Evidence for Jesus

[HansMustermann]

I'm not sure some people would even change the definition.

E.g., since we're talking about real cities, there still is no evidence of a Bethlehem in Judaea at all. (There is one in Galilee though.) And if there were one where it's expected to be, then it couldn't be more than an insignificant village, rather than some place where you could call a million people for a census.

Not only we don't have evidence for it being there, but we actually have evidence that there wasn't one there. Sometimes absence of evidence is evidence of absence, if what is absent would be pretty much mandatory. In this case for example we know an aqueduct passed through that point, yet we find no trace of the mandatory water tower and reservoir to supply a city.

Yet you don't see people throwing the whole thing out the window because a city is fake, do you? The whole handwaving about real cities vs fake cities is a bit fake, when actually even a fake one makes no difference.

ETA: But even without the census in Bethlehem, there are literally tens of things which are clearly fake and never happened in the gospels, but you don't see people going "it has a fake element, therefore we can't trust it." The whole argument that if there was something fake you could throw it away, but if it isn't then you don't, is a bit nonsensical as long as nobody does the first part anyway. There's always that trying to salvage the rest. We're at a point where about 90% of the story has no reason to be taken seriously, and yet people cling to that incredibly shrinking Son Of Man and insist that yeah, but the parts you didn't check are still true.

I can't even imagine at this point what would it take for the story to be false.

 

[I Ratant]

30 seconds with Google...
http://www.rkollp.com/attorneys-Daniel-Stein-Bio.html
.
As to the theme of the OP, with all the contradictions and errors and impossibilities that the original document contains, which clearly demonstrate flights of fancy, expecting the one of these about the supernatural made flesh to be anything else than fiction is naive squared!

 

[Brainache]

I'm learning here, too.
Could you show us why those ideas are unique to that time and place and need a Preacher/HJ?

Not really. That would take several books worth of writing about socio-economics in Roman client states in the first century and their interaction with traditional Jewish beliefs about God and his relationship to the land of Israel. It would require explaining the various ways people dealt with the Romans as Occupiers and the Jewish Authorities who were collaborating with them.

If you are really interested in reading all about this idea, John Dominic Crossan is my source for this stuff. He has a few books about it where he argues for a Jewish Peasant Jesus. I don't agree with everything he says (I don't believe in God, for a start.), but he makes a good case for his version of Jesus.

The short version is that this idea of "God's Kingdom" is a Peasant's ideal. Specifically a Jewish Peasant raised on the idea that the land belongs to "God", not men. Maybe this idea isn't unique to that time and place, but the version of it under discussion now is the one that came from there.

In God's kingdom, money doesn't matter because you can't buy stuff from God. Birds and flowers don't need money or jobs... etc. That whole "Render unto Ceasar" thing was about "Ceasar wants money? OK he can have money, I don't want money anyway. I get food and drink for free because I live in God's Kingdom with all my God Kingdom buddies who share everything..."

As to why it needs a preacher, maybe it doesn't, but it isn't the sort of thing that comes out of a committee. Individual teachers is how these ideas generally arose in those days. In a society like the one we're talking about where the rich were very rich, the poor were destitute and the divide was fairly rigid, bypassing the whole system of Patronage was a radical idea. Radical ideas come from radical Idealists.

I'm going to go all "Hans Musterman" on you and try an analogy: Look at Marxism. It arose in 19th Industrial England, because of socio-economic reasons. It had a few pre-cursors in Utopian Socialism and other thinkers. It may or may not have arisen without Karl Marx, but Marx was the guy who put it all together and whose name we remember.

So maybe Jesus was just part of a tradition, with pre-cursors (John The Baptist etc), competing ideas (Sicarii, armed rebels etc) and contemporary influences (economics, corrupt Temple etc). It makes more sense to me to assume there was a Jewish Peasant Preacher at the heart of it all, than that these specific teachings were invented by an Author in Rome (gMark) who had never been to Judea and who didn't even speak the language.

I'm not sure some people would even change the definition.

E.g., since we're talking about real cities, there still is no evidence of a Bethlehem in Judaea at all. (There is one in Galilee though.) And if there were one where it's expected to be, then it couldn't be more than an insignificant village, rather than some place where you could call a million people for a census.

...

This is the first I've heard of the non-existence of Bethlehem. Do you have a cite for this?

 

[pakeha]

I'm following up on the John Dominic Crossan lead you gave.
I'm limited to on-line sources but even so I'm getting an idea of what direction his studies take him.

 

[AgeGap]

Lets open the evidence bag.
What have we here?
Shroud of Turin When I was younger this was THE physical evidence.
The Bible
Physical evidence linked with Jesus.
Evidence that Pilate orderred the death of Jesus.
Herod and Massacre of the Innocents.

If there was any evidence we would have been shown it. That guy in the Vatican would have shown us.

 

[Spockette]

Could someone provide a short reading list about research into Historical Jesus? Preferably something I could get at a library or on Amazon. I've never done any research on this, didn't know Josephus had his critics, and assumed that there was a consensus on Historical Jesus being real.

 

[Brainache]

Could someone provide a short reading list about research into Historical Jesus? Preferably something I could get at a library or on Amazon. I've never done any research on this, didn't know Josephus had his critics, and assumed that there was a consensus on Historical Jesus being real.

There was something a while ago called "The Jesus Seminar" where all these Scholars got together and agreed that there was a Historical Jesus. Problem is they all seem to disagree about who he was, what he did, and what he said.
This book gives a summary of some of the main positions: The Jesus Debate: Modern Historians Investigate the Life of Christ
http://www.amazon.co.uk/The-Jesus-Debate-Historians-Investigate/dp/0745950132

Book Description
Publication Date: 1 Oct 2000
This absorbing and enlightening account of modern Jesus scholarship provides a critical summary of the contemporary arguments. It focuses particularly on the aims, methods and conclusions of such important contributos as Robert Funk, Marcus Borg, E.P. Sanders, John Meier, and John Dominic Crossan.
...

That would be the HJ side of the argument. On the MJ side the main guy at the moment seems to be Earl Doherty:
http://www.jesuspuzzle.humanists.net/jpadvert.htm

 

[tkmikkelsen]

Hi

I heard an argument from a ex-catholic atheist who proposed that there is no physical evidence of Jesus's existance dated from around the time he was supposed to have been alive.

I was wondering if this is infact the case?

If we are talking strictly physical evidence directly relating to Jesus, then there is none.

The written evidence is fussy at best and the written records of Jesus that we have are copies of copies of copies of hearsay or proven fakes. So that is not very reliable.

Add to that the problem of Jesus being from Nazareth, a town that we have virtual no evidence for existed in the first century. The evidence is very thin for a historical Jesus.

 

[HansMustermann]

I thought we could skip this tangent, but I guess we're doing all of them between you and Hans.

What you're doing is backwards from what I'm trying to explain.

As you add characteristics to a claim. Generally a probability goes down.

What are the odds of a random person having a child? Let's say I know nothing about this person, just someone picked randomly. Pretty high.
What about having a son? Around half what we started with.

What about brown haired son? The probability gets lower.

A brown haired son who plays cricket? Even lower

So you see, each addition to the CLAIM makes that claim statistically less probable. But I'm not talking about adding complexity to claims. I'm talking about how a static claim compares to real world evidence.

To address this too:

Except you just made my point. Adding a city or whatever DOESN'T and CAN'T make the probability of the actual claim go UP.

What is the probability that someone making the claim they're a lawyer is right? Well, P(X). What is the probability they're ALSO Jewish? Well, assuming they're independent, i.e., we're not stereotyping Jews as having more lawyers than the gentiles do, it's P(X)*P(Y). If not, well, it's simply P(X)* P(Y|X). I.e., now it went down. What's the probability that they're also a lawyer? It went down too. What's the probability that they're also in New York? Yep, it went down too.

If the question is whether that guy is really a lawyer, mixing such other elements in the mix can't make the probability go up, because the other probabilities you multiply with MUST be 1.0 or less. There's no way to multiply with a 2.0 probability for the extra elements.

Ditto for Jesus. It's nigh impossible to make the question of a HJ have a higher probability, by also mixing the city or whatever into the question. Best case scenario, you multiply by 1.0.

If a story contains some highly improbable element, like that Daniel Boone is a lawyer in R'lyeh, the probability goes down. But no matter how high a probability you multiply with, you can't push it higher than it was.

Well, not entirely. If you have some truly remarkable circumstances in some place and you know the condition to be true, that can differ from the baseline. E.g., if you knew that Jesus WAS crucified in Jerusalem, and that mostly rabbis got crucified in Jerusalem, that would push up your probability that he was a rabbi. But that still basically means you know that one of the probabilities you multiply with is 1.0, so you can take just the conditional part.

 

[HansMustermann]

This is the first I've heard of the non-existence of Bethlehem. Do you have a cite for this?

Well, there was one, but in Galilee, i.e., the wrong place pretty much. Luke for example tells us that Joseph went into Judea for that census. A Bethlehem in Judea also probably existed at some time, but by the 1st century AD there's almost a complete lack of evidence that it was there (including that we found zero buildings from that time) and it definitely wasn't a large city where a government would call a whole tribe for a census. It was at best a tiny insignificant village, if it existed at all.

For a very condensed source, see for example: http://www.archaeology.org/0511/abstracts/jesus.html

There are more problems there, such as the lack of a water tower from the nearby aqueduct and stuff, but it will have to do. if nothing else, to show that I'm not making it up.

 

[AgeGap]

Some dude on about Biblical Archeology

 

[Recovering Agnostic]

This thread would be much shorter if people understood the Conjunction Fallacy.

 

[Brainache]

Well, there was one, but in Galilee, i.e., the wrong place pretty much. Luke for example tells us that Joseph went into Judea for that census. A Bethlehem in Judea also probably existed at some time, but by the 1st century AD there's almost a complete lack of evidence that it was there (including that we found zero buildings from that time) and it definitely wasn't a large city where a government would call a whole tribe for a census. It was at best a tiny insignificant village, if it existed at all.

For a very condensed source, see for example: http://www.archaeology.org/0511/abstracts/jesus.html

There are more problems there, such as the lack of a water tower from the nearby aqueduct and stuff, but it will have to do. if nothing else, to show that I'm not making it up.

OK, but given that all the Scholars I've read about this say the birth narratives of Matthew and Luke (the ones who mention Bethlehem) were invented to shoehorn Jesus into some old OT prophecy, I don't see how it's relevant to the question of a HJ.

...Add to that the problem of Jesus being from Nazareth, a town that we have virtual no evidence for existed in the first century. The evidence is very thin for a historical Jesus.

Well there's this:

http://israel21c.org/news/house-from-jesus-time-excavated/

For the first time, a residential building from the time of Jesus has been exposed, in the heart of Nazareth.
An archaeological excavation recently conducted by the Israel Antiquities Authority adjacent to the Church of the Annunciation in Nazareth – where the traditional Christmas Mass takes place on December 24 – has uncovered remains of a dwelling that date to the Early Roman period.

According to excavation director Yardenna Alexandre, “The discovery is of the utmost importance since it reveals for the very first time a house from the Jewish village of Nazareth and thereby sheds light on the way of life at the time of Jesus.
...

 

[Last of the Fraggles]

This thread would be much shorter if people understood the Conjunction Fallacy.

No, while it's true. I don't think that's relevant to the discussion we were having. It was actually the thing I was trying to avoid.

I don't think its the argument that originally was being made and it certainly wasn't the counter argument I was trying to make.

 

[eight bits]

This thread would be much shorter if people understood the Conjunction Fallacy.

It might help with some parts, but not with others.

It cannot be more credible that some poster has a son in New York than that the poster has a son, given the same condition for both propositions. However, that wasn't usually the issue in the lengthy debate.

We were comparing the credibility of

"the poster has a son" given "the poster says he has a son"

versus

"the poster says he has a son in New York" given that "the poster says he has a son in New York."

People can find the latter less credible than the former, but not because the poster has a son in New York implies that the poster has a son. The same analysis would apply to a claim to know Daniel, the Jewish New York lawyer.

A Witness who can withstand long cross-examination is often rewarded with increased crebility by fact-finders (juries, for example). The prior probability (say, to cite one popular model of rational belief) of "a few things" is greater than the prior probability of "a few things and a lot more," but the fact-finders' probability of "a few things" given that the witness says "a few things" may easily be less than the fact-finders' probability of "a few things and a lot more" given the witness testified to that, if doing so without contradiction and under stress would be difficult for a liar. It would be nice if the story "hung together," and that is usually a matter of the conjunction not losing prior credibility more rapidly than keeping it all straight impresses.

The main feature of the particular problem that made any of this on-topic is that it is just as easy to insert real-life elements into a work of fiction as to include them in a work of non-fiction. The mere presence of generally known real-life elements in a story (London in Harry Potter books or in a biography of Margaret Thatcher) is plausibly uninformative about the truthfulness of the rest of the narrative.

 

[maximara]

I see these debates on a Historical v Mythical Jesus as two competing hypotheses.

What these hypotheses are trying to explain is the origin of a specific set of beliefs. A set of beliefs that emerged in the first century in Judea.

The core of these beliefs is something called "The Kingdom Of Heaven" - a naive and impractical belief that "we should all just get along" and that the land belongs to God, not men. "Share all your food and money, forgive debts, be nice to each other and don't screw around"...If people everywhere start acting like this, then "The Kingdom Of Heaven" has arrived here on Earth. We don't have to wait for some distant future when justice will be done, we can have it here and now.

The HJ Hypothesis, AFAICT is that this idea was proposed by a particular Jewish Peasant Preacher called Jesus. HJ didn't do miracles or much of anything else that the gospels say he did, because those gospels were written a long way away by people who never met him. The HJ hypothesis assumes that the Romans didn't like this "Kingdom of Heaven" idea and nailed the Preacher to a post. That's it. No "Son of God", no walking on water, no raising the dead or turning water into wine, those are all just later Theological metaphors - Bells and Whistles demanded by the marketplace of Messiahs.

Any MJ hypothesis (there are several) needs to account for the emergence of this "Kingdom Of Heaven" idea without a particular preacher espousing it. It is all very well to talk about other ancient mythical beings like Mithras or Hercules, but don't forget that Jesus was associated with real people from their recent past like John The Baptist, Ciaphas and Pilate. (yeah yeah, Sherlock Holmes was associated with Queen Victoria and Scotland Yard, I get it) It still leaves the question of where "Kingdom Of Heaven" came from.

We know of at least one sect of ancient Jews who practiced a form of communal sharing of property, who performed rituals with wine and bread at every meal, who believed in an imminent apocalypse and a Heaven for the righteous and Hell for the sinners- the Dead Sea Scrolls community, but even those DSS religious nutjobs had a flesh and blood Teacher, not some ethereal "Zeitgeist" inspiration.

Until the MJ hypothesis can account for the ideas without the Preacher, I think it is inferior to the HJ hypothesis. But then again, I'm still learning about this subject, so my position is open to change based on further information...

The problem with this view are the parts of the MJ hypothesis in the Mead-Ellegård mold where this Preacher was mythical in the legendary sense of the word and actually lived c100 BCE.

Wells Jesus Legend (1996) and Jesus Myth (1999) which accept such a Preacher for the theorized Q gospel but that Paul's Jesus was about a mythical (legendary) Jesus about a century earlier have been called "Mythical Jesus" works by many scholars and armchair researchers alike.

According to Wells to make the Q Jesus fit Paul's account the entire trial and crucifixion fictions were created and the actual Q Jesus died in obscurity of old age.


The problem is too many people do not understand the proper definition of myth and think it means a made up story. In reality it more properly means a traditional story whose historical accuracy can range from close to nonexistent.

Here are some modern myths that at one time were presented as history:

Columbus sailed west to prove the Earth was round.

Medieval people believed the world was flat.

Thomas Edison invented the first electric light.

George Armstrong Custer was a brave soldier trying (and failing) to save his men and the Indians from the machinations of greedy corporations and politicians. (They Died with Their Boots On (1941))

George Armstrong Custer was a narcissistic egotistical maniac who leads his men to certain doom because he is essentially a military idiot (Little Big Man (1970))

The Tanaka Memorial was a genuine Japanese strategic planning document for world conquest. (Capra's Why We Fight Series 1942-45; Know Your Enemy-Japan 1945)

These are all myths once believed to be true and you can see with these example that were was at least the seed of truth behind every one of them.

 

[Cavemonster]

Except you just made my point. Adding a city or whatever DOESN'T and CAN'T make the probability of the actual claim go UP.

Absolutely, that's why I'm not talking about adding anything.

I think a lot of this thread is bogged down with the example of the city, which is a shame because it's clearly the weakest of the examples I dashed off at the beginning of this thread.

It would be a much better application of the principle of charity, and probably a little less apt to fall into (at least some of these particular) misunderstandings and tangents, if we were to discuss the prevalence of proclaimed messiahs or of crucifiction.

 

[pakeha]

I'm following up on the John Dominic Crossan lead you gave.
I'm limited to on-line sources but even so I'm getting an idea of what direction his studies take him.

Just a quick question, Brainache, please.
From what I can gather, Crossan's line of thought actually denies the divinity of Jesus.
Is that right or have I missed something?
As I mentioned, I'm limited to online reading here, so any sources to clear up any mistake of mine must have on-line sourcing.
Thanks!

...The problem is too many people do not understand the proper definition of myth and think it means a made up story. In reality it more properly means a traditional story whose historical accuracy can range from close to nonexistent. ...

Good point!

 

[eight bits]

Absolutely, that's why I'm not talking about adding anything.

You are, sort of. "Adding" elements may be a rough way to phrase it, but much of the usefulness of modern accounts of rational belief is that it makes possible to discuss hypothetically the influence of specific pieces of a body of evidence.

Already, we have put this capability to good use. We can see that the appearance of real place names isn't directly helping assess the truth of the story. It does, however, help identify the story's genre. It is either history or historical fiction, for example, or possibly an early version of "magical realism."

Luke is the only Gospel that explains its purpose and tells where its version of the story comes from. John addresses the point, but without any clarity or much detail. The other two canonical Gospels are silent. We also get a little bit of the Jesus story from Paul, and he spins his source (personal visionary experience, but probably also from exposure to a "Jerusalem church" which he says that he opposed as a cop, and doesn't get along with very well as a preacher, either.)

Luke is history, then, in the sense that it is offering an orderly hypothesis about real events, based on pre-existing stories about those events which are accessible to the author. On its face, an orderly hypothesis is not the same as an accurate hypothesis. It is unsurprising, then, that a work of this kind would have historically false elements, like an ecumenical census taken by moving the whole population around the ecumen. If such a story was in circulation, however, and its inclusion made the narrative more orderly, in the author's opinion, then by the stated objectives of the author, it would be included in his narrative.

In terms of the discussion to date, then, we are not assessing the moral equivalent of the credibility of

The poster has a son in New York given that the poster says he has a son in New York

but rather something more like the credibility of

The poster has a son given that the poster says he had a son and says that last he heard, that son was living in New York, although it might have been York, Maine according to his other informants.

 

[Last of the Fraggles]

Absolutely, that's why I'm not talking about adding anything.

I think a lot of this thread is bogged down with the example of the city, which is a shame because it's clearly the weakest of the examples I dashed off at the beginning of this thread.

It would be a much better application of the principle of charity, and probably a little less apt to fall into (at least some of these particular) misunderstandings and tangents, if we were to discuss the prevalence of proclaimed messiahs or of crucifiction.

But the same logic holds as for the city, I think. The city example is just much clearer and that's why we have jumped on it.

If these things were prevalent at the time and everyone knew about them then its not in the least bit unlikely that a made-up story would feature them.

I could easily invent a story about a catholic priest who went to the electric chair or a Mormon minister who was hit by a bus. The prevalence of all of these things doesn't lead me to think the stories are more likely to be true.