Shit. What The Hell. Jesus Never Existed

[GrandizerII]

Irrational: I'm saying the fact that something appears real because it has been inconvenient for the authors to include is not enough evidence that it was actually real. Not for me, anyway. If it's enough for you, that's fine The whole point of religious propaganda is to convince people of stuff that isn't true, so I wouldn't be at all surprised at them being sneaky this way. I'm not saying they were, I'm saying it's enough doubt for me to not be easily convinced. I'd rather say I don't know than draw a conclusion I'm not confident about.

By including something that seems a bad choice, it's a fake embarressing detail. If that was their intention, it seems to be working, yeah?

The gospels are a pile of shit.

Does anyone agree with my checklist, by the way?

They didn't introduce the inconvenient parts. Not the authors of Matthew and Luke. What they tried to do is to rectify the inconvenient parts in accordance with the Old Testament passage which they, and their fellow Christians, interpreted as a Messianic prophecy after the fact.

And again, sneaky or not, you don't just complicate things for yourself unnecessarily if you want to convince people. A simple Jesus of Bethlehem would've been more convincing to the audience than the convoluted "Ok, so Jesus may have been from some simple village called Nazareth but he still is the Messiah because ... guess what ... he was somehow born in Bethlehem despite him being known as Jesus of Nazareth!"

Also, you've already made a conclusion about this topic. Your answers to your checklist.

[downbeatplumb]

The non-historicity of the nativity does not negate the historicity of Jesus's ministry for one thing.

In fact, the Nativity stories in Matthew and Luke point to a historical Jesus of Nazareth. Each of the account goes out of its way to make Jesus as being born in Bethlehem to fulfill the Micah prophecy and yet end up being raised in Nazareth out of all the villages. Why not keep him in Bethlehem if Jesus was nothing but a myth?
Mythicists do not seriously consider questions like this one from what I keep seeing.

It's the shoehorning that makes me think there may have been a historical figure. Like the excuses they make for such an ignoble death.

[Minimalist]

Like the excuses they make for such an ignoble death.

Um...and whose fault was that?

[Secular Elf]

I have just completed a list of Early Christian literature.  This list is probably not exhaustive, for this is what I have come across in my readings about Early Christianity which is mainly what I gathered on the Web, in large part Wikipedia articles.   From what I remember, some of the authorships regarding what made it into New Testament, are questionable.  The dates given are the time frame in which it is thought that these texts were written.  Some dates are exact while others are estimates.  The question marks are dates unknown.  Anyone interested in the details of any of the listed writings can check it out on Wikipedia.

To quote from my own unpublished essay about the history of Christianity, from the part of the Apostolic Period (33-115 CE):

V.   Early Christian Literature, Diversity of the Religion, and Continued Pagan Influences
During this period Early Christian literature emerged as texts were used for the instruction of local congregations in proper ritual and etiquette regarding inter-communal behavior.  Scholarly study has determined that what is now regarded as the New Testament had not yet been set.  There were many texts used at this period that some can be reliably asserted to be written by Paul while other texts cannot with any reliability be asserted to be actually penned by any of the Apostles.  And many other texts with Gnostic theological ideas had been considered important by quite a few Early Christians.   A few would become canon while many other books would later be rejected. Collectively Paul's writings can be dated between 52 and 62 CE.  The fact that there were so many texts in circulation of various theological flavorings only reflects upon the wider diversity of Christianity in its early days.

The List of Early Christian Literature:

Shepherd of Hermas (1st or 2nd Century CE)

Epistle of Barnabas (70-131 CE)

Didache (mid to late 1st Century CE)

2nd Epistle of John (c. mid to late 1st Century CE)

Epistle to Diognetus (late 2nd Century CE)

Epistle of James (late 1st to early 2nd Century CE)

2nd Epistle of Peter (c. 100-150 CE)

Epistle of Jude (early 2nd Century CE)

Apocalypse of Peter (ca. 134 CE)

Gospel of Thomas (40-140 CE)

Gospel of the Ebionites

2nd Epistle of Clement (140-160 CE)

The Gospel of Marcion (144 CE)

The Pauline Epistles (Ten of which were part of Marcion's Apostolikon)

The Protoevangelium of James [Gospel of James] (145 CE)

Dialogue of the Savior (late 1st Century to 150 CE)

Greek Gospel of the Egyptians (120-150 CE)

Acts of Paul (ca. 160 CE)

Gospel of Peter (2nd half of 2nd Century CE)

Third Epistle of the Corinthians (160-170)

Diatessaron (ca. 160-175)

The Gospel of Mary (120-180 CE)

Infancy Gospel of Thomas (mid to late 2nd Century CE)

The Gospel of Philip (180-350 CE)

Gospel of the Hebrews (2nd Century CE)

The Gospel of Judas (2nd Century CE)

1st Timothy (2nd Century CE)

The Book of Thomas the Contender (1st half of 3rd Century CE)

Nag Hammadi Library (80 CE-300 CE)

Gnostic Gospels (2nd-4th Centuries CE)

Epistle of the Laodiceans

Philemon (?)

1st Epistle of Peter (?)

Gospel of the Twelve (?)

[Minimalist]

Apologists are always trying to push this stuff back further into history.  The paleographers disagree.

[Aractus]

I'm not asking for it both ways. Charlatanism is a means to gain, not just a means to gaining money. It is possible for sincerely believing Christians to justify using a charlatan's tactics to gain believers; I used the example of faith healing because I know this exact thing goes on amongst their ranks. Some of them are in it for the money, sure, but some of them are in it because they actually believe that their god exists, and they are willing to drive people toward that god through whatever means will convince them, even if the means themselves are dishonest.

Just as faith healers can be motivated to use conjuring tricks to convince everyone else of something they themselves are convinced of, the early church scribes could have been motivated to bend and/or fabricate text to support a conclusion that they themselves were convinced of. Like I said before, if people believe something to be true so insistently that they're willing to die over it, then they're willing to lie over it, too. Science isn't even immune from this problem; history provides various examples of scientists who were so convinced of a foregone conclusion that they were willing to misinterpret and even fabricate evidence to support it.

Well that argument is just bullshit - it's completely refuted by the evidence. Why would Paul be writing to the other Christian churches in the first century telling them specifically not to behave that way if that is in fact how you think the Gospel spread? Furthermore is there no evidence at all that Paul and the others did any conjuring tricks of their own - the only so-called conjuring occurs from Jesus and perhaps slightly after his death. Paul, Luke, James, Peter, and the other apostles are not performing any miraculous signs to the early believers, but Paul's epistles demonstrate that he was indeed witnessing his faith to them and we can surmise the other apostles were doing likewise.

[Redbeard The Pink]

You keep saying "other apostles" as if those guys have any historicity to speak of. While I concede that Paul was probably a real guy (others can fight with you about that), I've yet to see any compelling evidence that the Big 12 actually existed, either. If we're supposed to be taking their testimony as evidence that they believed in a real guy, they had damn well better have at least as much historicity as Jesus; alas, it turns out most of them actually have less. More than half of them are just names on a page, and even those aren't consistent between accounts.

Paul is the hinge on which early Christian writings swing because he's virtually the only canonical NT scribe whose authorship we're even partially sure of. The books that are supposed to have been written by Peter, James, and Jude were most likely written by people who spoke Greek as a first language and not Palestinian Jews. The authorship of the Gospels is essentially impossible to determine, and the rest is either Paul or traditionally attributed to Paul but either forged or disputed. That we know of, the only evidence to support the notion that the 12 Apostles said or wrote anything themselves is roughly the same evidence that is used to justify the belief in a single, historical Jesus of Nazareth.

Also, I still wanna know what historical character "Jesus of Nazareth" would have been based on when the town of Nazareth doesn't seem to have existed during the time Jesus was supposed to have been alive.

[Aractus]

You keep saying "other apostles" as if those guys have any historicity to speak of. While I concede that Paul was probably a real guy (others can fight with you about that), I've yet to see any compelling evidence that the Big 12 actually existed, either.

Well Redbeard, besides Peter I didn't have anything to say about the 12 hand-picked disciples of Jesus now did I?

If we're supposed to be taking their testimony as evidence that they believed in a real guy, they had damn well better have at least as much historicity as Jesus; alas, it turns out most of them actually have less. More than half of them are just names on a page, and even those aren't consistent between accounts.

So what? I was specifically talking about Paul, James (the Just), and Peter. I didn't say anything about the 12 so don't come on here making straw man arguments. Also, it doesn't matter if a person has more evidence for their existence or less when compared to some other ancient person - each is analysed individually.

The very fact that you think Paul was "probably a real guy" as opposed to what any decent scholar would tell you (which is that he was certainly a real person) just goes to show you have a poor grasp of accepted history when it comes to the New Testament period.

Paul is the hinge on which early Christian writings swing because he's virtually the only canonical NT scribe whose authorship we're even partially sure of. The books that are supposed to have been written by Peter, James, and Jude were most likely written by people who spoke Greek as a first language and not Palestinian Jews.

That's just not true. In fact once again you've proven your inability to think critically or even cite the current scholarly understanding. Luke-Acts is another work that scholars are near unanimously agreed upon - i.e. we can have confidence that Luke-Acts is the work of a single author; and they also agree the author was a contemporary for the events from Acts 13 on. In fact, they don't even dispute who the author is, since Luke-Acts are anonymous works it's not required to know if the author was Luke or someone else - and any decent scholar will tell you that the author was most likely to have either been Luke or someone else who we know little about, whoever it was it was someone converted to Christianity in the mid-late 40's AD.

The very fact that you would lump the epistles of Peter with James and Jude just goes to show you have zero idea of what you're talking about. James's epistle is drastically different to "Peter's" two. The two claiming to be Peter's were almost certainly written in the second century. James's however was not - it was written probably in or before AD 49. There is no compelling evidence that the work is pseudononymous, and in fact if it was you need to explain why the author would use James's name instead of someone more prominent in the early Church? And specifically, James only has sway over anything up until the Council of Jerusalem - after that he appears to have no direct influence over the doctrines, theology, or leadership of the early church. So by the time this epistle would have been written, if it really was pseudononymous, James was simply not an authority figure to which people were interested in listening to. Jesus's other brother Judas probably wrote the Epistle of Jude, but it's really hard to say given how short the Epistle is and I don't think we're going to get anywhere in trying to answer that question, other than to acknowledge that it's unlikely to have been a forged work given how brief the epistle is and how little it actually has to do with doctrine. Most scholars do believe that Judas (the brother of Jesus) was probably the author.

Furthermore the Epistle of James is the most Jewish book in the New Testament, the fact that you would claim it is the work of a Greek and not a Jew is just plain disingenuous. The Greek is indeed excellent - perhaps matched only by the Greek in the book of Hebrews, but that's no evidence against authorship since we have no other epistles from James.

[robvalue]

Irrational: I admit I haven't looked into the whole Bethlehem/Nazareth business in as much detail as the other things. So I may well change my mind if I study that further. My conspiracy angle may well seem too contrived, even for me. However, as a separate issue, it's still hearsay and is subject to the criteria on my list.

So I stand by what I say in my checklist. Do you want to challenge an actual point in it? What have I said that you think is wrong? I've allowed for the possibility that they intended to base the story in part on a historical figure. I don't know what you mean by "I have drawn my conclusions", they are a summary of what I feel I have learnt so far. Am I not allowed to summarise? They are not set in stone. I've tried to allow for the things we can't possibly know for sure. I'm perfectly willing to change my mind if I'm presented with a good reason, or indeed from further study. Like I said, my research is far from complete. It's a learning process. But just telling me I'm wrong isn't helpful, as some people like to do.

[Aractus]

Robv, you already drew your conclusion without critically evaluating any of the evidence. What Irrational is telling you is that your wild allegations do not account for the primary evidence. Like Min you seem to result to the position that "these documents simply aren't evidence" which is simply untrue - not only are they evidence, but they are hard evidence for the existence of Jesus (and note that critical scholars Erhman and Hurtado both say there is hard evidence for the existence of Jesus). You have cited no scholarly sources for your allegations - they're simply a list of conclusions you drew yourself (or copied from a quack) and they aren't based on an evaluation of the evidence.