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Evidence for Jesus

BadBoy

Graduate Poster
BadBoy
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Jul 24, 2009
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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?
 
BadBoy said:
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?
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See the discussion in the currently active thread Jesus Christ?
 
Well, I think it's a bit unfair to dump ye ole' Jesus threads on him, because he asks for something much more narrow: physical evidence, and the threads mostly revolve around something else: how much you can take the Bible as evidence for stuff in the Bible.

The short answer is that no, there is no physical evidence of Jesus. There is no tombstone with his name on it, no first edition gospel signed by him, nor anything else which would count as physical evidence.

In fact, if we had any such evidence outside the bible, then we wouldn't be having such threads going in circles.
 
HansMustermann said:
Well, I think it's a bit unfair to dump ye ole' Jesus threads on him, because he asks for something much more narrow: physical evidence, and the threads mostly revolve around something else: how much you can take the Bible as evidence for stuff in the Bible.

The short answer is that no, there is no physical evidence of Jesus. There is no tombstone with his name on it, no first edition gospel signed by him, nor anything else which would count as physical evidence.

In fact, if we had any such evidence outside the bible, then we wouldn't be having such threads going in circles.
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I'd say that we have physical evidence in the broad sense, just not nearly enough.

If we define Jesus as a Jewish son of a carpenter named Yeshua living and preching in Jerusalem around the beginning of the first century who was executed by the Romans, then the evidence that the definition demands must cover all of that.

We have evidence that the city of Jerusalem existed at the time, that the Romans occupied it. We have evidence that carpentry was a trade, that crucifiction was a form of execution. We know that Jews lived in the area at the time and that Yeshua was a not uncommon name. This is all necessary but not sufficient evidence. For instance, if there was no such execution method as crucifiction, or if Romans were not active in that part of the world, that would kill the hypothesis that Jesus as described above existed.

Compare with Aslan, the talking lion from Narnia. We have no evidence that lions can talk or that aplace called Narnia might be home to them, so Aslan lags a bit behind historical Jesus.
 
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While that's true, it can also be summarized as: we have no evidence against Jesus either. Which is true too. But it's not the same as evidence for Jesus.
 
HansMustermann said:
While that's true, it can also be summarized as: we have no evidence against Jesus either. Which is true too. But it's not the same as evidence for Jesus.
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I'd say it's slightly different. I don't have very good evidence against Narnia's existence.

I'd say that we have evidence enough for the mundane parts of a Jesus description that it's more parsimonious for the character to be based on a real individual rather than made up from whole cloth.

If you tell me your uncle is a fire breather from Prague, then learning that your last name is common there and fire breathing is a popular profession is all evidence towards that. It's not enough to form a lot of confidence in the claim, but it's distinct from a lack of evidence against.
 
Without trying to reopen that discussion, everything you mentioned is not evidence even for that. In fact it's not even evidence that you can't disprove Jesus. It's just evidence that the SETUP of the story can't be disproved. That's nowhere near the same as evidence for Jesus.

I mean just to have the same kind of irrelevant handwaving about background details: we know that Moskow was a real place. We know that Paris was a real place. We know that many Russian youth did travel to Paris for studies. We know that the war between Napoleon and Russia was a real thing. Yet none of that is even close to being evidence that specifically Piotr Bezukhov from War And Peace is real.

ETA: In fact, even your example shows what's wrong with it. I COULD tell you that my uncle is a fire-breather in Prague, but actually he isn't. AFAIK he never even visited Prague. That you think you can support HIM just because Prague or fire-breathing aren't tripping your BS detector just shows what's wrong with that kind of support.

ETA 2: and since that will still get some to resolve it as "ah-ha, but you do have an uncle", I could say the same about my AUNT. Except I don't have one. Yet you'd apparently deduce that it's the most likely explanation because Prague is real and fire-breathing is real.
 
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By your logic, postulating an invisible pink dragon who does a girlie show at the Pink Pussycat Club on Fridays under the name "Candy" is enough evidence to make the existence of IPDs "parsimonious," just because strippers named Candy, the Pink Pussycat Club and Fridays exist.

So no, OP, there is no physical evidence. What there is is a lot of specious arguing that things which aren't physical evidence can maybe sorta resemble evidence if you squint at them in the right light.

[ETA] Damnit Hans! I'm leaving mine up, even if ninjad, because of the mental image of a dragon stripper. We're talking Skyrim dragons here, not furry ones.
 
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Cavemonster said:
I'd say that we have physical evidence in the broad sense, just not nearly enough....
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It's less than "not nearly enough". What is there is questionable, a stretch and includes some that looks outright forged, while evidence one would expect to find following someone who had the impact at the time Jesus supposedly had, is non-existant.
 
Imagine I told you about my Uncle Hans, the fire breather from Prague.

If you discovered that 99% of the population of Prague were professional fire breathers, would that add to known likelihood of my claim being correct, subtract, or make no difference?
 
Cavemonster said:
I'd say that we have physical evidence in the broad sense, just not nearly enough.

If we define Jesus as a Jewish son of a carpenter named Yeshua living and preching in Jerusalem around the beginning of the first century who was executed by the Romans, then the evidence that the definition demands must cover all of that.

We have evidence that the city of Jerusalem existed at the time, that the Romans occupied it. We have evidence that carpentry was a trade, that crucifiction was a form of execution. We know that Jews lived in the area at the time and that Yeshua was a not uncommon name. This is all necessary but not sufficient evidence. For instance, if there was no such execution method as crucifiction, or if Romans were not active in that part of the world, that would kill the hypothesis that Jesus as described above existed.

Compare with Aslan, the talking lion from Narnia. We have no evidence that lions can talk or that aplace called Narnia might be home to them, so Aslan lags a bit behind historical Jesus.
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Is your argument that if we strip Jesus of everything supernatural or even unusual then there is nothing impossible about his existence?

Isn't that then kind of working backwards from the myth to arrive at something that can't be disproved and then extrapolating from that basis that the myth was probably based on something real?

If so, it sounds like very shaky reasoning.

If you have to strip away all the made-up bollocks to arrive at something that could or could not be just as made up then isn't it more likely that the whole thing is simply made up?
 
It would make no existence about the existence of your uncle or his being in Prague. The city of Prague, the existence of the occupation, and your uncle, are three different entities, each of which could be true or false independent of the others. Something that supports entity A, does not support entity B.

And at the end of it, all I'd have is that I haven't found easy clues that your story is false, but I'd still have no evidence that it's true. That I can't disprove your story via finding something that contradicts various elements of it, is not the same as that I have stuff supporting it as true.

Again, look at the example base on War And Peace that i gave. That the cities Moskow and Paris are real, and that the Napoleonic war did happen, do NOT mean or even support the idea that Count Pierre Bezukhov is also real.
 
Cavemonster said:
Imagine I told you about my Uncle Hans, the fire breather from Prague.

If you discovered that 99% of the population of Prague were professional fire breathers, would that add to known likelihood of my claim being correct, subtract, or make no difference?
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tbh, it would subtract from it. Consider:

Cavemonster: Funnily enough, I have an uncle named Hans who's a fire breather in Prague.
Hans: Bull. There is only one Hans.
Cavemonster: No, it's true! Lots of people in Prague are fire breathers!

It becomes obvious you're just dodging the question, making even your mild assertion dubious.

Similarly, we're not asking if someone in Jerusalem was named Jesus, nor if anyone was crucified by the Romans. A simple "no, there's no evidence for Jesus, we must take it on faith that He existed" would have far more honesty and integrity than any amount of weasel-worded offerings.
 
Cavemonster said:
I assumed we were talking about the "historical jesus", the religious figure is just silly.
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Either way, you are stripping the story back to the mundane and then using evidence of the mundane to support something larger.

If I say my grandad was a plumber from London who was Prince Charles's real father then the existence of London plumbers does not corroborate my story nor does it mean that my tale was probably based on a real London plumber.

Furthermore it would be silly to postulate a 'historical plumber' that wasn't my grandad nor did he father a prince but is nonetheless still the same character from my story based solely on the fact that London plumbers happen to be common and provable.
 
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Cavemonster said:
I'd say that we have physical evidence in the broad sense, just not nearly enough.

If we define Jesus as a Jewish son of a carpenter named Yeshua living and preching in Jerusalem around the beginning of the first century who was executed by the Romans, then the evidence that the definition demands must cover all of that.

We have evidence that the city of Jerusalem existed at the time, that the Romans occupied it. We have evidence that carpentry was a trade, that crucifiction was a form of execution. We know that Jews lived in the area at .
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None of the above is evidence of the existence of the biblical figure named "Jesus".

The fact that a place called Jerusalem existed, is clearly not any kind of evidence to show that a biblical Jesus figure existed. The fact that New York exists is not evidence of the existence of Superman!
 
Beelzebuddy said:
tbh, it would subtract from it. Consider:

Cavemonster: Funnily enough, I have an uncle named Hans who's a fire breather in Prague.
Hans: Bull. There is only one Hans.
Cavemonster: No, it's true! Lots of people in Prague are fire breathers!

It becomes obvious you're just dodging the question, making even your mild assertion dubious.

Similarly, we're not asking if someone in Jerusalem was named Jesus, nor if anyone was crucified by the Romans. A simple "no, there's no evidence for Jesus, we must take it on faith that He existed" would have far more honesty and integrity than any amount of weasel-worded offerings.
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Are you assuming I'm Christian?
 
Let me quote myself from another thread:
Jorghnassen said:
The proper way to answer that is as follows: if there exists such surviving documents, they have yet to be found. If you think of HJ as a potential crime scene, any evidence has been tainted or tempered with long ago. Christianity took over the Roman Empire decades after it was founded, and grew from a small cult slowly so finding contemporary physical evidence (be it artifacts or original written documents) about its founding figure is by nature highly unlikely. So whether there is a founding Jesus or a founding Brian (say) who made up stories about some dude named Jesus, there's no way to get a definitive answer, only conjectures based on different interpretations of circumstantial evidence.
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Any conclusion one comes to on the existence of a historical Jesus is just a lousy attempt at Bayesian inference.
 
IanS said:
None of the above is evidence of the existence of the biblical figure named "Jesus".

The fact that a place called Jerusalem existed, is clearly not any kind of evidence to show that a biblical Jesus figure existed. The fact that New York exists is not evidence of the existence of Superman!
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It is evidence of Superman, it's just far outweighed by the evidence against.
 
TBH, the idea that I'm left with after all this threads is that some people firmly believe the following:

I could tell if someone were lying to me.[/i]

How? Well, obviously they'd include non-existing cities, talking lions, etc. OR they'd make any made up character such a complete and impossibly perfect and glorious Mary Sue, that, clearly, you could tell that it's something made up.

Not an exact quote, but the general gist I'm left with.

But it's really a rather silly assumption. If there is stuff that would tip someone off that a con-man is lying, then any good con-man, unless they're terminally retarded and disconnected from real people, would at least try to avoid such tell-tale elements.

E.g., if I wanted to scam you into joining my cult of our prophet and saviour Ivan, I wouldn't make up an Ivan who lives on Pluto and tames Mi-Go for a living. I'd make up exactly an Ivan who was in Prague.​
 
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