I can definitely imagine the “story” changing – and have seen how rumors can change first hand, but as to the “forgeting the source of one story”…didn’t they use a lot of mnemonic devices in the oral tradition? I don’t think a story teller would make a lot of slip ups on accident. And I can also imagine an audience that would hold them to it…”that’s not how it goes!!” Of course I have NO idea – just wonderin’.

This does point out why Obama cannot do much more than make rude noises at the financial class. Doing so he is biting the hand that feeds his political viability. They are not going to stand for much of that.

Correct it does. My purpose in that was to say that the contamination principle does not disprove a historical Jesus. IF a historical Jesus existed, there are many ways in which fanciful stories could have been attached to him.

Personally, I am neither a mythicist or historist; I don’t know enough to really make a stand for either. You could call me agnostic on that question. I am only pointing out that I don’t think that the contamination principle does much to support mythicism.

As to Caesar, there have been miraculous claims added to him (such as Julius Caesar being urged by a divine messenger to cross the Rubicon, and Caesar Augustus being born of a virgin.) Though that was just an example and other have given better ones.

With Jesus we are hearing a story that has already played the game of telephone for 40+ years. We really can’t know the reliability of the original witnesses and there’s a lot of room for embellishment.

Note that this assumes historicity. If there was no historical Jesus, there was no historical event c.30 CE, and no set time frame or initial eyewitness account for this putative game of telephone.

sailor1031:

In any case, what does it matter if a Yeshue Bar Yussef really existed or not? It can’t be proved one way or the other and it makes no difference to the manifest falsity of christianity or to anything else. It is a pointless debate.

I agree that it doesn’t matter for the manifest falsity of christianity, but that’s hardly the only factor that might motivate one to be interested in the subject. The earliest history of Christianity is a legitimate field of inquiry, and if there was no historical figure at its center the consensus view is drastically wrong.

OM, again:

Haile Selassie is a good example. Caesar and the various miracle claims he’s had is another.

Well, which Caesar, and which claims? The primary difference between Greco-Roman history (Tacitus, Suetonius, Plutarch, Dio, Arrian et al) and the gospels is that the gospels are anonymous, unprovenanced texts. Another key difference is that the historians refer to sources and provide their own analysis where their sources contradict each other or narrate improbable events, while this is entirely absent from the gospels. So we might amend the contamination principle somewhat: Tacitus, for instance, narrates miraculous healings performed by Vespasian in Egypt with a great deal of sarcasm and skepticism (typical for that author); such second-hand reports should not be understood to “contaminate” the mundane accounts in which they are found, as the author clearly doesn’t believe them or at the least leaves plenty of room for doubt. Nearly all of the miracle claims found in the Greco-Roman historians fit this mold; none of the miracles in the gospels do.

Francisco Bacopa:

I’ll come out and say that I am a historicist. I think there’s no other way to account for John the Baptist being in the gospels at all. I read the John the Baptist story as a peace offering to a losing faction. There must have been a John faction and a Jesus faction, they came into conflict, the John faction lost, but had John written into the Jesus story as part of the negotiations.

Even if you’re right, this doesn’t entail historicity. What is at issue is exactly what were the beliefs of the Jesus faction. Why could not a group dedicated to the exaltation of a cosmic redeemer figure like Paul’s Christ have come into conflict with a John faction, focussed on a historical baptizing figure?
In any case, I think you are wrong. John appears at the outset of Mark as Elijah redivivus, the traditionally expected herald of the Messianic age. It is at his baptism of Jesus that God proclaims Jesus his son, and the later digression to relate the death of John foreshadows the passion.

RW Ahrens:

But the fact is that if John the Baptist hadn’t existed, he would have had to have been invented anyway, for the Jesus story to work. And in fact, he doesn’t exist in other Gospels.

He’s in all four of the canonical gospels. What happens is we see increasing dicomfort on the part of the later authors who take up the story in Mark with the idea of Jesus submitting to a baptism administered by him, as in Mark he is said to be baptizing “for the forgiveness of sins”.

I was simply giving one example of how a story can change or get additions to it overtime with oral tradition. For example, imagine the following scenario. Someone is repeating the story of Jesus and remembers hearing about a guy who walked on water. The person thinks “That seems like something Jesus could’ve done… yea I think it really was him.” when in reality the person is remembering a different legend. That gets added onto the story and gets repeated with more certainty with every telling.

This happens all the time, even today. People forget the source of one story and mistakenly place it into another. Inconsistencies and detail get smoothed over to better fit the narrative (consciously or unconsciously) and, after a few repetitions, it becomes embedded into the story.