re: argument against the existence of Jesus.
I am a firm believer in the principle of Occam’s Razor; when all the evidence is examined, the easiest answer is likely the right one. I have zero doubt that a human being, whose name in Greek was Jesus (actual name closer to Joshua), existed in first century Palestine, that he had ties to John the Baptist, that he eventually had his own ministry, and that he was executed by the Romans, likely for sedition or something equivalent. It is too fanciful to believe in a religious conspiracy that would create such a person in order to create a religion. For one thing, if one was inventing such a being they would have done a far better job; there wouldn’t have been the discrepancies, the mixed messages, and other inconsistencies that appear in the earliest writings, and the theology, or Christology if we prefer, would have been less malleable (there seems to have been quite an evolution in Christology over the first century).
As for Paul not including more biological data about Jesus, I don’t see how he could have. For one thing, Paul had never met Jesus. Secondly, most of the biological narratives we are familiar with now had yet to be written in Paul’s time; there were likely stories being passed around orally, but these would have been stories about his ministry and his supposed miracles; how and where he grew up wouldn’t have been that important, and I firmly believe that the birth narratives found in Matthew and Luke had yet to be constructed in Paul’s time (a virgin birth, that he would have mentioned).
Frankly I’ve become bored out of my mind by the mythicism “debate” but I watched this one because I had enjoyed an earlier video from Kamil Gregor. It starts off rather slow and the last bit is Q&A but the middle hour is quite entertaining. It is the YouTube debate equivalent of a cat playing with a mouse and the mouse not realizing what is happening. The mythicist guy is mainly regurgitating talking points he picked up from Richard Carrier that he clearly doesn’t always understand. He makes several claims about Paul and Philo and the Hebrew Bible that are false but Gregor doesn’t bother to slog that out with him. Gregor approaches the issue from a different and interesting point of view which gets the mythicist guy off script with amusing results. The money quote is at about 1:02ish.
Robert
For critical scholars, he was a unique, biological man. For Paul, he was a pre-existent heavenly being who emptied himself and was born and died as a human being, and then was super-exalted to an even higher status than he had before his becoming human.
Steefen
For critical scholars, Paul and the gospel of John, and Hebrews see Jesus on a lifeline much longer than 80 to 120 years.
The heavenly being who emptied himself and was miraculously born by immaculate conception and miraculously resurrected has to be the same person as the Jesus of the late 20s early 30s.
If not, state the scholarly case.
“Yahweh was one of the sons of El Elyon; and Jesus in the Gospels was described as a Son of El Elyon, God Most High. In other words, he was described as a heavenly being. Thus the annunciation narrative has the term ‘Son of the Most High’ (Luke 1, 32) and the demoniac recognized his exorcist as ‘Son of the Most High God’ (Mark 5, 7). Jesus is not called the son of Yahweh nor the son of the Lord, but he is called Lord. We also know that whoever wrote the New Testament translated the name Yahweh by Kyrios, Lord … This suggests that the Gospel writers, in using the terms ‘Lord’ and ‘Son of God Most High’, saw Jesus as an angel figure, and gave him their version of the sacred name Yahweh.” G. Widengren M.Barker
Adoptionistic Christology sounds like heresy no 81 from Panarion. ;->
You cannot take the New Testament which is NOT Canaanite scripture and apply a Canaanite family tree to it.
Iron Age I (1200–930 BCE): El, Yahweh, and the origins of Israel
Israel emerges into the historical record in the last decades of the 13th century BCE, at the very end of the ** you do not have permission to see this link **
This pair made up the top tier of the Canaanite pantheon;** you do not have permission to see this link **
When the Most High (‘elyôn) gave to the nations their inheritance,
when he separated humanity,
he fixed the boundaries of the peoples
according to the number of divine beings.
For Yahweh’s portion is his people,
Jacob his allotted heritage.** you do not have permission to see this link **
The Israelites initially worshipped Yahweh alongside a variety of Canaanite gods and goddesses, including El, Asherah and Baal.
Luke 1,42 (“Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb”) clearly refers to Jdt 13,18 (“May you be blessed, my daughter, by God Most High, beyond all women on earth; and blessed be the Lord God, Creator of heaven and earth”). Rene Laurentin proposed an interpretation according to which “the fruit of your womb” should be intertextually interpreted as “Lord God, Creator of heaven and earth”.
In paleo-hebrew Omnipotence, Omniscience, and Omnipresence didn’t exist at all. This is an Aristotelian, hellenistic concept. To express greatness Most High is everything what they got.
El-elyon was Marcion’s Unknown God, Jesus was his true son, and YHWH was false son demiurg. Maybe????
Or maybe it is an elevation of Jesus by Mark and Luke without understanding of meaning “Most High”
Now we are lock with a basic question who is Jesus for Mark and Luke
“I don’t think any early Christian would have called Jesus YHWH. They would have seen him as the Son of YHWH. THe Gospel writers certainly did not think of him as the Lord God Almighty. He was the Lord of the world but there was one greater than he, who made him what he was.” – Bart
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Robert
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