FocusMyView said

Robert said

FocusMyView said

The biggest problem I saw with introducing this tidbit as a possible influence was Paul preceding Mark. Why would Paul need a crucifiction? What was being besieged? Who was being besieged? 

Because it actually happened and the earliest followers and Paul needed to make sense of it. It is the simplest historical explanation.

  

I always thought the same until I realize that the Jesus myth was much older than Paul or the gospels. Possibly centuries earlier. Its not just that other “Jesuses” were written about either, not just random people with the same name. It is the raising of the dead, curing the leprosy of a foreign invader, pouring of the oil, the sarcasm on the call to serve, the 3 times denial on the death of a master, the healing of the blind, the ability to see thousands of angels, the facing of Satan, clothed in rags, the potter’s field for 30 shekels, the being the son of YHWH the Righteous or the son of Nunn, crossing the river on dry land, and of course a child sacrificed by his father to end the siege of a city. All amazingly relevant to the story of Jesus Christ written by Mark. 

Besides, what simple explanation is there for the historical silence on Jesus and/or the movement? 

  

… even though you have not provided a shred of proof of a “Jesus myth” prior to Christianity. Aren’t you the one who said that Jeshua the Priest of the Second Temple, who is multiply attested close to his lifetime, was a myth? The one from Zechariah lol.

“Other Jesuses” yes… because the name Joshua was one of the most common and popular names in the entire ancient world. Congrats on noticing something completely insignificant and irrelevant to the historicity of Jesus. There is only one “Jesus” who raises people from the dead. There is only one “Jesus” who cures leprosy. I could go on and on.

“the facing of Satan, clothed in rags, the potter’s field for 30 shekels, the being the son of YHWH the Righteous or the son of Nunn”

Jesus in the NT is the son of Joseph. Also Jehozedek means “Yahweh is righteous” and was a very common name as well. How about you read an actual peer reviewed volume on theophoric naming conventions in the ancient world. Joshua the High Priest is attested in four books of the Bible as historical. He also does not “face” Satan. In Zechariah, he is accused by Satan and the dirty rags are a symbol of the sins of Israel. Joshua, being an allegory for Israel in this passage. He is then forgiven by God. This is not at all parallel to Jesus, who takes upon the sins and is himself perfect in all ways, and is neither presented as an allegory or anything similar.

“and of course a child sacrificed by his father to end the siege of a city”

This has nothing to do with any Joshua narrative. And you know it. You are just cherry picking random passages, cobbling them together, and saying “look here is Jesus now!!!!”

“All amazingly relevant to the story of Jesus Christ written by Mark.”

Only if you are a nutter with not a single credible methodological framework.

“Besides, what simple explanation is there for the historical silence on Jesus and/or the movement?”

I guess Mark, Paul, Matthew, Luke, John, Acts, the Deutero-Pauline Epistles, 1 Clement, Tacitus, Suetonius, Galen, (possibly) Josephus, Pliny the Younger, etc. etc. etc. just don’t exist now do they? Let me ask, do you just buy into everything mythicists say without a shred of critical evaluation, or are you incapable of evaluating them?

You really have nothing valuable here. Only if you just ignore any logical thinking and ignore the infinite fallacies in your logic is anything you say remotely credible.

F. Conyebeare once noted:

Verily we have discovered a new literary genus, unexampled in the history of mankind. You rake together a thousand irrelevant thrums of mythology, picked up at random from every age, race, and clime; you get a “Christist” [old term for mythicist] to throw them into a sack and shake them up; you open it, and out come the Gospels. In all the annals of the Bacon-Shakespeareans we have seen nothing like it. (The Historical Christ, 95)

This is basically what you are doing. Just randomly cherry picking random snippets of things, throwing them in a blender, and screaming “look guys its Jesus.” It is methodologically incoherent, fallacious, and frankly is not remotely convincing. This kind of thinking was thrown out the window for the nonsense it was back in the 1920’s, when anthropologists like Ruth Benedict and Franz Boas trashed it like the amateur work it is.

Tammuz has no relation to Jesus and is not “resurrected” in any recognizable fashion whatsoever. Joshua the High Priest is not a savior. And you just redefining terms, playing at false equivocation, cum hoc ergo propter hoc, and post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacies is not particularly notable or special.

Seriously… read a book on real historical methodology, and stop playing around with incompetent mythicists who have been completely dismissed by historians for the amateur bumblers that they are.

FocusMyView said
 

I picked apart the Elisha narrative, looking for similarities with gospel Jesus.

  

Cherry picking fallacy. A case in point as to why your arguments are illogical and have no real methodology and why no real historian would find them credible.

FocusMyView said
Elisha raised people from the dead and specifically cured a foreign military leader of leprosy. 

  

Last I checked: Jesus and Elisha are not the same name. There are not multiple “Jesuses” doing this.

FocusMyView said
When I read that I looked at the names realized the naming conventions at least look suspicious. Jesus the son of YHWH the Righteous. Kinda hits you in the face. I think the likelihood of that naming combination is somewhat small, and the likelihood of that name happening to the first high priest of the returnees? Of course they could be names taken on by those persons as adults. 

Have you read a book on theophoric naming conventions that you would recommend? 

  

Jehozedek does not mean “Yahweh the righteous.” It means “Yahweh is justified” or “Yahweh is righteous”… maybe.

And no it does not hit you in the face. Theophoric names to do with Yahweh are one of the most common things ever. Elijah “Yahweh is my god”; Joel “Yahweh is god”; Abijah “My father is Yahweh”; Joseph “Yahweh shall increase”; Obadiah “Servant of Yahweh”; like I could go on and on and on and on and on and on.

The likelihood that the high priest Joshua would have a father whose name had “Yahweh” in it is so insanely likely and common, that it would be the most insignificant thing ever noted in the history of anything ever. It doesn’t hit anyone in the face. The only person it would hit in the face is someone who has no idea what they are talking about. Especially considering that, and say this with me: The high priest Joshua is a multiply attested historical figure.

And yes, I do have a book for you: Jeaneane D. Fowler, Theophoric Personal Names in Ancient Hebrew: A Comparative Study (Sheffield: JSOT Supplement Series, 1988).

FocusMyView said
Moses is “attested” 716 times in the HB. Not real. I have to admit i did not come up with that one on my own. In passing something I read went, “the probably mythical first high priest of the 2nd temple.” I want to say it was Grabbe. The further you distance yourself from American universities the easier it is to apply rational thinking rather than save a fictional historical narrative. 

  

Moses is not a mythical Jesus. Again, you are just being dishonest. Also, you aren’t one to talk about rational thinking when your thinking is littered with fallacies.

FocusMyView said
This is basically what you are doing. Just randomly cherry picking random snippets of things, throwing them in a blender, and screaming “look guys its Jesus.” It is methodologically incoherent, fallacious, and frankly is not remotely convincing. This kind of thinking was thrown out the window for the nonsense it was back in the 1920’s, when anthropologists like Ruth Benedict and Franz Boas trashed it like the amateur work it is.

 

I have been very resistant to Stephen’s, for example, idea of using Moses or Elijah for miracles of Jesus. I think gospel Jesus is the newer, updated Jesus. 

This is not unheard of in the ANE. Actually, it is common for each heavenly being to have more than one origin story. My kids read the Rick Riordan series incorporating Greek and Egyptian myth motifs. They tend to get locked into ONE tale of how the gods rank or who beget who. I notice some scholars do that too, especially ones that reference the field but do not specialize in it. There are multiple stories for each god, including various origin stories. There is no “correct” heirarchy though at times and in places it has been theorized that a definite heirarchy was useful to a city rising to power from obscurity. 

 

sorry, rambling. Each itiration of Jesus, specifically Judean Jesus, is going to be bent to the purpose of that author. So yes, there will be differences. 

  

Rick Riordan is irrelevant to the Ancient Near East. He is also regularly inaccurate and just making stuff up. Because he is a fiction writer.

And you have yet to find a single notable similarity. “Oh look he raised someone from the dead”… congrats on finding something so ubiquitous and insignificant that the bloody rocks are rolling their eyes.

FocusMyView said
 

I only dared put it here after reading that this motif – sacrificing the kings son as the city was besieged – was evidenced in Ugaritic texts all the way up to a Roman historian talking about Tyre, written in 50 BCE. So it would seem to be a concept of some importance to the region and understood by Roman authors. 

  

That is bull. There is no evidence of child sacrifice in Ugarit. Go read Heath Dewrell, Child Sacrifice in Ancient Israel (Eisenbrauns, 2018). It is updated and contains current refutations on the matter. There is no evidence of child sacrifice in Ugarit.

Roman authors were only aware of child sacrifice in Phoenicia, specifically the city of Carthage. Which they universally decried as horrific and terrible. Even the Phoenician author Philo of Byblos described it as something that was exceptionally rare and happened in ancient times, it was not something going on during the first and second centuries, at least not with any regularity at all.

FocusMyView said
 

Moses is “attested” 716 times in the HB. Not real. I have to admit i did not come up with that one on my own. In passing something I read went, “the probably mythical first high priest of the 2nd temple.” I want to say it was Grabbe. The further you distance yourself from American universities the easier it is to apply rational thinking rather than save a fictional historical narrative. 

  

Moses has no near contemporary references. Joshua the High Priest does. Furthermore, the records of what happened under his command have been verified as well by Persian sources. James VanderKam has evaluated the evaluated all the evidence, and there is nothing to support a mythical theory of the priest Joshua whatsoever, see From Joshua to Caiaphas: High Priests After the Exile (Fortress Press, 2004).

Also, I have found no evidence to suggest that Grabbe is on your side.

FocusMyView said
 

I have been very resistant to Stephen’s, for example, idea of using Moses or Elijah for miracles of Jesus. I think gospel Jesus is the newer, updated Jesus. 

Think what you want. But just know that you are saying nonsense.

FocusMyView said
 

I picked apart the Elisha narrative, looking for similarities with gospel Jesus. I skipped some parts thinking they did not apply

  

Going back to this. Not only is it incoherent and fallacious methodology, which alone means no one should have any reason whatsoever to take your theories seriously, it is also something which was criticized and proven to be ridiculous decades ago, and which no credible historians of religion do anymore.

Again, let’s just take these quotes from Ruth Benedict, F. C. Conyebeare (non-American), and others:

Studies of culture like The Golden Bough and the usual comparative ethnological volumes are analytical discussions of traits and ignore all the aspects of cultural integration. Mating or death practices are illustrated by bits of behavior selected indiscriminately from the most different cultures, and the discussion builds up a kind of mechanical Frankenstein’s monster with a right eye from Fiji, and a left from Europe, one leg from Terra del Fuego, and one from Tahiti, and all the fingers and toes from still different regions. Such a figure corresponds to no reality in the past or present, and the fundamental difficulty is the same as if, let us say, psychiatry ended with a catalogue of the symbols of which psychopathic individuals make use, and ignored the study of patterns of symptomatic behavior—schizophrenia, hysteria, and manic-depressive disorders—into which they are built.

This is from Ruth Benedict’s book Patterns of Culture. And you specifically are doing exactly this. Mishmashing bits and pieces together, ignoring cultural differences and specificities, and also temporal specificities, in an attempt to just throw together a “Jesus”, because you are too rampant with your own parallelomania, and human pattern seeking behavior to see that this is absurd nonsense, and fallacious.

Verily we have discovered a new literary genus, unexampled in the history of mankind. You rake together a thousand irrelevant thrums of mythology, picked up at random from every age, race, and clime; you get a ‘Christist’ [=mythicist] to throw them into a sack and shake them up; you open it, and out come the Gospels.

F. C. Conyebeare agrees. He was an English scholar of religion. Furthermore, it is methodologically more coherent to emphasize difference over similarity, since similarity is something which does not intrinsically exist. It is something that we project, mentally, in our search for things. As J. Z. Smith in Drudgery Divine notes:

It is axiomatic that comparison is never a matter of identity. Comparison requires the acceptance of difference as the grounds of its being interesting, and a methodological manipulation of that difference to achieve some stated cognitive end. The questions of comparison are questions of judgement with respect to difference: What differences are to be maintained in the interests of comparative inquiry? What differences can be defensively relaxed and relativized in light of the intellectual tasks at hand?

In short… if you reject differences, you reject the only thing which even makes your comparisons noteworthy. Going around cherry picking “similarities” is the work of amateurs and it demonstrates absolutely nothing in any critical sense. It only demonstrates that you as a modern human being have pattern seeking behavior that you have left unchecked and without any methodological coherency. Similarity does not inherently exist. Smith writes

In the case of the study of religion, as in any disciplined inquiry, comparison, in its strongest form, brings differences together within the space of the scholar’s mind for the scholar’s own intellectual reasons. It is the scholar who makes their cohabitation – their ‘sameness’ – possible, not ‘natural’ affinities or processes of history.

You just going around saying “look these two random figures both raised dudes from the dead” is irrelevant, pointless, and demonstrates more about your own mental state and lack of methodological coherence, than anything about history. You are just projecting your interests and preconceived conclusions on the sources. You haven’t shown anything whatsoever.