aa5874

And added to that, there may have been Christians who already disproved the historical Jesus. Marcion, the Christian, claimed his Jesus was on earth in the fifteenth year of Tiberius as a phantom, during the governorship of Pilate.
Did the Romans argue about the Jesus of the Marcionites, the phantom ?

Jeffrey Gibson

In the form that Toto gives it -- which, I think, implies that a held assumption on the part of the "apologists" that the real reason that Celsus & Co. didn't say anything about Jesus not existing, even if they believed he didn't, is that they knew both that they had no empirical proof for this belief and that they were unable to obtain any?

Could you point me to some examples?

Moreover, note that if we take the case of Fronto and his charges against Christianity as a guide to the truth of this claim, we can see that they did not feel that not having "forensically derived" evidence and first experience of aspects of Christianity was something that would keep them from saying what they believed, or suspected, or thought was true.

Jeffrey

Malachi151

Let's say that you are Celsus, writing in the mid to late 2nd century, and you hear the basis of the Gospel account. What would make you question of the existence of Jesus?

Wouldn't the first thing to assume be that Jesus was another huckster like the dozens or hundreds of other known hucksters of the time, which Celsus was very familiar with?

mens_sana

My name is Celsus. I am extraordinarily skeptical of the overblown claims for this Jesus Christ person. But I have no reason to question his existence. These miracle claims go on all the time. It is one thing to pull the wool over the eyes of the plebeians, but to ask me to believe this balderdash .... Really!

Cordially,
Raymond

Diogenes the Cynic

Court records of what? what part of Christian doctrine could have been disproven by Roman court doctrines and why do you think they would have been so easy to locate? I think that a lot of lay skeptics and atheists tend to have an over-inflated idea of how comprehensive Roman records really were and tend to oversell the absence of a trial record for Jesus as having any significance at all. As far as I know, we don't have any records at all from Pilate, so it's not like anything is "missing." I actually don't think it's even likely that the execution of Jesus would have been recorded to begin with. I tend to find Crossan's view that the arrest and execution of Jesus was extremely casual and summary (likely with no trial at all and little or no direct participation by Pilate) to be quite plausible.
The "Jesus Family Tomb" story is really little more than a crackpot theory. It was the subject of a sensational television show but it's not something which has been taken seriously by scholars. the show (and the theory) are really of the same genre and credibility as the occasional Noah's Ark programs which turn up now and then.
Skipping pass the numerous other problems with this "why didn't the Jews/Romans show them the bones?" question that i've seen a million times, how would they be able to prove the bones belonged to Jesus?
Not if they didn't happen.
The zombie assault on Jerusalem appears only in Matthew's Gospel 50 years after the crucifixion. What "lines of evidence" would have existed to prove that Jewish saints didn't pop out or their graves in a destroyed city 50-100 years before and what makes you think that any Roman authorities would have read Matthew's Gospel in any case?

Malachi151

What DtC said, plus, denying or even disproving the miracles, which several people in the 2nd and 3rd century did do, doesn't prove that there was no Jesus.

Let's assume that Jesus did not exist and that the general development of the Christian cult follows roughly Earl Doherty's view, i.e. that from about 20-70 CE there various small Jesus cults that worshiped a heavenly messiah.

At this time there was no claim of a real Jesus to even deny. No one would have even been able to prove that Jesus never existed because no one claimed that Jesus ever existed, or if they did, the claim was so vague, like in Hebrews, as to be meaningless.

Let's then assume that the next stage took place after the destruction of Jerusalem, some time around 70 CE. Let's say that Mark was written in 70 CE.

So, Mark was written, and for a period of about 20 years it circulated around largely orally, inspiring the view of Jesus that we know today, of a guy killed by Pilate.

By around 90 CE the story finally became widely circulated enough that non-Christians started to hear something about it.

By 100 CE it became popular enough that Roman officials started to take minor notice of it, but not to pay it much heed.

By around 150 CE Romans would have started caring something about countering this movement, but not much.

By around 200 CE they really cared.

So, let's just say that around 100 CE some Roman may have cared to look into these claims of a guy named Jesus who was supposedly killed by Pilate and whom now a reasonable number of Jews and Romans were getting hot a bothered about. What would they do then?

#1) Why would they have even suspected that this guy never existed?

#2) Even if they did suspect it, what would they have done about it?

Take the letter of Pliny the Younger for exmaple:

Pliny had never even heard of Christianity prior to this. He then interrogated some Christians, we don't even know from this that those Christians even said that Jesus was a man or was on earth, and all he finds from them is "depraved superstition". Why and how would he launch in investigation into the existence of Jesus? #1 If he thinks is nothing but depraved superstition, then why bother doing anything, he just simply discounted the whole thing obviously. #2 Even if he did care, what would be do then, and why on earth would he think it would matter? Surely he couldn't present evidence to these people, as if they would listen.

As DtC said earlier, the Romans had no motivation to go on a fact finding quest regarding Jesus. The region was full of false prophets and tall tales of miracle workers, they were a dime a dozen, so it wouldn't have sounded anything out of the ordinary. The only issue was that these people weren't honoring the state gods, who cares was nonsense prophet or god they worshiped, that was irrelevant, and in a land with thousands of gods and hundreds of petty miracle workers and stories about miraculous healers and the like, the story of Jesus was just a dime a dozen.

Lastly, as has also been pointed, many Christians of the time, the so-called Gnostics, didn't even believe in a human Jesus anyway, so how can you argue that such a Jesus did not exist when the believers themselves hold a view of the deity which doesn't even depend on him having "existed" in any meaningful way in the fist place?

Jeffrey Gibson

Part of Celsus' intent is to show irrational Christianity is and how stupid Christians are for believing in what he takes pains to show are (to him) absurdities Don't you think that if he had any reason to believe that Jesus had not existed, he would have said something about this?

And just what hucksters besides Jesus does Celsus show he was familiar with?

Jeffrey

Jeffrey Gibson

Could you please document your claim that Gnostics didn't believe that the Jesus they thought of as their saviour was ever seen by, and encountered, such human beings as Peter, or that he wasn't condemned to death by Pilate, etc. and that he didn't walk the earth at a particular period of human history?

Jeffrey

Malachi151

Its pretty obvious that Celsus was working from a Gospel either directly or indirectly. Likewise, its also pretty clear that by this time there was widespread belief in the Gospel material as historical accounts (i.e. Jesus was killed by Pilate, etc.)

There is no such thing as an account of someone not existing. There were no stories circulating about Jesus not existing, because there is never such a story.

Today we can only establish that by doing extensive interviews and various checks of records, none of which Celsus would have been able to do even if he were so inclined.

I can't figure any way that Celsus would have even come to that line to reasoning. You have a story about a guy that was crucified by Pilate, who really did execute lots of Jews as we know, so its not at all improbable, and not only is this account written down, but by the time Celsus comes along it is also widely circulated and repeated as fact by thousands of people.

Where would the idea that this guy never have existed come from? Why would he have suspected that? Unless he did an extensive analysis of the scriptures to see that most of the scenes in the Gospels are derived from Hebrew scriptures and would have been smart enough to put two and two together, I don't really see how anyone would even suspect the story?

I can't think of anything that could have been done at that time to verify that Jesus never existed. If you know of what could have been done to verify that he never existed then offer it up.

Given that there would have been no way to verify that he never existed, why would Celsus have even started down that road? Why make an argument that can't possible go anywhere?

His claim would have only made him look foolish and unreasonable, just as people claim about the JM position today. The JM position is easier to prove today in fact that it would have been back then. We have access to more material now than what Celsus or anyone else, even the Christians, would have had access to. Its why we were able to figure out Markan priority recently, even though people within 100 years of the writing of the Gospels didn't figure it out. Its why we have a better idea about the authentic letters of Paul now than they did in the 2nd century.

So, the fact is that there was no way possible in the 2nd century to prove that he never existed, so why would anyone even go down that road, a road that he would surely have been trounced on?

If he was trying to win an argument or make a case, that would have been the worst position to take. He could prove that "the words of Jesus", as recorded in the Gospels, were no better than the words of Plato. He could prove that some of the beliefs were irrational. Why would he go down a road on something that he couldn't prove?

Indeed, if Jesus were real, and did exist, then it is more likely that someone would have tried to disprove the resurrection by proving that they knew where Jesus was really buried, but that didn't happen. That's a case where positive proof could have been provided, and not only that, would have been likely, since if Jesus had any following during his lifetime then surely his burial site, even if a mass grave, would have been known about.

So I don't see how Celsus, or anyone else, would ever have suspected that he never existed, at least not by the time that it matters, which is the 2nd century, when the story was already popularized.

Please feel free to put forward the case against existence that a 2nd century Roman could have made. Please feel free to put forward the tings that would have led a 2nd century Roman to suspect that the lead character from this story never existed.

Judging from the early material, I'm sure that even if one tried to investigate the matter by doing interviews that they would have run into a situation where they asked people and someone would say that they knew a friend of a friend that saw him, etc. I mean look at all of the Elvis sightings.

Look at the modern research into John Henry and Molly Pitcher. People even of the time couldn't figure out if John Henry was real, and we still don't know. How come there are no 19th century accounts claiming that John Henry never existed? Or, perhaps he did exist, there are theories which claim such, though they are flimsy. There are also numerous accounts from different locations of people who claimed to have witnessed the actual steel driving competition, but they are from different states....

Trying to sort all this out in 2nd century Rome? I don't think so, it would have been impossible.

It would have been much easier, if Jesus did exist, to have proved that he wasn't resurrected. That could have been proven or at least a much stronger case could have been made. Proving that something that never happened never happened, thus leaving no evidence to go on, is very hard.

So the real question is, if Celsus wanted to disprove Christianity so bad, and Jesus existed, why didn't he disprove the resurrection?

As for other frauds that Celsus knew of, I was just assuming there that this Celsus is the Celsus in the letter by Lucan about Alexander and Glycon and that he would have probably been familiar with the works of Josephus, etc. and that its something he would have know about. Based on the Origen reconstruction it seems that Celsus knew of these types of frauds, though I could be wrong on that, maybe he never heard of any other religious frauds (I doubt it) Certainly, there were many religious fraudsters around at the time, many false prophets and doomsayers.

As for the Gnostics, all of whose views of Jesus were also based on Gospel accounts, trying to prove that a phantom never existed, in some cases a phantom that was not believed to have been born or to have truly died, doesn't seem reasonable. Now you are talking ghost busters type activity. We can't even prove to people today that ghosts aren't real, how could they do ti back then?

GakuseiDon

If Mark was writing "midrashic fiction", based on Paul's MJ and the OT (which I believe is the standard mythicist line), why didn't anyone else recognise it? Why didn't critics like Celsus recognise it? Or Justin's "Trypho" character? I would have thought that Jewish scholars should have recognised the genre for what it was. Is there any evidence of anyone doing that? If not, it seems to me to provide support that Mark had a historical person in mind.

In your view, if Mark wasn't writing about a historical person, did Mark expect his intended audience to understand that? Should we have expected early Christians and/or Jewish scholars of Mark's time to have understood that?
If Mark was writing for a Roman audience about a fictional person, should we assume then that, as the Romans would have been unaware of the "midrashic fiction" genre, he was trying to fool them somehow? Would the Romans of Mark's time also never have suspected that Mark was writing fiction?