PhilipS said
Hello spiker,
Well the number of followers does not tell us much about his popularity. He could have been revered by hundreds or even thousands, but only have a small group of close followers, I would think.
Again: Ehrman thinks people may have heard of Jesus in Jerusalem before he even went there. That would suggest that he was at least very well known in Galilee.
But could have is not evidence. He COULD HAVE been know by every single person in the region or he COULD HAVE been known
by no one. He COULD HAVE been a boy genius or he COULD HAVE been a fool. He COULD HAVE….. fill in the blank
Why would you need to be “very well known in Galilee” to be heard of in Jerusalem?
Seems you make the same mistake with Ehrman’s estimate. You move from the ” have heard of” in Ehrman’s estimation to the assumption that “was at least very well known in Galilee”
20 followers certainly doesn’t give us the entire picture, but it does give us a piece of the puzzle; more of a piece than COULD HAVE.
Yet what can we say about him?
He was probably born and raised in the one horse town of Nazareth (though he may have been born in Bethlehem)
He may have been a follower of John the Baptist, but is no where described as having won over any of John’s followers.
He purportedly had an inner circle of 12 followers some of whom seem to have been convinced that he rose from the dead.
Which is more plausible? That he may have been a big fish in a very small pond or very well know because people in another
area MAY HAVE known who he was?
PhilipS said
Hello spiker,
Well the number of followers does not tell us much about his popularity. He could have been revered by hundreds or even thousands, but only have a small group of close followers, I would think.
Again: Ehrman thinks people may have heard of Jesus in Jerusalem before he even went there. That would suggest that he was at least very well known in Galilee.
PhilipS
I wanted to take another stab at putting the question on a more solid footing than the scraps I have culled together.
I poked around on Google for a bit, but seem to keep coming back to a line of reasoning that is truly odd though it seems to be popular to argue:
“Jesus was said (in the bible) to have performed MANY miracles and wonders and yet there is absolutely nothing about him or his works in the Roman/Jerusalem history books. Jerusalem was a hopping mecca back in those days. Many travelers/scholars passed through there on a weekly basis and yet not one on them even bothered to write anything about this AMAZING man…”
I wan’t able to ask the author what the heck he was saying or where he got his facts (e.g.,who were the many scholars passing through Jerusalem on a weekly basis in the early 30s?) from, but there is an annoying propensity in much of the commentary to lard up the facts with ones pet theory: There’s a tendency to read modern culture back into history. 1.)Heszer, estimated that 3% of the population for that time and place, would have been literate. 2.) In an oral culture writing is clearly not a popular means of communication. 3.) Even if the “many scholars” passing through Jerusalem on a weekly basis decided to write about him, why would we have any of their writings? The reality is we are stuck with oral tradition as a primary source and there is no way, as far as I know, to substantiate much less know very much about it.
However, Ehrman’s 2 part debate with Richard Bauckham might be a good place to pick up some useful information.
Greg Matthews said
There’s no guarantee Jesus was actually in Jerusalem. Ever. Some members of the Jesus Seminar question his ever being present there.
Interesting. I wondered if Dr. Ehrman ever suggested the possibility Jesus was never in Jerusalem but could only find “Why Did Jesus Go to Jerusalam? (5/18/12)
Judith said
Greg Matthews said
There’s no guarantee Jesus was actually in Jerusalem. Ever. Some members of the Jesus Seminar question his ever being present there.Interesting. I wondered if Dr. Ehrman ever suggested the possibility Jesus was never in Jerusalem but could only find “Why Did Jesus Go to Jerusalam? (5/18/12)
He definitely believes he was in Jerusalem because he believes Jesus was crucified there by Pilate. I believe that too, I’m just saying there are other viewpoints.
Greg Matthews said
There’s no guarantee Jesus was actually in Jerusalem. Ever. Some members of the Jesus Seminar question his ever being present there.
Isn’t that more a function of methodology?
I note that Robert Miller argued “In assessing the authenticity of the sayings of Jesus, the Jesus Seminar shouldered a burden of proof: to accept as authentic only those sayings it could demonstrate to be such.”
** you do not have permission to see this link **
Now according to Wikipedia
In 1998 the Jesus Seminar published The Acts of Jesus: The Search for the Authentic Deeds of Jesus. To create the material for this book, they voted on the individual acts of Jesus as recorded in the gospels, much as they’d previously voted on the individual sayings attributed to him.
One of the facts, agreed upon was that Jesus was ** you do not have permission to see this link **.
It’s important here to address the critics claim of a flawed voting system. Per the Wiki article ” ** you do not have permission to see this link **, … says ‘… I cannot understand how, if a majority … thought a saying authentic or probably authentic, the “weighted average” turned out to be “probably inauthentic”. A voting system that produces a result like this ought to be scrapped.'”
The problem here is not the “voting system” but that the critics seem to have, started with the assumption that the seminar HAD to be wrong and thus explained discrepancies by that assumption. Thus, “scholars” like William Lane Craig failed to find what it took me only a few minutes Googling to discover: To quote Miller again the seminar “shouldered a burden of proof: to accept as authentic only those sayings it could demonstrate to be such.” Thus the majority of scholars who may or may not believe in the empty tomb never the less were obligated to vote based on a methodological commitment.
Admittedly, we could accept the likes of Mike Licona looking mystified and going Beeads!? as if the seminar used the beads to tell them what was true instead of using them to register the conclusions of the individual members based on a specific standard of proof. In Sum, as fundamentalists like to say in response to textual discrepancies, the discrepancy is only apparent.
And now back to the OPs question. What do we have, if anything, to evaluate the question of his popularity?
Does, for example, being heard of in Jerusalem prior to arriving there mean he was well known in Galilee. If so, why?
BTW, my suspicion is that Jesus was small time and that his trip to Jerusalem was both his first and his last.
I don’t think it is too difficult for Jesus to have been on the periphery and have had some misguided ideas about what went on in the temple. Were the Chief priests changing the rules so Jesus wouldn’t be able to defeat the establishment candidate, Caiaphas, and be elected High Priest?
Ah the JESUS SEMINAR. The amusing thing is that it made a huge public splash and agitated the apologists no end but actually wasn’t taken seriously at all in the field save by the participants. Its devastating (and fatal) flaw in my opinion is that it took a non-apocalyptic view of Jesus. After that it didn’t matter how sound it’s methodology.
I would go so far as to say that if the apocalyptic view is not correct then we really can’t say ANYTHING at all about the historical Jesus. Now that in and of itself is not a reason to take the apocalyptic view. The truth is, the apocalyptic view has enormous explanatory power and is the preferred explanation simply on grounds of parsimony. It explains much without doing violence to anything we do know.
Non-apocalyptic views of the historical Jesus suffer from anachronism. At heart they are attempts to make the historical Jesus relevant to contemporary thought. The apocalyptic view has the opposite result. It acknowledges the reality of an impassable abyss between Jesus and his conceptual world and ours. Even 21st century Christian fundamentalists cannot access the historical Jesus. Paradoxically the more we know about the historical Jesus and the better we are able to find him in his own time and place the further away from us he moves.
This is what is so exasperating about Mythicism. I think it is fundamentally a polemic driven, not by a desire to understand history (which it does not take seriously), but by a desire to attack Christianity. Foolishly it does not grasp that taken purely as a polemic, identifying the historical Jesus in his own context is much more undermining of Christianity than fantasies about religious conspiracies.
Finally as to the question of Jesus’ popularity I think his was a sad example, often repeated, of the hayseed who went to the Big City and got creamed.
Stephen said
Ah the JESUS SEMINAR. The amusing thing is that it made a huge public splash and agitated the apologists no end but actually wasn’t taken seriously at all in the field save by the participants. Its devastating (and fatal) flaw in my opinion is that it took a non-apocalyptic view of Jesus. After that it didn’t matter how sound it’s methodology.
That’s a good point as far as it goes, but I think Greg mentioned somewhere a view (which I think the seminar held)that is very similar to apocalypticism. At any rate, the point of mentioning them had to do with the question of whether Jesus was ever in Jerusalem. We really can’t insinuate they were wrong about everything because they may have been been wrong about apocalypticism (while I think Jesus was an apocalypticist, I’m not going to dismiss another view out of hand.
I do recall a video Bart participated in (At the SBS maybe?) Where he started to lay into Crossan over TJS, but caught himself, unfortunately.. To be sure, Crossan is highly respected and having done the research for HJBG, Ehrman has adopted Crossan’s view,on Jesus alleged burial.
Lastly, My point about method had less to do with whether it was sound (if they had decided by nimbly jumping over candle sticks, I could still make the same argument) than the critics out of hand and, I think, uninformed dismissal.
spiker said
Greg Matthews said
There’s no guarantee Jesus was actually in Jerusalem.
BTW, Greg, I don’t necessarily disagree with that statement. It strikes me that you meant this more in terms of historical reality than likelihood. Further, I haven’t reviewed whatever evidence the seminar might have used to draw their conclusions. If my impression was accurate, then I think I agree with your statement.
I do think the Critical method gives us a strong indication that he was arrested, tried and convicted there.
I’m just playing devil’s advocate with all of this. There is a long list of unlikely events in Mark’s Passion narrative. Here are a few that I think are some of the strongest unhistorical elements:
1) trial of Jesus at night — illegal
2) EXTREME failure of the witnesses to agree, some were said to have even lied — should have resulted in a mistrial
3) right of the Sanhedrin to condemn a man to death — they almost certainly didn’t have this ability
4) that Jesus was crucified /died on/during the Passover — this would have been incredibly outrageous
5) Jesus’ anticipation of his death and viewing it as a covenantal sacrifice — critically we have to disregard these types of tropes
6) Pilate “wishing to please the crowd” by releasing Barabbas — historically as we have seen from Philo Pilate almost certainly had not a care in the world for “wishing to please” those under his thumb
These are just a few. I’ve seen many other elements that are supposed to be unhistorical or extremely unlikely.
Remember that there are a lot of scholars (I don’t know if it’s a majority) who think Mark’s community was in extreme southern Syria or in the hills above Galilee. The thinking for some of them is that Mark’s apparent ignorance for some of these extremely unlikely historical events is that he was creating a narrative for a community which was at odds with the Pharisaic ritual beliefs on an almost violent level. Note the pericopes in Mark dealing with cleanliness and Jesus’ reactions to the Pharisees in them. Add to this that they probably had a significant Hellenistic minority (or even majority) in their midst due to their being near all those Hellenistic cities in Galilee and Syria. Add these two together and maybe you have a community which is ignorant of how things were done in Jerusalem two generations in the past.
Add these things up and how likely is it that Jesus was even in Jerusalem to be crucified? Was he crucified? Q and other parts of Mark which are believed to be early don’t mention the death of Jesus.
I’m not saying I disbelieve that SOMETHING happened in Jerusalem and that he was crucified there. Paul wrote about meeting the pillars in Jerusalem so something must have happened there for there to, supposedly, be disciples and the brother of Jesus in Jerusalem. I just find some of the other critical theories to be of interest to me even if I don’t necessarily believe them.
Greg Matthews said
I’m not saying I disbelieve that SOMETHING happened in Jerusalem and that he was crucified there. Paul wrote about meeting the pillars in Jerusalem so something must have happened there for there to, supposedly, be disciples and the brother of Jesus in Jerusalem. I just find some of the other critical theories to be of interest to me even if I don’t necessarily believe them.
Good stuff!
I have heard most of these including the part about Mark’s ignorance. That doesn’t surprise me, given his gospel appears some forty
years later. I don’t accept earlier dating because much of it seems to be based on the idea that Jesus actually said X or Y. So the Gospels could not have been written after 70 because the authors would have made a big deal about the destruction of the temple;yet the question remains whether Jesus ever actually said anything about the destruction of the temple. If the destruction of the temple came first, it’s conceivable that this was read back into something Jesus actually said or simply made up to show prophetic ability.
4) that Jesus was crucified /died on/during the Passover — this would have been incredibly outrageous
This one is tricky. On the face of it, Jewish outrage didn’t seem to worry Pilate very much so crucifying a criminal during Passover isn’t necessarily implausible; however, you could argue that neither of Pilate’s previous abuses, if you will, were on the same scale as capital punishment on a high holiday. Further, a Passover crucifixion, death and burial may be a product of the Sacrificial lamb meme. The old chicken and egg dilemma: Did Jesus really die during Passover or did that make its way in to oral tradition after people began to believe his death was some sort of sacrifice.
Liam Foley said
Greg Matthews said
I doubt he was very popular, but he was popular enough for there to have been, almost immediately after his death, several competing Jesus groups. I say he probably wasn’t very popular because, during his lifetime, if the Gospels are to be believed, he was at odds with the Pharisees, the priestly elite, the Romans, and he was also somewhat lax with regards to Mosaic Law. He was also willing to spend time with the lowest castes of Jewish society like the sick, lepers (even worse than people who were merely sick), the demonically possessed, prostitutes, tax collectors, etc. How popular would that have made him with those in higher levels of social strata?That said, he was still popular enough for there to have been, according to some scholars, several competing Jesus groups almost immediately after his death. There was the Q community, the Thomasine community, the “Jerusalem pillars” and the various communities spreading various oral traditions (although those would not have necessarily been different from the previous three in my opinion). This is to say nothing of Pauline Christianity which was different from ALL the others.
I’m not disagreeing with anything you say, I’m just thinking we should differentiate between popularity and being well known. A person can be popular within a small group but not very well known outside that group.
How famous was Jesus?
The gospels depict him as a well-known and controversial figure, someone with many enemies but also with much popular support, including some powerful people. On the other hand, according to Bart Ehrman and others, he was just an illiterate peasant from Galilee who made a nuisance of himself when he came to Jerusalem and so was summarily arrested and executed.
The argument to support this huge discrepancy is basically that there is no independent evidence to support the gospel version, apart from a couple of mentions by Josephus, whereas if Jesus really had been well-known there ought to be numerous references to him. The fallacy of this argument is illustrated by parallel situations in current affairs.
Firstly, to the Romans, Jesus was from a small nation on the fringes of the empire, with a foreign language. This situation creates a barrier to mainstream interest and information. For example, what is the name of the rebel leader negotiating with the Afghan government? The answer would be familiar to Afghans, but who in America would know or even care? Jesus had no army and posed no threat to the Romans, so it would have been extraordinary if they had taken any notice of him. People can be well-known within their society but unknown to others.
Secondly, there is a complete lack of Jewish records from this period. Who were the members of the temple council who condemned him to death? They were important people in their time but their names are not recorded. Why then should Jesus be different?
Josephus mentions that the High Priest Ananus “assembled a council of judges, and brought before it the brother of Jesus, the so-called Christ, whose name was James” and had him condemned to death. James was sufficiently important that this illegal action led to Ananus’s replacement, but the implication of Josephus’s remark is that Jesus was even more important.
While there is undoubtedly a great deal of misunderstanding and complete fiction in the gospels, the hypothesis that Jesus was well-known in Jewish society but unknown to others at the time of his crucifixion, is a possibility which should be considered.
Blackwell said
While there is undoubtedly a great deal of misunderstanding and complete fiction in the gospels, the hypothesis that Jesus was well-known in Jewish society but unknown to others at the time of his crucifixion, is a possibility which should be considered.
How do you reconcile this with Bart’s most recent discussion? There could not have been a huge number of followers (or even a moderate number) after the crucifixion for the numbers to work out. His followers would have had to have been minuscule in number in ca. 33AD.
Greg Matthews said
How do you reconcile this with Bart’s most recent discussion? There could not have been a huge number of followers (or even a moderate number) after the crucifixion for the numbers to work out. His followers would have had to have been minuscule in number in ca. 33AD.
There were a miniscule number of people who believed that Jesus had been resurrected but a large number of people who knew that he had existed.
Blackwell said
There were a miniscule number of people who believed that Jesus had been resurrected but a large number of people who knew that he had existed.
But define “large”. There was probably a group left behind in Galilee when Jesus and his closest disciples went to Jerusalem but that might have only been a handful. I think there’s still this lingering prejudice (held even by non-believers) that a movement that mutated into a major world religion must have had a spectacular beginning.
Blackwell said
There were a miniscule number of people who believed that Jesus had been resurrected but a large number of people who knew that he had existed.
But only a minuscule number cared and for whom he would have been popular. I know many people, that doesn’t mean they’re popular. They might be very likable, but just not have many friends or associates who consider them “popular”.
Stephen said
But define “large”. There was probably a group left behind in Galilee when Jesus and his closest disciples went to Jerusalem but that might have only been a handful. I think there’s still this lingering prejudice (held even by non-believers) that a movement that mutated into a major world religion must have had a spectacular beginning.
Precisely.
Stephen said
But define “large”. There was probably a group left behind in Galilee when Jesus and his closest disciples went to Jerusalem but that might have only been a handful. I think there’s still this lingering prejudice (held even by non-believers) that a movement that mutated into a major world religion must have had a spectacular beginning.
According to the gospels, “Large” would be the thousands of people who heard Jesus speak, plus the people in Jerusalem who attended his trial and witnessed his crucifixion and others who heard about him second hand.
The hypothesis is that these accounts are valid unless there is evidence to the contrary, not just absence of evidence.
The hypothesis is that these accounts are valid unless there is evidence to the contrary, not just absence of evidence.
Nah that’s not the way it works. The burden of proof is on the one making the assertion not the one denying the assertion. I’m not asserting that the gospel accounts are inaccurate, you’re asserting that they are.
I can claim to be the smartest, most beautiful, most virile male heterosexual that has ever been born and it might be true* but you are under no compunction to believe it’s true until I demonstrate it is. See?
*It is of course. Trust me.
Greg Matthews said
But only a minuscule number cared and for whom he would have been popular. I know many people, that doesn’t mean they’re popular. They might be very likable, but just not have many friends or associates who consider them “popular”.
It is possible that in the last year of his life, Jesus became well known to thousands of Jews and a politically popular figure who was seen as an outsider who would overthrow the establishment and introduce a more just society (Does this not sound familiar in the context of the US presidential election?), but since it occurred in an obscure corner of the Roman Empire it was unnoticed by everyone else. The person who is “popular” is not necessarily likeable.
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