Nailed: Ten Christian Myths that show Jesus never existed

[Belz...]

We have a contemporary's non-apologetic account of James in Ants. 20.

Still not convinced that 20 hasn't been retrofitted. I know I keep coming back with that, but the throwaway nature of the "called Christ" line gives me the impression that someone saw "James" and thought it'd be a good idea to make a connection with Jeebus. I'd think Josephus would tell us who the hell that was that he just mentioned, especially since the other passage is probably a total fabrication.

 

[Belz...]

What I have consistently said is that Jesus is such an important figure now in the 21st century, that the evidence needs to be at least as solid, reliable and convincing as the best evidence that historians produce for figures like Julius Caesar or the early British kings and queens.

That's insane. He wasn't an important figure in his lifetime. Why do you expect a kind of evidence that befits his importance today ? That makes no sense whatsoever.

 

[JaysonR]

Okie dokie, I'll put together a Q thread after Christmas.

 

[Craig B]

... In the Jesus case it has to be particularly good, because (a)Jesus is such an important figure that he must require particularly clear and solid evidence to show that he at least existed at all, and (b)in the Jesus case the evidence needs to overcome the vast negative effect of claimed biblical evidence (which is the only source of any "evidence" for Jesus) which is certainly completely untrue and not genuinely "evidence" at all (except for being negative evidence of obvious and proven untruth and deceit.

I don't think these things are true, that because Jesus is important to believers, then non-believers have to apply extraordinary principles of analysis. Because Jesus is not important to non-believers who accept the evidence as sufficient to indicate a probability that he existed.

It is not accepted by me that the "bible" is a single uniform source of deceit, let alone a proven one. Though it has deceitful passages within it, in all probability. Untruth is not necessarily deceit. Ignorance or delusion can also produce untruth.

 

[Brainache]

Still not convinced that 20 hasn't been retrofitted. I know I keep coming back with that, but the throwaway nature of the "called Christ" line gives me the impression that someone saw "James" and thought it'd be a good idea to make a connection with Jeebus. I'd think Josephus would tell us who the hell that was that he just mentioned, especially since the other passage is probably a total fabrication.

But there is evidence from Early Church writers that Josephus originally contained other stuff that was less complementary to Jesus, but that is now missing.

It looks to me (and professional Scholars) that possibly Eusebius or his gang changed the text deliberately to minimise the influence of James The Just.

These guys thought Josephus should have said Jesus Christ, not his little brother Jimmy Christ.

 

[Foster Zygote]

I would agree that requesting ruler caliber evidence for any mundane citizen of Judea in the 1st c BCE or CE era is a bit odd.

Even high priests have very, very thin evidence of their existence, and our oldest fragment from a piece of the Torah (not counting the very rare DSS cave findings) is from the 1st c BCE...it's 25 lines long...and found in Egypt.

With purest of intentions, IanS, this era is almost impossible to produce hard pieces of evidence for anyone in there, primarily because Judah was burned down and all documents were as well (except a few scattered pieces that survived and some that were hidden in caves).

Most everything that wasn't destroyed was taken with people if they valued it to wherever they fled to.

It would be like asking for proof of someone at a concentration camp in WW2 if the Nazi's did not bother to keep records or had destroyed around 90% of any records made.

Yes, there might have been some record in a Roman provincial administrative office that included the name of Jesus of Nazareth among a list of names of people executed for offenses against Imperial authority. But the odds of such a clerical reference surviving for two millennia is virtually nil. It's very likely that such a record would not have survived the First Jewish Roman war. The point being that, even if Jesus did exist, we wouldn't expect textual references to him to be passed on from scribe to scribe and copied numerous times so that we might have preserved a textual witness from the 2nd or 3rd Centuries, much less an original document. It would be like expecting to find my county library card two thousand years hence.

 

[IanS]

.

We have a contemporary's non-apologetic account of James in Ants. 20.



We have the Mishnah, Tacitus, Pliny, Suetonius and Josephus for the crucifixion. You have to discount all five as a group if you really want to discount these creditably at all and also shew that you're not violating Ockam's Razor in doing so.



As has been pointed out here countless times before: apples and oranges. An itinerant Jewish rabbi is not comparable to a Pharoah or a King.

Stone

If you are citing Josephus, Tacitus and the rest, then it has been explained to you literally 100+ times in these HJ threads, that those authors (a)could not personally have ever known what had happened to Jesus, because they were either not even born at the time of the claimed deviants, and/or certainly could not claim ever to have witnessed anything about Jesus.

At the very best, those authors could only have been repeating hearsay of what they thought had once been said by Christian believers of the day.

And that's apart from the fact that none on those authors are known from anything they wrote anywhere near to the time of Jesus. Tacitus an Josephus for example, are known only from copies written by Christians in the 11th century and later ... ie a whopping and utterly incredible 1000 years after the named authors had died!!

As for apples compared to oranges with kings compared to Jesus - the fact that we do have such evidence for kings, whereas we do NOT have any such evidence for Jesus, hardly helps the case for anyone claiming that there IS evidence of Jesus, does it! It just leaves you with still zero evidence of Jesus (whereas the numerous kings, emperors and pharaohs, do have clear and precise verifiable evidence .... very often hundreds of museums around the world stuffed full of it ... whereas for Jesus, absolutely nothing ... except for the complete contrary of claims of the impossible and proven total fiction).

The bottom lime here, which you cannot accept, even though it’s undeniable, is that there is NO genuine evidence of the biblical Jesus. Whereas there most definitely is plenty of evidence for hundreds of other far less important figures of ancient history.

 

[pakeha]

... I'm getting the impression that however attractive a given method of analysing the gospels may be, at the end of the day, it's just literary analysis.

And why is that "just" or only? Literary analysis has revealed that the author of "Primary Colors" is Joe Klein (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primary_Colors_(novel)). Literary analysis has added a new play to the Shakspeare canon (Edward III). Literary analysis is not pointless woo. It's a discipline like any other, and it can be performed clumsily or adroitly.

Stone

"Primary Colors" and a newly attributed Shakespearean play.
I'm glad to know more about these works, of course.

Literary analysis is a fascinating subject, indeed.
But aren't we discussing how best to winnow historical aspects of the NT from its ghost stories, hagiography and midrash?

Certainly, without textual analysis, I'm not sure what we would be able to say about any text, such as the Jewish Bible (OT) and the NT. I suppose it would be difficult to even describe it as a text in the first place, let alone something with a discernible structure, with various bits that repeat, or are patterned, and so on. It would be a kind of ultimate nihilism in the presence of written culture!

I can see your point of view, especially from a modern lit. perspective.
With the NT, we're entering an entirely different realm from you or I would consider literature.
After all, at the end of the day, how much do you know about the messianic literature of the 2nd Temple period?
More than do I, most likely!

I question whether classic textural analysis has much value in analysing the NT.
I could be very, very wrong here and would be glad of seeing reason to think otherwise.

...Well, please let us know if you come across any clearly professional estimate/review in a scholarly venue of Gentile's analysis?

Oh, don't I wish, Stone.

 

[Foster Zygote]

That's insane. He wasn't an important figure in his lifetime. Why do you expect a kind of evidence that befits his importance today ? That makes no sense whatsoever.

Exactly. Jesus' death barely made a ripple in Judea, much less the Empire as a whole. The only people contemporaneously affected by his execution were sure to have been those among his band of followers.

"Say, do you remember that preacher from the Styx who rode into town last week, the one from Galilee?"

"What, the one with the crazy eyebrows and the awful stink about 'im?"

"No, the one from Nazareth, on the donkey."

"Oh yeah. I heard about that from my cousin. What happened to 'im?"

"Nailed 'im up, they did. Only took a few days. Did 'im along with the stinky one and some other one I hadn't heard about."

"Well, big surprise there. How many does that make this year? Too bad about the stinky one, though. His eyebrows were hilarious."

 

[Stone]

.


certainly could not claim ever to have witnessed anything about Jesus

Josephus was a contemporary of James living in the same city.

Deal with it.

Stone

 

[IanS]

I don't think these things are true, that because Jesus is important to believers, then non-believers have to apply extraordinary principles of analysis. Because Jesus is not important to non-believers who accept the evidence as sufficient to indicate a probability that he existed.

It is not accepted by me that the "bible" is a single uniform source of deceit, let alone a proven one. Though it has deceitful passages within it, in all probability. Untruth is not necessarily deceit. Ignorance or delusion can also produce untruth.

Oh, I think the preaching of Paul and others probably was only from ignorance and delusion. But it's still deceiving the listeners and the converted into believing something which was manifestly (to us now with 21st century education) untrue.

And more importantly, it's still to this day acting as a deceit, i.e. deceiving gullible Christian believers today who think the bible stories must be true ... either literally word-for-word, or even as in this very thread, believing as a matter of incredulity that there must surely have been some basic truth there about a real Jesus ... well that is a huge howler of a mistake - because there certainly does NOT need to be any truth in that biblical writing about anyone named Jesus.

In fact on the contrary, all the evidence that we now have from 21st century education, and particularly from any decent level of scientific education, should alert you to the fact that there is nothing in the biblical stories that is actually evidence of a real Jesus in any sense whatsoever.

On the complete contrary, what is said about Jesus in the bible is manifestly and most certainly NOT true. It is very obviously a superstitious religious fiction, which has clearly been shown to be taken from beliefs ion the OT.

But as I have emphasised at least 40 or 50 times here (literally!) - that is not to say Jesus was impossible. He might have existed. Anyone might have existed. And it certainly seems that there were lots of messianic OT Jewish preachers around Palestine in the 1st century.

But the problem is that the only stories of Jesus (the biblical stories) are most definitely complete and continuous fiction in almost every significant mention they ever make of Jesus. So that much is certainly not true.

And against that, we now know that fictitious stories of very similar religious belief were always told in every one of the many hundreds (if not thousands) of religious sects of that time … from the Christianity of Jesus to all of the various influences of Greek, Persian and Roman gods and deities that are now known to have pervaded belief, custom, education and all manner of life in that region.

 

[Stone]

"Primary Colors" and a newly attributed Shakespearean play.
I'm glad to know more about these works, of course.

Literary analysis is a fascinating subject, indeed.
But aren't we discussing how best to winnow historical aspects of the NT from its ghost stories, hagiography and midrash?

Yes, and literary analysis plays a distinct role there. I hope you haven't already been brainwashed into thinking it's of no account.

Oh, don't I wish, Stone.

Well, if you do find a scholarly professional assessment of Gentile's work in a professional scholarly venue/periodical/web site, please let us know.

By the way, when you found the Gentile analysis, why didn't you link to it for the rest of the posters here?

Thanks,

Stone

 

[jhunter1163]

The bottom lime here, which you cannot accept, even though it’s undeniable, is that there is NO genuine evidence of the biblical Jesus. Whereas there most definitely is plenty of evidence for hundreds of other far less important figures of ancient history.

The historical figures were important then; that's why there's rooms full of evidence of them. Jesus of Nazareth wasn't important then. That's why all he gets is (at best) incidental mention in a couple of histories. "Oh, yeah, they nailed up that Cheez-its of Nazareth or whatever his name was."

 

[tsig]

delete

 

[tsig]

Why would you expect the same quality of evidence would exist for Jesus as for Roman kings and queens, knowing what you know about Christian persecution in that time and place? If you were a Christian in the first century, you didn't advertise that fact if you wanted to live.

Because it's been stated that there is as much evidence for an HJ as there is for Caeser.

 

[JaysonR]

Because it's been stated that there is as much evidence for an HJ as there is for Caeser.

That is completely an error, no such equal quality exists.
A more apt comparison would be Hipocrates, but if Hipocrates were like Edgar Allen Poe in that only people cared after he was dead and hardly knew of him when he was alive.

I would say that it is better than, say, the high priest Joshua/Jesus ben Damneus.

 

[JaysonR]

I can see your point of view, especially from a modern lit. perspective.
With the NT, we're entering an entirely different realm from you or I would consider literature.
After all, at the end of the day, how much do you know about the messianic literature of the 2nd Temple period?
More than do I, most likely!

I question whether classic textural analysis has much value in analysing the NT.
I could be very, very wrong here and would be glad of seeing reason to think otherwise.

It's more kin to forensic textual analysis, or forensic anthropology than modern literature textual analysis; at least, commonly.

 

[IanS]

Why would you expect the same quality of evidence would exist for Jesus as for Roman kings and queens, knowing what you know about Christian persecution in that time and place? If you were a Christian in the first century, you didn't advertise that fact if you wanted to live.

I don't necessarily expect the same amount of credible evidence for Jesus as we have for Caesar. And I already dealt with that specific point in detail. Even a fraction of that sort of evidence would do.

But it is the very opposite of any defence of Jesus to say that the reason you have no evidence is that we should not expect any evidence. That is still a position of you having no evidence for your beliefs.

If you don't have any evidence (and you most certainly do not), then that is a huge problem for anyone claiming as you apparently do, that you nevertheless believe Jesus existed.

 

[Brainache]

Because it's been stated that there is as much evidence for an HJ as there is for Caeser.[sic]

If you think somebody meant that we have Jesus statues, buildings, coins, or books written by Jesus, you were very much mistaken.

 

[Brainache]

I don't necessarily expect the same amount of credible evidence for Jesus as we have for Caesar. And I already dealt with that specific point in detail. Even a fraction of that sort of evidence would do.

But it is the very opposite of any defence of Jesus to say that the reason you have no evidence is that we should not expect any evidence. That is still a position of you having no evidence for your beliefs.

If you don't have any evidence (and you most certainly do not), then that is a huge problem for anyone claiming as you apparently do, that you nevertheless believe Jesus existed.

Why do you believe that he didn't exist?