MysteryProf

Hey, I've been messing around on CF today and this guy keeps asking why, if Jesus didn't exist, early historians didn't try to disprove his existence and thus snuff out Christianity. I'm not even sure how to respond to that. Even though I'm not really a Jesus mythicist, it doesn't seem like a very good argument, but I'm not sure how to express why. Could anyone help me?

Ishmael

A good place to start in this sort of discussion would be with The Jesus Seminar crowd and with liberal Christianity in general. The Jesus Seminar scholars have agreed that there is a "historical Jesus" and a "Jesus of faith." That is the short answer. One probably existed and the other did not.

Mageth

Probably because the contemporary historians simply weren't that interested in "snuffing out" what was at the time considered just another sect of Judaism. By the time Christianity had grown to be considered a problem to some (decades after the fact), such an effort to disprove Jesus' existence would have been impossible, as well as pointless.

MysteryProf

Mageth:Thanks for responding. That's kind of what I said so I feel better now! Thank you to Ishmael as well. Just fyi I'm not really a Jesus mythicist. Just trying new things.

Toto

In the first place, it is not clear that asserting that Jesus did not exist would have snuffed out early Christianity. The era was not as skeptical or grounded in fact as we are, and it is not obvious that the religion would have died out if it turned out that its savior was a myth like most of the other religions of the time. Many early Christian sects did not believe that Jesus was actually a real person (the Docetists believed that the apparent Jesus was actually a ghost impersonating a person.) It is not clear what the various Gnostics believed - they may have assumed that the story about Jesus was only an allegory in any case.

In the second case, if any critic had asserted that Jesus did not exist, his writings may very well not have survived. We only have the documents from the era that Christians preserved by copying scrolls or manuscripts, and they were selective in what they copied.

Mageth

I meant to mention that as well. Christianity later did a very good job of cleaning up its past history.

funinspace

The other posters are quite right about it probably wouldn't have been possible to "snuff" it out. As far as us moderns being so skeptical, the Mormons and 7th Day Adventists provide perfect examples of the ability of people to put on blinders. Joseph Smith was a lier, kook, and a false prophet. Yet 150 years later it's a big Church. The 7Th Day Adventists predicted the end of the world a multitude of times. Yet the church is still strong. Go figure And that doesn't even cover the truly nutty groups.

DK

Radcliffe Emerson

Don't forget Scientology. Hubbard flat out said he was going to invent a religion so he could get tax free money.
Yet people like John Travolta and Tom Cruise are Scientologists.

CX

That's about the dumbest question I can think of anyone asking. If he didn't really exist there wouldn't be anyone historians needed to refute. Even if he did exist the scope of his program and ministry was such that he probably wouldn't have even been on the radar of any well known historian contemporaneous with him. By the time the gospels are written it's already 2 generations after Jesus execution. Then it's another hundred years before there's anything like wide distribution of the texts. It's probably not until the third century that many people had heard of Jesus and Xianity. By then in a largely illiterate society with no mass media, an invesigation would have been exceedingly diffcult. Furthermore the ancient pagan world up through the beginning of Xianity is not exactly known for being skeptical. Nobody tried to prove or disprove the existence of Romulus or Remus. Plus most of the claims made for Jesus weren't all the different from the claims of others.

MysteryProf

Yeah, I know. It's just that I always freeze up on the dumb questions. I mean, sometimes they're so dumb that I have to get my thoughts in order to answer them. It's like he's speaking a completely different language or something! I hope that makes sense.