Point 5 of The Jesus Puzzle discusses the influence of Platonism on Paul. Here is point 5:

Here is point 4 from Doherty:

4) Paul and other early writers place the death and resurrection of their Christ in the supernatural/mythical world, and derive their information about these events, as well as other features of their heavenly Christ, from scripture.

Evaluation: 

In many ways we have already discussed point 3 in many of the comments on earlier posts. Here is point 3 stated:

Antiquities 18.63-64

Josephus as it stands. I have included the three disputed portions in italics so they can be easily seen. It is clear why these portions are challenged as they are not likely to be things a Jew who was not a Christian would be likely to say. So here is the text:

We come now to the second point of the Jesus Puzzle. It is:

2) There is no non-Christian record of Jesus before the second century. References in Flavius Josephus (end of first century) can be dismissed as later Christian insertions.

Today I received an email that is typical of what I often receive. It deals with a book by Earl Doherty entitled the Jesus Puzzle. In this book Doherty makes 12 points to argue that Jesus did not exist and that Christianity was originally a mythic religion. I will precede through his points one at a time in future blogs. For now, here is his list of points.

We continue to study the Greco-Roman culture into which the New Testament is set. One of the things striking me about this study is how careful one should be to move from our world back to the first century. It is not simply the case that how we live and think is how people in the first century lived and thought.

James Tabor sent me an email this week to note a new study on the statistics for the Jesus Tomb. The study is “Probability, Statistics, and the Talpiot Tomb,” authored by Profs. Kevin Kilty and Mark Elliot.

In my Greco-Roman backgrounds course we are discussing the home and Roman family. It has been a fascinating journey. We tend to see the family as the building block of society-- and in many ways it is. However, my preparation for class helps me to appreciate why there is confusion sometimes in our culture about family roles.

I already noted in an earlier post how in the Roman world the gods were everywhere. When it comes to Roman religion, there are also important differences with our own religious culture. A nice summary of ancient texts on Roman religion is found in Roman Religion: A Sourcebook, by Valerie M. Warrior (published in 2002; her book on the topic has the same title and was published in 2006).

The world of the first century was not like ours. One of the features was that the gods are everywhere. There was no secular-religious divide as in our culture. One can think of Acts 17 where Paul is provoked by Athenian idols.

As you can see we have a new look with new capabilities. We have spent most of the summer speaking about this and designing a more user friendly, interactive site. This also allows me to work with pictures.

The Seminary Book Store tells me that Acts (BECNT) is now published. This commentary completes the Luke-Acts commentary commitment I made in 1984. It covers the message of Acts in detail, keeping a special eye on the commentary debates, key terms, the narrative argument, theological issues, and matters of background.

The election of the Majority Islamic (AKP) party's candidate in Turkey has taken place.

We noted the build up to this result earlier this summer. Here is the report from CNN:

Former Islamist Abdullah Gul has been elected president of Turkey following a contest that has split the nation and drawn opposition from the army.

I have returned home and dug out from the pile of mail and books awaiting me.  The new semester starts tomorrow. I am teaching a new class in First Century backgrounds that will use a library of over 39,000 pictures I have taken in the Biblical lands and key European and archaeological museums.  

Tomorrow I leave Lake Balaton to head for home in Dallas.

I spoke today on Jesus from the "Earth Up" at the Lausanne Conferecne on Jewish Evangelism. The goal was to introduce a fresh way to do Jewish Evangelism, besides dealing with Jesus as divine from John or the use of the Old Testament in the New. The presentation went very well, stimulating a great deal of discussion. I was pleased.

Tomorrow I leave for Hungary and the last leg of this long trip. I will be participating in the Lausanne Conference on Jewish Evangelism at Lake Ballaton in Hungary.

I am in the midst of a three night Jesus Seminar here in Berlin at Beit Sar Shalom, a messianic congregation in Berlin. The last night is tonight. We are going through key scenes in the life of Jesus. I will cover about 22 passages when the Seminar is done.

Today I visited Checkpoint Charlie in Berlin, which is now a museum and popular tourist site. As most of you know, this is where the American and Soviet sectors met in a divided Berlin and where Soviet and American tanks faced each other down as the Wall was built.

One of the greatest parts of teaching is to travel and see how graduates are doing. This trip has allowed me to do this with two of my graduates who are in Romania and Germany. These church scenes are very distinct from each other and from the USA. In fact, the one on Berlin is a messianic congregation that has a messianic shabbat service (ie, they do church on Saturday).

I am now in Warsaw, a special trip I made simply for myself to see the tribute to the Warsaw Jewish ghetto here. Here was the home of thousands of Jews out of whom 265,000 died at Treblinka concentration camp. I have made it a practice to never forget this extreme act of human atrocity and try to visit the key sites I am able to get to.

I am now at the end of the Sibiu, Romania SNTS meetings. These meetings have been relatively quiet with not to much to report on in terms of content. The advantage of being here is getting to hear about projects that are in the works by the many NT scholars here from around the world. There are not many Americans here this time and even the British are few and far between.

Seventeen years ago I was in Romania to take relief to various orphanages across the country in a 1964 Mercdes-Benz Truck (It was 1990). It was six weeks after the revolution that toppled the Communists here. It was a stark land with much suffering, but it also was a country with much hope. There was next to nothing in the stores or available to the average person.

I am currently in Vienna at the International SBL. I read a paper here in the Historical Jesus section. The paper went well and will be published in a volume on Jesus that will be a collection of the presentations. The seminar as a whole was called Jesus in Continuum.

A few months ago, when Christians were martyred in Eastern Turkey, we noted how important the election in July would be for Turkey and the entire region.

I am now in Vienna for the International Meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature. I will read a paper on the Historical Jesus here. That should be interesting, since every type of view is likely to be present.

On the train on the way here I read an editorial in the International Herald tribune (July 18 issue) about Pope Benedict Called Pope Benedict's Mistake, decrying the pope's attempt to call Europe back to Christ through the Catholic Church through an appeal to the teaching rooted in the apostles (as well as apostolic succession and the tradition of the church) It was written by James Carroll of the Boston Globe. What made the piece interesting was how it attacked the argument of Christianity in general.

I just finished my trek south to tape for a show on Paul's trip to Rome. This included stops at Pompeii, Vesuvius, and Puteoli, where we taped underground in an ancient theater that is like the way the bottom of the Colosseum was in Rome. It was a pretty fascinating trip. The Naples Museum is fantastic for ancient relics, Pompeii and Vesuvius are both one of a kind stops.

There is a lot of history here. The Appian Way Paul traveled to Rome was full of family tombs of the elite as one approaches the city. One can sense that Paul must have pondered what might happen to him as he entered the city. In addition, as Paul came to Puteoli, he would have sailed around the little island of Capri, where Tiberius often stayed and where the Claudian emperors often vacationed.

I am writing from Rome, having just attended the 4th Enoch Seminar in Camaldoli, Italy. Here 90 top scholars studied the books of Jubilees and Enoch intensively for 4 days. Most of the top scholars in Second Temple Judaism were there (from Ezra and Nehemiah until the fall fo that temple in AD 70). This is an expanding specialty and I got caught up with what is happening in this area. This is what profs do in the summer. This was a quite profitable time. Particularly interesting is how sime elements in Judaism worked witrh the Mosaic law and tried to standardize Judaism around a 364 day calendar, so that th eorder on earth matched that in heaven(that was the claim of Jubilees as it sought to tale the giving of the Law back to the partriarchs).

I am writing this from the Frankfurt airport where I am waiting for my connection to Rome. I will be attending the 4th International Enoch Seminar in Camaldoli, Italy (Between Florence and Rome, near Arrezo), the first of four conferences I am attending in Europe between now and August 24.

The study of Second Temple Judaism has become more refined since the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls. This conference takes a close look at a strand of Judaism that emerged out of the priestly circles and that lost its place at the Temple. It is called Enochic Judaism.It had a very precise solar calendar and rooted the rites of Judaism not in Moses but earlier int eh patriarchs. Most see the book of Jubilees as belonging to this wing of Judaism, which had contacts with the Essenes as well. It shoudl be an interesting four days, before I head off to do some filming for Day of Discovery on Paul's arrival to Rome in Acts.