Did Jesus Actually Exist?

I don't know if these facts are agreed on by and large by historians who are not Christians but have nevertheless researched the matter. But even if they were, you're missing the point. Facts are facts whether people agree on them or not. The only thing that matters is whether the available evidence validates or undermines the agreement.

On the life of Jesus, all putative evidence is hearsay, mostly originating from sources with a vested interest in spreading a religion. By contrast, evidence for the holocaust and global warming comes from a multitude of independent sources. The equivalence you are suggesting here is spurious.

Oh yes! mmm... mmm... mmm... You said it brother... peace... in the center we do have peace... and outside the center we have...what it was?.. oh yes... chaos!... and our solar system is the same way... sure!

Look at the peaceful center of our solar system



No chaos...So quiet...

Do you know what?

Your calculations expressed as explaining the whole universe are just the old story of the blind man and the elephant.

Such "Life cycle of a star" is not a solved inequality but a revolved crap factorization of substitutive caricatures of the micro and macro universe.

I have not a single clue of your "sending of negatives when having sex", but I can observe that mathematics and humans do not cohabited the same world, because after reading your message, it is clear that your parents having sex was an addition of two positives giving as result a negative... (you?)

The earth is not a perfect circle, it's oval

Then, according to your exposition, the universe is not even circular, it's oval. Pi works in a perfect circle, and the universe is not perfect.

End of your story.

You better keep fighting for Jesus or against Jesus, and stop fighting for numerical stupidities.

gibberish, total gibberish.

Olive Tree is simply attempting a variation on Godwin's Law. He wants to smear anyone who has the temerity to disagree with him, and uses the equivalent of calling someone in a politcal debate a Nazi.

Anyone who claims, for example, that Jeebus "healed" anyone is not practicing history, they're peddling superstitious fairy tales. Olive Tree doesn't care, he just wants'to "win."

This is the first line of the opening post. Note the claim in bold-face. That is an indefensible claim. When Louis Feldman claimed that the majority of modern scholars considered the testimonium flavinium to be in part or entirely an interpolation, he was very specific--he referred to the 50 year period from 1933 to 1983 (he published in 1984), and he listed those to whom he referred. (I have alread provided a citation for that paper.)



"Virtually all modern scholars of antiquity" is a phrase so vague as to be, essentially, meaningless. Who are the modern scholars? Where are the citations for their claims? How many of them are practicing christians (i.e., having a vested interest in the claim)?

Of course, as you have pointed out, the number of people making a claim is irrelevant. As Anatole France put it: “If fifty million people say a foolish thing, it is still a foolish thing.”

It is equally as possible that a character was created to expound and exemplify a particular brand of sectarian fanaticism as it is that said individual actually existed. Absent any contemporary evidence--of which there is none--the Jeebus crowd haven't got a leg to stand on.

The historians who study these matters agree on these facts, and they know best what criteria to use to analyse the data. They say the data is solid enough. I trust them more than fringe activists.

The myth thesis denying the historicity of Jesus has been abandoned by French academic studies since 1933, thanks to the critical work of the secular historian Charles Guignebert, professor of "History of ancient and medieval Christianity" at the Sorbonne University, who was an atheist raised without any religious education. He was the last one to care enough to review systematically the data and the rival theories of mythistes, and concluded there was no doubt a historical Jesus existed. Since then, the thesis has basically been ignored. It survived for a few years in the Dutch Radical School until the 50s, and among sovietic historians until the 60s. It's been scientifically dead ever since.

Assuming that a Christian historian is necessarily biased on this issue is fine -- they usually are -- but what about the opposite bias of the hyper-critiques? There is no reason to assume that an atheist would always be more neutral than a Christian.

In fact, if this review of hyper-critiques reveals anything, it is a curious OBSESSION of deniers for one particular issue or person, somewhat arbitrarily, which comes to totally dominate their thinking... Pi loonies focus on Pi but never ever argued against other important numbers such as e; GW deniers hate climatologists but watch the weather channel. Etc. in your case, Jesus Jesus Jesus obsesses more than one amateur historian. They don't argue that, say, similar Jewish sages of the same era did not exist... Never ever would you hear one of them musing, with their usual shallowness and facile arguments, on the
Reality of the persons of Hillel and Sammai, for instance. Note that we have much much less data on them than on Jesus, but they existed alright... Same thing with Thales or other pre-Socratics. We have much less info on any of them than on Jesus, but the denying industry never shows up for Thales.

And their obsession caries them very far to the edges of rational thought, and beyond... The delegitimization of history, to which you Thomas also contributes here by saying in essence that you know better than qualified historians, is morally despicable and intellectually stupid. This is what I am fighting here: obscurantism. You don't like the idea that ONE DUDE lived, so you are ready to get rid with vast swaths of historical science. Tacitus' Annals to the dustbin: hearsay! In fact, history books are majoritarily based on "hearsay". You cannot explain much with numismatics and archeology alone.

The GW deniers also want to get rid of climatology because they don't like one single finding from it.


FALSE. Tacitus, Pliny, Suetonius and the rabbi who wrote the Talmud ALL HAD AN ANTI-CHEISTIAN BIAS. This is so amateurish...

The comparison with GW deniers is to highlight the similarities in mental processes and debating technics. The same BS tactics are used by GW loonies and anti-Jesus loonies: change the goalpost, ignore data, treats sources with a cavalier attitude, ready to throw away entire sciences and de legitimizing science; confined at the margins and thus found of crappy lying websites with no scholarly support whatsoever; peddling laypersons as specialists; lying about what true specialists are saying; etc etc.

You can have your opinion about Jesus, Tomy. What you cannot do is lie about what scientists are saying. Do we agree on that?

Your hero Louis Feldman said that Josephus wrote about Jesus, set. You still have to register that, or to understand it, IDK...

And once you understand the point, you'd have to apologize for presenting a misleading view of his work on Josephus, again and again in a dozen posts.

Or you can keep denying truth. You can keep lying about Feldman... Your choice.

Yep, the same tactics you are applying to your demonstration of the existence on Jesus.

Yesterday, you told me that my sources are old and the authors were dead.
Now, you come up with Guignebert, who died in 1939..

I dare say: Jesus!

Guignebert pretty much killed the idea that there could be scientific value in any of the mythist theories. As I gather, after him, the idea pettered out among the Dutch radicals too, around WW2, and has been confined to sovietic scholars after that.

I'm not talking about his works, I'm talking about you hypocritically using him, while denying me the right to use authors of the same period.

Don't you feel like being a big-mouthed hypocrite?

Tom asked if secular scientists supported the historical Jesus thesis and I gave him the name of the best secular scholar on the subject. He didn't ask for a live one.

You on the other hand pretend that the Jesus myth theories are NOT DEAD in academia. You tried to prove it, and only found a bunch of dead scholars...

Comparing these two cases is absurd, and only shows how thick you are.

Your whole message is very good.

The opinion that Jesus didn't exist two thousand years ago is just fanaticism at work.

There is the current tendency to deny and attack everything that belongs to religion. There is no respect anymore.

The worst, is that for their mischievous purpose, they fall in the ridiculous when obvious evidence is given, but they still arguing the contrary.

At the end, I guess the deniers of Jesus as a living person two thousand years ago are happy with their silly imaginations. However, facts about his existence stand still and are the strong pillars of the several religions based on the Bible; and these facts are what make religious people happy as well.

So, everybody should be happy, but no... the party poopers (Jesus deniers) always let their envy and low instincts to transform their illusory happiness into a world of hatred.

It is hard to make them understand their error.

Are you a holocaust denier?

Absurdity is on your side.

You are lying again, as many of the authors and scholars I cited are alive and well.

The myth theory is alive and well too..

I do prefer being thick and reasonable than stupid and stubborn..

You cannot prove any of your lies. Go ahead punk, find me one living, qualified scholar doubting a historical Jesus. I have been asking for ONE NAME FOR DAYS. And all you could show for it is two names of scholars who never denied the historicity of Jesus.

That's the kind of BS you peddle: lies about what scientists claim or think. And contrary to you, I can prove it:

You have listed Niels Peter Lemche and Thomas L. Thompson as doubters here:
http://able2know.org/topic/215173-57#post-5797484
but they are not, as proven here:

Niels Peter Lemche: Has published extensively on ancient Israel and the OT but not on the NT. Has participated in and lends much support to the Jesus Seminar, who believes in a real, historical Jesus.

Thomas L. Thompson: wrote in response to a 'dismissal' of one of his books by Bart Ehrman:
http://www.bibleinterp.com/articles/tho368005.shtml
[Bart Ehrman] has attributed to my book arguments and principles which I had never presented, certainly not that Jesus had never existed. Rather than dealing with the historicity of the figure of Jesus, my book had argued a considerably different issue [...]. Rather than a book on historicity, my The Messiah Myth offered an analysis of the thematic elements and motifs of a particular myth, which had a history of at least 2000 years. This included a discussion of the Synoptic Gospels’ theological reiteration that Samaritan and Jewish scriptures had their roots in an allegorically driven discourse on a large number of dominant ancient Near Eastern literary themes.

Because I had mentioned Marrou and his cogent review of hyper-critiques of all stripes, you saw on wiki that a certain Ilsetraut Hadot had critiqued his work, and you gratuitously assumed she poked fun at him... Just like that, without any proof. Evidently without knowing even what she had to say…
http://able2know.org/topic/215173-61#post-5797732

That’s how cheap you are. You lie about true scholars' positions. Despicable...

I have won already, and a long time ago. The question was: is there consensus among qualified scholars that a historical Jesus existed, and the answer is yes, there is such a scientific consensus. That is the truth.

I just keep posting for the pleasure of educating you, Set, and you acolytes in denial.

Not that there happen to be enough solid evidence to reach that conclusion and I had yet to see a poll of so call qualified scholars just a claim to that they are of the opinion that Jesus was in some manner base and somehow on a real person.

We need DR. Who and his time traveling phone booth.

That's because you haven't done your homework, Bill. Find ONE living, qualified scholar who doubts the historicity of Jesus. ONE SCHOLAR, other than Carrier who I found myself, is the exception that confirms the rule, and admitted on his blog that the Myth Thesis had never ever been published in a peer-reviewed journal.

That's all need to do to prove me wrong. Find one scholar. That should be easy, but you can't.

who decides if they're "qualified"?

You're obviously disqualified from being on that committee, so who are you going to nominate to determine if the scholar is qualified?

We could agree on fairly straightforward criteria before hand, e.g.:

1) some higher education in history of antiquity or philology (a BA is not enough; theological or philosophy 'expertise' is not enough);
2) teaching or having taught in academia about the same sorts of topics;
3) scholarly familiarity with at least some of the sources (e.g. Louis Feldman, mentioned by Set, is THE living expert on Josephus, so I grant him much more status on this issue than say to a specialist of ancient neo-platonic thought); and
4) published in peer-reviewed journals.

Does that make sense?