Shit. What The Hell. Jesus Never Existed

[Redbeard The Pink]

The evidence is:

1. The Gospels and Book of Acts.
2. The Writings of Paul.
3. The other New Testament writings with clear multiple authors from the first century.
4. The so-called heretical writings about Jesus.
5. Other non-church writings from the likes of Josephus, Pliny the Younger, Tacitus, Suetonius, etc.
6. Modern academic publications including peer-review publications, and academic books and chapters.

Does that mean that everything within those documents is true? OF COURSE NOT and that's a strawman argument I've seen YOU and others make on many occasions. No ancient document is ever taken to be literal truth. It doesn't need to be 100% true to be evidence. In fact what the New Testament and so-called heretical documents show you is what the early Christians' beliefs about Jesus were. They believed that he had risen from the dead and had appeared to the 12. Now, that's not to say that the 12 believed that - because we don't have any authentication writings from the original 12 that say it, but it says the next generation or the one after believed that. Just as people believed all kinds of farcical things about Ned Kelly just 20 or so years after his execution; and yet those same documents also tell us truths about the man. They not only tell us facts, for want of a better word, but they also tell us about what some of the rumours and folklore had started.

Herodotus convinced historians that the Egyptian pyramids were built by slaves for over 2000 years - that was their only evidence. Does that mean we throw out every other peice of writing he made because of one monumental cock-up? NO.

Ok, see, here's why Christ Mythers get so pissy with people who think he was historical: we get accused of having terrible arguments and terrible evidence, and yet mainstream historians have arguments and evidence of roughly the same caliber that we have. The only advantages they have in an argument arena are the fact that they're the consensus. That's it.

Mythicist historians like Carrier (of which there are admittedly few) can use the exact same evidence you just described to convincingly argue that Jesus of Nazareth did not exist without having to resort to conspiracy theory gymnastics and without having to misinterpret anything. Josephus has been useless to historicity claims since the early 1800s. Tacitus is pretty hotly disputed as well, and I've seen the language he uses; it's entirely reasonable to assume that the brief information he mentions about Christians was for the purpose of describing them and their beliefs, and not necessarily to record their beliefs as historical facts. He may have been documenting the existence of the Christians themselves, and in so doing had occasion to briefly describe their beliefs for anyone reading the text who didn't know already who the Christians were. This is, of course, entirely ignoring the camp that thinks he originally wrote "Chrestians" and that all the stuff about Jesus is forged.

As for the rest of that list, those are primarily scriptures of one brand or another that would have had occasion to mention Jesus and get parts of his known story right even if he were a totally fictional character. How many writings and stories are there about Odin? How many of those agree on various points of his story? Does that mean Odin was based on a real person, too?

Paul is especially interesting because if you take the writings of his that aren't forged and the one that was probably written by someone who knew him personally (Hebrews), there really is no definite mention of a human story for Jesus. He's only ever said to appear to anyone after his death and resurrection have already taken place, and the few vague passages that might mention his family could also be interpreted to mean his followers instead.

Evidence that Jesus of Nazareth didn't exist? Am I reading that right? You do realize where the burden of proof is in this scenario, right? I do think there's some evidence that the character we know as Jesus of Nazareth is entirely fictional (some of which I've just described), but regardless of which claim is more accepted or even more likely, it is always up to the positive claim to prove itself because the nonexistence of something is basically unprovable unless you can demonstrate the object in question to be somehow impossible (like, for instance, a guy with magic powers who rises from the dead and grew up in a town that purportedly didn't exist until well after he was dead...or ascended to heeeven...or whatever). You're already calling us crackpots and arguing from popularity, and now this? Come on, man.