Questioning the Historicity of Jesus (Value Inquiry Book / Philosophy and Religion, 336)

✍ Scribed by Raphael Lataster

• Publisher: Brill | Rodopi
• Year: 2019
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 509
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

This volume moves beyond the mainstream scholarly scepticism over the Christ of Faith and considers if there is sufficient evidence to establish the existence of the more mundane Historical Jesus. Using the logical tools of the analytic philosopher, Lataster finds that the relevant sources are unreliable as historical documents, and that the key method of those purporting that the Historical Jesus existed is to appeal to sources that do not exist. Considering an ancient hypothesis suggesting that Jesus began as a celestial messiah that certain Second Temple Jews already believed in, and was later allegorised in the Gospels, Lataster discovers that it is more reasonable to at least be agnostic over Jesus' historicity.

✦ Table of Contents

Questioning the Historicity of Jesus: Why A Philosophical Analysis Elucidates the Historical Discourse
Copyright
Contents
Foreword
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1 Which Jesus?
2 A Debate among Atheists
3 The Problem
4 The Philosopher's Probabilistic Approach
Part 1: The Case for Historicity
1 Ehrman's Dual Approach towards the Gospels
1 A (Mostly) Wonderful Start
2 The Gospels and the Folly of the Hypothetical Source
2 Beyond the Gospels
1 The Problem of Paul
3 Casey's Superfluous 'Scholarship'
1 Poisoning the Well
2 'Method'
3 Why the Gospels Ought to Be Trusted, but Only When We Feel like It
4 After the Case
5 Even Worse than Ehrman: Offensive and Facetious
6 Crossan's Brief Attempt
Part 2: The Case for Agnosticism
4 Inadequate Methods
1 History Concerns What Probably Happened
2 Criteria for Authenticity
3 Faith and Inconsistency
4 A Bayesian Alternative
5 The Criteria vs. Bayes
5 Inadequate Sources
1 The Silence of the Primary Sources
2 'Other' Christian Sources
3 (Non-Christian) Extrabiblical Sources
4 Josephus
5 Tacitus
6 Thallus (and Phlegon)
7 Pliny, Suetonius, and Mara bar Serapion
8 The Talmud
9 The Less Interesting Books of the New Testament
10 The Canonical Gospels: Matthew, Mark, Luke-Acts, and John
11 Mark's Burden
12 The Genre of the Gospels
13 Burridge's Take on the Gospels' Genre
14 Mark's Failure
6 The Problems of Paul
1 The Docetic/Marcionite Jesus
2 The Earliest Witness' Sources
3 Paul's Minimal, Unquotable Jesus
4 Paul's Cosmic Christ
5 Philo's Pre-Christian and Pre-Pauline 'Celestial Jesus'
6 The Evolution of Jesus
7 Fictitious Founders
8 The Revelation of/from Paul
9 Agnosticism is Rational
Part 3: The Case for Mythicism
7 Prior Probabilities
1 The Problem
2 The Hypothesis of Historicity
3 The Hypothesis of Myth
4 Background Knowledge (Christianity)
4.1 Elements of Christian Origin
4.2 Elements of Christian Religion
5 Background Knowledge (Context)
5.1 Elements of Political Context
5.2 Elements of Religious and Philosophical Context
5.3 Elements of Literary Context
6 The Prior Probability
8 Consequent Probabilities
1 Primary Sources
2 Extrabiblical Evidence
3 The Evidence of Acts
4 The Evidence of the Gospels
5 The Evidence of the Epistles
9 Calculations
1 Carrier's Calculations
2 Alternative Calculations
3 Devil's Advocate
Conclusions
1 The Glory of Agnosticism
2 Mainstream Scholars Already Agree with Us
Bibliography
Index