Objective evidence for the existence of Jesus Christ?

[robvalue]

Long post!

Please note this is all my opinion. I'm not a historian. I'm just offering the best arguments I can for the evidence I'm aware of.

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Some thoughts:

What evidence there is or what conclusions anyone draws about other historical figures is irrelevant to the discussion at hand. It's a tu quoque fallacy. It's saying, "Everyone believes in X with such weak evidence, so why not jesus?"

The thing about "authority" is that we have all the same evidence they have in this case pretty much, and what they present are their arguments. Historians are much better placed to judge, say, whether a document is a forgery. But if they want to say something about the likelihood jesus existed, under a certain criteria for that definition, then they must present arguments and evidence. If their arguments are weak, then they don't convince me. If they are fallacious, I can dismiss them.

Remember that the bible is one long book of claims. It shouldn't be assumed anything in it is true unless it can be reasonably well demonstrated by independent sources. Otherwise, it's circular logic. Say for example about the authors going on about Bethlehem or Nazareth a lot when it may seem like it would be "easier" not to. So what? It's a story. It's a book of claims. There may be any number of literary reasons to stick those towns in as they did. Considering what a late iteration of the bible we have, it may have been totally clear for the purposes of the story why this was and it's now been lost.

Bottom line, I think often people give allowances to the bible that they would not give to any other random book. There seems to be a baseline assumption that it's not all totally made up. Why would I assume that? I totally will assume the whole thing is made up, and I'll only accept what can be objectively demonstrated to have a decent chance of actualy being true. Just like I would do with any random book someone shoved into my hands, particularly one written so long ago.

Also, the whole point of the story is that jesus is the most important man ever. Ever! Yet no one bothered to write anything about him, as far as we know, until years after his death. Now this is an appeal to motive, which I am not fond of, so it doesn't make the accounts less true. But it is a startling lack of evidence (contemporary accounts) exactly where you would expect to find tons of it. The fact that "he" became so popular such a long time later, even after he supposedly rose from the dead, is much more consistent with the development of an entirely fabricated legend.

This is what I would propose as criteria for a "historical Jesus":

A demonstration that there is enough independently verified information and criteria about "jesus" that it is reasonable to conclude it would be likely only to apply to a single historical person.

If the information we have about jesus could reasonably be expected to apply to, say, 500 people alive at that time, then we don't have a historical jesus, in my opinion. We're pinning a story on any one of a bunch of random guys, or more likely, a combination of many characters. If it can be so easily shifted like this, then personally I say historical Jesus has not met its burden of proof. If it's fair to assume jesus is a mixture of more than one person, then this is not good enough.

I am not making the claim that there was no historical jesus, just like I don't make the claim there is no God. I only say I don't believe the claim of a HJ until there's good enough evidence and argument to sufficiently pin it one one person. I'm not asking for that person's social security number or anything, I'm talking about an honest probability assessment of the criteria to say how many people we would reasonably expect to match the description. Even if it's as high as 10, then it fails in my opinion. It's just a mish mash of local mad men, there is no one "jesus". But if the criteria are so specific that you wouldn't reasonably expect more than one person to have matched all of them, then we have a winner. If the evidence isn't there, too bad. I'm not going to give extra weight to what little evidence there is, just because we don't have much.

Do we have a winner?

Well that's enough rantings for now. I'm not having a go at anyone, I respect everyone else to draw their conclusions and I'm not saying I'm right and they are wrong. This is purely a matter of personal judgement.

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