Was there a 'historical Jesus'? -- GakuseiDon vs. Malachi151

[KnightWhoSaysNi]

This thread has been set up for a formal debate between GakuseiDon and Malachi151 who will debate the following resolution:

"Resolved: the evidence shows that the Jesus of the letters of Paul, the Gospels and other New Testament works was a real live person."

GakuseiDon will affirm and Malachi151 will oppose. The debate will tentatively have three rounds and GakuseiDon will go first, per the parameters (http://www.iidb.org/vbb/showpost.php?p=4952506&postcount=7).

A Peanut Gallery (http://www.iidb.org/vbb/showthread.php?p=4954268#post4954268) is set up in the Biblical Criticism & History forum for the rest of us to comment on the debate.

Enjoy the debate!

- KWSN, FD Moderator

Addendum (Nov. 27): GakuseiDon and Malachi151 have agreed to end the debate at 3 rounds.

[GakuseiDon]

I'd like to thank Malachi for participating in this debate, and to KnightWhoSaysNi for setting up this thread and doing the moderating chores.

The debate question is: "What is the evidence that the Jesus of the letters of Paul, the Gospels, and other New Testament works was a real live person?" The guidelines state that the debate is "limited purely to positive evidence for the existence of a historical Jesus; it does not include anything to do with any evidence or argument for a mythical Jesus."

I think that putting the emphasis on the positive evidence for a historical Jesus is an excellent choice. Debates on this topic inevitably get bogged down on negative evidence -- i.e. what early authors didn't say -- rather than examining what they did say. Since what is missing is often gospel details, such debates end up being about the Gospel Jesus rather than the shadowy figure that is the historical Jesus.

In this debate, I will concentrate on the positive evidence that I believe shows that the early Christian writers regarded Jesus as a real live person. I have no problems with Malachi bringing in negative evidence, but I only ask that he builds a case to demonstrate it is negative evidence relevant to the debate topic. For example, it would be no good to claim that Paul should have written that Jesus performed miracles, since a miracle-wielding Jesus is not a requirement for historicity.

What is the evidence for a real live Jesus at the start of Christianity? It is a reasonable question, because there is very little direct evidence. Jesus, if he existed at all, didn't leave behind any writings or monuments. He didn't win any battles, or rule any country. Richard Carrier writes that:
"[W]e have no reason to expect any historical record of a HJ. We are lucky to have any sources at all from that time and place, and those sources do not record every movement or its founder. Indeed, consider Josephus: though we know the names of about thirty sects of Judaism, Josephus only mentions about six (and says next to nothing about most of them, and neglects to discuss the founders of any of them, except perhaps the Zealots)."

If Jesus ever existed, he has largely been lost in the passage of time. This unfortunately leaves us with a 'minimal' Jesus. By 'minimal', I mean that we can't know much about him with certainty. Of course, that doesn't mean that Jesus didn't do very much -- for all we know, many of the stories told about him are true -- but it means that much about his life will always be speculation.

But this debate isn't about trying to prove how much we know about Jesus, or how many of the stories about him are true. It's to see if there is reasonable positive evidence to conclude that there was a historical Jesus at the start of Christianity.

I would like to begin this post by looking at the writings of those people who were there near the start. Along the way, I think it will be useful to try to understand the thought-processes behind such writings by placing them in the context of that time.

Let's start with some background information about First Century beliefs.

Around the First Century CE, some Jewish writers wrote about an amazing man. He was pre-existing, "prepared before the foundation of the world", that he might become the mediator of God's covenant. He addressed supplications and prayers on behalf of Israel to God, entreating God to pardon their sins. He enacted a new covenant with God, and after he died, he was changed, given a new body, and taken to Heaven.

That man was Moses.

Writers like Philo of Alexandria (http://www.earlyjewishwritings.com/text/philo/book25.html) and the author of "The Testament of Moses" (http://www.piney.com/Testament-Moses.html) depicted a Moses as a pre-existing figure with a special relationship with God, someone worthy of mediating a new covenant with God.

Paul also believed that Jesus was a pre-existing being who brought in a new covenant. I'll expand on these ideas below, but an additional key to Paul is understanding that he didn't just believe that Jesus was a new kind of Moses. He also believed that this Jesus was also the Christ -- in fact, a Christ for the gentiles as well as for Israel. And the only way to convince people that Jesus fulfilled that role was by tying him back to the Hebrew Scriptures.

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Hebrew Scriptures as source

The Hebrew Scriptures was a major source in the Jews' understanding of the expected Messiah. The Jesus being pushed by early Christians had to be "found" in the Scriptures. We can see the incredible focus on this in the writings of early Christians, continuing even into the Third Century CE and beyond. But at the start of Christianity itself, when it was struggling for validity, such an exercise would have been crucial. It simply wasn't enough to show that Christ was a "good person" favoured by God, like a Honi the Circle-Drawer; he had to be shown to be the one about whom the Scriptures prophesized.

The pressure to refer back to Scriptures cannot be overstated. We can see examples in early literature:

Acts 17:11
"They searched the Scriptures day by day to check up on Paul and Silas' statements, to see if they were really so."
Ignatius:
http://www.earlychristianwritings.com/text/ignatius-philadelphians-roberts.html
"When I heard some saying, If I do not find it in the ancient Scriptures, I will not believe the Gospel; on my saying to them, It is written, they answered me, That remains to be proved."

Justin Martyr, First Apology, Chap 53:
"For with what reason should we believe of a crucified man that He is the first-born of the unbegotten God, and Himself will pass judgment on the whole human race, unless we had found testimonies concerning Him published before He came and was born as man."
Now, this pressure undoubtedly meant that early events concerning Jesus were recast along Scriptural lines, if not fabricated wholecloth. It casts doubt on the veracity of much of what we see in early Christian writings regarding Jesus. Even if we assume that actual events were restyled to portray Jesus as being prefigured in the Scriptures, the chances of extracting such historical events from those writings are small. There are some textual analysis tools that we can use, but even these provide probabilities, not certainties.

However, for purposes of a 'minimal' historical Jesus, I think there is enough evidence to suggest that Paul had in mind a person who was:
1. Born on earth
2. Crucified in Jerusalem
3. Lived in Paul's near past.

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1. Born on earth

Paul has Jesus as the descendent of Abraham and of David. Also, Romans 9:
"3 For I could wish that I myself were accursed from Christ for my brethren, my *countrymen according to the flesh, 4 who are Israelites, to whom pertain the adoption, the glory, the covenants, the giving of the law, the service of God, and the promises; 5 of whom are the fathers and from whom, according to the flesh, Christ came."

If nothing else, this is prima facie evidence that he regarded Jesus as someone who was born on earth and lived in history at some point.

Reasonable alternatives?

I'll list some common counter-points as I go along.

(1) "Such passages are interpolations" -- Interpolations are always possible, so this can't be ruled out. I'm not aware that this is thought to be the case in all the relevent passages, however.
(2) "Paul meant something else, like 'spiritual' descendent" -- again, it can't be ruled out, but I'm not aware of any compelling reason why Paul didn't mean actual descendent in those passages, short of assuming it in the first place.

At this point, I should point out that there are always possible counter-points that could be raised. The question is whether the counter-points are reasonable. I can't state conclusively that they can be ruled out as impossible, but only that as far as I know, I'm not aware of any counter-point that is more reasonable to the face reading of the "seed" passages.

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2. Crucified in Jerusalem

First, Paul says that Christ "crucified" is a stumbling block:
1Cr 1:23 But we preach Christ crucified, unto the Jews a stumbling block, and unto the Greeks foolishness
Then, he quotes scriptures to say that the stumbling block was in Zion (Jerusalem):
Rom 9:32 For they [Israel] stumbled at that stumbling stone.
Rom 9:33 As it is written: "Behold, I lay in Zion a stumbling stone and rock of offense, And whoever believes on Him will not be put to shame".
Next, he quotes scriptures to say that the Deliverer will come out of Zion, in terms of a new covenant. This strongly identifies the "Deliverer" with Jesus:
Rom 11:26 And so all Israel will be saved, as it is written: "The Deliverer will come out of Zion, And He will turn away ungodliness from Jacob
Rom 11:27 For this [is] my covenant unto them, when I shall take away their sins".

Reasonable alternatives?

(1) Someone suggested that Paul was talking about the Heavenly Jerusalem. But for this reading to be valid, it would have to mean that Satan actually entered the Heavenly Jerusalem and crucified Jesus there, which seems very unlikely. At least, I've never seen anyone present evidence of such. Satan is the god of "this world" -- the Heavenly Jerusalem is not part of this world.
(2) Someone else mentioned that Paul got the information from Scriptures, therefore it isn't historical. But this argument is circular. Even if he got this from Scriptures, the passages suggest that Paul regarded Jesus as being crucified in Jerusalem. But I'm not aware of any compelling argument that Paul didn't believe this, other than assuming it in the first place.
(3) Could it be allegorical? The context doesn't seem to support it. Paul clearly believes that Jesus was crucified and was a deliverer. The context doesn't support an allegorical interpretation in those passages above.

I think that the most natural reading is that Paul believed that Jesus was crucified in Jerusalem.

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3. Lived in Paul's near past

Paul places Jesus's death in the past: (Note: the following list and comments have been taken from posts by Ben C Smith -- used with permission):

1. Jesus must have lived after Adam, since Paul calls him the latter Adam (1 Corinthians 15.22, 45).

2. Jesus must have lived after Abraham, since Paul calls him the seed (descendant) of Abraham (Galatians 3.16).

3. Jesus must have lived after Moses, since Paul says that he was the end of the law of Moses (Romans 10.4-5).

4. Jesus must have lived after David, since Paul calls him the seed (descendant) of David (Romans 1.4).

Evidence that Paul regarded Jesus as having lived recently, within living memory, as an older contemporary:

1. Paul believes he is living in the end times (1 Corinthians 10.11), that he himself (1 Thessalonians 4.15; 1 Corinthians 15.51) or at least his converts (1 Thessalonians 5.23; 2 Corinthians 4.14) might well live to see the parousia. Paul also believes that the resurrection of Jesus was not just an ordinary resuscitation of the kind Elijah or Elisha supposedly wrought; it was the first instance of the general resurrection from the dead at the end of the age (1 Corinthians 15.13, 20-28). When, then, does Paul think Jesus rose from the dead? If, for Paul, he rose from the dead at some point in the indeterminate past, then we must explain either (A) why Paul thought the general resurrection had begun (with Jesus) well before the end times or (B) why Paul regarded the end times as a span of time stretching from the misty past all the way to the present. If, however, Paul regarded the resurrection of Jesus as a recent phenomenon, all is explained. The resurrection of Jesus was the beginning of the general resurrection and thus the ultimate sign that the end times were underway.

2. Paul expects that he might see the general resurrection in his own lifetime (1 Corinthians 15.51). He also calls Jesus the firstfruits of that resurrection. Since the firstfruits of the harvest precede the main harvest itself by only a short time, the very metaphor works better with a short time between the resurrection of Jesus and the resurrection of the rest of the dead, implying that the resurrection of Jesus was recent for Paul.

3. There is, for Paul, no generation gap between the death of Jesus and the resurrection of Jesus (1 Corinthians 15.4). Furthermore, there is no generation gap between the recipients of the resurrection appearances and Paul himself; he is personally acquainted with the first recipient of a resurrection appearance (1 Corinthians 15.5; Galatians 1.18). Is there a gap between the resurrection and the first appearance? The flow of 1 Corinthians 15.3-8 would certainly not suggest one; however, I believe we can go further.

Paul claims that Jesus was the end of the law for those who have faith (Romans 10.4), that he was raised from the dead in order to justify humans (Romans 4.25), and that this justification comes by faith (Romans 5.1) in Jesus (Romans 3.22). Paul also claims that no one can have faith unless he first hears the gospel from a preacher (Romans 10.14) who is sent (Romans 10.15). Finally, Paul acknowledges that it was at the present time (Romans 3.26) that God showed forth his justice apart from the law (Romans 3.21), and that the sent ones, the apostles, were to come last of all (1 Corinthians 4.9); he also implies that the resurrection appearances were the occasion of the sending out of apostles (1 Corinthians 9.1; 15.7, 9; Galatians 1.15-16). If we presume that, for Paul, Jesus was raised in the distant past but only recently revealed to the apostles, we must take pains to account for this gap; why, for Paul, did Jesus die in order to end the law and justify humans but then wait indefinitely before making this justification available to humans? If, however, we presume that, for Paul, Jesus was raised recently, shortly before appearing to all the apostles, all is explained. That was the right time (Romans 5.6).

4. Paul writes that God sent forth his son to redeem those under the law in the fullness of time (Galatians 4.4). It is easier to suppose that, for Paul, the fullness of time had some direct correspondence to the end of the ages (1 Corinthians 10.11) than to imagine that the fullness of time came, Jesus died, and then everybody had to wait another long expanse of time for the death to actually apply to humanity.

Reasonable alternatives?

Perhaps the "current age" had lasted from the start of time? It's possible, but a more recent death seems the most likely explanation. At the least, Paul seems to have believed that Jesus came some time after Moses, if not died close to Paul's own time.

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Jesus and Moses

As I noted earlier, the Moses figure in First Century thought appeared to incorporate many of the attributes that Paul found in Jesus:
* Pre-existence: "prepared before the foundation of the world" (http://www.piney.com/Testament-Moses.html)
* Mediator of God's Covenant (this and next points can be found in Philo (http://www.earlyjewishwritings.com/text/philo/book25.html))
* Given a new body
* Taken to Heaven

Paul appeared to see Christ as coming after Adam and Moses, and somehow affecting the significance of the law that Moses brought:
"Romans 5:12 Therefore, just as through one man sin entered the world, and death through sin, and thus death spread to all men, because all sinned--
13 (For until the law sin was in the world, but sin is not imputed when there is no law.
14 Nevertheless death reigned from Adam to Moses, even over those who had not sinned according to the likeness of the transgression of Adam, who is a type of Him who was to come."

Finally, Paul describes how the Israelites were "baptized into Moses (eis Moseus)" (1 Cor 10:2), using terminology similar to that about Christians being "baptized into Christ (eis christon)" (Gal 3:27).

It's clear that Paul didn't see Jesus as a normal human being. But we can't automatically determine from this alone that Paul regarded Jesus as an ahistorical being -- a spiritual being outside time and/or how didn't appear on earth. Clearly Moses represents a precedent for how Paul and the early Christians viewed Jesus, and that was someone whom they regarded as being a historical figure.

In the next section I will discuss Paul's "Spiritual Jesus".

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The Spiritual Jesus

Paul lived in a time when it was believed that demons filled the air, and Satan was the god of this world. Paul and the early Christians saw themselves as being involved in a war: not between Jews and Romans, but between spiritual powers. Paul emphasises this struggle often, and saw it as a battle in full view of those spiritual forces:
"for we are made a spectacle unto the world, and to angels, and to men" (1 Cor. 4:9).
Paul saw that Jesus aided in this battle. There is no question that Paul believed that the post-resurrection spiritual Jesus who now existed in heaven was the most important spiritual force in this battle (short of God). So it is not unexpected that his writings should reflect this belief by focusing on the spiritual Jesus.

In what is generally thought to be a pre-Pauline hymn, Paul gives some interesting details:
Phil 2
3 Let nothing be done through selfish ambition or conceit, but in lowliness of mind let each esteem others better than himself.
4 Let each of you look out not only for his own interests, but also for the interests of others.
5 Let this mind be in you which was also in Christ Jesus,
6 who, being in the form of God, did not consider it robbery to be equal with God,
7 but made Himself of no reputation, taking the form of a bondservant, and coming in the likeness of men.
8 And being found in appearance as a man, He humbled Himself and became obedient to the point of death, even the death of the cross.
9 Therefore God also has highly exalted Him and given Him the name which is above every name,
10 that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, of those in heaven, and of those on earth, and of those under the earth,
11 and that every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.

Here, Paul gives the three stages that standard Christianity believes reflects Jesus's life:
1. A pre-existing spirit Jesus
2. Who then comes in the likeness of men, humbling himself, being obedient, and dying on the cross
3. And finally ascending to heaven to be exalted (arguable for humbling himself)

Paul often uses "spiritual" or "mystical" language to express the Christian's relationship with the post-resurrection spiritual Jesus. It's worth noting that other early Christian writers, including Second Century "historicist" writers used the same style of language. While they may well have copied this from Paul, I'm not sure how this could be proved. The prima facie case is that such "mystical" language was used by early Christians to describe a spiritual Christ without necessarily being an indication in a belief in ahistoricity.

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Conclusion

1. There is a precedent for a pre-existing figure who was a mediator for God. That figure was Moses, who was regarded as a historical person to First Century CE Jews.
2. There was enormous pressure on the early Christians to "find" Jesus in the Hebrew Scriptures. Early Christian writings are full of allusions and quotes from the Old Testament. This focus was undoubtedly a response to trying to prove that Jesus was the predicted Messiah when Christianity was struggling to establish its validity.
3. Early Christians used "mystical" terms to describe Christ. This also included writers who regarded Jesus as historical.
4. Paul appears to believe that Jesus was a person born as a descendent of historical people, was crucified in Jerusalem, and died at some point after Moses, possibly in his near past.

[Malachi151]

Thanks GakuseiDon for this debate.

What I would like this debate to cover is all of the evidence that is believed to support the existence of a real Jesus. This is not limited just to scritpures, but can, and I hope will, also include extra-scriptural sources as well.

There are many different pieces of information that are claimed by theologians and scholars to support the existence of a real live Jesus. Evidences put forward include passages from Paul, like those which have been highlighted by GakuseiDon, the Gospels themselves, the supposed dedication of the apostles, which it is claimed would only happen if these people were really followers of the "real Jesus", and writings such as those from Tacitus and Josephus which mention Jesus.

I believe that all such pieces of evidence can be shown to be lacking in their ability to affirm that the "Jesus Christ" of Christianity actually existed.

I feel that the letters of Paul, regardless of Paul's concept of Jesus Christ, (as human or spiritual) demonstrate a lack of knowledge of a historical person. I will address this in further detail below.

I feel that the Gospels can be shown to be based ultimately on scriptures and that all narratives about the life of Jesus can be traced back to the Gospel of Mark, which itself is based on scritpures. This strongly undermines the Gospels as historical accounts, and also undermines the idea that there were historical accounts to go on, since there was a such a heavy use of scripture and such a reliance on a single fictional account. We do not see truly independent "witness" to a historical figure that diverges from the fictional narrative established in Mark within any of the Gospels.

I feel that essentially all of the writings about the apostles, outside of the letters of Paul, are basically fictional, and thus don't really tell us anything about what the supposed early followers of Jesus really did in the first place, and that even if the martyrdom accounts of the supposed twelve disciples were true, that this would not be any kind of proof that these people were martyrs only because they had personally met Jesus Christ.

I feel that there are only two non-Christian source which may be seen as even relevant to the discussion of the historical existence of Jesus, and those are the passage by Tacitus in Annals, and the two well known passages in the works of Josephus. I think that it can reasonably be concluded that the passage by Tacitus is authentic, but that it merely reflects tradition, not fact. I think that the passages by Josephus can be shown to either be later additions to the texts, misunderstandings, or authentic passages by Josephus which were themselves based on Gospel traditions not facts.

Since GakuseiDon has chosen to first focus on the letters of Paul, I will now go into a more detailed assessment of those sources.

The first thing to establish is what constitutes evidence. While GakuseiDon has put forward arguments that Paul conceived of Christ as human, I do not consider this to be a form of evidence, or at least not a powerful enough form of evidence.

I consider this point, if it itself can be established, to be supportive, or at least not detractive, to the claim that Jesus really existed, but by itself it cannot establish this as a fact.

Even if we assume that Paul conceived of Jesus as earthly, this does not mean that he really existed, any more than the fact that the Greeks conceived of Hercules and Achilles as earthly establishes their existence.

It is not required to show that "someone" is or was conceived of in purely supernatural terms in order to show that such a figure is not historical. Indeed the bulk of fictional and legendary characters are portrayed as earthly beings.

So right from the beginning GakuseiDon and I have a conflict in our view of the evidence and our view of what it takes to establish historicity. Keep in mind that I am not requiring GakuseiDon to establish historicity, only to establish that each given piece of evidence is indeed a convincing piece of positive evidence that could be used in any argument for historicity, i.e. that the evidence being presented can support an argument for historicity, though the argument for historicity does not need to be given here.

As GakuseiDon points out, there was already a scriptural basis for a belief in an earthly Messiah. Thus, this aspect of the "Christ" persona was already prefigured. Because of this, there was of course a reason for viewing and presenting Christ in such a way.

1. Born on the earth:

The passage cited by GakuseiDon comes from Romans 9. Here is a fuller quotation from the NRSV:

Romans 9:
3 For I could wish that I myself were accursed and cut off from Christ for the sake of my brothers, my kindred according to the flesh. 4 They are Israelites, and to them belong the adoption, the glory, the covenants, the giving of the law, the worship, and the promises; 5 to them belong the patriarchs, and from them, according to the flesh, comes the Messiah,* who is over all, God blessed for ever.* Amen.

6 It is not as though the word of God had failed. For not all Israelites truly belong to Israel, 7 and not all of Abraham’s children are his true descendants; but ‘It is through Isaac that descendants shall be named after you.’ 8 This means that it is not the children of the flesh who are the children of God, but the children of the promise are counted as descendants. 9 For this is what the promise said, ‘About this time I will return and Sarah shall have a son.’ 10 Nor is that all; something similar happened to Rebecca when she had conceived children by one husband, our ancestor Isaac. 11 Even before they had been born or had done anything good or bad (so that God’s purpose of election might continue, 12 not by works but by his call) she was told, ‘The elder shall serve the younger.’ 13 As it is written,
‘I have loved Jacob,
but I have hated Esau.’

14 What then are we to say? Is there injustice on God’s part? By no means! 15 For he says to Moses,
‘I will have mercy on whom I have mercy,
and I will have compassion on whom I have compassion.’
16 So it depends not on human will or exertion, but on God who shows mercy. 17 For the scripture says to Pharaoh, ‘I have raised you up for the very purpose of showing my power in you, so that my name may be proclaimed in all the earth.’ 18So then he has mercy on whomsoever he chooses, and he hardens the heart of whomsoever he chooses.

I'm not familiar enough with this passage to even address any possibility of interpolation, but I don't think that such as argument is needed anyway.

If we assume that "according to the flesh" in line 5 is authentic, all that this establishes is that Paul knew of the traditional view of the Messiah as being a descendant of the Jews. But such a belief was the typical view anyway, derived from the scriptures. The same goes for the rest of the examples presented.

What is lacking in the letters of Paul, is any description of Jesus that does not come from the scritpures.

GakuseiDon has done a good job of framing this issue by saying that people interpreted reality through the scritpures, and while this may be true, we are still lacking in evidence that is not itself derived from the scritpures.

The argument can certainly state that the reason that the real live historical Jesus was considered to be the Messiah is because his life corresponded in every way to the scriptures, thus the real Jesus and the scriptural Jesus are indistinguishable, but what we still lack then is some evidence for the real Jesus which can separate scriptural Jesus from historical Jesus. We are left with the assumption that historical Jesus parallels scriptural Jesus, but there is no basis for this assumption other than tradition.

So, in order to make this case, I think that evidence which cannot be said to be derived from scritpures will have to be presented, or you can argue that my criteria are unreasonable.

Where does Paul convince us that he knows something about this person which he didn't learn from reading the Hebrew Bible?

What other evidence, aside from Paul, supports the existence of a real live Jesus?

[GakuseiDon]

In this my second post, I will: (1) clarify the Debate Parameters in light of Malachi's comments on evidence, (2) respond to Malachi's comments about Paul, (3) look at how the Gospels were perceived, and (4) look at several other early Christian sources.

Debate Parameters

In the classic British TV Series "Fawlty Towers", Mrs. Richards is in her Torquay beachside hotel bedroom, complaining to Basil Fawlty about the view from her window:

Mrs. Richards: "When I pay for a view, I expect to see something more interesting than that" (pointing to the view of Torquay).
Basil Fawlty: "That is Torquay, madam."
Mrs. Richards: "Well, that's not good enough."
Basil Fawlty: "Well, might I ask what you expected to see out of a Torquay hotel bedroom window? Sydney Opera House, perhaps? The hanging gardens of Babylon? Herds of wildebeest sweeping majestically..."
Mrs. Richards: "Don't be ridiculous. I expect to be able to see the sea."
Basil Fawlty: "You *can* see the sea. It's over there between the land and the sky."
Mrs. Richards: "I'd need a telescope to see that."

Both are right, from their own perspective: Mrs. Richards, by pointing out that the view isn't to her expectations and so doesn't constitute a real view; and Fawlty, by pointing out that a view exists nonetheless.

I think that Malachi and I have a similar disagreement, when he writes (my emphasis):
The first thing to establish is what constitutes evidence. While GakuseiDon has put forward arguments that Paul conceived of Christ as human, I do not consider this to be a form of evidence, or at least not a powerful enough form of evidence.

I consider this point, if it itself can be established, to be supportive, or at least not detractive, to the claim that Jesus really existed, but by itself it cannot establish this as a fact.
I agree with Malachi. I'll go further: I don't think evidence exists that establishes Jesus's existence as a fact. If the debate topic was "Resolved: It is a fact that Jesus was a real live person", then I'm more than happy to say I'd lose. But it isn't. The debate parameters are defined thusly (my emphasis below):
http://www.iidb.org/vbb/showpost.php?p=4952506&postcount=7
"Resolved: the evidence shows that Jesus of the letters of Paul, the Gospels, and other New Testament works was a real live person...

"The debate will focus on what is a reasonable interpretation of evidence purported to support the existence of a "historical Jesus"... The debate does not mean that one has to argue that the Gospels are factual or that any specific aspect of the New Testament canon is factual; only that these documents are based on the life of some real person, however distorted they may or may not be."
As per the parameters, it is about a reasonable interpretation of the evidence. In my first post, I presented data to argue that Paul believed that Jesus was a descendent of supposed historical people, crucified in Jerusalem, and probably died in Paul's near past. While this may not have been enough to establish it **as a fact**, I don't see that Malachi has engaged the data to show that it isn't **a reasonable interpretation**.

I'm more than happy to admit to being an interested amateur in the field of early Christianity. I am a hobbyist and nothing more. But when I read how scholars aren't particularly interested in the question of the existence of a historical Jesus, I understand it. There is very little data there. (I find Second Century CE Christian writings much more interesting, simply because there is more data to work from.) None of the data we do have is certain. All of it can be questioned. But it comes down to what we would regard as a **reasonable interpretation** of each piece of data.

I think it is reasonable to conclude from the little data I present that Jesus was a real live person. I also have no problems with people who are "historical Jesus-agnostic" if they believe that the evidence for historicism isn't strong enough to come down one way or the other. I suspect that many of the scholars that hold this latter view are the ones who aren't interested in the question of Jesus's historicity, simply because there isn't enough data to meaningfully discuss the question. And again, that is a reasonable position to take.

A well-formed ahistorical argument would be enough to overturn historicity. Such an argument faces the same test as the historical argument: working from the same small set of data, and needing to provide a reasonable interpretation from that data. Since this debate isn't about ahistoricism, I won't comment further on this. I will simply note that, in the data, we meet a historical Jesus at every turn. It isn't that the cumulative case for a historical Jesus is so strong, it is that the data (such as we have) tends to support such a conclusion more strongly.

Malachi's comments about Paul

Malachi writes:
Even if we assume that Paul conceived of Jesus as earthly, this does not mean that he really existed, any more than the fact that the Greeks conceived of Hercules and Achilles as earthly establishes their existence.
That's true, if Paul regarded Jesus as someone who existed in the distant past. It becomes less true if Paul thought that Jesus was a contemporary. For example, if the passage about Jesus appearing to James and others are original to Paul, and Paul actually met James and some others, this would strongly suggest that Jesus was a contemporary of Paul in time. Paul's description of an "earthly" Jesus gain much more weight.

Malachi writes:
What is lacking in the letters of Paul, is any description of Jesus that does not come from the scritpures
There have been threads on IIDB where people are challenged to 'prove' things by using passages from the Bible (e.g. 'dogs must be kept inside'), and often they are able to find a reference. It is an interesting game, and no doubt played by the early Christians as well. How often has it been noted that the 'prophecies' relating to Jesus have been taken out of context, or poorly interpreted by Christians in order to apply to Jesus? If they were actually getting the data from Scriptures rather than retrospectively trying to fit it, why does the matching appear so adhoc?

So how about: Where did Paul get the crucifixion of the Messiah from? Which is more likely: That Paul 'found' the crucifixion in those passages, or that he searched for passages to confirm an already existing idea?

Gospels and genre

The "Superman scenario" goes like this: In the distant future, a Superman comic is found. People wonder whether the main character Clark Kent was a real person or not, since he is shown as interacting with known historical people. Some conclude that he may have been real, postulating that his remarkable abilities were mythological developments.

The parallel is then drawn with the gospels, specifically the Gospel of Mark, as an example of a work of fiction being treated as historical.

This scenario I think is a useful one. In the scenario, people make a false conclusion because they don't recognise the genre. They lack the capacity to understand the work in its original context. The argument goes that someone born into the same culture would have recognized the genre for what it is.

I think the same should be applied to the Gospels. How did the people of the time view them?

While the Gospels are not biographies or histories in the sense that we know them today -- I see them as more like Anne Rice's latest fictional work about Jesus -- they were treated as memoirs by Justin Martyr, and as having some truth in them by Celsus (Origen accuses Celsus of believing "the Gospel accounts only where he pleases"). There is no record that they were recognized as being works of fiction as far as I can see, even by the people of that time.

Malachi writes:
I feel that the Gospels can be shown to be based ultimately on scriptures and that all narratives about the life of Jesus can be traced back to the Gospel of Mark, which itself is based on scritpures. This strongly undermines the Gospels as historical accounts, and also undermines the idea that there were historical accounts to go on, since there was a such a heavy use of scripture and such a reliance on a single fictional account...

I feel that essentially all of the writings about the apostles, outside of the letters of Paul, are basically fictional
If Paul's letters are genuine, and represent (as I argued in my first post) a belief in a 'real live Jesus' crucified in Paul's recent past, how can Malachi decide that the Gospels are fictional with respects to Jesus as a 'real live person'? Is this not the same person as Paul's, however distorted? So if Paul was NOT writing fiction, then aren't the Gospels based on an actual person?

Note that I'm not saying that they are historically accurate, nor that they weren't plays or stories. But like Anne Rice's fiction book about Jesus, arguably they were positioned as works about an actual person. If they were fiction about a "non-actual" person, it doesn't appear to have been recognized by anyone. I'd be curious to see if Malachi has evidence to suggest if this is not the case, and why no-one picked up on it in his next post.

Does this establish Jesus as a fact? No. But I suggest that a reasonable interpretation is that the Gospel of Mark was constructed around a person whom they genuinely thought lived in the days of Pilate.

Papias

The fragments of the writings of Papias (http://www.earlychristianwritings.com/text/papias.html) retained in later works suggest a link going back to an actual Jesus. Papias wrote about some of Jesus's disciples, and about Judas and his rather bizarre death, which is at odds to the Gospel accounts.

Again, does this establish Jesus as a fact? No. As I mentioned in my first post, I can't rule out interpolations, etc, as possibilities. But this data exists to show an early belief in an actual Jesus.

Tacitus

Malachi writes:
"I think that it can reasonably be concluded that the passage by Tacitus is authentic, but that it merely reflects tradition, not fact."
I agree that Tacitus probably received his information from the Christians in his day. But why would Christians have claimed that Pilate crucified Pilate in the first place? Because they DIDN'T believe this to be the case?

If the passage in Tacitus is authentic, it shows an early belief in an actual Jesus. If the Christians had changed their minds from an earlier ahistoricist belief, I'm not aware of any evidence to that effect. Occam's razor would suggest that, in the absence of any evidence to the contrary, we can assume that the Christians held the same belief as from the time that Paul wrote to the Romans. (Of course, beliefs can evolve. If the evolution from "non-historicity" to "historicity" is more likely than the reverse, then my argument loses force).

Does this establish Jesus as a fact? No. But as part of a cumulative case it is evidence for the historicist side rather than the ahistoricist.

Ebionites

To quote the Catholic Encyclopedia (http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/05242c.htm):
"The doctrines of this sect are said by Irenaeus to be like those of Cerinthus and Carpocrates. They denied the Divinity and the virginal birth of Christ; they clung to the observance of the Jewish Law; they regarded St. Paul as an apostate, and used only a Gospel according to St. Matthew (Adv. Haer., I, xxvi, 2; III, xxi, 2; IV, xxxiii, 4; V, i, 3)."
The Ebionites traditionally claimed James "The Just", the same James that Paul met, as one of their leaders. Does this establish Jesus as a fact? No, but again it gives us a view of early Christianity that aids us in developing an idea of how it started, with an actual person at its core.


Conclusion

If some hypothetical scholar without knowledge of Christianity picked up the writings referred to in this debate so far, would that scholar be justified in concluding that there was an actual person Jesus at the core of Christianity? I think they would. I suspect the picture they would develop of early Christianity would match that which we have today:

1. Paul appears to refer to a historical Jesus, crucified in Jerusalem and probably in his near past.
2. Paul established a church in Rome, and these Roman Christians later tell Tacitus about their beliefs in an actual Jesus crucified under Pilate.
3. Paul meets James, a person belonging to a church which evolved into the Ebionites. The Ebionites appear to believe that Christ was an actual person who was not divine.
4. The Gospels are written, presenting Jesus as the prophesized Messiah, and using references to Scriptures to prove this. No-one appears to question that the Gospels are presenting someone as an actual person who existed, not even non-Christians like Celsus.
5. Fragments in Papias attest to how the oral tradition from the early disciples was passed down to his time, including the death of Judas.

All points to an actual person at the centre of Christianity. I agree that none of this can be established as "fact", but I think it can be defended as being a reasonable interpretation of the evidence.

[KnightWhoSaysNi]

Malachi151 has requested that the deadline for his next statement be extended to Nov. 28. I have agreed to grant his request.

KWSN, FD Moderator

[Malachi151]

Note: I have had to limit my quotations of GakuseiDon in order to meet the 5,000 word limit.

Again, what we are looking for here is the evidence which can support the existence of a real live historical Jesus that lived during the reign of Pilate and was crucified by Pilate, etc., upon which the Christian religion was then built.

In regard to the letters of Paul, and what constitutes evidence, I'm not debating what evidence we should or should not expect to find, merely what the evidence is and what we do have.

Comments about Paul

There are things that could be present in the letters of Paul which would be powerful evidence for the existence of a real live Jesus.

For example, if the letters of Paul contained authentic passages which said something like, "I saw Jesus one day as he was walking through Jerusalem attracting crowds of people," or "A friend of mine met Jesus," or "Cephas told me about the time that he spent with Jesus," etc., these things would clearly be strongly supportive of a historical Jesus. Yet, Paul says nothing like this, the closest thing being his telling of the Eucharist ritual in 1 Corinthians. The mention of Paul meeting "James, the Lord's brother" is frequently cited as such a statement, however there is a mountain of evidence on the other side to show that this statement can't be talking about a real literal brother of Jesus. If it were, however, then this would be powerful evidence.

Likewise, if Paul said things like, "Jesus is an eternal spirit who has always lived in the Heavens, where he was crucified by Belair," then this would be a statement that solidly supports the view that Jesus never existed at all.

Unfortunately, we don't have anything so clear one way or the other from Paul.

In trying to ascertain what the actual evidence is, we can't simply suggest that having solid evidence is unreasonable and that therefore, spurious evidence rises to the level of solid evidence. Not expecting solid evidence doesn't make solid evidence out of questionable evidence.

Furthermore, people can easily genuinely believe in the actual existence of people or things that never in fact existed and they can believe in the occurrence of events that never in fact took place.

A person's belief in the reality of an event doesn't indicate that the event was reality.

This is very important to keep in mind when addressing the reception of the Gospels and the understanding of Jesus by the early apologists.

I fully agree that the apologists and most everyone that we have any knowledge of treated "Jesus" as "real" in some fashion or another. Again, however, many of these same people treated Zeus as real in some fashion or another as well.

There is no doubt really that by the Second Century Jesus was universally regarded as "real". What "real" meant was different for different people. The Manichæan sect, who called themselves Christians, regarded Jesus Christ as the very real sun.

The Manichæans have supposed that the Lord Christ is that sun which is visible to carnal eyes, exposed and public to be seen, not only by men, but by the beasts. But the right faith of the Catholic Church rejects such a fiction, and perceives it to be a devilish doctrine: not only by believing acknowledges it to be such, but in the case of whom it can, proves it even by reasoning. Let us therefore reject this kind of error, which the Holy Church has anathematized from the beginning. Let us not suppose that the Lord Jesus Christ is this sun which we see rising from the east, setting in the west; to whose course succeeds night, whose rays are obscured by a cloud, which removes from place to place by a set motion: the Lord Christ is not such a thing as this. The Lord Christ is not the sun that was made, but He by whom the sun was made. For"all things were made by Him, and without Him was nothing made."

http://www.newadvent.org/fathers/1701034.htm

Others regarded him as a very real phantom, a very real spirit, a very real ordinary human being, a very real son of God, etc. We simply have to accept that the understanding of reality was quite different at that time and is not comparable to our modern standards.

Likewise, when we look at historians like Tacitus and Josephus we find that even they considered events such as the healing of a blind man with the spit of the emperor absolutely fact, as well as the presence of large armies fighting in the clouds.

Poorly fitting Prophecies

The problem of so-called "poorly fitting prophecies" stems from the fact that the first Gospel, the Gospel of Mark, made no use of so-called scriptural prophecies at all. What the Gospel of Mark did was use literary allusion. Later readers and writers interpreted this as "prophecy fulfillment". The later so-called fulfillment of prophecies that are found especially in the Gospels of Matthew and John are elaborations on the literary allusions in Mark.

The precedent was set with Mark, which has nothing to do with "prophecy fulfillment". The later writers tried to turn Mark's allusions into "prophecy fulfillment", thus they already had a framework within which they were bound, and thus the reason that some of the examples of so-called prophecy fulfillment are so poor in the other Gospels.

It is actually quite possible, indeed it is highly likely, that writers of the Gospels of Matthew, Luke, and John all thought that Jesus was a real person, whose life was attested to in the existing Gospel account(s) that they were aware of. It is almost certain that they all took these stories as "true".

So as far as the writers of the Gospels other than Mark were likely concerned, Jesus was a real live person. The problem is that their concepts of Jesus all go back to the Gospel of Mark, not to some other "real life" accounts of this being. The importance of the "independence" of the Gospel accounts has always been understood, thus the tradition was established from the very beginning that the Gospels are all separate and independent account, yet we now know that this isn't true. The degree to which this undermines and historical value of the Gospels is immensurable, indeed it completely undermines them. We have nothing more than three stories base don another story. And as for other Gospels, the non-canonical ones, these can all also be best explained as having come along after the Gospel of Mark and ultimately dependant on it or the other Gospels.

So how about: Where did Paul get the crucifixion of the Messiah from? Which is more likely: That Paul 'found' the crucifixion in those passages, or that he searched for passages to confirm an already existing idea?

There are various conjectures that can be made here, but none of them, on either side of the issue, boil down to evidence.

Gospels and genre

Herein lies the problem, all of the commentary that we have about the Gospels comes from people who were outside of the culture, who lacked the proper context.

There is no Jewish commentary on the Gospels until hundreds of years later.

The only commentary that we have on the Gospels comes from Greeks and Romans, who were themselves outside of the cultural context of the supposed writers of the Gospels.

Unfortunately, we don't have an analysis of the Gospels by Philo or Josephus or some Jewish Rabbi from the 1st or 2nd century.

The Gospels are effectively the one and only source of information about the life of Jesus that we ever have. All of the commentary about Jesus from the apologists and those such as Celsus all comes back to the Gospels. There is no source of information outside the Gospels. It is clear that everything that is ever said about Jesus by those who discuss the events of his life is based on the Gospels.

Everything is based on these writings with no evidence that these writings are indeed reliable or based on history themselves. It is clear that Martyr and others treated them as historical and reliable, but that indeed is what is in question. They never provided anything to backup or support these writings, they always simply took them at face value as absolute truth. When they did seek to make arguments to attest to the "truth" of the Gospels, they did so by appealing to "prophecy fulfillment" via the Hebrew scriptures, stating that "Jesus must have been real because the book of Isaiah predicted him", etc. For example in First Apology Justin Martyr's entire defense of the truthfulness of the Gospels and the existence of Jesus is based on correlations between the Gospels and the scriptures. The chapters from First Apology:

http://www.newadvent.org/fathers/0126.htm

Chapter 31. Of the Hebrew prophets.

Chapter 32. Christ predicted by Moses.

Chapter 33. Manner of Christ's birth predicted.

Chapter 34. Place of Christ's birth foretold.

Chapter 35. Other fulfilled prophecies.

Chapter 36. Different modes of prophecy.

Chapter 37. Utterances of the Father.

Chapter 38. Utterances of the Son.

Chapter 39. Direct predictions by the Spirit.

Chapter 40. Christ's advent foretold.

Chapter 41. The crucifixion predicted.

Chapter 42. Prophecy using the past tense.

Chapter 43. Responsibility asserted.

Chapter 44. Not nullified by prophecy.

Chapter 45. Christ's session in heaven foretold.

Chapter 47. Desolation of Judæa foretold.

Chapter 48. Christ's work and death foretold.

Chapter 49. His rejection by the Jews foretold.

Chapter 50. His humiliation predicted.

Chapter 51. The majesty of Christ.

Chapter 52. Certain fulfillment of prophecy.


How does Martyr defend the fleshy existence of Jesus from those who did not believe in the existence of his flesh?

Chapter 32: Christ predicted by Moses.

And the first power after God the Father and Lord of all is the Word, who is also the Son; and of Him we will, in what follows, relate how He took flesh and became man. For as man did not make the blood of the vine, but God, so it was hereby intimated that the blood should not be of human seed, but of divine power, as we have said above. And Isaiah, another prophet, foretelling the same things in other words, spoke thus: "A star shall rise out of Jacob, and a flower shall spring from the root of Jesse; and His arm shall the nations trust." And a star of light has arisen, and a flower has sprung from the root of Jesse this Christ. For by the power of God He was conceived by a virgin of the seed of Jacob, who was the father of Judah, who, as we have shown, was the father of the Jews; and Jesse was His forefather according to the oracle, and He was the son of Jacob and Judah according to lineal descent.

He did so not by appealing to information about the life of Jesus, but by referring to prophecy from the Hebrew scriptures. According to Martyr, "Jesus existed because his existence was predicted."

The apologists discuss things such as the dividing up of Jesus' clothes during his crucifixion, as well as his walking on water, as absolute facts, yet there are very good reasons to conclude that these things never in fact happened.

What does this say about the reliability and the gullibility of the apologists if they treated such things as facts? What does it say about their real "knowledge" of Jesus if they are firmly supporting such claims as historical? This can only mean that they actually had no idea of what they were talking about, and that they didn't actually have any information about Jesus outside of the Gospels.

There is never an appeal to evidence outside of scripture by the early apologists.

Paul provides no evidence for a person. Paul perhaps provides evidence of a BELIEF in some "person", but he provides no evidence for his existence. In other words, Paul never places Jesus in space and time, other than perhaps the very vague ways in which you mentioned earlier, all of which are themselves derived from scriptures.

If Paul were to have said that Jesus were killed by Pilate, or that Jesus met John the Baptist, or that a friend of Paul's was there when Jesus was baptized, or that the temple priests were upset when Jesus attracted so many followers or even something else entirely, such as any event that isn't even mentioned in the Gospels or even recalling teachings from Jesus or talking about where he was born, who his parents were, or what kind of food he liked, or anything, then these things would establish a "historical person", but Paul doesn't do these things.

This in and of itself is not evidence against historicity, but nevertheless, the letters of Paul lack any solid evidence FOR historicity either. Other than vague theological inferences that you make from the scriptures that Paul cites, there is nothing in his letters that clearly establishes the existence of a real life person. As I said, IF the "brother of the Lord" statement could be conclusively shown to mean "the literal brother of Jesus" then it would be evidence for historicity, but again the evidence is to the contrary.

That someone like Celsus treats them as some sort of account other than a fictional story stems simply from the fact that these same writings were portrayed as such by their backers.

In essence, all of the 2nd century+ debate about Jesus comes back to the Gospels themselves, not to any other source of information, which itself is problematic when regarding the discussions about Jesus by 2nd century+ writers as "evidence for historicity".

Papias

Actually, it again undermines the case for historicity and only proves the point of how bad the "evidence".

The supposed writings of Papias state:

I asked minutely after their sayings,--what Andrew or Peter said, or what was said by Philip, or by Thomas, or by James, or by John, or by Matthew, or by any other of the Lord's disciples: which things Aristion and the presbyter John, the disciples of the Lord, say. For I imagined that what was to be got from books was not so profitable to me as what came from the living and abiding voice.

So what we are talking about here is hearsay and legend. What was his source? We don't know, but it is easy to see that whatever it would have been, it would have been a chain of "he said she said." It can be inferred that he is saying that "John the presbyter" is his source, but this is not even clear from his own words, that point is only established by the second writer.

If in fact Papias were consorting with real live disciples who had met Jesus, and Papias later testifies to the validity of the Gospels of Mark and Matthew, and at the very least Papias would have been aware of the claims about Jesus such as rising from the dead, we must then be led to believe that Papias received affirmation of the events of the Gospels from the supposed two disciples with whom he consorted. This is, basically, completely out of the question. This would have us believe that Papias sat down with John son of Zebedee and said "Did Jesus really come running out to you on the waves of the Sea of Galilee and hop in your boat?" And John said "Why yes, he did!" "Did Jesus really die on the cross and come back to life after three days?" "Why yes he did!" "Did Jesus really feed thousands of people with a few loaves of bread?" "Why yes, he did!"

Judas walked about in this world a sad example of impiety; for his body having swollen to such an extent that he could not pass where a chariot could pass easily, he was crushed by the chariot, so that his bowels gushed out.

This claim has all of the hallmarks of legend, which again only goes to show the unreliability of the source here. There is no doubt that the writer honestly believed these things himself, but surely his credulity is on display. This statement is easily recognized as an urban legend, and furthermore there is much good reason to believe that "Judas" is a literary invention of the author of the Gospel of Mark, who used the name "Judas" to symbolize the Jews.

If, therefore, Judas is indeed a literary invention of "Mark", then we see here again evidence that everything stems from this singular fictional account and that the earliest believers in the reality of these things had absolutely no idea what they were talking about.

Keep in mind that the Gospel of Mark does not contain a death scene for Judas, and thus it is easy to see that from the Gospel of Mark various different tall tales about the death of Judas would spring. Due to this, that Papias is supposedly recounting a legend for the death of Judas here that is different from Matthew is really no surprise, and in fact exactly what one would expect.

From the fragments:

We must now point out how Papias, who lived at the same time, relates that he had received a wonderful narrative from the daughters of Philip. For he relates that a dead man was raised to life in his day. He also mentions another miracle relating to Justus, surnamed Barsabas, how he swallowed a deadly poison, and received no harm, on account of the grace of the Lord.

This also points to the credulity and untrustworthiness of these accounts.

For information on these points, we can merely refer our readers to the books themselves; but now, to the extracts already made, we shall add, as being a matter of primary importance, a tradition regarding Mark who wrote the Gospel, which he [Papias] has given in the following words]: And the presbyter said this. Mark having become the interpreter of Peter, wrote down accurately whatsoever he remembered. It was not, however, in exact order that he related the sayings or deeds of Christ. For he neither heard the Lord nor accompanied Him. But afterwards, as I said, he accompanied Peter, who accommodated his instructions to the necessities [of his hearers], but with no intention of giving a regular narrative of the Lord's sayings. Wherefore Mark made no mistake in thus writing some things as he remembered them. For of one thing he took especial care, not to omit anything he had heard, and not to put anything fictitious into the statements. [This is what is related by Papias regarding Mark; but with regard to Matthew he has made the following statements]: Matthew put together the oracles [of the Lord] in the Hebrew language, and each one interpreted them as best he could. [The same person uses proofs from the First Epistle of John, and from the Epistle of Peter in like manner. And he also gives another story of a woman who was accused of many sins before the Lord, which is to be fount in the Gospel according to the Hebrews.]

This again points to the total unreliability of this source and to the total lack of any real understanding by the earliest apologists. That the author of the Gospel called Mark would have recorded his information from Peter makes no sense and is generally rejected because Mark is universally negative towards Peter.

Likewise, it is clear that "Matthew" is copied from Mark, and thus the claims about "Matthew" cannot be correct either. Furthermore, of course, that the authors of these Gospels were even people named Mark or Matthew is now widely rejected as nothing more than a confused and baseless tradition.

Taking occasion from Papias of Hierapolis, the illustrious, a disciple of the apostle who leaned on the bosom of Christ, and Clemens, and Pantaenus the priest of [the Church] of the Alexandrians, and the wise Ammonius, the ancient and first expositors, who agreed with each other, who understood the work of the six days as referring to Christ and the whole Church.

Here we have more evidence of fabrication based on the Gospels and tradition. Clearly, by using the term "apostle who leaned on the bosom of Christ", a reference is being made to the "beloved disciple" of the Gospel of John. Yet, there are many reasons to conclude that the Gospel attributed to John was not only not written by John, but was in fact written by someone who didn't even like John and intentionally left him out of the Gospel.

Even my study Bible states that authorship is no longer certain and no longer thought to be John son of Zebedee, to whom it was traditionally attributed. Likewise, this infers that the "beloved disciple" is John, which we know was the tradition, but which is an even more tenuous reading, and one that is actually only even vaguely supportable by the added passages of John 21. So we can see that within even the earliest of accounts there was fabrication and gullibility and a desire to build authority by tying together traditions.

The early sources are shown to not only be unreliable, but they indeed show that they are being sewn from a cloth other than reality.

The so-called fragments of Papias do not give us reason to believe that we have the testimony of a man who actually met with real disciples of Jesus who passed on to him their experiences and knowledge of the "real teachings" and "real deeds" of Jesus. The fragments of Papias present us with an early record of the hearsay, confusion, and gullibility that reigned among the early believers in this religion as well as the actual lack of any direct evidence of anything from even the earliest of times.

Tacitus

My reading of the Tacitus passage is that, being written in 109 CE, Tacitus was piecing together real events and the later interpretations of those events. First of all, there is no other account that gives us reason to believe that "Christians" were even a recognizable sect in 64 CE at the time of the fire, or indeed that the name "Christians" even existed at this time. Secondly, there are other accounts of Nero's actions after the fire which state that Nero punished the Jews, not the "Christians".

This gives us good reason to believe that what Tacitus is recording in 109 CE is a version of history that has been filled in with details from later accounts. The statement, "Christus, the founder of the name, was put to death by Pontius Pilate, procurator of Judea in the reign of Tiberius," is no doubt a detail that stems from the Gospels themselves, which would have been in circulation for some 30 or so years by the time The Annals was written.

In other words, Tacitus is injecting information from his present time into his account of the past. It is not necessarily the case that whoever was persecuted in 64 CE said or knew anything about "Pontius Pilate", rather, Tacitus is working from his current state of knowledge of the Christian sect to try and fill in details as he explains the event.

He mentions "Christians" and then goes on to explain what a "Christian" is. The explanation he gives is not based on information from 64 CE, it is based on information from 109 CE, after the dissemination of the Gospels, just as someone today writing a biography of President Eisenhower might talk about events that happened during his presidency using information that has only recently come to light, but was unknown during the time of his presidency.

Ebionites

The key here is that even the Ebionites were using a Gospel. It is also somewhat odd that they would use the Gospel of Matthew, since that is the Gospel that contains the story of the virgin birth, but this may point to some different version of Matthew or simply a confusion on the part of later chroniclers. I also long said that I think that the Gospel of Matthew was a version of Mark that was created by someone from the Jamsean sect. I think that there was a real "James the Just" who met with Paul, and that this James the Just was simply a leader of a Messianic movement in Jerusalem. Indeed I think that James the Just was the most important figure in this movement in the early days and that there are two main branches, the Jamsean branch and the Pauline branch, which broke away from James. The Jamsean branch is very Jewish oriented and the Pauline branch is "Gentile" oriented.

Nevertheless, one can conclude that this James was dead by the time the Gospel of Mark was written. The Gospel of Matthew I think was produced by a later follower who was in the line of the Jamsean tradition, though of course by that time 20-40 years removed from the time of the life of James.

If anything I think that James was the actual person at the core, but that is not pertinent to this debate. The key here is what evidence can you muster? So far I only see that the Ebionites also based their understanding of Jesus on a Gospel, and as I say, I think that all of the concepts of "Jesus the man" come from the Gospels. I have yet to see any evidence of some concept of Jesus the man that is not rooted in a Gospel.

Conclusion

1. Paul refers to a scriptural being. All of Paul's "knowledge" of Jesus comes either from the scriptures or from his claimed "revelations". Paul never demonstrates any knowledge of a life, deeds, or teachings of Jesus that is not itself derived from the scriptures, with the possible exception of the Eucharist ritual, which has yet to be addressed.

2. We don't know this at all. Tradition talks about Paul establishing a church in Rome, but we have no actual evidence that this is the case. Due to the fact that much of early Christianity was obsessed with creating "lineages" and using names of figures to establish legitimacy, it is easy to see that churches which sprang up in Rome would have been eager to claim Paul as their founder.

We have no evidence from Paul that this ever actually happened, and we do have lots of evidence of fraud in Paul's name, namely the 5 or so letters falsely attributed to Paul by later writers.

3. The Ebionites view of Jesus comes from the Gospels.

4. Fully analyzing the Gospels is perhaps beyond the scope of this debate, but my understanding of the Gospels, the full justification of which is beyond the scope of this debate, is that the Gospel of Mark was written as an allegorical fiction about the conquering of Judea and destruction of Jerusalem in 70 CE after these events and that the author of the Gospel of Mark used literary allusion, not claims of prophecy fulfillment. Later Gospel writers, seeing the correlations between the Gospel of Mark and the Hebrew scriptures then interpreted these correlations as "prophecy fulfillment", for example believing that the correlations between Psalm 22 and the crucifixion scene made Psalm 22 "a prophecy". It was these writer who then, building off of the literary allusions in the Gospel of Mark, tried to explicitly craft "prophecy fulfillment" scenarios into their narratives.

There is no doubt that second century readers, all of whom that we know of were non-Jews, believed the Gospels as historically true. What we fail to see, however, is any knowledge of the life of Jesus that does not stem from the Gospels, even by those like Celsus.

5. The Papias fragments point to gullibility, confusion, and the fabrication of tradition, they do not attest to a solid or verifiable linage of personal relationships going back to Jesus.

Obviously Christian tradition holds that Jesus really existed. This tradition is based on certain claims and beliefs that have been established and integrated into "proofs" by Christians over the centuries. Thus, the arguments for a historical Jesus are ready made and the "evidence" for a historical Jesus has long been identified.

The issue is establishing whether or not these pieces of evidence do actually hold up to scrutiny, or if their interpretation as affirmative evidence for the existence of Jesus was and continues to be a product of wishful thinking, confusion, biased interpretation, and unfounded assumptions.

The types of evidence that I would consider to be supportive of a historical Jesus would be:

1. Accounts of the life of Jesus that can be shown to be independent of the Gospels or readings of the Hebrew scriptures.
2. Authentic and reliable accounts of people who had actually met either Jesus or his disciples, and who describe those disciples as people who had actually met Jesus. (In other words, Paul talks about "apostles of Christ", but makes no mention that these people ever actually met a real live Jesus and traveled with or learned from him)
3. Roman records of Jesus' execution.
4. Accounts of Jesus by people such as Philo who lived during his supposed time and were aware of the goings on in Jerusalem during the reign of Pilate.
5. Writings by Jesus or his "disciples" which attest to his existence. Even letters such as the epistles of Peter and James (the authenticity of which are certainly questionable) make no real mention of his life or his teachings or anything about him, they just talk about resurrection and salvation, and do not themselves even attest to his existence.

So far everything that I have seen from GakuseiDon can be explained, or is best explained, as having come from scripture, having originated with the Gospel of Mark, or is shown to be from unreliable sources.

[GakuseiDon]

In my final post, I don't plan to introduce any more evidence. I will respond to some of Malachi's comments, and then summarize my position.

I'll note here that I've avoided some of the "usual suspects", like Paul's "born of woman", the TF, and "James the Lord's brother" statements, since they have been done to death elsewhere. I think a prima facie case for the existence of a historical Jesus can be built from Paul alone, which is why my first post concentrated on Paul.

In trying to ascertain what the actual evidence is, we can't simply suggest that having solid evidence is unreasonable and that therefore, spurious evidence rises to the level of solid evidence. Not expecting solid evidence doesn't make solid evidence out of questionable evidence.
I'll agree that the evidence I've presented is circumstantial, though whether this makes it "spurious" or not I'll leave to others to decide. Malachi states in his conclusion that evidence would need to be "shown to be independent of the Gospels or readings of the Hebrew scriptures." Since I haven't done this, I agree that if evidence does need to show such independence, then Malachi is correct to reject it. At the least, we need to acknowledge that early Christians were eager to "find" Jesus in the Hebrew scriptures, but whether details were "derived" from scriptures, or whether scriptures were reinterpreted to match actual details can be difficult to determine, thus we need to be wary of accepting Gospel accounts as historical.

Furthermore, people can easily genuinely believe in the actual existence of people or things that never in fact existed and they can believe in the occurrence of events that never in fact took place.
This is true, and can't be ruled out. A good example is Ebion, a person whom modern consensus agrees probably didn't exist. Others, like Honi the Circle-Drawer, have similarly marginal evidence but the consensus is that they did exist. To my mind, the circumstantial evidence shows Jesus falling into the latter group rather than the former.

It is actually quite possible, indeed it is highly likely, that writers of the Gospels of Matthew, Luke, and John all thought that Jesus was a real person, whose life was attested to in the existing Gospel account(s) that they were aware of. It is almost certain that they all took these stories as "true".
Given that the Gospels seem to belong to the same genre, I'd be interested in how Malachi can be "almost certain" that Matthew, Luke and John considered the stories to be true while Mark didn't (unless I misunderstand what he is claiming for Mark?)

Paul provides no evidence for a person. Paul perhaps provides evidence of a BELIEF in some "person", but he provides no evidence for his existence. In other words, Paul never places Jesus in space and time, other than perhaps the very vague ways in which you mentioned earlier, all of which are themselves derived from scriptures.

If Paul were to have said that Jesus were killed by Pilate, or that Jesus met John the Baptist, or that a friend of Paul's was there when Jesus was baptized, or that the temple priests were upset when Jesus attracted so many followers or even something else entirely, such as any event that isn't even mentioned in the Gospels or even recalling teachings from Jesus or talking about where he was born, who his parents were, or what kind of food he liked, or anything, then these things would establish a "historical person", but Paul doesn't do these things.

This in and of itself is not evidence against historicity, but nevertheless, the letters of Paul lack any solid evidence FOR historicity either. Other than vague theological inferences that you make from the scriptures that Paul cites, there is nothing in his letters that clearly establishes the existence of a real life person.
I agree. Nothing in Paul "clearly establishes" the existence of a real life person in terms of what Malaci requires. It is circumstantial evidence. But I would say that a reasonable interpretation is that Paul regarded Jesus as someone who was a descendent of David and Abraham, crucified in Jerusalem, and lived sometime after Moses (and I would argue, in Paul's immediate past). The question is, why did Paul believe this? Paul doesn't give any reasons why he believed it, but one obvious reason is that he believed it because there really was a real life Jesus that this was based on. I would present this as the most reasonable explanation, even though there is no conclusive evidence for it. Malachi has raised alternate explanations, but I haven't seen anything from Malachi to show that this isn't the most reasonable explanation.

The so-called fragments of Papias do not give us reason to believe that we have the testimony of a man who actually met with real disciples of Jesus who passed on to him their experiences and knowledge of the "real teachings" and "real deeds" of Jesus. The fragments of Papias present us with an early record of the hearsay, confusion, and gullibility that reigned among the early believers in this religion as well as the actual lack of any direct evidence of anything from even the earliest of times.
I agree that it's possible that Papias just gullibly accepted the words of those he met, and those people either didn't know or were deceptive about the origins of their beliefs.

In other words, Tacitus is injecting information from his present time into his account of the past. It is not necessarily the case that whoever was persecuted in 64 CE said or knew anything about "Pontius Pilate", rather, Tacitus is working from his current state of knowledge of the Christian sect to try and fill in details as he explains the event.
I agree that it's possible that the Christians to whom Tacitus spoke didn't understand the origins of their own religion.

If anything I think that James was the actual person at the core, but that is not pertinent to this debate. The key here is what evidence can you muster? So far I only see that the Ebionites also based their understanding of Jesus on a Gospel, and as I say, I think that all of the concepts of "Jesus the man" come from the Gospels. I have yet to see any evidence of some concept of Jesus the man that is not rooted in a Gospel.
I agree that the Ebionite's beliefs that Jesus was a man born of Joseph and Mary and that Paul was an apostate from the Law could have been derived from the Gospels and other early Christian texts.

So far everything that I have seen from GakuseiDon can be explained, or is best explained, as having come from scripture, having originated with the Gospel of Mark, or is shown to be from unreliable sources.
I think that it is at the point of the best explanation that I would disagree. Malachi has provided possibilities, but he hasn't shown that they present a stronger case than the one provided by the prima facie case.

For example, Paul arguably believed that Jesus was a real life person: a descendent of historical people, crucified in Jerusalem and probably in his near past. As Malachi wrote, Paul perhaps provides evidence of a BELIEF in such a person, but not "solid" evidence for that person's existence. But I think that Occam's razor can be invoked to say that the prima facie explanation for the reason that Paul believed that such a person existed was because such a person really did exist. It isn't conclusive evidence, of course -- we can point to counter examples like Ebion and William Tell -- but it is part of a cumulative case. Malachi believes that Paul may have derived the information from scripture, but I've seen nothing to support such a case other than the assertion itself. I'd like to ask again my question from the last post: Where did Paul get the idea that the Messiah was crucified, in Malachi's opinion? And does it appear that Paul is deriving the information from those passages, or that he is trying to fit an existing idea into those passages?

The prima facie case goes like this:
1. Paul believed in a Jesus Christ who was a descendent of some famous Jewish figures, was crucified in Jerusalem, and arguably lived in Paul's near past.
2. The author of the Gospel of Mark then seemed to write about the same figure, and placed him in the time of Herod and Pilate.
3. The other Gospel writers wrote similar gospels, using the same genre, incorporating material not in Mark. Luke appeared to state that he was writing a history, and the other Gospel writers appeared they were writing histories as well.
4. Papias provides a link back to Jesus's disciples and gives some insight to how the gospel message developed in its written form.

Malachi has rightly questioned each of these points: Paul doesn't provide conclusive evidence; Mark may have been a fictional account; Papias may have been gullible; Christianity was derived from Hebrew Scriptures, and this is evidence enough that there was no real life person at the core. I just don't see that Malachi has done anything more here than raise counterpoints. At the least, I'd hoped for some deeper analysis of Paul other than "it can be mapped back to scriptures, therefore it was derived from scriptures". As I said in my first post, it comes down to what is the most reasonable reading. If Paul believed that Jesus Christ was a real life person, it isn't conclusive proof that such a person existed, but more often than not such data is accepted as prima facie evidence toward such a conclusion.

It isn't particularly strong evidence, so it isn't unreasonable to be agnostic towards the historical Jesus position. I agree that the question is by no means settled, and I would be interested in seeing debates like these played out in scholarly circles.

I'd like to thank Malachi for his participation in this debate, and Knight for moderating this thread.

[Malachi151]

I'd like to thank GakuseiDon for this debate and while there are a couple of the "standard" claims that I would like to have addressed, such as the "brother of the Lord" passage from Paul, I also greatly appreciate GakuseiDon's presentation of more original arguments and information.

I'll agree that the evidence I've presented is circumstantial, though whether this makes it "spurious" or not I'll leave to others to decide.

I will agree that some of the evidence you put forward could be called circumstantial and that spurious was a loaded term used to describe evidence that you put forward, but I also think that much of the evidence that you put forward actually works against your case more than it works for your case.

For example the evidence from Paul is all based on scritpures that Paul cites, which of course just highlights the prefiguring of this character and the reliance on prefigured concepts.

Likewise, the fragments of Papias, while presented as evidence that Papias knew people who knew Jesus, really only underscores the unreliability of this testimony and highlights the confusion and fog that separates Jesus and the so-called disciples from the earliest accounts of their existence.

Given that the Gospels seem to belong to the same genre, I'd be interested in how Malachi can be "almost certain" that Matthew, Luke and John considered the stories to be true while Mark didn't (unless I misunderstand what he is claiming for Mark?)

My view, which is laid out in my article on Mark (http://www.rationalrevolution.net/articles/gospel_mark.htm) (which I'm not presenting as an argument in this debate), is that the author of the Gospel of Mark wrote a fictional story. The scenes in the Gospel of Mark are symbolic and based on the Hebrew scriptures. The author therefor had to have known that these things didn't "really" happen, because he was inventing them. Likewise the system of the passages seems to indicate that the motivation for the story was something other than simply trying to chronical the deeds of Jesus.

All of the other Gospels are based on the Gospel of Mark, and it is possible that all of the other Gospel writers thought that the Gospel of Mark was a "factual" account. I feel certain that this is true for the author of Luke at the very least.

It is hard to understand the mentality of the writers of religious narratives, and this holds true for religious writings of all kinds. Where the stories are Buddhist, Hindu, Islam, Jewish, Greek, Egyptian, Celtic, etc., it is very difficult if not impossible to understand the process by which clearly non-historical narratives came into existence about figures that never existed, why they came into existence, and how the developers of such stories viewed them.

I don't see this issue as any different for the Gospels than for other religious myths.

I reject the idea that if an author added an element to a story from his own imagination that the only explanation for this can be that the author was willfully telling a lie. The boundary between "truth" and story telling was somehow different in the past and I think that the idea that one's own inventions were "not true" is simply a concept that was not accepted at that time.

Ancient religious stories, while invented by people, were also seen as inventions of "truth", and thus I think that it was quite possible for people who fabricate narratives from their own mind and still believe themselves that their stories were true, and again I think this applies to all religious stories from the time, whether they be about Zeus, Dionysus, Buddha, Vishnu, Osiris, Apollo, Moses, or Jesus.

I don't view ancient story telling as either "lying", "accurate", or "mislead hearsay". I think there is plenty of room for creative invention that was simultaneously believed by the author as "true". In other words, I think that the idea that you could "invent truth" back then was generally accepted.

I think that this is what the authors of Matthew and John were doing. I think that the author of Luke was writing what he thought was real history by piecing together sources and various accounts. I think that the writer of the Gospel of Mark was writing a symbolic fictional story that he meant to be taken as symbolic, not real.

My justifications for these views is of course beyond the scope of this debate, and so can rightfully be attacked as unsupported.

Malachi has raised alternate explanations, but I haven't seen anything from Malachi to show that this isn't the most reasonable explanation.

Agreed, and I think that my side is somewhat lacking in this debate because I'm trying to stick to the parameters, which put burden of proof on you. By doing so, however, I'm also not presenting a very strong case myself, because basically I'm just playing defense trying to keep you from scoring while making no attempts at a goal myself.

I want to stick to this because of the scope of the material and the debate. If we got into debating my case for non-historicity then that would make things much bigger and more complicated. We can do that in a follow-up debate if you wish though, where I would be on offense and you on defense.

For example, Paul arguably believed that Jesus was a real life person: a descendent of historical people, crucified in Jerusalem and probably in his near past. As Malachi wrote, Paul perhaps provides evidence of a BELIEF in such a person, but not "solid" evidence for that person's existence. But I think that Occam's razor can be invoked to say that the prima facie explanation for the reason that Paul believed that such a person existed was because such a person really did exist. It isn't conclusive evidence, of course -- we can point to counter examples like Ebion and William Tell -- but it is part of a cumulative case. Malachi believes that Paul may have derived the information from scripture, but I've seen nothing to support such a case other than the assertion itself. I'd like to ask again my question from the last post: Where did Paul get the idea that the Messiah was crucified, in Malachi's opinion? And does it appear that Paul is deriving the information from those passages, or that he is trying to fit an existing idea into those passages?

I agree with your points here. My argument is bascially one of "reasonable doubt" meant purely to show that the evidence isn't beyond question. I've noted the type of evidence that I think would be beyond question, and we both agree it is possible that such evidence could exist, but that it doesn't.

I think that the points made can be taken in two ways. As far as I am concerned I have made my case, which is only that there is no "solid" evidence for the existence of a historical Jesus. All of the evidence presented can be questioned.

What I haven't done is make a solid case for alternatives, as you note. My objective, though, was only to demonstrate that alternatives are possible - that none of the evidence is beyond being reasonably questioned.

Unfortunately I think the title that was given to this debate is misleading, because this isn't a debate over the existence of a historical Jesus, it is a debate over the quality of the evidence used to make that case.

My objective was simply to argue that the quality of the evidence is poor.

Obviously, I have not made a case here that Jesus never existed, nor have I even tried.

It isn't particularly strong evidence, so it isn't unreasonable to be agnostic towards the historical Jesus position. I agree that the question is by no means settled, and I would be interested in seeing debates like these played out in scholarly circles.

I'd like to thank Malachi for his participation in this debate, and Knight for moderating this thread.

I agree. Some may view this debate as uneventful, but I prefer to see it as measured. I like taking baby steps as I think it is more accurate and less gets missed. I think this could be the opener in a series of debates, perhaps a series of three.

This would be on the evidence for. The next could be on the evidence against. And the third could be arguments for vs arguments against using the evidence that came out of the prior two debates. Don't know if people are interested in that, but I would do it if others are interested.

I think GakuseiDon was an excellent debate opponent and presented arguments that I hadn't seen before and had to study in order to address.

I'll let others be the judge, but I think that I've made the case that the evidence for historicity is weak and questionable.

Thanks to all

[KnightWhoSaysNi]

The formal debate is now complete. We would like to thank GakuseiDon and Malachi151 for their participation. Discussion can be continued in the peanut gallery.

KWSN, FD Moderator