spamandham

It's in the same article I linked to.

spamandham

No that wouldn't be good enough. That's not all there is to the argument fortunately.

spamandham

It seems reasonable enough to me that someone named Peter, someone named James, and someone named John actually existed in the first century. What isn't so clear is whether the Peter, James, and John of Paul are the same Gospel Peter, James, and John. They might be, or it might just be that these names were very popular.

It's possible that the Gospel versions folded in historical early church leaders, just as the Gospels fold in Herod and Pilate and others.

spamandham

You realize of course, the fact that we don't even know where 1st century Nazareth is, is the same problem the early church faced. They didn't know where it was either until they found a well and declared it to be Mary's well.

Doesn't it seem odd to you that even the early church didn't know where Nazareth was?

robto

A quick look makes me think this site is pretty crappy. The Jesus from Apollo page is worse than even the usual J from pagan god-man garbage.

We start with a claim:

And then.. what? A series of artistic representations from the third century and later! Guess what: Christianity came about in the first century! Anything from the third century is unlikely to be relevant to the origins of the myth. Sure, Xns based their artwork on pagan representations and motifs, so what?

Even a cursory glance at the Gospels and Paul is enough to indicate to anyone with half a brain that Xty is rooted in Judaism and the OT. Just count quotations from the OT and compare to quotations from non-Jewish texts. So, a claim that Apollo was the myth that was being borrowed from need more than a couple of pieces of artwork from hundreds of years later to back it up.

Roger Pearse

Once people say "there is no evidence" when they mean "there is no evidence that I am willing to accept" again the argument is over.

All the best,

Roger Pearse

Amedeo

You ask a loaded question, Did Jesus exist? It's like asking, Does God exist?

Which Jesus? Which God?

If you are interested, check out my posts on the Gospels, which contain references to the Biography of Jesus the king and the Biography of Jesus the Messiah (Christ).

In the Gospels, there is also the mention of a Jesus who had the reputation of being a magician and was apparently cited as a false prophets. [I don't recall in which Gospel.] I am beginning to see the possibility that the biographers of Jesus the King made reference to the other Jesus, the miracle-worker (which happens to be Jesus the Christ: he told many stories of his miraculous exploits).

Two Jesuses or one Jesus with a split personality?

Solitary Man

What do you expect - a signpost? Get real.

Toto

Rene Salm claims to have examined the evidence, and decided that Nazareth did not exist.

His work is affordable and available for purchase from his site, but the issue of whether Nazareth existed or not has not been at the top of my list of priorities. I was hoping that people with better archeological background that I have would read and evaluate it.

He has a short sentence of praise from Greg Doudna, but otherwise his reviewers are Frank Zindler of American Atheists, who is not an archeologist and has a preexisting opinion, and others who line up on predictable sides.

There appears to be some recent participation and discussion by Salm on the ANE-2 yahoogroup.

GakuseiDon

According to Richard Carrier, there's no doubt that there was a Nazareth at the time Jesus was supposed to have lived:
http://www.iidb.org/vbb/showthread.p...3&page=8&pp=25

[A]rchaeology has confirmed a stone building in Nazareth of the size and type to be a synagogue, and it dates from the time of Christ. See the entry in the Archaeological Encyclopedia of the Holy Land...

The evidence is insurmountable that there were numerous permanent structures--most of Nazareth's buildings even before the 1st century were partially carved from the rock of the hill, in a manner similar to Pella...

I was able to track down on my own the most extensive report, that of Bagatti (Excavations in Nazareth, vol. 1, 1969), and I looked through all the subsequent reports on Nazareth from Excavations and Surveys in Israel, and this is what I found:

(a) Very little of Nazareth has been excavated, and therefore no argument can be advanced regarding what "wasn't" there in the 1st century.

(b) Archaeological reports confirm that stones and bricks used in earlier buildings in Nazareth were reused in later structures, thus erasing a lot of the evidence. Therefore, it is faulty reasoning to argue that there were no brick or stone structures simply because we have not recovered them from the relevant strata (i.e. one of Hoffman's sources assumed that the absence of this evidence entailed mud-and-thatch housing, but that is fallacious reasoning--especially since no clear evidence of mud-and-thatch housing has been found, either).

(c) One example of the above includes four calcite column bases, which were reused in a later structure, but are themselves dated before the War by their stylistic similarity to synagogues and Roman structures throughout 1st century Judaea, and by the fact that they contain Nabataean lettering (which suggests construction before Jewish priests migrated to Nazareth after the war). This is not iron clad proof of a 1st century synagogue (since the pieces had been moved and thus could not be dated by strata), but it does demonstrate a very high probability--especially since calcite bases are cheap material compared to the more expensive marble of structures archaeologists confirmed started appearing there around a century later, i.e. by the end of the 1st century AD (or early 2nd century at the latest, since marble fragments have been found inscribed in Aramaic that is paleographically dated to this period), and more extensively again in the 3rd century (when a very impressive Jewish synagogue was built there, this time using marble, which was later converted to Christian use).

(d) I confirmed beyond any doubt that Nazareth was built on a hill--more specifically, down the slope of a hill, with a convenient "brow" roughly one city block away from the edge of the ancient town as so-far determined archaeologically. Because the town was built down the slope of a hill, we have found numerous examples of houses, tombs, and storage rooms half cut into the rock of the hill, leaving a diagonal slope for structures to be built up around them to complete the chambers (as I described above). Since these structural elements were so completely removed and apparently reused by later builders, no evidence remains of what they were composed of (whether mud, brick, or stone).

The bottom line: there is absolutely no doubt that Nazareth existed in the time of Jesus.