What Is The Point Of Prayer?

[Esquilax]

There are no extra biblical accounts of Jesus? Do you have a source or a reference for that?

Do I have a source for the absence of something? That's... not really how existential claims work... We don't generally have professors of non-history, after all...

I have no good reason to doubt Jesus existed and have good reasons to believe He did. Therefore I believe He existed.

Actually, I think I'm getting too bogged down talking about existence, anyway. Whether there was or was not a Jesus, you do have good reason not to believe that he was the son of god and capable of miracles, namely that such things are physically impossible and have never been replicated. It's special pleading; why does this one account get a pass, while competing miracle claims from other religions do not? If someone were to claim he performed a miracle today, in front of you, would you believe him on these same grounds, that you don't have a reason not to?

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Not really, there are many historical figures for which we don't have 100% entirely complete information of their life, like Socrates or Hannibal of Carthage. Jesus would be more akin to them than to King Arthur, who probably did exist as well though we know practically nothing about him.

Oh, sure! The difference being that the attendant claims for Socrates and Hannibal don't violate the physical laws of the universe. They aren't even in the same ballpark; extraordinary claims necessarily require more evidence than mundane, physically possible ones.

20 years was well within living memory even back then so if Jesus hadn't existed someone would have just said. But no-one argued about Jesus existence only his divinity.

I don't really understand this argument. Do you often find historical documents that tell us about what wasn't happening?

1st century Jews wouldn't have been easily willing to accept God as a man or physical resurrections from the dead before the end times. They weren't necessarily any more gullible than people living today these were intelligent civilised people.

But necessarily lacking our current knowledge of how the world works. It's how humanity has always explained things it doesn't understand: lightning was from Zeus, or it was from Thor. Rough seas were the anger of Poseidon, etc etc...

The gospel accounts had their original source in people who had known Jesus and put his teachings to memory. This was then written down by the first Jewish Christian communities. Within 20 years of Christs crucifixion there were people who believed in Christ so passionately that they were prepared top martyr themselves for it. No-one ever did this over Zeus, Mithras or some mythical figure. Again this was well within living memory of Jesus himself so close enough to contemporary not hundreds of years later.

If they were that passionate about the man- and I agree that seeing his miracles for themselves would be impressive enough to inspire- why did they wait twenty years to begin telling his story? Especially if they thought he was the son of god and that people were doomed to hell without accepting his sacrifice?

Was it just a busy couple of decades for them? Also, how do you know nobody ever martyred themselves for another, older god?

Here we go.

http://carm.org/non-biblical-accounts-ne...dor-people

Well, thanks for that, but I get kind of wary when people point me to places like carm.org, or answers in genesis, or places like that. For one, an apologetics website can hardly be considered unbiased; there's a definite presupposition involved there... not to mention apologists have a proven track record of being liberal with the facts...

But I took a look anyway. Now, I'm hardly well versed enough to speak with authority here, but the first four references are Josephus, whose authenticity is hardly accepted as true. The fifth is Tacitus, who mentions Christus, not Jesus. Thallus' writings only exist in fragments, Pliny only mentions Christians, not Christ as an existing person. I won't even go into why the Talmud is a bad reference to use, and Lucian was a second century satirist, so hardly a contemporary, either way.

Not to mention, Tacitus, Josephus and Pliny the younger were born decades after the supposed coming of Christ, so... hey.

Anyway, I guess it doesn't matter, regardless; even accepting the existence of a Jesus character- and on balance I'm willing to accept one or many inspirations for this- there's simply no reason to accept the miracle claims associated with him. All the questions I asked Disc apply here, too.