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Did Jesus Exist?

Solitaire

Neoclinus blanchardi
Solitaire
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Picking up from the "The Writings of Jesus" thread,
what evidence is there that Jesus actually existed?
 
My snap answer would be "the writings of Flavius Josephus". These are a little suspect because it appears that some over-enthusiastic translator in a monastery somewhere along the line inserted some additional words about Jesus that supported the view of Jesus as divine. But modern historians are pretty sure they know which parts were forged and which parts were original, and there are mentions of Jesus in the original.

That was my snap answer off the top of my head. Googling turned up this:
http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/~humm/Topics/JewishJesus/

By the way, despite his Roman name, Josephus was Jew, a local. He took the Roman name and had a career in the Roman government.

Pilate was real, and I think we know a little about his career as well (which wasn't so great after the Jerusalem period, as I recall).

This seems to be another good site, which I don't have time to go through in depth:
http://www.earlychristianwritings.com/theories.html
 
I found this article most interesting, and I provide it here even though it is fractionally off-topic:

Did Jesus Really rise From The Dead?

It does have quite a few paragraphs on the question of Jesus' existence, and it notes that Josephus' Antiquities is likely to have been altered in the 4th Century.
 
Believers: Recommended reading. (yawn)
With all the hoopla one would think Josephus lived when Jesus did.

There's one, maybe two short paragraphs that mention a small group known as Christians who believe in someone named Christ who rose from the dead.

From that, historians infer that Jesus is actually confirmed to exist.
 
Synchronicity said:
Picking up from the "The Writings of Jesus" thread,
what evidence is there that Jesus actually existed?
Click to expand...

From the limited digging I have done - not much. There seems to be a good chance that the few non gospel / epistle related references are actually about 2 different rabbis covering almost a century around the time JC is supposed to have been about.

Much of the other stuff is thought to have been added to the originals later on.

This is worth a read. It has a certain bias to it but does seem to go in to a great deal of detail about many of the claimed sources. It also explains confusions that have arrisen during translations and so forth that have completely changed the meaning of original texts.
 
What we know, without doubt, is that a cult surrounding someone flourished a few decades after his death. I don't believe most of the stories about him, but I think it is unlikely that this Yehshua fellow didn't even exist. If you believe that, you have to assert that someone in the mid "first century" decided to invent a non-existent fellow, create a history surrounding him, and then get people to worship him. It's not impossible, but it strikes me as unlikely.

Far more likely is that there was some strange cult-like leader who was a rabble-rouser. He got himself killed by the Romans for stirring up trouble, and then his followers didn't give up on him.

Of course, he was a fairly obscure fellow. Just barely worth killing, really. A few decades on, new followers are recruited, and they start adding to the legends. Suddenly, he wasn't just a Jewish reformer, or even just a prophet. He was the Son of God.

One interesting source to read is the Hebrew Gospel of Matthew. (try google) If authentic, and there is good reason to believe it is, it would be an earlier source than our "official" gospels, and would show some of the transition from the Hebrew fellow named Jehoshua that probably really lived to the much more Greek Jesus.
 
I posted two links, one to Jewish writings, one to early Christian writings. As far as I can tell, neither one includes contemporaneous sources. It looks like we don't have anything written by someone alive ca 30 AD.

BTW, I've often heard 4 BC as the generally-accepted estimate of the birth of Jesus. Does anyone know what that's based on? Is it correlating historical data (such as the reign of Herod) with Gospel accounts? There's another thread discussing the census that brought Mary and Joseph to Bethlehem. It appears we have a record of a census being done in 6 AD, but not in 4 BC, and it wouldn't have required people to travel to their birthplace.

The Jewish site includes a Josephus link and the discussion of the forgery question. There's an Arabic translation which the author considers most reliable, and which mentions Jesus. Obviously anybody judging which translation is most accurate is guessing at best, based on style and other clues.

The other Jewish writings mention various Yeshu's spanning about a century. It wasn't an uncommon name, apparently. (Barrabas, the prisoner who is released in the crucifixion story, is called Jesus Barrabas in at least some translations.)
 
rppa said:
The other Jewish writings mention various Yeshu's spanning about a century. It wasn't an uncommon name, apparently. (Barrabas, the prisoner who is released in the crucifixion story, is called Jesus Barrabas in at least some translations.)
Click to expand...

I think Barabbas is a confusing character. The bible calls Barabbas an "insurrectionist." But oddly enough, Barabbas means "Son of Abba", aka, "Son of God"

So Pilate gives the Jews the choice between Jesus, who is claimed to be the son of god, or this other guy, who is also supposedly the son of god. Insurrectionist? By who's measure?

It suggests that there is a lot more to the story than is given in the gospels, but we are only hearing a very selective version of it.

I had never heard that he is called Jesus Barabbas in some translations. That makes it more interesting, because it means he is "Jesus Son of God"
 
rppa said:
BTW, I've often heard 4 BC as the generally-accepted estimate of the birth of Jesus. Does anyone know what that's based on?
Click to expand...

It is based on the dating of Passover. I don't remember the details, but the Last Supper was a Passover seder. The date it was celebrated would be 14th Nissan. (Or was it 15. I don't remember.) The Gospels say what day of the week that was. From that, you can figure out some possible dates right around 1 A.D. 4 B.C. was an appropriate candidate.

Of course, it gets a little tricky because John has it slightly different than Matthew, Mark, and Luke, but John always was a loose canon.
 
pgwenthold said:
I had never heard that he is called Jesus Barabbas in some translations. That makes it more interesting, because it means he is "Jesus Son of God"
Click to expand...

I heard it last Sunday in a Palm Sunday service, in a reading from Matthew [1]. I hadn't heard it before, or at least hadn't noticed it before. But internet searching confirms "in early manuscripts of Matthew, he is called Jesus Barrabas". I saw statements to that effect in several places.


[1] It is traditional on Palm Sunday to act out the verses of the gospel covering events from the arrest to the crucifixion. This is called a "Passion" or "Passion Play" and goes back at least to the 12th century. There is a large body of sung Passions going back almost as far.
 
Meadmaker said:
What we know, without doubt, is that a cult surrounding someone flourished a few decades after his death. I don't believe most of the stories about him, but I think it is unlikely that this Yehshua fellow didn't even exist. If you believe that, you have to assert that someone in the mid "first century" decided to invent a non-existent fellow, create a history surrounding him, and then get people to worship him. It's not impossible, but it strikes me as unlikely.
Click to expand...

Do you mean like Xenu?

Okay, they don't worship him, but the point is the same.
 
Ipecac said:
Do you mean like Xenu?

Okay, they don't worship him, but the point is the same.
Click to expand...

Not quite. Xenu isn't supposed to have actually been a person or to have done things, esp. within living memory of people who might actually have been witnesses to what did and did not happen. Forrest Gump was a great story, but there are too many eyewitnesses still around to say "that didn't really happen" for people to take it seriously. On the other hand, a lot of people really do believe in George Washington's cherry tree.....
 
new drkitten said:
Not quite. Xenu isn't supposed to have actually been a person or to have done things, esp. within living memory of people who might actually have been witnesses to what did and did not happen. Forrest Gump was a great story, but there are too many eyewitnesses still around to say "that didn't really happen" for people to take it seriously. On the other hand, a lot of people really do believe in George Washington's cherry tree.....
Click to expand...

Huh? Don't scientologists supposedly believe Xenu was a real guy?
 
BTW, I've often heard 4 BC as the generally-accepted estimate of the birth of Jesus. Does anyone know what that's based on? Is it correlating historical data (such as the reign of Herod) with Gospel accounts? There's another thread discussing the census that brought Mary and Joseph to Bethlehem. It appears we have a record of a census being done in 6 AD, but not in 4 BC, and it wouldn't have required people to travel to their birthplace.
Click to expand...

This is one of the problems. King Harrod was around until about 4BC but there wasn't a census until 6AD. the gospels however call both at the same time. Major contradiction.

The problem with Josepheus is that at least some and probably (possibly) all of the Jesus reference is an interpolation(later edit). Eusebius (proponent of the lie for god) is a likely perpetrator of the "corrections".
 
The question of "Did Jesus exist" is troublesome.

Imagine asking "Did Joe exist". Who's Joe? If he's some guy that lived once upon a time, then ipso facto, he existed.

It may be better to independently examine the historical answers to:

1) Did a person exist named Jesus first century?
2) Did the person exist whom it is claimed founded the Christian Church?
3) Did a person exist who (more or less) can be identified as the subject of the Gospels?
4) Did a person exist who was the Son of God and the salvation of mankind?

1) is pretty meaningless. Josephus speaks to 2) and 3). As to 4), all we have is the NT books, which admittedly, may be suspected by critics.
 
There was a religious teacher named Jesus in Palestine at the time. However, records being spotty and historians being fallible, accounts of her life have been distorted.
 
I see that it didn't fall apart into a discussion of the historacity of Socrates..
Click to expand...

I don't think the discussion falls apart on a discussion of Socrates. It only adds the reality that the "evidence" of a historical Jesus is so far as number of ancient manuscripts, date of oldest existing manuscripts, and elapsed period of writing to events, stacks in favor of a historical Jesus. The weight of the "evidence" is actually greater than Socrates, and really when it comes to manuscripts, it is almost embarassing to consider the wealth of material when contrasted to that of any figure from antiquity.

The problem is that much of this material was "canonized" and therefore deemed suspect by unbelievers.

I am reminded of C.S. Lewis, who spent the first 21 years of his life an atheist. He really avoided the canon because he found the assertions in it displeasing. It was Tolkein, his college roommate who confronted him about it.

Tolkein asked Lewis why he would read numerous works of ancient literature and search for meaning in them without blinking an eye. Tolkein asked Lewis to treat the gospels as merely a work of literature and apply the same search for meaning and sense of enjoyment to them, so Lewis tried it and changed his viewpoint.

The problem with rejecting the existing historical record, is taht logically speaking, one is rejecting it out of personal preference as opposed to the facts. That's fine, but it's still illogical.

It is the same thing as rejecting Descartes because he wrote that animal spirits control the movement of our limbs. While most of us might find that intellectually displeasing, we don't throw out the baby with the bath water. Yet, atheism, at least in many forms of it, is extremely intolerant and largely content to throw out ancient manuscripts for the only reason that they were accepted as truth by a group of people they don't agree with.

Flick
 
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