Existence of Jesus

[Mark]

Others reading all this, if any indeed have the patience for it, will have to judge which of us has made the better case. Fundamentally they will have to decide whether the reports of Jesus and the existence of the Christian religion itself is more compatible with the supposition that Jesus the preacher did exist, or that he did not.

Indeed.

In any case it is a question of very scant importance for us as atheists, unless like chatpilot you consider it necessary to bash Christianity as much as possible.

I do not favour any view that has no rational justification but more to the point, given the nature of belief, each and every claim that is made by them should be critically examined ... they (and you) have failed to make a convincing case for the physical existence of Jesus whilst I and ChatPilot can simply sit back and say, "Show me the money".

Do you see that an entirely different evidentiary standard is being proposed in these two sections? In the first we have the question, "Which proposition accords better with the given set of records and with everything else that we know about history?" In the second we have a juridical notion that if X can't be proved to be certainly true, it must be taken as false. It is only the first standard of proof that is meaningful for discussions of history, particularly that of the First Century A.D. The study of history wouldn't get very far if the second standard were customarily applied to its propositions.

Of course if you insist on the second standard and and you assume that the burden of proof falls upon those who would assert Jesus' existence, then you can sit back in triumphant surety that the available evidence dosn't meet your evidentiary standard and, ergo, Jesus did not exist. That is a rather barren and self-justifying position, however, since very little that is widely supposed to have happened in history, particularly in ancient times, can be proven with certainty to have happened. And since I have already conceded that it is possible that Jesus did not exist, I wonder why you even bother to post replies.

The fact is, the claim that Jesus did not exist can't be made with any more certainty than the claim that he did. There is no burden of proof on either side; there is no default conclusion that some person did not exist if the evidence that he did is a little shaky; the only thing it comes down to is the balance of likelihood, and that is the basis on which I have argued here.

Further it appears necessary to point out that it is you, not I, that has personally attempted a textual analysis of Josephus, namely when you assert that you can tell from your English edition there that the disputed passage is not in Josephus' style. So it is your qualifications as a textual analyst and putative expert in classical Greek, not mine, that are relevant here.

Lastly if you read back, you will see that you did assert that there was evidence of Jesus' non-existence; but it appears now that that was a mere misstatement, so it contents me if you have abandoned it.