Jesus--Fact or Fiction??

[Baruch]

One day I really will have to read Carrier's description of it.

Description of The Historical Jesus by Crossan?  He didn't agree with, but cooperated with, The Jesus Seminar

[josephpalazzo]

[/quote]

Yes, the Bayes Theorem did puzzle me.  He wrote an earlier book dealing only with that--I promised myself that I would circle back, later, a read it.  I guess I don't always keep promises to myself, for I've not read it yet.  So, early on, I ignored it.  The rest of the book is very solid.  And his footnotes are so extensive one can use this book as the center of a deep study of the issue from all sides, if one wanted to.  I find much of the Jesus was real evidence wanting.  I am convinced Jesus was a myth.

The problem with Carrier is that he assigns probabilities to historical events out of his ass. For Bayes theorem to work you need to know the probability of an outcome. Example: the probability of getting heads on tossing a fair coin is one-half. That's not a guess but a fact. In the case of Carrier, he takes a guess of what is the probability that Jesus resurrected. No matter what number you use, already Bayes theorem will give you a false result. It's a total misuse of the theorem if the input is not back by research, observation or a study of a large group giving you a meaningful stats - example: % of non-believers in the US is 22.8, from the latest survey. What you get is William Lane Craig doing the same as Carrier and comes up with a high probability that Jesus did resurrect.   Both Carrier and Craig are just playing a game of bullshit.

[Mike Cl]

Description of The Historical Jesus by Crossan?  He didn't agree with, but cooperated with, The Jesus Seminar

No, the book Carrier wrote abut the Bayes Theorum.

I've already read Crossan.

[drunkenshoe]

I didn't read the books or watched the videos. But I don't get why people keep looking into history as a discipline; historical events, historical evidence for this. Invalid. It's ridiculous. It's like 'lets play Indiana Jones without the guns'. Anthropology would provide the best approach.

Humans created gods and religions for many reasons -which anthropology explains- and also created middlemen.

When people think about the questions of 'Did Moses or Jesus really exist?' they start with an accumulation of a specific information provided by some sources, first religious text and then try to find historcial ones to support them.

To me the most important problem is that when belief is the subject, they start with already defined characters.

However, if you start with the idea that we actually have zero information about these figures, the evolutions of societies humans created throughout history, would only leave blanks for collective characters of a certain type. That's why Moses is a collective version of hundreds of clan chiefs and ancient deities. When that figure expired, you get Jesus, another figure who is a collective figure of different gods and characters.

There is only a few human characters and a certain set of parables -imagined as their lives- to go around. Abrahamic prophets are all different veersions of few male characters.

You know that how people who believe in horoscopes keep insisting, how good their sign fits them or not exactly because of some effect or this and that? Every one of these people count some human characteristics with different combinations, as if they are uniquely different from each other and talk about how true it is.

And then when you tell them that there are only several basic human characteristics to go around and all these signs are the same bullshit with expressions of different aspects and that of course every body fits in them because there is nothing else to fit in!

Anyway, you get what I mean. So these characters are like horoscopes signs a bit. They are all like each other, but different aspects of a male human roles, -some times deity parts added- is emphasized in each one. 

But trying to look for 'historical' Moses or Jesus, asking if they really existed is like asking an atheist 'Could "the real god" convert you?' Because that 'historical' actually means what kind of a man was the real Jesus, did he really said that, did these...? It's not a valid, reasonable question. It's a quest for faith, not for history.

Why don't you ask the real god?

[Baruch]

Anthropology?  Yes.  Psychology?  Yes.  But not as castrated and communized by European scholarship.

[drunkenshoe]

Psychology? No!

Why do we need psychology for the Real Jesus Quest?

[Mike Cl]

I didn't read the books or watched the videos. But I don't get why people keep looking into history as a discipline; historical events, historical evidence for this. Invalid. It's ridiculous. It's like 'lets play Indiana Jones without the guns'. Anthropology would provide the best approach.

Humans created gods and religions for many reasons -which anthropology explains- and also a created middlemen.

When people think about the questions of 'Did Moses or Jesus really exist?' they start with an accumulation of a specific information provided by some sources, first religious text and then try to find historcial ones to support them.

To me the most important problem is that when belief is the subject, they start with already defined characters.

However, if you start with the idea that we actually have zero information about these figures, the evolutions of societies humans created throughout history, would only leave blanks for collective characters of a certain type. That's why Moses is a collective version of hundreds of clan chiefs and ancient deities. When that figure expired, you get Jesus, another figure who is a collective figure of different gods and characters.

There is only a few human characters and a certain set of parables -imagined as their lives- to go around. Abrahamic prophets are all different veersions of few male characters.

You know that how people who believe in horoscopes keep insisting, how good their sign fits them or not exactly because of some effect or this and that? Every one of these people count some human characteristics with different combinations, as if they are uniquely different from each other and talk about how true it is.

And then when you tell them that there are only several basic human characteristics to go around and all these signs are the same bullshit with expressions of different aspects and that of course every body fits in them because there is nothing else to fit in!

Anyway, you get what I mean. So these characters are like horoscopes signs a bit. They are all like each other, but different aspects of a male human roles, -some times deity parts added- is emphasized in each one. 

But trying to look for 'historical' Moses or Jesus, asking if they really existed is like asking an atheist 'Could "the real god" convert you?' Because that 'historical' actually means what kind of a man was the real Jesus, did he really said that, did these...? It's not a valid, reasonable question. It's a quest for faith, not for history.

Why don't you as the real god?

I asked myself those questions; read those books because I'm curious.  I simply want to know.  Plus, I did not fully appreciate what you mention above until I started doing actual research and began delving into those questions beyond the surface stuff.  And I learned to appreciate the roles fairy tales, myth, legends, stories, rites of passage play in societies.  And I grew to really appreciate Joseph Campbell and his explanation of the role of myth.  Stories and myth have power even if all understand they are just that--stories and myth; for we all experience those feeling and thoughts at one time or another.  When one adds the 'historical' layer, then those things (fairy tales, myth, legends, stories and rites of passage) become even more compelling--almost compulsive in that nobody questions them anymore or tries to evaluate what they mean.  The just accept whatever their designated expert tells them.  One does not have to be an expert to understand what a fairy tale means; but one does(or so everybody says) to explain what Jesus means in the bible because he is real and the fairy tale is not.  So, basically, I  just wanted to untangle all that stuff for myself.

[drunkenshoe]

I asked myself those questions; read those books because I'm curious.  I simply want to know.  Plus, I did not fully appreciate what you mention above until I started doing actual research and began delving into those questions beyond the surface stuff.  And I learned to appreciate the roles fairy tales, myth, legends, stories, rites of passage play in societies.  And I grew to really appreciate Joseph Campbell and his explanation of the role of myth.  Stories and myth have power even if all understand they are just that--stories and myth; for we all experience those feeling and thoughts at one time or another.  When one adds the 'historical' layer, then those things (fairy tales, myth, legends, stories and rites of passage) become even more compelling--almost compulsive in that nobody questions them anymore or tries to evaluate what they mean.  The just accept whatever their designated expert tells them.  One does not have to be an expert to understand what a fairy tale means; but one does(or so everybody says) to explain what Jesus means in the bible because he is real and the fairy tale is not.  So, basically, I  just wanted to untangle all that stuff for myself.

Yeah that makes sense. You are curious to learn the source of something that big. (When I was a kid, I had mom to pester about all this stuff, she  was a philosophy teacher) Stories and myths are very very powerful. But they are very few. Same deal. Most of them are the different versions of the few major ones or their parts. Gılgamesh... then down there, heeere we go. They are also all we have about most of the accumulation we call history. Starting back from a much closer point than anyone thinks.

Have you ever heard a historical concept called 'secret history'?  In 17th century Europe, some scholars, writers... start to write about 'secret history' of any figures they can. Popes, Cardinals, Kings, Queens, Generals, Dukes...etc.

They first start to do this to show the people that some events -be it a war, invasion, a decree...etc- that have impact on people's lives are actually based on personal ambitions, relationships, goals and power hunger. They get killed, jailed, tortured... (The modern understanfing of secret history, wiki leaks even papparazi is coming from here.)

So what did the scholars do? They used characters and events in myths, ancient history to disguise a current event by telling it via something of the past. They also knew that Kings and Queens and Popes and Cardinals had their own 'history makers'. What these men did was to act like an image maker for their masters and mistresses and define them and their reigns by myths and mythical characters. Even cities. Every big city they are proud of is a Rome (2nd Rome, 3rd Rome etc), every city they fight for is a Jearusalem and of course every reign that changes hand between sects are delivered, an Exodus for the winning side. You wouldn't believe how many Romes, Jerusalems and Exoduses we have. Kings became ancient Commanders...etc. (Think like first triumvirate and the second one, you can find depictions, made up ones with generals and commander hundreds of years after Roman Empire collapsed.) Pretty much like the horoscope thing. Collective characters of fiction and history. What happening in courts, whose sleeping with whom... What was the real reason of the 30 year wars. Popes, oh Popes. Do I even need to get there?     

Well, at some point this gets out of hand. And this has some bad and good consequences. Scholars and writers produce a crazy kind of scepticism.  For example every thing about Ancient Roman History gets dismissed. One by one everything. Starting with 'what would Vercingetorix say about the war, if he had written a journal' to 'did Caesar even exist?' 

For 200 years it is a mess. (Until Ranke) History is just seen as 'Romans' and written as 'Romans'. (Romance) For the first time in history, history gets into a real crisis, I mean one that close to what we understand as a crisis in the field today. Because during that period all that made up bullshit showed people that everything could be made up and how would they know? It also provided them a different view of the world and they learned to look at sovereigns and monarchs from distance and see their deeds differently. It's also when people start to question biblical texts or lives of Saints.

And this^ is a fraction of history making. Early modern Europe is soo fucked up and really good, lol.

Something called 'criticism' was born. And it was born from revealing forgery as in created historical documents. Oh the mess. Well, the French! LOL Descartes did collapse the grand narrative of humanist history. And then after him, Foucault, Derrida and Lyotard did a similar thing for us.

Long story short, there is no way of knowing some thing real, healthy about a historical figure we surely know that existed and left tons of stuff a few  hundred years ago, let alone a real human inspiration for a god figure who is supposedly lived 2000 years ago, in a land of thounsands of gods and beliefs where every corner has/had some sort of a legend of a coming saviour at the time. It's just not possible imo.


Modern history is very good at filtering them, yes. But it is also very harsh about what is defined as historical and mythical, exactly because of those myths, legends and crisis' they constantly created in different periods between history and fiction. The question alone can't pass in a modern field, it is not a question of history. It is a matter of faith. Because it doesn't matter if he existed or not. It's belief. I don't want to sound like an ass, I get your curiosity, but the kind of historians after these kind of quests are one step away from Dan Brown. 

[Baruch]

Psychology? No!

Why do we need psychology for the Real Jesus Quest?

No real Jesus of course.  The idea of having a Real Jesus Quest ... is circular logic, it presupposes what it wants to demonstrate.  This is the central weakness of the Jesus Seminar, though that group and their associates are more "realist" than regular Christian apologetics.  The very basis of early Christian experience, we have the Didache.  Crossan gives a good description, in one of his books, of what the Pauline community was like in context.

There can be no anthropology without psychology, it is collective psychology.  The beginning of a whole section of scholarship ...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Varieties_of_Religious_Experience

Without an academic knowledge of folk medicine and shamanism how can one understand the healing stories?  It isn't enough to simply dismiss anything other than JAMA (Journal of the American Medical Association).  One has to understand ancient people from within their own Zeitgeist.  Without Kabbalah/Gnosis ... how can one understand the NT?  Well, for some people, they have no desire to understand the NT.  That is fine.  But then they go on and attack those who do.  This is anti-theism.

[trdsf]

  I would like to recommend two books by former Christian biblical scholar, Bart Ehrman

"Misquoting Jesus" which explains why claiming inerrancy  for the New Testament is not supportable. Hint:  until the fifteenth century and Gutenberg's printing press, all books were 'published' by being copied by hand. Simple errors occurred, plus some scribes would deliberately leave out bits or insert bits. I was astounded to learn, that in those times, it was common that a scribe would be illiterate.IE he could copy what  he saw, but could not read or understand it.

The other is " Did Jesus Exist?" . I've only just started reading this book, but it's promising. Ehrman argues the affirmative .

My own position is;   First century Judea was neck deep in wandering Rabbis. The Romans crucified literally thousands of Jews during Roman occupation. So, it's possible, even likely, that there was a rabbi called something like Yeshua bar Yusuf, that he upset the wrong people and got himself crucified for sedition. For the sake of argument I accept that Jesus existed.

What became the New Testament, and the religion called "Christianity" has little or nothing to do with poor Yeshua bar Yusuf . The book is the mythology of Christianity. Virtually all revered holy books are mythology, not history, imo.

Reference ; "Paul; The Mind Of The Apostle' A N Wilson.

((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((((9)))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))))

Bart Denton Ehrman (/bÉ'ːrt ˈɜːrmÉ™n/; born October 5, 1955) is an American New Testament scholar focusing on textual criticism of the New Testament, the historical Jesus, the origins and development of early Christianity. He has written and edited 30 books, including three college textbooks. He has also authored six New York Times bestsellers. He is currently the James A. Gray Distinguished Professor of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bart_D._Ehrman

Somewhere on YouTube there's a debate between Carrier and Ehrman on the historicity question.  I can't say Carrier convinced me there wasn't a Jesus, but Ehrman definitely failed to convince me there was.  The entire basis for Ehrman's argument was essentially, "Well, we have the bible, therefore there was some sort of Jesus about whom the New Testament was written," which is about on par with saying, "Well, we have the entire Rowling collection, therefore there was some teenaged wizard about whom they were written."

Actually, you could make a better case for Harry Potter on those terms -- those books are a lot more internally consistent.

In any case, I'm not convinced there was no historical Jesus... but neither am I convinced there was, and I'm not sure how much it matters anyway since most churches actually follow the (purported) writings of Paul than the (purported) teachings of Jesus.

[drunkenshoe]

No real Jesus of course.  The idea of having a Real Jesus Quest ... is circular logic, it presupposes what it wants to demonstrate.  This is the central weakness of the Jesus Seminar, though that group and their associates are more "realist" than regular Christian apologetics.  The very basis of early Christian experience, we have the Didache.  Crossan gives a good description, in one of his books, of what the Pauline community was like in context.

There can be no anthropology without psychology, it is collective psychology.  The beginning of a whole section of scholarship ...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Varieties_of_Religious_Experience

Without an academic knowledge of folk medicine and shamanism how can one understand the healing stories?  It isn't enough to simply dismiss anything other than JAMA (Journal of the American Medical Association).  One has to understand ancient people from within their own Zeitgeist.  Without Kabbalah/Gnosis ... how can one understand the NT?  Well, for some people, they have no desire to understand the NT.  That is fine.  But then they go on and attack those who do.  This is anti-theism.

NO. Anthropology is based on facts. Understanding 'varities of religious experience' and its effects on people does not require 'psychology'. If you mean social psychology that deals ends with the individual.

Anthropology doesn't work that way. Archeology doesn't work that way. History doesn't work that way.

Understanding a belief does not require to believe in it; support or attack it. On the contrary, anthropologists often get attacked by ignorant people because the field does not define ANY culture, as 'good or bad' does not matter how abhorrent practices they have according to our understanding. E: By the way this is the exact reason why right wingers keep attacking specifically cultural history, anthropology in general. They hate it with a vengeance. Because it puts them and all those savages in the same place as a culture. LOL 

The scientific method, rationality, basic reasoning do not need psychology to work. That's why they work.

Apart from all that, I do not accept psychology as a scientific discipline. Because there isn't such definition of a scientific field that in 'some ways' scientific and in 'some ways' not. That doesn't mean people don't need it or that accomplishes nothing once in a while. It's human mind and activity which means countless variables... it is bound to get it right more than it actually is. It's Homo Sapiens... ffs.   

     

[Cavebear]

I didn't read the books or watched the videos. But I don't get why people keep looking into history as a discipline; historical events, historical evidence for this. Invalid. It's ridiculous. It's like 'lets play Indiana Jones without the guns'. Anthropology would provide the best approach.

Humans created gods and religions for many reasons -which anthropology explains- and also created middlemen.

When people think about the questions of 'Did Moses or Jesus really exist?' they start with an accumulation of a specific information provided by some sources, first religious text and then try to find historcial ones to support them.

To me the most important problem is that when belief is the subject, they start with already defined characters.

However, if you start with the idea that we actually have zero information about these figures, the evolutions of societies humans created throughout history, would only leave blanks for collective characters of a certain type. That's why Moses is a collective version of hundreds of clan chiefs and ancient deities. When that figure expired, you get Jesus, another figure who is a collective figure of different gods and characters.

There is only a few human characters and a certain set of parables -imagined as their lives- to go around. Abrahamic prophets are all different veersions of few male characters.

You know that how people who believe in horoscopes keep insisting, how good their sign fits them or not exactly because of some effect or this and that? Every one of these people count some human characteristics with different combinations, as if they are uniquely different from each other and talk about how true it is.

And then when you tell them that there are only several basic human characteristics to go around and all these signs are the same bullshit with expressions of different aspects and that of course every body fits in them because there is nothing else to fit in!

Anyway, you get what I mean. So these characters are like horoscopes signs a bit. They are all like each other, but different aspects of a male human roles, -some times deity parts added- is emphasized in each one. 

But trying to look for 'historical' Moses or Jesus, asking if they really existed is like asking an atheist 'Could "the real god" convert you?' Because that 'historical' actually means what kind of a man was the real Jesus, did he really said that, did these...? It's not a valid, reasonable question. It's a quest for faith, not for history.

Why don't you ask the real god?

I repeat your entire post because it is so good...

I would not have explained it that way (because you are you and I am I), but I appreciated it completely.  And so much of it (and maybe all) is true to what we know about human cultural developement.

I've now spent most of my life trying to explain that religions follow human advancement rather than the reverse.  IOW,  in tribes, it was very important not to "covet".  Early humans had to have lived in groups that shared all food and skills.  Any leader would have been only slightly more skilled than the others and more of a first among equals.  A ribal member who took what was used by others would have been a problem.

As humans collected to larger groups, the conflicts would have been greater, so more rules were needed.  We can't say exactly where religion first developed,.  Thunder, lightening, fires, and earthquakes are good possibilities for spirits to perform.  But those wouldn't have initially connected to ethical group rules.  Local disasters would suggest that you had to fear things, but not especially perform any rituals.

I do think that, at some point, pre-scientific peoples, did conclude there were Powers to be propitiated.  "FEAR ME, THE SKY POWER SAID, maybe.  But that doesn't explain why some male leader wouldn't want the fertile women for himself, why you shouldn't take the neighbors crops, or why you should care for your decrepit elders.   Those aren't really religious concerns.

But those ARE matters that would concern any large collection of people living together whether they had a religion or not.  A large group of ancient atheists in one village would have had the same concerns as a village of profoundly religious people across the valley.

6 of the 10 generally judeo-christian commandments have little to do with a deity and much to do with getting alonh in human societies...

5. “Honor your father and your mother.
6. “You shall not murder.
7. “You shall not commit adultery.
8. “You shall not steal.
9. “You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor.
10. “You shall not covet your neighbor’s house; you shall not covet your neighbor’s wife, or his male servant, or his female servant, or his ox, or his donkey, or anything that is your neighbor’s.”

I think it is obvious, for that reason alone, that religious texts follow rather than precede human ideas of how to get along.  We humans developed those ideas on our own as we advanced.  I'll add that since they make sense to the religious and non-religious alike they are (by definition) "not religious".

[Cavebear]

The problem with Carrier is that he assigns probabilities to historical events out of his ass. For Bayes theorem to work you need to know the probability of an outcome. Example: the probability of getting heads on tossing a fair coin is one-half. That's not a guess but a fact. In the case of Carrier, he takes a guess of what is the probability that Jesus resurrected. No matter what number you use, already Bayes theorem will give you a false result. It's a total misuse of the theorem if the input is not back by research, observation or a study of a large group giving you a meaningful stats - example: % of non-believers in the US is 22.8, from the latest survey. What you get is William Lane Craig doing the same as Carrier and comes up with a high probability that Jesus did resurrect.   Both Carrier and Craig are just playing a game of bullshit.

I had to read up on Bayes theorem, and I don't see how his testing ideas apply to religion.  Of all matters of human thought, religion surely has the fewest facts to consider. 

[Cavebear]

Somewhere on YouTube there's a debate between Carrier and Ehrman on the historicity question.  I can't say Carrier convinced me there wasn't a Jesus, but Ehrman definitely failed to convince me there was.  The entire basis for Ehrman's argument was essentially, "Well, we have the bible, therefore there was some sort of Jesus about whom the New Testament was written," which is about on par with saying, "Well, we have the entire Rowling collection, therefore there was some teenaged wizard about whom they were written."

Actually, you could make a better case for Harry Potter on those terms -- those books are a lot more internally consistent.

In any case, I'm not convinced there was no historical Jesus... but neither am I convinced there was, and I'm not sure how much it matters anyway since most churches actually follow the (purported) writings of Paul than the (purported) teachings of Jesus.

I like the basic thrust of your post, but given that the burden of proof is with those who claim a deity, I would say that the logical debate conclusion is very in favor of there not being one.

[Baruch]

NO. Anthropology is based on facts. Understanding 'varities of religious experience' and its effects on people does not require 'psychology'. If you mean social psychology that deals ends with the individual.

Anthropology doesn't work that way. Archeology doesn't work that way. History doesn't work that way.

Understanding a belief does not require to believe in it; support or attack it. On the contrary, anthropologists often get attacked by ignorant people because the field does not define ANY culture, as 'good or bad' does not matter how abhorrent practices they have according to our understanding. E: By the way this is the exact reason why right wingers keep attacking specifically cultural history, anthropology in general. They hate it with a vengeance. Because it puts them and all those savages in the same place as a culture. LOL 

The scientific method, rationality, basic reasoning do not need psychology to work. That's why they work.

Apart from all that, I do not accept psychology as a scientific discipline. Because there isn't such definition of a scientific field that in 'some ways' scientific and in 'some ways' not. That doesn't mean people don't need it or that accomplishes nothing once in a while. It's human mind and activity which means countless variables... it is bound to get it right more than it actually is. It's Homo Sapiens... ffs.   

   

Unfortunately this is incoherent, as I find many of your posts.  I suggest you outline next time, or don't write while drinking ;-)

You seem to have a political-economic ideology and work backward from that to rationalize your conclusions.  Whatever names one gives it.

Your commitment to Plato seems total.  And that much is consistent with your Plato's Republic version of society, so popular with intellectuals and authoritarians of all types.