RE: Objective evidence for the existence of Jesus Christ?
April 2, 2015 at 5:21 pm
(This post was last modified: April 2, 2015 at 5:23 pm by watchamadoodle.)
(April 2, 2015 at 3:13 am)robvalue Wrote: Watchamadoodle: Cool, so say we allow jesus be baptised by John and then crucified by poncho pilot. Would he be the only guy to have had both these events, also called jesus, in all likelihood?The baptism and crucifixion aren't sufficient IMO, but there is the implicit third requirement for a historical Jesus - the person needed to be an early leader in proto-Christianity. There is a good chance that only one early leader of Christianity was also crucified by Pontius Pilate. The Josephus reference to the stoning of James the brother of Jesus might be the smoking gun - but only if that is the same incident described in Acts. Acts was written before the Josephus reference, and Josephus would not have copied the story from Acts.
I'm not saying you're wrong, I'm genuinely interested. I don't know how common both those events would have been.
The dates are so all over the place that "when" they happened isn't much of a big deal. There's a fairly big time window. I assume the baptism would generally be first, though
If the answer is yes, and we have identified a single dude, then I agree, you could call that a HJ. It does satisfy my definition. It would be about a 1% correlation with the story or something. I haven't looked in detail at how reliable it is that jesus was indeed poncho'd and john'd so I'll have to come back to those when I have the brain power.
So, IMO, the historicity of Jesus depends on how many people named "James the brother of Jesus" were stoned just shortly before the Temple was destroyed. Normally I think people add the name of a father instead of the name of a brother, so that fact makes this James fairly unique.
Of course, if Josephus's reference to James is interpolated, then the evidence for a historical Jesus is a lot weaker IMO. But we still have the textual criticism of the gospels (the relationship between Jesus and John the Baptist, the birth in Bethlehem and Nazareth, etc.)
I'm not pretending to be an expert, but that's my opinion.
