Minimalist

A Yeshua son of Yosef walking around loose is irrelevant. You need one who did all the magic tricks.

That's what they worship...not "the man."


I'm still with the 0% category....and I don't care how its worded.

mountainman

Dear Minimalist and DNAReplicator,

Firstly DNAReplicator thanks for the articulation in the poll. I think that this is perhaps one of the best attempts I have seen to date in BC&H to get hold of the basic sense of the question to address. As a database professional whose business it has been to attempt to reflect the real world in an artifical structure of the database I have been compelled to understand that there is an extemely important issue surrounding the distinction between the two different concepts of a zero percentage and a null percentage.

Additionally, the concept of Historicity (which in one sense summarises this poll) has always been viewed as a positive value. I would like to comment that we need to view the historicity of facts in a fiction not just as a zero value. We need to understand that the value itself could be null, and not zero. There is a very subtle but exceedingly great difference between the two options. If anyone would like me to spell out the difference in greater detail, just ask.

For what it's worth, because the 0% option included the "by faith" qualifier I avoided this option and selected the 0-20% option. My faith if any is placed in the generic ability of human academic thought, in this more enlightened age, to keep an open mind on the question of the issues of the historicity of the Jesus in the canonical new testament literature, and to evaluate the entire business as an exercise in the objective assessment of ancient history from first principles in which we follow the evidence wheresoever it may lead us. Start with the carbon dated Jesus.




Best wishes,


Pete

patcleaver

I think that the gospels are intentional fiction, they are no more historical than Harry Potter. They are intended to tell an interesting story that does not correlate with reality.

The chance that Jesus existed is the same chance that other fictional characters existed. It is probably less then 1%.

CMc

Christianity had a beginning. The stories of the NT were written by several different people over many decades, and by the time Constantine came along, there were enough people buying in to Christianity to make it a viable national religion. This isn't like UFOs or ghosts where you debate the existence. Consider the possible origins. It could have been created as a total work of fiction, but I consider that unlikely because there appears to be so many different authors. To me, the most likely cause is a charismatic religious leader whose devout followers couldn't accept the fact that he was dead after execution by the Romans and developed the myth out of fragments of truth. The myth was passed on orally and enhanced over several decades before it was written down.

thedistillers

It makes very little sense to me to attribute a number to something that is a chimera. The historical Jesus is as much a fantasy as the Christian Jesus.

Whatever claim made about the historical Jesus is speculation... And attributing numbers to speculation is futile. Or maybe someone could explain me concretely what it means to say that it is 55% certain that a historical Jesus existed, as opposed to 70%.

aa5874

Now, you must know how the first Jesus story began before you propose a theory about the probability of the historical Jesus.

Probability is based on some tangible or credible source of information, a belief or leaning towards the idea that Jesus was a figure of history has no real value.

And how could Jesus of the NT be a charismatic leader and was still uknown by Jewish writers like Philo and Josephus.

How could a leader be worshipped by Jews as the son of a God in the 1st century, an unprecedented phenomena, never known to have happened before, a man crucified for blasphemy is worshipped as a God, yet up to 92 CE, Josephus is not aware of such a charismatic leader.


There is no credible record that Jews ever worshipped Jesus, prayed to Jesus, believed anyone named Jesus died for their sins or died to make the Laws obsolete.

youngalexander

Perhaps you might care to consider a (somewhat tongue in cheek) set of probabalistic calculations based upon Bayes' Theorem. concrete probability

If you don't like that, then wait for Carrier's coming book: The Historicity of Jesus which promises to present an expert exposition of the subject.

Elijah

I’ve asked this of someone before and never got an answer. In what work of Philo’s do you think Jesus should have been mentioned?

Josephus has a tampered with mention of Jesus so he can’t be used for or against Jesus’ existence so do you have any other Jewish historians around the time of Jesus that should of mentioned him to support your argument? Shouldn’t there be a bunch?

CMc

There is no way to know how the Jesus story began. That is the point of all the speculation. I never proposed a theory about the probability of a historic Jesus. Before you can calculate probabilities, you must have something to quantify. There is no way to logical way to assign quantities to the Jesus story other than Christianity Began = 100%. The best we can hope for is plausibility.
People are being worshiped as the Son of God in the U.S. today. Do you know who they all are? I only know of two. One just got busted for molesting a minor. There is no reason to think Josephus knew about every little sect in existence in his time.
There are records. Not all of the gospels made it into the NT, yet they all see Jesus as divine. Why would someone fake a gospel and not include it in the NT?

aa5874

But, why do you think Jesus believers were a little sect? The written statements of the authors and church writers claimed Jesus was known all over Judea and ouside the region, even known by Kings, including Herod.

If the written statements of the authors of the NT and the church writers are not true, then there is no other source of information about Jesus and I cannot assume that there was a Jesus sect or assume I know the size of the sect.

It is completely plausible that that there was no sect and that Jesus believers started in a similar fashion to Joseph Smith's Mormonism, where one man writes a story about a fabricated character called Jesus and people just believe the story and hundreds of years later there are millions of believers.