has fulfilled prophecies,
2. has worked miracles,
3. has pre-existed before his earthly existence, and
4. is worshipped as a savior god.

My evaluations:

List of Lord Raglan evaluations | Atheism | Fandom

Usually close to Lord Raglan's. My numbers, out of a maximum of 22 (26):

• Biblical: Moses: 15 (16), King David 4 (4), Jesus Christ 18.5 (22.5)
• Indian: Krishna 17 (21), the Buddha 13 (17)
• Greco-Roman Mythology: Zeus 14.5 out of 16 (16.5), Dionysus 13 out of 15 (16), Hercules 15 (16), Theseus 16 (18), Asclepius 14 (16), Perseus 17 (18), Oedipus 13 (14), Romulus 19 (21)
• Greco-Roman History: Alexander the Great 9 (10), Julius Caesar 9.5 (9.5), Augustus Caesar 10 (12)
• Northern Europe: King Arthur 14.5 (16.5)
• Modern History: George Washington 6, Napoleon Bonaparte 8, Abraham Lincoln 6, Charles Darwin 5, Tsar Nicholas II 14, Winston Churchill 5, Adolf Hitler 4, John Fitzgerald Kennedy 7, Muammar Gaddafi 6.5
• Modern Fantasy: Sherlock Holmes 7.5, James T. Kirk 4.5, Anakin Skywalker 10.5, Luke Skywalker 14 of 20, Leia Organa 9.5 of 15, Harry Potter 12 of 15

In summary, legendary heroes often score very high, while well-documented people almost always score very low.

Jesus Christ is well within the legendary range.

About RC's criteria, hardly anyone well-documented ever fulfilled some prophecy, and no one well-documented had some pre-existence as a similar sort of entity. Miracles are somewhat debatable, I will concede, as is being worshipped as a savior god. But Jesus Christ fits all four of them.

 

[lpetrich]

Miracles, I'll note what David Hume wrote some 250 years ago in The Project Gutenberg eBook of An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, by David Hume.:

in Section X, "Of Miracles", he notes "It is strange, a judicious reader is apt to say, upon the perusal of these wonderful historians, that such prodigious events never happen in our days."

In effect, where did all the miracles go? Did humanity's history have some long-gone "Age of Miracles"?

 Of Miracles - Miracles | Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy - Miracles (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)

 

[Swammerdami]

I want to address Lumpen's comments.

He's absolutely correct that the worship of Jesus was a very unusual and unique event...
...
The rapidity with which Christianity spread was phenomenal.

I think this is worth re-iterating. The ONLY sudden emergence of religion that is possibly comparable is the rapid spreading of Islam. (It had a very different character; perhaps one of our experts could comment.)

Judaism itself, according to many or most experts, gained spiritual strength only during or after the Captivity, perhaps 1000 years after the religion's origin. Romans promoting dead Emperors to Gods certainly doesn't qualify. The early evangelism, if any, of Hinduism is lost in antiquity.

Did Buddhism have a rapid expansion soon after Siddhartha Gautama's teachings? Don't be silly! Experts differ by an entire century on Siddhartha's dates.

Confucius's dates are well-known, yet -- just as with Buddhism -- the religion did not have a quick phenomenal rise like Christianity's:

Confucianism was not successfully spread by Confucius. Instead, the scholar Mencius, who was born more than a century after Confucius died, ...

No matter how eager we are to hate Christianity and to doubt 1st-century accounts, its quick phenomenal rise is unique and undeniable.

-- -- -- -- -- --

I see that lpetrich has introduced the "Rank-Raglan mythotype criterion." Regardless of its suitability for some purposes, it is laughable to use it to derive estimates of Jesus' historicity. This is true on various grounds. Rank and/or Raglan themselves freely admit this.

Muhammad, Czar Nicholas II, Abraham Lincoln, Cyrus the Great, Sargon I and especially King Mithridates VI of Pontus (perfect score!) are examples of historic characters that score high on Raglan's scale: All of these outscore Harry Potter.

It should also be noted that many myths are based, however distantly, on historical persons. This may even be true of one of the most ancient of myths:

[Gilgamesh] was possibly a historical king of the Sumerian city-state of Uruk, who was posthumously deified.

When we write "Gilgamesh was mythical", we just mean that supernatural events in the eponymous Epic are not to be believed. Well, that's the same friggin' thing that rational thinkers say about Jesus Christ!

 

[steve_bank]

The first organized writings that we know of attributed to Buddha were several centuries after he allegedly lived.

The point is Buddhism has endured as has Christianity and predated Jesus by about 300 years.

In China and Asia Confucianism is still influential.

Rapid rise of Christianity? As today you have to look at the geopolitics and economics of the day.

By the time of Nicaea there was little traceable to a small group of heretic Jews. There were disputes over whether Jesus was supernatural or not. The disputes were more over power politics between factions than theology.

Constantine used Christianity as a political tool, just like our conservative politicians do today.

Note that if one or two critical battles between European Christians and Muslims went the other way Europe may have gone Muslim.

Look at Rome. Romans consideed a state religion essential to maintaining civil order. The dominant Christian sect became the Roman Catholic Church with its hierarchical power structure based on Rome.

Whether or not there was an HJ and the gospel stories were true early on became irrelevant.

Also consider the literacy of the average person in those days. You didn't go to a library or a book stre to get a book on history or mythology. People were high;y superstitious and susceptible.

We are still are superstitions and susceptible today. Witness modern Chrtians.

Christianity arose die to a combination of unrelated events.

One of the best shows ever produced was the BBC show Connections by Burke in the 80s. In a series of shows he goes through history showing how a confluence of unrelated events led to major historical changes.

You can find his shows online, still good and relevant to religion.

That Christianity became what it did in the first centuries probably has little to do with a wandering Jew raising the dead or morality.

And as I like to say it should be called Paulism instead of Christianity. Paul took the Jewish out of Jesus and sold it to Gentiles.

 

[Don2 (Don1 Revised)]

Lord Raglan's hero profile | Atheism | Fandom


Why aren't there ever any stories like these about recent ones?

• Southern plantation owners vs. Abraham Lincoln
• Fundamentalists vs. Charles Darwin
• Rabbis, Jewish bankers, and Jewish Marxists vs. Adolf Hitler
• Psychiatrists vs. L. Ron Hubbard
• Oil-company executives vs. Muammar Gaddafi

Could you be looking in the wrong places? Perhaps, try this one instead??

• Satanic pedophiles vs Donald Trump

You can probably get some good answers if you read QAnon rantings but here's my attempt:

1. Hero’s father's mother is a royal virgin has maiden name of Christ;
2. His father is a king oligarch, and
3. Often a near relative of his mother, but
4. The circumstances of his conception are unusual, and
5. He is also reputed to be the son of a god oligarch.
6. At birth an attempt is made, usually by his father or his maternal grandfather to kill him, but
7. He is spirited away, and
8. Reared by foster-parents in a far country. Generals at a military school.
9. We are told nothing of his childhood, [because schools will get sued] but
10. On reaching manhood he returns or goes to his future Kingdom [NY real estate].
11. After a victory over the king and/or a giant, dragon, or wild beast Hillary Clinton,
12. He marries a princess, often the daughter of his predecessor and Mike Pence
13. And becomes king President Chosen One.
14. For a time he reigns uneventfully and
15. Prescribes laws to save children from being trafficked inside of Wayfair furniture, but
16. Later he loses favor with the gods election thieves and/or his subjects, and
17. Is driven from the throne and city, after which

 

[Swammerdami]

Steve, if you're trying to dispute my point you are arguing against a point OPPOSITE to the one I made.

The rapidity with which [early] Christianity spread was phenomenal.

I think this is worth re-iterating. The ONLY sudden emergence of religion that is possibly comparable is the rapid spreading of Islam. ...

... Did Buddhism have a rapid expansion soon after Siddhartha Gautama's teachings? Don't be silly! Experts differ by an entire century on Siddhartha's dates.
... No matter how eager we are to hate Christianity and to doubt 1st-century accounts, its quick phenomenal rise is unique and undeniable.

Buddhism's spread was so slow that its "founder's" estimated death date varies by a century.

From Paul's testimony we know that Christianity had spread to Asia Minor and Greece less than than two decades after the crucifixion. It seems to have reached Rome at about the same time. Recall that this was before the invention of high-speed communication, e.g. telephones and passenger aircraft. Christianity had already spread widely Less than two decades after its initiation.

That's what "The rapidity with which early Christianity spread was phenomenal" means. (The Emperor of Rome converted to Christianity less than three centuries after the Crucifixion, and the continued spread after that was also rapid but that's irrelevant to the point I was making.)

 

[Swammerdami]

Could you be looking in the wrong places? Perhaps, try this one instead??

• Satanic pedophiles vs Donald Trump

You can probably get some good answers if you read QAnon rantings but here's my attempt:

1. Hero’s father's mother is a royal virgin has maiden name of Christ;
2. His father is a king oligarch, and
   ...
3. Prescribes laws to save children from being trafficked inside of Wayfair furniture, but
4. Later he loses favor with the gods election thieves and/or his subjects, and
5. Is driven from the throne and city, after which

Some genealogists conjecture that Donald Trump is descended from Peter Stumpf (The Werewolf of Bedburg) and his mistress Katharina Trump, but the relationship is uncertain, so best classified as "possibly mythical." Donald Trump could be related to historic serial killer 'The Werewolf of Bedburg'

Not mythical of course is the fact that Trump's grandfather, Friedrich Drumpf (husband of Elizabeth Christ), started the family fortune by selling female flesh during the Yukon Gold Rush.

 

[Politesse]

If you want people to believe the things you say about the social sciences without any need for providing any substantive supporting evidence, the trick is to write out your theories in overflowing purple prose, be filthy rich, and publish it between 1850 and 1970.

 

[bilby]

Recall that this was before the invention of high-speed communication

The Roman Empire is rightly famous for its high-speed communication. The roads were a major part of that, but they had a lot of supporting infrastructure along those roads that made it possible to send messages extremely quickly.

A Roman courier could travel 200km a day; Less expensive communication by land might only be in the order of 50km per day, though riverine and coastal shipping would mean faster communications than that in most conditions.

People moved around a lot in the Roman world, certainly by comparison to the medieval era. The rapidity of spreading of Christianity isn't any more impressive than the similarly rapid spread across the Empire of changes in fashion, or changes in currency (new coins appear across the entire Empire very rapidly). Indeed, in comparison with these other changes, Christianity spread rather sluggishly.

 

[steve_bank]

Rome was a hub for trade and communications. Very easy for ideas and stories to propagate by word of mouth. And get embellished or distorted in the retelling.

 

[Lumpenproletariat]

What is it that happened 2000 years ago?
Didn't a noteworthy change take place?

No, not really.

What's noteworthy is that someone demonstrated unique super-human power -- ability to instantly heal physical afflictions, and ability to rise back to life, or resurrect and live again, after being killed -- and this is documented in the written record of that time (the time when it happened), or legitimate evidence, based on manuscripts surviving from the time of these events (rather than centuries later) to us today, in multiple sources rather than only one. There is no such evidence for any other miracle legends in ancient religious traditions, Western, Eastern, Jewish, pagan etc.

This is the singular case of a miracle "legend" based on legitimate historical evidence rather than on tradition and culture and myth only (such as Moses and Buddha and Osiris and Zeus etc.). There were no other cases of this, and it's all based on historical fact rather than on superstition or religious traditions evolving in the culture over many centuries.

If the facts matter, then this is noteworthy. The only way this is not noteworthy is if you dismiss the facts as irrelevant. I.e., the historical facts which we all accept as being based on something objective, on evidence everyone has access to, rather than on the subjective traditions of one's culture.

 

[Lumpenproletariat]

"what Christianity became"?

In the history of the papacy podcast, episode 94, the host lists the top 4 people who influenced what Christianity became.

His list in order is:
Charlemagne, Muawiya, Constantine and Diocletian.

The interesting thing about this list is that two on it weren't Christian at all. But rather sworn enemies of Christianity. Them trying to destroy Christianity forced Christianity to adapt and change. I think this focus on Jesus is a bit silly. I think Jesus' overall influence on what Christianity became is tiny. If not non-existent.

translation: It's silly to discuss the historical Jesus in a forum titled "The Historical Jesus."

 

[Lumpenproletariat]

Learner,

What makes you think the gospels represent what really happened? Your personal bible is a translation of a translation of a . . .

Our translations today are mostly based on the earliest Greek manuscripts, many centuries prior to the KJV. But even if we allow for the discrepancies, earlier and later, the general picture of "what really happened" is agreed by all the different versions:

Jesus enters history in Galilee about 30 AD, did many miracle healing acts, widely witnessed, and 1-3 years later he travelled to Jerusalem where he was crucified/killed and buried and then resurrected afterwards and was seen alive by multiple witnesses. ALL the evidence says that this happened, with no discrepancies between the hundreds of translations other than on minor details.

So the evidence is that this happened, probably true based on the normal historical evidence like all the other facts of history, despite much else which also happened but which is doubtful, including some conflicts between different versions and translations.

. . . translation...certainly the translations were corrupted by bias of the translators.

All translations of anything are corrupted, but that doesn't mean we can't determine the facts, or the events that happened.

Translations have always been influenced by politics.

Nothing about a leper being healed or about Jesus resurrecting back to life was influenced by politics. It doesn't matter if some minor details about something unimportant was influenced by Democrats or Republicans (or Whigs or Tories or Prohibitionists, etc.).

The modern NSRV translation has been criticized by conservative Xhrtians for softening te male misogyny.

But no translators or scholars or experts of any kind have softened the fact that Jesus did the superhuman acts. Which is the most important fact about what happened. That part is probably true, and then there's quibbling about the politics and sex and other secondary silliness.

A divine Jesus was not the only narrative.

The miracle acts are the most important narrative, and then other less important narratives are included, with some discrepancies here and there.

Where ALL the sources agree it's probably true, regardless of individual differences about the terminology and quibbling over the jargon (e.g., whether to call it "divine" etc.).

The basic facts of the miracle acts are what make the writings have any importance, and without which they would never have been written. If they did not agree on that basic point, there'd be nothing to write about. That he demonstrated that special power is all that matters, and the rest is just subjective personal feelings in reaction to those basic facts about what happened.

 

[DrZoidberg]

"what Christianity became"?

In the history of the papacy podcast, episode 94, the host lists the top 4 people who influenced what Christianity became.

His list in order is:
Charlemagne, Muawiya, Constantine and Diocletian.

The interesting thing about this list is that two on it weren't Christian at all. But rather sworn enemies of Christianity. Them trying to destroy Christianity forced Christianity to adapt and change. I think this focus on Jesus is a bit silly. I think Jesus' overall influence on what Christianity became is tiny. If not non-existent.

translation: It's silly to discuss the historical Jesus in a forum titled "The Historical Jesus."

No. It means that we can't look at what Christianity became and infer anything about Jesus. Nothing. Not even his values. I like Bart Ehrman's analysis. His take is that Jesus really existed, but was nothing like described in the Bible. His conclusion is that given the context Jesus must, at the minimum been a rabbi. He doesn't think he was a carpenter/tecton.

Historicist biblical scholars have looked at the type of story the Bible is and compared it to other texts. Most of it is lifted straight out from other, (ie pagan) works, and only lightly re-edited to fit a Christian context. The story is chock full of stereotypes, litterary devices, symbolism that would have been clear to the contemporaries, but lost to us. It's a highly symbolic work. It's not a history of Jesus' life. They can even infer the level of education of the person who wrote a specific Biblical text by how writerly it is.

After the death of Jesus we got a bunch of Christian factions and politics. Each faction wanted Jesus to support whatever they wanted Christianity to be, so would, most likely, edit the words of Jesus to fit. So we get a bunch of versions of Jesus' life that don't match.

And finally, the Bible is propaganda. The writers of the Bible wasn't even trying to write a accurate history of Jesus. They were using Jesus as a litterary device to tell a moral story. The type of book is an hagiography. We know how they were written. The writers would take in whatever rumour was swirling about and if it matched the writers own politics they'd include it into the story.

We can compare it to Islam. All evidence suggests that Abdel Malik, the fourth Caliph invented Islam. He put words in the mouth of Mohammed, in order for him to score points against his political opponents. Mohammed being a new prophet served his political agenda. Or it's just an amazing coincidence that the Quran, dictated by the illiterate Mohammed just happened to be written in the style of Zoroastrian sacred texts. Persia was conquered after the death of Mohammed. After Persia was conquered the Muslim conquerers would use the Zoroastrian administrators to handle the administration of their new empire. It's pretty clear that they wrote the Quran. Not Mohammed.

That's how religion and sacred texts worked back then.

Or look at any Christian hagiophgraphy. They're all like this. There's hagiographies of fairly modern saints. From the modern age, when we can check facts. They're not even trying to be truthful. The Bible is a hagiography.

 

[steve_bank]

Lumpy

Th earliest kown version of the gospels are still largely fictional. There is no way to spin it. We do notknow who an HJ may have been. From what we do know of the times we can speculate.Many possibilities.

You can rationalize until you are blue in the face, but it changes nothing. There is no contemporaneous corroboration of the supernatural events or an HJ.

Creating an alleged link to a god to legitimize a ruler or figure was used in many cultured far before Jesus appeared. Add to that stories of miraculous powers and events.

Caesar claimed to be descended from gods at least for the masses.

Look at the Krishna link I posted. Hinduism predates Jesus by about 1000 years.

By the 2nd and 3rd centuries Christianity had little to do with who a wandering Jewish rabbi may have been. Chrtinity had been Romanizedas things tended to to in the Roman empire. A blend of many things.

 

[Swammerdami]

Recall that this was before the invention of high-speed communication

The Roman Empire is rightly famous for its high-speed communication. The roads were a major part of that, but they had a lot of supporting infrastructure along those roads that made it possible to send messages extremely quickly.

A Roman courier could travel 200km a day; Less expensive communication by land might only be in the order of 50km per day, though riverine and coastal shipping would mean faster communications than that in most conditions.

People moved around a lot in the Roman world, certainly by comparison to the medieval era. The rapidity of spreading of Christianity isn't any more impressive than the similarly rapid spread across the Empire of changes in fashion, or changes in currency (new coins appear across the entire Empire very rapidly). Indeed, in comparison with these other changes, Christianity spread rather sluggishly.

You're comparing apples with oranges. News of the death of an important person or of a military event would indeed travel quickly. Not so the news that, once again, several insurrectionists had been crucified near Jerusalem but we should immediately start worshiping one of the more obscure ones.

But you may be half-right. As I said "Jesus was in the right place at the right time." Fast communication in the Roman Empire may indeed help explain why this TOTALLY UNPRECEDENTED rapid growth of a religion was allowed to occur.

Your comparison with "changes in fashion" should help you reconsider. New fashions were brought by or for "influencers" -- that's why they were adopted. Influencing the adoption of a totally new religion is rather more difficult.

 

[bilby]

What's noteworthy is that someone demonstrated unique super-human power -- ability to instantly heal physical afflictions, and ability to rise back to life, or resurrect and live again, after being killed -- and this is documented in the written record of that time (the time when it happened), or legitimate evidence, based on manuscripts surviving from the time of these events (rather than centuries later) to us today, in multiple sources rather than only one.

Hahahahahahahahahahahahaha!!

Have you considered a career in stand up?

 

[bilby]

Your comparison with "changes in fashion" should help you reconsider. New fashions were brought by or for "influencers" -- that's why they were adopted. Influencing the adoption of a totally new religion is rather more difficult.

Not at all. Belief is just as subject to fashion as clothing is, and that was even more true in the Roman Empire. In both cases, what matters is influencers.

In matters of the cloth, they were as fickle as can be...

 

[steve_bank]

On the contrary, given there were no news, internet, tv, books, newspapers, and video games gossip and keeping up with what was going on was an important social function, as it is today.

There are around 140 apartments in my building. Gossip abounds, as does rumors. Stories change in the telling.

The region where Jesus was said to wander was small. Soial and family group woud have be close. News of somebody raising the dead and walking on water would spread quickly. Anyone clmg to be the ffspring of a god would certainly get the attention of Romans. The only god was the emperor and he did not like competition.

That the supernatural events exist only in gospels says it was based on hearsay embellished by fiction.

Six degrees of separation - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org

Six degrees of separation is the idea that all people are six or fewer social connections away from each other. As a result, a chain of "friend of a friend" statements can be made to connect any two people in a maximum of six steps. It is also known as the six handshakes rule.[1]

The concept was originally set out in a 1929 short story by Frigyes Karinthy, in which a group of people play a game of trying to connect any person in the world to themselves by a chain of five others. It was popularized in John Guare's 1990 play Six Degrees of Separation.

The idea is sometimes generalized to the average social distance being logarithmic in the size of the population.

Mathematics

Mathematicians use an analogous notion of collaboration distance:[43] two persons are linked if they are coauthors of an article. The collaboration distance with mathematician Paul Erdős is called the Erdős number. Erdős-Bacon numbers and Erdős-Bacon-Sabbath (EBS) numbers[44] are further extensions of the same thinking.

Watts and Strogatz showed that the average path length between two nodes in a random network is equal to ln N / ln K, where N = total nodes and K = acquaintances per node. Thus if N = 300,000,000 (90% of the US population) and K = 30 then Degrees of Separation = 19.5 / 3.4 = 5.7 and if N = 6,000,000,000 (90% of the World population) and K = 30 then Degrees of Separation = 22.5 / 3.4 = 6.6. (Assume 10% of population is too young to participate.)

 

[TomC]

After the death of Jesus we got a bunch of Christian factions and politics. Each faction wanted Jesus to support whatever they wanted Christianity to be, so would, most likely, edit the words of Jesus to fit. So we get a bunch of versions of Jesus' life that don't match.

Exactly this.
Obviously, something happened during the mid 1st century in Judea that snowballed into Christianity. My best guess is that a loose set of groups formed that shared 2 main characteristics. Deep reverence for Jesus and a solidly communitarian ethic. It's the ethics that made it popular. Near everyone was uneducated and superstitious. Lots were also desperate, living in a tumultuous and insecure world on the verge of collapse. A community that basically tried to "keep each other alive" would be attractive.
And as for the dead hero figurehead leader, no praise was too high, no flattery too extreme, no story too tall. It just wouldn't matter. Because He wasn't there.
Tom