Did Jesus Actually Exist?

@Finn dAbuzz,

Finn dAbuzz wrote:

I am a very important person.

Aren't we lucky then to be on planet Earth while you are visiting.

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@Foofie,

Yes you are.

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@Finn dAbuzz,

Finn dAbuzz wrote:

Yes you are.

Oy gevalt. And serious too.

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@Foofie,

How would you have prefered me to respond to your silly and insulting comment?

"Oh geez foofie, you are so profoundly insightful! I apologize for my hubristic certitude!"

Get stuffed.

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@neologist,

What you want to believe. What else?

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@Foofie,

Foofie wrote:

You forgot the schleppers that came to the U.S. and promulgated the bagel with a schmear.

...which they didn't invent but discovered while living in the schtetls of Eastern Europe during the Diaspora.

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@Olivier5,

And what are the oldest texts we have surviving from Flavius? In Josephus's Antiquities of the Jews appears the notorious passage regarding Christ called the "Testimonium Flavianum":

Quote:

"Now, there was about this time, Jesus, a wise man, if it be lawful to call him a man, for he was a doer of wonderful works,--a teacher of such men as receive the truth with pleasure. He drew over to him both many of the Jews, and many of the Gentiles. He was [the] Christ; and when Pilate, at the suggestion of the principal men amongst us, had condemned him to the cross, those that loved him at the first did not forsake him, for he appeared to them alive again the third day, as the divine prophets had foretold these and ten thousand other wonderful things concerning him; and the tribe of Christians, so named from him, are not extinct at this day." (Whitson, 379)

Despite the best wishes of sincere believers and the erroneous claims of truculent apologists, the Testimonium Flavianum has been demonstrated continually over the centuries to be a forgery, likely interpolated by Catholic Church historian Eusebius in the fourth century.

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@Olivier5,

What we want to believe is irrelevant.

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@Finn dAbuzz,

If facts are very important to you then you should only accept facts that are inviolate. The evidence for Jesus is shaky at best, most of the gospels are 4th 5th (or even later) accounts of something that may have happened. Even Tacitus' account is suspect given that he was born 25 years after the crucifixion.

If you then look at the similarities between the crucifixion/resurrection and Pagan mythology the factual nature is even more stretched.

In short you can't say with any certainty that Jesus' existence is a fact, neither can you say his non existence is factual either. You can believe something, you believe he existed, and BillRM believes he didn't, but there's not enough evidence either way.

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The "Tacitus" account is of the great fire at Rome (great fires, were in fact, common--this one occured in 64 CE). He never mentions "Jesus," and his mention of christians is quixotic given that even christians did not call themselves christians at that time. It is flatly contradicted by the account of Suetonius of those events.

This is the problem with this silly question. No one in the first century was calling anyone else Jesus. If there were a particular man calling himself a rabbi who was named Yeshuah, no one speaking Hebrew, Aramaic, Koine Greek or Latin was calling him Jesus. This points to the central foolishness of this question. What a person of the 21st century means when he or she says Jesus bears absolutely no relationship to that cult of the first century. It's a stupid question, and only intended to stir up trouble.

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By the way, i went to Wikipedia to make sure of my dates. Someone has edited their article on Tacitus as recently as March 31st of this year. It has a pronounced pro-christian tone now, and ignores basic realities such as that less than 40 years after the alleged execution of the putative "Jesus," the Tacitus passage would suggest that there were a large community of christians in Rome. This was at a time (just before the death of Paul) when there was not a large community of christians in Rome, nor anywhere outside the middle east.

(I went to Wikipedia to check the date of the death of Paul--someone has edited that article as recently as May 27th. It appears to me that there is a christian fanatic at work at Wikipedia.)

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I had a brief struggle on Wikipedia because the author of an article blatantly lied. I corrected him three or four times but he always changed it back. I don't know what the article says now, a year later.

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@edgarblythe,

This is a translation of the relevant passage, and mostly concerns the persecution of the Christians under Nero. The actual evidence about the existence of Christ is hearsay at best.

Quote:

But all human efforts, all the lavish gifts of the emperor, and the propitiations of the gods, did not banish the sinister belief that the conflagration was the result of an order. Consequently, to get rid of the report, Nero fastened the guilt and inflicted the most exquisite tortures on a class hated for their abominations, called Christians by the populace. Christus, from whom the name had its origin, suffered the extreme penalty during the reign of Tiberius at the hands of one of our procurators, Pontius Pilatus, and a most mischievous superstition, thus checked for the moment, again broke out not only in Judaea, the first source of the evil, but even in Rome, where all things hideous and shameful from every part of the world find their centre and become popular.

http://www.chieftainsys.freeserve.co.uk/tacitus_annals15.htm

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I've been checking around. The Wikipedia article on early christianity was edited on May 29, 2013. Several others have been recently edited. I did a search for "Tacitus+interpolation" and the search result directed to Wikipedia contained no reference to the arguments for the Tacitus passage as an interpolation at all. It was edited this spring, and it's sources are without exception, christian writers. It appears that there is a fox among the hens.

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Note that the Tacitus passage as you have presented it describes Pilate as a procurator. Pilate was a prefect. No governor of Iudaea was a procurator until about 15 years after the alleged execution of the putative Jesus. Tacitus was an imperial governor at the time that the wrote the Annals--you can bet that he knew this.

**********************************************

The Wikipedia article on Christianity in the First Century was edited on May 18th, 2013.

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@Setanta,

I never claimed the translation was perfect, and my Latin is incredibly rusty. Amo Amas Amat is about it, but it doesn't strike me as that significant an error.

Maybe George could advise.

This is the original.

Quote:

ergo abolendo rumori Nero subdidit reos et quaesitissimis poenis adfecit quos per flagitia invisos vulgus Christianos appellabat. auctor nominis eius Christus Tiberio imperitante per procuratorem Pontium Pilatum supplicio adfectus erat

http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus:text:1999.02.0077:book=15:chapter=44

The word in question is procuratorem. What are you suggesting, that Tacitus was being sloppy, or someone has deliberately altered the text?

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@ZarathustraReborn,

The Testimunium Flavinium is not the only place where Jesus is mentioned in the Antiquities. There's also a mention of the death of his brother James in Jerusalem. And even if the testimunium was evidently redacted, many scolars think that it was not added in its entirity. Rather, a nucleus was expanded upon... At a bare minimum, that's a possibility.

The Talmud also mention Jesus extensively and quite negatively. Written 2 or 3 centuries after his death, you would assume that if there were any reason to believe he was a fictional character, the good rabbis would have used this argument against him.

Why focus only on Jesus though? Did John the Baptist exist? Did Zarathustra? Did Hillel? Did Shakespear? Did thousands and thousands of historical characters mentioned here or there in passing in one text or another actually exist? A huge field of enquiry is open to all the conspiration theorists. Why pick up only on poor baby Jesus?

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@neologist,

Quote:

What we want to believe is irrelevant.

Speak for yourself.

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@Olivier5,

Olivier5 wrote:

Why focus only on Jesus though? Did John the Baptist exist? Did Zarathustra? Did Hillel? Did Shakespear? Did thousands and thousands of historical characters mentioned here or there in passing in one text or another actually exist? A huge field of enquiry is open to all the conspiration theorists. Why pick up only on poor baby Jesus?

Why don't you ask Finn? He was the one who initiated the thread.

Although it's quite clear that those who have come to a decision one way or the other, really do feel a need to be right, the language is becoming more extreme.

Those of us who are more interested in the facts, what little of them there are, have decided that the only sensible decision regarding the historical existence of Christ is agnosticism.

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@izzythepush,

Tacitus might have been sloppy - he used the term/title which was valid at his lifetime.

Here's an inscription, showing Pilutus' correct title
Place: Horbat Qesari / Caesarea Maritima
[Nauti]s(?) Tiberieum / [3 Po]ntius Pilatus / [praef]ectus Iudae[a]e / [ref]eci[t]

Source

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Did Jesus Actually Exist?

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