spamandham

I'm not interested in pedantry, or a debate. I am simply trying to understand what the rational is for presuming that Jesus actually existed as a human being (generally said to be an itinerate preacher), in the most concise form possible.

As I see it, the Gospel records are easily rejected on the grounds that;
- the Jesus character is so tightly coupled to mythology there is no way to distinguish fact from fiction
- they incorporate pre-existing myths such as the resurrection of Lazarus, the 153 fish story, the astrotheological symbolism of the birth story, water into wine, etc.

Paul's writings are also easily rejected as providing anything of substance because he states nothing of substance about Jesus, and further, even states that he was the one chosen to reveal the mystery. What mystery!? Isn't this a guy who lived just 20 years earlier Paul?

The rest of the NT is easily dismissed on similar grounds.

Josephus is dismissed for 3 reasons:
- he was a tabloid journalist, and his writings are of no value unless independently confirmable
- assuming the blurb about Jesus was actually penned by him, it is clearly not first hand knowledge, but is simply a handed down record
- it is doubtful the blurb about Jesus is genuine. It is either highly interpolated or an outright forgery. We have no idea what, if anything, Josephus knew about Jesus.

The question then is this. Is there any CREDIBLE historical evidence that supports the idea that Jesus existed in human form? If not, why do historians almost universally pander to the idea, when the simpler explanation is that he is a mythical figure?

GakuseiDon

The following comment by atheist historian Michael Grant is quite concise:

...if we apply to the New Testament, as we should, the same sort of criteria as we should apply to other ancient writings containing historical material, we can no more reject Jesus' existence than we can reject the existence of a mass of pagan personages whose reality as historical figures is never questioned.

spin

Bloody silly, isn't it Gak? This gets paraded by people who have little understanding of history as though one should go "wow, this guy's an atheist and he says that!!" As I said, bloody silly.

You simply cannot apply to the christian testament the criteria that can be applied to classical sources. There are no coins to back up the historicity of christian literature. You cannot back it up with epigraphic or archaeological materials. The earliest christian literature fail even to be datable.

Grant was either out of touch with modern procedure, off his head or misquoted.


spin

spamandham

This seems to me to be a commentary on the lax standards of historians rather than an argument in favor of a historical Jesus.

GakuseiDon

If you say so. It is, at least, concise. It would need another historian to determine whether Grant is using lax standards or not, I'd think. It would be good to see Grant (or anyone else) justify his statement though.

Lowder looks at how historical questions are framed here:
http://www.infidels.org/library/mode...r/indconf.html

Godless Raven

Agreed.

Personally, I can't say whether a rabbi radical named Iesous ever walked the planet living the preaching life that an historical Jesus is said to have lived. But my opinion is...there's no good reason to believe he did.

My reasons are:

1. The nativity story is clearly fictional. So is the lineage to King David.

2. The massive inconsistencies in the goseples not to mention the exclusive use of only the 4 gosepels over so many others.

3. The lack of historical evidence of a man who allegedly healed sick and raised the dead during a time when people were willing to believe just about anything and the development of linguistics was exploding in the area.

4. The miracles are...so incredibly unrealistic and lacking in evidence whatsoever.

5. The way he is allegedly captured is even inconsisten in the scriptures and this is a pretty important key element to the story since it's what leads to his death.

6. The already mentioned parallels to many pagan resurrecting godmen.

7. The massive gaps of decades between the writtings of his alleged biography. (decades back then could easily be a generation considering the estimated life span)

8. The unlikeliness of an actual ressurection ever taking place in the real world.

9. What appears to be an evolution of religion starting with primative sun gods right up until what we currently have, which give or take a little can actually be traced.

10. The New Testement

Laura D.

Historians may refuse to dismiss an historical Jesus out of fear that they must then dismiss some pet figure from ancient history if they applied to it equivalent standards. As non-historians, we do not face the same biases, so we are better positioned to excise an historical Jesus is we choose (I do not, but then you know my bias). One historian I respect is Will Durant, the Pullitzer Prize Winner of Will and Ariel Durant fame, e.g., The Story of Philosophy and The Story of Civilization series.

His acknowledges that "there are many contradictions between one gospel and another, many dubious statements of history, many suspicious resemblances to the legends told of pagan gods, many incidents apparently designed to prove the fulfillment of Old Testament prophecies, many passages possibly aiming to establish a historical basis for some later doctrine or ritual of the Church." He notes that the New Testament evangelists shared with Cicero, Sallust, and Tacitus the conceptions of history as a vehicle for moral ideas." But ultimately, he firmly supports the accuracy of "an historical Jesus." He contends that in the enthusiasm of its discoveries, the Higher Criticism has applied "tests of authenticy so severe that by them a hundred ancient worthies—e.g., Hammurabi, David, Socrates—would fade into legend." You can more fully examine his position in Part III of his Story of Civilization.

I also respect Joseph Klausner (a Jewish scholar, so he has his own biases). According to Klausner, "If we had ancient sources like those in the Gospels for the history of Alexander or Caesar, we would not cast any doubt upon them whatsoever." Bless his heart, I think we may all agree he puts his case a bit strongly. But, as I said, historians don't dismiss Jesus partly for fear of losing their own particualr pet favorites. Now, we all know of Klausner's love for Alexander (the earliest biographies of Alexander date some 400 years after his death in 323 B.C.). So you might understand why he might swing his bat for Jesus in order to keep Alexander safely in play.

Now, I love the analogy of Josephus to a tabloid journalist. And I won't deny it carries some accuracy (the analogy is on point for almost every ancient historian—the idea of a neutral, unbiased historical record is anathema to almost any rational scholar of ancient times). But let's be honest, Josephus is a pretty significant source for a lot of post exilic Jewish history. Josephus,writing for the Roman government in the 70's A.D. records some incidental things regarding Christ and the church. He confirms that John the Baptist died at the hand of Herod (this same incident is recorded in the gospels) as well as the death of, "The brother of Jesus, who was called Christ, whose name was James. . . he delivered them to be stoned" (Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews, Book XVIII, ch. V, p. 20; Book XX, ch. IX, p. 140 ). While you can dismiss Josephus as a hack, he has proved a reliable source of history for information regarding the First Jewish-Roman war and the rise of Herod the Great. Josephus likely lived during the time of Christ. His reference to Christ is in passing, he has no particular axe to grind in favor of the existence of Christ. So we can take it that within 40 years of Christ's death, the knowledge of who he was was widespread enough that Josephus could reference him and expect his readers to know exactly who he was talking about. More importanly, at the time of his writing, we could reasonably expect living eyewitness to exist who might dispute his existence. In fact, given that the Christians of that time were part of a rather suspect movement, we could expect Josephus to dispute the existence of Jesus if this was a mythical figure.

Tacitus is another reasonable extra-Biblical source. His description of the nine-day Roman fire of late July in 64 C.E. references both the Christians and the one called Christ:

Christus, the founder of that name, had undergone the death penalty in the reign of Tiberius, by sentence of the procurator Pontius Pilatus, and the pernicious superstition was checked for the moment, only to break out once more, not merely in Judea, the home of the disease, but in the capital itself, where all things horrible or shameful in the world collect and find a vogue. (Annals 15-44)

Now Tacitus is not a fan of Christians, is a respected (oft cited) Roman with access to the records of Rome and certainly a motive to dismiss as mythical Jesus.

From an historical standpoint, I think the existence of a Jesus the man, a movement of some sort, the execution of this Jesus, and the continuation of some sort of movement will be acknowledged by the majority of serious historians (those hacks), while they will clearly dispute just about anything else (miraculous works included).

This is certainly the case if we compare the historical basis for Jesus with other figures such as Muhammad (lived from A.D. 570 to 632, biography written in 767); Buddha (lived in 6th Century B.C., first biography 1st Century A.D.); Gathas of Zoroaster (lived 1,000 B.C., biography 3rd century A.D.).

God bless,


Laura

P.S. With respect to Josephus, I think most secular (and many religious) historians dismiss as subsequent Christian interlineations those copies of Josephus, which reference the Messiah, his resurrection, prophecies, miraculous works, etc.

hatsoff

The evidence is not overwhelming, certainly, but we can arrive at the existence of Jesus in a progressive fashion.

First we establish the existence of Paul. His catalog of Epistles is sufficient to do that, but what's more it gives him a voice which can testify to some facts of the 50s AD. In them, he mentions James, Peter and John by name, and eludes to other "Apostles." He claims to have personally met both Peter and James. Thus we have strong evidence for the existence of two companions of Jesus, and therefore for Jesus as well.

This evidence is weak on its own, though, and requires corroboration. Fortunately, we have it: If Josephus' discussion of Jesus is entirely interpolation, there is still the matter of his mention of James. Tacitus may have gotten his information from nth-hand traditions, but Papias claims to have known at least two disciples of the original Apostles. And of course there are the volumes of literature dedicated to the man Jesus, fictional or not.

I think the sum of the evidence strongly suggests the existence of a man named Jesus who lived in the first century and taught at least a few Apostles. Given that, it is probably fair to say he was crucified for some reason, as tradition has testified. Beyond that, it's difficult to speculate what else he might have done, or might have been done to him.

There remains some small doubt that the man ever really existed, but in my opinion that is quite unlikely.

lpetrich

None of that absolutely rules out the existence of some historical prototype; there could have been a historical Jesus Christ who was much like the self-styled prophets that Josephus had described: John the Baptizer, Theudas, "the Egyptian", etc.

But even if there was, much of the Gospels is still unhistorical; not only the miraculous parts, but likely also some of the non-miraculous parts, like his trial. For starters, lynch mobs don't usually consider themselves to blame (Matthew 27:25). And as to Pontius Pilate's character, Philo and Josephus both agree that he was rather ruthless, not someone who had to be pushed into sentencing JC to crucifixion. And given the track record of zealous followers of various movements, some of JC's followers would likely have stubbornly stayed at his side, unless "persuaded" otherwise by the local Roman garrison.

As to the crucifixion itself, JC died unusually fast; crucifixion victims usually survived for several hours.

Laura D.

Granted,

Well, I'm not granting the truth of what you say. But I completely get what you're saying. The reason I was intrigued by Spamandham's question is it's narrow focus: Is there any CREDIBLE historical evidence that supports the idea that Jesus existed in human form?

This we can address. To summarize Lowder, if we define 'historicity of Jesus' as 'whether the Christ of the New Testament existed -- whether Jesus was born of a virgin, performed miracles, etc.,' we take the question out of the realm of basic historical analysis. I find it more legitimate to ask whether the Jesus of the New Testament is based upon a person who actually lived' and not 'whether this person did the deeds the New Testament claims he did.'

Leaving Lowder, let me put it in another context. Some find it frustrating to debate evolution with creationists. It's because many creationists simply dismiss basic scientific tenants to arrive at the result they want. We can attack the historical existence of Jesus the man in the same way, dismissing the empirical standards employed by historians in evaluating the reliability of various historical facts. But then I think we have to be intellectually honest and fully acknowledge the real scope of what we dismiss in terms of man's history when we do so.

And with that statement (which even I'm not sure I understand), I'll head to bed.

God bless,


Laura