Did Jesus Actually Exist?

Everything you can attribute to Jesus are things done in his name, or cull from the Bible. Or infer without evidence. His story is as fantastic as Zeus and the tales of miracles spontaneously occurring the day the Buddha was born. With zilch but faith to back it up.

I was planning to do so, Finn...'til you got involved.

Olivier's comment WAS illogical.

Wasn't Alexander divinised at some point? If not him, all the pharaohs, and a great deal of Roman emperors were considered gods and made miracles. Does that "divinisation" mean they never existed, as human beings?


Many documents speak of Jesus too, but since they are written by Christians, they can't be trusted, right? So to prove the historicity of Alexander, by the same standard, you'd have to find a mention of him DURING HIS OWN LIFE and written by an Indian or Persian source.

And if and when you find that, I will then retort, like Thomas retorted to me upthread: "While you can technically count this as Alexander being mentioned by a non-Greek, it does nothing to support the conjecture that Alexander did, in fact, exist..."

In other words, you guys are applying a totally unfair standard to the person of Jesus. If we had to apply the same standard of historical existence --or lack of standard, since you haven't yet dared to answer my question about what standard to use-- to other antiquity dudes, not many of them would be considered historical.

Doubting the existence of Jesus is funnier than Alexander's... I grant you that. It gets the Bible thumpers all angry and that's probably why it's done so often. But historically, it has the same merit than doubting Alexander's existence.

EDIT: This post is in response to EB's post. I wouldn't want that jackass Olive Tree to think i'd waste my time reading his drivel, much less replying to it.

Coins exist from the reign of Alexander. He established cities named Alexandria all across the middle east--the one in Egypt, at least, exists to this day. He is remembered not only in written records, but in the memories of people from the middle east to the western reaches of what was once India, and is now Pakistan. Those people remember "Sikander."

What is more important is that there are no written records of the so-called Jesus which were contemporary. Even the so-called gospels were written long after his death. Most of the records on which the christians lean are also pathetic because of the gross errors they contain. The story of the alleged "census" at the time of the birth of the putative Jesus is not just implausible (the Romans didn't count people who weren't citizens, except for purposes of taxation, within their provinces only; no one would have been so foolish as to require the entire population of the Roman world to return to the places of their respective births--the transportation system would have broken down under the strain)--it is flatly false, because we know when Augustus Caesar conducted lustrums (the real name of such an accounting) because it is literally carved in stone. Until 1961, many scholars even doubted that Pontius Pilate had existed. But we now know he existed, because it is literally carved in stone. In 1961, Israeli archaeologists excavated a coliseum at the site of Caesarea Maritima, once the administrative capital of the sub-province (the prefecture) of Iudaea (Judea)--Jerusalem was not the capital. The dedicatory stone is inscribed with the name of Pontius Pilate, Prefcct, dedicating the coliseum to Tiberius. This provides another example of the stupidity of early christian writers. Pontius Pilate was not a proconsul. The office of proconsul, as a governor of a province or subprovince, did not exist at the time that Pilate lived--yet the so-called gospels refer to him as a proconsul. (On another interesting note, i went to the Wikipedia article on Caesarea Maritima to make sure i was spelling it correctly. In the text, it says that Pilate ordered the execution of Jesus--something no prefect had the power to do. The article was last modified yesterday. Those christian vandals are busy little f*ckers.)

The supposed passage in Tacitus is clearly false for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is that it refers to christians at a time when even christians didn't call themselves christians. Furthermore, it is contradicted by Suetonius, who was born just four years after the fire referred to in the Tacitus interpolation. Suetonius, who consistently displayed contempt for Nero, not only told no story of persecutions, he told of how Nero had reacted to provide aid to the people made homeless by the fire. Suetonius had the testimony of many people who had lived at the time of the fire, including members of his own family. Christians consistently screw up the narratives when they attempt to cobble together their historical lies.

Origen is important because he was one of the most prolific of the early church scholars, especially in the field of christian apologetics. Yet he does not mention any such passage in Flavius Josephus, nor in Tacitus, even though he was born almost a century after those men died, and flourished as a writer at the beginning of the third century. No one mentions the passage in Flavius Josephus until Eusebius mentions it in the fourth century. The silence of Origen is telling in the debate on the authenticity of that passage.

I'm not saying that Jesus never existed, and i've never said that. However, it is bullshit to claim that there are any near-contemporary records of his existence. Even the christians aren't so lame as to claim there are any contemporary records. As i've said here, consistently, for years--what matters is that billions of people believed he existed. For practical purposes, that makes it an "historical fact." My only purpose in what i write about this subject is to point out that it is not an historical fact, that it is conjecture which people treat as though it were fact.

I've written these things so many time over the years i could probably do it in my sleep (although i'd probably get the spellings wrong in that case).

My comment was very logical. I don't believe for one second that the Rabbis who authored the Talmud, and their teachers and their teachers before that, were stupid enough to allow some Roman clique to fabricate a Jewish Messiah out of the blue, complete with his bio, death, and resurrection, without them Rabbis noticing it and fighting back.

The fact that the Talmud includes its own bio(s) of Jesus, very different from the Christian version but somehow recognizable, is a powerful argument in favor of Jesus' historical existence, precisely because the Rabbis wanted to get rid of Christianity and were the only ones, apart from Christian authors, who could possibly have known and written about Jesus during his lifetime or soon thereafter. If they have had the slightest doubt that Jesus ever existed, they would have mentioned it. Instead they spoke of him as a bastard, a loser and a sorcerer, they looked into his genealogy, and used him as a counter-example for yeshiva students who might be tempted to think by themselves...

I actually believe that the bastard bit is quite probably true... That would explain a lot, starting with the 'virginal' birth.

Well, I guess you'll show me!

Your comment WAS NOT LOGICAL, Olivier.

You wrote: "But if there was any merit to the thesis that Jesus was a Pagan invention, that thesis would be relayed in the Talmud."

You are asserting here that short of being mentioned in the Talmud...there is no merit to the thesis that Jesus was a pagan invention.

I defy you to put that into a reasonable syllogism.

I say it cannot be done...because it is illogical.

It also involves a variant of begging the question.

But I do not expect you to ever own up to that error and was willing to give you the last word on the issue, except that Finn brought it back up.

You can have the last word of denial of the illogicality of the comment...mostly because I understand you seem unable to own up to error. I will comment, if I deem it appropriate, on any comments from others on the issue.

I think my point is understood by all those who want to understand it.

I defy you to cook up any credible scenario under which JC would be a pagan invention through and through, and in which the Talmud would still include all the material it does include on Jesus.

Zilch.

You've been pushing that nonsense for years mate even though people have corrected you, but you've got half the forum on ignore and your spiritual evolution is therefore at a standstill..

Yes but the pol-correct lefties LURV Alexander because he was gay and therefore won't hear a word said against him..

Zilch too.

I see your zilch and raise you three.

Never met the man myself, but if I ever do I'll take picture. But first I will demand to see his badge, his union card and a photo ID. Then I will watch to make sure he doesn't vote anyplace where he is not registered. You can't be too vigilant.

He don't need no stinkin' badge.

The need to believe in Jesus overrides the facts for many, just as being a creationist overrides science. Being intelligent in nonproductive ways is total waste.

A lot of the nascent Christology has been blamed on Josephus. Its now been an undisputed fact that Josephus phucked up a lot of his writing. Like he NEVER was at Masada. He wrote about it second handedly. SO why are his musings on a Christ any more credible.
There are scads of web sites from reputable scholars that dispute much of what Josephus presented.

I raise your zilch by one fact.


Fact 4: whose conspiracy is it anyway? Paul? Did he invent Jesus? Well yes, in the sense that he never actually met the man and yet talked about him all the time... so he invented his own Jesus but who invented the Jesus of Marc, the Jesus of Luke, the gnostic Jesus of Thomas, etc.? It CANNOT be Paul, for these jesuses are too different from his. Why did so many different people invent the same character? And who invented James, the brother of Jesus, whose death the Jewish historian Josephus speaks of? Who invented John the Baptist, also mentioned by Josephus?

Was Josephus (and the Rabbis) part of a Roman-world-wide conspiration involving dozens of writers, designed to fabricate a false Jewish Messiah modeled upon the myth of Mitra?

Or shall we believe that a certain Jesus live in Gallilea in the first century post himself, went a bit mystical, was baptised by another similar dude called John, and ended up dead as a result of his preaching, just like John died and quite a few others at the time for similar reasons?

And now all my cards are on the table, while yours are still close to your chest...

It seems to me that Jesus became more of a superhero as the gospels progressed. As far as Josephus, welllll, the man didn't let fact get in the way of a good story about Msada

I don't feel passionate about this either way. I could live with a real Jesus but Im saying that the accounts don't even rise up to good circumstantial evidence. Its hearsay and much of the critical stuff is from dubious sources by folks with agendas.