Archaeologists devise a better clock for Biblical times
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
So does that date the conquest (city burned) or when the pottery was created (by high heat)? Could pottery be used over several generations? I.e. Could broken pottery fragments have been created 100 years before it was destroyed?
But pottery doesn't help with this because it records the orientation of the magnetic field at that moment, and pottery is movable.
The general problem with biblical archaeology is that it is particularly susceptible to dogmatically motivated biases. During my studies in Heidelberg in the 1990s, I also took a few courses in this field. I never met an archaeologist at the entire university who even remotely believed in the existence of king David, let alone Solomon, Saul or even Joshua or Moses. However, when I visited Israel with a group of students, we were proudly presented with artifacts from these "empires" in some kibbutz museums. We or our professors did not directly object, of course, but smiled politely, just like in the churches where we were allowed to admire the miraculous icons.
Indeed. And it's not just biblical archaeology. The Israeli government influence and corruption extends to most academics.
When the Israeli academy is under control, a government can carefully construct its own history and when there is evidence of historical religious claims, well then, one can even reclaim ancient lands.
Also, a government can also confiscate land and open up a theme part based on this "research". Don't laugh. Ever hear of City of David?
This distrust of Israeli "historians" and it's treatment of Ilan Pappe even started the modern BDS movement
https://www.counterpunch.org/2005/05/11/tantura-teddy-katz-a...
Israeli citizens are not aware of their shameful past (ethnic cleansing, massacres, looting, and rapes) that took place in 1947-1949.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christ_myth_theory
am i the only one who keeps reading that scholars claim that no serious scholar thinks Jesus is a myth without producing a shred of evidence other than mythical gospels and other Christian sources?
as an atheist i have no skin in the game whatsoever. i simply try to apply Occam's razor and will always always follow Sagan standard.
To plenty of scholars, a "historic X" just means that X was recorded in history, and there's a set of techniques to perform critical reading of written history that is used to reject the incredible.
It's fair to say that Biblical history is especially rich in designing such criteria however ...
As I suspect most engineers do I do see values in systematic, critical approaches to dealing with human-made documents and artifacts, but have a hard time feeling certain without direct physical evidence. By implication this makes a lot of popularly-held history unknowable to me however (as in, the historicity of many people other than Jesus is believed without direct physical evidence as well, based on "records from the time show ...").
From POV, we have between 4 and 6 (depending on your cannon) different people that record first hand records of Jesus. And it turns out that these same people were passionate followers of Jesus. What other response would you expect from someone who actually knew someone who actually died and was brought back to life?
Since you seem to be a Christian working from a perspective of faith, I don't expect to convince you of anything, but you should at least study Biblical history a bit[0] before making as naive an argument as this.
>What other response would you expect from someone who actually knew someone who actually died and was brought back to life?
Many people are passionately convinced of things that aren't true. Passion is not a signifier of truth, rather it signifies a willingness to abandon objectivity. You're presenting the common Christian apologetic that the passion of the original Christians and the longevity of the religion is a sign of the validity of the resurrection, as no one would be expected to suffer for a known falsehood. This argument fails to take into account that every religion has its zealots, and people who suffer and die for their faith. That no more validates Christianity than it does the pagan faiths it replaced.
[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_reliability_of_the_...
I am a Christian (though, that term has many inaccurate definitions). I'll look through the Wikipedia article.
You mention that the Gospels don't agree on anything except the basic narrative. We actually only need a small number of facts to agree. The Wikipedia article you linked confirms Jesus was real and he was crucified. His crucifixion fulfilled a lot of prophesy in plenty of scripture.
Jesus' resurrection is pretty hard to prove (there is no body!), but we see ancillary evidence: His followers gave up their lives for what Jesus taught. Luke-Acts was written "shortly after" the resurrection, when eye witnesses were still alive. Thomas ran off to India and started a church "before" early Christians had a chance to "fake" evidence
I agree with you that passion alone is weak- every (most?) religion has zealots. The 4 Gospels and Paul's account are first hand accounts. They heard directly from Jesus who claimed to be God. Jesus might be crazy, but the original Apostles watched Jesus ascend into heaven - and then they died pursuing what Jesus taught. Paul was passionate about persecuting Christians (note the misplaced passion!), but then Jesus visited him directly and redirected Paul's passion and faith.
People have definitely died for lesser causes. People have definitely pursued petty fights - but the decision of Jesus isn't petty - it is quite literally a decision that defines what happens after our short life here on earth.
I appreciate you sharing the Wikipedia article. I'll read through it so I can better understand you and people like you. I wholeheartedly believe that the God of the Universe made you and loves you - and I want to show you that same love.
My take:
Mark has plenty of references to Jewish law - it was almost certainly written by someone with a strong Jewish background.
The names of the people in the book of Mark are "normal" names for people during the time of Jesus. A study got what amounts to a census during the time and location of Jesus - they documented the most popular names - and these names aligned with the names contained in each of the Gospels. This means that the person who wrote Mark was probably near Jerusalem during Jesus' time
The Gospels reflect personal differences in the authors... I haven't seen this yet in the Wikipedia article, but i expect to see it: Luke was Roman trained. Matthew, Mark, and John were jewish trained. Luke's account of the times when Jesus died are shifted by 6 hours. This is important. Luke believes that the day starts at midnight (like most Americans). Mark believes the day starts at sunset (like most Jews).
Mark and Luke had distinct authors.
I'll keep reading.
Thanks!
This observation allows us to conclude with high confidence that this passages constitute a "hidden" intependant gospel, that Luke and Matthew used together with Mark (and their individal traditions) as a source.[1] And we have also a very early Christian example of this literary genre of a collection of sayings ("Logiensammlung") in the (non-cannonical) Coptic Gospel of Thomas.[2]
Another remark in this context: That the different gospels (including, but not limited to those that become later cannonical) contradict each other one way or the other was noticed very early. There had been an attempt to construct a single sanitized gosple by Marcion of Sinope around 130-150, which was more or less a condensed version of Luke. It is interesting that such an attempt to propagate a single gosple as the only binding one was strongly opposed by many and resulted in a canonization of a multitude of four gospels and the popularity of many others for centuries. This diversity of "witnesses", characteristic for especially early Christianity stands in strong contrast to the historically rather naive biblical literalism (biblicism) of 19th century to contemporary Evangelicals.
[1] This was only a very brief summary, neglecting a lot of the scholarly discussion around it. For a somewhat more detailed introduction you may have a look at the Wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Q_source
Can you please share more about this? I haven't seen any credible contradictions among the Gospels - but I keep hearing credible people reference it.
If you want to study the differences between the gospels you may use a so-called "synopsis", that presents equivalent text passages from the different gospels next to each other. For example this color-coded one, that make it easy to spot differences: https://sites.google.com/view/biblestudyresources/gospels/co...
Another interesting difference in the New Testament concerns the text of the Acts of the Apostles. To quote from Wikipedia: "There are two major textual variants of Acts, the Western text-type and the Alexandrian. The oldest complete Alexandrian manuscripts date from the 4th century and the oldest Western ones from the 6th, with fragments and citations going back to the 3rd. Western texts of Acts are 6.2–8.4% longer than Alexandrian texts, the additions tending to enhance the Jewish rejection of the Messiah and the role of the Holy Spirit, in ways that are stylistically different from the rest of Acts." -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acts_of_the_Apostles#Manuscrip...
Include 3 specific women in the list.
List non Jewish heritage -and the specific number of "jewish" relatives necessary to make Jesus a "full blooded jew". This is important as it reflects the Jewish nature of the authorship of Matthew
Having different versions of the Lord's prayer isn't a problem either. Perhaps one author didn't find the entire prayer important enough. Or didn't find it important enough to include at all. This is what you would expect if 4 friends were writing down a single event they all attended.
The same goes for differences in the death and resurrection. In fact some of the differences are explained by the different background of the authors - which you would expectif there are different authors.
Also, two versions of Acts that are different by 8.4%? Really? Does it change the gospel? If not, then does it matter?
There are some arguments that Mark was the "source" of Matthew and Luke. And that Mark was based on "Q source". Nether of these assumptions are "earth shattering" or even disruptive. I maintain that these 3 gospels were written by 3 different people- and they likely referenced "existing documents"(for instance, any records of Jesus' birth, likely were based on interviews with Mary or Joseph). Perhaps "Q source" was the source - perhaps not. Either way, all 3 gospels had 3 different authors. And all 3 were inspired by the Holy Spirit.
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I also saw remarks about "Jesus having his divinity a secret until after his death. And Early Christians making up Jesus' claim to be God". This is totally bogus.
All 4 gospels repeat that Jesus claimed to be God. They have stories where Jewish leaders "tried to kill Jesus - because he claimed to be God". He was eventually tried for claiming to be God. There are also lots and lots of old testament prophesy that Jesus quotes pointing to Him being God. Yes, His disciples were surprised when he died, and again when he was resurrected. (Oh, BTW, the first 2 people who discovered his empty tomb were women, counter cultural at the time) - but His plan to die and be resurrected was a complete secret from even Satan himself.
Read it because you want to understand what the evidence shows about the authorship of the Gospels and their historicity, even in general terms. But please don't be one of those Christians who sees non-believers as a puzzle-box to be solved, and read it because you want to find the one rhetorical trick or gotcha that will convert me. You can't understand anything about me, much less "people like me" based on a Wikipedia article. I am a whole-ass complex person with a unique personal history, circumstances and outlook, not the straw mass of generalities, biases and stereotypes you have labeled "non-believer" in your head.
If you want to be a witness, live as Jesus said, by example. "Pure and undefiled religion before God and the Father is this: to visit orphans and widows in their trouble, and to keep oneself unspotted from the world." Stop trying to score Jesus points on people.
For it is written, “I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, and the discernment of the discerning I will thwart.”
For since, in the wisdom of God, the world did not know God through wisdom, it pleased God through the folly of what we preach to save those who believe.” 1 Corinthians 1:18-19, 21 ESV
For millenia, multitudes have sacrificed their life to follow Christ. The cost is quite literally one’s entire life.
One explanation could be that millions (billions?) have been deceived over the course of millenia.
Or another could be that since Jesus walked this earth, multitudes have come to the conclusion that Jesus is who He said He is. God Himself.
Many come to the conclusion via teaching. But the Christian walk is not one that is primarily about doctrine.
It’s about being lead subjectively by God Himself. It’s the fact that the Christian’s experience of following Jesus matches the character of God as revealed in the scriptures.
They have seen Him, experientially. And this is why multitudes, starting with the apostles, have lay down their lives proclaiming the good news - that though we have been separated because of the sin in our heart, God has made a way for us to be reconciled back to Him. And the way back to God - the only way - is to take Jesus at His word. To turn from our self will and to believe in Him.
Edit: removed a typo and added the reason why we need to be reconciled.
I see you became a Christian a couple of years ago. Welcome! I will pray that you learn and grow in your faith
Second of all: these accounts are not independent. There is the gospel of Mark, and them other authors went on copying most of the previous books, but adding sections that frequently contradict others. So, what we have are not 4 to 6 different accounts, we have a single story that has been copied and edited by several anonymous people.
Be that as it may, another aspect from Josephus is much more interesting, because it provides us with some context we would have otherwise missed: He tells us about other pretenders of the Messiah from that time, inluding the Roman suppression of this movements, and about John the Baptist in some detail. These passages are usually considered original.
Two different paragraphs to be exact. The first is accepted as at least a partial interpolation, while the second is usually accepted in full.
Also it's just incorrect to say "as an atheist I have no skin the game". If you are agnostic/atheist you range from questioning to non-beleif in god which necessitates that Christianity and other religions could be or are wrong. It seems ridiculous to me to hold a position that contradicts another and say you have no skin in deciding wheather the other one is right.
Sure, atheists‘ beliefs are benefited by religions being wrong in general, but no smart atheist would choose the totally plausible existence of a person as a hill to die on, when there’s such a large surface area of unlikely claims to attack instead (miracles, etc).
I agree that no atheist should have stakes in the theory, it's pretty clear that a lot of the more vocal types think they have some kind of stake in it (Bill Maher has been a big proponent of it, to give one prominent example).
There is "atheism" in the sense of its literal definition, and then there is "atheism" as a contemporary cultural phenomena, which involves many beliefs (even if only commonly rather than universally) which do not necessarily follow from that literal definition. "Jesus mythicism" is one of those later beliefs, even if a lot less than universal one.
To give some other examples, I know someone who calls themselves an "atheist" – and indeed, they fit the literal definition, they think the existence of God is improbable – but they also believe in ghosts and a life after death, beliefs which are generally outside the bounds of "atheism" in that second sense. Similarly, the early 20th century British philosopher John McTaggart, was an atheist in the literal sense – he was convinced that the existence of God was impossible, and even believed that he had a proof of God's necessary non-existence – but he also believed that matter and time were mere illusions, and that all that really existed was timeless immortal souls and their eternal love for one another – beliefs radically incompatible with "atheism" in that second sense. Similarly, many Buddhists (especially Theravadins) are in some literal sense atheists, in that they deny the existence of any ultimate God (as is claimed to exist in the Abrahamic religions and in many Hindu sects), but they also have many beliefs (rebirth, past life memories, enlightened beings having psychic, even miraculous, powers) which are way outside "atheism" in that second sense.
(Even though orthodox Theravada does believe in gods, including those of Hinduism, as mortal non-ultimate deities, I think that belief is somewhat peripheral, in that a person could interpret that belief in an essentially non-literal way, and not be that far from Theravadan orthodoxy; however, rebirth is a much more central belief, and to interpret that in an equally non-literal way, would be straying much further from that orthodoxy.)
I think the most fundamental belief behind that worldview, is that the most fundamental theoretical entities of physics (whatever they may turn out to be–particles, waves, strings, branes, forces, fields, etc) are the only ultimate reality, and everything else which exists somehow grounds its existence on them. The non-existence of God is merely a consequence of that fundamental belief, not a fundamental belief in itself. "Naturalism", "materialism", "physicalism" all do a better job of naming that fundamental belief than "atheism" does, which is a word which refers to a non-fundamental consequence of it.
"Antisupernaturalism" is another option, albeit it has the disadvantage of being purely negative, whereas I think this worldview actually makes positive claims about the nature of reality and what can be known of it.
No? A large number of dispersed communities cannot have all been exposed to the hypothetical founder directly espousing their own teachings; the phenomenon you seek to explain actually precludes the explanation you're trying to give.
A rapid rise in dispersed groups following a set of teachings has to be explained by a large number of people espousing those teachings in parallel. It makes no difference whether those people got their knowledge as disciples of an individual person, as members of a committee devoted to a supernatural force, by reading the same book at the same time in different places, through the grapevine, or by independently adapting their teachings to what their audiences want.
Leaving all supernatural claims aside, assuming that such an individual really existed does seem a more plausible explanation than the idea that it was all fictional.
It also helps explain many other elements in the gospels. For example, a purely mythical narrative would have him come straight from Bethlehem as prophesied. Instead, the gospels report that he comes from the unimportant village of Nazaret (likely true) and then feel the need to add the (fictional but lovely) Christmas narrative to have him fulfil the prophecies.
Incidentally, these questions are not uncommon at all in ancient history, see also for example the Socratic problem: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socratic_problem
It's really bizarre when you think about it. There are figures that historians think might have been composite figures developed over centuries, but nothing like disparate groups suddenly creating a fake founding figure from a generation back (the Pauline letters are written a couple of decades after Jesus is supposed to have died).
And the theory doesn't solve any problems. Instead of one preacher we have some evidence for, we now have multiple preachers we have no evidence for, multiple proto-Christian movements we have no evidence for, councils to unify the movements by falsify their origin we have no evidence for, etc.
You're assuming that there were leaders. Not really, the earlier christianity was the combination of several loose teachings taken from different sources, including jewish and pagan. They were then combined by Paul, who preached a celestial being, not a human, as their ultimate source. His writings were later harmonized with the tale of a human Jesus, who appeared on a somewhat remote past and in a remote country that had been destroyed by the Romans (Judea). So, no wonder that nobody disagreed about this tale, nobody had really seen it happening other than by "revelation".
You're also claiming that the proto-Christians weren't working within a messianic Jewish framework (which the academic view of early Christianity fits nicely), but a completely different framework that we neither have evidence of before and that completely disappears afterwards.
Speaking of completely disappearing afterwards - Paul's letters are from ~50 AD, Mark is ~70 AD. So you have still have to posit a massive and seemingly unified (even though the early Christians were hardly unified) agreement to adopt the human narrative, since soon after we get a lot of information about heresies, and lots of criticisms about Christianity, but no one is aware that it (supposedly) was as a completely separate religion within living memory.
It's just a very strange theory, one that posits a completely different religion suddenly appearing and disappearing, and seems to be based solely on ignoring most of the content of the Pauline letters, twist the words of some of the others, and just making up the rest whole clothe. It's about as historical as Dan Brown's version of Christianity, and has as much scholarly support.
It's not built entirely on the letters of one person. Anyone who's studied early Christianity knows that there's a large variety of early sources, including Christian proto-orthodoxy, other Christian sects (including things that get labelled as heresies and gnostic today, though those terms are misleading), and early critics of Christianity.
This all gives us a decent understanding of how the religion developed during the first couple of centuries. Though we see a great deal of variety in early Christian thought, we don't see any of the evidence of this proposed precursor religion. The idea seems to entirely exist because people want it to, which is why it's been rejected by historians as a fringe theory.
I brought up the letters of Paul because the claim was that Paul personally created Christianity on his own as an entirely separate religion (one where Christ is a celestial and not earthly creature), and that it was completely changed (by...someone?) within a few years of his death. I'd think Paul's writings directly contradicting this theory would be rather important, not "dogmatic bias."
> myths are created all the time and always has been.
I can't think of any religion where historians believe the found preacher was invented within a few decades of it's creation. And the existence of myths in the past isn't carte blanche to ignore evidence and then make up one's own theory that's completely devoid of evidence.
No, you don't need agreement for any of this to happen. In fact quite the opposite, we know today that original christians (at the time of Paul) were at odds in practically anything, including the idea that Jesus came in flesh (you will find this being condemned in the new testament itself).
However, from several branches of this fringe cult one won out over time, the one started by Paul (who never knew a real Jesus, as he confess by the way). This one branch created a single story (the Gospel of Mark) that was copied and embellished by several others. This is the one version of Christianity that became famous and powerful.
So we don't have them all agreeing on the basic facts, as you mention. We have a story that was created and embellished, and them every other dissenting voice was suppressed.
What are you saying is being condemned in the NT, exactly?
> Paul (who never knew a real Jesus, as he confess by the way).
Where does Paul confess that he never knew a real Jesus?
In Galatians 1:12 to 1:16, Paul affirms that he didn't lean about Jesus from flesh and blood, but from God's revelation. In no moment Paul says he ever saw a real Jesus, only his "divine revelation", which is a big confession from someone who lived in Jerusalem during the supposed ministry of Jesus. Moreover, given his age he should have been himself among those who killed Jesus, but he never mentions this little fact.
Anyway, we know a lot about the beliefs of various early Christian groups, and even have the writings of a number of them. But none of them match the beliefs you're positing.
Ultimately, I’ve found that a person’s opinion on this tends to follow their preconceived ideas. Someone intending to dismiss Christianity altogether might conclude that since its supernatural claims are probably untrue then the whole thing should be thrown away. On the other hand, someone intending to take Christianity seriously might find that the combination of its founder’s teaching plus three thousand years of cultural development is something of extraordinary value in itself, regardless of any faith in the supernatural.
I don't think this example is so clear. First, "logos" is a common word that appears hundreds of times in the NT. Second, "the word of God / the LORD" is a common and important occurrence in the OT. John's argument is that Jesus was the one delivering these messages, as he existed beforehand to do so (see John 8:52-58).
Third, just because it was a Greek concept, doesn't mean John is intending to apply it here. An easy example is how the Septuagint always translates the Hebrew word "sheol" to the Greek word "hades". Even though hades is a Greek philosophical concept, the intention is not to apply that concept; it's just the word that the translators decided is closest to the meaning of the original.
With that said, there's no question that the early church beyond the twelve wrestled with and eventually incorporated many Greek philosophical concepts into their belief systems. We just don't see clear evidence of that in the gospels, I don't think.
Or, you know, the theory that doesn’t rely on a historical conspiracy.
Totally untrue, there is archeological evidence for Alexander from day 1 of his conquests. Jesus has zero contemporaneous sources, everyone who wrote about him was living after his supposed death, and said what his followers were claiming at the time (hearsay).
Tell me you're completely uneducated about a subject without telling me you're completely uneducated.
"Christus, from whom the name [of 'Christian'] had its origin, suffered the extreme penalty during the reign of Tiberius at the hands of one of our procurators, Pontius Pilatus, and a most mischievous superstition, thus checked for the moment, again broke out not only in Judaea, the first source of the evil, but even in Rome, where all things hideous and shameful from every part of the world find their centre and become popular." [1]
One could cast doubt upon Tacitus, but he is one of the primary chroniclers of Rome, and much more of what we know of Rome would be in doubt also.
[1]https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Annals_(Tacitus)/Book_15#...
Tacitus writes aprox. 90 years after the event. What were his sources? Christianity seems to have already achieved a certain notoriety, from which Tacitus quickly distances himself ("a most mischievous superstition"). But the story fits well to support his anti-imperial and specifically anti-Neronian stance. Therefore we do not need to expect a lot of deep research on his side before including this little remark into his Annals. And the mentioning of Pontius Pilatus sounds suspiciously canonically Christian. The most likely conclusion is that Tacitus is just repeating what his contemporary Christians have told everyone about the origin of their cult.
This does not mean that what he tells us is incorrect, but that is account is probably based on a Christian and not an independent tradition.
90 years isn’t a long time and many contemporary primary and secondary sources no doubt existed. If I was speaking about US history, I could mention Gov Al Smith of New York contemporaneously and many people with context would understand me immediately. Tacitus wasn’t writing for an audience a millennia in the future.
He was an imperial official and solider who sympathized with the barbarians resisting the empire. So it wouldn’t be surprising if he used sources outside of the mainstream of the day. I think the ultimate answer is that we don’t know who his source was. If you look at the entirety of independent sources mentioning Christ, I think most scholars agree that he was a historical figure… but the details of what he did when and why do not have that level of consensus.
Tacitus not being a Christian makes him not automatically an "independent source" in the eyes of historians. We need to ask, what was most likely his source (and the source of his source, etc.). This is why historians often prefer to use in such circumstances the more precise term "independent tranditions" instead of "independent sources". Two "independent sources" are either an independent primary or secondary (or tertiary, or ...) source unconnected to each other. Discussing what speeks for or against the independence of sources about the same topic is bread-and-butter work of so-called "source criticism".
That we do not know the source of Tacitus' knowledge and probably never will is not unusual, but the rule for the ancient world. We only have a few important primary sources from that era.[1]
What a historian of Antiquity learns during her or his training and what makes a large part of their academic work is to evaluate such secondary (or tertiary or more remote) sources regarding their most likely history of tradition. In this respect Tacitus' account is a very bad candidate of being really independent, since it is extremely unlikely that it was not even indirectly influenced by someone who knows something about "Christ" without ever having come into contact with the Christian tradition. If instead, he would have claimed that his knowledge was based on old documents from the archives of Pontius Pilate, the picture would be entirely different. Though, we still could have our doubts that such archives were really authentic and not Christian "forgeries".[2]
[1] We have almost no autographs of important historic persons from Antiquity. A noteworthy exception are letters from Bar-Kokhba, the leader of the Jewish revolt from 131-136. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cave_of_Letters#Bar-Kokhba_let...
[2] Christians produced a lot of fictional document, such as letters of Jesus and the Apostels, some of which made it into the New Testament. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pseudepigrapha#Biblical_studie...
Personally, for what it’s worth, I think Christ was a real person whose life and death created a cult of personality at a key moment in time. The details of the story have been fiddled with 1000 times over a millennia and are not reliable historically. Entire branches of Christianity have vanished with varying beliefs as to the details of the story.
Is that not itself a dogmatic motivated bias?
Roll forward 2000 years and people discussing Spielberg and Lucas's accounts as conflicting along with palimpsest of Alex Guinness' Biography
When we talk about a person we have been trained to apply implicit frameworks, which are typically quite vague, what gives us confidence that a certain character really existed and is related in such and such a way to what is said about this person. Saying that someone is a historical person means that we have a canonical body of knowledge related to that "person" that is considered (more or less!) being historically valid. For a mythical person the opposite is true: we have a canonical body of knowledge related to that "person" that is considered (more or less!) being ficitional. Some canonical truth about a historical person might turn out to be false; but such a discovery might not make this person suddenly fictional. Or we might discover that some narrative about a fictional character is rooted in an historic event; but this does not make this fictional character suddenly a historic person.
However, this contrast between a historical and a fictional person marks only the ends of a spectrum. Many characters from the past are somewhere in between. You do not need to go back to antiquity for some interesting cases. Take for example the so-called Shakespeare authorship question,[1] which might be summarized with the bon mont, that the works of Shakespeare have not been written by Shakespeare but by another person with the same name. But all joking aside, when discussing ancient characters which have a large fictional text corpus around them, scholarship typically differentiates between a historical X and a fictional X. Among scholars this difference is usually only made explicit, when one is contrasting the two, and left to the context if not, because it goes without saying. So we speak for example of the historical Socrates in contrast to the Platonic Socrates (as a character in Plato's dialogues). And of course there is a debate which features of the Platonic Socrates might be ascribed to the historical Socrates and which not. (And the closest sources about Socrates are from his biased desciples Platon and Xenophon -- aside from some jokes of Aristophanes.)
Regarding Jesus, a similar distinction makes sense, between a historical Jesus and the Jesus of the gospels (and the Jesus of other sources). In its modern form this distinction has a very long and intense research history starting in the 18th century.[2] The complexity of this research history shows that it is all but easy to identify the historic Jesus behind the sources, but that we have nevertheless so much evidence, that some historic person takes shape behind the narratives. However, there is almost no substantial agreement about the individual features of the historical Jesus other than that he was a male that was cruxified during the reign of emperor Tiberus in Jerusalem. I personally think that much more can be said with good reason, but any other claim is at least a tiny bit dubious.
In contrast, when we focus on characters like king David, Salomon, Josua or Moses there exist next to nothing that links their biographies from the bible to external evidence and a lot of evidence that contradicts the details. This does not mean that no connections can be made between these stories and some presumed historical events backed by other evidence. But this connection is not strong than, for example, the connection between the legend of king Arthur and the history of the dark ages and late Roman Britain and Brittany.
>> As an archeologist, ...
Biographical footnote: I studied philosophy, but had to chose a so-called "minor subject" that was (protestant) theology, which was methodically quite neutral. i.e. biblical sources were treated like any other historical source and being sensitive to once own potential biases was part of the methodology. In practice, this meant that there was a lively exchange between the theological department, historians, papyrologists, egyptologists, classical archaeology, philology etc. You were even required to take a certain amount of courses in other departments. As being a secularised student myself, it was no problem at all to study theology. I would estimate that only about half of the theology students at that time were "observant" Christians in the stricter sense.
[1] See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shakespeare_authorship_questio...
[2] For an overview see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quest_for_the_historical_Jesus
Furthermore, if we look at the more specific information we have, we find information which arguably increases that probability even further. Suppose, hypothetically, that the early Christian sources had disagreed about which century Jesus had lived in-that fact surely would have increased the odds that Jesus was mythical. But, conversely, the fact that all known early Christian sources which explicitly date his life, do so to the same period, give or take a few years at most, has to increase the odds that Jesus was historical. Conversely, Buddhist sources disagree (by decades, even centuries in some cases) about when Siddharta Gautama lived, which implies his odds of being mythical are greater than those of Jesus of Nazareth.
There is nothing religious about these arguments - they are simply treating Christianity as one religion among many, trying to devise general criteria - applicable to any religion - to determine whether a religious founder is likely historical or mythical, and then applying those criteria to Christianity
Yes, the founder has necessarily to be a real person. But not the one from which the tales are made. For example, all greek mysteries purported to come from a real teacher, but in most cases these were gods, i.e., not real people.
There is really no evidence of a christian sect forming in Jerusalem at the time of the supposed death of Jesus. Christianity appeared for all purposes in the Greek Asian Minor, pushed by someone who called himself Paul, and all the writings we have are from Greek-speaking composers. The idea that Christianity goes back to a Jesus and his followers in Judea seems to be a romantic idea used by the real founders of the movement to make it older than it really was.
None of the ancient Greek mystery religions claimed a recent human founder as their central figure. Their central figures were almost all deities, not humans; even when they occasionally centred on a human, it was a hero who lived in the distant uncertain past, not someone who lived at a defined recent historical moment. By contrast, the four canonical Gospels all agree that Jesus was executed while Pontius Pilate was governor of Judaea (between 26/27 and 36/37 CE), and it seems likely those Gospels were composed within a century of that date.
> There is really no evidence of a christian sect forming in Jerusalem at the time of the supposed death of Jesus.
The New Testament is evidence. To be clear, a historical text claiming X is evidence for X. Now, we can argue about how whether it is strong evidence or weak evidence, but either way it is still evidence. And of course, accepting the text as evidence, doesn't mean we have to accept all of its claims as equal in evidential weight, especially those of a miraculous or supernatural nature. If a text makes a mixture of claims, some historically plausible, and others which are (from a purely secular perspective) extraordinarily improbable, it is reasonable to judge its evidential strength as being much higher with respect to the former claims than with respect to the later.
> Christianity appeared for all purposes in the Greek Asian Minor, pushed by someone who called himself Paul, and all the writings we have are from Greek-speaking composers.
The vast majority of scholars accept Galatians as an authentic work of Paul. In Galatians 1-2, he claims the "Jesus Christ" movement which he propagates pre-existed his conversion to it, and he reports visiting its leadership in Jerusalem. So this is evidence that a "Jesus Christ" movement existed in Jerusalem prior to Paul's conversion to it.
> The idea that Christianity goes back to a Jesus and his followers in Judea seems to be a romantic idea used by the real founders of the movement to make it older than it really was.
In order for that to be true, either (1) Galatians is not an authentic letter of Paul, (2) Galatians has been tampered with to insert material claiming Paul visited the pre-existing proto-Christian community at Jerusalem, (3) Paul was lying. While none of that is impossible, it seems less likely than that Paul really did join a pre-existing religious sect headquartered in Jerusalem. In particular, while I'm no expert at biblical Greek, scholars argue that there is no textual evidence in support of (1) or (2).
Saying that Pauline Christianity had its origins in a pre-existing proto-Christian sect headquartered in Jerusalem, is not denying that Paul took it in some innovative theological directions, such that it ended up with significant differences from that starting point. One obvious difference–apparent from Paul's own writings–is a much greater distance from Judaism, moving beyond being a sect of Judaism and towards becoming an entirely distinct religion.
Gospels are not historical texts. They are religious literature. They present zero evidence of the facts they narrate.
Religious literature is a form of historical evidence. The LDS scriptures (Book of Mormon, Doctrine and Covenants, Pearl of Great Price) is historical evidence for the thinking of Joseph Smith and the early Mormons. The Quran and Hadith are historical evidence for early Islam and the life of Muhammad. The Scientology scriptures are historical evidence for L. Ron Hubbard. And, in the exact same way, Christian religious literature is historical evidence for the history of Christianity. Accepting all of this as historical evidence, doesn't mean we have to uncritically accept all of their claims – we can compare them to other sources (when they exist, they don't always do); we can judge the inherent plausibility of each claim, and justifiably be open to accepting the more historically probable claims of these texts while rejecting the miraculous elements of them. Of course, if one has a faith commitment to one of these religions, that might predispose one to accept rather than reject some of those miraculous claims, but then one isn't playing the language-game (Sprachspiel) of "secular history of religions" any more, one is playing a different language-game instead.
But the reality is, most Christians never cared much about this problem. Exactly which miracles Jesus of Nazareth did or didn't do, and exactly which order he did them in, was never seen as particularly important by most Christians. Sure, there have always been some who have wanted to "smooth things over" by constructing Gospel harmonies (most famously Tatian's Diatessaron), but it has always been a minority concern. Ultimately, in Christianity, there is only one miracle which really counts (the Resurrection), with the virgin birth following close behind–the rest pale in significance. And, it is worth noting, that the numerous factional disputes which consumed early Christianity ("heresies"), almost none of them were concerned with questions of which miracles happened or which order they happened in, most of them were about more abstract theological questions, or else more practical matters (e.g. can sinful clergy perform valid sacraments, which was the central dispute motivating Donatism and Novatianism.)
I think you really touched on it here.
Jesus was born. He is man and God.
Jesus was crucified.
Jesus was resurrected.
Jesus ascended into heaven.
Those miracles/events are the core events that are necessary.
I feel like you are simultaneously violating the scientific perspective (where a small numbers of impossibilities is just as bad as a large number although it feels more plausible - fake psychics exploit this discrepancy by only moving light objects short distances as if that was any easier) and the religious one (where you're making the accusation that all of the early church fathers were pathological liars, and that Jesus was at best misinformed when he referred to bronze age myths in his sermons) in an attempt to sit on the fence and appease the mental habits taught by two deeply conflicting cultures.
There is even a bible verse about this: "So then because thou art lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will spue thee out of my mouth." (Revelation 3:16)
> How can you say that the authors of the bible made up 99 miracles but were honest about a few of them?
Personally, I doubt the Gospel authors consciously invented stories intending to deceive people. I suspect a lot of what happened, is people constructed tales which were meant as metaphors rather than literally true, but at some point in the retelling their metaphorical nature was forgotten. In other cases, such as healings – people actually did have the subjective experience of being miraculously healed, whatever objectively may have been going on – something which still happens today, whether at Lourdes or at Pentecostal churches. Similarly, many cases of demonic possession were likely culture-bound syndromes, and exorcists actually can heal culture-bound syndromes. Even someone with a mental illness which is less culture-bound in nature, convince them a miracle worker has cured them, and they may actually experience a respite in symptoms, even if sometimes only a temporary one. Added to that, stories about healings and exorcisms tend to grow in the retelling, so elements of the stories which seem medically impossible may be later embellishments, and the core may involve a medically plausible story of a faith healer who uses the placebo effect, the psychosomatic nature of some illnesses, the ability of mental state to influence the odds and rate of recovery from actual physical illness or injury, the actual non-zero efficacy of faith healing in treating mental illness in populations predisposed to believe in its effectiveness, etc, etc.
Please don't (mis)quote the Bible at me if you don't take it seriously. This isn't what this verse means and is a distraction.
>How can you say that the authors of the bible made up 99 miracles but were honest about a few of them?
My comment was directed to a fellow Christian and lacked a lot of context important for non believers. Let me try and unpack my original intent.
There are a LOT of facts and pseudofacts in the Bible. There are a LOT (like a lot) of distractions in the discussions of Christianity. There is a small number of relevant and key facts that are critical to agree on. If these facts are wrong - nothing else matters. If we disagree on these facts - nothing else matters. These facts are commonly summarized as "The Gospel". Here they are:
God created everything
God created you and me to be in a perfect relationship with Him
We sinned and are separated from this perfect relationship
There is no way we can earn our way back to this perfect relationship
Jesus, who is God, came to earth. He lived a perfect life. He died the death that I deserve.
He was resurrected
He ascended to heaven
If I accept His death in place of mine, I can live forever in a perfect relationship with the God of the Universe
------
That is it. Here are some things that don't matter: How many fish Jesus used to feed people. Are Angels real. What on earth was happening in Genesis ch 6 (Christians, you know what I'm talking about). Was David king.
These questions might be nice to talk about amd agree on - BUT - and this is important - if we can't agree on the Gospel then nothing else matters. Nothing. So let's not get distracted with "do all 4 gospels agree on the order of the miracles". Let's stay focused on things that point to the gospel. Did Jesus die? Was he resurrected? Did he ascend into heaven?
Because if we can agree on these questions (and the others in the gospel), then and only then can we talk about "Did Jesus walk on water" or "is homosexuality wrong". But if Jesus didn't come back to life, then I am truely screwed and nothing else matters. (and, yes, there is a bible verse for that, but I'm not going to waste my time looking it up)
Catholicism takes this idea of "core"-versus-"non-core", and elaborates it into a whole "hierarchy of truths" (also called "theological notes"), with numerous defined levels. Orthodoxy and Protestantism have never accepted the details of that picture, but most Orthodox and Protestants would probably agree that it is more than a simple binary, it is more of a spectrum, even if they think Catholic theology went overboard in trying to break down that spectrum into precisely defined levels. (And some contemporary Catholic theologians agree with the criticism that Catholic theology did historically go overboard with this.) Viewed in that light, it can be defended that while both the Resurrection and the Virgin Birth belong to the core, the former is "even more core" than the later; there may be a small number of other individual miracles (such as the Transfiguration) which may be somewhat core as well, although clearly "less core" than either the Resurrection or the Virgin Birth are. But, one doesn't need to be a Christian at all to understand all this – one can understand the details of the history of how Christians have understood their own doctrines and dogmas, whether or not one personally believes in any of them.
> If I accept His death in place of mine
This sounds to me like an expression of penal substitutionary atonement (PSA). While many Protestants (especially conservative evangelical ones) tend to believe that PSA is core to the Gospel, other Christians disagree. The intellectual history of PSA can be traced through Anselm of Canterbury in mediaeval England, who in turn influenced Catholic scholastic theology (especially Thomas Aquinas) and then Protestant Reformers such as Luther and Calvin (who despite openly rejecting much of mediaeval Catholic theology, sometimes retained more of it than they consciously realised.) The whole satisfaction/substitutionary approach to atonement is rather Latin/Western (Roman Catholic and Protestant), while Eastern Christian traditions (Eastern Orthodoxy, Eastern Catholicism, Oriental Orthodoxy, Church of the East) put more emphasis on alternatives such as ransom theory and recapitulation theory. While one could interpret your statement in terms of ransom or recapitulation theory, I doubt such an interpretation would be true to what you actually meant by it.
If someone tells you a story with several elements in it, one that is important but you can't verify, and the others which are trivial but you know to be lies, what would you say about the one important claim they're making? I don't see how someone can (for example) say that angels or miracles are supposed to be metaphorical without calling in to question whether the birth of Christ was metaphorical.
I doubt the Gospels contain "lies". Even if it is true that many of the events in them never happened as described, I doubt they are deliberate falsehoods – which is what "lies" are. I think it is far more likely that its authors genuinely believed they were writing the truth, even if it turns out they sometimes weren't. I think most religious scriptures (whatever the religion) are the product of genuine (even if mistaken) belief rather than blatant charlatanism. Stories can evolve through retelling (especially in oral-centric cultures), such that a small kernel of truth becomes surrounded by elaborate fictions, without anybody ever consciously engaging in lying or deception.
Furthermore, a Christian who believes in the "core miracles", but doesn't extend their belief to the "non-core", is unlikely to agree that they "know" that these non-core miracles are false. They are more likely to say that, they have a faith conviction in the truth of the core, but are agnostic ("I don't know") with respect to how much truth is contained in the non-core. I'd be surprised if there was anyone who was positive about the truth of the core, and just as positive about the falsehood of the non-core.
It was the success of Paul's version of Christianity that made everyone follow his "revealed Jesus" point of view, which later was embellished in the "gospel of Mark" as a person living in Israel, and reedited several times by different anonymous writers.
I think you are interpreting Paul's words here in an overly literalistic fashion. He isn't claiming that people preaching "another Christ" are preaching a different historical figure as their saviour – as in "my Christ is Jesus of Nazareth, your Christ is Menachem of Jericho". Rather, he is claiming their theology or morals are so wrong that the "Christ" they preach is no longer the "real one" even if it still claims the same historical figure as its foundation.
Today, you can walk into a fundamentalist Protestant church, and hear a preacher complaining that Catholics follow "another Christ and another Gospel". The preacher isn't claiming Catholicism is based on a different historical figure; rather, he is claiming that their theology and morals are so radically wrong it might as well be. You don't have to have any sympathy at all for the preacher's views, to understand that Paul was making the same kind of claim, just in a very different time and place, and against rather different targets.
> It was the success of Paul's version of Christianity that made everyone follow his "revealed Jesus" point of view, which later was embellished in the "gospel of Mark" as a person living in Israel,
That's a hypothesis. How strong is the evidence for that hypothesis? Most scholars think it is quite weak – even among non-Christian scholars (such as atheists and Jews) who don't have any theological motivation for rejecting it. The alternative hypothesis–that Paul joined a pre-existing Jewish sect based in Jerusalem, centred on the historical figure of Jesus of Nazareth, but transformed it into a rather different religion by refocusing it away from Jews and towards recruiting Gentiles–is considered the more probable one by mainstream scholarship.
"If you were a rising young archaeologist in the 1970s, you were skeptical of stories about Jewish kings. The ascendant critical school in biblical scholarship, sometimes known by the general name "minimalism," was making a strong case that there was no united Israelite monarchy around 1000 B.C."
From this article: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/archaeological-dig-re...
For a long time, people dismissed the idea that Vikings made it to the Americas ahead of Columbus. That changed in the 1960s:
https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/new-dating-met...
It was laughable until it wasn't. I could point out similar discoveries that have been made about the history of American peoples before Columbus arrived that 19th scholars would have found unbelievable. In the same way, many places mentioned in the Bible were laughed away by scholars until archeology started digging up lots of finds in the 20th century. Sure, plenty of people are biased before they start digging, but it's similar to when you know there's buried treasure in the vicinity so it helps narrow down your search. A lot of discoveries in archeology, science or whatever are made when people have something specific in mind that they're looking for before they even start exploring, and when they discover something, no amount of hand waving makes the discovery untrue. :)
That's a very interesting conclusion but remarkably different to the Biblical record.
This seems to change by university. Had you for example visited Tel-Aviv university (site of Finkelstein et. all) you would have likely gotten a different vibe.