Flaming Moe

It seems that we really only have a disputed text from Josephus outside the Bible texts so what evidence can we substantiate for the person of Jesus. I can accept that there may have been many apocalyptical prophets but, again, I don't know of any relating evidence that might indicate they were the same person.
:devil2:

Solitary Man

You mean, besides the gospels (all of them, not just the Christian 4), besides Paul, besides the various Acts, besides the various other epistularies, besides Papias, besides the mostly-undisputed passage in Josephus, besides Tacitus, we only have the disputed passage in Josephus, right?

spin

There is no contemporary evidence for the existence of Jesus. Paul never met Jesus and one has difficulty finding anything in his writings that suggests that he got any first hand witness of Jesus from others. We don't know when the gospels were written, but the earliest, Mark, was written after the fall of the temple, mentioning the rending of the curtain of the temple to make the overthrow of the Jews and the liberation of their god for christians.

Josephus writes half a century after the time of Jesus and despite the fact that the Testimonium Flavium had been rejected as spurious for a long time there has been a resurgence of support for arbitrarily reclaiming parts of it.

People parade the sorry excuse for evidence as though a lot of names well after the fact make up for none when it counts. Then one must admit that the pagan texts which do mention Jesus were maintained by christians scribes, scribes well known for innovation in their own literature.

We have

1. the Tacitus passage, which is tacked onto a long attack on Nero and changes the topic; it also contains some awful Latin from one of the best orators of his day; and it wrongly gives Pilate's rank despite the fact that Tacitus was well versed in Judean affairs.
2. the Suetonius passage, which inserts a short note about the execution of christians in a list of provisions for public order, really convincing.
3. two passages from Josephus, the marvelous "he was the christ" passage, which christians admit has obviously been tampered with, but they still think they can save bits, and the James passage which has features that show it stinks as well.

There's only one of these late passages that come out apparently unscathed, the Pliny passage, though given the obvious hands in the others, it may just as easily be from the same brush, but a little better done. Fake letters are part of the christian tradition, letters between Paul and Seneca, various Pauline pseudepigrapha, the letter of Abgar.

Non-christians trying to sell this stuff as secure historical sources is like Somali women advocating infibulation for their daughters.

The task of trying to do history in the area has to involve rolling back the two millennia of apologetic actions aimed at securing the faith from any attack in order to have any hope in trying to understand the origins of christianity. It may have started as described, but we will never know unless we try to use a coherent historical methodology as employed in other fields of history.


spin

aa5874

This is indeed the history of a God-man called Jesus, written about by four unknown gospel writers, unknown authors of Epistles, with unknown and contradicting chronologies. According to Josephus, this God-man was seen alive on the third day, after "he died", this is likely to be fiction. And Tacitus does not make any mention of Jesus of Nazareth in any of his extant writings.

It is wholly reasonable to reject Jesus of Nazareth as an historical figure.

There are no known credible non-apologetic extant records of a man called Jesus of Nazareth who had thousands of followers and was regarded as the Messiah and son of a God, in the 1st century.

Up to late 1st century, Josephus' Wars of the Jews 6.5.4, and 2nd century Tacitus' Histories 5.13, and Suetonius' Life of Vesapasian wrote that the Messiah was probably Vespasian and that the Jewish Messiah was expected around 70CE, not during the procuratorship of Pilate.

Even Philo of Alexander, who wrote about events during and after Pilate, made no mention of this Jesus of Nazareth, his disciples, apostles, Paul, or his doctrine, although Philo lived during the reign of Tiberius.
And further Philo used the word "Logos", meaning the "Word" and never mentioned Jesus of Nazareth at all, but then, very strange, the author of gJohn referred to Jesus of Nazareth as the Word or Logos. See John 1.

The history of Jesus of Nazareth is exteremly doubtful.

Flaming Moe

None of what you mention can be classed as objective historical evidence. I disagree that Josephus's passage is "mostly-undisputed" and I think most serious Christian scholars would class it as a given that Paul never met Jesus; indeed I find it interesting to ponder the miracles and supernatural events in the gospels that Paul doesn't mention as well as finding it probable that his kristos was not Jesus at all.
I don't think historians would consider the acts objective and historical either but I may have led you to believe that this was what I was looking for by the way I asked the question. I find it interesting that scholars within the Jesus Seminar rely upon an amalgamation of figures to create this one personality rather than what would have been an easily recordable objective account of his life.

aa5874

The word "Christians", as used in the Pliny letters, is very ambiguous. It would appear that there were different concepts of Christ in the 2nd century, and there were also persons who believed that they were sons of God whose followers were referred to as "Christians".

It would appear that all the followers of the heretics, as mentioned in Against Heresies, were called Christians among themselves, yet some of these Christian sects had no connection to Jesus of Nazareth.

The Pliny letters, whether authentic or not, have very little use to identify the the sect of Christians mentioned therein.

In First Apology, Justin Martyr claimed that followers of Simon the magician were called Christians, and these Christians of Simon the magician predated the Pliny letters.

Justin Martyr's First Apology 26 The Christians in the Pliny letters may be the Christians of SIMON DEO SANCTO, (SIMON THE HOLY GOD)

Dogfish

Yeah, that's about it. I'm assuming he meant objective evidence.

Solitary Man

Do you have any evidence that there's such a thing as "objective historical evidence", and why it would exclude Tacitus?

Of AJ 18.3.3, you're most certainly right. Of the later passage, AJ 20.9.1, it's not nearly as contested. It's mostly undisputed. I think only spin here has tried (in vain).


No, but most Christian scholars, and many, many non-Christian scholars think that Paul knew James, and that James was the brother of Jesus, something spin has also in vain tried to refute.

I'll repeat it again, do you have any evidence that any ancient testimony is objectively historical? I cannot see how. You asked for historical evidence, i.e. evidence which can be used positively in deciding the historicity of Jesus. I provided a list.

Does such an account exist for anybody? No ancient account is objective.

Dogfish

But the ones that carry weight are corroborated.

Solitary Man

Yes, indeed. And the more corroboration, the weightier the evidence. No lie there.