aa5874

Well, then there is evidence that the Pauline writer may have been mistaken or mis-led. Another writer called Papias claimed that James the apostle was the son of an aunt of the supposed Jesus.

And then, there is evidence that Jesus was the child of the Holy Ghost.

We have more evidence that he walked on water, transfigured, was raised from the dead and ascended through the clouds.

There is more evidence.

There is evidence that Jews would only worship a God, not a man. There is evidence Jews worsiped Jesus as a God. A Pauline writer claimed he was not the apostle of a man but of Jesus Christ who was raised from the dead.

The abundance of evidence points to the very high probabilty that Jesus known, believed or was intended to be a God.

There is more evidence that Jesus was the Creator and equal to God but I think we all realise by now that the abundance of EVIDENCE OVERWHELMINGLY support theory that Jesus was a MYTH.

Toto

What if we call it "questionable evidence?" or "evidence that would not be admissible in a court of law?"

What's with this off the wall hyperbole? If it's not good evidence, there's no need to destroy it. Instead, it becomes evidence of scraping the bottom of the barrel for anything that can be used to argue for a historical Jesus. Which is "evidence" of how weak the case for a HJ really is.

Chaucer

Nothing of what you say gainsays that Galatians remains a form of evidence.

Chaucer

Toto

Well, I see that Professor McGrath is browsing this thread. I hope he doesn't take some of these comments as typical of the discussion here.

Zaphod

You really are losing it, Chaucer. It was not I who discussed Galatians with you.

Now, perhaps I was not consistent enough about the word "evidence", for on only two or three occasions did I say "artifactual evidence", and I assumed you would remember that. Are you arguing that reliable artifactual evidence exists?

And I never meant to imply that a statement in the NT is not evidence. It's just not necessarily very productive evidence, is it, to offer as evidence for the HJ the very source that proposes him.

Sort of like using The Sorcerer's Stone as a proof source for the historical Harry Potter. (Except, of course, we know who wrote the Sorcerer's Stone, and when it was published, and we have the original first edition, and millions of copies, and the living author available for commentary, photos of the publishing house etc - you know, artifacts. Seems a perfectly fine proof source for the mythical Harry Potter, though.):grin:

Same for Josephus, et al. Certainly it is evidence, just not very persuasive. Pity.

And that is all I am saying. That without any good evidence, along with a distinct lack of contemporary artifactual materials, the HJ can not be assumed. And I think that is a point of enormous importance. It is high time that the world received the honest appraisal of historians that it can not be said at this time whether Jesus actually existed.

maryhelena

Update re the debate


Even an atheist finds an historical Jesus in his own image

2010/02/24 by neilgodfrey

http://vridar.wordpress.com/2010/02/...his-own-image/

Toto

From the title, I wondered if this would be about Elton John deciding that Jesus was a wise, gay pop star. But I don' know if Elton John is an atheist or not.

gurugeorge

The evidence is a story about a fantastic, mythical being.

To claim that the story has a real person at the root of it is an interpretation. But it is one interpretation among many.

Stories about mythical, fantastic entities can have any number of interpretations: they may be sheer literature; myths deliberately created to make philosophical, cosmological or political "points"; fabrications intended to deceive; jokes or farces; lucubrations about entities seen in visionary experience; confabulations and confusions about real events (in which the historical core is so distant from the story it becomes meaningless to talk about a "historical X"); or even myths that "just growed" in the manner of "urban myths".

Any of these positions needs further evidence to back them up.

The kind of further evidence that would be needed to back up a historical Jesus would be, for example, mention of such a person by independent witnesses of the time, inscriptions, archaeological evidence, etc.

Until such evidence turns up, the historical Jesus is still merely a hypothesis to explain the existence of the texts and the religion, it is not something directly evidenced by the texts (which directly evidence a mythical being).

The a-historical interpretations also need further evidence, but in the nature of things that evidence needn't be external to the texts themselves (because the existence of no special, extra entity, such as a particular human being, is being claimed). It can be purely internal - hermeneutic, philological, etc., in which a logical argument about the content of the text can itself be evidence of the truth or falsity of a hypothesis (e.g. internal evidence might turn up an acrostic - did they have acrostics in Greek? - or a bit of code that shows beyond reasonable doubt that the whole thing was a joke). That's not to say external evidence wouldn't also be helpful to the a-historical arguments, but it's not bound up with their very logic, in the way that "there was a real human being at the root of this myth" is.

The trouble with historicists is that they use purely internal evidence (for it is admitted on all hands that, to date, there is little external evidence of a historical Jesus, except the doubtful Josephus passages) to try and shore up a hypothesis that requires external evidence.

Toto

the discussion of historiography has been split off here

andrewcriddle

Do we have real evidence that the Temple of Jupiter in Hadrian's Aelia Capitolina stood on the site of the Jewish Temple ?

The only evidence seems to be Cassius_Dio epitome of book 69 This has been questioned both on grounds of the ambiguity of the Greek (See Bar Kokhba War Reconsidered) and on the basis of concerns that the Christian epitomist has distorted the original. (See The Temple Mount)

If there was a temple to Jupiter on the Temple Mount then Constantine must have demolished it. But we have no evidence that this happened.

Andrew Criddle