CADRE Comments

In my first part of this article , I unpacked the details and implications of the sceptical proposition "The canonical Gospels (and particularly their infancy narratives) are, in part, orthodox responses and redactions of stories by early pagan converts that simply got out of hand and became too popular to ignore." This proposal represents an interesting variant of a normal type of sceptical theory about how various fictional myths (distinct from historical events with mythic meaning) got attached to the story of the historical Jesus Christ by the followers of Jesus after his death. On this general type of theory the pronoun would be decapitalized of course, Jesus having never been anything other than another purely human man; although actually this variant of the theory is flexible enough that it could include something like the idea that almost all events and ideas in the Gospels (and Acts) are true except for the virgin birth and the two infancy narratives built arou...

This past January (gosh, it is almost September already??), I saw an interesting question asked on a Facebook group against Jesus Mythicism: "Could the gospels (and particularly the infancy narratives) be, in part, orthodox responses and redactions of stories by early pagan converts that simply got out of hand and became too popular to ignore? Could this be a fair compromise between mythicism and historicism?" FB being FB, after I posted a reply, I never noticed that Alexander, who asked the question, replied to a basic answer from me with a further question, and that particular thread soon dropped out of sight. I think it's a respectable question, and I meant and still mean no disrespect in giving a short answer there and a longer consideration of it here. It's a somewhat vaguely broad question, of course, but it's still precise in the basic concept being proposed, and its broadness allows a lot of flexibility for fulfillment options: perhaps it could be tru...

The Jesus Project was started in 2007 as a forum for skeptical biblical scholars, both professional and amateur, to conduct a 'scientific' investigation of the historicity of the Jesus traditions in the New Testament. Their sessions resulted in an edited volume, Sources of the Jesus Tradition , published last year. In this post I want to take a closer look at an essay by classicist Justin Meggitt called 'Popular Mythology in the Early Empire and the Multiplicity of Jesus Traditions', which provides an alternative, skeptical model of the transmission of Jesus traditions in early Christianity. As Meggitt puts it: When the popular cultural contexts within which stories about Jesus were first told or retold are taken into account, it becomes apparent that they are likely to be characterized by far more creativity, improvisation, idiosyncrasy, and inconsistency than has hitherto been assumed by most New Testament scholars. Far from being careful and cautious in their hand...