Did Jesus Actually Exist?

@Frank Apisa,

What Frank said. . .

. . .and meant.

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@Setanta,

Setanta wrote:

I don't really care who you allege is responsible, it's still hilariously silly. Was it a civil suit? Yahweh and Son versus Macedonian Dynasties Incorporated?

No it wasn't a civil suit, and that was never the point. The point was to answer the questions: "What is the proper standard of proof for historical claims?", and, "What rules of evidence are suitable for making evidence rise to this standard?" Joe and I agree that the proper standard is "more likely than not", or in legalese, "preponderance of the evidence". I used to think the suitable rules of evidence are whatever a court would use in a civil suit, since civil suits happen to be decided by this more-likely-than-not standard. Joe disagreed and convinced me that he's right. This issue is mute at this point of our discussion. I don't intend to discuss it any further.

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@Thomas,

Quote:

This issue is mute at this point of our discussion. I don't intend to discuss it any further.

Mute, yes that would probably be best.

Perhaps the subject's immutable popularity will remain moot for all eternity.

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@Thomas,

Way to weasel, Thomas. I'd say you have a lot to learn about how the practice of history works, as well as how popular history works. But of course, i can't make y ou discuss something out of which you have so succinctly weaseled.

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Thomas had the intelligence and intellectual honesty to recognize when he was wrong. I respect that thousands time more than a person who lies repeatedly about scientific data and claims. E.g. about Feldman on Josephus.

Quote:

That, indeed, Josephus did say something about Jesus is indicated, above all, by the passage – the authenticity of which has been almost universally acknowledged – about James, who is termed (A XX, 200) the brother of “the aforementioned Christ”.

Josephus, Judaism, and Christianity, by Louis Harry Feldman & Gōhei Hata, 1997, ISBN 90-04-08554-8, page 56
http://books.google.com/books?id=f3KwlJSQr4cC&pg=PA56&lpg=PP1&focus=viewport&dq=Josephus,+Judaism+and+Christianity+Louis+H.+Feldman,+Gohei+Hata&output=html_text

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@Setanta,

Setanta wrote:

But of course, i can't make y ou discuss something out of which you have so succinctly weaseled.

I'm glad you approve. Smile

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@joefromchicago,

Quote:

That doesn't really follow. If pagan myths were successful because they were straightforward, then that provides a model of success for other religions to emulate, not to reject. But we don't have to go back to antiquity for examples. Scientology was invented less than a century ago, and its cosmology is pretty straightforward. It's completely insane, to be sure, but it's not difficult to understand, and that's despite the fact that it's competing with hundreds of other far more well-established religions. I don't think that was a coincidence. Indeed, that's exactly the kind of thing we should expect from a religion that is made up out of thin air.

Another example is Islam. Contrary to Christianity, it is logically consistent and clear, and that has served Islam very well over the ages. Mohammad clearly learnt from Jesus' mistakes and made sure his 'revelation would be written down during his life.

The idea that a bunch of writers inventing Christianity would have come up with such odd, contradictory, decades-after-the-fact documentation of their invented messiah, is so bizarre that I think it's rationally indefensible. Why oh why write 4 contradictory gospels, for instance??? Why put so many holes in their story? The hypothesis seems absurd to me.

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@joefromchicago,

joefromchicago wrote:

We can agree that Jesus was as historical as the real people who inspired Emma Bovary, Columbo, and Michael Doonsbury (if, indeed, they were inspired by real people -- I have no clue).

I don't think we have a clue whether the New Testament's Jesus of Nazareth was inspired by real people, either. But, close enough.

joefromchicago wrote:

I don't deny that theological obscurity can have a kind of "evolutionary" advantage [...] But it still strikes me as implausible that anyone starting a religion would choose that strategy by inventing a figure like Jesus.

I see we have another mismatch here, this time in our unstated assumptions. You seem to imagine the "making-up of a person out of thin air" as a process of intelligent design. Meanwhile, I imagine it as evolution all the way back. In an evolutionary dynamic, it doesn't matter who the original storyteller was or what strategy he chose, if any. Maybe it started with someone sitting in a kosher Irish pub in Jerusalem and, having had a few too many drinks, spinning some yarn about some dude he claimed to have heard about. Whether the dude was fact or fiction doesn't really matter.

What matters is that enough people in the audience like the story enough to retell it. In retelling it, they unconsciously aggrandize some bits that they liked. "He liked to splash around in the water" turns into "actually, he was a pretty good swimmer", which turns into "little-known fact: he literally walked on water!". On the other hand, retellers instinctively omit bits they didn't like hearing. And then, of course, they also add some yarn of their own.

Ten years later, the story is utterly transformed. It has looped many thousand times through an evolutionary cycle, consisting of Chinese-whisper effect after people selecting and amplifying their favorite bits after more Chinese-whisper effect, and so on forever. The story now comes in many versions that compete for people hearing and retelling them. And the winners in this competition are entirely determined by the selective environment: What do storytellers like to listen to? And what do listeners like to retell?

Assume, as I do, that the making-up of Jesus's biography happened in such an evolutionary fashion. Where does that leave us with Occam's razor and the mess that was the Jesus character's life? It seems to me that we're good. The messiness of Jesus's story is no longer a surprise to be explained, or else to be cut out by the razor. It is, rather, an expected consequence of the underlying Chinese-whisper effect, and of obscurity being a selective advantage in many theological environments.

1 Reply

@Olivier5,

Olivier5 wrote:

Another example is Islam. Contrary to Christianity, it is logically consistent and clear

You must have read a different Quran than I have. The one I read mostly plagiarizes the Bible's bullshit, and is just as obstruse as a result.

Olivier wrote:

Why put so many holes in their story? The hypothesis seems absurd to me.

Fallacy alert: Argument from lack of imagination.

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@Thomas,

Quote:

You must have read a different Quran than I have. The one I read mostly plagiarizes the Bible's bullshit, and is just as obstruse as a result.

I've had many theological discussions with Muslims, and honestly, their arguments are much much stronger and logical than Christians: their god is unique and pure knowledge/light; no trinity BS; their god doesn't have children or parents; their documentation of Mohammad's ministry is much better, current (written down during the ministry), coherent, rational and logical than the Gospels. And the Sharia is lifted up from the Torah and follows it closely, rather than contradict it like the Gospels do. In terms of internal logic, it is far superior to Christianity, and much easier to defend in a debate.

In such a debate, a Muslim will often say for instance that the Gospels are hearsay written decades after the fact and have probably been redacted; that it's ridiculous to believe that a man comes back from death or walks on water; that God does not have children, etc. They can easily exploit the holes in the Jesus story. Historically, it must have helped Islam's dissemination.

Quote:

Fallacy alert: Argument from lack of imagination.

You don't lack imagination, grant you that...

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Olivier wrote:

Historically, it must have helped Islam's dissemination.

You can't stop uttering crap.

Was this expansion made by the soundness of the Qur’an or by this:

Quote:

And fight them until persecution is no more, and all religion is for Allah” (Qur’an 8:39).

?

http://bigfaithministries.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/islam1.jpg

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@timur,

Even in war, faith plays a role. But I don't think that warfare was the only way used by Islam to spread. This is just another simplistic cliché. The 'product' was also better than the competition, and even co-opted the competition (Islam emphasizes Jesus a lot).

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@Thomas,

Thomas wrote:

I see we have another mismatch here, this time in our unstated assumptions. You seem to imagine the "making-up of a person out of thin air" as a process of intelligent design. Meanwhile, I imagine it as evolution all the way back. In an evolutionary dynamic, it doesn't matter who the original storyteller was or what strategy he chose, if any. Maybe it started with someone sitting in a kosher Irish pub in Jerusalem and, having had a few too many drinks, spinning some yarn about some dude he claimed to have heard about. Whether the dude was fact or fiction doesn't really matter.

That's certainly possible, but in the case of Jesus we can be reasonably confident that didn't happen. After all, we can be pretty certain of the historical reality of Paul the Evangelist and of St. Peter. Peter was one of the apostles, and Paul knew of Jesus second-hand, and they were rather confident that Jesus actually existed. Consequently, there simply wasn't enough time between the putative death of Jesus and the beginning of their ministries for Peter and Paul to be acting on a still-accreting myth about a fictional Jesus. And if they were simply adapting a much-older myth, why didn't anyone else do it before them? In other words, if the Jesus myth was already established by the time of Peter and Paul, why hadn't anyone acted on it, or even mentioned it, before?

Thomas wrote:

Assume, as I do, that the making-up of Jesus's biography happened in such an evolutionary fashion. Where does that leave us with Occam's razor and the mess that was the Jesus character's life?

I think it leaves us in the same place as before. Take a real mythologized character, such as Paul Bunyan. There may very well have been a mighty lumberjack named Paul who inspired tall tales that later coalesced into the legend of Paul Bunyan, or it may have been completely made up. But his life story is rather simple and straightforward, and the details (big guy, hung around with a blue ox) never changed no matter how many times the story was told and retold. Why do you think the telling and retelling of the Jesus myth would make the Jesus story more complicated? That just does not follow.

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@joefromchicago,

joefromchicago wrote:

Why do you think the telling and retelling of the Jesus myth would make the Jesus story more complicated? That just does not follow.

I'm not saying it follows as a matter of logical necessity. I'm saying that it makes it possible, and plausible enough to survive Occam's razor.

1 Reply

@joefromchicago,

joefromchicago wrote:

In other words, if the Jesus myth was already established by the time of Peter and Paul, why hadn't anyone acted on it, or even mentioned it, before?

I wouldn't be surprised if somebody had. Maybe Paul was just the most effective community organizer among those who attempted it. Judging by his letters, he did seem pretty good at it.

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@Thomas,

Thomas wrote:

I'm not saying it follows as a matter of logical necessity. I'm saying that it makes it possible, and plausible enough to survive Occam's razor.

I don't think it does. The simplest explanation is probably the correct one: there really was a guy named Jesus who went around Palestine with a bunch of his buddies and was later executed by the Romans. Your version, in contrast, isn't simple at all.

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Christianity is not a simple story at all. In fact, it is a story of convoluted tales all trying to make of the putative Jeebus something wh ich is so implausible as to be laughable, were it not for the fact that there is nothing laughable avout the misery christianity has visited on the world. They co-opt any widely popular facet of religious obervance in the early principiate empire. December 25th as a holiday, druidic sacred groves and springs become holy woods and holy wells. Some early cultist believe that Jeebus was just a man, the messenger of god. Others claim he is the son of god. Some gnostics even claim that he was neither god nor man, but the avatar of the spirit of god. What do the christians come up with? The trinity! There's nothing simple at all about that claptrap.

The story of the birth of "the savior" is a tissue of falsehoods breath-taking in its scope Augustus orders a "census of all the owrld." Never mind that there is no evidence for this. Never mind that, in fact, there is abundent monumental evidence for exactly when Augustus conducted lustrum--inscriptions in more than one place. Off Joseph goes to Bethlehem--even though he wasn't a Roman citizen, and Augustus had no interest in counting anyone but Roman citizens. Some people claim that at that time, Bethleham was a small pile of ruins, and would not be settled again for more than a century. Some also claim that Nazareth did not yet exist. I don't have enough evidence to confirm or deny either claim. However, the Bethleham claim as the birth place of "messiah" is a transparent effort to link Jeebus with King David, as were the two contradictory geneologies in the gospels. That would fulfill a prophecy made in the Old Testament.

Passion week is even worse. We've fot Cisaphas pusing Pilate around. As Prefect (not proconsul), Pilate appointed the igh priest from a short list sent over by the temple. Furthermore, while were expected to take Josephus' alleghed references to Jeebus seriously, we are apparently expected to ignore his description of Pilate as a brutal and arrogant man who rode rough-shod over local religious sensibilities. (A measure of the reliability of Josephus is his belief that Hercules was an historical figure. Supposedly there was an earthquake and a total eclipse of the sun at the time of the death of the putative Jeebus. No one else in antiquity seems to have noticed those events. The there's the problem that as a prefect, Pilate had no atuhority to put anyone on trial nor to execute anyone. All the havering and equivocating of christians on these subjects just confirm the unrelability of the supposedly divinely inspired and inerrant scripture.

There's nothing simple about that story at all. What it gets us back to is a wandering religious loon with some raggedy-assed followers. When you speak of "Jesus" in modern times, that's not what people think of. "Jesus" as known to the modern world doesn't have a shred of evidence, and in fact is surrounded by implausibilities and impossibilities.

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@joefromchicago,

Quote:

there really was a guy named Jesus who went around Palestine with a bunch of his buddies and was later executed by the Romans.

I am in sync with you, Joefromchicago. I'm unable to prove Jesus existed but there's just too much around to refute otherwise. I believe Jesus was who he was before man institutionalized him.

During the cycle of Jesus' life there were purported many prophets roaming the hillside preaching the word of the coming Messiah. Throughout much of recorded history there have been men who has stood out because of their courage, defiance, and daring to be different. Jesus, in my limited knowledge of what I've read with respect to him, sought to moderate the Jewish religious tradition, to make it more accessible to everyone, not just to orthodox Jews. For instance, if there were an unforeseen problem on the Sabbath, it would be alright to handle the problem instead of waiting for the day after the Sabbath.

I believe Jesus to have been a fascinating persona because he was capable of attracting quite a following. In fact, he seemed so magnetic to others that the Romans thought he might be able to gather an army against Rome. It was the Romans who killed this man, not the Jews, but the latter's criticism of Jesus has lingered down through the ages and they carry the label of "Christ Killer" by many Christians steeped in moral ignorance.

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I will maintain to the end that with no evidence for him, I don't believe he existed. That he is a product of the emotions of the times, a conglomeration with no provable substance.

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@joefromchicago,

Urban legends emerge, about all kinds of things real or imagined, all the time. Jesus may well be one of those things, and may well fall into the "imagined" subset. How is that a complicated theory?

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Did Jesus Actually Exist?

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