Freethought & Rationalism Archive

Amaleq13 · 12-27-2004, 01:47 PM

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Originally Posted by jonesg

Sheesh, now I gots to look it up, ok

The credentials don't change the fact that the statement is an opinion of arguable truth that, even if assumed true is ultimately meaningless in establishing the historicity of Jesus.

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Yes, the Talmud was written after the fact, thats usually how facts are reported isn't it. hahaha

LONG after the fact and there exists no good reason to assume its historical reliability. That's how reports are assumed to be facts. hahaha

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The point I was making is Thomas's writing establishes Jesus was.

It does no such thing. It is a collection of sayings attributed to Jesus. Many of them don't even name him.

Vorkosigan · 12-27-2004, 02:54 PM

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Bruce Metzger, PH.D , currently professor emeritus at Princeton theological seminary, he is co-editor of the "NEw Oxford Annotated Bible with the apocrypha" Plus a slew of other books, if you scan the footnotes of any authoritative book on the text of the New testament, odds are his name is there.

John MCray PH.D , former trustee and research associate of W F Fullbright inst of Archeological Research in Jerusalem, a current trustee of Near East Archeological Society.

Gregory A Boyd PH.D , Master of Divinity from Yale, Doctorate(magna cum laude) Princeton. Authored lots of books, Letters from a skeptic, God at war, Jesus under seige.

Three conservative Christians? Don't make me laugh. Let's check out that list:

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1. What Might We Expect to Find?
What sort of historical corroboration of the Christian message should we expect to find from non-Christian sources? Certainly not claims that Jesus was the Messiah, or that he rose from the dead. The Christian faith was seriously at odds with accepted beliefs in Jewish, Roman and Greek society, so we should expect rather that such references as do exist in non-Christian sources would be disparaging....

Numerous errors....Christian faith was right in line with many beliefs in Jewish, Greek, and Roman society. See, for example, Alan Segal's groundbreaking work on the "Two Powers" belief in ancient Judaism. It is significant that when Philo and Paul propose their "Two Powers" (in Heaven) idea, neither has to write an apologetic for it to their fellow Jews. It was widely accepted in the Judaism of the period.

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Very few secular documents from the time of Jesus and the apostles have survived to the present.

Hmmmm....entirely untrue, as anyone who has been Oxyrhynchus in Egypt can attest. "Very few" is a loaded and relative term, in any case. Go here for more: http://www.csad.ox.ac.uk/POxy/VExhibition/intro.htm

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Tacitus and Josephus are amongst the best, since both are well attested and have a reputation as careful researchers.

<howls with laughter> Tacitus was a Roman senator who wrote history as a sideline, and scholars are skeptical of many Josephean passages. "Careful researchers!" Don't make me laugh. The lad is writing propaganda here.

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2. Tacitus.
The Roman historian and orator Tacitus (c.55-120 AD) is acknowledged as one of the best historians of his time. He writes of the sequel to the Fire of Rome in 64 AD:

The problems with the Tacitus quote are well known. See Peter Kirby's website and bone up on him. Ther's a good article by Darell Doughty there.

http://www.earlychristianwritings.com

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3. Flavius Josephus.
Born in 37 AD to a Jewish priestly family, Josephus was later adopted into the family of the Roman Emperor Vespasian. His writings contain references to James the Just and John the Baptist. But the most famous is the 'Testimonium Flavianum', concerning Jesus. Most scholars accept that this passage has been altered by a later Christian hand; but even if we strike out the suspect portions completely, we are still left with this, acknowledged as authentic by the vast majority of scholars:

Again, read the stuff at ECW.
http://www.earlychristianwritings.com

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4. Citations from Lost Documents.
Citations in writings of the early church Fathers reveal that there were also references to Jesus in other secular works that are now lost to us. These include:

These are just howlers.

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A letter by Justin Martyr to the Roman Emperor Antonius Pius, in which he cites the official 'Acts of Pilate' as corroboration for the crucifixion account.

A forgery. Check out the discussion on ECW. The scholar and conservative apologist FF Bruce is cited there:

It would no doubt be pleasant if we could believe this story of Tertullian, which he manifestly believed to be true but a story so inherently improbable and inconsistent with what we know of Tiberius, related nearly 170 years after the event, does not commend itself to a historian's judgment.

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A sceptical reference by Julius Africanus to an attempt by the first century historian Thallus to explain the darkness at the time of Jesus' death in terms of a solar eclipse.

Another howler. One wonders how a solar eclipse could occur at Passover. Even the ancients knew this story was bullshit.

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References by both Julius Africanus and Origen to a second century historian, Phlegon, who mentions the eclipse and accompanying earthquake, as well as acknowledging that Jesus had the ability to predict future events.

More desperate reaching. See ECW.

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We have the entire text of a letter from Pliny the Younger, then governor of Bythinia, to the Emperor Trajan in about 112 AD,

Proves Christians exist, which no one denies. Some radicals suspect this as a forgery.

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In about AD 170 Lucian of Samosata wrote "The Passing of Peregrinus", a satire about a con-man who preyed on the supposedly gullible Christians.

Hey! 170! Proves Christians exist. No one denies that.

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6. Rabbinic Literature.

Zindler has just shown in The Jesus the Jews Never Knew that these are not related to Jesus.

No, the external sources are pretty hopeless, and consist either of late documents, forgeries, or confusions.

Vorkosigan

jonesg · 12-27-2004, 04:01 PM

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Originally Posted by Toto

So which of these three authored the quote, and where is a cite to the quote?

The Talmud was written centuries after Jesus supposedly lived, and seems to be a reaction to the Christians' stories, not to Jesus himself.

Any biographical details would tend to support your argument. But there don't appear to be any that can be traced to the time he apparently lived.

The Gospel of Thomas does nothing to establish Jesus' existence, anymore than "Jesus Christ Superstar" does.

So maybe it's not important if he existed or not? There appears to be little if nothing that was unique to Jesus.

I don't have time to look up exact wording, the book is "the case for Christ" Lee Strobel . Its 100% consistent throughout.

Its obvious the Talmud isn't supposed to be a sympathetic reference toward Jesus, but in its negativity, it nonetheless makes reference and thats a reference outside the NT.

If there was nothing unique to Jesus, why are you expending energy and time trying to refute him. WHy not carp about buddah. What about Mohammed , surely he didn't exist, theres no video footage.

What is it about Jesus?

jonesg · 12-27-2004, 04:08 PM

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Originally Posted by NOGO

Can Christians even agree on what the message is?
Let's see.
Some humans long ago did something to offend Yahweh.
Yahweh needed a human sacrifice to put things right.
We know from the Hebrew bible or the OT that Yaweh needs blood in order to forgive. What the OT does not speak about at all is Yahweh's Son.

Is this the message?

The OT does refer to a son being sacrificed.
Abraham was to offer up his son, he confused what that meant and thought it meant kill his son. doh!

Jesus apparently figured it out and knew what he had to do.

Toto · 12-27-2004, 04:17 PM

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Originally Posted by jonesg

I don't have time to look up exact wording, the book is "the case for Christ" Lee Strobel . Its 100% consistent throughout.

Lee Strobel has been consistently debunked around these parts.

Doherty's review of Strobel

Lowder's review of Strobel

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Originally Posted by jonesg

Its obvious the Talmud isn't supposed to be a sympathetic reference toward Jesus, but in its negativity, it nonetheless makes reference and thats a reference outside the NT.

But it's not contemporaneous and it has no value as evidence of the existence of Jesus of Nazareth.

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Originally Posted by jonesg

If there was nothing unique to Jesus, why are you expending energy and time trying to refute him. WHy not carp about buddah. What about Mohammed , surely he didn't exist, theres no video footage.

What is it about Jesus?

No one is trying to "refute" Jesus. We are just trying to understand the real history of early Christianity as best we can.

Since we live in a predominantly Christian culture, obviously Christianity is our focus. But Buddhism is not based on the existence of a historical Buddha. As for Mohammed, Robert Price wrote

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For a long time scholars have considered Islamic origins as basically unproblematic. It seemed fairly straightforward: the founder was a figure of relatively recent history, amply documented, and many of his own writings and sayings survived. True, there had been a frenzy of fabrication, but early Muslim scholars themselves had seen this early on and moved to weed out spurious hadith (traditions of the founder's sayings and deeds). What was left seemed ample enough, as did the text of the Koran, the revelation of Allah to Muhammad. Even if one could not confess with Muslims a belief in the divine inspiration (actually, dictation) of the Koran, one still agreed the text preserved the preachments of Muhammad. The most recent generation of students of Islam, however, have broken with this consensus. Gunter Luling is joined by many in his opinion that Western scholars of Islam and the Koran had simply accepted the official party line of Muslim jurists and theologians regarding the sources for Muhammad and early Islamic history.... In fact, Western Islamicists had done everything but accept the Koran as the revealed Word of God. In retrospect one wonders why they balked at this last step!...

The Koran was assembled from a variety of prior Hagarene texts (hence the contradictions re Jesus' death) in order to provide the Moses-like Muhammad with a Torah of his own....

[T]his means that all we thought we knew of the Prophet Muhammad is really a mass of fictive legal precedents meant to anchor this or that Islamic practice once Muhammad had been recast as an Arab Moses. And the question of the origin of the Koran is no longer "from Allah?" or "from Muhammad?" but rather "from Muhammad?" or "from countless unnamed Hagarene jurists?"... And it becomes equally evident that the line between the Koran and the hadith must be erased, for both alike are now seen to be repositories of sayings fictively attributed to the Prophet and transmitted by word of mouth before being codified in canonical written form.

Diogenes the Cynic · 12-27-2004, 04:25 PM

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Originally Posted by jonesg

I don't have time to look up exact wording, the book is "the case for Christ" Lee Strobel . Its 100% consistent throughout.

Strobel is a Christian apologist and an extremely ineffective one at that. His "Case for..." books are compendiums of tiresome logical fallacies, distortions of historical evidence and trite regurgitations of C.S. Lewis. You probably don't want to cite him as an authority around here. He's already been ground into hamburger many times

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Its obvious the Talmud isn't supposed to be a sympathetic reference toward Jesus, but in its negativity, it nonetheless makes reference and thats a reference outside the NT.

It's a reaction to Christianity several centuries down the line. It has no value in establishing the historicity of Jesus.

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If there was nothing unique to Jesus, why are you expending energy and time trying to refute him.

The OP specifically asked if there was any dispositive historical corroration for the existence of Jesus. There is not. That's just giving a factual answer to a factual question. What's the problem?

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WHy not carp about buddah. [sic] What about Mohammed , surely he didn't exist, theres no video footage.

Ask a question about historical Buddha or Mohammed and we'll tell you what the empirical evidence is. The evidence for their mere existence, at least, is much stronger than for Jesus.

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What is it about Jesus?

I don't understand this question. Why shouldn't we answer historical questions with objective accuracy?

jonesg · 12-27-2004, 06:34 PM

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Originally Posted by Vorkosigan

Three conservative Christians? Don't make me laugh. Let's check out that list:

Numerous errors....Christian faith was right in line with many beliefs in Jewish, Greek, and Roman society. See, for example, Alan Segal's groundbreaking work on the "Two Powers" belief in ancient Judaism. It is significant that when Philo and Paul propose their "Two Powers" (in Heaven) idea, neither has to write an apologetic for it to their fellow Jews. It was widely accepted in the Judaism of the period.

Hmmmm....entirely untrue, as anyone who has been Oxyrhynchus in Egypt can attest. "Very few" is a loaded and relative term, in any case. Go here for more: http://www.csad.ox.ac.uk/POxy/VExhibition/intro.htm

<howls with laughter> Tacitus was a Roman senator who wrote history as a sideline, and scholars are skeptical of many Josephean passages. "Careful researchers!" Don't make me laugh. The lad is writing propaganda here.

The problems with the Tacitus quote are well known. See Peter Kirby's website and bone up on him. Ther's a good article by Darell Doughty there.

http://www.earlychristianwritings.com

Again, read the stuff at ECW.
http://www.earlychristianwritings.com

These are just howlers.

A forgery. Check out the discussion on ECW. The scholar and conservative apologist FF Bruce is cited there:

It would no doubt be pleasant if we could believe this story of Tertullian, which he manifestly believed to be true but a story so inherently improbable and inconsistent with what we know of Tiberius, related nearly 170 years after the event, does not commend itself to a historian's judgment.

Another howler. One wonders how a solar eclipse could occur at Passover. Even the ancients knew this story was bullshit.

More desperate reaching. See ECW.

Proves Christians exist, which no one denies. Some radicals suspect this as a forgery.

Hey! 170! Proves Christians exist. No one denies that.

Zindler has just shown in The Jesus the Jews Never Knew that these are not related to Jesus.

No, the external sources are pretty hopeless, and consist either of late documents, forgeries, or confusions.

Vorkosigan

Well who do you expect to learn about Jesus from, atheists?
The external sources look pretty decent to me.

Amaleq13 · 12-27-2004, 07:01 PM

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Originally Posted by jonesg

Well who do you expect to learn about Jesus from, atheists?

If you are only interested in confirming your existing beliefs, no. In that case, you should stick with the sources upon which you currently rely.

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The external sources look pretty decent to me.

That isn't surprising considering the warped lenses through which you are viewing them.

jonesg · 12-27-2004, 07:48 PM

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Originally Posted by Toto

No one is trying to "refute" Jesus. We are just trying to understand the real history of early Christianity as best we can.

Since we live in a predominantly Christian culture, obviously Christianity is our focus. But Buddhism is not based on the existence of a historical Buddha. As for Mohammed, Robert Price wrote

Maybe you need to cast a wider net then, obviously a religion started 2000 yrs ago around someone who was crucified had something going for it beyond a con job. People today will explain "Jesus changed my life", I don't know how that worked for them but I know what happened to me and if hadn't fallen as far as I did I would never have come to God.
Maybe the average person suffers more than appears.
What I see resulting from their rebirth is church going , singing and TV hucksters, maybe I miss the point but thats what I see.

What I have done in my life is likened to 'first century Christianity', from what I see of Christianity today, its not quite the same anymore.
I'm spiritual not religious and I had to find a vital spiritual experience to restore my life. No churches, no priests, nothing but me and God and using the directions Jesus gave.

THe question then is , would directions contained in other religions work just as well, in order to work they'd have to be just about identical.
So far I haven't seen anything which is as unique.
Personally I think the muslims and jews are right about a few things when they say " they hid the body" and eventually that will come out.
But that only shows the hand of man in the Jesus story, theres something else which was divine about him and I don't mean miracles.
The church has often acted idiotic, the shroud of turin for example, but Jesus remains.

jonesg · 12-27-2004, 07:57 PM

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Originally Posted by Amaleq13

If you are only interested in confirming your existing beliefs, no. In that case, you should stick with the sources upon which you currently rely.

That isn't surprising considering the warped lenses through which you are viewing them.

Since I went back through the book to find quotes I was skimming/reading and theres some decent reading in there, some obvious desperation on the author's part too, but thats easy to spot.

If you really want to get information on Jesus, the best way is to try what he suggested, actually do some of the things.
You can read all the windy books in the world but direct application is the only real way to discover for yourself.
At some point everyone has to put the manual down and pick up the tools or nothing changes.

Its quite possible to keep reading cookbooks and starve to death.

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