Very interesting: thanks. I have got to a point where I never say, at least until quite deep into a conversation, ‘Jesus was/did/preached’ - I need to have said ‘Jesus is presented as being/doing/preaching’ in several previous breaths and I need to have reckoned in some way with the existential question. The principle of logic, that existence is not a predicate, needs to be remembered, so there is always somewhere in the background, the question ‘what would someone need to have done (what predicates need to be true of him);in order to have been Jesus?’ Been a preacher in Pilate’s Judaea, been crucified - perhaps that is enough, though at that rate we need to remember that more than one person might qualify and the Jesus as Presented might be a composite figure.
Only when I’ve thought about the Presented Jesus, or one of the conflicting presentations, can I bring myself to say ‘Jesus won the confidence of the sick’ or something like that. Which is an example of a predicate in modern, but not exactly in ancient use, which we might think applicable to the real person. It isn’t just a question of deciding whether to accept, but of deciding how to interpret or rephrase the predicates they use.
Is Jesus presented as Jewish? I think that it was not the universal wish of the presenters to emphasise this and it is not clear how that predicate functioned in their minds. There could be no plausible reconstruction of any person behind the presentation which did not make him Jewish in our sense I agree, but to them was someone really Jewish if not a committed devotee of the Temple, which Jesus, as presented, was not?
Did Jesus die? We know how the texts use phrases with a certain uncertainty about them, so what do we conclude? The problems roll on
Very interesting: thanks. I have got to a point where I never say, at least until quite deep into a conversation, ‘Jesus was/did/preached’ - I need to have said ‘Jesus is presented as being/doing/preaching’ in several previous breaths and I need to have reckoned in some way with the existential question. The principle of logic, that existence is not a predicate, needs to be remembered, so there is always somewhere in the background, the question ‘what would someone need to have done (what predicates need to be true of him);in order to have been Jesus?’ Been a preacher in Pilate’s Judaea, been crucified - perhaps that is enough, though at that rate we need to remember that more than one person might qualify and the Jesus as Presented might be a composite figure.
Only when I’ve thought about the Presented Jesus, or one of the conflicting presentations, can I bring myself to say ‘Jesus won the confidence of the sick’ or something like that. Which is an example of a predicate in modern, but not exactly in ancient use, which we might think applicable to the real person. It isn’t just a question of deciding whether to accept, but of deciding how to interpret or rephrase the predicates they use.
Is Jesus presented as Jewish? I think that it was not the universal wish of the presenters to emphasise this and it is not clear how that predicate functioned in their minds. There could be no plausible reconstruction of any person behind the presentation which did not make him Jewish in our sense I agree, but to them was someone really Jewish if not a committed devotee of the Temple, which Jesus, as presented, was not?
Did Jesus die? We know how the texts use phrases with a certain uncertainty about them, so what do we conclude? The problems roll on