Did William Shakespeare exist?

[Alex K]

All I can say about the Socrates vs. Jesus debate - what a hoot would it be if one of Jesus' friends (with the caliber of an Aristophanes) had written a series of mean satirical plays about him
Then again, maybe that's exactly what happened and we are reading the new testament all wrong!

[robvalue]

It's always possible stuff has been written about people, even Jesus, and did not survive.

I heard he's got more willy than you can shake a spear at.

[BrianSoddingBoru4]

All I can say about the Socrates vs. Jesus debate - what a hoot would it be if one of Jesus' friends (with the caliber of an Aristophanes) had written a series of mean satirical plays about him
Then again, maybe that's exactly what happened and we are reading the new testament all wrong!

The thought of the New Testament being satire makes me go all warm and fuzzy.

As to Shakespeare, 'the play's the thing.' I don't much care if the person commonly accepted as William Shakespeare wrote those plays or not - they're cracking good entertainment, regardless.

Boru

[Minimalist]

[Mudhammam]

[Minimalist]

First off, most of your bible horseshit was cobbled on parchment which does last better than papyrus.

Second, so what?  You clowns are the ones insisting your fairy tales are real and if you had any actual evidence you'd be shrieking it from the rooftops.  Instead, all we ever get is the same old shit.

It really doesn't matter if Socrates was real or not.  And it is only religious clowns who insist that the godboy was. 

But my standing offer remains intact. Bring some evidence and we'll discuss it.  I'm not going to prove your case for you.  That's your job.

[Mudhammam]

First off, most of your bible horseshit was cobbled on parchment which does last better than papyrus.

Second, so what?  You clowns are the ones insisting your fairy tales are real and if you had any actual evidence you'd be shrieking it from the rooftops.  Instead, all we ever get is the same old shit.

It really doesn't matter if Socrates was real or not.  And it is only religious clowns who insist that the godboy was. 

But my standing offer remains intact. Bring some evidence and we'll discuss it.  I'm not going to prove your case for you.  That's your job.

Well, I think you were responding to me, but your bizarre-sort-of-emotional rant made it difficult to tell... I took your answer as, "Oops, no... we don't. Duh."

[Minimalist]

That's the 'so what' part.  You clowns are champions of the false-equivalency.

But if you really want to get into it how come your church scribes didn't do a better job of saving this supposedly holy horseshit they were supposed to be copying.  Seems like someone really let your side down.

The fact that we have any surviving manuscripts from the Greco-Roman world is largely attributable to the Arabs who at least at that point in their history saw the value of preserving the written word....unlike jesus freak thugs who ran around burning down libraries.

[Mudhammam]

[Pat Mustard]

Right. Nor should we, as amateur historians, expect Jesus to have anything that matches that of a person like Socrates, which makes what we do have about Jesus all the more impressive.

The sum total of our accepted knowledge of a historical Jesus:

There is exactly zero independent evidence for the existence of Jesus or any of his supposed acts. The bible itself cannit be taken as evidence, because a) it was at best written as a compilation of third hand hearsay and b) it has been altered so often and so thoroughly over the intervening 1700 years that we cannot even be sure what is hearsay and what is outright fabrication.