The Historical Jesus

[Huolpoch]

Interesting, this is the first time I've encountered a historical narrative this skewed against Jesus.

Here is my first question for all of you, when did people start to point out that Jesus wasn't a real person? Or that all of the miracles were made up? How long did it take the ancient world to produce this account?

As far as I know, Luke is actually a highly regarded historian. As the author of his gospel as well as Acts; I have heard that so far every single name of a person, place or a thing that can be accounted for by modern archaeology has been confirmed to be true. A quote from New Testament scholar Greg Bloomberg, "A historian who has been found trustworthy where he or she can be tested should be given the benefit of the doubt in cases where no tests are available." So far we have more than 70 confirmed tests of Luke's historical accuracy which means that Luke is, by any standard, a trustworthy historian.

Beyond this we have the over-abundance of copies of the New Testament, every-single book and letter has more than 1,000 early copies for us to compare against one another. Yes, scholars will make mistakes, but they won't make the same mistakes in the same places. Consider this simple example.

The cat leaped
A cat jumped
the dog jumped

Here we have 3 copies of 1 original message. Can you tell me what the original message is even though each copy is off by 1 out of every 3 words.

With 4 biographies, all of which containing a compatible story, I think we have every reason to believe in the Historical Jesus, but beyond that we have the witness of the apostles, men who were willing to die for their risen King.

People started openly pointing out Jesus wasn't real when the stopped being persecuted for speaking against the teachings and power of the Catholic Church and the Church of England, and started learning about other religions.

If you take the time to just read (not even study) about other religions and deities, it should be obvious that Jesus is an amalgamation of many other deities that are present in various cultures and literature, many older than Jesus: son of a god/god incarnate, virgin birth, miracles, crucified, resurrected, prophesies....Just read about Krishna; you'll see the similarities,and Krishna shows up in literature 200 years before the first book of the NT was allegedly written.

It s easy to come up with similar texts when those texts are written one after the other, or come from the same narrative. Then there are the multiple translations...

Christians do, but I don't know who has high regards for Luke as a historian, when many can't even ascertain he was real.

Dying for a cause is not uncommon: Muslim suicide bombers, Heaven's Gate cultists, immolation to protest government actions, kamikaze pilots, samurai committing seppuku, heck, the secret service agents guarding the President of the U.S. are willing to take a bullet for him... so your apostles willing to die is not special in any way, shape, or form.

[Pat Mustard]

The issue I have with comparing the Gospels to Moby Dick is that Herman Melvil never even once made the claim that his story was true. Nor is there any significant number of people alive today who think that Captain Ahab was a real person. If you're going to make a comparison I think it should be more Apples to Apples in order for it to be effective. 

Let's imagine that I wanted to create a version of Abraham Lincoln who raised people from the dead and fought vampires. If I tried to spread Lincolnism today, beyond taking advantage of a small handful of lonely and imaginative people, how well would Lincolnism stand up to criticism? Would if my Lincolnites were being persecuted or killed for their faith? How many of them do you think would be willing to die for something that can so easily be proven false? 

In 200 A.D. denying that Jesus performed miracles was almost impossible. There were simply too many eye-witness accounts that had been passed down by parents to their grand children (and on to their grand children as well). The Jews had every reason to want to dis-credit Jesus, but they couldn't assert that the miracles weren't real so they just had to call him a sorcerer and leave it at that.
If Jesus performed no miracles then why did so many people believe in him? And why were so many people convinced that he was able to cast out demons? How did his word spread across Rome, Greece and even Israel when it was being met with so much resistance? Why were so many people willing to die for the idea that their life had been touched by the Holy spirit? 

Why were there so many people willing to face death or imprisonment for their faith? How much more opposition could a believer of any story encounter? How much opposition would prove that, at the very least, their beliefs were sincerely held?

For a guy who was hanged on a cross and bled out in front of thousands of jeering spectators (gods aren't supposed to bleed you know). For a guy whom many believed to be a god the crusifixion would represent the defeat of said god, would Thor allow himself to be sacrificed by his own people? What about Zeus? No one was expecting the son of God to allow something like this to happen. Every rational person was thinking at that time, "If Jesus is more than just a sorcerer, then why wouldn't he come down from that cross? Why not summon an army of angels? Why not use a miracle in front of all these witnesses to prevent yourself from experiencing any more pain, or humiliation?"

  Who among us would be willing to face that amount of pain and humiliation if we had the power to simply snap our fingers and become Superman?

         For the skeptic, the crucifixion would mark the ultimate cap-stone to Jesus legacy. He lived, people say he performed a few miracles, and then he died by the people he was trying to save. In the end he was proven to be a fraud, he was proven not to be the son of God. And so an execution, that would've ended any other cult leader's career; somehow managed to be the most talked about miracle in history; the empty tomb.


Why did the disciples go from being depressed, after Christ's crucifixion, and giving up on spreading the gospel to being willing to risk their lives for Jesus?
What explains Paul's conversion from a man who wanted to kill Christians to a man who was willing to die for the testimony of Christ?

"Would you believe that a christian life was a good life, if there were no christ?"  Well if it were proven that Christ couldn't do miracles then I would probably try to keep the morals but I would retreat to Daoism. I like Lao Tsu's teaching a lot so it's my second favorite religion.

Actually going further with this, in the third century CE there were no eye-witness accounts, there were plenty of accounts purporting to be of eye-witnesses (some of which became the canonical gospels) but none were written earlier than 75CE at best. Most were written significantly later.

The jews didn't need to discredit Yeshua because they knew full well that most of what was written about him was fantasy.

The reason why he was held to cast out demons was because every holy man was held to do so (no matter their religion). Many natural illness processes were not well understood 1,800 years ago and were attributed to demons. An observant person could see that quite a few of these processes had a finite existence with the sufferer coming out ok so they would tailor their flim-flam accordingly if their goal was to deceive others.

What resistance did christianity face, the only well documented resistance to christianity was from other christians. Intra-doctrinal bustups were a frequent event within the early churches, something that has barely diminished to today (albeit with fewer murders).

On the "why would somebody die for a lie?" bit, millions willingly died for fascism and nazism in the second World War, millions more unwillingly. People die for lies the whole time and christians are no exception.

On the crucifiction, we don't even know if it happened. According to the bible, Yeshua died for disobeying Talmudic law. In that case his death would have been caused by stoning or by hanging, the jewish laws didn't prescribe crucifiction as punishment. As to the growth of christianity, many con artists, get rich quick men and eventually those wielding real power got interested enough in the cult to promote and grow and use it to their own ends that it got entrenched within society and became a prerequisite for one's continuing existence in European cultures. It's a classic case of growth by the sword.

[Pat Mustard]

@h311inac311

You’re still (deliberately, I think) missing the point about Moby Dick. I mentioned it to refute one particular point you made, that the  number of copies of a manuscript has some bearing on the truth or falsity of what’s contained in that manuscript. It doesn’t matter if the author claims it to be true or if there are people who believe it to be true. 

Think about the converse of your argument: if there was only a single but complete copy of the Gospel of Luke, would you be less likely to believe it to be true? What you’re doing with your point about copies is setting up a scale of veracity based on a single - and rather silly - criterion.

Let me try another example. Consider Geoffrey of Monmouth’s ‘History of The Kings of Britain’. Monmouth claimed it to be true. It was considered to be a valuable historical source for nearly half a millennium. There are hundreds of manuscripts of it dating from during or shortly after Geoffrey’s lifetime. And yet it contains such nonsense as the Trojans found Britain, wizards, dragons, legendary kings, etc.

Boru

     What I'm getting at is that multiple copies can be compared one to another to ensure that they haven't been tampered with. Simply put, if we have 100 copies of Mark then it is basically impossible for any one person to be able to alter the Gospel of Mark. The edits can be compared against the other copies. People will make mistakes, language will change, even people with good intentions will add to the scriptures (as they did with the story of the woman caught in adutery) but ultimately the vast majority of these copies agree far more than they disagree. The mistakes can be made known by comparing them to the majority of the other texts that are available. 

                  I knew at least one of you would want to pull the "Gospels have been corrupted" card. So I was trying to get ahead of that claim.

      No, I'm not setting up a scale of veracity based on one single and important criterion. I'm pointing something out that's very important to know. The Gospels haven't been tampered with. We know that as a historical fact because of the many different copies of the original which are still available today. It is one point in favor of the Gospel, can a Mighty Temple be built on a single pillar? I'm just here to make sure that you guys know that the first pillar is there and that it is made of stone. 


 How do you know that Geoffrey of Monmouth's 'History of The Kings of Britain' is wrong?

The gospel of Mark has been heavily altered over the centuries. Did you know that the earliest extant complete copies of Mark (contained within the Codices Siniaticus and Vaticanus) do not depict the resurrection of Yeshua? In fact it is well known by scholars that the resurrection story in Mark was added later to bring more in line with the other, later written, canonical gospels.

"Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past."
George Orwell.

[Pat Mustard]

There is no evidence that apostles died for Jesus or their faith. Not even the Bible makes that claim (Bible mentions deaths of two apostles: James and Judas). There were later legends of how each apostles died invented by Christians because they love inventing stories and then believe in them as if they are true. Like, Christians invented thousands of saints and their biographies and then believe in them as if they really existed and died for their faith. Take saint Christopher - he never existed.

An excerpt from Church History Book II from author Eusebius, a 4th century church historian.

The Roman Tertullian is likewise a witness of this. He writes as follows: Examine your records. There you will find that Nero was the first that persecuted this doctrine, particularly then when after subduing all the east, he exercised his cruelty against all at Rome. We glory in having such a man the leader in our punishment. For whoever knows him can understand that nothing was condemned by Nero unless it was something of great excellence.

5. Thus publicly announcing himself as the first among God's chief enemies, he was led on to the slaughter of the apostles. It is, therefore, recorded that Paul was beheaded in Rome itself, and that Peter likewise was crucified under Nero. This account of Peter and Paul is substantiated by the fact that their names are preserved in the cemeteries of that place even to the present day.


https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/250102.htm


These words come from someone on my side of the debate so of course they will be dis-regarded as bias. 

Beyond that, the well has already been poisoned against all believers, so what can any of us say in our defense?

Eusebius is a well known liar for Jesus. We know this because he invented the Tetamonium Flavorum.

[h311inac311]

The authors didn't just make truth claims, they also made these claims during a time when there were living witnesses to the events in question who would've called them out for telling lies. Many of them died for those claims as well.

They also made them during a time when a living witness the next village over might never hear the claim until it's in wide circulation and then are you going to believe what a leader says that everyone knows or that one guy who says he was there and the widespread story is wrong? It was a time of no fact-checkers, no journalistic standards, and barely historical standards.

       When did I say new religions can't be started?
What I was saying is that if your new religion is based on something verifiably false then it will be much more difficult for it to spread. 

I'm not so sure about that. There seem to be several extant religions that have spread pretty well in their mere decades or century or two of existence despite being verifiably false. I think Mormonism and Scientology are verifiably false, do you disagree?

Is all eyewitness testimony of the supernatural wrong by default? 

It's not wrong by default, but it is by default not historical.

     Oh and yes the crusifixion of Jesus was unique, even from a totally secular perspective; this is because Jesus was well known for his ability to talk his way out of a tight situation. And yet, when faced with certain torture, humiliation and death, he didn't bother to open his mouth in his own defense. 

I admit I haven't heard the viewpoint that Jesus should have been able to fast-talk his way out of getting crucified.

Also, the crucifixion is one of the biggest events in all of human history. So yes it is a very big and unique event, not just because a person died on a cross but because one of the most famous people died on a cross. Indeed, there was something peculiar about this one Roman crusifixion which stands out against all others.

You THINK it was one of the biggest events in human history because you're a Christian. To the rest of the world it either didn't actually happen or it was just another poor schlub horribly executed by Roman authorities. Jesus's fame seems largely posthumous, given contemporary historians didn't make note of him.

1. The big word in your response here is might. But the eye-witness accounts might also be true, good thing we have 4 early accounts from 4 early journalists that pass every archeological test we can currently throw at them.

2. But until Matthew Stone and Trey Parker did what they did these religions operated based on secrecy. The church of latter-day saints acts like it is just another denomination of Christianity in order to lure people in. Then they introduce you to the teachings of Joseph Smith. Only after years of indoctrination will they begin to share with you the actual history of the golden plates and Joseph meeting with the angel Moroni. Most people wouldn't convert if they were shown the real truth about Joseph Smith as soon as they walked through the door. By the time they know the truth they already have a whole community to disappoint should they chose to leave the faith.

Same largely goes for Scientology, it starts with a therapy session (audit) where the therapist assures you that they have a solution for all of your problems. Years of indoctrination and communal integration passes and eventually they may tell you who L Ron Hubbard actually was. When the story doesn't hold up to scrutiny the cultists learn very quickly that they have to keep it a secret or else they will push people away.

Christians, on the other hand, put the Gosple front and center, it is all throughout the New Testament (as well as the Old Testament if you have eyes to see). Paul puts Christ's resurrection front and center in his ministry. Nothing was hidden. One of my favorite lines on this matter is this one from the book of Acts. "For the king knows about these matters, and I speak to him also with confidence, since I am persuaded that none of these things escape his notice; for this has not been done in a corner."

3. Kind of circular, so in order for history to be history are you saying that atheism needs to be baked into the cake?

4. Thank you.

5. Yet here you are spending much of your time discussing this insignificant story. Why aren't you debating a Zeus apologist? How many defenders of Thor are left alive?

Contemporary historians didn't make note of him? Now how do you know that to be the case?

[h311inac311]

@h311inac311

So are you telling me that you know what God's standard ought to be? And are you telling me that you know that his standard has been violated by our modern understanding of the manuscript tradition?

Well, isn’t that your own position? Your immutable, perfect, all-wise, all-knowing, all-loving God has allowed errors to creep into His holy writ. Since we don’t know - and can never know - what the original text was, this roadmap to salvation is less than worthless. Scripture says that God deliberately deludes people for the express purpose of tricking them into damnation. How do you know that these seemingly harmless textual errors aren’t more of the same?

Boru

When you use the word error what do you mean?

If you don't give me some kind of concrete example (within the New Testament) then I don't see the point in chasing you in circles around this point.

Yes God allows those who avoid the truth to live a lie. And as they live their truth their understanding of the truth gets more and more deluded as they have been handed over to a debased mind (Romans 1). The hope is that by the time someone starts with the premise, "well men and women are more similar than they are different." And uses that as a basis to destroy the fundamental dichotomy of male and female, eventually they reach a place where they cannot utter the phrase, "men can't become women" without fear of being labeled as a bigot. They will begin to see the flaw in their own logic. 
You may not believe in Chris†'s death and resurrection, but what about logical consistency? How deep is your hypocrisy going to go before you turn around and start heading towards a consistent understanding of what's true?

It starts with men laying with men, then it becomes men laying with men who claim to be women. Now we have gender studies professors who can't answer the question "what is a woman?" 
I'm glad that my God hands my enemies over to their depraved desire and provides them with a reprobate mind. 
Makes the non-sense easier to spot as time moves forward. They expose themselves and eventually will un-ironically wave a gay pride flag next to a Palestinian flag. 
Seeing no contradiction. 

These fornicators have rejected not just the command of God but also common sense as anyone who is thinking about the greater impact that they have on society would know that you shouldn't be trying to have children with someone whom you would not want to raise children with. That's the reason why "thou shalt not commit adultery" was given to us as a Godly commandment, and that's why so many cultures the world over have frowned on such hedonistic and short-sighted behavior.

[Fake Messiah]

But the eye-witness accounts might also be true, good thing we have 4 early accounts from 4 early journalists that pass every archeological test we can currently throw at them.

We do not have four independent eyewitness accounts, or even four independent historical reports because all four stem from the first, what we call Mark’s Gospel.

What we have is a single religious document, written at least a generation after the time it portrays, by an anonymous author far away from the setting of the story for purely theological purposes. And every subsequent Gospel writer simply copied Mark and added more stuff - like Matthew added sermon on the mount where Jesus quotes stuff from the Old Testament.

In every new gospel, Jesus becomes more impressive, more perfect, more divine; his career and miracles grow more spectacular and earth-shaking; and by the time John’s story is written, Jesus has become a cosmic deity from the very creation of the universe who strides around Judea fearlessly declaring to all that he is God almighty made flesh.



There is no archeological evidence that Jesus existed nor the apostles. There is no evidence that even the most spectacular miracles happened like darkness that spread around the world, that hundreds of people rose from the graves and walked into Jerusalem, nor is the place of crucifixion known or Jesus tomb.

[The Grand Nudger]

Christ, turned into republican culture wars bullshit awfully quick. Did you wanna talk about the historical jesus, a demi-god, or fags?

[Ferrocyanide]

Hello h3311inac311,

What was the purpose of Jesus according to you or what have you been told his purpose is?

[brewer]

When you use the word error what do you mean?

If you don't give me some kind of concrete example (within the New Testament) then I don't see the point in chasing you in circles around this point.

Yes God allows those who avoid the truth to live a lie. And as they live their truth their understanding of the truth gets more and more deluded as they have been handed over to a debased mind (Romans 1). The hope is that by the time someone starts with the premise, "well men and women are more similar than they are different." And uses that as a basis to destroy the fundamental dichotomy of male and female, eventually they reach a place where they cannot utter the phrase, "men can't become women" without fear of being labeled as a bigot. They will begin to see the flaw in their own logic. 
You may not believe in Chris†'s death and resurrection, but what about logical consistency? How deep is your hypocrisy going to go before you turn around and start heading towards a consistent understanding of what's true?

It starts with men laying with men, then it becomes men laying with men who claim to be women. Now we have gender studies professors who can't answer the question "what is a woman?" 
I'm glad that my God hands my enemies over to their depraved desire and provides them with a reprobate mind. 
Makes the non-sense easier to spot as time moves forward. They expose themselves and eventually will un-ironically wave a gay pride flag next to a Palestinian flag. 
Seeing no contradiction. 

These fornicators have rejected not just the command of God but also common sense as anyone who is thinking about the greater impact that they have on society would know that you shouldn't be trying to have children with someone whom you would not want to raise children with. That's the reason why "thou shalt not commit adultery" was given to us as a Godly commandment, and that's why so many cultures the world over have frowned on such hedonistic and short-sighted behavior.

That fits so well with WWJD, congratulations. You've become the best 'worst' example.