Green Witch wrote:It's like the story of George Washington cutting down the cherry tree and not being able to lie about it. Many people believe this to be true and know little else about the man. The myth trumps the truth over time, but within the myth is a real person.
There is a problem with this relative to the question of the "historicity" of the putative Jesus. We know that the cherry tree story comes from Parson Weems, that he wrote it down after Washington was dead, that he claimed he had the tale from Washington's contemporaries, although most or all of them would have been dead at the time Weems wrote his drivel, and that there are no other sources for this story other than Parson Weems, until after Weems had written his book.
The same circumstances do not apply to the story of the putative Christ. The "gospels" contain a good deal of crap which is contradicted by both actual historical records, and by what we know from historical records about how the Roman world worked. Two good examples are: the census story, which is contradicted both by the historical record which Caesar Augustus left of how often and when he conducted a census or lustrum, and the improbable implication that the Romans ever counted or cared about those who were not Roman citizens; and the story of Pilate and the execution of the putative Christ--Pilate had no such authority, and, in fact, his rights and responsibilities as the prefect of Iudaea would have required him to send anyone accused of rebellion against the Empire to the Legate of Syria for judgment and disposition.
Until quite recently (relatively speaking) many scholars even doubted that Pilate existed. He is only mentioned once in Roman records, by Tacitus, who claimed that he was The province of Iudaea was created from three other subdivisions of the senatorial province of Syria, and was itself a subdivision of Syria. The governor would not likely to be known as procurator, which is how Tacitus describes him. You can remove the sentence which describes Pilate from Tacitus' account, and do no violence to the narrative, which lead many scholars to decide that the Tacitus entry about Pilate was an interpolation (something someone else added after Tacitus wrote his history), and that there was no good reason to assume that Pilate ever existed.
Furthermore, procurator is a name for a financial officer, and although it was sometimes used for someone who was, in effect, a governor, it was only ever used in regions in which the population were Roman citizens, or had Latin rights (citizenship without the vote), and would not have applied to Iudaea. However, in 1961, an inscription was unearthed at Caesarea Maritima, which was the "capital" of Iudaea (near modern Tel Aviv), which refers to Pontius Pilate and refers to him as prefect, which does fit into the Roman governance hierarchy. So we now know that Pilate existed, and that it is likely that Tacitus (who should have known better) interpreted the abbreviation "pr." as procurator rather than prefect.
However, none of that alters that the account given in Matthew and Luke are dubious at best. Pilate had no authority to execute anyone. The Legate (Governor) of Syria had Roman troops, the prefect of Iudaea did not--Pilate would have had, at most, about 3000 auxiliaries, but no Roman troops. Pilate, from the Jewish sources, was exceedingly contemptuous of the Jews and the Samaritans, and is accused by Jewish historians of cruelty, murder and willfully offending the religious sensibilities of the people of Iudaea. This leads to the question of whether or not he would have had someone executed because the mob demanded it. On the one hand, it was certainly not outside the probability which arises from his character as described by the Jewish historians. At the same time, the contempt for the Jews which the Jewish historians allege Pilate displayed (and the overwhelming historical evidence is that the Romans
were contemptuous of the Jews, and considered them an annoyance and trouble-makers) could as easily suggest that Pilate would not take any notice of the demands of the mob. Although technically, Pilate would have committed an administrative "crime" in executing anyone accused or rebellion without referring the case to the Legate of Syria, it is unlikely that he would have been punished for it. Only a case of the population in arms threatening rebellion would likely have been seen as reason for him to appeal to the Legate.
However, the doubts which surround this episode, as alleged in Matthew and Luke, point out just how shaky the historical evidence which Christians allege actually is. Furthermore, it is now almost (almost) universally accepted by scholars that the most famous passage in Tacitus--about the fire at Rome when Nero was the Emperor, which claimed that Nero persecuted the Christians--was actually an interpolation, a passage added probably in the 15th century in the Vatican (it was not known to exist before the 15th century), and added to a text which was a 9th century copy of Tacitus'
Annals. None of the early church fathers refer to the supposed passage in Tacitus, nor the alleged reference to the putative Jesus in Flavius Josephus, even those these were literate men who were familiar with works of both writers. The Tacitus passage refers to Christians, at a time when Christians did not call themselves Christians, and uses the term "the Christ," although that would have been using a Greek term unknown to Romans, without explaining the term to his readers. In the lifetime of Tacitus and Flavius Josephus, Christians were referred to simply as Jews, and no distinction was made between them as Jews and those Jews who definitely were not Christian.
So a comparison to Washington and the cherry tree incident is not quite accurate--but it is helpful in that the means by which that story can be discredited are exactly the same means by which the Tacitus and Josephus passages are thrown into doubt.
But one big problem which historians have in convincing Christians is the ampitheater which Israeli archaeologists found with the Pilate inscription. Scholars had so long doubted that Pilate even existed, that since the Pilate inscription was found, no one has been able to convince Christians that it
does not constitute evidence that the "gospels" are accurate.
We know as well as we can know anything that the Parson Weems cherry tree story is BS. The Jesus story is subject to a good deal more doubt.
Personally, i consider it a 50-50 shot that such an individual did exist. I consider the "gospels," however, to be bullshit cobbled together long after the fact, if fact it ever were.
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