RE: Existence of Jesus
March 13, 2009 at 11:48 am
(This post was last modified: March 13, 2009 at 12:12 pm by Mark.)
(March 13, 2009 at 9:18 am)Giff Wrote: Is there a document that says that Jesus existed, from the supposed time when he lived? I have never heared of such document.
The gospels in the bible are written a long time after his supposed death. So no evidence there. You have to find an historian or author that wrote something about Jesus while he lived. But such document have I never heared of.
Considering the state of the written record from the early First Century, it really would be quite extraordinary if a contemporary report of any particular preacher in any particular corner of the Roman Empire had come down to modern times. So little has come down of anything, you see?
If the only question were whether such a report existed, there would be no debate. But in matters relating to the classical period, these questions can only be adjudged by asking, "What is most consistent with all the facts currently available?" What, for instance, is more consistent with the reports that we have about Jesus and the rest of our understanding of the world at that time and subsequent to then, that a preacher from Nazareth named Joshua existed, or that he did not? Certainty is something that you will not find in this or any similar question, so what is left is the balance of likelihood.
(March 13, 2009 at 11:08 am)chatpilot Wrote: wikipedia is not the best source for information on the historical Jesus google The Jesus Puzzle he covers most of the subject matter on his website about the secular evidence for the existence of Jesus.
Well I really think that the best information of all concerning the historicity of Jesus lies in the scholarship of this time and place in history. It happens to be the case that a substantial majority of historians of this period do take the position that there did exist this particular Jewish preacher. See for example History of Rome by Michael Grant, Chapter 16.
I visited "the Jesus puzzle" and I must say it looks much more like the ravings of an autodidact than a product of serious scholarship. At least wikipedia purports to be scholarly. For one thing, this Doherty fellow seems to have the idea that the New Testiment constitutes a coherent whole from which the truth can somehow be extracted via textual analysis. But it is not a coherent or consistent whole, and of course it is extensively self-contradictory.
Here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Grant_(author) for instance, is Michael Grant's biography, though he is merely one of many well-regarded historians who took Jesus as an actual, historic figure. Who is Earl Doherty, and where does he teach?