Its easy to put bones together and say that it existed but there’s no way to guarantee “these are certified bones of Jim the stegosaurus, religious figure”
The Egyptians also mummified their dead, preserving the corpses into the modern era. “Older” ≠ “more evidence”
We have loads more records from the Romans than from the Norse for example, even though the Norse came later, because the Norse didn’t keep as many records as the Romans.
That’s because there weren’t multiple people around to write down what they saw. You’re confusing paleontology and history. They have very different standards for proof.
There are tons of historical figures for whom we have no physical evidence. But we have tons of written evidence from people who all experienced those people.
You won’t find fossilized Jesus, he apparently got resurrected and became wine & cookies, so some people started eating him on Sundays. And he doesn’t want us to say fuck, or shit, or do it in the butt. But that’s not really related to the question.
That’s prehistory. Everything we know about history comes from written accounts. Historians study written documents and argue whether or not the available evidence makes it more likely that something (or someone) was real or fiction.
Most historians agree that there was a Jewish man named Jesus (yehoshua), who preached in Judea and the Galilee in the early first century, who gained followers and was crucified by Rome. There are also historians who examine the same evidence and conclude it is more likely that no such person existed, because that’s how academia works.
The point is that you are asking the wrong question sort of. If we only accepted physical remnants of someone or their life to prove they exist, Jesus wouldn’t be the only one we would have to throw out.
Not to say I know how to prove stuff historically, it does sort of seem like magic sometimes. If we found out today that carbon dating was off by a magnitude I would not be shocked, so that’s all the faith I have in it due to my bad understanding of it.
Archaeology in good at giving us clues about the living thing. References to people existing is almost purely based on text people wrote. The proof would be someone writing down “Chrestos, popular among the poor was crucified for his crimes for spreading heresy” as a contemporary. But since the earliest reference we have is a century after his death it’s not necessarily accurate or true.
Literary proof is, but also doesn’t exist for Jesus Christ.
There’s a few mentions of just a “Jesus” but its not like no one else was named Jesus, and those don’t really make any mention of him being remarkable in any way.
I have a pet peeve about this phrase. A) yes there is. B) that’s not the standard, e.g. it would be incorrect to say there’s no evidence aliens abduct and probe people: there are eyewitness accounts
I don’t believe that, and since it’s impossible to show evidence something doesn’t exist, the people claiming evidence Jesus existed is gonna have to do some linking…
that’s not the standard
You mean evidence?
Evidence isn’t the standard for things existing?
What exactly is the standard in your mind for whether a historical figure existed?
Quality of the evidence matters. I’m personally not a historical expert on the topic and in such situations, I’m inclined to believe whatever the people who are experts say - and as far as I gather, most experts are in the “Jesus was a real historical person”-camp.
What exactly is the standard in your mind for whether a historical figure existed?
Hard evidence has never been the standard for proof that a historical figure existed. Corroborating records are. It’s great if you can find some hard evidence, but if that was the standard then most people in history wouldn’t have any historical proof of their existence. And even when there is a corpse, we still rely on burial records to be certain that the corpse is who we think it is. Or if there are letters, we can’t confirm they were written by the same person we think they were.
Like a third of the bible as well as several contemporary documents all point to the existence of a guy named something like Joshua (which we now translate as Jesus) who traveled around Palestine preaching and was crucified in around 33AD. There are plenty of historical figures who we mostly agree existed despite having approximately the same amount of proof as for Jesus.
“There’s a Jesus that got crucified, but no mention about him being able to perform miracles”
We know this from somewhat later annals. The texts are closer in the timeline to the historical figure than in the case of Diarmait mac Cerbaill, and are more numerous.
We share a general contempt for Christians and Christianity.
What are you driving at bringing up the semantics of ‘contemporary’??
The only time that word was used was when you said (incorrectly), “That is contemporary literary evidence of his existence.” – the annals are centuries after the 6th-century reign of Diarmait at Tara. We don’t have any 6th-century manuscripts. The situation in the Roman Empire is quite a bit better, lots of texts.
Would you say that a person called Caius Vipstanus existed because Tacitus mentioned him in his annals a few decades later? Isn’t that valid inference from the text?
There’s a Jesus that got crucified, but no mention about him being able to perform miracles
Obviously miracles aren’t real. I wasn’t claiming otherwise. We’re talking about whether or not the person Jesus existed, not if magic is real.
It sounds like we agree
I don’t think any of it was written till decades after he supposedly died tho…
Okay but it was written by people who claim they were there and met him personally.
To borrow your asinine LOTR analogy, it is more like you are claiming Thorinn Oakenshield never existed simply because Bilbo only wrote “There and Back Again” after he got home from memory.
A bunch of the books in the new testament are letters written by Jesus’s followers. We can’t prove whether they really are that, but they all agree that a dude named Jesus existed. If a bunch of people all wrote about a guy they knew, and most of the details match, that guy probably was real.
Yeah I’m not arguing with that. You’re just nitpicking semantics because you have lost this argument. Literally the very next sentence after the one you quoted I qualified that by saying it’s debatable.
I don’t have a horse in this race, but man, let it drop. The person who’s fighting for ridiculous improbabilities here is you. Nobody you’re arguing with in this thread is even making a claim that Magic Jesus existed. Just that the man named Jesus who is talked about by the early Christians likely existed (which is scholarly consensus, not even a niche claim). They’re specifically not claiming that the fantastical claims made by the early Christians about that man are true.
If your only requirement is that a man once existed by the name of Jesus and was crucified, then the bar is on the floor. Jesus was not a rare name, and the Romans crucified many, many people. It is not out of the realm of possibility that these two common data points would overlap and give us a crucified Jesus.
Is there proof that it was THE Jesus though? Do we have corroborating evidence of a man travelling the countryside with his posse, changing the minds and hearts of the masses?
I feel like there’s some room for Occam’s Razor here. Is it more likely that dozens of people got together and agreed to start a cult centred around a fictional person that they were all going to agree existed? Or that the guy actually did exist? Like why would all the people who say they followed him around lie about that but also be on the same page about so many details of him?
Like, we know the posse existed, so why is it a stretch that the guy they all went on to turn into a religion was really there in the middle of it all?
To be clear (and I can’t believe I have to say this, but there are some idiots in this thread) I’m not claiming magical miracles are real, just that there was a real dude in the middle of that posse that those followers went on to turn into a religion.
Right. I think we’re in agreement. There was a historical Diarmait. There was a historical Jesus. We know this from textual sources dated a little later than the historical figures.
His life was written about while it happened in the Irish Annals…
We have no Irish texts as old as Diarmait’s reign. CELT date the Orgguin trí mac Diarmata Mic Cerbaill “Created: Possibly in the Old Irish period. Date range: 700–900?” So we rely on things written 100+ years after the historical figure. And that’s referring to when it was originally written; it’s know from later transcriptions; the oldest physical Irish manuscript we have (Lebor na hUidre) is around 1100. So how do we know there was a historical Diarmait?
In the case of Yeshu the Nazarene, it’s similar, though some texts are a little nearer his historical period than in Diarmait’s case.
Like, there’s lots of information about Bilbo Baggins in Lotr, that doesn’t mean it was written in the third age of Middle Earth homie
The conceit of the LOTR appendices is that Lord of the Rings, as published in English, is really just the Red Book that Bilbo writes at the end. Dr. Tolkien merely found the manuscript somewhere and has graciously translated it from Third Age common language into English for the benefit of us modern people.
several contemporary documents all point to the existence of a guy named something like Joshua
IIRC, there’s really only a single mention of a possible link to someone of this name that was crucified at the supposed time, and that single mention happened at least 50 (maybe 100?) years later, and there’s evidence that this passage was added even later.
So I didn’t think it’s true that there are “several contemporary documents” like you claimed…
Of course not. There are millions of examples of false claims for which there is more than zero evidence. e.g. I can claim I know which stocks will rise tomorrow, and point to various data of times I’ve been right. You can’t correctly say “There is zero evidence Frightful Hobgoblin is prescient about stock movements”.
There often exists evidence of two mutually incompatible propositions. This is basics.
If you want to research the historicity of Jesus it’s easily done. If you want to argue on the internet… you know what they say about that.
I will say that while evidence existing isn’t definitive proof, the total lack of evidence would be convincing (in the other direction). That said, evidence does exist in this case, so
If no evidence whatsoever for a claim exists, then there is no reason to favor that claim. This is an effectively rare situation, and basically only applies to things someone has made up whole cloth just now.
Likewise, the existence of some evidence is not necessarily definitive “proof” of a claim, merely enough of a reason to consider it further (such as considering alternative explanations or how well said evidence matches what we might expect)
In this case, there is evidence that somebody named Jesus may have existed, and however ideal that evidence may or may not be, it is about the amount of evidence we would expect to find of any given figure from his time.
AFAIK most historians/scholars agree that Jesus was a real person (even if a lot of the Bible’s claims about what he did are not true). But I’m not a historian. What are you basing your opinion on?
So we have to differentiate between what is the actual Gospel and life of Jesus and what the more creative parts of the churches invented on top of it over time.
Jesus said unto them, Verily, verily, I say unto you, Before Abraham was, I am. John 8:58
Which is from one of the original 4 gospels. Apparently there’s evidence of it being written as early as 70AD. There’s a couple other quotes I found in a link some other person linked in this thread but this one seems most direct.
I think this is a terminological confusion. The original Gospel as in the life and teaching of Jesus, that got lost as it wasn’t documented in his lifetime.
The four gospels that made the choice are as you said collections written later. And there were many more Gospels that the early church decided not to put into the bible. On top of that there is the issue how those gospels got translated multiple times and each translation inadvertently adds a layer of interpretation.
Alright but he quoted a gospel from 70AD, and the idea that in the “true gospel” he wasn’t the son of god or never claimed to be is a concept present in opposing religions like Islam first written down 500 years later, which famously mistranslated Marry with “she flowed like a river” instead of “she was chaste” when the region was constantly caught between Phoenician based alphabets like Greek, Hebrew, multiple Arabics, and much later on Cyrillic.
The Roman’s artistic licenses aside, their accounts of history are the most reliable source on all of this.
Jesus as literal son of god was only established some 400 years later. And when later the records of the gospel got translated through multiple languages it seems very plausible to me, that under the assumption that Jesus should be the literal son of god, this sentence is supposed to be worded to confirm that. It is as easy as forgetting a half sentence like “HE said” or turn a third person into a first person form. Or to loose the context that he was announced already before Ibrahim etc.
Sure, but that doesn’t change the fact that there was (most likely) an actual historical person who is the origin of these stories, i.e. Jesus. He’s probably not really as fantastical as the Bible would have you believe, but he did exist, as opposed to being just an entirely fictional character.
There exists documented proof in many bits of literature from around 200 BCE to around 100 CE of numerous different figures in what is called ‘Jewish Apocalypticism’, basically a small in number but persistent phenomenon of Jews in and around what was for most of that time the Roman province of Palestine, preaching that the end would come, that God or a Messiah would return or arise and basically liberate the region and install a Godly Kingdom, usually after or as part of other fantastical events.
Jesus was one of many of these Jewish Apocalypticists. Much like the rest of the movement’s key figures, they were wrong, and their lives were greatly exaggerated in either their writings or writings about them or inspired by them.
This seems to be the (extremely condensed) opinion of most Biblical Scholars.
There are a very small number of modern Biblical Scholars that are ‘Mythicists’ of some kind, who believe that Jesus was completely fictional and wholly invented by certain people or groups.
This is an unpopular view amongst scholars and historians of that time and region, as most believe it more plausible that Jesus was just another example of a radical Jewish Apocalyptic preacher, which again, was fairly common for roughly 300 years in that region.
Its like how if you go to a big city theres always that one guy with a megaphone preaching imminent doom. 99% of people think this is silly and ignore them, but tons of people know that people like them exist and do have small followings.
I’ve heard theories that key people probably had hallucinations of Jesus a few days after he was killed, which was the big thing that helped launch him from yet-another-apocalyptic-preacher to (eventually) God himself. I don’t know how well these are accepted, though.
This stems from the fact that, so far, the earliest dated written fragments we have from what is now the New Testament are some of the writings of Paul.
Paul was not one of the Apostles EDIT: Disciples, and it seems possible that, after persecuting earlier, existing Christians, he could have basically had a stress induced psychotic break and hallucinated the vision of Jesus that he had, then converted.
Thing is though, Christians would have to … you know exist and already be a real thing first, for that to make sense.
It does explain why Paul does not mention some very key elements of the narrative of the Gospels: He just had not actually read about or heard of those parts yet.
This creates some theological problems down the line, and some of those problems were ‘remedied’ by what a good deal of scholars and historians believe to be forgeries… chapters of the Bible that modern Christians attribute to Paul, but do not seem to actually have been written by Paul.
It is also possible to some of the empty tomb accounts in some of the Gospels as similar kinds of trauma induced hallucinations.
Mark famously originally just ends with an empty tomb, and nobody said anything about this because they were scared… and then the last bit of verses giving Mark a more satisfying ending have been shown to be added … decades later.
The explanation I heard was that it was likely Mary and Peter hallucinated Jesus only a few days after he died. That’s a very common timeframe for when people hallucinate seeing dead loved ones, and the early descriptions in Bible match the flavor of dead loved-one hallucinations people typically have, with the figure assuring the person everything will be all right and whatnot. Other descriptions (like Jesus appearing to all twelve disciples or crowds of people) seem to have been written later more as persuasive arguments, with doubting Tomas acting as the stand-in for the skeptical listener. This is all from “How Jesus Became God” and I have no idea how mainstream or fringe the author’s views are.
I think it is more likely that they refer to the minimum witnesses argument put firth by a youtuber Paulogia. He has done a lot to popularize it as a response to the criticism that sceptics have no singular explanation for the proposed evidence of Jesus provided by the spread of christianity and the accounts of early cristians.
I thought Paulogia’s minimum witnesses argument is basically that Paul could have hallucinated, and that those who witnessed an empty tomb basically did see an empty tomb, but circumstantial confusion led them to misinterpret what they saw?
Aah okay, that makes sense. Paulogia does however put forward at least one more person having an experience, possibly due to a grief hallucination. If I remember correctly he suggested Peter being the one to have it.
I also don’t remember him ever suggesting that the empty tomb is an actual fact in need of explanation. I think he sees it as likely that Jesus would have been unceremoniously put in a mass- or ditch grave as was common for crucifixion victims. The tomb would then be a detail added on later by other christians, likely through narrative evolution.
I may misremember some of it though, so maybe I should go back and rewatch as well.
I agree with you that Jesus wasn’t God, who doesn’t exist, and that there were no miracles, which are impossible. However, this is not the same thing as saying that there’s no evidence for the existence of Jesus, the Jewish apocalyptic preacher.
The earliest documents about Jesus, such as the Pauline Epistles, were written by people who knew people who knew him. In a mostly illiterate society 2,000 years ago, this is about as good as evidence gets. It’s also the exact same kind of evidence as a journalist or researcher writing an account based on interviews with people. This was how, e.g, Herodotus wrote his histories. When Herodotus says ‘A guy rode a dolphin once’ we dismiss that. But we don’t say ‘The people in the Histories didn’t exist, except those for whom there’s physical evidence, which is about three of them, not including the author’. We do much the same with Jesus and the miracles.
If the Apostles had wanted, for some reason, to make up a guy, that would have been risky. Other people would have just said, ‘That guy didn’t exist’. If they had anyway decided to make up a guy, they’d have invented someone who actually fulfilled the Jewish propehcies of the Messiah, instead of inventing Jesus, who obviously didn’t. This suggests they didn’t invent him, which strengthens the plausibility of the evidence we do have.
A third way of looking at this is to ask if there are any comparable figures, religious founders from the historic era, who we now think were wholly made up in the way you’re suggesting. But there aren’t. The Buddha, Confucius, Mohammed, Zoroaster - they all certainly existed. Indeed, I can’t think of any figures form the time period who were actually imaginary.
Personally, I think it’s most likely that he’s composed of many people. It’s a bunch of stories which all got attributed as one person, which isn’t uncommon. Personally, though I’m far from an expert, I think there wasn’t a singular Jesus figure who actually existed, but rather a story of a figure named Jesus that rose from stories about other events.
Like you said, it’s almost certain that something was happening around that time. In fact, there are many more Messiahs who were mostly forgotten. I just think it’s most likely that people told stories and those stories all merged together into another larger story, which then became the story of Jesus.
It’s certainly possible that sayings of other people were later attributed to him, but to really make this case you’d need to have quotations that were attributed to multiple sources, including him, if you see what I mean. Absent that, it could be true, but there’s no particular reason to believe it.
There are enough specific biographical details about Jesus of Nazareth to make it likely that there’s a specific, real central figure. For example, the fact that he was from Nazareth was a problem for his early followers (it didn’t match the Messianic prophecies), which is why they invented the odd story of the census, so that they could claim he’d been born in Bethlehem, the hometown of King David, from whom Jesus was supposedly descended. That seems unlikely to have happened if there hadn’t been a real, central historical figure.
Also, none of the early non-Christian sources claim he wasn’t real or that he was a composite, which they surely would have done if there was any doubt on the matter.
The evidence isn’t even that strong, there i just aren’t that many people willing to risk becoming a pariah to dispute them.
If you are a Christian, there is no doubt Jesus existed. Any oblique reference to a rabbi who was persecuted hundreds years ago is considered evidence that Jesus existed. But no contemporaneous documentation exists.
If you’re not a Christian, debunking all of those vague references that might be proof of a Jewish leader named Jesus just isn’t particularly important, won’t persuade anyone who believes Jesus was(is) God, and will paint a target on your back for terrorists.
Wait… you mean to tell me there’s not a collective of atheist Wikipedia writers that have dedicated their lives to the absence of religion and citing themselves on refuting evidence on Wikipedia?!?
Wouldn’t it be weird of every Wikipedia article on the historical validity of Jesus was written by Christian scholars that have dedicated their lives to their religion? It would be wild if they were just citing themselves in these Wiki articles in order to sell some books, wouldn’t it?
It’s weird how many people in this thread are vaguely debating the validity of the historical research into this question when one person has posted a link to a well cited article on this very very heavily studied subject.
I don’t feel compelled to argue an interpretation. The facts are well documented and their interpretations by experts available. What anyone chooses to do with these are of no real concern to me.
Yeah there are plenty of historians who have done good work studying this and the academia is mostly settled. Not to say there’s no controversy, but there’s definitely an orthodox opinion.
I don’t feel compelled to argue an interpretation. The facts are well documented and their interpretations by experts available. What anyone chooses to do with these are of no real concern to me.
but then
It’s weird how many people in this thread are vaguely debating the validity of the historical research into this question when one person has posted a link to a well cited article on this very very heavily studied subject.
Well cited article aren’t proof of existenceof a man. Is spiderman real if enough people cite the comics? A group of influential people could gather and make their own circle of these myths and present it as a fact. And it isn’t fucking new.
Religions and all their influence could force a lot of heavily studied subject to be skewed for their benefit. Hell, there were studies that were treated as standard making sugar and alcohol heavily beneficial for human beings. And we’re talking about a person.
In my experience, when it comes to debating the validity of religion, people tend to get far more emotional than other topics. People who are normally level-headed and quite logical tend to completely lose their ability to think rationally. And I mean both the people who argue for religion and against it.
I shouldn’t bother responding to this, but I have to point out that this weird assumption that scholars of Christianity are all Christian partisans seems pretty similar to people who say that climatologists are all biased in favor of a global warming hoax.
You don’t think anyone goes into studying a field to challenge the orthodoxy? That’s the fastest way to get famous. Even if the rest of your field hates you, you can make an incredibly lucrative career out of being “the outsider”. I literally linked to a collection of experts who agree with you.
If you don’t believe the experts, I guess it’s fine. But it’s weird when people use expertise on a subject as proof of bias to discredit expertise. It’s just such a silly thing to do.
I think it’s a weird to assume the wiki-link that you posted is in support of the “Christ Myth Theory” (as they call it).
Read the contents of the wiki link you sent and check all of the citations, you’ll see that the Christian Scholars that contributed to writing the article aim to dismiss the theory by citing their own books.
There were a lot of people that shared that name, and a lot of people were crucified at that time.
That implies each source says: “A man called Jesus was crucified”. The article you provided (if you read it) should have told you otherwise.
Flavius Josephus: Antiquities of the Jews, year 93-94: “About this time there lived Jesus, a wise man, if indeed one ought to call him a man. For he was one who performed surprising deeds and was a teacher of such people as accept the truth gladly. He won over many Jews and many of the Greeks. He was the Christ. And when, upon the accusation of the principal men among us, Pilate had condemned him to a cross, those who had first come to love him did not cease. He appeared to them spending a third day restored to life, for the prophets of God had foretold these things and a thousand other marvels about him. And the tribe of the Christians, so called after him, has still to this day not disappeared.”
Tacitus’s Annals, year 117: Christus, from whom the name had its origin, suffered the extreme penalty during the reign of Tiberius at the hands of one of our procurators, Pontius Pilatus
I didn’t provide any article. I read the one you linked.
In this most recent response, you are annotating sources from 93, and 117. Those years are notably (at minimum) 60 years after the supposed resurrection; and as such are not first hand accounts.
They very likely was someone named Jesus, because there were many people with that name. There was very likely someone named Jesus that was crucified, because many people were crucified. There’s 0 evidence or recorded documentation that a resurrection ever happened. That’s the big one.
You suck ass at reading. The title of this post is asking about “Jesus Christ,” which we all know to mean the son of God and the guy that resurrected after 3 days.
The title of this post is asking about “Jesus Christ,” which we all know to mean the son of God and the guy that resurrected after 3 days.
lol no… this thread is not talking about anything like that hahaha. Read it.
Obviously people don’t come back from the dead or transform into cheddar cheese; we don’t need historical research to tell us that.
His given name was יֵשׁוּעַ or Yeshua, which is Jesus in one speech-type, عيسى (ʿIsà) in another, as well as a lot of other variants.
‘Christus’ in Latin seems to refer to the same person; Tacitus wrote “called Christians by the populace. Christus, from whom the name had its origin, suffered the extreme penalty during the reign of Tiberius at the hands of one of our procurators, Pontius Pilatus”
What do you think of what Ehrman says here at 1h45m25s that the mythicist theory isn’t taken seriously by the academy because it’s mostly pushed by people who seem eager to dunk on religion.
I like to picture my Jesus as a desert hippie that people liked and told tall tales of in order to give people living in that harsh environment some hope and meaning.
I like to think of Jesus with like giant eagles wings and singing lead vocals for lynyrd skynyrd with like an Angel Band, and I’m in the front row, and I’m hammered drunk.
IIRC, the religion didn’t get anywhere is Palestine after Jesus supposedly died and it wasn’t until decades later that it picked up in and around Greece thanks to Paul, but no one was around that saw any of the events attributed to Jesus - it was all heresay.
I mean the bible is how many pages and how much of it actually takes place during Jesus’s life? And what is the timespan of the small part that does? Like a year? And the 4 gospels that talk about it are all rehashings of the same stories (more or less) and even contradict each other at times.
That’s a story with a lot of gaps and plot holes to base a belief system around - and that doesn’t even include all the baggage and hate that comes along with it.
People nowadays lose their mind and make death threats to the creators of stories that don’t fix or create new plot holes in canon. And we’re supposed to smile, nod, and happily accept one of the worst constructed stories ever just because some old white men that live the opposite way they tell us to live say so?
Skimmed through some of these, like this which isn’t even a contradiction.
Even here you can see that it even shows a verse where Jesus drinks the vinegar in two gospels yet claim it’s s contradiction because He didn’t receive the wine.
Luke and Matthew were referring to acquiring or buying a staff, Mark was referring to simply going as you are. The emphasis was that Jesus didn’t want them to excessively prepare for the journey, but simply go out with the sandals they were wearing and a walking stick they had on them.
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.
I’m by no means an expert but I was briefly obsessed with comparative religion over a decade ago and I don’t think anyone has given a great answer, I believe my answer is correct but I don’t have time for research beyond checking a couple of details.
As a few people have mentioned there is little physical evidence for even the most notable individuals from that time period and it’s not reasonable to expect any for Jesus.
In terms of literary evidence there is exactly 1 historian who is roughly contemporary and mentions Jesus. Antiquities of the Jews by Josephus mentions him twice, once briefly telling the story of his crucifixion and resurrection. The second is a mention in passing when discussing the brother of Jesus delivering criminals to be stoned.
I think it is reasonable to conclude that a Jewish spiritual leader with a name something like Jesus Christ probably existed and that not long after his death miracles are being attributed to him.
It is also worth noting the historical context of the recent emergence of Rabbinical Judaism and the overabundance of other leaders who were claimed to be Messiahs, many of whom we also know about primarily(actually I think only) from Josephus.
The part mentioning Jesus’s crucifixion in Josephus is extremely likely to have been altered if not entirely fabricated.
The idea that the historical figure was known as either ‘Jesus’ or ‘Christ’ is almost 0% given the former is a Greek version of the Aramaic name and the same for the second being the Greek version of Messiah, but that one is even less likely given in the earliest cannonical gospel he only identified that way in secret and there’s no mention of it in the earliest apocrypha.
In many ways, it’s the various differences between the account of a historical Jesus and the various other Messianic figures in Judea that I think lends the most credence to the historicity of an underlying historical Jesus.
One tends to make things up in ways that fit with what one knows, not make up specific inconvenient things out of context with what would have been expected.
In terms of literary evidence there is exactly 1 historian who is roughly contemporary and mentions Jesus
Misinformation.
There’s Tacitus’s Annals (year 117), Josephus’ Antiquities of the Jews (93-94), Mara bar Serapion’s letter to his son.
Seutonius (Lives of the Twelve Cæsars) and Pliny wrote about the conflict between the Romans and the followers of Christ (or Chrestus) around that era.
You are the one who is doing the misinforming. All of the sources you mention, except Josephus, were written up to more than a century after his supposed existence. With Josephus being written around half a century after his existence.
And as mentioned, the specific quotes from Josephus are of a dubious nature.
I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt here but both Suetonius and Pliny are talking about Christians in the 2nd century, Tacitus speaks about Christ only in the context of Nero blaming Christians for the great fire. These are literary evidence for the existence of Christians in the second century but are not direct literary evidence of the existence of Christ as an individual which was the question I was addressing.
I’d be delighted to be shown to be wrong but I believe my original post stands.
The thing is that compared to other historical people we kid of have similar evidence. Like we have records of Socrates existing and we have records of some Joshua existing.
The difference is that nobody claims that Socrates was a fantastical god being who defied death, which is a extraordinary claim, we just say he was a very smart guy, we se very smart guys on a daily basis, nothing special with that so we can just believe it and even if we are wrong it has no real life implications.
For the Joshua guy, that's quite a different story. The claims about him are extraordinary and need extraordinary evidence. But we only have normal evidence. If the claims about him were true it would contradict almost everything we think we know about the universe, how it behaves, etc.
So again, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
The difference is that nobody claims that Socrates was a fantastical god being who defied death,
To use a more modern example, pretty much everyone agrees that Grigori Rasputin was a real person who played a crucial role in the court of the last Czar of Russia.
But there are some positively wild and unexplainable stories that have a decent amount of corroborating evidence that they happened. The story about him healing the prince via a phone call sounds like actual magic. However we all know magic isn’t real, there is definitely some kind of logical explanation. But that explanation is lost to time.
So where do historians land on Rasputin? Well, there was definitely a guy called Rasputin. Some of the stories about him are true. Some are probably false or exaggerated. There isn’t even a consensus on what colour the dude’s eyes were. But that doesn’t mean we dispute his existence.
nobody claims that Socrates was a fantastical god being who defied death
Socrates literally claimed that he was a channel for a revelatory holy spirit and that because the spirit would not lead him astray that he was ensured to escape death and have a good afterlife because otherwise it wouldn’t have encouraged him to tell off the proceedings at his trial.
Also, there definitely isn’t any evidence of Joshua in the LBA, or evidence for anything in that book, and a lot of evidence against it.
We have a lot more contemporay primary sources for the existence of Socrates than we have of Jesus (of which the number of contemporary primary sources is 0).
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
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.
There’s a bunch of old texts about a Jewish “prophet” called Jesus, who was gathering some followers. As far as I understand, there’s no really reason not to believe the person existed.
Then again, all the Jesus lore, there’s no reason to believe his miracles were real as those made no sense and there’s no real proof besides those same texts written after Jesse’s death
This. There is evidence that a preacher called Jesus existed, was crucified, and was well-regarded enough to start a following that persisted even after his death.
There isn’t, however, strong historical evidence for any of the magical parts of it.
Chances are he was more like a cult leader it wasn’t until a decade or two after his death that things really got into full swing, so chances are the actual Jesus would be quite surprised by everything “he” did.
But there were a lot of Jewish mystics cropping up at the time so it’s not impossible or even implausible for some one vaguely matching the description to have existed.
Good thing back in the day there were probably very few cult leaders…
Does anyone wonder about how the story of Jesus being plagiarized from the Egyptian myth of Horus affects the narrative about the Jesus that supposedly lived and died a century earlier? You know the one that happened to have incredibly important political value for the established leaders of the time?
Exactly. An example from outside the Bible might be Achilles. There was probably a great warrior with that name in the Mycenaean Greek world. Later storytellers probably just added more to make it sound better or the material was from other warriors who were like Achilles.
Some of Jesus’ teachings definitely come from the milieu of the Roman era in Judea and Palestina.
Personally my favorite head canon is that Jesus was, or his parents were, Egyptian born Jews or Coptic converts to Judaism. It’s a reverse Obamas birth certificate. There is so much time spent establishing the lineage and explaining the flight to Egypt.
You realize that a significant portion of the bible is the collected letters and works that were at the time (that it was assembled) considered credible, right?
There’s a period of around 80 years that’s pretty hard to account for, but unlike the four gospels where there’s little corroborating evidence that tracks back into that 80 year period, the epistolary works are pretty likely to be authentic. They also reference a bunch of other letters that didn’t survive, something that tends to make them more likely authentic than not. And they involve people who were eyewitnesses of a man named Jesus (or Joshua or Yeshua if you prefer) and his younger (step) brothers.
The rest of the statements about him were solidified by 80 years or so after his death, but all the accounts don’t quite line up — which is actually a good argument for them being based on actual events.
So while there may be plenty of room for debate as to how much of the biblical teachings actually originated with a man named Jesus, his actual existence seems more evident than, say, Shakespeare.
The mental gymnastics is palpable. That things don’t line up is evidence they’re true? And because people believed it at the time it must be credible? Did a guy really live in the belly of a whale for three days simply because some simpletons believed it?
That’s how epistemological analysis works… if the general structure is the same but everyone pulls different meaning out of an event, something probably happened. If everything lines up exactly, someone probably faked the letters. If there’s totally conflicting stories, the record has been tampered with too much to say anything. If there’s no record, there’s nothing to say one way or another.
Of course not because it’s a load of hogwash. Go play telephone with a class of 6th graders for 5 minutes and then tell me these stories are accurate. Also the events in most of them are clearly impossible situations.
Assembled a thousand years after the fact by a group with a vested interest in solidifying the narrative to fit their own.
Hell, the Tanakh didn’t really get put together until well after Christianity appeared and it was a reaction to Christians appropriating Jewish literary culture to establish their own.
It’d be similar to people a thousand years from believing that Christian Gray is literally descended from Edward and Bella.
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.
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).
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.
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.”