Did Jesus Actually Exist?

@Olivier5,

In short ...

1 Reply

@Olivier5,

Quote:

it's more than we have for Thales... and scores of others.

Complete nonsense.

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@timur,

I'm not religious. And as somebody pointed up thread, many of the scientists who conclude Jesus existed are atheist. But ALL of those arguing against it are atheists. And motivated by bias, I contend.

A majority of specialists on this issue conclude that Jesus was a historical character, by the way. About like for global warming... This issue is treated seriously by some. And just like for global warming, the dissenters are not without extraneous motivations in my view.

Why do you think the existence of Pontius Pilate was doubted for so long? Because he is mentioned in the gospel. Otherwise, there were many independent mentions of him in the literature but no, that was not enough... To some. He HAD to be doubted. Until they found his name carved on a stone and that was the end of that charade.

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@edgarblythe,

Address the Talmudic sources, for instance.

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@BillRM,

Sure billy. You know better than most on this, right?

What sources do we have about your boy Thales again? A few guys talking of him decades after his life?

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@Olivier5,

Quote:

Sure billy. You know better than most on his, right?

Not sure the meaning of the above sentence as it is not written very clearly at least to me it is not.

Still guessing a little at your meaning, I would state that I am hardly the only person that see zero evidence of a real life Jesus character that was the basic for a new religious cult.

Nor is a real live person needed for such a cult to come into being.

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@BillRM,

I mean you're just parroting stuff you know nothing about. Tell us all about global warming too.

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@Olivier5,

Olivier5 wrote:

I mean you're just parroting stuff you know nothing about.

Wild Bill has no difficulty doing that, wherever and whenever.

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@Olivier5,

Quote:

A few guys talking of him decades after his life?

Guys???? You are insane as those guys was such men as Aristotle and Herodotus.

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@Olivier5,

Quote:

nd as somebody pointed up thread, many of the scientists who conclude Jesus existed are atheist. But ALL of those arguing against it are atheists. And motivated by bias, I contend.

There simply is no reason to think that there was a real person behind the fantasy of a cult concerning a god/man any more then the other stories that predate the Jesus story of a virgin born son of god or a god that humans had come up with.

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@BillRM,

BillRM wrote:

Quote:
A few guys talking of him decades after his life?

Guys???? You are insane as those guys was such men as Aristotle and Herodotus.

What compelling evidence do you have that this Aristotle and this Heredotus aren't made up figments of somebody's imagination?

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There probably was A Jesus. He was just another jackleg prophet at a time when Israel was awash in them. He wasn't particularly influential, but what he had going for him was really REALLY good PR people, some influential ones who didn't come around until qite awhiled after he died and had no firsthand knowledge of him, who created a legend around him and pushed it really hard after his death, not, when you look at it closely, unlike Col. Tom Parker creating the myth of Elvis Presley, tho Elvis was probably more charismatic than the original Jesus.

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@Lustig Andrei,

Quote:

What compelling evidence do you have that this Aristotle and this Heredotus aren't made up figments of somebody's imagination?

LOL.............Maybe god came up with the many theories that are credit to Aristotle that came down to us from his life time,

Oh and we did not land on the moon and Obama was not born in the US and so on.

Quote:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aristotelian_physics

The works of Aristotle that have survived from antiquity through medieval manuscript transmission are collected in the Corpus Aristotelicum. These texts, as opposed to Aristotle's lost works, are technical philosophical treatises from within Aristotle's school

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@BillRM,

Herodotus wrote a century after Thales, Aristotle 2 centuries later. Josephus' account come sooner than that after JC.

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No matter how many people you cast doubt on, Jesus remains unproven.

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@edgarblythe,

edgarblythe wrote:

No matter how many people you cast doubt on, Jesus remains unproven.

Sure, and so do those others. Why reject one while accepting a whole slew of 'maybes' as proven?

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@edgarblythe,

Unproven to you. He's perfectly proven to me. And nobody on this thread has come up with a credible alternative either, about how or why or by whom he was invented.

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@Olivier5,

That's what always stops me: who and why? Cvi bono? And no matter how good a salesman and promoter Saul of Tarsus was, it would have been quite a feat to convince the entire Roman Empire and then the rest of the world of the miraculous existence of someone who had no real-life counterpart to refer to.

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@Olivier5,

Quote:

Herodotus wrote a century after Thales, Aristotle 2 centuries later. Josephus' account come sooner than that after JC.

Thales works/writing was still in existence at the time of both of those men life and refer to many times in their own works and writings.

It is a shame that books was few before the printing press and could be lost when the few main libraries of the ancient world was destroy in one manner or another over the thousands of years however his writing did indeed exist for many hundreds of years and was read by Herodotus and Aristotle and refer to in writings of their that did survive to the current day.

Hell many others refer to his writings over the hundreds of years they remain in existence so unlike Jesus there is no reason to think that he did not exist.

Nor is there any motivation for someone to invented Thales as he was not the center of some religious cult.

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@Lustig Andrei,

I'm not taking any more lame "no proof" posts until they give me a not-totally-improbable scenario about how the supposed scam happened.

0 Replies

Did Jesus Actually Exist?

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