Not really true, you need to seperate the belief that Jesus was the son of God from the belief that he existed. The existence of Jesus the man says nothing at all about the existence of God.
What is the historical evidence for Jesus?
- Thread starter Rachmaninov
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Not really true, you need to seperate the belief that Jesus was the son of God from the belief that he existed. The existence of Jesus the man says nothing at all about the existence of God.
Associate
None at all because there was never a 0AD.
My first thought was that this was a blatant troll thread (the rofl kinda gives it away), but I'll give the OP the benefit of the doubt and give a brief response.
Given the historical period to which Christ is attributed to exist it would be difficult to expect direct archaeological evidence to exist for a man whose importance and subsequent fame came after his death.....which is something that people seem not to realise when trying to debunk any suggestion that he existed. Jesus Christ was during his life only a travelling reformist Rabbi for all intents and purposes, not unlike his teacher John the Baptist or several other Rabbinic Jewish teachers at the time....Judaism during the Second Temple Period was not as it is today, today it is largely Rabbinic Judaism while then it was split into several sects who had some very different interpretations of their faith, the one we are primarily concerned with are the Pharisees who were the main representatives of the Jews at the time in Judea and Palestine.......The Pharisees were opposed to messianic Judaism and so people like Jesus who preached a different kind of interpretation were often sidelined and were considered to be nothing more than what we would consider a side-show preacher today. It would be unlikely that official records would have been made and even more unlikely that they would have been held in such esteem as to be protected for antiquity...even today we do not keep every record for posterity, in the 1st Century it was very expensive and time consuming to keep records at all, so mostly they just didn't bother.
It is accepted that the Pharisees and the other major sect, the Sadducees and Essenes existed, much of what we learned about them during this period comes from the Roman-Jewish 1st Century historian Titus Flavius Josephus (37-100CE) in his book Antiquities of the Jews (known as the Testimonium Flavianum):
he is also one of the non biblical sources for Jesus....the main claim against the Josephus is that he was born after the alleged time of the crucifixion thus his evidence would be based on third party evidence, probably oral (which the vast majority of information was during this time.) However, if we are to dismiss Josephus so easily then we need to also consider how that impacts on Josephus' entire body of work and what we consider to be accepted history based on that work.
Another non-Biblical account comes from the Roman historian Tacitus:
who wrote about Jesus in his Annals, again Tacitus was born 30 or more years after Jesus' crucifixion, and again, we have to consider the same things as we do for Josephus when attributing value to his works.
There are other mentions of Christ that are also controversial as they come from historians who lived in the century following Christ's death and are not eyewitness accounts, they include Pliny the Younger and Gaius Suetonius Tranquillus, Lucian and Thallus amongst others.
However, before we dismiss them out of hand, we have to consider just how Modern Historians of Ancient Antiquity attribute and form what we know about the period....for one, there is very little written or archaeological evidence still remaining, it was not until the 1960s that Pontius Pilate for example has any direct evidence of his actual existence...we relied on the scraps of manuscripts from the authors mentioned above, other manuscripts such as the Gospels, Dead Sea Scrolls, and their attributed sources as well as what we learn about the period from archaeology and attribution, the largest and by far the most controversial evidence historians use to form a picture of antiquities is from the various Oral traditions, and when we consider that during the time of Tacitus and Josephus they were only 50 years or so from the actual events, it is reasonable to assume that their accounts have some validity.
How do the events mentioned in the Bible and other sources stack up to what we have evidence for?...this is again, highly controversial and inconclusive as much of the archaeological evidence is as unreliable as the accounts of Tacitus and Josephus et al. What happens is that historians make assumptions and build a pattern of events and traditions that create a picture of the period in question....as more evidence is discovered, then the assumptions are altered to account for the new information, thus changing the picture to one degree or another. The example of Pontius Pilate illustrates this.
What happens is that all these sources are subject to several methods of critical analysis:
Multiple Attestation is when there are two or more independent sources that are consistent or similar to each other....remember that oral accounts are by far the largest body of evidence from these periods and we have to rely on people like Tacitus et al who came along and wrote them down. We also have to be careful that one account is not the source for subsequent accounts, an example of this is that the current thinking is that the Gospels of Luke and Matthew are in fact based on the Gospel of Mark to some degree.....we then have Historical Context, in other words do the accounts stack up to what we know about the culture and region in which these events took place, are they likely to have occurred at the time stated or do they have details that suggest they are later additions?...also the Age of the Source, the older, the better....as I explained earlier, much of the history is oral and so the closer we are to that oral history being written down, the more accurate it is likely to be. (which is why we should not dismiss authors of the 1st and 2nd century so easily as some might want to.) There is also the agenda of the author, this has many criterion, one being whether the event was something that the author would rather have not mentioned, something that puts, for example Jews in a bad light when the author is Jewish.....and then we have the most important part*......Linguistic Analysis, basically we look at the original source languages, how it was translated, the contextual and historical veracity of the speech, whether it makes sense in multiple languages, what changes may have been made either through translation, transliteration or by the agenda of the translator etc....Jesus and his followers almost certainly spoke Aramaic for example, yet the lingua franca was Koine Greek due to the Roman Occupation and much of the oral history was written in various languages and dialects of those languages with the inherent differences therein, it is possible to date a phrase or manuscript simply by Linguistic Analysis to with a very narrow time period, in some case just a few years.
Anyway, rather than simply giving you a list of examples I though it better to explain how antiquarian history is formed, and that might give you some idea how difficult it is to attribute definitive factual events to anyone, least of all Jesus.......if we have a strict verified multiple eyewitness fact only criteria, then it would be difficult to prove that any number of historical figures actually existed, one example is Richard Whately's satirical essay "Historic Doubts relative to Napoleon Bonaparte" where he goes to disprove the existence of Napoleon....this is why we use the methodology I have briefly touched upon in this (rather long) post.
As you can see the topic is huge, so if you have any specific questions in specific examples then feel free to ask.
tl/dr: Most current Scholars and Historians believe that Christ was an historical figure, but not necessarily the miracles or supernatural claims made about him.....most would agree that his existence is able to be illustrated in established documentary and other historical evidence. So Jesus probably existed as a wandering religious teacher, all else is theology and not history.
*probably not the most important, but it's my job...
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Soldato
tl/dr: Most current Scholars and Historians believe that Christ was an historical figure, but not necessarily the miracles or supernatural claims made about him.....most would agree that his existence is able to be illustrated in established documentary and other historical evidence. So Jesus probably existed as a wandering religious teacher, all else is theology and not history.
*probably not the most important, but it's my job...
Hmm, I read the whole lot, an interesting read, but I've always found this vaguely interesting. I think it comes with the agnosticism.
The linguistic analysis, whilst maybe not the most important right now does seem to have the most revolutionary and changing effect in our opinion on history. The other factors seem to have been more heavily researched and an opinion more settled on as such...
Linguistic analysis actually seems to make a huge difference though. The one I can remember, is that whilst most 'stories' see the creation story as seven days, isn't it supposed to be 'seven time periods,' which has quite a few effects on other theological arguments....
kd
Indeed, the Hebrew word Yowm can apply to any number of specified time periods, be they days, a year, or simply a time period of indeterminate length.....when what makes the difference is largely the context and the way in which the word is used. For Yowm to be specifically attributable to a day or a week or a year, the passage must make that distinction, in other passages such as Psalms the time period is defined....in Genesis it is not, thus we are left with the original source material not making any claim that the Earth was created in 7 days, that was the work of the translators (the KJV is an example).....with regard to Genesis there are far more examples that the passages are largely allegorical and with regard the linguistic evidence that the 7 days is figurative and is actually 7 periods in which specific things happened there is other evidence to support this conclusion.
Permabanned
I recommend the book by Bart D. Ehrman called Forged. He has written several books. If you are interested in the historical accuracy of the bible and similar texts then Bart D. Ehrman is your man. You can find the audio book online.
full name of the book: Forged: Writing in the Name of God--Why the Bible's Authors Are Not Who We Think They Are
full name of the book: Forged: Writing in the Name of God--Why the Bible's Authors Are Not Who We Think They Are
Man of Honour
There's ample evidence that by the mid 1st century there were more than a few Christians in Rome, which implies that there had been Christians around in Judea for a little while before then. There are some copies of historical accounts dating as far back as ~100AD which state that Christians believed that their Christ had lived early in what we'd call the 1st century AD. There's some dispute over the authenticity of some of it (the copies that exist today were written by Christian clerics and there's some evidence of fakery), but the same information is contained in references that are extremely critical of Christianity. That could be clever faking, but probably not.
Of course, that's not proof that Jesus actually existed, although it's often portrayed that way. It's evidence that early Christians believed he had existed, which isn't the same thing.
There's other indirect evidence - the existence of Christianity. Something had to have happened to split it off from Judaism. Someone must have been preaching reform to Judaism significant enough to split off a new religion.
I think there's enough evidence to conclude that there very likely was a person in the early 1st century AD who preached a version of Judaism that varied enough to cause it to split off into a new religion. Although his name wouldn't really have been Jesus because that's a modern English version of a Greek version of a Hebrew name. I've read that 'Yahoshua' would probably be the best modern English transliteration.
Permabanned
There was also the case of John M. Allegro who was a famous scholar who wrote books on the dead sea scrolls. When he was given original texts to decipher he ended up writing books on the history of mushrooms and spirituality. Very interesting case indeed.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_M._Allegro
With his most infamous works: The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross & Dead Sea Scrolls and the Christian Myth
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_M._Allegro
With his most infamous works: The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross & Dead Sea Scrolls and the Christian Myth
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Soldato
Neither can the Jewish Religion because the Torah said so
Neither can the Islamic Religion because the Koran said so
I am starting to think religion is a man made concept used to control those of weak mental agility........................ all religions can't be right at the same time surely ????
I'm not sure how anyone can not think this.
They don't all claim to be.
Soldato
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There is certainly a great deal of wisdom in most religions, and lessons to be learned in all of them. Sadly, wisdom, which is more associated with probable outcomes, is often sidelined these days in favour of binary decions, and people see the world as black and white instead of shades of grey.
Soldato
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You could say the same for any social construct, including Civilisation itself.
I think people cannot seem to separate Religion from Religious Institutions and they are not the same thing, one is about shared faith and beliefs systems, the other is about Traditions, Behaviours, Collective Ceremony and adherence to certain criteria.
Religious Institutions are a system of control, just like a Govt, Council, Monarchy, or any social hierarchy. Religion, as in the shared beliefs and culture is not necessarily a system of control, although it is understandable that people cannot separate the two.
Man of Honour
I always imagined Jesus was just a holy man who claimed he was a son of god (in the sense that 'we are all sons of god') - best game of Chinese whispers of all time?
Off the top of my head, I don't recall the Christian bible containing a clear statement attributed to Jesus directly referring to himself as the son of god.
I can recall a fair few in which he's alleged to have referred to his god as "father", but that's not the same thing at all. It's normal in Christianity - pater noster.
In short, I think the same as you do.