While reading my Sunday Telegraph this morning, my eye was caught by an ad for yet another proactive atheist venture, a movie (or at any rate a DVD) titled The God Who Wasn’t There. Its premise seems to be that Jesus of Nazareth didn’t exist. That doesn’t seem very likely to me — didn’t one of the Roman authors mention him? — but I’m no expert. Anyone seen this movie and got an opinion?
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Meta
Josephus.
That’s the bloke. It seems to be highly disputed, though.
I’m a bit puzzled by the psychological need, on the part of (apparently) some atheists to deny that Jesus existed. I think most of us on this site would be content to deny his (or anyone’s) supernatural nature, and leave his existence an open matter, with the circumstantial evidence in favor of his having been a real person. But perhaps I should get the DVD and see what kind of case they make.
it’s pretty good. sam harris is in it and offers good commentary as well.
Bradlaugh, this link might be useful:
http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20090209125435AAYGydM
I’m generally uninterested in questions regarding the existence of Jesus that don’t first define who it is we’re talking about. Is the claim that there was no one in that day named Yehoshua? No one named Yehoshua from Nazareth? No one named Yehoshua from Nazareth who had a following? No one named Yehoshua from Nazareth who had a following and also was born from a virgin mother, walked on water, was God’s only begotten son and arose from the dead?
Perhaps the simplest question would be whether we have any evidence that the authors of the Biblical books in question (or the fellow who is the originator of the story that they recorded) made it up at of whole cloth (rather than simply merging traditional Jewish and pagan elements into the story of an actual Yehoshua who had some devoted followers). But unless we find the guy’s journal it seems unlikely that we’ll discover any such evidence.
As for Josephus, I’ve met many evangelicals who hold on to his testimony of Magic Jesus as a talisman but, for the most parts, scholars laugh at the section in question. It’s very clearly pseudo-Josephus and a very bad attempt at it too.
@Bradlaugh
Atheists who put a lot of effort into arguing about whether Jesus lived are too fixated on responding to a particular religious belief.
What atheists ought to be asking: Are we just elements in a simulation? If there was a Creator the Creator was probably a software developer. Whether the Creator is still involved in maintenance work on our simulation I can not say. Maybe someone else has taken over the job.
What I want to know: What answer(s) does this sim seek to answer?
Randall: My daughter (16) told me just yesterday that Sims 3 is out. (Her intent was not so much to impart news as drop a heavy hint.) She’s a great Sims fan. I have watched her at work on it, creating people and situations. I’ll admit it creeped me out, and thoughts like the one behind your comment — whose Sims game are we? — came irresistibly to mind. That New Scientist cover didn’t help any …
You’ll want to look at a few things from G. A. Wells, who seems to be the best at arguing for the lack of a Jesus who walked in the flesh as described in even the Jefferson Bible.
In short, outside of two mentions by Josephus, there are no mentions of Jesus in history not coming decades after his apparent date of death. Furthermore, the two mentionings by Josephus are suspect. One can easily be argued away as referring to a different Jesus with a brother names James. That entry seems to refer to a high priest who had a brother names James killed during his lifetime.
The second entry, which I believe is the better known Testimonium Flavianum, has a long and storied history. There are many arguments against authenticity, some of which are an argument from silence. People such as Origen fail to mention it, which citing other sources from the text attempting to arguing for the case of a physical Christ. The first person to cite the passage, Eusebius, is on record of being in favor of forging documents for the good of the people(faith? paraphrase here).
If those entries fail, the case for even a great teacher gets weakened.
Please remember that the early church was split into varied factions, several of whom did not believe in a messiah made flesh. Shoot, there are a few versus in the New Testement against that line of thought, if I recall correctly.
Bradlaugh, I’d ask what circumstantial evidence you’ve encountered claiming that Jesus was a physical human? I went looking, and there isn’t much.
More than you probably want to know about Josephus on Jesus at:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Josephus_on_Jesus
Essentially, the meat of the argument on that piece is that the oldest surviving copy we have of Josephus’ original works dates from the 11th century, and it’s possible (perhaps even likely) that the reference was inserted into a prior copy.
While I haven’t seen that particular movie, I read “The Jesus Puzzle” about a decade ago. As I recall, the arguments in this line are that there aren’t any primary sources – everything is secondary, and, at at a bear minimum (even if you grant Josephus as authentic), 40 years after Jesus’ supposed death. If you properly control for things like likely later insertions or forgeries, you end up with more like a hundred years removed from Jesus’ life before anyone bothers writing about him, and none of those are otherwise-neutral historical sources outside the Bible.
Additionally, there are a lot of myths and writings that predate Jesus’ life and have striking similarities to his (name included). Anything that didn’t correspond to their particular view of Jesus was systematically suppressed by the early church as heresy, which gives us a deceptively clear view of a historic Jesus. Finding the details of these heresies is difficult, but there are snippets that have survived, as have specific criticisms from early church thinkers.
When you add up all this evidence, it seems to me that the most reasonable historical picture is of a lot of fragmented Jesus cults, with different views about the details of his life (or even if he physically existed on our world, at all). The Nicene Creed is further evidence of this – in 325 AD, it’s not just some rote words spoken every Sunday. It’s a positive affirmation of the very specific details believed by the early Catholic Church, and each one of those lines is rejecting specific heresies believed by others. The early church was so successful in stamping out these other views of the divine that most people today don’t even know they existed.
Given this actual historic record, it seems reasonable to think there never was a specific person named Jesus (or Yehoshua, or whatever) that was an inspiration for the bible – any more than Zeus was inspired by a specific individual person in history. At the end of the day, I don’t think it particularly *matters*, one way or another, but certainly for any student of history, it’s interesting to read the record and weigh the facts, such as we have them.
40 years? What about Paul?
By circumstantial evidence, I meant the fact that when so much folklore is attached to a name, it’s generally the name of an actual person. Though I’ll allow Robin Hood as a probable counterexample.
@Luke
Well, let’s recall Paul never claimed to know Jesus personally, so he’s not a primary source.
But, regardless, the first quoting we have of Paul is about 96, by Clement of Rome. All we can definitively say is that the Epistles existed before that (which, I’ll grant, was sixty or so years after Jesus’ death, not the “more like a hundred” I claimed, above).
It seems to me that a secondary source sixty years after the event isn’t much of a historical pedestal to stand on. That said, I’m not an expert in this field (as I said, I just read a book ten years ago), and I’d be perfectly content to be disproved.
The passage from Josephus is pretty clearly an interpolation, i.e. a fraud. There is still some argument about this, but there is a general consensus that most of it was a later interpolation. Personally, I think the whole thing is blatantly fake. Josephus goes through a laundry list of various Jewish sects in The Jewish War and the Jewish Antiquities and never mentions Christians or Jesus except in that one passage. Far too convenient, in my opinion. There are some other issues with textual interpolation in Josephus, so the possibility that the copyists did some creative editing on this issue is by no means implausible.
As for Jesus’ actual historical existence, its certainly possible that he was based on a historical figure, but the literature we have on him is obviously highly fictionalized. Whether a rabbi named Jesus actually lived and led a small apocalyptic sect of followers is a bit irrelevant. The Jesus that Christians worship is ahistorical, and consciously so.
Wait! There IS a God!
The oldest New Testament book is dated around the 50s AD. I believe it’s 1st Thessalonians. The other six genuine letters are from around the same period. The gospels date from the late 1st century to the early 2nd century. You also have secondary and tertiary epistles, like Ignatius, Polycarp and the Didache. Too, we have heretical writings from the mid-2nd century. On top of this, we have 2nd century attestations of Christianity from Roman historians, including Tacitus’ famous description of Nero using the Christians as scapegoats for the fire at Rome.
One can try to quibble with each source and say it’s all based on construct of someone like Paul (whose genuine writings don’t reveal anything like that sort of genius), but it seems a weird and contorted game. This is particularly when you consider some of the embarrassing stuff withing the Gospels that no mythmaker would have included. Jesus’ bad prediction about returning within the “same generation”, for example. Paul repeats this in one of the Thessalonian letters. There’s also a great deal of anti-gentile sentiment in Mark and Matthew, like the story of the Syro-phoneician woman, that indicate a real person at the center of the events upon whom a great deal of rumor and legend were added.
The historical consensus is that some real person named Jesus probably existed and was the kernel around which a cult began: it’s simply the simplest explanation for how things got started.
As to any of the specifics, there are a lot of arguments from silence.
My favorite is the throwaway bit in one of the gospels about how as Jesus died, tons of saints burst out of their tombs and started wandering around appearing to people. You’d think that a full on zombie apocalypse would rate some mention in contemporary historical accounts, even if the routine killing of some dude did not.
It’s also fascinating how little Paul has to say about the life of Jesus: you’d think that he’d illustrate his arguments with claims and stories about Jesus’ teachings and parables and what not. But all of this stuff is almost entirely absent: he draws more from the bare idea of someone dying to cleanse sins and then some of his own convoluted arguments and reinterpretations of Scripture (including the bizarre Abrahamic heir switcheroo) than virtually anything else.
I vaguely recall that the Romans made claims about the sun turning dark for a year after Julius was murdered, etc. The statements can easily be considered metaphor, but if we take them to be actual claims of fact, then we can turn to other sources and societies that would have noticed such a thing and kept good records. As I recall, no such notice was found.
As for why it matters: I consider that fairly obvious, but if you want an explicit explanation, read the letters of St. Paul in which he states that if things like the Resurrection weren’t actual events but mere symbolic stories then the faith is a false one and the hopes of the faithful are delusions.
I think John Prine fills us in as good as any source on these mysteries on his great song “Jesus, the missing years”. For those not familiar with this gem, click the small speaker button for a preview.
http://www.allmusic.com/cg/amg.dll?p=amg&sql=10:a9fwxqr5ldfe
“For at the first of the games which his heir Augustus gave in honour of his apotheosis, a comet shone for seven successive days, rising about the eleventh hour, and was believed to be the soul of Caesar, who had been taken to heaven…” (Suetonius, The Deified Julius)
Jesus’s existence is yet another red herring in the battle against irrational faith. There are plenty of moderate theists who concede that Jesus was not a real person and yet still cling to the title of “Christianity” because they “follow the teachings of Christ”. Much like how people who put “Jedi” as their religion follow the teachings of an imaginary Yoda.
This is evidence enough for me that it is impossible to remove the “enablers” of fundamentalism, and that our best hope is to work with moderates to redefine what “Christianity” is.
(By the way, my friend’s uncle wrote a book called “Caesar’s Messiah: The Roman Conspiracy to Invent Jesus” about 20 years ago, but only recently got it published in the wake of all the new atheist literature, if anybody is interested in scurrying down this rabbit-hole.)
I’ve never believed that Jesus never existed, but back in the days when I used to take an interest in Christian Origins, it did used to seem possible to me that there might have been more than one Jesus.
You know like a Galilean Jesus who went around and taught and did all the rural stuff, and another Jesus who got crucified by the Romans in Jerusalem and whose body went missing – giving rise to all sorts of speculations. And then a third pure-mythical Jesus in the Apocalypse of John. Maybe a few other bits and pieces too. Possibly a Sea of Galilee Jesus myth cycle.
So that the Jesus myth as we receive it, is a composite myth of several different Jesus traditions – Originally unrelated. Jesus (Joshua) is a powerful Jewish name with deep Biblical significance to a foreign-occupied people. It’s not surprising it occurs more than once. A bit like the British dream of the return of King Arthur.
Perhaps one should speak of a Jesus myth-complex arising out of a dream of messianic liberation from foreign domination. Maybe Jesus communities in different parts of the country; each telling their own tales about local Jesuses.
Somebody (Mark?) started gathering all the traditions together – producing the first composite narrative or Gospel – and our Jesus is the result.
If the amount of “evidence” we have for the real existence of Jesus does not allow us to assert that he really lived, then we need to erase innumerable other historical figures from our history books as mythological. Our “evidence” for Jesus is much, much stronger than all sorts of figures from antiquity. So…if you want to bite that bullet, go ahead. That way lies madness.
Ross-
Would you care to share any of the abundant evidence that hasn’t already been dismissed above, or should we take your words on faith as well?
The premise seems beyond simple – the character of Jesus is mentioned nowhere in any wrtings other than in the canons of the 2000 year old entity that has had as many millenia to sanitize its subject matter.
Tacitus made mention of an uprising in Palestine but never mentioned any one by name. The “Slavonic” Josepehus” has long been debunked.
The town of Nazareth appears on no tax rolls from Herod, the Romans or from Josephus, the ostensible military governor of the northern province of Israel. And we know how lax the tax collectors of that era were.
Nazareth appears nowhere before the 4th century AD.
If Jesus, Yeshua ben Joseph existed, he left a historical footprint to small to measure.
Actually Tacitus does mention him by name:
“Consequently, to get rid of the report, Nero fastened the guilt and inflicted the most exquisite tortures on a class hated for their abominations, 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, and a most mischievous superstition, thus checked for the moment, again broke out not only in Judaea, the first source of the evil, but even in Rome, where all things hideous and shameful from every part of the world find their centre and become popular.”
The premise seems beyond simple – the character of Jesus is mentioned nowhere in any wrtings other than in the canons of the 2000 year old entity that has had as many millenia to sanitize its subject matter.
The Nag Hammadi gospels were never under the orthodox’s control. We also have second century fragments that were not under the Church’s control. You have mentions in Tacitus and Pliny of Christians. You can believe in a grand conspiracy if you wish, but it gets very hard after a while.
Policinello-
Nobody doubts that Christians existed by AD 116. If future generations read about Scientologists, should they conclude that Xenu existed? Even if we accept the Tacitus evidence at face value (and there are some interesting problems with it, see Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tacitus_on_Jesus) the fact remains that it’s only a secondary source. We have no idea where he got the information. Since there are no official records extant today and any that may have existed would probably have been destroyed in that fire Tacitus wrote about we are led to the conclusion that he probably just asked a local Christian what he believed.
If future generations read about Scientologists, should they conclude that Xenu existed?
I don’t think that’s analogous. It’s more appropriate to analogize Jesus to Ron Hubbard. After all Xenu is supposed to have existed quite a while further back than 116 or so years.
Well, let’s recall Paul never claimed to know Jesus personally, so he’s not a primary source.>
Paul said he met Jesus on the road to Damascus.
There is more evidence for Jesus Christ than any other figure of ancient antiquity. If Jesus didn’t exist, forget about Plato, Thucydides, et al. The shroud of turin is proof Jesus Existed. We still don’t have the technology to make an atomic x-ray image on linen. Why would the early church lie, and unspeakable torture and death, for what? They didn’t gain anything. The emperor Hadrian, the Jews, et al. of the first century affirmed Jesus’ existence, amongst many other evidences.
Paul supposedly “met” Jesus after Jesus ascended. What’s more likely is that he had some sort of vision. As for the shroud, the impression of a European guy taller than I am is not really convincing evidence of the existence of an ancient Semetic man. Once again, if the historical evidence is so abundant, you should have no problem sharing some.
Polichello: Perhaps a better example would be a modern student reading “Johnny Tremain” and thinking he was a real figure. I know I’m begging the question by avoiding figures with actual historical residue. Perhaps I could say that if a person claims to follow the teachings of Yoda that claim is not evidence of a three-foot alien warrior.
Perhaps a better example would be a modern student reading “Johnny Tremain” and thinking he was a real figure.
This would work only if you contending schools of Tremainites with their own bodies of commentary. You don’t have that.
As far as Paul goes, he never met Jesus in flesh, I agree. Accepting the seven letters as genuine (as most scholars do), he did meet and know Jesus’ disciples.
I grant that you can construct a very clever theory as to how all this could arise, but it just not very Occamish. Far simpler to assume that there was a charismatic nutbag who got himself killed, and his followers deluded themselves into buying into his resurrection, as happened with some other Rabbis of the time.
One good analogy that occurs to me is Joseph Smith. We have all sorts of miracles attested to him by followers, despite evidence to the contrary. People fanatically followed him although to anyone with any sense he was clearly a fraud. Now he has millions of followers. No need for a “mythical” Joe Smith who was invented by Brigham Young.
I’m with Polichinello on this. It’s not really even about evidence for the existence of Jesus, specifically – it’s about the observation that when cults appear around messiah figures, there’s usually an actual person at the center of it all. And the time frame is important – a century or two isn’t so far back in the mists of time that Jesus could have passed as an origin myth (like Romulus and Remus). And something started Christianity. Perhaps the real founder wasn’t named Jesus (though I find that unlikely), but someone was preaching a lot of the stuff that early Christians believed.
Good discussion here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christ_myth_theory
The Christ myth theory (also known as the nonhistoricity hypothesis, Christ myth, or Jesus myth) is the contention that Jesus did not exist as a historical person and that the Jesus of the New Testament was created by early Christians based on earlier mythology. Different versions of the theory have proposed many different sources for the New Testament Jesus, including Indian myths of Krishna, myths of dying and rising gods such as Adonis and Osiris, Hellenistic mystery religions such as Mithraism, or a pre-Christian cult of Jesus within Judaism. Some versions of the theory attribute the beginning of Christianity to a historical founder who predates the time Jesus of Nazareth is said to have lived, such as Yeshu ben Pandera or the Teacher of Righteousness.
“No need for a “mythical” Joe Smith who was invented by Brigham Young.”
Ah, but there is a general agreement among followers of what Joseph Smith was supposed to have done.
He also lived at a time that is not only much closer to the present, but kept better records.
There was probably some originating figure that eventually became the character of ‘Jesus Christ’, but his teachings were probably re-evaluated heavily after the fall of Jerusalem. Some argue that the teachings about going along with the Romans and turning the other cheek and so forth were inserted after that event, both to make the Romans less hostile to the religion and to make the religion look wise in hindsight.
“There is more evidence for Jesus Christ than any other figure of ancient antiquity.”
This is not even remotely true.
He also lived at a time that is not only much closer to the present, but kept better records.
That only strengthens my point. You can have good agreement amongst followers and better documentation, and you can still have belief in supernatural capabilities–despite a lot of evidence to the contrary.
There was probably some originating figure that eventually became the character of ‘Jesus Christ’, but his teachings were probably re-evaluated heavily after the fall of Jerusalem.
The catch with that is that you have to account for the genuine Pauline letters, which have been dated to the 50s AD. There are some clever fellows out there who try to fight the tide of consensus, but they haven’t got much traction.
Some argue that the teachings about going along with the Romans and turning the other cheek and so forth were inserted after that event, both to make the Romans less hostile to the religion and to make the religion look wise in hindsight.
I don’t see the need for such an insertion. You already had a number of Jewish sects preaching that very thing, and the “cheek” teaching is stylistically consonant with everything else Jesus is said to have taught. In fact, the non-resistance pretty much accords with what we know of early Christian activity. I’ll grant that this aspect was highlighted by Christian propagandists, but that would be opportunism.
Look at it like evolution. You had a number of sects with different characteristics. One happened to preach non-violence and was opening itself up to gentile converts. It also happened to be more open to women than other groups of the time. Then you had Jewish rebellions by other sects that triggered an anti-Jewish response. Who’s most likely to survive? Someone already predisposed to nonviolence and gentile outreach or a sect that did not do this and then decided to change ind the midst of the turmoil? I’d say the former. Certain historical events “selected” Christianity to survive, not some intelligent designer. 🙂
OFT:“There is more evidence for Jesus Christ than any other figure of ancient antiquity.”
Grant: This is not even remotely true.
There are over 39 sources outside of the Bible that attest to more than 100 facts regarding Jesus’ life, teachings, crucifixion, and resurrection. Today there survives more than 24,000 partial and complete, ancient handwritten manuscript copies of the New Testament alone, not to mention hundreds of Old Testament manuscripts that survive today dating back to as early as the third century B.C. No one else comes close.
OFT,
What you have here is a small handful of second- and third-hand (or more) non-independent sources. It is enough to establish that there was a significant social movement afoot, and is sufficient to suggests that a living human was at the center of that, but it certainly doesn’t prove it. And certainly doesn’t document him better than any other figure in ancient antiquity. (As opposed to modern antiquity???? Ha!)
The fact that scholars can reasonably debate whether such a guy was real or fictitious or some combination of both, whereas no one but the ignorant or the kook would dispute the historicity of, say, the Emperor Tiberius, is some indication that this evidence is not substantively what you wish it to be.
Today there survives more than 24,000 partial and complete, ancient handwritten manuscript copies of the New Testament alone, not to mention hundreds of Old Testament manuscripts that survive today dating back to as early as the third century B.C.
None of which are evidence for the existence of Christ. They evidence the spread of religion and Christianity, but don’t prove anything about Jesus actually existing. (*and the Old Testament fragments are irrelevant, seeing as how ol’ J.C. was a New Testament character.)
Polichinello,
In your view, when did the Pauline, Gentile-friendly interpretation of Christianity, emerge as the dominant view? Before the War or after the War?
OFT, I repeat my request for you to actually specifically name any of the sources you claim that have not already been dismissed as forgery or biased. Where is the historian who mentions the great healing prophet of Judea? What Jewish critic denounces the blasphemy of a man claiming to be the Son of God? The Gospels claim Jesus drew crowds of thousands, but not one contemporary commentator even takes note of it. Where’s the beef?
In your view, when did the Pauline, Gentile-friendly interpretation of Christianity, emerge as the dominant view? Before the War or after the War?
Sometime between 66 and 130. I don’t think the first uprising did in Jewish Christianity. You have some internal evidence in Matthew that that gospel was aimed at a Jewish audience. By the middle of the second century, though, Christianity became a more non-Jewish affair. In addition to the effects of the wars, I should add, you had the effect of the Pharisees consolidating their control against the Sadducees and other smaller sects. The rise of the rabbinate sort of raised a lot of low-hanging Jewish fruit.
This actually brings to mind a piece of evidence against the idea of an invented Jesus: why would an invention marketed to gentiles include stories like the anti-gentile story of the Syro-Phonecian woman. Luke deleted this story from his recycling of Mark.
Again, let me be clear: I have no doubt that a lot of the actions and settings described in the Gospels are either exaggerations or outright fictions, but the counter-interest elements in the narrative lead me to believe that there was a person at the center of the story.
The idea that there is more reason to believe in Jesus than in (say) any of the Caesars, or Alexander the Great, or ancient Chinese emperors, is simply absurd.
Grant Canyon: What you have here is a small handful of second- and third-hand (or more) non-independent sources. It is enough to establish that there was a significant social movement afoot, and is sufficient to suggests that a living human was at the center of that, but it certainly doesn’t prove it
I never said I or the Bible could prove the Bible.
And certainly doesn’t document him better than any other figure in ancient antiquity.>
Who has more documentary evidence of the ancient world than Jesus?
None of which are evidence for the existence of Christ. They evidence the spread of religion and Christianity, but don’t prove anything about Jesus actually existing.>
Here is two contradictory statements. One pleads for evidence, of which is obvious, the other for proof, which only exists in mathematics, and apodictic logic. The object is evidence.
(*and the Old Testament fragments are irrelevant, seeing as how ol’ J.C. was a New Testament character.)>
The O.T. telling the future of Messiah, on paper before the N.T. is evidence it is from God.
Xenocles: I repeat my request for you to actually specifically name any of the sources you claim that have not already been dismissed as forgery or biased.
Tacitus.
YHWH: The idea that there is more reason to believe in Jesus than in (say) any of the Caesars, or Alexander the Great, or ancient Chinese emperors, is simply absurd.
Who has more manuscript evidence in its favor?
The Shroud of Turin is clearly the greatest evidence of Jesus’ existence. It’s laced with substances found only in Israel. We know it isn’t a painting, and we still don’t have the technology to make a three dimensional x-ray. Even its whipping marks were lined up perfectly with a Roman whip. The only counter argument is that Jews took the shroud from another body, which didn’t happen; they don’t touch dead bodies. And how would a gentile know where the body was years after the fact? He, or they, would have to gravedig to look for the lucky shroud.
This is getting boring. We discussed Tacitus already. As for the shroud, can you explain why the man in the shroud (who is supposedly a descendant of King David) a) looks nothing like any Semitic person who ever lived and b) is taller than me, a modern male of European extraction.
The shroud also was also dated to the 14th century by three independent carbon datings. The blood on it? Type AB, which is widely thought not to have even existed until AD 700.
Who has more manuscript evidence in its favor?
Do we have a coin from the era in question with Jesus’ image on it? We have that for many Caesars, Alexander the Great and we have coins and tokens from the Chinese emperors.
Look, I don’t subscribe to the mythicist position, but your statement is just embarrassingly silly.
“Who has more manuscript evidence in its favor?”
I’ve just written down the hypothesis that Jesus did not exist and fed it into a copy machine. With enough copies, eventually there will be more manuscript evidence favoring the myth hypothesis than not — and I have a whole lot of change!
Bwa ha ha ha!
I never said I or the Bible could prove the Bible.
And I wasn’t talking about “prov[ing] the Bible.” I was talking about Jesus. And I was using the word “prove” in a non-technical sense of “establishing through evidence.” Basically, the fact that a very small number of second- and third-hand versions of a story is little or no evidence of the actual existence of any of the personages in those stories.
Who has more documentary evidence of the ancient world than Jesus?
Rather than point to the emperors, etc., as other posters have done, and assuming that you aren’t talking about just counting copies of stories from the time, but are talking about the quality of the documentary evidence, just off the top of my head and in keeping with the subject, I’d mention with Josephus. Here you not only have documentary evidence that he lived, but you have documents which he, himself, wrote. In fact, his historicity is so well accepted as a result of this documentary evidence that ancient Christians attempted to bolster the weak evidence in support of Jesus by inserting forgery into Josephus’s work.
Here is two contradictory statements. One pleads for evidence, of which is obvious, the other for proof, which only exists in mathematics, and apodictic logic. The object is evidence.
Not at all. As I said, I was using “proof” and “prove” in the non-technical sense. And your statement was that there was evidence of Jesus. Evidence that a religious and social movement existed beginning in the first century is suggestive that a real person was at the center of that religious and social movement, but is little or no evidence that such person existed.
The O.T. telling the future of Messiah, on paper before the N.T. is evidence it is from God.
LOL. Aside from the fact that the messiah character in the old testament is nothing like the Jesus character in the new testament, it is not evidence that the new testament is from God for the writers of the new testament to include details in their writings which reference the messiah story. (And, even at that, did so unconvincingly.) All it requires is for them to have read of them before they wrote the new testament.
I watched it, has a lot of historical facts that could make any “believer” question their beliefs in reality.
As for the shroud, can you explain why the man in the shroud (who is supposedly a descendant of King David) a) looks nothing like any Semitic person who ever lived and b) is taller than me, a modern male of European extraction.>
You’re kidding? It’s an x-ray, how do you know what He looked like?
Do we have a coin from the era in question with Jesus’ image on it? We have that for many Caesars, Alexander the Great and we have coins and tokens from the Chinese emperors.>
A coin is not a manuscript.
I’ve just written down the hypothesis that Jesus did not exist and fed it into a copy machine.>
Eyewitness testimony is not a machine.
second- and third-hand versions>
You mean first hand eye-witness testimony.
In fact, his historicity is so well accepted as a result of this documentary evidence that ancient Christians attempted to bolster the weak evidence in support of Jesus by inserting forgery into Josephus’s work.>
We have arabic versions of Josephus’ work which is accurate. It could be a copying error. Calling Jesus the Christ, isn’t necessarily from a person of faith.
Evidence that a religious and social movement existed beginning in the first century is suggestive that a real person was at the center of that religious and social movement, but is little or no evidence that such person existed.>
Christians giving their lives is sufficient evidence.
Aside from the fact that the messiah character in the old testament is nothing like the Jesus character in the new testament, it is not evidence that the new testament is from God for the writers of the new testament to include details in their writings which reference the messiah story.>
You must be reading a different book. Read Isaiah 53.
All it requires is for them to have read of them before they wrote the new testament.>
This won’t wash, the Dead Sea Scrolls destroy that interpretation.
You’re kidding? It’s an x-ray…
X-ray? It shows hair, for Pete’s sakes.
You mean first hand eye-witness testimony.
LOL. None of the gospels were first-hand accounts.
Christians giving their lives is sufficient evidence.
For you, perhaps. For me, they’re just more in a long string of deluded, nonsensical religious folks wasting their lives over nothing. (Also, since the suicide bombers give their lives for Islam, does that mean that Islam is true?)
You must be reading a different book. Read Isaiah 53.
Read. Not impressed. That the Christians retconned Jesus into the Jewish Bible is quaint, but the rest of the world need not overlook the fact that the Jewish Messiah is described as an earthly king who leads a nation, not a street preacher killed like a common criminal.
This won’t wash, the Dead Sea Scrolls destroy that interpretation.
Nonsense. You bring up Isaiah. Isaiah was immensely popular during the Second Temple period. Do you actually think it is a sign _of divinity_ that the writers of the gospels include details to reference things in Isaiah? You don’t think that just… maybe… they knew all these things about the supposed messiah from their own reading of the Jewish scriptures and just wedged details into their Jesus story to support their claim that he was the messiah?? Not a big stretch.