The Three-Headed "Jesus" Problem

[Brakeman]

You've thrown a lot of crap at the wall but do you have any hard evidence?  Please produce links to your 1st & 2nd Century sources so that we can evaluate them.

I already covered this in the last goddamned thread. Yes there is hard evidence . You already have a list of 1st and 2nd century works here.

Since you vest Sooo much value in the opinion of so called "scholars" that miraculously keep out their employer's bias from their studies, perhaps you can explain just what is soo complex and difficult about evaluating direct evidence for the truthfulness of the claim of jebus' existence so much so that you would be need "scholars" to digest it for you.

In physics, we would need "scholars" to predigest questions of, say, a quark's existence because the math and the relied upon concepts, constants, and nomenclature would be too daughnting for someone who had not completed the prerequisite coursework.

For the existence of jebus problem though, none of this is true. The language translations that presupposes a jesus are not being contested, so the skills of ancient hebrew reading is not needed. The dating of the scrolls is performed by radiometric dating and the bible scholars are easily as laymen on that skill as your everyday mailman.
Claims of dating texts by style and so on by "bible scholars" would not be accurate enough to withstand claims of serious statistical certainty. Certainty is completely out the window, only a balance of opinion exists.

Bart Ehrman has seriouly tarnished his reputation as an honest and competent scholar by his historic jesus writings because he couldn't stick to the facts.

Books and several blogs have torn his "scholarship" to shreds.

Here's a good blog to read that discuses his poor attempt to defend the historocity,

http://freethoughtblogs.com/carrier/archives/1026

Having completed and fully annotated Ehrman’s new book (Harper 2012), I can officially say it is filled with factual errors, logical fallacies, and badly worded arguments. Moreover, it completely fails at its one explicit task: to effectively critique the arguments for Jesus being a mythical person. Lousy with errors and failing even at the one useful thing it could have done, this is not a book I can recommend.

The Pliny Confusion: Ehrman almost made me fall out of my chair when he discusses the letters of Pliny the Younger. He made two astonishing errors here that are indicative of his incompetence with ancient source materials. First, he doesn’t correctly cite or describe his source (yet in this particular case that should have been impossible); and second, he fails to understand the difference between a fact and a hypothesis. Ehrman says that Pliny discusses Christians in his correspondence with emperor Trajan in “letter number 10,” and that “in his letter 10 to the emperor Pliny discusses” the problem of the imperial decree against firefighting societies in that province, “and in that context he mentions another group that was illegally gathering,” the Christians (pp. 51-52). This is all incorrect, and demonstrates that Ehrman never actually read Pliny’s letter, and doesn’t even know how to cite it correctly, and has no idea that the connection between Pliny’s prosecution of Christians and the decree against illegal assembly affecting the firefighters in Bithynia is a modern scholarly inference and not actually anything Pliny says in his letters.

In fact, Pliny never once discusses the decree against fire brigades in his letter about Christians, nor connects the two cases in any way. Moreover, neither subject is discussed in “letter number 10.” Ehrman evidently doesn’t know that all of Pliny’s correspondence to Trajan is collected in book 10 of Pliny’s letters. His letter on the fire brigades is, in that book, letter 33; and his letter on Christians is letter 96 (and therefore nowhere near each other in time or topic).

The “No Records” Debacle: Ehrman declares (again with that same suicidally hyperbolic certitude) that “we simply don’t have birth notices, trial records, death certificates—or other kinds of records that one has today” (p. 29). Although his conclusion is correct (we should not expect to have any such records for Jesus or early Christianity), his premise is false. In fact, I cannot believe he said this. How can he not know that we have thousands of these kinds of records? Yes, predominantly from the sands of Egypt, but even in some cases beyond. I have literally held some of these documents in my very hands. More importantly, we also have such documents quoted or cited in books whose texts have survived. For instance, Suetonius references birth records for Caligula, and in fact his discussion of the sources on this subject is an example I have used of precisely the kind of historical research that is conspicuously lacking in any Christian literature before the third century (see , pp. 182-87).
From Ehrman’s list, “birth notices” would mean census receipts declaring a newborn, tax receipts establishing birth year (as capitation taxes often began when a child reached a certain age), or records establishing citizenship, and we have many examples of all three; as for “trial records” we have all kinds (including rulings and witness affidavits); we have “death certificates,” too (we know there were even coroner’s reports from doctors in cases of suspicious death); and quite a lot else (such as tax receipts establishing family property, home town, and family connections; business accounts; personal letters; financial matters for charities and religious organizations). As one papyrologist put it, “a wealth of papyrus documents from the Graeco-Roman era have come to light on the daily lives of ancient people in Egypt, including their love letters and marriage contracts, tax and bank accounts, commodity lists, birth records, divorce cases, temple offerings, and most other conceivable types of memoranda, whether personal, financial, or religious” (see Greco-Roman Papyrus Documents from Egypt).
That Ehrman would not know this is shocking and suggests he has very little experience in ancient history as a field and virtually none in papyrology (beyond its application to biblical manuscripts). Worse, he didn’t even think to check whether we had any of these kinds of documents, before confidently declaring we didn’t. Instead, Ehrman only demonstrates how little we can trust his knowledge or research when he says such silly things like, “If Romans kept such records, where are they? We certainly don’t have any” (p. 44). He really seems to think, or is misleading any lay reader to think, that (a) we don’t have any such records (when in fact we have many) and that (b) our not having them means Romans never kept them (when if fact it only means those records have been lost, because no one troubled to preserve them; which leads us to ask why no one in Jesus’ family, or among his disciples or subsequent churches, ever troubled to preserve any of these records, or any records whatever, whether legal documents, receipts, contracts, or letters).

The Tacitus Question: Ehrman says “I don’t know of any trained classicists or scholars of ancient Rome who think” the passage about Christians in Tacitus is a forgery (p. 55). Now, I agree with Ehrman that it’s “highly unlikely” this passage wasn’t what Tacitus wrote [I have since changed my mind about that–ed.]; but the fact that he doesn’t know of the many classical scholars who have questioned it suggests he didn’t check. See Herbert W. Benario, “Recent Work on Tacitus (1964–68),” The Classical World 63.8 (April 1970), pp. 253-66 [and in 80.2 (Nov.–Dec. 1986)], who identifies no less than six classical scholars who have questioned its authenticity, three arguing it’s an outright interpolation and three arguing it has been altered or tampered with [correction: he names five scholars, one of them arguing in part for both–ed.]. This is important, because part of Ehrman’s argument is that mythicists are defying all established scholarship in suggesting this is an interpolation, so the fact that there is a lot of established scholarship supporting them undermines Ehrman’s argument and makes him look irresponsible.

Serious "Scholars" with a reputation to uphold don't write such piff unless they are doing it to satisfy one's employers..