sugarhitman

No. But it does show that He did exist.

sugarhitman

Um, someone provided the Tacitus link in their post and I hit it and there it was. Besides on the sites of those critics you cannot post responses defending the Tacitus statement.


And do you realize how many views this site receives? A great audiance....it has nothing whatsoever to do with taunting.....defending is the correct term.

Minimalist

Xtianity is not a fiction. It is merely based on one.

Ben C Smith

Tacitus wrote about Christ in the Annals, not in the Histories (at least, not that we know; the relevant years are missing in the fragmented Histories).

And what exactly is the force of not given to folklore? Tacitus perpetuates the story that the Jews worshipped an ass in Histories 5.3-4:

Nothing, however, distressed [the Israelites] so much as the scarcity of water, and they had sunk ready to perish in all directions over the plain, when a herd of wild asses was seen to retire from their pasture to a rock shaded by trees. Moses followed them, and, guided by the appearance of a grassy spot, discovered an abundant spring of water. This furnished relief. After a continuous journey for six days, on the seventh they possessed themselves of a country, from which they expelled the inhabitants, and in which they founded a city and a temple. Moses, wishing to secure for the future his authority over the nation, gave them a novel form of worship, opposed to all that is practised by other men. Things sacred with us have no sanctity with them, while they allow what with us is forbidden. In their holy place they have consecrated an image of the animal by whose guidance they found deliverance from their long and thirsty wanderings.

He also describes the arrival of a phoenix to Egypt in Annals 6.28:

During the consulship of Paulus Fabius and Lucius Vitellius, the bird called the phoenix, after a long succession of ages, appeared in Egypt and furnished the most learned men of that country and of Greece with abundant matter for the discussion of the marvelous phenomenon.

[Long, partially critical and partially credulous discussion of the phoenix.]

All this is full of doubt and legendary exaggeration. Still, there is no question that the bird is occasionally seen in Egypt.

Ben.

Sheshonq

How does it do that?

Cesc

I thought the Talmud was speaking about a Jesus ben Pandira, nephew of Jesus ben Perashya, some Sanhedrin guy, who supposedly went to Egypt with his nephew during King Janneus or something around the 80's BC. If Justin Martyr sincerely believed that "Jesus Christ" was that Jesus from the Talmud, then the Gospels would have been pure fiction to him as far as I can see.

Sheshonq

No, it's about your citation of Tacitus, which allows you to fake interest in what skeptics might have to say.

aa5874

[QUOTE=aa5874;5258548] Where does Tacitus mention Yeshua? The word Yeshua is nowhere in the passage at all. Your claim is erroneous. Tacitus never said anything about Yeshua.

Gawen

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tacitus_on_Jesus

Of course, some people are prone to believe even a Roman who believed in Roman Gods that Jesus the Christ ever existed. At any rate, even if Jesus was "real", according to Tacitus, it doesn't prove any of the divinity alleged to Jesus. And this (above citations for Jesus) Tacitus reports flying chariots (Histories, Book 5, v. 13).

Gamera

I'm a Christian. Let me state unequivocally that if God wanted to prove the historicity of Jesus he could have done a better job than an ambiguous disputed passage in Tacitus, a politically motivated historian given to bouts of nostalgia and romanticism.

sugarhitman, why this desire to "prove" the existence of Jesus "empircally." For Christians even if the historicity of Jesus could be "proven" (whatever that means), how would it in any way relate to the real issue for Christians, which is the acceptance of the gospel as a narrative about the transformational power of God's love, a narrative that can never be shown by empirical data but only accepted by faith.