Objective evidence for the existence of Jesus Christ?

[Mudhammam]

So, I think what pocaracos and others who have expressed doubt about the legitimacy of any information derived from Christian sources have said is entirely reasonable, and I too have wondered if Jesus really existed, and what can we know about him. And beyond a few points, I'd say I'm pretty much agnostic on the issue, and furthermore, it's not a big deal to me either way.

Here's been the frustrating thing about engaging in this topic when the discussion comes up, as it frequently does. First, to act as though the Bible or any other source is legitimate to derive information about Jesus (at least what early Christians, not including Josephus and Tacitus, believed about him) is not a basis for pegging that person as "un-atheistic" (huh?) or somehow even remotely religious. The issue of historicity of any given event in the Bible is not a religious issue, except to the religious. So, saying that Jesus probably existed is not to say anything about Christianity. That the two were conflated as many times as they were in this thread is bothersome because a goal of a rational person shouldn't simply be to persuade the religious to doubt, but to encourage valid and sound thinking, and I'd like to think that the "atheist" or "secular movement" (if we can call anything that) of the last 150 or so years has contributed to that, and hopefully will continue to do so---which is why I am a bit concerned with the rise of mythicism in the same way that I'm concerned about the loudest YECs' attack on scientific education. History may not be a science proper but there are rigorous, even objective, methods for doing it.

Second, there is no historical method that I'm aware of that looks at a work religious in nature and automatically concludes that everything in it is bologna. There is always something historians can glean from a text, even if it is nothing more than the beliefs of the people who wrote it, and clearly, some texts are more esoteric than others and others easier to dissect. Nobody, in their right mind, could put the letters Paul wrote next to something like the book of Revelation or the Ascension of Isaiah. Different genres involve different ways of analyzing the historical value of the work. Granted, we should be more skeptical about some documents than others, there is nothing in the earliest works of Christianity that should lead someone to think that every single author was motivated by a desire to deceive. I think the morality of the writers often shines through as quite noble, even if I know they’re obviously wrong about some particular issue or event. They don't come across as liars whom not a word could be trusted, and lying is repeatedly condemned. If someone is going to take that view, they ought to support it with evidence other than just claiming that they were peddling obvious bullshit (because it was bullshit they sincerely believed in). This whole idea that the New Testament documents can’t be included in the evidence we have for the existence of Jesus is bizarre, and not many historians will find any argument for that credible. Why? Because it’s not how history is done, nor could much of any history be done if the opponents of a person’s existence simply dismiss all the relevant data we have about them. Imagine if Socrates had inspired a cult and we found a cache of documents giving incredible stories about his life. Would we just declare that Socrates never existed? Would we automatically assume there was nothing of value in them? Would we discard Plato, Aristophanes, and Xenophon’s works as telling us nothing useful because this one cult had a vested interest in the existence of Socrates? That would be absurd. We know how people wrote back then, and it’s rare that you’ll find anyone who doesn’t believe in some antiquated or supernatural concept. This is why volumes of debate are written about each of these separate works in the New Testament, because they do pose something of a puzzle, but that's not a reason that should cause people to lose their common sense. First century minds didn't view the world or the laws of physics or biology as we do in the twenty-first.

Another point: When we look at the documents we have about other figures in history, all we have are writings that come hundreds of years later. We have nothing close to the originals. The situation with the New Testament is a lot better. We have, not only a lot of manuscripts, but fragments that go back very early. So, we know that there was editing done but we also know that the copies we have are pretty good representations of the originals, all things considered. Everybody believed Jesus was a human being. His death pervades the earliest accounts. It’s the nature of his resurrection, as a body rising from the grave, that comes later. Anyway, I don’t mean to keep beating a dead horse, but to stress, methodology here is important, and the Bible is a collection of documents like any other, keeping in mind that some of them aim to establish theological truths, some intend to convey history, and in both there are truths and falsehoods to be found. With completely certainty? Of course not. But probability? That’s a big difference.