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Comment by Maursault | Hacker News Reader

> Yeah, from what I understand, it's generally accepted that some rabble rouser called Yeshua existed, and later had followers who considered him to be holy.

Except for where you start a sentence with "yeah," apparently answering in the affirmative a hypothetical question that no one has asked, and adding a superfluous and grammatically incorrect comma, you are vaguely correct.

Jesus is the English transliteration of a Germanic adaptation of the Latin transliteration of the Greek transliteration of the Hebrew name Yeshua.

What is agreed upon by near universal scholarly consensus is instead that Jesus was baptized and crucified. But I personally believe it is a sure bet he also was a rouser of rabble, had a ministry, and was considered holy, as beyond the 10 or so natural holes he ultimately was given at least 4 additional holes.

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> Except for where you start a sentence with "yeah," apparently answering in the affirmative a hypothetical question that no one has asked, and adding a superfluous and grammatically incorrect comma, you are vaguely correct.

Wow, you must be a hit at parties. The way I phrased that sentence is how some some dialects of English, like the one I speak, express agreement. Consider it shorthand for "I agree,". And perhaps consider the limits of your experiences and that wisdom is (partially) knowing what you don't know, and not attempting to speak with authority in such areas.

In wording my response to you, I've deliberately avoided other expressions from my dialect that may confuse you, but are very applicable. Like "twat" or "tosser", or "tu meke".

> Jesus is the English transliteration of a Germanic adaptation of the Latin transliteration of the Greek transliteration of the Hebrew name Yeshua.

Yeah, nah. Thanks for contributing nothing that a basic Google of "Jesus Yeshua" wouldn't have.

In my dialect, "yeah, nah" often means "I'm experiencing fremdschämen".

> What is agreed upon by near universal scholarly consensus is instead that Jesus was baptized and crucified.

You're going to need an awful lot of citations there.

Firstly, define the scholars you're referring to.

Also, what sources are they working from?

Josephus, the closest there is to a contemporaneous source, doesn't mention baptism. Neither do Seutonius, Pliny the Younger, Mara bar-Serapion or Tacitus.

Maybe the scholars you refer to are extrapolating from the title "Anointed", or from the fact that, gosh, if you're saying this Jesus is sinless, and baptism is for the remission of sins, then why would you include a story in your holy writings that Jesus was baptised? It makes no sense, so you must've included it to be historically correct! Also known as proof by mortification. [0]

Or maybe, you're just referencing crap you garnered from a 5 minute speed read of Wikipedia that really needs more citations? Who knows? Tu meke au.

[0]: https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/biblical-literalism

> > What is agreed upon by near universal scholarly consensus is instead that Jesus was baptized and crucified.

> You're going to need an awful lot of citations there.

> Firstly, define the scholars you're referring to.

Not being OP, I’ll list at least John Dominic Crossan and James Dunn, who has said that the baptism and crucifixion of Jesus “command almost universal assent.”

Of course, I got those names from five minutes speed reading Wikipedia. But that’s two more scholars’ opinions of the scholarly consensus than you’ve provided.

> Also, what sources are they working from?

Surely this is the very definition of moving the goalposts. OP stated the scholarly consensus is that Jesus’s baptism and crucifixion are true (this, incidentally, was my existing impression of the scholarly consensus). Now you’re no longer just arguing that OP was wrong about that, but have moved on to claiming that any scholars and historians who believe in Jesus’s baptism are wrong because they have no reliable sources.

I have to admit, I’m not inclined to throw out my understanding of the scholarly consensus or which sources are reliable to argue the historicity of Jesus based on an unsourced Hacker News comment.

I chose sources that are either non-Christian, or their subsequent Christian modifications are well identified (i.e., Josephus' Antiquities), because if you're wanting to make a case for the historical Jesus, then it's best to avoid as much bias as is possible.

And I'm very interested indeed in Crossan and Dunn's sources, sadly Wikipedia doesn't yield any light on this.

The historical sources I mentioned can be found in more detail on newadvent.org, whatever else you think of the Catholics, they compile a humdinger of a wiki, and are probably the experts on Christology and the historical Jesus.

> Wow, you must be a hit at parties.

Ad hominem attack.

> The way I phrased that sentence is how some some dialects of English, like the one I speak, express agreement. Consider it shorthand for "I agree,".

There is no English dialect that does not include the adverb, "yeah," etymologically formed from drawling the affirmation, "yes," colloquially and informally. More often, however, "yeah" is employed as a common filler in the same way as, "um," or "uh," used as a pause to think when not finished speaking, as such, when written, it is meaningless and superfluous. In modern usage, however, it may most often be correctly replaced with the phrase, "as a Millennial, I informally affirm."

> And perhaps consider the limits of your experiences and that wisdom is (partially) knowing what you don't know, and not attempting to speak with authority in such areas.

Ad hominem attack.

> In wording my response to you, I've deliberately avoided other expressions from my dialect that may confuse you, but are very applicable. Like "twat" or "tosser", or "tu meke".

Ad hominem attack.

> Yeah, nah. Thanks for contributing nothing that a basic Google of "Jesus Yeshua" wouldn't have.

Contradiction of informal colloquialisms and an ad hominem attack.

> In my dialect, "yeah, nah" often means "I'm experiencing fremdschämen".

False. An affirmative placed with a negative is a contradiction, but the assertion here is a clumsy ad hominem attack.

> You're going to need an awful lot of citations there.

While I agree with anjbe that this is moving the goalposts, it is also an ad hominem attack.

> Firstly, define the scholars you're referring to.

While I have not referred to any particular scholars, making your employment of such a straw man, I would define scholars in the ordinary sense as academics.

> Also, what sources are they working from?

This is further development of the previous straw man.

> Josephus, the closest there is to a contemporaneous source, doesn't mention baptism. Neither do Seutonius, Pliny the Younger, Mara bar-Serapion or Tacitus.

Though this is a continuation of the previous straw man argument, in fact, the closest contemporaneous sources, in chronological order, are the letters of Paul, the Gospel of Mark, the Gospels of Luke and Matthew, Acts of the Apostles, and the Gospel of John.

> Maybe the scholars you refer to are extrapolating from the title "Anointed", or from the fact that, gosh, if you're saying this Jesus is sinless, and baptism is for the remission of sins, then why would you include a story in your holy writings that Jesus was baptised? It makes no sense, so you must've included it to be historically correct! Also known as proof by mortification. Or maybe, you're just referencing crap you garnered from a 5 minute speed read of Wikipedia that really needs more citations? Who knows? Tu meke au.

It its entirety, this is a straw man argument which happens to include ad hominems.

> ...as such, when written, it is meaningless and superfluous. In modern usage, however, it may most often be correctly replaced with the phrase, "as a Millennial, I informally

The distinction between spoken and written seems a) arbitrary and b) entirely irrelevant to a comment section on a website. I'm writing conversationally, comments aren't technical documentation or tenders, they're comments. Observations in passing.

Being honest, when you opened with... ...whatever your thinking there was, I immediately shut down on engagement.

Genuine feedback - you know your shit, so just lead with that, not the part where you decide to lead with "You started a sentence with 'yeah', and that's wrong". It helps establish a rapport.

Anyway, you got your chronology slightly wrong but only slightly, so very much well done, and I mean that genuinely, and it only erred in where you placed Acts, which contains the earliest Christian writings. (That we know of (so far))

Anyhoo, I'm a big fan of this book if you've not read it yet: https://www.amazon.com/Reading-New-Testament-Pheme-Perkins/d...

But I suspect you may have.

> Being honest, when you opened with... ...whatever your thinking there was, I immediately shut down on engagement.

My thinking was the tenor of your comment was overly informal and self-gratifying considering the subject, a major theme of whose teachings was humility. It doesn't quite follow that being antagonistic is not engagement.

> Anyway, you got your chronology slightly wrong but only slightly, so very much well done, and I mean that genuinely, and it only erred in where you placed Acts, which contains the earliest Christian writings. (That we know of (so far))

"The earliest possible date for Luke-Acts is around 62 AD,[citation needed] the time of Paul's imprisonment in Rome, but most scholars date the work to 80–90 AD on the grounds that it uses Mark as a source, looks back on the destruction of Jerusalem, and does not show any awareness of the letters of Paul (which began circulating late in the first century); if it does show awareness of the Pauline epistles, and also of the work of the Jewish historian Josephus, as some believe, then a date in the early 2nd century is possible."[1]

"The Gospel of Mark... is usually dated through the eschatological discourse in Mark 13: most scholars interpret this as pointing to the First Jewish–Roman War (66–74 AD) that would lead to the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 AD, with the composition of Mark taking place either immediately after the destruction (the majority position) or during the years immediately prior."[2]

"A majority of scholars agree that Galatians was written between the late 40s and early 50s, although some date the original composition to c. 50–60."[3]

"The Epistle to Philemon was composed around AD 57-62 by Paul while in prison at Caesarea Maritima (early date) or more likely from Rome (later date) in conjunction with the composition of Colossians."[4]

"Regardless of the literary unity of the letter, scholars agree that the material that was compiled into the Epistle to the Philippians was originally composed in Greek, sometime during the 50s or early 60s AD."[5]

The earliest surviving subject materials are the authentic Pauline Epistles, and the oldest surviving Gospel is the one attributed to John Mark. It has been theorized and argued that a lost Gospel, a gospel of sayings, known as the Q source,[6] was composed earlier or around the same time as Mark, with the Gospel of Thomas a candidate for the Q source, but most place the date of Thomas' composition after the 2nd Century, and there is no consensus on whether the Q source existed. The earliest recorded words attributed to Jesus are found in Matthew 5-7, portions of the Sermon on the Mount[7] ("Blessed are the cheesemakers...")[8]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acts_of_the_Apostles#Title,_un...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gospel_of_Mark#Authorship,_dat...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epistle_to_the_Galatians#Date

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epistle_to_Philemon#Compositio...

[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epistle_to_the_Philippians#Com...

[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Q_source

[7] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beatitudes

[8] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NFPIGNua5WM

I reiterate my recommendation of that book by Pheme Perkins. Acts contains the oldest Christian traditions. Oral traditions, natch.

Your comments on my tone are bewildering in their absolute irrelevance - discussing the historical Jesus doesn't require reverence or adherence to the themes of Christianity, like how discussing the historical Muhammad doesn't require me to adhere to the shahada, nor consider dogs unclean.

But hey, maybe you're neurodiverse, or maybe you're just an asshole, but you do you.

If your objection to my tone was because of closely held personal beliefs, then I'm afraid you'll just have to build a bridge and get over it.

> Acts contains the oldest Christian traditions. Oral traditions, natch.

The Oral Tradition hypothesis holds that where Matthew and Luke agree against Mark, rather than using a Q Source, the source is oral traditions. Prior to Mark and the letters of Paul, surely there had to be oral traditions passed on for decades. Luke may refer to these in the first two verses of his gospel.

But since the synoptic gospels all attest together to a number of events, known as the Triple Tradition, including Jesus' baptism and crucifixion, and many details in between, and Acts begins with the replacement of Judas with Matthias, detailing further events only after this event, I don't see how the earliest oral traditions could be found in Acts.

Clearly the baptism, temptation, gathering of disciples, etc., all occurred prior to Mathias elected to replace Judas, and if drawn at least partially from oral tradition, how could the later traditions predate the earlier? Without earlier oral traditions including key elements from Jesus' life, how could oral traditions concerning much later events in Acts begin to develop?

Oral traditions detailing the spread of the gospel predating the oral traditions of the gospels themselves is difficult to imagine and implies early Christians developed what necessarily then becomes a backstory, or prequel, namely Jesus' ministry, only after developing the oral traditions concerning the oral transfer of those earlier events. That would be a neat trick, as the narratives about the oral transfer of those chronologically earlier narratives somehow would predate the content of the oral transfer detailed in Acts.

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