Shit. What The Hell. Jesus Never Existed

[Redbeard The Pink]

Nice cartoon. Psst: historians can be scientists, and usually are since they follow the scientific process.

Unless they're dealing with the existence of an ancient character, and then the paradigm seems to be to assume someone existed as long as someone wrote about them as if they existed. When the question is then raised as to whether that's a good way to determine if an ancient person existed, the cry immediately becomes, "What, are you just gonna deny ALL historical evidence for EVERYTHING? Do you think Hitler escaped and the Holocaust didn't happen, too? Are you just some conspiracy theorist quack? ARE YOU STUPID?!" That is some apologist, ad hominem, well-poisoning bullshit. If I wanted to listen to that, I'd track down Brother Micah's Open Air Campus Ministry and try to have a logical discussion with that loud-ass mother fucker.

I already said that my evidence is at least partly the same evidence that you're giving me. You have already seen my evidence, and you are accepting the consensus interpretation of that evidence mostly (from what I can tell) because it's the consensus claim. If the consensus claim were arrived at through anything resembling actual science (and if historicist atheists didn't instantly morph into apologists when the question of Jesus' historicity is raised), then I would have no problem with that. In this instance, that is not the case.

Besides, if you're even passingly familiar with Richard Carrier, then you're already more or less familiar with my take on this and how I arrived at my conclusion. There's an early non-canonical gospel called "The Ascension of Isaiah" whose earliest redactions seem to lack Jesus' visit to earth; his death and resurrection happen instead in the heavens and hells off in outer space somewhere. Looking at the handful of undisputed Epistles and Hebrews (which, again, was likely written by somebody who at least knew Paul), there is some indication that the story being referred to is this one and not the one with Jesus of Nazareth in it. There are some passages that challenge this theory, but those passages can also be interpreted to mean something other than what they're claimed to. "Brothers of the Lord" is a favorite of historicists, for instance, and yet they're forgetting that even still today, all Christian believers are often labeled as "brothers and sisters of/in Christ." That moniker is not new.

Jesus of Nazareth, as written in the Bible, very obviously did not exist and could not exist in a Universe governed by the physics we know. His magical powers preclude him from it. Because of this, he has to be either an original, fictional composition, or he must be based on a character that came before himself. There are roughly equivalent levels of evidence for the claims that he was based on an earlier fictional character, that he was based on one guy, and (maybe, again haven't looked deeply into it) that he was based on a handful of guys or a type of apocalyptic preacher. Until historicists have better evidence than any I've seen, it is perfectly reasonable for me to hold a position of non-belief concerning the historical existence of the Jesus of Nazareth character, just as it's perfectly reasonable for me to hold a position of non-belief concerning his invisible sky-daddy.

I don't really count books or journals as evidence. Those are presentations of and conclusions drawn from evidence, but they themselves are evidence only of the fact that the consensus among historians is for historicity, and as I've already stated for reasons I've already stated, I do not accept the consensus claim. Jesus doesn't get to hang with Julius Caesar and Socrates just because he was passed off as history during a time period when it was much easier to do that.