Did Jesus Actually Exist?

@izzythepush,

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

He only started it because the issue was being discussed in another thread and out of topic. But let's start a thread on whether Zarathustra actually existed, and watch posters come en masse to discuss this fascinating topic... or not.

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@izzythepush,

I am suggesting, as so many have over the centuries, that it is an interpolation. Someone added to the original text. There are several good arguments for this. One is the glaring error of calling Pilate a procurator. Prior to the appointment of a procurator as governor, procurator was the title of a fiscal officer--a sort of accountant and inspector general appointed separately from the governor, and answerable to the Senate. (The Wikipedia article on procurator was edited on February 25th, 2013.) According to Livius-dot-org, no procurator was appointed as a governor until the reign of Claudius in 53 CE.

The use of the term christian is an anachronism, something else Tacitus would have know as his imperial appointment was in Asia Minor, where christianity had begun to take hold. Origen, one of the most important early church writers and the man who selected what became the accepted gospel canon, does not mention this passage in Tacitus, which would have been an important passage to any christian apologist. More than that, he states that Josephus did not believe that Jesus was the messiah, which flatly contradicts the accounts since the time of Eusebius.

All of this becomes important because the question is not whether or not there was a self-styled rabbi called Yeshuah in the first century, but of whether or not there was a Jesus as modern people know him. The name Jesus does not appear before the 6th century.

This joker who has been doing the hatchet job at Wikipedia is stating the the alleged passage in Tacitus and the alleged passage in Josephus are two of the three important confirmations for an historical Jesus. The other he lists is the letter of Trajan to Pliny. This is really playing fast and loose with the truth. Pliny wrote to Trajan in the second decade of the second century to ask what to do about christians. Nowhere does his letter state that there was a Jesus, just that christians had told him that they meet together to worship their Christ as a god. Trajan writes back and basically recommends a "don't ask, don't tell" policy to Pliny. You can read the Pliny-Trajan correspondence on this topic at this page from Georgetown University. Some joker is having a field day at Wikipedia.

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@Olivier5,

Olivier5 wrote:

Quote:
What we want to believe is irrelevant.
Speak for yourself.

My brother didn't want to believe he had cancer.

He's dead now.

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I forgot to mention that you can remove the passage from Tacitus without doing any violence to the text.

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@Olivier5,

Nobody's stopping you starting a thread on anything you want.

You are becoming highly emotional about this, you clearly don't think people should be allowed to discuss such an issue.

The person in question that prompted the thread is BillRM. Why don't you pm him? You've got a lot in common, you're both selective with the facts, are convinced you're right about everything, and insist on having the last word.

Any argument you two have will run and run, but it won't achieve anything

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@izzythepush,

Quote:

Nobody's stopping you starting a thread on anything you want.

That's not my point though. My point was: few people would be tempted to argue Zarathustra did not exist, because more people find it funny to put down Christians (and Muslims, who also believe in Jesus, though a slightly different version) than Zoroastrians...

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You are becoming highly emotional about this, you clearly don't think people should be allowed to discuss such an issue.

Strange idea. Why would you say that? I enjoy the discussion, even though I suspect ulterior motives.

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you're both selective with the facts, are convinced you're right about everything, and insist on having the last word.

While of course, you are convinced that you are wrong on many issues, including this one... :-)

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@neologist,

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My brother didn't want to believe he had cancer.

And that's relevant because? Jesus had cancer?

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@Olivier5,

Here is a textbook example of confirmation bias:

I wrote:

What we want to believe is irrelevant.

Olivier5 wrote:

Speak for yourself

I wrote:

My brother didn't want to believe he had cancer.

He's dead now.

Olivier5 wrote:

And that's relevant because? Jesus had cancer?

Make sure you have your annual medical checkups when you reach age 50. What you don't believe can kill you.

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@Finn dAbuzz,

Finn dAbuzz wrote:

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.

To be candid, I do not believe that on an unconscious level it is your love of facts that drives this thread. Jesus's existence is really a non-sequitor, in my opinion. As much a non-sequitor as "the burning bush" having talked to Moses, in my opinion. I say that, because the proof of the pudding is in the eating. People believe; who cares. People disbelieve; who cares. Your caring so much can just be an unconscious ploy, for just so much self-aggrandizement, in my ever so humble opinion.

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@Lustig Andrei,

Lustig Andrei wrote:

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.

But who knows of the more edible bialy?

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@Setanta,

Setanta wrote:

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.

The "J" may have been pronounced as an "H"? Were there Hispanics in Jerusalem back then?

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Didn't "Jesus" reflect an acronym for "King of the Jews," meant to be mocking? Any Jew crucified might have been mocked with a sign above the crucifix with that mocking message? I've known more than one latter day Roman that spent time mocking Jews. What's new?

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@Olivier5,

Trying to ascertain the truth of something isn't the same as putting someone down.

There's nothing funny about this thread, and if your faith is threatened by BillRM's clumsy attempts to ridicule Christianity, it's not much of a faith at all.

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@neologist,

Quote:

What you don't believe can kill you.

And therefore, what you believe can also kill you. Your point is thus irrelevant.

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If by Jesus, one means the Messiah, the son of god, on of the triune aspects of god, then the answer is definitely no. If, however, one means some joker named Joshua (as we would render it), who was called or called himself a rabbi, and about whom there grew up a minor, obscure sect, then the odds are pretty good.

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@izzythepush,

Quote:

Trying to ascertain the truth of something isn't the same as putting someone down.

But it can also be used for that purpose. It's done all the time, e.g. on FAUX News. "Was Obama born American?" is a perfectly valid question but when I see it asked again and again, I start to wonder what the motive is for that line of questioning...

Quote:

There's nothing funny about this thread, and if your faith is threatened by BillRM's clumsy attempts to ridicule Christianity, it's not much of a faith at all.

Don't assume too much. I have no religious faith whatsoever.

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@Olivier5,

You are missing the point. To believe the fact that Shakespeare wrote a pretty poem makes people go, "Huh! That Shakespeare fella sure cun' write!" It is stored as a general fact that bears no harmful, consequential reality on the world we live in. Unfortunately the Jesus cult is responsible for atrocities in war, education, usury, and most damaging, creates a devastating ideal where the lowest amongst us is the highest in honor. "The meek inherit the Earth," "Turn the other cheek," "Give onto Caesar"-- ideas which have fundamentally propelled the master-slave psycho-social substrate, predominate even in our contemporary culture today. The psychological pacifism which allows tyrants to destroy our world and limit our horizons... we have millions of individuals who believe-- because of this man Jesus-- that this world is not their home. That their bodies are simply shells of divinely operated spirits, that ten percent of their earnings should go to support a caste of power hungry clergy... It is abominable. It is control. It is a different kind of tyranny. A psycho-tyranny, one which, obviously as your concerned, is no different than the arguments of whether or not Claudius like pickles, or if Zarathustra came down from a mountain.

Once again, not the point.

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@ZarathustraReborn,

ZarathustraReborn wrote:

You are missing the point. To believe the fact that Shakespeare wrote a pretty poem makes people go, "Huh! That Shakespeare fella sure cun' write!" It is stored as a general fact that bears no harmful, consequential reality on the world we live in. Unfortunately the Jesus cult is responsible for atrocities in war, education, usury, and most damaging, creates a devastating ideal where the lowest amongst us is the highest in honor. "The meek inherit the Earth," "Turn the other cheek," "Give onto Caesar"-- ideas which have fundamentally propelled the master-slave psycho-social substrate, predominate even in our contemporary culture today. The psychological pacifism which allows tyrants to destroy our world and limit our horizons... we have millions of individuals who believe-- because of this man Jesus-- that this world is not their home. That their bodies are simply shells of divinely operated spirits, that ten percent of their earnings should go to support a caste of power hungry clergy... It is abominable. It is control. It is a different kind of tyranny. A psycho-tyranny, one which, obviously as your concerned, is no different than the arguments of whether or not Claudius like pickles, or if Zarathustra came down from a mountain.

Once again, not the point.

I'm not a big fan of religion...especially of Christianity. But after listening to that rant, Z, if we had to have a dictator, I'd sooner pick the pope than you. You seem a bit out of control.

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And although there is no evidence for the historical Jesus in the writings of Jewish historians, there are a handful of passages in the Jewish Talmud that are sometimes wheeled out to provide some evidence for Jesus the man. These are clearly not Christian forgeries. Here is what they say:

1) It has been taught: On the eve of passover they hanged Yeshu…because he practiced sorcery and enticed Israel astray.

2) Our rabbis taught: Yeshu had five disciples-Mattai, Nakkia, Netzer, Buni, and Todah.

3) It happened with Rabbi Elazar ben Damah, whom a serpent bit, that Jacob, a man of Kefar Soma, came to help him in the name of Yeshu ben Patera. Once I was walking on the upper street of Sepphoris, and found one of the disciples of Yeshu the Nazarine.

That’s it. Now for the rest of the story:

1) ‘Yeshu’ is a shortened form of ‘Yehoshua’ or ‘Joshua’, which in Greek becomes ‘Jesus’, so perhaps these passages are about the Jesus of the gospels?

2) However, dismissing the facts that we have mention of only five disciples with completely unrecognizable names, their are other reasons why these passages are not the proof we are seeking.

3) The fact that we have mention of ‘Yeshu the Nazarine’ is not extraordinary. The Nazarenes were a Jewish religious sect and the use of the word does not imply ‘from Nazareth’. Yeshu was an extremely common name that could refer to any number of people. Josephus mentions at least 10 Jesuses, although it is revealing to note that some translations of Josephus only translate the passages that they want the reader to identify with Jesus Christ using the Greek version of the name that we all recognize, while leaving the names of all other Jesuses in the untranslated Hebrew!

As the scholar who unearthed these passages in the Talmud admits, even if they do refer to Jesus and not some other Yeshu, they cannot be taken as proof of Jesus’ existence, because they were written so late. Although based on older writings, the Talmud was not written until 200 CE, and we do not know whether these were early passages. Anyway, the rabbis are so vague in their chronology that they differ by as much as 200 years in the dates they assign to the figure that may or may not be Jesus!

There really does not seem to be anything substantial here.

1 Reply

@ZarathustraReborn,

Quote:

You are missing the point. To believe the fact that Shakespeare wrote a pretty poem makes people go, "Huh! That Shakespeare fella sure cun' write!" It is stored as a general fact that bears no harmful, consequential reality on the world we live in. Unfortunately the Jesus cult is responsible for atrocities in war, education, usury, and most damaging, creates a devastating ideal where the lowest amongst us is the highest in honor.

If that's the point you were trying to make, you failed. What you did instead, was try to abuse history to make an ideological point. That's pretty disgusting in my book.

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"The meek inherit the Earth," "Turn the other cheek," "Give onto Caesar"-- ideas which have fundamentally propelled the master-slave psycho-social substrate, predominate even in our contemporary culture today.

Yes, "the meek will inherit the Earth". In fact they have: we call it democracy. "Give onto Ceasar" provided the foundation for the idea of a secular state. And "turn the other cheek" has been used quite effectively to shame the aggressive tendencies of countless oppressors, e.g. by Gandhi.

3 Replies

Did Jesus Actually Exist?

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