The (non) existence of Jesus

[Neo-Scholastic]

There is more evidence for a historical Jesus than there is for Socrates, so I have no problem accepting that He was real. I also have no problem with the idea that Christianity was highly Hellenized prior to the Council of Nicaea.

[Zidneya]

[The Grand Nudger]

There is more evidence for a historical Jesus than there is for Socrates, so I have no problem accepting that He was real. I also have no problem with the idea that Christianity was highly Hellenized prior to the Council of Nicaea.

LOL, prior he says. It remains heavily hellenized....que the chorus "holy shit jesus, that was a miracle, how can this be?" Fellas, it's been less than 24 hours since you saw me perform a miracle....give it a rest.

Also, Socrates...very likely a narrative device, if there was some man he was based upon..we have no knowledge of that man. If I were going to compare the historicity of Jesus to anyone (particularly if I were angling for some flesh and blood person)....probably wouldn't have picked Socrates....

[Mudhammam]

If Plato is to be believed as containing elements of historical detail, Socrates was the first sacrificial lamb. Sadly, he didn't have the motive of being resurrected three days later.

[RobbyPants]

Interesting. The third bullet point is the one I'd be most curious to learn more about. Just going off the top of the dome, isn't Philippians typically considered to be an authentic Pauline epistle and isn't that the one where he writes about Jesus as being born of a woman? Anyway, any additional text on this point that you can link me to?

It's probably best to watch the video or go and look at Carrier's books. I haven't read any of his works, so I can't really speak to their contents or quality. In the video, he does get into reasons about why he uses the Epistles to get to the conclusion he reaches. He spends maybe the first 20 or so minutes hitting on the first two bullet points. He spends a pretty good chunk going over the Epistles. A very high-level review of what I remember is:

• The Epistles are the earliest known books included in the Bible.
  
• Several Epistles are known to not be written by Paul, so these are excluded.
  
• Of the Epistles included, there were some minor edits to wording seen in older manuscripts. One such word that was changed in several places has to do with how Jesus came to be. I don't remember the exact verb used, but it was changing something like "begotten" or "made" into "born". From my understanding, that was an edit to the original texts, and Carrier is asserting that it was done after the Gospels were written to legitimize the notion of Christ existing on Earth.
  

Still, it's been a while since I've seen the video, and I haven't read his books, so that's about the best I can do. If you have an hour you can carve out, I'd suggest watching the video. He goes into depth and references his book, and possibly other works, as well.

Haha, he says a load of intellectual stuff to criticize the text, then the next thing is saying "so this is bullshit". I like his style.

I always find that style humorous, too, but sadly, because he swears, there are times I want to link to him on other forums/groups and cannot. I prefer forums with looser rules on language.

One should not cherry pick the explanation that strengthens one's own point of view when equally good explanations in the opposite direction also,exist.

I'm not saying it's correct; I was just listing the main points liked asked. Note that I said "he thinks" in the conclusion. I found the video informative and interesting, but there's enough I don't know about Biblical history to know if he can make a slam dunk case that the Epistles were edited with the sole purpose of retconning a physical Jesus into them.

[Cato]

There is more evidence for a historical Jesus than there is for Socrates,...

You're going to have trouble defending this canard. We have contemporaneous accounts of Socrates from people who are also known to history (Plato, Xenophon, and Aristophanes). Not only are the gospels not contemporaneous, we don't know the authors so absolutely nothing can be known of their sources. Paul cites revelation. I'm not sure where you would go from here to establish that there is more evidence for Jesus than Socrates.

[Mister Agenda]

There is more evidence for a historical Jesus than there is for Socrates, so I have no problem accepting that He was real. I also have no problem with the idea that Christianity was highly Hellenized prior to the Council of Nicaea.

You don't have any doubts that Socrates was real?

---

For the record, I'm not a mythicist. I lean very slightly toward there actually having been an apocalyptic preacher whose life and collected sayings are at the bottom of Christianity, around whom some preposterous legends grew.

[Clueless Morgan]

I'm reading Carrier's book, now.

Which one? On the Historicity of Jesus? I've read Proving History but haven't gotten to OTHOJ yet (waiting for the price to drop a bit, and getting through other books).

I think he makes some very good points in his criticisms of the methods historians use to discern historicity, and I confess he makes a strong case for the mythicist position, but I'm not fully convinced (I'm maybe 60/40 that's he's a mythicised historical figure rather than a historicised mythical figure). I'm hoping that when I get to OTHOJ that Carrier address more of the evidence historians cite for why they conclude Jesus was historical. I've read David Fitzgerald's 10 Reason Jesus Never Existed At All (or something close to that title) and while I find that book to be entertaining, that's my main criticism of it: it doesn't address the current historical position or directly refute the evidence they cite in a comprehensive way. Though, to be fair, I don't think it was meant to do that.

I also confess this isn't a topic I've read much about so I'm easily swayed right now due to sheer ignorance.

I think Carrier makes a good case. I've seen that video before and would be interested in an expert's rebuttal.

I think Carrier links to critiques of his books on his blog, but I haven't done a lot of digging to find them.

Actually validating this might be impossible, after all there can be multiple people with that name during that time period, and even if we find a proof of one of those persons, there is no way verify if he was the one from the stories.

The only way to verify the book is by verifying the possibility of the illogical BS in the book.....which can only be done after one decides to thow out common sense and sanity, out of the window.

To be honest I had the same thought, it may be that yeshua was a common name then

This is something I've been thinking about, though in a somewhat unrelated matter:

How would one go about trying to determine how common a name was during a specific time?

My particular interest right now is in when names that became more popular after the Protestant reformation (Thomas, Samuel, John, Matthew, etc.) started being shortened to their common "nickname" version that we often use today (Tom, Sam, John, Matt, etc.) I've been trying to look into this but my google returns have been thwarted by baby name websites.

Also, if you thought the OP video was interesting, you might like this one, too:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MclBbZUFSag&

[robvalue]

To me, no other sources talking about Jesus + the bible only talking about him some 30 years after his death = most likely never existed.

I bet 99% of christians have no idea how fine a line Jesus is hanging from. Considering they don't even know the bible, it's not much of a stretch that they don't know the history of the bible.

I like maths better than religion.

[CapnAwesome]

Jesus existing is sort of a misnomer to start with. Take someone like Bart Erhman who believes in a historical Jesus, but doesn't believe in the resurrection, that he walked on water, that he did any of the miracles associated with him? What you have is a person who lived around 30 AD, preached a form of Judaism, possibly claimed to be the Messiah and was killed by the Romans. If that person existed is it really fair to even say that they were 'Jesus' without all the other attributes attached to them. At the best you could say that there was someone that Jesus was based on. To me it becomes an irrelevant question whether or not Jesus of the bible is loosely based on a real person.

However those in the 'Jesus never existed' camp don't do themselves much of a favor with the historical community by making some extremely poor arguments. Mostly to do with primary sources. Yeah, Jesus doesn't have any primary sources but neither do a lot of well established historical figures. Aristotle doesn't have any either. Neither does Ghenghis Khan, who conquered half the world. No primary sources at all yet no credible historian would at all question the existence of Ghenghis Khan. We are talking about a time when there was mass illiteracy and the only people really writing stuff down were professional scholars and sages. It's not like people in the extreme backwater of the Roman empire were keeping diaries, nor are they likely to have survived. Mostly these things are said by people with little understanding of history. Actually the Gospels come relatively quickly after the event for writing down of what was probably not that important of events.

Also sometimes I hear super stupid things from the myth camp like 'The Romans kept such good records of the people the crucified.' What? No they didn't. That's just a blatant lie, and we certainly don't have anything close to complete records of who the Romans crucified. So there are reasons that Historians don't take this stuff seriously, not because it's not a serious idea, but because often the arguments used to advance it are not very in line with the historical process and lack a very good understanding of the world at large. People trying to make the case that Jesus didn't exist should spend some time understanding the overall history of the region and drop a lot of the crappy arguments they make.
(Keep in mind I'm not sure whether or not this applies to the video link, as I haven't watched it yet.)