Literary proof is, but also doesn’t exist for Jesus Christ.
There’s a few mentions of just a “Jesus” but its not like no one else was named Jesus, and those don’t really make any mention of him being remarkable in any way.
AFAIK most historians/scholars agree that Jesus was a real person (even if a lot of the Bible’s claims about what he did are not true). But I’m not a historian. What are you basing your opinion on?
So we have to differentiate between what is the actual Gospel and life of Jesus and what the more creative parts of the churches invented on top of it over time.
Jesus said unto them, Verily, verily, I say unto you, Before Abraham was, I am. John 8:58
Which is from one of the original 4 gospels. Apparently there’s evidence of it being written as early as 70AD. There’s a couple other quotes I found in a link some other person linked in this thread but this one seems most direct.
I think this is a terminological confusion. The original Gospel as in the life and teaching of Jesus, that got lost as it wasn’t documented in his lifetime.
The four gospels that made the choice are as you said collections written later. And there were many more Gospels that the early church decided not to put into the bible. On top of that there is the issue how those gospels got translated multiple times and each translation inadvertently adds a layer of interpretation.
Sure, but that doesn’t change the fact that there was (most likely) an actual historical person who is the origin of these stories, i.e. Jesus. He’s probably not really as fantastical as the Bible would have you believe, but he did exist, as opposed to being just an entirely fictional character.
There exists documented proof in many bits of literature from around 200 BCE to around 100 CE of numerous different figures in what is called ‘Jewish Apocalypticism’, basically a small in number but persistent phenomenon of Jews in and around what was for most of that time the Roman province of Palestine, preaching that the end would come, that God or a Messiah would return or arise and basically liberate the region and install a Godly Kingdom, usually after or as part of other fantastical events.
Jesus was one of many of these Jewish Apocalypticists. Much like the rest of the movement’s key figures, they were wrong, and their lives were greatly exaggerated in either their writings or writings about them or inspired by them.
This seems to be the (extremely condensed) opinion of most Biblical Scholars.
There are a very small number of modern Biblical Scholars that are ‘Mythicists’ of some kind, who believe that Jesus was completely fictional and wholly invented by certain people or groups.
This is an unpopular view amongst scholars and historians of that time and region, as most believe it more plausible that Jesus was just another example of a radical Jewish Apocalyptic preacher, which again, was fairly common for roughly 300 years in that region.
Its like how if you go to a big city theres always that one guy with a megaphone preaching imminent doom. 99% of people think this is silly and ignore them, but tons of people know that people like them exist and do have small followings.
I’ve heard theories that key people probably had hallucinations of Jesus a few days after he was killed, which was the big thing that helped launch him from yet-another-apocalyptic-preacher to (eventually) God himself. I don’t know how well these are accepted, though.
This stems from the fact that, so far, the earliest dated written fragments we have from what is now the New Testament are some of the writings of Paul.
Paul was not one of the Apostles EDIT: Disciples, and it seems possible that, after persecuting earlier, existing Christians, he could have basically had a stress induced psychotic break and hallucinated the vision of Jesus that he had, then converted.
Thing is though, Christians would have to … you know exist and already be a real thing first, for that to make sense.
It does explain why Paul does not mention some very key elements of the narrative of the Gospels: He just had not actually read about or heard of those parts yet.
This creates some theological problems down the line, and some of those problems were ‘remedied’ by what a good deal of scholars and historians believe to be forgeries… chapters of the Bible that modern Christians attribute to Paul, but do not seem to actually have been written by Paul.
It is also possible to some of the empty tomb accounts in some of the Gospels as similar kinds of trauma induced hallucinations.
Mark famously originally just ends with an empty tomb, and nobody said anything about this because they were scared… and then the last bit of verses giving Mark a more satisfying ending have been shown to be added … decades later.
The explanation I heard was that it was likely Mary and Peter hallucinated Jesus only a few days after he died. That’s a very common timeframe for when people hallucinate seeing dead loved ones, and the early descriptions in Bible match the flavor of dead loved-one hallucinations people typically have, with the figure assuring the person everything will be all right and whatnot. Other descriptions (like Jesus appearing to all twelve disciples or crowds of people) seem to have been written later more as persuasive arguments, with doubting Tomas acting as the stand-in for the skeptical listener. This is all from “How Jesus Became God” and I have no idea how mainstream or fringe the author’s views are.
I think it is more likely that they refer to the minimum witnesses argument put firth by a youtuber Paulogia. He has done a lot to popularize it as a response to the criticism that sceptics have no singular explanation for the proposed evidence of Jesus provided by the spread of christianity and the accounts of early cristians.
I thought Paulogia’s minimum witnesses argument is basically that Paul could have hallucinated, and that those who witnessed an empty tomb basically did see an empty tomb, but circumstantial confusion led them to misinterpret what they saw?
Aah okay, that makes sense. Paulogia does however put forward at least one more person having an experience, possibly due to a grief hallucination. If I remember correctly he suggested Peter being the one to have it.
I also don’t remember him ever suggesting that the empty tomb is an actual fact in need of explanation. I think he sees it as likely that Jesus would have been unceremoniously put in a mass- or ditch grave as was common for crucifixion victims. The tomb would then be a detail added on later by other christians, likely through narrative evolution.
I may misremember some of it though, so maybe I should go back and rewatch as well.
I have a pet peeve about this phrase. A) yes there is. B) that’s not the standard, e.g. it would be incorrect to say there’s no evidence aliens abduct and probe people: there are eyewitness accounts
I don’t believe that, and since it’s impossible to show evidence something doesn’t exist, the people claiming evidence Jesus existed is gonna have to do some linking…
that’s not the standard
You mean evidence?
Evidence isn’t the standard for things existing?
What exactly is the standard in your mind for whether a historical figure existed?
What exactly is the standard in your mind for whether a historical figure existed?
Hard evidence has never been the standard for proof that a historical figure existed. Corroborating records are. It’s great if you can find some hard evidence, but if that was the standard then most people in history wouldn’t have any historical proof of their existence. And even when there is a corpse, we still rely on burial records to be certain that the corpse is who we think it is. Or if there are letters, we can’t confirm they were written by the same person we think they were.
Like a third of the bible as well as several contemporary documents all point to the existence of a guy named something like Joshua (which we now translate as Jesus) who traveled around Palestine preaching and was crucified in around 33AD. There are plenty of historical figures who we mostly agree existed despite having approximately the same amount of proof as for Jesus.
There’s a Jesus that got crucified, but no mention about him being able to perform miracles
Obviously miracles aren’t real. I wasn’t claiming otherwise. We’re talking about whether or not the person Jesus existed, not if magic is real.
It sounds like we agree
I don’t think any of it was written till decades after he supposedly died tho…
Okay but it was written by people who claim they were there and met him personally.
To borrow your asinine LOTR analogy, it is more like you are claiming Thorinn Oakenshield never existed simply because Bilbo only wrote “There and Back Again” after he got home from memory.
A bunch of the books in the new testament are letters written by Jesus’s followers. We can’t prove whether they really are that, but they all agree that a dude named Jesus existed. If a bunch of people all wrote about a guy they knew, and most of the details match, that guy probably was real.
Like, there’s lots of information about Bilbo Baggins in Lotr, that doesn’t mean it was written in the third age of Middle Earth homie
The conceit of the LOTR appendices is that Lord of the Rings, as published in English, is really just the Red Book that Bilbo writes at the end. Dr. Tolkien merely found the manuscript somewhere and has graciously translated it from Third Age common language into English for the benefit of us modern people.
Right. I think we’re in agreement. There was a historical Diarmait. There was a historical Jesus. We know this from textual sources dated a little later than the historical figures.
His life was written about while it happened in the Irish Annals…
We have no Irish texts as old as Diarmait’s reign. CELT date the Orgguin trí mac Diarmata Mic Cerbaill “Created: Possibly in the Old Irish period. Date range: 700–900?” So we rely on things written 100+ years after the historical figure. And that’s referring to when it was originally written; it’s know from later transcriptions; the oldest physical Irish manuscript we have (Lebor na hUidre) is around 1100. So how do we know there was a historical Diarmait?
In the case of Yeshu the Nazarene, it’s similar, though some texts are a little nearer his historical period than in Diarmait’s case.
several contemporary documents all point to the existence of a guy named something like Joshua
IIRC, there’s really only a single mention of a possible link to someone of this name that was crucified at the supposed time, and that single mention happened at least 50 (maybe 100?) years later, and there’s evidence that this passage was added even later.
So I didn’t think it’s true that there are “several contemporary documents” like you claimed…
Of course not. There are millions of examples of false claims for which there is more than zero evidence. e.g. I can claim I know which stocks will rise tomorrow, and point to various data of times I’ve been right. You can’t correctly say “There is zero evidence Frightful Hobgoblin is prescient about stock movements”.
There often exists evidence of two mutually incompatible propositions. This is basics.
If you want to research the historicity of Jesus it’s easily done. If you want to argue on the internet… you know what they say about that.
I will say that while evidence existing isn’t definitive proof, the total lack of evidence would be convincing (in the other direction). That said, evidence does exist in this case, so
If no evidence whatsoever for a claim exists, then there is no reason to favor that claim. This is an effectively rare situation, and basically only applies to things someone has made up whole cloth just now.
Likewise, the existence of some evidence is not necessarily definitive “proof” of a claim, merely enough of a reason to consider it further (such as considering alternative explanations or how well said evidence matches what we might expect)
In this case, there is evidence that somebody named Jesus may have existed, and however ideal that evidence may or may not be, it is about the amount of evidence we would expect to find of any given figure from his time.
Quality of the evidence matters. I’m personally not a historical expert on the topic and in such situations, I’m inclined to believe whatever the people who are experts say - and as far as I gather, most experts are in the “Jesus was a real historical person”-camp.
I agree with you that Jesus wasn’t God, who doesn’t exist, and that there were no miracles, which are impossible. However, this is not the same thing as saying that there’s no evidence for the existence of Jesus, the Jewish apocalyptic preacher.
The earliest documents about Jesus, such as the Pauline Epistles, were written by people who knew people who knew him. In a mostly illiterate society 2,000 years ago, this is about as good as evidence gets. It’s also the exact same kind of evidence as a journalist or researcher writing an account based on interviews with people. This was how, e.g, Herodotus wrote his histories. When Herodotus says ‘A guy rode a dolphin once’ we dismiss that. But we don’t say ‘The people in the Histories didn’t exist, except those for whom there’s physical evidence, which is about three of them, not including the author’. We do much the same with Jesus and the miracles.
If the Apostles had wanted, for some reason, to make up a guy, that would have been risky. Other people would have just said, ‘That guy didn’t exist’. If they had anyway decided to make up a guy, they’d have invented someone who actually fulfilled the Jewish propehcies of the Messiah, instead of inventing Jesus, who obviously didn’t. This suggests they didn’t invent him, which strengthens the plausibility of the evidence we do have.
A third way of looking at this is to ask if there are any comparable figures, religious founders from the historic era, who we now think were wholly made up in the way you’re suggesting. But there aren’t. The Buddha, Confucius, Mohammed, Zoroaster - they all certainly existed. Indeed, I can’t think of any figures form the time period who were actually imaginary.
Personally, I think it’s most likely that he’s composed of many people. It’s a bunch of stories which all got attributed as one person, which isn’t uncommon. Personally, though I’m far from an expert, I think there wasn’t a singular Jesus figure who actually existed, but rather a story of a figure named Jesus that rose from stories about other events.
Like you said, it’s almost certain that something was happening around that time. In fact, there are many more Messiahs who were mostly forgotten. I just think it’s most likely that people told stories and those stories all merged together into another larger story, which then became the story of Jesus.
It’s certainly possible that sayings of other people were later attributed to him, but to really make this case you’d need to have quotations that were attributed to multiple sources, including him, if you see what I mean. Absent that, it could be true, but there’s no particular reason to believe it.
There are enough specific biographical details about Jesus of Nazareth to make it likely that there’s a specific, real central figure. For example, the fact that he was from Nazareth was a problem for his early followers (it didn’t match the Messianic prophecies), which is why they invented the odd story of the census, so that they could claim he’d been born in Bethlehem, the hometown of King David, from whom Jesus was supposedly descended. That seems unlikely to have happened if there hadn’t been a real, central historical figure.
Also, none of the early non-Christian sources claim he wasn’t real or that he was a composite, which they surely would have done if there was any doubt on the matter.
Its easy to put bones together and say that it existed but there’s no way to guarantee “these are certified bones of Jim the stegosaurus, religious figure”
That’s because there weren’t multiple people around to write down what they saw. You’re confusing paleontology and history. They have very different standards for proof.
There are tons of historical figures for whom we have no physical evidence. But we have tons of written evidence from people who all experienced those people.
The Egyptians also mummified their dead, preserving the corpses into the modern era. “Older” ≠ “more evidence”
We have loads more records from the Romans than from the Norse for example, even though the Norse came later, because the Norse didn’t keep as many records as the Romans.
That’s prehistory. Everything we know about history comes from written accounts. Historians study written documents and argue whether or not the available evidence makes it more likely that something (or someone) was real or fiction.
Most historians agree that there was a Jewish man named Jesus (yehoshua), who preached in Judea and the Galilee in the early first century, who gained followers and was crucified by Rome. There are also historians who examine the same evidence and conclude it is more likely that no such person existed, because that’s how academia works.
You won’t find fossilized Jesus, he apparently got resurrected and became wine & cookies, so some people started eating him on Sundays. And he doesn’t want us to say fuck, or shit, or do it in the butt. But that’s not really related to the question.
The point is that you are asking the wrong question sort of. If we only accepted physical remnants of someone or their life to prove they exist, Jesus wouldn’t be the only one we would have to throw out.
Not to say I know how to prove stuff historically, it does sort of seem like magic sometimes. If we found out today that carbon dating was off by a magnitude I would not be shocked, so that’s all the faith I have in it due to my bad understanding of it.
Archaeology in good at giving us clues about the living thing. References to people existing is almost purely based on text people wrote. The proof would be someone writing down “Chrestos, popular among the poor was crucified for his crimes for spreading heresy” as a contemporary. But since the earliest reference we have is a century after his death it’s not necessarily accurate or true.
No. But physical proof is not the standard we use for determining someone’s historical existence.
Literary proof is, but also doesn’t exist for Jesus Christ.
There’s a few mentions of just a “Jesus” but its not like no one else was named Jesus, and those don’t really make any mention of him being remarkable in any way.
There’s just no evidence
AFAIK most historians/scholars agree that Jesus was a real person (even if a lot of the Bible’s claims about what he did are not true). But I’m not a historian. What are you basing your opinion on?
Exactly this. The person did exist. There’s proof of that. It wasn’t the son of god and didn’t perform miracles, but he was real nonetheless.
Important notion that Jesus never claimed to be the son of god and that entire line of thinking was established some four hundred years after.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Council_of_Nicaea
So we have to differentiate between what is the actual Gospel and life of Jesus and what the more creative parts of the churches invented on top of it over time.
Jesus said unto them, Verily, verily, I say unto you, Before Abraham was, I am. John 8:58
Which is from one of the original 4 gospels. Apparently there’s evidence of it being written as early as 70AD. There’s a couple other quotes I found in a link some other person linked in this thread but this one seems most direct.
I think this is a terminological confusion. The original Gospel as in the life and teaching of Jesus, that got lost as it wasn’t documented in his lifetime.
The four gospels that made the choice are as you said collections written later. And there were many more Gospels that the early church decided not to put into the bible. On top of that there is the issue how those gospels got translated multiple times and each translation inadvertently adds a layer of interpretation.
Ah, okay. But then we can’t really make a claim either way, can we? We don’t really know who he was or who he claimed to be.
Sure, but that doesn’t change the fact that there was (most likely) an actual historical person who is the origin of these stories, i.e. Jesus. He’s probably not really as fantastical as the Bible would have you believe, but he did exist, as opposed to being just an entirely fictional character.
There exists documented proof in many bits of literature from around 200 BCE to around 100 CE of numerous different figures in what is called ‘Jewish Apocalypticism’, basically a small in number but persistent phenomenon of Jews in and around what was for most of that time the Roman province of Palestine, preaching that the end would come, that God or a Messiah would return or arise and basically liberate the region and install a Godly Kingdom, usually after or as part of other fantastical events.
Jesus was one of many of these Jewish Apocalypticists. Much like the rest of the movement’s key figures, they were wrong, and their lives were greatly exaggerated in either their writings or writings about them or inspired by them.
This seems to be the (extremely condensed) opinion of most Biblical Scholars.
There are a very small number of modern Biblical Scholars that are ‘Mythicists’ of some kind, who believe that Jesus was completely fictional and wholly invented by certain people or groups.
This is an unpopular view amongst scholars and historians of that time and region, as most believe it more plausible that Jesus was just another example of a radical Jewish Apocalyptic preacher, which again, was fairly common for roughly 300 years in that region.
Its like how if you go to a big city theres always that one guy with a megaphone preaching imminent doom. 99% of people think this is silly and ignore them, but tons of people know that people like them exist and do have small followings.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=z8j3HvmgpYc
Satans Guide to the Bible for more apocalyptic felt Jesus.
I’ve heard theories that key people probably had hallucinations of Jesus a few days after he was killed, which was the big thing that helped launch him from yet-another-apocalyptic-preacher to (eventually) God himself. I don’t know how well these are accepted, though.
This stems from the fact that, so far, the earliest dated written fragments we have from what is now the New Testament are some of the writings of Paul.
Paul was not one of the
ApostlesEDIT: Disciples, and it seems possible that, after persecuting earlier, existing Christians, he could have basically had a stress induced psychotic break and hallucinated the vision of Jesus that he had, then converted.Thing is though, Christians would have to … you know exist and already be a real thing first, for that to make sense.
It does explain why Paul does not mention some very key elements of the narrative of the Gospels: He just had not actually read about or heard of those parts yet.
This creates some theological problems down the line, and some of those problems were ‘remedied’ by what a good deal of scholars and historians believe to be forgeries… chapters of the Bible that modern Christians attribute to Paul, but do not seem to actually have been written by Paul.
It is also possible to some of the empty tomb accounts in some of the Gospels as similar kinds of trauma induced hallucinations.
Mark famously originally just ends with an empty tomb, and nobody said anything about this because they were scared… and then the last bit of verses giving Mark a more satisfying ending have been shown to be added … decades later.
The explanation I heard was that it was likely Mary and Peter hallucinated Jesus only a few days after he died. That’s a very common timeframe for when people hallucinate seeing dead loved ones, and the early descriptions in Bible match the flavor of dead loved-one hallucinations people typically have, with the figure assuring the person everything will be all right and whatnot. Other descriptions (like Jesus appearing to all twelve disciples or crowds of people) seem to have been written later more as persuasive arguments, with doubting Tomas acting as the stand-in for the skeptical listener. This is all from “How Jesus Became God” and I have no idea how mainstream or fringe the author’s views are.
I think it is more likely that they refer to the minimum witnesses argument put firth by a youtuber Paulogia. He has done a lot to popularize it as a response to the criticism that sceptics have no singular explanation for the proposed evidence of Jesus provided by the spread of christianity and the accounts of early cristians.
I thought Paulogia’s minimum witnesses argument is basically that Paul could have hallucinated, and that those who witnessed an empty tomb basically did see an empty tomb, but circumstantial confusion led them to misinterpret what they saw?
I’ll have to rewatch some of his vids.
Also, hey, Goju Ryu! I trained in Shito Ryu =D
Aah okay, that makes sense. Paulogia does however put forward at least one more person having an experience, possibly due to a grief hallucination. If I remember correctly he suggested Peter being the one to have it.
I also don’t remember him ever suggesting that the empty tomb is an actual fact in need of explanation. I think he sees it as likely that Jesus would have been unceremoniously put in a mass- or ditch grave as was common for crucifixion victims. The tomb would then be a detail added on later by other christians, likely through narrative evolution.
I may misremember some of it though, so maybe I should go back and rewatch as well.
Oh nice! :D
I have a pet peeve about this phrase. A) yes there is. B) that’s not the standard, e.g. it would be incorrect to say there’s no evidence aliens abduct and probe people: there are eyewitness accounts
I don’t believe that, and since it’s impossible to show evidence something doesn’t exist, the people claiming evidence Jesus existed is gonna have to do some linking…
You mean evidence?
Evidence isn’t the standard for things existing?
What exactly is the standard in your mind for whether a historical figure existed?
Hard evidence has never been the standard for proof that a historical figure existed. Corroborating records are. It’s great if you can find some hard evidence, but if that was the standard then most people in history wouldn’t have any historical proof of their existence. And even when there is a corpse, we still rely on burial records to be certain that the corpse is who we think it is. Or if there are letters, we can’t confirm they were written by the same person we think they were.
Like a third of the bible as well as several contemporary documents all point to the existence of a guy named something like Joshua (which we now translate as Jesus) who traveled around Palestine preaching and was crucified in around 33AD. There are plenty of historical figures who we mostly agree existed despite having approximately the same amount of proof as for Jesus.
And there’s not enough to prove that Jesus Christ existed…
There’s a Jesus that got crucified, but no mention about him being able to perform miracles
I don’t think any of it was written till decades after he supposedly died tho…
Like, there’s lots of information about Bilbo Baggins in Lotr, that doesn’t mean it was written in the third age of Middle Earth homie.
Name one and I’ll disporve it.
Obviously miracles aren’t real. I wasn’t claiming otherwise. We’re talking about whether or not the person Jesus existed, not if magic is real.
It sounds like we agree
Okay but it was written by people who claim they were there and met him personally.
To borrow your asinine LOTR analogy, it is more like you are claiming Thorinn Oakenshield never existed simply because Bilbo only wrote “There and Back Again” after he got home from memory.
Not really, and definitely not the 1/3 you were claiming…
Like, where are you getting any of this?
It sounds like what they teach at one of those “bible colleges”
A bunch of the books in the new testament are letters written by Jesus’s followers. We can’t prove whether they really are that, but they all agree that a dude named Jesus existed. If a bunch of people all wrote about a guy they knew, and most of the details match, that guy probably was real.
You just 100% conceded. /thread
There was a Paul that lived in Midwest America
Is that proof he had a big blue ox?
Like, you know the Romans were pretty big fans of crucifying people for pretty much anything?
Like, we have that elusive physical evidence that 6,000 of Sparticus’ followers were crucified…
There’s a pretty good chance at least one of those guys was named Jesus too mate, it was a pretty common name
I do not understand.
Go on then. Show us the evidence.
Not all the texts use that name. Some say Christus or Chrestus, ha-Notzri, Yeshu, ben Stada or ben Pandera.
Says who?
The conceit of the LOTR appendices is that Lord of the Rings, as published in English, is really just the Red Book that Bilbo writes at the end. Dr. Tolkien merely found the manuscript somewhere and has graciously translated it from Third Age common language into English for the benefit of us modern people.
Diarmait mac Cerbaill
Yes.
His life was written about while it happened in the Irish Annals…
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irish_annals
That is contemporary literary evidence of his existence.
Not just some dude named Diarmait existed in Ireland at some point.
Right. I think we’re in agreement. There was a historical Diarmait. There was a historical Jesus. We know this from textual sources dated a little later than the historical figures.
We have no Irish texts as old as Diarmait’s reign. CELT date the Orgguin trí mac Diarmata Mic Cerbaill “Created: Possibly in the Old Irish period. Date range: 700–900?” So we rely on things written 100+ years after the historical figure. And that’s referring to when it was originally written; it’s know from later transcriptions; the oldest physical Irish manuscript we have (Lebor na hUidre) is around 1100. So how do we know there was a historical Diarmait?
In the case of Yeshu the Nazarene, it’s similar, though some texts are a little nearer his historical period than in Diarmait’s case.
IIRC, there’s really only a single mention of a possible link to someone of this name that was crucified at the supposed time, and that single mention happened at least 50 (maybe 100?) years later, and there’s evidence that this passage was added even later.
So I didn’t think it’s true that there are “several contemporary documents” like you claimed…
Of course not. There are millions of examples of false claims for which there is more than zero evidence. e.g. I can claim I know which stocks will rise tomorrow, and point to various data of times I’ve been right. You can’t correctly say “There is zero evidence Frightful Hobgoblin is prescient about stock movements”.
There often exists evidence of two mutually incompatible propositions. This is basics.
If you want to research the historicity of Jesus it’s easily done. If you want to argue on the internet… you know what they say about that.
I will say that while evidence existing isn’t definitive proof, the total lack of evidence would be convincing (in the other direction). That said, evidence does exist in this case, so
Edit: clarity
That’s the opposite of how it should work
Well, no. Perhaps I’ve been misunderstood.
If no evidence whatsoever for a claim exists, then there is no reason to favor that claim. This is an effectively rare situation, and basically only applies to things someone has made up whole cloth just now.
Likewise, the existence of some evidence is not necessarily definitive “proof” of a claim, merely enough of a reason to consider it further (such as considering alternative explanations or how well said evidence matches what we might expect)
In this case, there is evidence that somebody named Jesus may have existed, and however ideal that evidence may or may not be, it is about the amount of evidence we would expect to find of any given figure from his time.
Ah, yeah I must’ve misunderstood. Cheers
Quality of the evidence matters. I’m personally not a historical expert on the topic and in such situations, I’m inclined to believe whatever the people who are experts say - and as far as I gather, most experts are in the “Jesus was a real historical person”-camp.
I agree with you that Jesus wasn’t God, who doesn’t exist, and that there were no miracles, which are impossible. However, this is not the same thing as saying that there’s no evidence for the existence of Jesus, the Jewish apocalyptic preacher.
The earliest documents about Jesus, such as the Pauline Epistles, were written by people who knew people who knew him. In a mostly illiterate society 2,000 years ago, this is about as good as evidence gets. It’s also the exact same kind of evidence as a journalist or researcher writing an account based on interviews with people. This was how, e.g, Herodotus wrote his histories. When Herodotus says ‘A guy rode a dolphin once’ we dismiss that. But we don’t say ‘The people in the Histories didn’t exist, except those for whom there’s physical evidence, which is about three of them, not including the author’. We do much the same with Jesus and the miracles.
If the Apostles had wanted, for some reason, to make up a guy, that would have been risky. Other people would have just said, ‘That guy didn’t exist’. If they had anyway decided to make up a guy, they’d have invented someone who actually fulfilled the Jewish propehcies of the Messiah, instead of inventing Jesus, who obviously didn’t. This suggests they didn’t invent him, which strengthens the plausibility of the evidence we do have.
A third way of looking at this is to ask if there are any comparable figures, religious founders from the historic era, who we now think were wholly made up in the way you’re suggesting. But there aren’t. The Buddha, Confucius, Mohammed, Zoroaster - they all certainly existed. Indeed, I can’t think of any figures form the time period who were actually imaginary.
Personally, I think it’s most likely that he’s composed of many people. It’s a bunch of stories which all got attributed as one person, which isn’t uncommon. Personally, though I’m far from an expert, I think there wasn’t a singular Jesus figure who actually existed, but rather a story of a figure named Jesus that rose from stories about other events.
Like you said, it’s almost certain that something was happening around that time. In fact, there are many more Messiahs who were mostly forgotten. I just think it’s most likely that people told stories and those stories all merged together into another larger story, which then became the story of Jesus.
It’s certainly possible that sayings of other people were later attributed to him, but to really make this case you’d need to have quotations that were attributed to multiple sources, including him, if you see what I mean. Absent that, it could be true, but there’s no particular reason to believe it.
There are enough specific biographical details about Jesus of Nazareth to make it likely that there’s a specific, real central figure. For example, the fact that he was from Nazareth was a problem for his early followers (it didn’t match the Messianic prophecies), which is why they invented the odd story of the census, so that they could claim he’d been born in Bethlehem, the hometown of King David, from whom Jesus was supposedly descended. That seems unlikely to have happened if there hadn’t been a real, central historical figure.
Also, none of the early non-Christian sources claim he wasn’t real or that he was a composite, which they surely would have done if there was any doubt on the matter.
I’m pretty sure without the fossilised bones we would think dinosaurs weren’t a thing
Its easy to put bones together and say that it existed but there’s no way to guarantee “these are certified bones of Jim the stegosaurus, religious figure”
Are you doubting about the existence of our Lord Jim the stegosaurus?
Can I apply, for the Jim Stegosaurus religion?
Bones prove you existed.
But the absence of bones does not mean that you didn’t.
Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence
That’s because there weren’t multiple people around to write down what they saw. You’re confusing paleontology and history. They have very different standards for proof.
There are tons of historical figures for whom we have no physical evidence. But we have tons of written evidence from people who all experienced those people.
History is known by:
Archæological evidence
Oral interviews with eyewitnesses
Texts
Archæogenetics
Historical linguistics
Myth (euhemerism)
Maybe some others I’m forgetting
Dino-history isn’t comparable to tthe literate Roman period.
Yet we have dozens of proof about empires and people BEFORE Jesus. Like the Egyptians
The tone of this comment makes it suddenly seem like you’re not asking a question but trying tp prove a point.
The Egyptians also mummified their dead, preserving the corpses into the modern era. “Older” ≠ “more evidence”
We have loads more records from the Romans than from the Norse for example, even though the Norse came later, because the Norse didn’t keep as many records as the Romans.
There are 20th century figures whose historicity is disputed.
Okay now you made me curious, do you have any particular in mind? Sounds interesting
https://www.artnet.com/artists/pietro-psaier/
NSFW warning, btw
Which Egyptians are you referring to? We have lots of archæological proof of the Judaeans.
People. Not person. There is HUGE difference.
That’s prehistory. Everything we know about history comes from written accounts. Historians study written documents and argue whether or not the available evidence makes it more likely that something (or someone) was real or fiction.
Most historians agree that there was a Jewish man named Jesus (yehoshua), who preached in Judea and the Galilee in the early first century, who gained followers and was crucified by Rome. There are also historians who examine the same evidence and conclude it is more likely that no such person existed, because that’s how academia works.
See also for comparison: Genghis Khan
We don’t have the bones of gengis khan either
Dinosaurs aren’t people.
They are, in accordance with the teachings of Jim the Stegosaurus.
You won’t find fossilized Jesus, he apparently got resurrected and became wine & cookies, so some people started eating him on Sundays. And he doesn’t want us to say fuck, or shit, or do it in the butt. But that’s not really related to the question.
The point is that you are asking the wrong question sort of. If we only accepted physical remnants of someone or their life to prove they exist, Jesus wouldn’t be the only one we would have to throw out.
Not to say I know how to prove stuff historically, it does sort of seem like magic sometimes. If we found out today that carbon dating was off by a magnitude I would not be shocked, so that’s all the faith I have in it due to my bad understanding of it.
Archaeology in good at giving us clues about the living thing. References to people existing is almost purely based on text people wrote. The proof would be someone writing down “Chrestos, popular among the poor was crucified for his crimes for spreading heresy” as a contemporary. But since the earliest reference we have is a century after his death it’s not necessarily accurate or true.