Conversely, there are many other people from his time that definitely did exist and verifiably so. I have a bronze coin minted in Judea by Pontius Pilatus. I can look at it, I can touch it, it’s real. Even as an avowed agnostic, I see no reason why Jesus couldn’t have been a real person (minus the miracles that were almost certainly later additions).
I really like the theory that someone just made up an entire religion that would proceed to affect the entire world for thousands of years just to cover up adultery.
Christianity exists. Religions don’t tend to spring up from nowhere. Every myth has its nugget of truth. Was there a preacher back then whose followers later spread around the world? Almost certainly. Where else could Christianity have come from?
Was he the son of god though? Was he capable of all the miracles the bible claims? Is the god he preached even real? There is no evidence that the answer to these three questions is anything but no I’m afraid.
These sort of prove op’s point tho, right? Like Hubbard and Smith were real people. They weren’t magic like they claimed, but their historicity isn’t questioned. So Jesus also coulda been a real person, a preacher, just not magic
No. There’s a whole mythology that Smith alluded to. That mythology and its alleged revelation were supposedly there before smith or anyone else. Smith is a charlatan who started the myth.
Jesus’ myth was started by alleged followers (being generous) at least 50+ years after his alleged existence.
All of the myths attributed to yeshua are torn from other sources and are a patchwork of stories that held attention at the time.
It’s more likely yeshua was a myth told by charlatans who needed money to keep spreading the wonderful story of a Jew who could have ruled the Roman empire but fed the poor and healed others instead.
The new testament stories were written well over a hundred years after. That would be like someone today writing an account of the civil war based solely on stories.
The new testament stories were written well over a hundred years after
Not right.
These were written 20 to 30 years after: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_the_Apostle (“Fourteen of the 27 books in the New Testament have traditionally been attributed to Paul. Seven of the Pauline epistles are undisputed by scholars as being authentic, with varying degrees of argument about the remainder.”) It would be more like someone writing about this now, which I do remember.
Gospel of Mark is dated to around the year 70
Book of Revelation around 81-96
The canonical gospels are the four which appear in the New Testament of the Bible. They were probably written between AD 66 and 110. — en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gospel
The New Oxford Annotated Bible claims, “Scholars generally agree that the Gospels were written forty to sixty years after the death of Jesus. They thus do not present eyewitness or contemporary accounts of Jesus’s life and teaching.”en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Testament
He was a prophet whose movement had around 120 or so core disciples along with his apostles, plus thousands who followed him about and considered him a healer and revolutionary teacher.
There are people who have done similar things that are completely lost to history other than small records that vaguely outline the controversy surrounding them… We shouldn’t really expect more in terms of proof…
But what is unique is the fact that we have an extremely well preserved corpus of text surrounding him. We also have some good idea that a lot of his followers were prosecuted and killed, and never recanted in the process, which might incline you to believe in the radical truth that they lived by.
Of course I am biased - I am a Christian - but it really does just seem pointlessly antagonistic to dismiss His Existence at all.
Irrespective of whether people believe the prophets to be prophets the level of “proof of existence” they demand is often way beyond what is accepted for other historical people.
And frankly it is quite childish. There is rational criticisms of what happened between the life of Jesus a.s. and what is printed in modern bibles. There is a lot of rational criticism for various christian institutions like the catholic church or other churches.
And i think it is unsurprising when looking at groups like atheist memes. It mostly seems to be a self help group for people who struggled under bad christian parents, rather than a theological conviction. And i don’t think that mocking Christianity is the healthy approach to reconcile with that childhood trauma.
Doesn’t the old testament acknowledge the existence of the other gods of the region? The Hebrew’s god tells them not to worship the other gods but only him. They’re not presented as false gods, more as opponents.
So christians believe in multiple Gods? What about gods from other regions? Does Jesus God Holy spirit supervise them? I love the Bible, when it comes to fantasy… You really can’t get any better…I met a goddess on the Truckee River one time and I tell you whut boy
This is one of the silliest quotes because we know that the ancient pagans often viewed one another’s gods as correspondent - “Thor is their Zeus,” etc.
And then you have the problem of henotheism where there is potentially a single god with many avatars and a pantheon of lesser spiritual beings… And you start to realize, "Wait, if the Vasihnavites, Shiavites, etc. are really just saying that there is a an arch deity over everything with many avatars in the form of lesser gods that he wears the masks of, plus lesser deities that can’t defy him and act as angels and demons…
"… What is a God, really? Aren’t they nearly monotheists…?"
What is a God.
Plus there’s the very classic position of the Jews and the Chrsitians - the gods of gentiles are demons.
Christianity does not become a religion that denies other gods, but one that claims other gods are misidentified.
Throw in some liberalism and yuo can even have Christians arguing that the worship directed as Vishnu by devoted Hindus who lead ethical lives and strive to be great manifestations of goodness & virtue for the sake of God’s love is not the worship of demons, at all, but rather, an attempt to reach our God through their own traditions that may even be guided in some form by the Holy Spirit…
So, IDK, IDK to what extent anyone is denying other people’s gods and its relevance to religion today.
We also have some good idea that a lot of his followers were prosecuted and killed, and never recanted in the process, which might incline you to believe in the radical truth that they lived by.
Man, I can’t get trial transcripts for cases that happened 2 years ago, and you’re getting them for trials that happened 2,000 years ago?
The very earliest stuff obviously doesn’t have that, and we rely on church history because it wasn’t like even the most interesting thing a Roman governor did that week to kill some random churchmen who created conflict among Jews, nor do we have much preserved about mobs killing these guys other than in the original Christian communal sources.
But really, if you start from the premise that everything Christians ever write about thesmelves is pure propaganda without an iota of truth in it, that creates a non-serious standard with which to evaluate things.
Is it really absurd to think that Protomartyr Stephen was killed by a mob of Jews for preaching a radically different religion to them in a time of great political upheaval? Isn’t this exactly what we think of Christians at later times - that they’d just turn on a guy and kill him for being a heretic? Why is it so unbelievable that it once happened to a Christian? Why is it so troublesome that the only people who bothered to write about these martyrs and preserve their memory were the people who were victims in the course of this?
Obviously, you can say that it’s propaganda and lies, and maybe some of it was. But we know it’s absolutely historic that Christians wre officially persecuted later on. it is also par for the course that they would be less formally persecuted prior to that. it also amkes sense that Christians, like every other group, try to preserve a communal memory.
Almost all of the Christian folklore surrounding Jesus can be directly tied to other myths that were common knowledge to Mediterranean people at the time.
There was a dude called Jesus, there were a lot of them. That one was Jewish and belonged to an evangelical cult was likely. But we can’t really say that because the Bible exists so too must have the Jesus described within.
What we have today was written by people hundreds of years after the fact. There was nothing written during these events, nothing at least that survived.
If you go looking for proof of Jesus, you’ll either come out disappointed, or delusional. Think of guys like Ken Ham.
Keep the faith, by all means. But part of believing is accepting that you don’t get to have proof.
Almost all of the Christian folklore surrounding Jesus can be directly tied to other myths that were common knowledge to Mediterranean people at the time.
Yeah I got the Mithra chainmail in my AOL account back in 1998 - I know the arguments.
But Christianity presents us with something very wild - it takes the Messianic tradition of Jews which was hitherto interpreted as being about creating an earthly Kingdom that conquers the world and incorporates the gentiles into Israel (or makes the gentiles servants of Israel, who all become noblemen living in a heaven on earth, some interpretations)… and Christ says
“Yeah, but no - the Kingdom is purely spiritual. It’s not temporal. The gentiles join us by worshiping God with us and living these truths - look, this Roman occupier has more faith than all Israel, because you guys are just terrible. You bicker over the law, and miss the total point of the law…”
And the Messiah is now about conquering the world through spreading the Gospel of loving God, and loving your neighbor as yourself, giving up your possessions and conquering greed, freeing yourself from hypocrisy; living in simplicity and supreme virtue, at peace with those around you, practicing non-violence, and now we don’t even need any kind of ceremonial laws at all because we are living the virtues. And that’s how the world becomes part of Israel - by adopting the great things abotu our religion - and that’s also how you get to heaven, which is only achievable after death when I come again…
This is a very unique interpretation of the Judaism of the time - absolutely revolutionary.
Even if you want to say that all the miracles and ‘signs’ are a myth, I think that the “Mithra” angle is actually bad beacuse you could just say they came up with those signs and added them so as to be able to claim they are fulfilling the Old Testament, which was infinitely more relevant to the Jews who were the community that gave birth to the religion.
Keep the faith, by all means. But part of believing is accepting that you don’t get to have proof.
Yeah I agree - there is no proof, and if there was proof, it would ruin it, because we’d no longer be doing good and loving God and our neighbor because it is right, but we would be doing it with the expectation of receiving heaven…
We would no longer be living a spiritual life for the good of oruselves and others - in hope & faith - but we would be Capitalists engaging in transactions that we deemed profitable.
But what is unique is the fact that we have an extremely well preserved corpus of text surrounding him.
IIFC all those writing are dated to well after the life time, like 100 year past it or so. It may be a bunch of written things but there is no/little reason to take those writings as anything but written down stories.
Ever play Telephone with a single word for 5 minutes? Now do that to a epic for 100 years, the end result will certainly be something but it may be nothing like the truth
I am not saying you have to believe the corpus of text as 100% factual and become a Christian right now, but I am suggesting that people believing the text isn’t absurd… Moreover, I would suggest that it tends to prove that Jesus Christ was real…
The text itself asserts
Times & places where he was; actual historic figures; a trial and a death, all of a single person.
Claims he drew large crowds, healed people, had some publicly known altercations with local religious authorities.
Claims that other people died in very public events (Stephen the Martyr in Acts) and that actual meetings were convened to decide what to do about it with the head Jewish rabbi at the time (Gamaliel)
Records his teachings in ways that sometimes kind of conflict with one another in terms of phrasing, and also records different details about events that could be mutually contradictory…
Which all implies that the synoptic Gospels and Acts were very opened to being fact checked by their contemporaries and future generations by trying to place themselves in history, and that the texts were not designed by a cabal of conspirators who wanted to deceive people and come up with the perfect story because the story they made was hardly written by committee - it has things we’d see as imperfections & errors.
Ever play Telephone with a single word for 5 minutes? Now do that to a epic for 100 years, the end result will certainly be something but it may be nothing like the truth
The Telephone game is designed to show you how private rumors occur.
The four Gospels are all the accounts of eyewitnesses to these events that were then recorded by their own hand or by their assistant’s hand, and preserved within the church. Of course, some speculate that they were forged later, but there’s a very long, complicated argument that involves the earliness of the spread of the knowledge of the Gospels and how well they were independently preserved in faraway locations from France to Egypt that indicate that they likely were completed shortly after Christ’s death.
It’s also the case that Christianity was a proselytizing faith, right, so immediately there are operations which send missionaries into the world to spread the news… By all means, deny the miracles and the story, but it seems likely that there was consensus about what had happened before the missionaries departed, which allowed for there to be the preservation of the Gospels and what would later constitute the New Testament.
There’s not a good argument to be made that these guys were just spreading nonsense and spitballing it as they go - the story was straight before they were leaving Jerusalem, or else the four Gospels and the subsequent apostolic letters would not have been something they could have ever all agreed upon.
It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter if there was a “real” Jesus. The Jesus of the Bible, the Jesus that is worshiped is an impossibility. A fiction. His life is full of details that defy basic biological and physical laws. On top of that, nothing he supposedly said was written down at the time, so we have no idea if what is recorded to have been his sayings in the Bible are things he actually said.
I always relate it to Ian Fleming having a schoolchum who’s father’s name was Ernst Stavro Bloefeld. So was there a real Ernst Stavro Bloefeld? Yes. Was he a supervillain fighting the world’s greatest secret agent? No.
Listened through a history of rome podcast and learned an interesting thing where win was basically like a concentrate so you would mix it with water to drink. Aka. water -> wine.
Using reasoning like this to remove the supernatural from the Bible rather defeats the entire point, doesn’t it? If Jesus just made Gatorade like anyone else would, that’s a rather unremarkable thing to describe. Hardly worth committing to writing.
That’s what I’m saying. There’s no record of him wiping his ass or playing cards. If it’s in the book it must be intended to present something exceptional. Explain his actions as something mundane and there isn’t really any reason to write it down.
But equally, the fantastic supernatural elements make the whole thing into a fairy tale to be completely disregarded as a dubious source of folk wisdom at best by any thinking person.
Ok, if you want me to sum up in a way that addresses it: Because the Jesus OP is very likely thinking of is fictional, there is no real physical proof of his existence.
I’d say the “Real Historical Jesus” matters at least as much as a Real Historical Julius Caeser or a Real Historical Abraham Lincoln.
I always relate it to Ian Fleming having a schoolchum who’s father’s name was Ernst Stavro Bloefeld.
That’s different in so far as Fleming was simply borrowing a name for a totally independent character. But Fleming was, himself, a Naval Commander and intelligence officer who leveraged his own biography to inform James Bond’s personal traits. What’s more, he borrowed heavily from the reports and anecdotes of other intelligence officials both during and after WW2 to inform the behaviors and attitudes of his side characters in his original novels.
It actually is pretty interesting to talk about “The Real James Bond” from a historical standpoint, because British intelligence services were pivotal in maintaining the imperial and international financial controls necessary to run a globe-spanning empire.
In the same vein, you might be curious to read about “The Real Julius Caeser” after working through the Shakespearean play or “The Real Abraham Lincoln” after getting through the stories where he’s a Vampire Hunter. These biographies inform all sorts of cultural and economic norms of the era. And reading about historical individuals can be both entertaining and illuminating, particularly when you begin to consider how your own world ended up as it is today.
“Why is Christianity a globe-spanning religious movement going back 2000 years?” is a question worth interrogating. And you can’t really interrogate that question without asking who this Jesus guy was or how he got so popular.
There’s nothing to read about when it comes to any real Joshua, son of Joseph the Carpenter of Nazareth because nothing has been written about such a person.
Are we talking about whether or not a historical person the Jesus of the Bible is based on existed or are we talking about whether or not there were any contemporary accounts? Because those are two very different things.
As I suggested in the beginning, whether or not a “real” Jesus existed is not really relevant, because if we did, we know nothing about him except what was written a long time after he would have died, which we can’t trust. Which is the same reason not to trust Plato’s dialogues even if Socrates existed. Plato wrote them long after Socrates died.
if we did, we know nothing about him except what was written a long time after he would have died
Hardly the first instance of a historical figure with unreliable historical accounts. You could make the same criticism of Egyptian pharaohs. They were deified in their eras, too. Their monuments were not completed until many of them were long dead. I guess we should just ignore them and pretend they had no impact on the course of history.
Where on Earth do you get the idea that monuments to pharaohs were not built within their lifetime?
Consider the Boy Pharaoh, Tutankhamen. He was dead at the age of 17, before the completion of his tomb. And thanks to repeated grave robberies, his tomb had to be repaired and refortified on subsequent occasions. His elderly successor and family advisor, Ay, was buried who died four years after his own ascension to the throne, effectively swapped Tutankhamen’s intended tomb and claimed it as his own, but never lived long enough to see it completed.
Numerous unfinished or partially completed tombs dot the Valley of Kings. And even the Great Pyramids have several chambers that were started but never filled out before the builders were retasked to the next Pharaoh in line.
It also misses my point.
The standards by which we hold “historical Jesus” would disqualify a litany of other historical figures of antiquity, as the bulk of our knowledge comes from reprints of reprints of surviving accounts of other accounts which are themselves often politicized documents intended to score contemporary points.
The Hellenistic Era might as well not exist, for all the first party accounts of the era that survive. Herodotus was dead before Darius the Great was even born, and yet his histories are fundamental to understanding the Achaemenid Empire during his reign. The only surviving copy is dated fifty years after the events it claims to document. That’s roughly as reliable as The Gospel of Mark, which is dated some 30 to 80 years after the death of its primary subject matter.
If you want to hold historical figures to equal standing, you’re going to write off everyone from Archidamus II to Cyrus I. Obliterating huge swaths of history with a single pen stroke, because Herodotus is an unreliable narrator.
That’s a terrible argument. That was one pharaoh and the monument would have been finished within his lifetime if he had lived a normal lifespan for a pharaoh… Most Pharaohs had monuments to them- not just tombs, but temples- built within their lifetime. We know because they tell us so right on the walls.
And, again, I was talking about the Jesus of the Bible, which is obviously who OP is asking about. That Jesus, who has magic powers and is the son of a god, did not exist. So there is no evidence for him even if he was based on a real person. A point you are still missing because you seem to think I am saying that there was no real person the character was based on, I am not. I thought I made that clear when I mentioned Bloefeld.
If there was a real Jesus, we have absolutely no idea what, if anything, said about him in the Bible actually happened or was something we said because there is no evidence of it outside the Bible and the Bible cannot be trusted. Which is why I maintain it doesn’t matter if the Jesus of the Bible was based on a real person, because it tells us nothing about that person that we can confirm as being true.
So, to answer OP’s question, there is no real physical proof that Jesus Christ ever existed. The name OP gives is a hint. “Christ” means messiah and “Jesus” is the Greek version of the name. A real Jesus would have a name similar to Yeshua and his full name would have been similar to Yeshua bin Yosef. Nazareth might be appended to the end. That wasn’t who OP was asking about though. They were asking about a messiah.
That’s a terrible argument. That was one pharaoh and the monument would have been finished within his lifetime
That’s two pharaohs and the mega-monuments completed over 27 years that Ramses lived to see were the exception rather than the rule.
And, again, I was talking about the Jesus of the Bible
The Gospel of Mark is part of the Bible. That makes Jesus at least as historical as anyone in Herodotus’s Histories. Significantly more so in many respects, as Herodotus writes on The Trojan War, some 800 years before his birth.
If there was a real Jesus, we have absolutely no idea what, if anything, said about him in the Bible actually happened or was something we said because there is no evidence of it outside the Bible
You could say the same of the Anatolian tribes or the Achaemenid dynasty or Sparta.
there is no real physical proof that Jesus Christ ever existed
Go back far enough and there is vanishingly little biographical evidence that any singular person existed. From the Mayan Empire to the Australian Aboriginal People, you can wave your hands and dismiss them all, due to the lack of first party written accounts of their existence.
So bringing him into an argument about whether or not a character in a book with magical powers exists when the person you’re talking to says that the textual claims aren’t reliable is beyond me.
And you are still ignoring my argument, an argument where I never claimed there was no historical person the character of Jesus in the Bible was based upon, so I’m not sure there is any point to continuing this conversation.
His life is full of details that defy basic biological and physical laws.
Which is perfectly sensible given that he was given the power to perform wonders by god to establish that he is indeed a messenger of god. The entire point of wonders is them defying the otherwise imposed limits of the physical world. Because the only one who can grant this power is the source of the physical limits themselves and that is god.
This is logically consistent under the axiom that god exists. Which is what the scriptures are all about.
You can set the axiom that god does not exist. But as there is no proof of that, it is equally axiomatic. So given that your logic works on an unproven assumption you should not use it to criticize a different logic based on another assumption.
Again you are making an assumption as the base of your logical construct.
That assumption is that the “laws of physics” are absolute in the sense that you know them. This is already problematic from a scientific point of view because our understanding of what the “laws of physics” are were and are under a constant change.
The scriptures are based on the axiom that god created everything including the laws of physics so when he chooses to, these laws can be defied. You can disagree with that axiom, but that does not mean that the logic is inconsistent.
So if you want to be honest your argument is “I don’t believe the scriptures, so i don’t believe in Jesus” which is perfectly valid, but very different from “I know Jesus is impossible and i can prove it.”
Maybe to make an example in science to wrap it all together. Before the invention of microscopes some doctors theorized about bacteria and viruses as the source of diseases. They often got ridiculed as “some invisible animals making us sick? Yeah you drank too much wine again” . Then the telescope came about and it could be seen what used to be unseeable for humans. Nowadays if you would claim there to be no bacteria you’d be rightfully ridiculed. But we also saw in human history that knowledge got lost and things that were established knowledge became bold theories subject to ridicule again.
So being honest to science and human knowledge the valid position is “I don’t believe in Jesus like described in the bible, as it is inconsistent with what i can observe today, but i have no proof in either direction.”
But this position is not more or less valid than “I do believe in Jesus like described in the bible.” Or “I do believe in Jesus but not like described in the bible.”
No, I am assuming that a book written in the iron age was written by people with no knowledge of physics and I am also assuming, like every other iron age religious text, there’s no need to accept it as truth.
Your whole “you can’t prove it isn’t true” argument is not how anything works. The burden of proof is on the claimant. In this case, my claim is I have no reason to believe any of it is true based on modern physics. And telling me I can’t assume that the laws of physics work all the time doesn’t really compel me to think otherwise since I’ve never seen any modern documented account of the laws of physics not working.
If your god wants me to believe he exists, he knows what he can do about it. I guess he’s fine not providing a shred of evidence he exists outside of an iron age book, which means I’m fine assuming he doesn’t exist.
was written by people with no knowledge of physics
So why would they write about it and describe it as wonders? Do you think they did not understand that walking on water, giving life to the death, curing diseases on the spot and other things ascribed to Jesus as wonders were defying the conventional laws of nature?
The burden of proof is on the claimant.
Exactly. You claim to know that Jesus as described in the bible is an impossibility. So you have to proof that. All i want you to acknowledge, is that you are making an assumption, not providing proven knowledge.
And telling me I can’t assume that the laws of physics work all the time doesn’t really compel me to think otherwise since I’ve never seen any modern documented account of the laws of physics not working.
Ever heard of modern Physics? Relativity theory? Relativistic effects? All of these are the results of observations in defiance of classical Newtonian physics. There is an ongoing revolution in physics since a hundred years because we keep observing things inconsistent with our prior assumptions about the laws of physics.
So why would they write about it and describe it as wonders?
The same reason the authors of the Vedas, the Quran, the Book of Mormon and any other religious text you’d like to mention. I assume you don’t think Vishnu is a god as well as your god. I look forward to the special pleading of why the “wonders” of the Bible are true and the “wonders” of the Trials of Hercules are not though.
Also, you’re “ever heard of” thing doesn’t change the fact that there is not a single documented account of the laws of physics not working. You are describing things being more complicated than was thought, not things not working.
But feel free to show me video of a modern-day miracle your god is responsible for. You know as well as I do that there is no such thing, but I’m sure you’ve got some amusing excuse for why your omnipotent god no longer performs those miracles of his.
So do you believe the people 2000 years ago knew nothing about the laws of nature or did they? Did they understand that walking on water was something regularly possible or not? Did they understand raising the dead was something not normally possible?
Because that is your claim. And i strongly disagree because we have plenty of evidence that people understood the laws of nature quite well, even if they couldn’t verbalize them in math yet. We have many ancient buildings and technologies that only work with a profound understanding of how physical matter behaves under normal circumstances.
EDIT: By the way i do not believe the bible to be an accurate description of Jesus, as there is an accurate description in the Quran. Still i don’t claim to have proof that Jews, Christians or Hindus are wrong, because i have different theological believes. I acknowledge that my believes are that. And Atheists should realize that they also have theological believes, which is fundamentally different from knowledge about natural sciences.
Atheists do not have theological beliefs, atheism is characterized by a lack of religious faith. If one is lacking in faith then they cannot still have faith, that is an incoherent position.
Yes they do. They believe, without evidence, that no god exists. This is specifically different from agnostics, who say that they do not know. So atheism is a form of faith, because they choose to believe something about the nature of the divine, even if that is the absence of any divine.
Interestingly there is also religious atheism for instance in some forms of Hinduism and Buddhism.
I always find it silly, when atheists proclaim to “believe in science” violating the very principles of scientific research by proclaiming something as factual and absolute they have no evidence for. If someone is true to scientific principles he’ll say he does not know hence he is an agnostic. An Atheist however is always a person of faith, even if many people fight tooth and nail to deny it. Which brings me back to what i wrote here somewhere earlier in the comment chain that my impression is most atheists to be traumatized by bad religious practice or actors abusing the religion to harm them, and not having found a healthier way to address their trauma yet.
I think you’re operating on a different understanding of the words ‘faith’ and ‘belief’ here. Do you believe that Tuesday comes after Monday? Do you believe the Earth orbits the Sun, or that puppies are cute? Belief in something does not require faith, faith is a specific kind of belief. This is the kind of belief I have when talking about God.
I do not need evidence to disprove the existence of God, much the same way that I do not need the same for Dragons, or Magic, or the Flat Earth. I am not claiming these things do not exist, I am simply not going to believe they do until there is some evidence of their existence. I would suspect you do not think that I am religious in my lack of belief in dragons.
I also do not “believe” in science. That is a misunderstanding of science, which is simply a methodology. One cannot believe in it any more than they can math. It just is.
Tuesday coming after Monday is an arbitrary convention. In the same way that for natural numbers in the decimal system we called the number after one two and the one after that three. But we could have also called them three, two, one, four…
And yes i claim that believing there to be no god is a form of faith.
Think about it this way: God promises the believers who do good and ask forgiveness for their sins paradise and threatens the disbelievers with eternal hellfire. This is reiterated throughout history multiple times by prominent figures and the believe in god is the standard around the world. So from a rational risk minimizing point of view believing in God is the safer thing to do. Especially with how little religious practice Christianity requires compared to Judaism or Islam.
But to get to your core argument: Flying Squid claimed Jesus like in the bible did not exist because it is impossible for him to have existed in this way.
That is like saying you know for a fact Dragons never existed because there is no Dragons today. Now replace Dragon with Dinosaur and you see why this line of argumentation is problematic from a scientific methodological point of view.
So i think we agree that what is consistent with scientific methodology and what are matters of believes need to be separated in argumentation.
The Tuesday/Monday example being arbitrary is my point, glad you pointed that out. This is the casual way that I “have faith” that there is no God. In my eyes your choice of deity to worship is just as arbitrary, there are thousands of religions. The fact that some of them promise “hell” to “sinners” is not a reason for me to operate as though these things are true. There are just as many if not more spiritual practices that have nothing to do with eternal damnation, why would I operate as if any of these are the reality when they’re all claiming to be The One Truth? I’m expected to pick yours just because you said so? That seems silly, and it’s also silly to call this thought process “faith” I think.
Regarding the dinosaurs, we have fossil records, and that’s a bit different than “God is gonna getcha, better be a good boy, believe me bro,” but I do in fact believe that Jesus existed, because we have extensive historical context and documents talking about him. As stated elsewhere this is sufficient to generally consider a person to have existed. Most historians also claim as much, and I’m not a historian so I will defer to the experts. Whether or not he is the Messiah though, and has magic powers as stated in the bible, is a much more ridiculous claim. When you tell me a reality-bending zombie that is his own father exists, the burden of proof for that claim is much higher than “Did this person exist historically?” This is the point that FlyingSquid is making, which I agree with.
Fact: when science holds an incorrect idea, based on observable evidence - the idea changes to match reality. If there were observable evidence of your imaginary sky guy, scientists would update their idea or theory to match the observable evidence.
Saying that there might be elephants living on top of clouds doesn’t make it true. Entertaining the idea without proof is not science or even theory.
Even with perfect faith, elephants still live on terra firma.
Where did i say that it should be scientifically proven? I merely reject the idea that it is scientifically disproven or to claim that what has no scientific proof does not exist. This kind of thinking has rejected microorganisms, atoms, gravity and many other nowadays established things. Heck people acknowledge it to be perfectly reasonable to theorize about the existence of dark matter that is unobservable to us and holding the universe together.
It is simply unscientifc to claim to have “facts” against what is written in the scriptures as they describe events from 1400 to 5000 years ago. Not believing in them is perfectly valid, but it needs to be acknowledged as a matter of believe, a matter of faith and is in such in no way more valid than the believe that a scripture is true.
Things that exist, can be scientifically proven. We have evidence for the presence of dark matter. This is a placeholder for something we don’t know what it is yet.
We don’t have evidence of gods in any way that can be tested.
“What can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence” - hitchens razor
The Bible is a bunch of self-contradictory folk-tales. Which makes it useless in knowing any real Jesus. So, while one cannot say historical Jesus absolutely didn’t exist, one cannot cite the Bible as a credible source of any knowledge about him. One might as well contemplate historical Hercules.
Did i ever cite the bible as that? I also think the bible has many inconsistencies and looking at concepts like trinity or Jesus as literal son of god being introduced hundreds of years later, are things i also disagree with.
But i understand that theological differences are something different from scientific differences. And i think it is important to separate the two.
Because scientific differences can be analyzed with repeatable tests and empirical evidence. Theological differences are either a simple matter of different faith or they can only be discussed in whether the theology is consistent in itself. But that again relies on certain axioms, like math relies on certain axioms or many social sciences need to use axioms because of the complexity of empirical information.
It sure is convenient that the omnipotent and wise God decided to send his son to earth and perform wonders to prove he is the messenger of God long before humanity had advanced enough to create better records and spread that truth. I wonder why God has not wisely re-upped on this, given technological advancement, which God should be pretty caught up on.
The final prophet Mohammed s.a.s. whose life and effect are well documented as well as the direct word of Allah s.w.t., preserved as original in the Arabic language of revelation in the Quran. You should not though that according to Islam Jesus was merely a human messenger as Allah neither was born nor gives birth. In the same wake Allah is one and not three. But these concepts were added by the church to the Christian theology four hundred years after the life of Jesus.
You’re making an incorrect assumption that says the burden of proof is not yours. I’m not making absurd claims about things that defy all logic and physical limits.
You are. The burden is on you.
Your invisible helper cannot carry this burden for you.
the burden of proof lies with the one who speaks, not the one who denies) is the obligation on a party in a dispute to provide sufficient warrant for its position.
Flying Squid said it is impossible what is described in the bible. So he or you if you take his side are the one burdened with proof. In fact the bible provides a very straightforward reasoning. Jesus was granted the power to do wonders by God so people would recognize him as a messenger of God and listen to him spreading the message of God.
You can say you dont believe in that. But it is not a proof of it not having happened. Especially as a lot of people who lived at the time said otherwise.
This person is currently trying to argue with me that it was definitely true that when iron age people wrote in a book that Jesus walked on water decades after the event supposedly took place, it really took place because quantum physics tells us more about the universe than Newtonian physics, therefore something? I’m not sure. Somehow that makes walking on water possible but I just don’t have the faith apparently.
Physical proof? No. But if that’s the criterion for proof that someone existed, then that mean 90% of historical figures can’t be proven to have existed. We don’t have the remains of Alexander the Great or any artefacts we can be sure are his. We have no remnants of Plato, none of his original writings remain.
Did a person name Jesus live sometime during the first century AD? Scholars are fairly certain of that. We do have textual evidence other than the bible that points to his existence.
It is highly unlikely that he was anything like the person written about in the bible. He was likely one of many radical apocalyptic prophets of the time.
We don’t have too many details about his life but because of something called the criterion of embarrassment we have good reason to believe he was baptized by a man named John the Baptist and was later crucified. (i.e. most burgeoning religions seeking legitimacy don’t typically invent stories that are embarrassing to their deity)
then that mean 90% of historical figures can’t be proven to have existed
Well for most of those we tend to use independent verification for their existence. And in the case of jesus, we have literally zero Credible examples of independent verification.
Even assuming the passage is totally genuine, two fires had destroyed much in the way of official documents Tacitus had to work with and it is unlikely that he would sift through what he did have to find the record of an obscure crucifixion, which suggests that Tacitus was repeating an urban myth whose source was likely the Christians themselves,[3]:344 especially since Tacitus was writing at a time when at least the three synoptic gospels are thought to already have been in circulation.
Scholars have differing opinions on the total or partial authenticity of the reference in the passage to the execution of Jesus by Pontius Pilate.[15][30] The general scholarly view is that while the Testimonium Flavianum is most likely not authentic.
Respected Christian scholar R. T. France, for example, does not believe that the Tacitus passage provides sufficient independent testimony for the existence of Jesus [Franc.EvJ, 23] and agrees with G. A. Wells that the citation is of little value
A. The first line of the Tacitus passage says Chrestians, not Christians.
Suetonius says Chrestus was personally starting trouble in Rome during the reign of Claudius.
Suetonius is writing years after Tacitus yet doesn’t mention that Chrestus died.
So Chrestus can’t be Jesus because it’s the wrong decade, wrong continent and missing a death.
B. The second line in Tacitus that mentions Christ and his death was never noticed until after the mid-fourth century. So this second line is fake.
P.S. Even if the second line was somehow authentic, the information would have come from Christians. This would be the equivalent of deriving Abraham’s biography by talking to Muslims.
This is why Bart Ehrman specifically dismisses Tacitus and Josephus. As do most other biblical scholars.
In the immortal words of Christopher Hitchens, if this is all you got, you are holding an empty bag.
Even assuming the passage is totally genuine, two fires had destroyed much in the way of official documents Tacitus had to work with and it is unlikely that he would sift through what he did have to find the record of an obscure crucifixion
Why? If it was a popular myth, why assume he wouldn’t try to confirm/deny it
According to Bart Ehrman, Josephus’ passage about Jesus was altered by a Christian scribe, including the reference to Jesus as the Messiah
So? I’m not presenting evidence for him being a Messiah. I am saying there is some independent evidence of him existing.
B. The second line in Tacitus that mentions Christ and his death was never noticed until after the mid-fourth century. So this second line is fake.
I agree that is bizarre, but not proof of it being fake. Though should be taken with a grain of salt.
This is why Bart Ehrman specifically dismisses Tacitus and Josephus. As do most other biblical scholars.
Who is Bart Ehrman and why relay his beliefs rather than speak for yourself?
If you mean Jesus as described word for word in the bible? Yes you are right. Such a mythical figure never existed.
A man name Jesus from the first century AD? Who preached in the Levant? Who was baptized by a man named John and was later crucified? There is good enough evidence of such a person existing. This isn’t even a debated question among new testament scholars anymore.
I see you are familiar with Bart Ehrman, Even he doesn’t dispute that a historical Jesus existed.
We do have textual evidence other than the bible that points to his existence.
Idk why you would need textual evidence besides the Bible to be certain the guy existed. It’s not like these are magical books that sprung from the earth. They have historical reasons for existing and the most likely reason includes the existence of the dude.
It seems like the consensus is that the stories probably stem from a real guy because that’s deemed more likely than no person existing as a basis for the story, but no, there is not material evidence for jesus christ’s existence
As far as I know, we simply don’t have directly contemporary, first-hand evidence of him. Even the most ‘contemporary’ accounts of him that still exist were written at least 50 years after he would have died, and those are quite cursory. Perhaps primary sources were lost–or intentionally destroyed when they didn’t align with beliefs–or perhaps they never existed. There’s not even much evidence for Pontius Pilate (I think one source mentioning that he was recalled to Rome and executed for incompetence?), and there should be, given that he was a Roman official.
People that study the history of the bible–as in, the historical bible, not the bible as a religious text–tend to believe that a historical Jesus existed, even if they don’t believe that he was divine.
IMO, the most likely explanation is that Jesus was yet another in a long-line of false messiahs, and was summarily executed by Rome for trying to start yet another rebellion. Since cult members tend to be unable to reconcile reality with their beliefs, they could have reframed their beliefs to say that he was a spiritual messiah, rather than a physical messiah.
There are lots of people now today who claim to be god, claim to be jesus, claim to have magic powers. so it would appear this is just normal human behavior and has been for a very long time. But the main reason people continue to believe these ancient holy books and all the stories in them is literally because they are protected from inquiry. So Jeff down the street claims to be jesus? We can go test him and try to falsify his claims. But some guy 2000 years ago, ya its not possible to check that one out. And That is why they persist, its by design.
A historical Jesus might have had a small cult following, enough that the Romans couldn’t ignore him. He would have been talking about Jewish liberation from the Roman rulers, and how he was called by god. And then boom, he gets executed. His followers probably believed that he was actually the son of god, sent to liberate them. But now he’s dead. How do they reconcile the belief with the reality? So they retcon everything; he was a spiritual messiah, and he’ll eventually return and free the Jews, once the people are spiritually prepared.
You can see traces of this in the way that the four gospels don’t agree with each other, but they all include bits of prophecies from earlier scripture about the messiah. They were written with the intent of making Jesus appear to fit in to older prophecies about who the messiah would be, since he ended up not being the liberator that they had been expecting.
You can see similar behaviors in cults now. It’s clearly visible with Q; Trump was supposed to be their messiah, but he hasn’t managed to make any of their prophetic beliefs come true. So they’ve invented reasons why Trump’s holy will has been thwarted, and changed their history, rather than accepting that he was a false messiah.
Then why is it that the message was so powerful that the Roman empire abolished its idol worship and chose Christianity? Especially as Jesus a.s. was supposed to be a rebel against the empire?
Do you think people 2000 years ago were all stupid?
The message of Christianity is excellent for subjugating populations, giving them purpose & hope, keeping people busy & out of trouble. I think that all sounds very appealing to rulers.
And the roman empire was not able to do that already? From my understanding mythologically/spiritually the Roman empire was perfectly settled with what it had before in terms of political power. Incidentally the roman empire declined and fell apart in the centuries after accepting Christianity.
And before the Roman empire there were the Egyptians. They seemed to fare much better in terms of power with their idol worship than later when they embraced Abrahamic religions, yet they did.
A message being powerful is not in contradiction to it taking time to establish. If you look at the timeline you will see that it grew exponentially. and that the critical point was in the fourth century, after which it became the dominant religion in many parts of the empire.
Jesus never led an army or ruled a country, so we cannot have coins bearing His face or remnants of an army, etc. However, there is plenty of physical proof of the early Church. There is evidence of pilgrimages to Bethlehem early on and Jerusalem as well, such as the church of the Holy Sepulchre, which is a plausible candidate for Jesus’ actual tomb.
No, there’s barely any physical evidence that anyone a few hundred years ago existed.
But if writing is enough, there are some. Tacitus basically said: “Nero blamed the Christians, followers of that Guy called Jesus who Pilatus executed a few decades ago.”