Reddit mentions of Jesus, Criteria, and the Demise of Authenticity

We should move on from the criteria of authenticity. They are unable to really prove/disprove anything and the categories of authentic/inauthentic are problematic.

The edited volume Jesus, Criteria, and the Demise of Authenticity is a good work to start with for further reading.

> please highlight the errors you found, along with page numbers would be helpful.

Hell no, I won't do your work for you. What I will do is cite Bart Ehrman on it and then I will cite a couple of examples.

Ehrman: I’d say 1/3 to 1/2 of the pages in my copy have bright yellow large question marks on them, where (when highlighting) I found factual errors, misstatements, dubious claims, inconsistencies of logic, and so on.

Aslan says the letters of Paul make up "the bulk of the New Testament." The Pauline epistles are at most one fourth of it, and that's if you include the pseudoepigraphic ones.


Aslan puts the destruction of Sepphoris during the tax rebellion of 6 CE. Varus destroyed Sepphoris during the troubles following the death of Herod in 4 BCE.

Aslan claims that following the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 CE, the Jews were “exiled from the land.” The Jews were not exiled from the land of Palestine by the Romans.

Aslan places Eusebius in the third century. Eusebius was alive in the 3rd but his first major work wasn't published until shortly before the turn of the 4th and it was only in 314 that he became Bishop of Caesaria.

There are many many many more. But that's not the only reason to utterly reject Reza "Dan Brown" Aslan's book. One, he cherry picks the data, highlighting only the things that support his (thoroughly debunked decades ago) thesis and ignores the many data that contradict his quite imaginative rehash of long ago discredited theories. He also just makes shit up.

Scholars were stunned to learn from Aslan that Jesus ben Ananias, the first century prophet mentioned Josephus, prophesied the "imminent return of the messiah." Not one scholar ever heard that, not one record of such a pronouncement exists.

Ehrman: Aslan – in order to heighten the horrific relations between Pilate, governor of Judea, and his Jewish subjects – claims that “in his ten years as governor of Jerusalem, he had sent thousands upon thousands to the cross with a simple scratch of his reed pen on a slip of papyrus” (p. 148). Aslan is making this up. Our sources for Pilate are: (a) the New Testament Gospels; (b) Josephus; (c) Philo of Alexandria (a prominent Jewish philosopher of the first century); (d) an inscription bearing Pilate’s name, discovered in Caesarea in 1961; (e ) several coins minted during his rule. In NONE of these sources is there any reference at all to Pilate crucifiying “thousands and thousands” of Jews. In all these sources, there is reference only to three crucifixions, Jesus and the two crucified with him. We have no idea how many Pilate condemned to crucifixion.


>There's definitely some facts which are widely agreed upon about the guy, but probably not everyone agrees.

No, there are no "facts" at all. There is absolutely nothing historical that can be recovered from the available sources. No historian would make a pronouncement as to anything about Jesus because there's no history to be found. Not one paper about Jesus has ever been published in a history journal. Any paper claiming anything about Jesus submitted to their history prof got an F, unless it was titled something like "Why Historians Can't Say Dick About Jesus."

The scholars saying this and that are universally not historians, and they don't use the accepted methodology used by historians, and they mostly don't apply the same criteria as the historians do, and when they do - as with the Criterion of Multiple Attestation - they abuse it. Really, I can't count the number of times big name NT scholars claim that Mark, Matthew, and Luke are "multiple attestations." They are, in a sense, but they are definitely not independent, which is what the criterion demands. Bart Ehrman, who is not a historian, has rather a bad habit of repeating such abuse and making pronouncements of history based on it.

Those scholars who write about "the historical Jesus" aren't writing about an actual historical Jesus who probably or almost certainly did this thing or that thing. That's because, I said, there's no history to support it. The "historical Jesus" they are talking about is a reconstruction. Lacking any actual acceptable-to-historians evidence, they came up with their own criteria and methods. Example: the Criterion of Embarrassment. You can look it up so I'll just say that noted NT scholar and historical Jesus quester Mark Goodacre thinks the CoE is an embarrassment. Or try the Criterion of Plausibility. An awful lot of NT scholars deem it implausible. There is a growing segment of scholars who say it's time to wash their hands of it entirely. The "historical Jesus" those questers are questing for would better be called the "authentic Jesus."

The only thing thing that nearly everyone agrees on is that there was person (who may or may not have been named Jesus) who walked around, presumably farting now and then and taking an occasional dump, was (or wasn't) baptized by John the Baptist and that he was crucified (by someone at some time). Those things aren't "facts" in the view of a historian because there's nothing a historian could hang his hat on to support it. Still, even the questers for the "authentic Jesus" don't all agree to the details (as noted above) but only that "this and that almost certainly happened."

Robert Price (who was a member of The Jesus Seminar, questers for the historical [authentic] Jesus):

>The "historical Jesus" reconstructed by New Testament scholars is always a reflection of the individual scholars who reconstruct him. Albert Schweitzer was perhaps the single exception, and he made it painfully clear that previous questers for the historical Jesus had merely drawn self-portraits. All unconsciously used the historical Jesus as a ventriloquist dummy. Jesus must have taught the truth, and their own beliefs must have been true, so Jesus must have taught those beliefs.

[...]

>My point here is simply that, even if there was a historical Jesus lying back of the gospel Christ, he can never be recovered. If there ever was a historical Jesus, there isn't one any more. All attempts to recover him turn out to be just modern remythologizings of Jesus. Every "historical Jesus" is a Christ of faith, of somebody's faith. So the "historical Jesus" of modern scholarship is no less a fiction.

Price says elsewhere:

>What one Jesus reconstruction leaves aside, the next one takes up and makes its cornerstone. Jesus simply wears too many hats in the Gospels – exorcist, healer, king, prophet, sage, rabbi, demigod, and so on. The Jesus Christ of the New Testament is a composite figure (...) The historical Jesus (if there was one) might well have been a messianic king, or a progressive Pharisee, or a Galilean shaman, or a magus, or a Hellenistic sage. But he cannot very well have been all of them at the same time.

In short, barring some new evidence that actually counts as evidence there is no such thing as "historical Jesus." The "authentic Jesus" isn't in much better shape.

>There is an incredible amount of evidence for this, by the standards of evidence that historians routinely use.

No, there's not. There's a lot of evidence by the standards used in textual criticism of the Bible. By the standards of ancient historians studying anything else, there's paltry evidence.

But that doesn't necessarily mean there's actually any reason to doubt the consensus. There is a method, after all, and the only reason you'd question the results of that method would be if it had been shown, say, that the system was logically invalid and incapable of coming to a consistent conclusion.

Oh.