Can I ask, do you think that the summated qualities attributed to the package ‘Jesus’ could possibly be applied to more than one human?
…I see. I didn’t realise we were in competition for such status.
I hereby own up to all of my previous posts.
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Anyone else having a solstice party tonight?
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There’s not a lot of evidence (though Josephus is pretty much a slam dunk), but there are very good reasons. The best reason being that accepting a historical figure existed is a much simpler explanation for why shortly after the assumed figure existed there cropped up a large number of cults talking about him and a few historians noting him. The fact is that the documents from those cults generally referred to him as a historical figure, and it’s not very long before we have a large body of texts referring to very early figures in those cults. Assuming that they made it all up out of the blue is far less likely than assuming there was a historical figure.
There’s also the fact that the texts that we have of Jesus and other early figures who knew him aren’t very flattering. They talk about how Jesus was short, have him fail in his mission of becoming messiah and suffer a humiliating death that has to be explained in various confusing ways. Were they in a position to invent everything from scratch rather than have to work with existing material it’s much more likely a much more compelling, consistent, and less bizarre story of Jesus, Paul, Peter and the rest would have been invented.
If you apply Occam’s razor, assuming a historical figure existed gives you a far simpler explanation than the strange and complicated fantasies that the Jesus Mythers invent.
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At the very most of ‘one of several figures’ would include one, would it not?
It seriously sounds like you’re trying to create an argument where none exists. Several times you’ve argued against the extreme in a defined range rather than arguing against the range itself, I’m not sure where the benefit of this is.
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Let me attempt one more time.
Obviously I am attempting to draw a differentiation between the packaged Jesus meme and the evidence for one or more individuals to whom this meme can be applied. I think this is the crux. When you say historians believe there was a Jesus I’m not entirely disagreeing with you.
Your argument that this package of qualities to which historians are concretely referring as Jesus is not the same as saying that there was an individual human being to whom those properties can be concretely applied.
Your admission that those properties can be attached to more than one person is the central point around which my differentiation is revolving and you agree so long as I will then go on to flout the differentiation between the package and it’s attribution to a specific person or specific people.
I am not making the argument that you are arguing against.
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I am speechle…
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Appearing to be ‘the more rational one’!
There can be only one!
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Also…
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You know, I went ahead and read your links after all. And I think I now understand.
There have developed camps in the historical Jesus argument. One of these, to which you belong, is that the packaged qualities of Jesus that can be (perhaps strongly) historically implied must belong to one individual person. Even though there may be multiple people to whom the packaged properties can be applied, it must be only one person.
The other camp, to which I have unwittingly allied myself, finds that because no specific evidence for such an individual exists, and that the properties could be applied to more than one person, given the nature of the evidence, it is probably fair to say that the qualities that have come to be packaged under one name originate from more than one, badly recorded source.
This has been used, in the views of those to whom you are avowedly allied, as a rhetorical device to insert ‘distance’ between the ahistoricity of an individual Jesus and the package of non-mythical properties that it cannot be proven do not originate from more than one source.
I hadn’t realised that I had asked a much more central question of you than I thought when I asked if the properties could be applied to more than one person. Perhaps I should have asked if the package itself was inviolate. No true Jesus.
You can shed properties from the package at your whim in order to maintain the specific individual hypothesis!
You seek to be most rational and this is your bid!
Jesus! Talk about entrenched. I didn’t know! Wow!
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#notalljesuses?
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I agree with your overall post and most particulars (that RationalWiki article reeks of sad desperation), but regarding Socrates, Plato, Xenophon, and Aristophanes were contemporaries who wrote about him (and there were probably others). He was at the center of the intellectual life of a very literate city, so he was quite a topic of written discussion by contemporaries.
Alexander the Great’s existence is clear from the epigraphic and numismatic evidence alone, but he had an official historian, Callisthenes in his entourage, Ptolemy wrote about him, we have a letter from Aristotle to Alexander (who was a student of Aristotle’s), and I believe there were other contemporaries who wrote about him, though my memory is fuzzy.
Jesus was a far less notable figure in his lifetime than Alexander or Socrates living in a cultural backwater very unloved by Rome, so it’s not surprising that there aren’t a lot of contemporary textual accounts, it would be very strange for there to be. The fact that have Josephus talking not only about Jesus (in multiple passages), but also his brother James, and John the Baptist is really remarkable.
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WTf is going on with the rationalwiki bashing!?!?
We laugh, oh how we laugh! Don’t they reek of desperation and a kind of sour effluvia!
How we talk about them behind their backs, the fun we make!
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Yeah, not getting this bit either. Is there something specific that people are unhappy with? It’s a wiki and can be updated after all.
I’ve found it a really good resource for all kinds of things, and not in a ‘grumpy Atheist’ way (I’m more of a cheerful agnostic).
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Get off the fence! 
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We need those agnostics to join in the argument though. Can’t trust Christians even if they are scholars, apparently.
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Oh, I don’t trust anyone. I’m chaotic neutral.
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That rationalwiki article is amazingly bad. The general account that is given is that most ancient historians assume a historical Jesus, by shifting that to “scholar” they can rant about theologians and ramble pointlessly. But it is the case that the overwhelming majority of academically trained ancient historians accept a historical Jesus by the standards of ancient history (which are often probabilistic), and offer very good reasons for doing so which the rationalwiki article never goes near.
If you want to talk about ancient history in a meaningful way you’d do well to look at what serious academic historians are up to on the topic, look at the ancient sources involved, and learn what you can about the history and historiography of the time frame involved rather than turning to a site explicitly designed to offer rationalizations for people with axes to grind. Instead of accepting a conveniently packaged opinion, you’d learn a lot not only about what evidence and data is actually out there (and there’s a lot of relevant evidence and data), but also the most effective ways to analyze and reason about that data.
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/Thread
It’s over. Go home everybody.
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