Doug Shaver

There is plenty of evidence. It might be inconclusive, but that doesn't mean there isn't any. All the debates and arguments are about how it should be interpreted.

aa5874

In the NT Canon there are claims that there was a character called Jesus the Messiah who was worshiped as a God by Jews and had the ability to REMIT their sins. But, if Jesus did exist and was just a man then it was virtually historically improbable that Jews would have worshiped a man who lived in Galilee as a God and that the Jews would abandon the Laws of God and followed a corruptible man BEFORE the Fall of the Temple.

Tacitus, a Roman writer, gives support to the notion that JESUS was a mythical/fictional character.

Tacitus was NOT aware that Jews ever worshiped a man as a God.

Tacitus "Histories" 5

See http://classics.mit.edu/Tacitus/histories.5.v.html

Based on Tacitus, the Jews had a PURELY MENTAL concept of DEITY. No man was worshiped as a God by Jews.

The historical Jesus is purely a figment of imagination.

coconino

The phrase, "Jesus' historicity" is used a lot. Is there agreement on what the phrase means ? It could mean many things.

Doug Shaver

Not much. Most people take it mean that the canonical gospels are, in some sense, stories about an actual Jewish teacher/preacher whose disciples founded the religion now known as Christianity sometime after he was crucified by Pontius Pilate. The disagreements are about how much historical fact, besides the crucifixion, is in those stories. The positions range from "They contain almost no historical facts" to "They are entirely factual."

spamandham

It means, "something(s) or someone(s) at some time(s) somewhere(s) that we can grasp by a thread and label 'the historical Jesus' ".

jgoodguy

IMHO the historicity of Jesus means that one accepts that a specific methodology used to analyze the gospels can find historical fact by eliminating myth and theology.

Rejecting the methodology puts one in the MJ camp if one accepts the methodology of the Mythical Jesus or the Agnostic Jesus camp if they reject all methodologies and conclude that myth and theology cannot be untangled from historical fact. I.E. A piece of information in the gospels may be myth, theology or historical, but there is no way to analytically determine which.(Assuming a basic naturalistic outlook, all the supernatural can be eliminated out of hand)

spamandham

I suppose that's one way of looking at it. My cynicism is a result of:

a) Unique methods invented just for Biblical analysis

b) About a million different Jesus'es that result from this invalid approach

aa5874

One cannot simply IGNORE the data that describes Jesus as a MYTH in order to claim Jesus was a figure of history. The fictional/mythical details are an intergral part of the Jesus character/description.

The Jesus stories are CAST in stone.

Homer's Achilles is cast in stone, too.

No one can dare IGNORE that it is claimed Homer's Achilles was the offspring of a sea-goddess.

Of course, it can be deduced that certain information about Jesus is fictional or mythical. There are other entities that are considered fictional/mythical that are described similar to Jesus of the NT.

The following pieces of information are fictional/mythical.

1. Jesus was the offspring of a Ghost of God.

2. Jesus was tempted by the devil on the pinnacle of the Temple.

3. Jesus cursed a tree and it died from the root.

4. Jesus walked on water.

5. Jesus healed incurable diseases with saliva.

6. Jesus' transfiguration.

7. The resurrection of Jesus.

8. The ascension of Jesus.

Jesus appears to be an invention primarily using Hebrew Scripture, the Septuagint, Josephus and Roman Greek mythology.

jgoodguy

My cynicism is also from a and b.