Blui

Indeed after reading this thread it seems the apologetics are slightly derailing it, at the very least their arguments dont make much sense.

Saying 'well if you believe Sokrates existed you must believe Jesus existed' or any variation thereof is irrelevant.

Even if your right that there is only as much or less evidence of Sokrates as Jesus, how does this at all address the validity of the Historical/Mythical debate of Jesus? if Sokrates didnt exist, what does this mean for Jesus? nothing.
If Sokrates did exist, what does this mean for Jesus? nothing.

Your remark is really an attack at people on this board, essentially your saying 'well your saying my arguments/beliefs are wrong well so are yours so dont criticise me'.

I understand that debating inherently involves someone telling you your wrong, this can get personal, and im sure the other athiests here have made not very professional posts to you either, but you are not convincing anyone, and the only way you can is through an objective debate.

In other words, where is the credible evidence of Jesus that supports Jesus being historical?

Celine

dddc0708 and Blui,
Thanks for expressing what I was feeling after twenty-odd pages of diversion, bloated rhetoric, and obfuscation concerning the original claim about "extra biblical" evidience.

I enjoy this forum, but one fo the aspects of "argument" I notice cropping up, whenver apologists or theists in general "argue" about a topic, is that the notion of claim-evidence seems rather....alien to their modes of thinking. Instead, they tend to rely on a third elememt of argument, the assumption (or "warrent" in the technical term) in place of the claim.

That, to me, seems why these debates get convoluted and sidetracked. After that, the only question is whether this is deliberate diversion, or just the inability to argue formally, with evidence.

Doug Shaver

Let's focus on Plato, since I don't know enough about Xenophon to comment intelligently on him. The points I make will, I hope, be of general relevance.

Somebody had to write the works that have come down to us with Plato's name on them. Plato's existence is attested to by other ancient writers who give us a bit of biographical information about Plato. (There is an autobiographical epistle written in Plato's name, but most scholars think its true authorship is uncertain at best.) One of those later writers, Aristotle, claims to have been a student of Plato, and he clearly believed that Socrates was a real philosopher known to Plato and not just a figment of Plato's imagination.

But what do we really know about Aristotle? Well, he was mentioned by writers who came after him, and they were mentioned by writers who came after them, and so forth until we get to a document whose authorship just cannot be sanely disputed and making assertions that we can independently corroborate. The chain of evidence, then, becomes weaker the longer it gets, and each link gets winker the farther back along the chain it is. But then we can ask about the first link: Who started it, and why?


Why would anybody writing a work of philosophy in ancient times claim to be Plato, or Aristotle, unless those names were already famous in the intellectual community? There is no point in claiming to be somebody unknown. If you want people to pay attention to your ideas, you might as well use your own name as to use a name that nobody ever heard of.

And so, if all the documents attributed to Plato and Aristotle are fakes, then they were faked because Plato and Aristotle were already famous at the time the forgeries were written. But then, how did they get famous except by writing the documents attributed to them? Or, if they got famous on account of other documents they wrote, then why do those documents not appear in the historical record?

Now, there are references to works by Aristotle that have not survived. Absent more evidence, though, it is too much to ask of coincidence that all his genuine work was lost and only the forgeries survived into modern times. And in Plato's case, no ancient writer mentions anything he wrote of which we have no copy. He could have written other things, and it strikes me as unlikely that he did not, but we don't know about any of them. In any case, if they were neither preserved nor referenced by anybody, chances are it was because they were not of such a nature as to make somebody famous enough to inspire forgeries in his name.

My approach does not begin with any assumptions about trustworthiness. I infer from the relevant evidence that the gospel attributions are not to be trusted. I infer from the relevant evidence that the attribution for Plato's dialogues may be tentatively trusted -- but only tentatively. My world view will not collapse if I come across good reason to think that there was no real Plato. But I have no good reason to think that. It is a theoretical possibility, but to believe the theory I would have to believe a lot of other things for which no evidence exists at all. It is not a parsimonious way to explain the origin of the writings known as Plato's Dialogues.

But any theory about the origin of Luke's gospel has to fit a theory about the origins of Christianity. The questions of who wrote that book and how Christianity got started are inseparable, and this greatly complicates the parsimony issue. There are many more -- and more conflicting -- data points that have to be accommodated than there are when when we talk about who wrote Plato's Dialogues.

Doug Shaver

If the text affirms that a dead man came back to life, I could take it to mean that an actual dead man actually came back to life, or I could take it mean something else. The identity of the author is not irrelevant to which meaning I should consider more likely to be true.

cajela

Gamera has already conceded that there is no extra-bibilical evidence, so technically the thread is over. But the side track is alive and well...

The Socrates vs Jesus parallel is not very strong IMHO. OK, we know nothing of Socrates/Jesus except what was written about him by others. But what we do know of Socrates is his philosophy, a work of reason that can be read and critiqued on its own terms. The actual identity of the author is not important.

If someone one day discovered a cache of documents that conclusively showed that Socrates was a pseudonym for Mysteriocles, it would change nothing at all except the answers in some trivia games. Likewise Shakespeare is very ill-attested, but to me Shakespeare is "the author of those amazing plays" and if it turned out that he was really Kit Marlowe, well, cool, I always liked that story more than the Bacon one. Whatever. Hamlet hasn't changed.

Jesus, on the other hand, is not the author of anything, and the stories about him are about a lot more than teachings. There's the whole miracles and death & resurrection thing. If you merely wanted to argue that someone probably called Jesus or Yeshua or whatever actually gave his sermons, cool, that would fit the Socrates model. But the rest of the story requires a lot more evidence, not just because there's miracles involved, but also because it is supposed to *matter* to the message. Socrates' message is independent of his life, Jesus's isn't.

OldYgg

The apparent lack of evidence for Jesus does not assure us completely that Jesus or Jehoshua or Joshua existed at that time. The name Jesus comes from the Greek - and Greek language lacked the ability to represent components of the name Joshua.

In any case - there are a number of people that we can prove existed at that time, and these people were of lesser importance than the son of god - or at least so one would think.

If the son of god existed on Earth - you would think there would be a plethora of evidence. Right to my primary complain that the son of god would have to have written a vast catalogue of content - and if he existed and he had a core of followers - they would have collected all this information and preserved it as the works or Aristotle are preserved to the present.

Old Ygg

Nightson

You would think he would have at least writen a book himself.

Doug Shaver

They didn't need a reason. Nobody before the very late first century said there was a body missing.

aa5874

So far none of the followers of Jesus have shown or refered us to any verifiable evidence outside the Bible. They have not used any contemporary event or any source to bolster the reality of Jesus. With the exception of the Bible, the followers appear to be 'stuck in mud'.

With billions of so called followers, they cannot extract one single event that can settle the reality of Jesus in their favour. With their barrage of faith healers and prophets, billions of daily prayers, and thousands of years of worship, the followers still search for one, just one piece of verifiable fact that can muzzle the criitics. The followers of Jesus go against all odds, against nature, against history, against science and common sense. But they declare, as if in a dream world, 'Jesus lives within my heart'. Now this sounds like witchcraft to me.

Avatar

Correction...only the writers of the Bible claimed anything of the sort. No mention of the event one way or the other in Roman records. One would think that if guards had been stationed at the tomb (why?) that there would be some mention of it somewhere.