The categories of ‘being much more than human, sent by God into the world’ and ‘human being making many controversial statements’ are not mutually exclusive. We may well think that the first category is empty but if people do consider it to be populated and describe an individual they think belongs to both categories they do not necessarily contradict themselves. If we encounter their literature it is not out of the question for us to think that their descriptions were in fact influenced, even determined, by elements of the real history of a controversial person.
On the other hand I don’t see a way of making it probable, simply from the content of these descriptions, that this sort of ‘determination by reality’ is taking place. There is debate about whether the message attributed to Jesus is political - but if it is that does not show that the writers of the story had a real historical record before them. Angels can give political advice. I’d probably ask for some if an angel walked into the room.
I don’t see why an angel should not be, if he chooses, to all appearances the brother of a real person, full of family resemblance and speaking freely of family history. (My projected best-seller ‘An Angel Stole my DNA’ will cover this possibility in more modern terms. Like my other project, ‘Jesus: Caesar’s Double Agent’, it will make me very rich.). The statement ‘your bro was really an angel’ is very hard to subject to Popperian falsification, at least if you are in a culture where angels are believed in.
So I don’t think that there’s any use in trying to prove that Jesus really existed by considering just what was said about him and I don’t think that the fact that the status attributed to ‘Jesus’ from an early date was a supernatural one shows strongly that those referring to ‘Jesus’ had no remembered or recorded real individual in mind. Existence is not a predicate, as Kant insists so boringly. What predicates need to be true of a person for that person to be/have been Jesus? I don’t think we have got as far as an answer to that question - and that is partly because of the heterogeneous mixture of human and supernatural predicates that have become associated with that name?
The related question of how those who spoke of Jesus knew whereof the spoke has troubled thoughtful Christians from a very early stage, I think.
The categories of ‘being much more than human, sent by God into the world’ and ‘human being making many controversial statements’ are not mutually exclusive. We may well think that the first category is empty but if people do consider it to be populated and describe an individual they think belongs to both categories they do not necessarily contradict themselves. If we encounter their literature it is not out of the question for us to think that their descriptions were in fact influenced, even determined, by elements of the real history of a controversial person.
On the other hand I don’t see a way of making it probable, simply from the content of these descriptions, that this sort of ‘determination by reality’ is taking place. There is debate about whether the message attributed to Jesus is political - but if it is that does not show that the writers of the story had a real historical record before them. Angels can give political advice. I’d probably ask for some if an angel walked into the room.
I don’t see why an angel should not be, if he chooses, to all appearances the brother of a real person, full of family resemblance and speaking freely of family history. (My projected best-seller ‘An Angel Stole my DNA’ will cover this possibility in more modern terms. Like my other project, ‘Jesus: Caesar’s Double Agent’, it will make me very rich.). The statement ‘your bro was really an angel’ is very hard to subject to Popperian falsification, at least if you are in a culture where angels are believed in.
So I don’t think that there’s any use in trying to prove that Jesus really existed by considering just what was said about him and I don’t think that the fact that the status attributed to ‘Jesus’ from an early date was a supernatural one shows strongly that those referring to ‘Jesus’ had no remembered or recorded real individual in mind. Existence is not a predicate, as Kant insists so boringly. What predicates need to be true of a person for that person to be/have been Jesus? I don’t think we have got as far as an answer to that question - and that is partly because of the heterogeneous mixture of human and supernatural predicates that have become associated with that name?
The related question of how those who spoke of Jesus knew whereof the spoke has troubled thoughtful Christians from a very early stage, I think.