The Historicity of Jesus - The Spread of Christianity in the 1st Century

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I went to graduate school for this and will get into such details later. Perhaps I'll begin to post my own topics on here. My expertise is the spread of early Christianity and its conflicts with paganism and Rome. As for the historical Jesus, the gospel writers' main focuses were rallying people in a post-war era. Mark however was wartime literature. Pay attention to all the conflicts Jesus gets into with Jewish leaders. It was simply the authors of the gospels plugging Jesus into their own times. For example, Barabbas's character likely comes from the author of Mark seeing his fellow Jews siding with murderers rather than the Son of God as a result of the war. Alright I'll start posting topics because now I'm rambling.

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1Cor 1:20 “Where is the wise man? Where is the scholar? Where is the philosopher of this age?”

…looks like we found the one Paul wrote about:

I went to graduate school for this and will get into such details later. Perhaps I'll begin to post my own topics on here. My expertise is the spread of early Christianity and its conflicts with paganism and Rome.

Then what does that make me…Mrs. Nesbitt?!  Sorry, I am just a little depressed, that's all. I..I..I can get through this.. Oh, I'm a sham! ...Years of at home scriptural training in splendid isolation with supplemental Dinner Doodles, wasted!

But the moniker ‘jmfcst’ looked good? Tell me the moniker looked good. The ‘consigliere’ title is a bit much, but…

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As for the historical Jesus, the gospel writers' main focuses were rallying people in a post-war era. Mark however was wartime literature. Pay attention to all the conflicts Jesus gets into with Jewish leaders. It was simply the authors of the gospels plugging Jesus into their own times. For example, Barabbas's character likely comes from the author of Mark seeing his fellow Jews siding with murderers rather than the Son of God as a result of the war. Alright I'll start posting topics because now I'm rambling.

…but, wait…you earned a post-graduate degree in conjecture?! 

Yes mommy and daddy were wrong.

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I mean seriously, jmfcst, before the printing press, the Bible that reached the public said only whatever the Catholic hierarchy wanted it to say.

you do know we have very early and extensive copies of the NT letters from pieces of surviving manuscripts and from quoted references, right?

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 In 1 AD? All of those letters only had one copy--the original, were only viewed by the recipient, and were at that person's discretion to heed all of it.  

As if there was something about the late 1st Century that stopped people from making copies of the letters?!

That doesn't mean they weren't written with an agenda to spread propaganda. Just for this I'm posting about Pontius Pilate soon.

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1Cor 1:20 “Where is the wise man? Where is the scholar? Where is the philosopher of this age?”

…looks like we found the one Paul wrote about:

I went to graduate school for this and will get into such details later. Perhaps I'll begin to post my own topics on here. My expertise is the spread of early Christianity and its conflicts with paganism and Rome.

Then what does that make me…Mrs. Nesbitt?!  Sorry, I am just a little depressed, that's all. I..I..I can get through this.. Oh, I'm a sham! ...Years of at home scriptural training in splendid isolation with supplemental Dinner Doodles, wasted!

But the moniker ‘jmfcst’ looked good? Tell me the moniker looked good. The ‘consigliere’ title is a bit much, but…

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As for the historical Jesus, the gospel writers' main focuses were rallying people in a post-war era. Mark however was wartime literature. Pay attention to all the conflicts Jesus gets into with Jewish leaders. It was simply the authors of the gospels plugging Jesus into their own times. For example, Barabbas's character likely comes from the author of Mark seeing his fellow Jews siding with murderers rather than the Son of God as a result of the war. Alright I'll start posting topics because now I'm rambling.

…but, wait…you earned a post-graduate degree in conjecture?! 


Yes and whoever wrote Corinthians was facing the same debates I'm giving you! Of course they paint those who don't follow Christianity or have "heretical" views as deficient! It's not like anyone read that anyway with the literacy rate between 3%-5%. Those who heard the gospel and letters simply heard and didn't read it. Therefore, those passages were spoken in ways of swaying listeners rather than what we are capable of reading today. Not to mention, the message was laughed at until the gospels cleared things up. Anyways, I think that's enough explanation as to why the scholars are painted poorly in the New Testament.

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Yes and whoever wrote Corinthians was facing the same debates I'm giving you! Of course they paint those who don't follow Christianity or have "heretical" views as deficient! It's not like anyone read that anyway with the literacy rate between 3%-5%. Those who heard the gospel and letters simply heard and didn't read it. Therefore, those passages were spoken in ways of swaying listeners rather than what we are capable of reading today.

  So, the letters mean something different depending on whether you have them read to you, verses reading them yourself?!

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can a mod please check this guy's ip?...he is displaying Derekish tendencies.

You just spun what I said. If it's read directly to you yes, but it wasn't read word for word. The message was spoken to give hope to the less fortunate and that's how it was received. Anyways, they're only political documents written by the oppressed in the first century as members of the movement faced persecution and refused to pay taxes because they saw Christ as their king rather than Caesar. It's about as accurate of a picture as listening to Rush Limbaugh about Obama and then listening to Obama about Romney and taking both sets of information at face value.

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  So, the letters mean something different depending on whether you have them read to you, verses reading them yourself?!

You just spun what I said. If it's read directly to you yes, but it wasn't read word for word.

and the hits just keep on coming...You know, for someone claiming to be educated, your imagination sure does lead you to make a lot of wild and baseless claims.

This is rhetoric. The problem is you keep using the Bible to aruge points that it was never meant to argue.

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They COULD have been read word for word, but the odds of this occuring in every case is so low that its absolutely impossible. Even if every literate missionary did the word for word duty (again, even if optomistic, you have to say at most 99% did; someone had to have skipped out on something somewhere or else you're saying there is no such thing as human error or free will), the remaining 95 percent of illiterates would not have spread it the same way. A man listening to the missionary who goes home and tells his brother, his wife, and his kids about it would only remember the juicy details (the cruxification, ressurrection, and promise to return soon) and none of the rest.

Not at all what I was saying. Interpretations vary from scholar to scholar and person to person but I never said that the meaning is different depending on if heard or read. What's there is there to be translated, argued, cut up, ordered, reordered, looked at historically, spiritually, agreed with, disagreed with, or mocked.

granted, but Tidewater was saying there are different meanings to the epistles depending if someone read it as opposed to having it read to them…as if the words somehow take on different meanings.

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Tidewater, let me walk you through how I see your argument, from my own standpoint…

To me, there is a night and day difference between A) actually being a student of the bible and B) having a degree in theories about the history of the writing of the bible.  Now, you would think A would be a prerequisite of B, as it should be.  But, from my experience dealing with people like you, that is almost never the case.  

And, to me, it would seem most logical that if you’re going to come up with theories to explain the motivations of NT writers, you would FIRST study the attitudes that the writers expressed in their own writings, since, after all, their own letters are the most direct evidence of their own attitudes.

I’ve been on this forum for 10 years this coming April, and as many of the regulars can tell you, I spend a lot of study examining the logical tendencies of Jesus and the Apostles in regard to what they thought about scripture, how they formulated their arguments, and how they attempted to communicate across a diverse church audience that was dispersed in geography as well as in language.

So, when you come on here claiming a motivation and attitude of the NT writers that is completely contrary to the motivation and attitude I’ve witnessed while studying the letters of those writers within the NT, it’s a pretty trivial task for me to point out the inconsistencies between the attitude of what they actually wrote and what you’re claiming their attitude was.

And the ironic thing is that you claim your education is of value, but when I point out their attitudes engrained within their own letters, you object claiming that their letters weren’t intended to be used that way:

The problem is you keep using the Bible to aruge points that it was never meant to argue.

... It’s as if gleaning the attitude of the writers directly from their letters is a complete foreign concept to your educational process.

Since there are no surviving eyewitness accounts to their attitudes, why wouldn’t their own letters be the cat’s pajamas to your study of their motives?!

Do you understand what I am saying?

I'm both a student of the Bible and a scholar and I see some understanding between us here. I have several theories on how the books of the Bible were written and why which is predominantly political especially for the Hebrew Bible. It was meant to advocate and set in stone what the Shiloh priests wanted. This was canonized shortly after the return from exile but that is way off of this particular topic.

I do go primarily by the authors words and you can see that I quote scripture quite a bit from a literary critical standpoint. Notice how the NT uses the OT to structure the story of Jesus. Just look at the Jesus and Moses birth stories and how similar they are.

You sound educated in scripture as well and I apologize if I seem doubting of that even if I tend to disagree with you a bit.

It's not my argument that the gospel writers or NT writers had different intentions than what is seen in scripture. It's my argument that they have different intentions from what has been thought for the majority of 2,000 years because alot of it has been covered up by the church. This leads into the topic of "Orthodox" Christianity vs. Gnostic Sects but is way off topic.

I haven't said too much about the letters but the Bible as a whole was never meant to be understood the way it came to be understood by the church. Take for exmaple the "Red Sea" was actually Sea of Reeds in Hebrew or the fact taht the word "almah" in Hebrew actually means young woman or newly married woman. When translated into the Septuagint, the word became parthenos which refers to virgin as we know it. Then again without this poor translation, we wouldn't have Christmas.

I take nothing at face value in ancient literature. Claiming to be the Word of God is suspect at best. Now I'm not against Christianity but I am against how people understand and use/misuse the Bible.

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  So, the letters mean something different depending on whether you have them read to you, verses reading them yourself?!

You just spun what I said. If it's read directly to you yes, but it wasn't read word for word.

Are you saying that the scriptures were read word for word outside of perhaps worship? That wouldn't catch an audience like preaching would. I'm just saying realistically that it's highly unlikely that the early Christians read anything to the laity unless of course they were in church on Sunday mornings and it was used for worshiping purposes.

and the hits just keep on coming...You know, for someone claiming to be educated, your imagination sure does lead you to make a lot of wild and baseless claims.

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Are you saying that the scriptures were read word for word outside of perhaps worship? That wouldn't catch an audience like preaching would. I'm just saying realistically that it's highly unlikely that the early Christians read anything to the laity unless of course they were in church on Sunday mornings and it was used for worshiping purposes.

I don’t know how you stretched this into the context of the reading of the letters in the public realm, but even in your stretch you are wrong, for it was COMMON for the early church to read to the public:

1 Tim 4:13 “Until I come, devote yourself to the public reading of Scripture, to preaching and to teaching.”

If they read to the public, would they not have read to their own congregations?!

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I'm both a student of the Bible and a scholar

You claim to be a student of scripture, but you’re not even aware that the practice of reading to the public that was instituted by Moses (Deut 31:10) was also followed by the NT church!  This is a prime example of you being soo completely unaware of what the NT actually says, you think it odd that the church leaders would even read to their congregations!!!

Again, refuting your idiotic claims regarding the attitude of NT writers is a trivial matter for any student of the NT, even for a novice.

I already stated how scripture was read to congregations. Stop making things up and trying to get away with it by only quoting parts of what I say. Deuteronomy was forged in order to give justice to the tyranny of Josiah. In fact it was written by Baruch, scribe of Jeremiah who was the son of Hilkiah; the priest who was in office during its formation in 632 BCE. Odd that leaders read to their congregations? I said the exact opposite. Here is what I said. "I'm just saying realistically that it's highly unlikely that the early Christians read anything to the laity unless of course they were in church on Sunday mornings and it was used for worshiping purposes."

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Take for exmaple the "Red Sea" was actually Sea of Reeds in Hebrew

This always seemed like a ridiculous cop out to me.  You could wade through the Sea of Reeds on a good day with no part at all.  If this was, in fact, the body of water, why even write it as a "miracle" in the first place?  There'd be no miracle in the Israelites crossing the Sea of Reeds: the miracle, if any, would be the Egyptians managing to drown in it.  (Same thing goes for the Israelites' later crossing of the River Jordan under Joshua, which is about waist-high, but which is parted anyway for no discernible reason).  How could the author of Exodus portray parting the Sea of Reeds as a miracle when it'd be manifestly unnecessary for passage out of Egypt without the original audience for which the text was intended laughing off the "miracle?"  At least the Red Sea is a formidable body of water.

In a way I have much more respect for someone like jmfcst that flat-out accepts the miracles in the Biblical narrative over someone that tries to explain them away and ends up with a text that loses all its punch.

It was a miracle because they escaped the Egyptians if you look at it that way. The story never actually happened though and is a way to establish history for a new group in a foreign land (Cana). In Hebrew it was Sea of Reeds. The story of Joshua and story of Moses were written by separate sources as Joshua was a patron of northern Israel and Moses was a patron of southern Israel. Yes it loses its punch when you look at it historically.

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What I'm saying is that if the Exodus never happened (which I agree is likely), why not go for broke in your story version and use the Red Sea? 

Also, your statement about the "young woman" vs. "virgin" line in Isaiah, I'm surprised that you didn't go for the obvious alternative: that Isaiah wasn't making a Messianic prophecy at all, but was referring either to the birth of Ahaz's son Hezekiah or the birth of Isaiah's own son in the following chapter (pretty much immediately after Isaiah declares that the young woman will conceive, he "went in unto the prophetess" and conceived his son Maher-Shalal-hashbaz).

I was more adamant on Matthew's use of the word "almah" as he clearly looked to the Septuagint where the word would be "parthenos" because that is what is thought of in New Testament studies, but you're right about it originally referred to. Yes, the Red Sea allows for a better story, but was not the way it happened. Whether or not the Exodus happened, my theory has been that they left Egypt in herds; possibly during annual droughts. After a generation of this migration, Cana became Jewish rather than Canaanite in their religion. From there on out, southern Israel was predominantly Jewish and northern Israel was a mixture.

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What I'm saying is that if the Exodus never happened (which I agree is likely), why not go for broke in your story version and use the Red Sea?  The "realism" aspect of crossing the Sea of Reeds followed by "the Exodus didn't happen at all" doesn't make much sense because if it didn't happen at all the authors would have license to make up as extravagant a story as they'd want.

Also, your statement about the "young woman" vs. "virgin" line in Isaiah, I'm surprised that you didn't go for the obvious alternative: that Isaiah wasn't making a Messianic prophecy at all, but was referring either to the birth of Ahaz's son Hezekiah or the birth of Isaiah's own son in the following chapter (pretty much immediately after Isaiah declares that the young woman will conceive, he "went in unto the prophetess" and conceived his son Maher-Shalal-hashbaz).

In fact I included this in my thesis on Matthew.

Matthew’s gospel repeatedly uses biblical passages in the prophetic writings and psalms to illustrate the events of Jesus’ life. Nowhere is this clearer than in his fictitious birth story. “Therefore the Lord himself will give you a sign. Look, the young woman is with child and shall bear a son, and shall name him Immanuel” (Isaiah 7:14). Immanuel means “God with him.” The irony of this is that Isaiah’s prophecy in 733 BCE was a failed attempt to persuade King Ahaz, ruler of the southern Jewish Kingdom of Judah, to trust in God rather than the Assyrian Emperor for assistance. At the time Isaiah warned King Ahaz of this, enemies from Syria and the northern kingdom were attacking Judah. The term “almah” is used to refer to a young woman. When translating from Hebrew to Greek, almah becomes parthenos which means a newly married young woman. The author of Matthew incorrectly took the term “virgin” to mean not only the prior state of the mother but also her continuing state after conception. Nowhere does Isaiah 7:14 or the verses following indicate anything about a woman bearing a son who has not yet engaged in intercourse. Proof of Matthew’s use of Isaiah 7:14 is seen in the name Immanuel; “God with him.” What does “God with him” mean? “He shall eat curds and honey by the time he knows how to refuse the evil and choose the good. For before the child knows how to refuse the evil and choose the good, the land before whose two kings you are in dread will be deserted” (Isaiah 7:15-16). Choosing the good and refusing the evil is not exactly peaceful as most Christians view the birth story of Jesus as peaceful. What Isaiah was warning Ahaz of was judgment, not salvation! However, the author of Matthew was not interested in writing a historical biography, but looking to debate the interpretations and authority of the Pharisees.