Rex the Wonder Squirrel wrote:You say you've studied history "all your life," yet those who usually make such accusations against the existence of the "Jesus figure" are certainly not historians, but are surprisingly ignorant of the facts.
Ah the historicity of Jesus (or lackthereof). An argument the church has been trying to prove for centuries yet throughout time can barely produce a scrap of evidence.
Quote:First of all, the New Testament contains twenty-seven separate documents which were written in the first century A.D. These writings contain the story of the life of Jesus and the beginnings of the Christian church from about 4 B.C. until the decade of the A.D. nineties. The facts were recorded by eyewitnesses, who gave firsthand testimony to what they had seen and heard. "What was from the beginning, what we have heard, what we have seen with our eyes, what we beheld and our hands handled, concerning the Word of Life" (I John 1:1, NASB).
I'll address the problem of the gospels first (Mark, Matthew, Luke, John). The gospels were not originally even known by these names. They were not attributed to any particular author, each gospel being regard as "the gospel" of a particular Christian sect. Only later did they acquire the names of their supposed authors. The gospels are actually anonymous works, in which everything, without exception, is written in capital letters, with no headings, chapter or verse divisions, and practically no punctuation or spaces between words. They were not even written in the Aramaic of the Jews but in Greek.
The gospels have also been added to and altered over time. The pagan critic Celsus complains that Christians "altered the original text of the gospels three or four times, or even more, with the intention of thus being able to destroy the arguments of their critics." Modern scholars have found that he was right. A careful study of over 3,000 early manuscripts has shown how scribes made many changes. The Christian philosopher Origen, writing in the third century, acknowledges that manuscripts have been edited and interpolated to suit the needs of the changing theological climate.
To convery the enormity of the problem, one scholar describes selecting a place in the gospels completely at random (in this case he chose Mark 10-11) and checking to see how many differences were recorded between various early manuscripts for these passages. He discovered "no fewer than 48 places where the manuscripts differ, sometimes there are only two possibilities, often there are three or more, and in one case there are six!"
Quote:Moreover, the existence of Jesus is recorded by the Jewish historian, Flavius Josephus, who was born in A.D. 37:
Quote:Antiquities, XVIII, III).
And although this passage has been contested because of the reference to Jesus being the Christ and rising from the dead, the fact of His existence is not in question.
As it has been pointed out much of the two sections of Josephus' work on Jesus is, at least in part, forged. Not only does the Christian language used in the text dismiss this as forgery the brevity of the passage disproves its authenticity. Josephus' work is voluminous and exhaustive. It comprises twenty books. Whole pages are devoted to petty robbers and obscure seditious leaders. Nearly forty chapters are devoted to the life of a single king. Yet this remarkable being, the greatest product of his race, a being greater than any earthly king, is dismissed with a few dozen lines.
Quote:Cornelius Tacitus (A.D. 112), a Roman historian, writing about the reign of Nero, refers to Jesus Christ and the existence of Christians in Rome (Annals, XV, 44). Tacitus, elsewhere in his Histories, refers to Christianity when alluding to the burning of the temple of Jerusalem in A.D. 70. This has been preserved by Sulpicius Severus (Chronicles 30:6).
The evidence of Tacitus is not contemporary but dates from about 50 years after the event. As governor of Asia c.112 CE, he must have been familiar with Christian "troublemakers." The only thing that would make Tacitus' writings an independent testimony to the existence of Jesus and not merely the repetition of Christian beliefs would be if he had gained his information about Jesus being crucified under Pontius Pilate from the copious records that the Romans kept of their legal dealings. But this does not seem to be the case, for Tacitus calls Pilate the "procurator" of Judea when he was in fact a "prefect," so Tacitus is clearly not returning to the records of the time but quoting hearsay information from his own day.
Quote:There are other references to Jesus or His followers, such as the Roman historian, Seutonius (A.D. 120) in Life of Claudius, 25.4, and Lives of the Caesars, 26.2, and Pliny the younger (A.D. 112) in his Epistles, X. 96.
Pliny, the governor of Bithynia in Asia Minor, wrote a very short passage to the Emperor raja in 112 CE requesting clarification on how to deal with the troublesome Christians. The Roman historian Suetonius, in a list of miscellaneous notes on legislative matters (between considering the sale of food in taverns and briefly discussing the behavior of charioteers), relates that in 64 CE, "Punishment was inflicted on the Christians, a class of men given to a new and wicked superstition." But all these sources really tell us is that a few Christians existed in the Roman world--which is not in doubt--and that they were not considered of any importance. They tell us nothing about Jesus himself.
