Christian Texts and History • What COULD have persuaded me that Jesus existed

PREMISE:
Ignore please the "brother(s) of the Lord" in Pseudo-Paul or the false Testimonia in Josephus. The guy who says to be historicist in virtue of that so-called "evidence" is probably a liar or one who has not made the right homework.

Now I propose what could pose as real evidence of a historical Jesus (and yet fails to be so).


(Revelation 11:8)


Russell Gmirkin had intrigued with this claim:


(my bold)

Usually the mythicists face Rev 11:8 in two ways:

• Richard Carrier answers that Revelation knows Matthew therefore the author of Revelation is infected by the historicist virus therefore he doesn't count in the discussion on the historicity.

• Paul-Louis Couchoud concedes that Revelation precedes the first gospel and yet he rejects the phrase "where their Lord was crucified" as interpolation, given the sound silence about the crucifixion itself in the rest of the book.

Contra both Carrier and Couchoud, I think that the solution of the enigma "the great city that symbolically is called Sodom and Egypt" allows to ransom the phrase as historicist evidence.
I mean the Witulski's and Turmel's solution: Jerusalem, as Aelia Capitolina (a colony full of gentiles), could well be execrated by the same Jewish-Christians.

Which implies three facts:

• 1) the phrase "where their Lord was crucified" is genuine, pace Couchoud, since the hostility against Aelia Capitolina is coherent with the anti-Gentile character of the rest of the book;

• 2) the phrase "where their Lord was crucified" couldn't be written under the influence of the Gospel of Matthew, pace Carrier, since Rev 11:8, correctly interpreted, attributes the death of the Lord to the Romans while Matthew attributes the death of the Jesus to the Jews.

• 3) even if the original layer of Revelation was a Jewish source and not a Jewish-Christian text, then the Lamb would be probably Bar-Kokhba (docet Turmel) hence still an example of a Jewish Messiah being believed risen and vindicated by YHWH after the death.

It would seem then that Rev 11:8 is evidence of historicity. Yet there is a good objection: what if Rev 11:8 reflected the first timid attempts to spread the voice that Jesus was killed in Jerusalem? In that case, Rev 11:8 would be only vile Judaizing propaganda designed to make the source of authority not more Jesus, but Jerusalem (and the Jewish-Christian community found in it). Something of similar to the Catholic rumor that the bones of Saint Peter were buried in Rome: the real source of authority ceases to be Saint Peter and becomes Rome itself (and the bishop found in it).

What I have learned from this analysis is that the real threat of a late dating of the Christian writings is not so much a threat to the reliability of the memory. Rather, it is a threat to the same innocence of the text, since the risk is again and again concrete, that we are reading propaganda and only propaganda (and that Jesus himself was historicized in virtue of mere propaganda).

CONCLUSION:
I have learned a sound lesson: never to be persuaded that Jesus existed in virtue of what is written in a Christian text.

Only a Josephus can save a historical Jesus, to this point.

Statistics: Posted by Giuseppe — Wed Nov 13, 2024 10:27 pm

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