Category: Vridar

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Scholarly Reconstructions of the Historical Jesus

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COVERED IN THIS POST:

• Consensus scholarly views of the historical Jesus
  • The tyranny of the Gospels
  • What Q does not tell us about an historical Jesus
  • How New Testament scholarship operates
• Conflicting scholarly views about who and what Jesus was
• Finding Jesus in the Q prophets
  • An argument for the existence of Q
• Not finding an historical Jesus in the epistles’ Christ
• Ehrman’s criteria for the genuine words and deeds of Jesus

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Finding the Jesus of History

(Did Jesus Exist? pp. 267-296)

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What scholars claim to know about the historical Jesus

Here is Ehrman’s summation of what critical scholarship in general believes about the historical Jesus:

[T]here are a number of important facts about the life of Jesus that virtually all critical scholars agree on, for reasons that have in part been shown and that in other ways will become increasingly clear throughout the course of this chapter and the next. Everyone, except the mythicists, of course, agrees that

• Jesus was a Jew who came from northern Palestine (Nazareth)
• and lived as an adult in the 20s of the Common Era.
• He was at one point of his life a follower of John the Baptist
• and then became a preacher and teacher to the Jews in the rural areas of Galilee.
• He preached a message about the “kingdom of God”
• and did so by telling parables.
• He gathered disciples
• and developed a reputation for being able to heal the sick and cast out demons.
• At the very end of his life, probably around 30 CE, he made a trip to Jerusalem during a Passover feast
• and roused opposition among the local Jewish leaders,
• who arranged to have him put on trial before Pontius Pilate,
• who ordered him to be crucified for calling himself the king of the Jews. (DJE? p. 269 — my formatting)

This is a prime example of what I have called “the tyranny of the Gospels,” for not a single one of these biographical details is to be found in the non-Gospel record of the first century.

Furthermore, the three later Gospels of our canonical four (along with the satellite Acts) seem entirely dependent on Mark for their basic story of “Jesus of Nazareth.” Critical scholarship is essentially deriving its picture of an historical Jesus from the work of one author, at least several decades after the supposed fact. Continue reading “31. Earl Doherty’s Response to Bart Ehrman’s Case Against Mythicism – Part 31 (Scholarly Reconstructions of HJ)”

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Bart Ehrman vs. Earl Doherty

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COVERED IN THIS POST:

• Using previous scholarship with a different end result
• Ehrman’s numerous misreadings and misrepresentations of my text
  • Platonic (and other) ancient views of the universe
  • What was the interpretation of the cultic myths:
    • allegorical or literal, heavenly or earthly?
    • among the philosophers?
    • among the devotees of the cult?
    • among the common people?
• Revisiting 1 Thessalonians 2:15-16
• Revisiting “the rulers of this age”
• Was the Christ cult Jewish or Greek—or both?
• Jewish sectarian thinking moves upward
• Was Pauline Christianity “Aramaic rural Palestinian Judaism”?
• Must Christ have shed his blood on earth?
• Problems and declarations

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Was Jesus Crucified in the Spiritual Realm Rather Than on Earth?

(Did Jesus Exist? pp. 252-258)

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The practice of drawing on previous scholarship

Ehrman calls me “one of the staunchest defenders of a mythicist view of Christ.” Well, that’s almost the only valid statement he makes about me in the entire book. He starts off with a complaint which has often cropped up in criticisms directed against me:

He quotes professional scholars at length when their views prove useful for developing aspects of his argument, but he fails to point out that not a single one of these scholars agrees with his overarching thesis. (DJE? p. 252)

First of all, I scarcely think I needed to point this out. What mainstream New Testament scholar subscribes to the mythicist theory, let alone that Paul regarded Christ as sacrificed in the heavenly realm? If any of these scholars I draw on had so believed, does Ehrman think I would not have trumpeted it to the skies? I was hardly concealing what anyone would assume was the historicist orientation of such scholars.

More importantly, does Ehrman or anyone else regard it as illegitimate of me to draw on observations and conclusions on the part of established scholarship if they can be fitted into the context of my own argument? Mainstream scholars do that all the time. All of scholarship builds on the work of predecessors, and all of those predecessors are subject to reinterpretation and the reapplication of their work to the new conclusions of their successors. Besides, many of my references to the views of historicist scholars involve a clear indication that I make use of their observations in different ways than they do, with different end results.

Enough said on that fallacy. Ehrman’s motive in raising it is quite clearly to impugn to me some form of dishonest procedure.

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Multiple views of the universe
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One of the “problems” Ehrman finds in my book is its main thesis:

One particular piece is especially unconvincing: in Doherty’s view, Paul (and other early Christians) believed that the Son of God had undergone a redeeming “‘blood’ sacrifice” not in this world but in a spiritual realm above it. (DJE? p. 252)

In the course of explaining why he is unconvinced, Ehrman makes a number of egregious misreadings of my text. (I know it is 800 pages, but it is still incumbent upon Ehrman to actually see the words as they stand on the page if he is going to find fault with them.) He says: Continue reading “Bart Ehrman vs. Earl Doherty. Part 29 of Earl Doherty’s Response to Bart Ehrman’s Case Against Mythicism”

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Part II: The Mythicists’ Claims – One: A Problematic Record

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.COVERED IN THIS POST:

• Admitting to problematic Gospels
• Gospel authors unknown
• Fallacious analogies:
  • Obama’s birth certificate
  • The Hitler diaries
  • Clinton’s presidency
  • George Washington
• Discrepancies and contradictions in the Gospels
• Radically different pictures of Jesus
• How much of the Gospels is fictional?
• Form criticism and the argument of Robert Price
• The criterion of dissimilarity: is it applicable in the Gospels?
• Doubly strong claims? — multiple attestation and dissimilarity:
  • crucifixion
  • brothers
  • Nazareth
• P.S. Claim 2: Nazareth Did Not Exist

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Chapter Six: The Mythicist Case: Weak and Irrelevant Claims

Claim 1: The Gospels Are Highly Problematic as Historical Sources

(Did Jesus Exist? pp. 177-190)

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The present chapter will look at the typical arguments used by mythicists that are, in my judgment, weak and/or irrelevant to the question. (DJE? p. 177)

With that, Ehrman embarks on a direct attempt to discredit some of the arguments on which mythicists like myself base their contention that Jesus did not exist.

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Problematic Gospels as Historical Sources

After allowing that the great number of manuscripts of the New Testament documents we possess, as compared to copies of other ancient writings, has nothing to do with whether they are reliable or not, Ehrman makes a pretty heavy set of admissions:

• we do not have the original texts of the Gospels, and there are places where we do not know what the authors originally said;
• the Gospels are not authored by the persons named in their titles (Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John) but were written by people who were not followers of Jesus but lived forty to sixty years later in different parts of the world;
• the Gospels are full of discrepancies and contradictions;
• the Gospels report historical events that can be shown not to have happened.

Moreover,

. . . even though the Gospels are among the best attested books from the ancient world, we are regrettably hindered in knowing what the authors of these books originally wrote. The problem is not that we are lacking manuscripts. We have thousands of manuscripts. The problem is that none of these manuscripts is the original copy produced by the author (this is true for all four Gospels—in fact, for every book of the New Testament). Moreover, most of these manuscripts were made over a thousand years after the original copies, none of them is close to the time of the originals—within, say, ten or twenty years—and all of them contain certifiable mistakes.

But in Ehrman’s view,

 . . . for the question of whether or not Jesus existed, these problems are mostly irrelevant. (DJE? p. 180)

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Inconsistent and contradictory Gospels

Well, let’s see. The Gospels do not agree in their wording, or in the inclusion of certain passages in all the extant copies? “So what?” Ehrman asks. It doesn’t matter, for example, if some copies of John are missing the pericope of the woman taken in adultery, this hardly has any bearing on whether Jesus existed or not.

Continue reading “23. Earl Doherty’s Response to Bart Ehrman’s Case Against Mythicism – Part 23”