Why can't Christians Verify Exactly Where Jesus Was Buried?

[rexbeccarox]

There.is.no.such.thing.as.scholarly.consensus.on.anything.

I'm sorry; what?

(bold mostly mine)

First of all the Ned Kelly analogy doesn't work because we know Kelly was a real man, we have no idea whether Yeshua bar Yosef ever existed.

Yes we do, there's scholarly consensus on that.

There is plenty of independent primary and secondary documentation of Kelly's existence and quite a lot of his exploits, yet the very best we have for Yeshua is a 2 centuries later copy of a tertiary source which was originally written two generations after his supposed death.

That's completly incorrect. We can date Paul's writings very well to the 50's AD, and we can date James and Mark to around the same period. Just because the other books were (probably) written later than 60AD doesn't alter the fact that there at least 9 including 1 gospel written before 60AD.

And your references to copies shows you are not knowledgeable about ancient writings. There are no extant first century writings anywhere that aren't on tablets or stone*. Almost everything we have is a copy, including Josephus, including ancient Roman writings.

* There is one writing in Hebrew extant from that period which survived, but the New Testament was written in Greek which itself was more common anyway.

Anyway, how do you know Ned Kelly was a real person?

Plus what little of his life we have is contradictory and doesn't make sense, ...

No it makes perfect sense and I've made that point several times. As for his crucifixion, the act of him going and disrupting the peace at the Temple was all that the Roman authorities would have needed to sentence him to death by crucifixion.

So it is pointless at this moment to talk about where Yeshua was buried because we haven't even come close to establishing whether he even lived.

Yes we have because there's scholarly consensus on that. If you doubt that in the face of scholarly consensus it's up to you to provide the evidence, of which you've provided none.

Richard Carrier denies you "consensus."

He's a complete quack. Stop quoting from fringe scholars who aren't respected by their peers.

I get it from your apparent taking them at face-value, and assuming that others (namely James) would not only do so, but endeavor to report their entirety as, ahem, gospel truth, when in fact any time an author sets pen to paper, he does so with an agenda.

Yes and his agenda is as clear as Paul's...

The consensus of biblical scholars is as valuable as the consensus of creatards.

No it isn't! It has the same value as a scholarly consensus in any other field. WWII historians for example. There is no difference, whatsoever in believing in Jesus Mysticism and in believing in Holocaust Denial. And in fact there are more scholars (within their field) who doubt the Holocaust than there are that doubt the historicity of Jesus. If that's what you believe then you have lost all credentials for critical thinking and for evaluating evidence.

It is based on taking a prior assumption as if it were proven true. There is no evidence given for the existence of Yeshua outside of the bible and a few insertions by later christian scholars into non christian documents.

So what? There doesn't need to be any more evidence than that. This is a point made by numerous historians - not just NT scholars, but ancient Rome historians as well. Are you saying their expertise is worthless as well??

And frankly I'm not convinced either way on Yeshua, there is too little evidence there for to say, definitively, yay or nay. But I'm pretty convinced that if there were a real Yeshua, instead of being the genesis of the christian religion, he was probably a proto-zealot, being leader of a small (possibly violent) anti-Roman group who wanted to restore the theocratic kingdom of Jewish legend.

That hypothesis is laughable.

Edit: As regards the writings, I wasn't talking about the dates of their provenance (because that is an estimate), I was talking about the earliest date we have for a substantial part of a single christian document from the new testament (or other similar documents rejected by orthodoxy). The oldest example of a largely complete document is a copy of Luke dated to c.200CE. We have older fragments, but they are little better than a small part of a leaf containing word and sentence fragments. Either you misunderstood me, or you deliberately misconstrued me in an attempt to make me look bad. Given your track record my money's on the latter.

So what? Later copies are all that exist of almost anything with very little exception from the period. The earliest copy of Antiquities by Josephus is from the 10th century and it's incomplete.

I think we can safely dismiss Irving.  Maybe, if I feel like it, I'll look up your other "examples."

Indeed, just as we can safely dismiss Carrier and Price, and that's my point. None of them are distinguished scholars in their fields. They're the bottom of the barrel. Indeed if you bothered to actually read the Hurtado's blog I've posted several times now, you'd see he clearly says "Along with the view of pretty near all scholars in the field .." and he mentions another mythicist Thomas Brodie who was having a book published titled "Beyond the Quest for the Historical Jesus". The fact is that he, Carrier, and Price all have wildly different hypotheses about how this "Jesus myth" came about, and none of them have amassed a scholarly following, or even executed their arguments with sufficient evidence. If you look up Brodie you'll actually find that he held this mythicist belief before he even learned about scholarship, and never seems to have subjected his opinions to scholarly standards - in otherwords, as far as scholarly standards go he's not at the level of Hurtado, or even Ehrman. He was reportedly never that interested in receiving criticism from other scholars. Or at least that's what I just read according to another scholar, James F. McGrath. There is an essay on mythicism here by another scholar (Jon Burke), note that he also says there's scholarly consensus: "Jesus’ existence is considered well established by professional historiography, and the idea that he did not exist is typically not taken seriously."

I just read Burke's essay it's quite interesting:

"All Carriers arguments have been contradicted by qualified scholars in the relevant fields, and his books have failed to shift the scholarly consensus on the historicity of Jesus, despite his claims that the first book (now two years old), would have a massive influence on Jesus studies and overturn the case for historicity. Carrier is the only online skeptic of Jesus’ historicity worth taking seriously."

So again Min, it's up to you to provide evidence that goes against the clear consensus that exists among academics. The burden of proof is on you.

Would you like me to go on?

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Are you being deliberately obtuse? You're assuming the evidentiary value of the writing you're citing, which is wholly insufficient for the claim under discussion. To answer this question -- have you not heard of archaeology? Societies leave behind a lot of physical evidence for their cultural beliefs and mores.

Without ancient writing, archaeological finds are much more difficult to evaluate meaning from. This is why we debate the function of the Pyramids for example, and wouldn't you know it arrive at a scholarly consensus on that. Again you are deliberately creating a false dichotomy as any decent archaeologist is a scholar of ancient literature as well - like Israel Finkelstein.

Say, next week can we debate the existence of Beren and Luthien? I'm sure they existed, because Tolkien wrote about them. And writing is evidence!

AGAIN you are using a false dichotomy. A straw man argument. The writings of Shakespeare are, according to Scholars, hard evidence for the historicity of William Shakespeare. They don't tell us anything directly about his character however, but they do provide clues. They are not evidence for the historical existence of Romeo and Juliet. Without writing we have no evidence whatsoever that Shakespeare ever existed. Therefore it is at least possible that the plays were written by a woman using a pseudonym; so I could put forward that hypothesis and you wouldn't be able to directly refute it. I could indeed go further and use the evidence of women using pseudonyms to have novels published in later centuries. But I would be doing the same thing that Carrier does, which is assuming that a paradigm that exists elsewhere (female authorship of novels) would apply to the case I'm looking at (authorship of plays), and therefore the onus of proof would be on me to show why it applies. Again, from what I've seen of Carrier he does not do this, he simply assumes that what he sees in ancient polytheist religions would apply to a first century monotheist religion.

But WHAT IS THAT EVIDENCE, Danny?  Hint:  It's the fucking gospels which are about as useful as tits on a bull in this discussion because they are:

1: Anonymous
2: Date from considerably later than the events they describe
3: Are full of errors
4: Have been deliberately altered to fit later theological designs.

Now, all of this comes from Professor Ehrman.... who has shit all over them for 25 years but then decided they could be useful to him when he chose to write another book.  I lost a lot of respect for him when he did that.

Right, so I'll say this a third time: you are knowingly putting forward a false dichotomy. The writings of Josephus contain author errors as well. The writings of Herodotus contains errors - in fact they contain a WHOPPER that had Egyptologists the world-over convinced that the ancient Egyptian Pyramids were built using slave labour for more than 2 millennia! Every ancient writer made errors, so you can't expect the gospel writers to have higher standards: that is creating impossible conditions, as you well know.

NB: The gospels are four books, five including Acts of the Apostles. They are not the only evidence, nor did I say they are the best evidence for the historicity of Jesus. We also have non-gospel/Gnostic writings such as the gospel according to Thomas, we have seven letters penned by Paul in the 0050's, and we have the Epistle of James as well.


I'll go through your points:
1. It is true that the gospels are anonymous, however we do know that Luke-Acts was either written by a close associate of Paul's named Luke the Physician, or someone that was close to Luke. There is scholarly consensus that one of those two options is the most likely, and there is scholarly consensus at least among critical scholars not accept second century ascribed authorship to the other three. Although we can't know for certain about the other three, the fact that Luke is associated with Paul means scholars can make reasonable inferences about the other synoptic gospels, and that is that Mark was already written and Matthew was written around the same time as Luke. Please note that there was another gospel written in Hebrew quite similar to Matthew, that scholars think was written before Matthew as well.
2. Their dating is early by ancient standards. They are however written at least 30 years after the death of Jesus, and probably 40-50 years later.
3. Errors can help authenticate works, as well as help to discredit them. Mark's ignorance of geological locations within Judea indicates the author was likely a Gentile Christian rather than a Jewish Christian for example. This would in-turn lead to the plausibility of Acts 15's account of an early Christian Council in Jerusalem at which proselytising to non-Jews was discussed.
4. They haven't been deliberately altered, at least not substantially. I'm not sure where you're getting that from, but there are numerous quotations of the New Testament made in the writings of Church Leaders in the early centuries (2nd, 3rd, and 4th), and nothing within them suggests that the text was systemically altered (i.e. what is quoted is exactly what is in the New Testament as found in ancient manuscripts). Ehrman himself confirms this is the case. That is, he has no evidence to show that what existed in the first century was in anyway dissimilar to what existed in the 2nd-4th centuries, beyond the textual variation that presently exists, and has said so.

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As for your question, did I mention anyone aside from you? No. I mentioned you and only you, and not to discredit your argument, but to return your insulting demeanor.

Perhaps if you read what was written for content rather than for argument's sake, your discussions would avoid the vitriol they seem to end up in most of the time.

I'm done with this discussion. You can have the last word; make it a good one.

I am mentioning my argument with Min because he has made the same argument as you, however he is also much more informed about ancient history than you appear to be. I've been making exactly the same argument on the historicity of Jesus for two years, and that is that the expert historians in the relevant fields have a consensus view that Jesus of Nazareth was a historical person. I have asked you a specific question, the same question I asked of Firefighter - why is it that you have a prejudice against these particular academics (New Testament era historians)? I can actually show you, although it'd be a bit more difficult because I'd have to find my references, but believe me I can show you that not only do NT unanimously scholars say that Jesus of Nazareth was a historical person, but so do Roman Empire historians.

If you think we can't use the New Testament as evidence then why can't we use academic publications as evidence? See this is the problem with your argument, as soon as I show you that the evidence all points one way you decide the change the conditions by claiming that you want a different standard of evidence. But it's not up to you to set the standard of evidence, that's up for professional historians to decide. Then you say "if we can't trust the gospels for X then they must be wrong about Y" - again a clearly invalid argument. If that were the case we would ignore everything that Josephus has to say about the ancient world too because he makes a few clear errors too.

Then you lay claim to the gospels laying claim to too many miracles to be taken seriously: and that is not true either. Most of the miracles are healing ceremonies, and that requires a low level of sophistication in the real world that can be, let's say, mildly exaggerated by the time they're written down in the gospels. Besides healings and exorcisms there's only a handful of events: walking on water, raising Lazarus from the dead (which is just an extension of healing anyway), the transfiguration, water into wine, and of course cursing the fig tree (which was out of season anyway - so not much of a curse that one). Anyway at this point, we can be as sceptical as we like but it doesn't change the fact that we've established Jesus existed - the epistles of Paul in the absence of the gospels demonstrate that as it is, and they don't lay claim to all the miracles happening.


Christians believe that Jesus was resurrected from the dead, and then after 40 days ascended into heaven and took his body with him. Therefore if Christians knew exactly where he was buried it would disprove their belief. And I might add, it would be very difficult to prove a specific ossuary was his (that's if he was even laid to rest in one), as it would be vey unlikely to name all of his brothers mentioned in the Bible as well as his parents. IIRC most simply name just the father and perhaps one brother, "Jesus son of Joseph brother of [Simeon/Joseph/James/Judas]" could be anyone, as they are all common names. If it said "Jesus son of Joseph and Mary, brother of Simeon, Joseph, James, and Judas" then you might have proof. And if that's what you had it'd be more likely to be a forgery anyway, like the James ossuary. And back to the specific topic of this thread, the type of tomb that Jesus was said to be laid in immediately following his crucifixion, is an intermittent tomb used by the wealthy to let the body decay so it can be later placed within the family tomb in an ossuary, as opposed to putting the body straight into the family tomb and stinking it out while it decays. Furthermore it was located within Jerusalem or nearby, and not owned by one of Jesus's family members, which is all the more reason to think the family might want to move the body quickly to their family tomb. We just don't know - the tomb's owner may have been simply doing the family a favour by laying the body there until the Sabbath had passed so it could be moved to their tomb located in Nazareth (or wherever).

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So, is there scholarly consensus or isn't there?