Are there any texts about Jesus during his life?

Factual Questions
61

Not according to Paul himself, who claimed to have met the risen Jesus.

“But miracles don’t happen!” Diogenes says. If one starts off being 100% committed to the notion that God does not exist, or that he would never intervene in the world, then of course one will be led to that conclusion regardless of where the evidence points.

Note that I am not specifically arguing for the Resurrection at this point – or indeed, for any of the miracles of Jesus. As I said, that’s subject matter for another discussion, and we are dealing with the more modest issue of Christ’s existence. Rather, I’m pointing out the inaccuracy of claiming that the Bible contains no eyewitness testimony of anyone having met Jesus. Even if you adopt the most liberal views in existence with regard to New Testament authorship, one must still deal with Paul’s testimony. The only reason to reject his testimony right off the bat would be a prior commitment to the notion that Paul is wrong – that there is no God who intervenes in the world.

And of course, the whole notion of demanding eyewitness testimony for ancient historical events (or even more modern events) is woefully misguided anyway. For a discussion of philosophical principles for evaluating historical claims, check out Justifying Historical Descriptions by historian-philosopher C. Behan McCullagh. Suffice to say that it provides a much more thorough discussion that demonstrates the naivete of demanding eyewitness accounts.

62

The main argument against 1Peter being “written by” Peter is that the Greek is too good. That argument is dismissed quickly by noting that scribes often assisted men back in those days, and in fact even few of the most educated Roman and Greeks didnt use a scribe or secretary*. The tradition is even that Silvanus acted as Peters scribe or secretary. There is great debate on the subject, including the idea that Peter only “wrote” a small portion (Chapter 5), or even nothing at all. I personaly subscribe to the idea that most of it was dictated by Peter to a secretary but later editors changed some sections. More or less as is thought to have occurred with the Gospel of John.

Almost no one beleives 2Peter is anything but pseudepigraphical. Perhaps it has a few stray ideas of his in there, maybe.

  • It was thought of as amazing that Ceasar could read a letter right through, without help of a secretary or sounding it out first.
63

It’s not just the quality of the Greek, but the familiarity with formal Greek rhetoric and with the LXX. It shows a formal Greek education, not just a knowledge of the language. From The Oxford Bible Commentary, (p. 1263)

One cannot save Petrine authorship by arguing that Peter employed a secretary. If one argues that this secretary was Silvanus, the travelling companion of Paul (e.g. Selwyn 1958) or an anonymous amanuensis of the Roman church (Michaels 1988) the letter then becomes the product not of Peter, but of the secretary, since it is the latter’s language that the epistle exhibits (see Beare 1970)..

Aside from the Greek, there is also the presupposition of Pauline theology, the post-70 CE use of the name “Babylon” to refer to Rome and the range of provinces addressed which all point to a post 70 date. Since you like Raymond Brown, I will quote him here:

At the upper end of the possible chronological scale I Pet is cited by or known to several early-2d century witnesses, e.g., II Pet 3:1, Polycarp’s Philippians, and Papias (EH 3.19.17), and thus a date after 100 is unlikely. At the lower end of the scale, we need to posit a date after Peter reached Rome. Since there is no reference to Peter in the letter Paul wrote to Rome in 58, presumably I Pet could not have been written before the early 60s. If Peter wrote the letter, the possible range would be 60-65. If the letter is pseudonymous, written by a disciple, the range would be 70-100. One might doubt that the respect for the emperor inculcated in 2:13,17 would have been likely during the time of Nero’s persecution which began after the fire of 64 (he was assassinated in 68) or in the final years of Domitian’s reign (81-96), after the revolt of 89, when he let loose his hostility toward those of suspicious outlook (p. 807 below). Thus the two ranges can be reduced to 60-63 and 70-90. Pastoral care for Asia Minor exercised from Rome would be more intelligible after 70. Similarly the use of ‘Babylon’ as a name for Rome makes better sense after 70, when the Romans had destroyed the second Temple (n. 22 above); all the other attestations of this symbolic use of the name occur in the post-70 period. The best parallels to the church structure portrayed in I Pet 5:1-4 are found in works written after 70. All this tilts the scales in favor of 70-90, which now seems to be the majority scholarly view."
An Introduction to the New Testament, (pp. 721-722)

64

Really just to clarify this for GQ a bit I think the closest we have to a witness account of Jesus’ life are Paul’s Letters not the Gospels. The vast majority of true historians and most biblical scholars outside of Oral Roberts and Liberty University would concede that as fact.

Paul is writing within ~25ish-30ish years of the crucifixion. He isn’t writing a biography of Jesus - he is writing mainly to settle disputes among the various “Christian” churches he has established in Asia Minor. He doesn’t say much about Jesus as a person - mainly he talks about Jesus as Christ the Savior in Paul’s religious cosmology. He may not have known much about the physical man Jesus or he may be assuming that his followers know all that he does. Whatever, he doesn’t go into detail and I think a fair argument could be that he doesn’t see it as important to emphasize this.

Interestingly, apropos of nothing except the scarcity of sources discussion, Bart Ehrman once mentioned that Paul is the only Pharisee writing that pre-dates the destruction of the Temple and is valuable in that regard as well.

Paul says about historical Jesus that he was “of the seed of David and born of a woman under the Law”, was betrayed, had a last supper, was crucified, died (1Co 11:23-25), that Jesus told his followers to pay their preachers (1Co 7:10,1), he said that Jesus said you can’t remarry after divorce (1Th 4:15-17). he notes a “12” as important followers of Jesus, he names some by saying Jesus had significant followers called Peter (literally ~”Rocky”), John and a “brother” James all of whom he met and Paul had tense relations with– mainly apparently centering on the appropriateness of and mechanics of taking Jesus’ message to Gentiles and Paul took great pains to make very, very clear that he (Paul) had his authority directly from Paul’s vision Jesus and not necessarily from them.

Although that is in a nutshell the closest thing to a written biography of Jesus in his lifetime, there is not much more detail than the above paragraph in Paul.

65

(My emphasis added.) :dubious:

Sighhhhh…

Ted, when Matthew has Jesus born 4 BC or earlier, while Luke has him born 6 AD…

When these two fall all over each other with weird “creative writing” mechanisms to insert “prophecies” into their Infancy Narratives (which no one has ever successfully harmonized) …

When the Johannine date of crucifixion is one day earlier than the Synoptics, because John wanted Jesus’s death to be the new Passover sacrifice…

When John insists that the Beloved Disciple and Peter were first to believe the Resurrection or at least ponder the meaning, ahead of Mary Magdalene, while the other three all insist that several women, including her, brought the news to skeptical apostles…

When there is disagreement over where (Jerusalem or Galilee) Jesus first appeared resurrected to the bulk of the apostles, with absurd conclusions coming from trying to maintain the other as a second literal event…

You can jolly well leave off the quotation marks from the word.

  • “Jack”

P.S. Oh, and BTW, “John” even contradicts “himself” in two especially glaring places. One is when Jesus bitterly complains that no one has asked him where he is going. Peter and Thomas have each just done that. :rolleyes:

66

Well, what I thought we were talking about were contemporaneous writings. By your standard, everyone who sees the image of Jesus in a waterstain or a burnt piece of toast is just as credible as Paul’s claim to have seen Jesus after his death.

67

That’s misleading. The fact that he read silently was the surprise, not the fact that he read it ‘right through’. Silent reading was an unusual accomplishment in classical times, and would not become common until centuries later.

68

Absolutely not. First, while Paul did write his epistles after the death and supposed Resurrection of Jesus, he did claim to have personally met the risen Christ. The fact that he wrote about this a few years later is ultimately a petty detail.

And second, there is a huge difference between seeing an image of Jesus in a waterstain and claiming to have met him personally. One could insist that the two are fundamentally identical, but that would be denying the obvious differences in the nature of these experiences. The only rationale for equating the two would be an attempt to disregard the latter right off the bat. (Note that in saying this, I’m not arguing that you have to automatically accept the veracity of either experience. That would be a matter for further philosophical investigation, after all. Rather, I’m saying that it would be ludicruous to treat the two scenarios as though they were at all comparable. They are not.)

69

I would agree. In the former, there is physical evidence that may be falsified; in the latter, there is not.

70

I’m curious. Why is the author “Luke” considered to have been writing at least 30 years after Paul died?

  • “Jack”
71

Having a vision…actually, let’s call a spade a spade, having a hallucination of a dead person you never met is not the same as actually meeting that person.

The difference is that a vision bespeaks psychosis, while seeing shapes is pretty much harmless self-delusion and a normal inclination for the brain to look for familiarity and patterns in random shapes.

72

Again, you’re assuming that the vision was not real. Now in principle, that may very well be the case, but the fact that you’re automatically dismissing it as a hallucination indicates a prior conception, not scholarly inquiry. It amounts to forming a conclusion ahead of time, and them dismissing the recorded accounts as necessary in order to satisfy that conclusion.

73

Because he shows a familiarity with the works of Josephus. His knowledge of Jewish Antiquities, in particular, puts the authorship of Luke-Acts into the mid-90’s.

The fact that he used Mark as a source in itself puts Luke into the 80’s (Mark is post 70, and the general rule of thumb is to allow ten years before a book becomes copied and distributed enough to become a source for another author.

74

Why do religionists always do this? The only valid scientific presumption is to assume that the impossible is impossible until proven otherwise. If you don’t rule out physically impossible claims a priori, you can’t do science at all.

What’s even more silly is that apologists only object to ruling out the patently impossible when it comes to their own pet book. Everybody else’s magic book is mythology.

75

So, anyone who writes about Jesus, God, Mary, Satan, ghosts, or aliens appeared and spoke to them is proof that such beings existed?

It is one thing to discuss evidence of the existence of Jesus a historical being. But I think it is extremely questionable to include claims of supernatural phenomena, such as post-death reanimation, in the category of such evidence.

There is some evidence suggesting that Jesus the person existed. Evidence of his divinity is a whole nother ballgame. You discredit the first, by introducing supposed evidence of the latter.

76

I suspect this thread has long since strayed into Great Debates territory. The OP asked

This question has already been answered: No, there isn’t.

We’ve also answered some other related questions, such as “Does the Bible contain any writing dating back to when he walked the Earth?” (Answer: No).

And, “Is it significant that we don’t possess any references to Jesus that were written during his earthly lifetime? Should we expect to if he really existed?” (Answer: No, not necessarily).

And, “Did any of the writers of the New Testament have personal, first-hand experience of Jesus?” This is hard to answer definitively, because we don’t know for sure who wrote many of the NT books, and there is controversy over what (if any) connection people like John and Peter (the apostles) had with the books that bear their names.

At any rate, the NT contains vitually no first-hand, first-person mention of encounters with Jesus (“So then Jesus says to me, he says…”): nowhere do any of the writers claim to have seen Jesus in person. One exception to this is the one JThunder brought up: Paul’s claim to have encountered the risen Jesus. That he made this claim, is a fact. (It occurs in a book which scholars pretty much agree was written by Paul.) The facts behind the claim (i.e. what “actually happened,” or whether Paul might have been lying or deluded) is something we probably can’t discuss without getting into Great Debates territory.

For what it’s worth, Garry Wills begins Chapter 1 of his book What Paul Meant with the sentence,
[QUOTE=Garry Wills]
The most important event of Paul’s life, which determined everything else, was his encounter with the risen Jesus.
[/QUOTE]
A page or so later:
[QUOTE=Garry Wills]
In the Gospel stories of meetings with the risen Jesus, genuine apparitions occur—the Lord not only appears to men and women but he converses with those who see him, he gives instructions, he answers questions. Paul, putting his own record along with theirs, implies that his experience was like theirs—that he spoke with Jesus.

…

Of all those who saw the risen Lord, Paul is the only one whose own words we possess.
[/QUOTE]

77

Who cares. He’s dead and he ain’t coming back…

78

Too bad for us, not too bad for Jesus. In fact that fact is crucial for him. If his “miracles” would have been subjected to contemporary peer review, as opposed to having learned about them from 2000 year old writings that were made scores of years after he died, I doubt you would know his name now.

79

I don’t think this really counts as somebody “writing about Jesus” as a historical personage, though. Pliny is referring to “Christ” only as the name of the deity of the sect called the Christians. Certainly, there is plenty of evidence from the first century that Christians existed, and worshipped a deity called “Christ”. But that is not evidence for any claims that are made about the life or actions of the historical Jesus.

Mind you, I personally don’t disbelieve in the existence of a historical Jesus, but I wouldn’t accept what Pliny said about Christians as evidence of his existence: it is evidence only that the sect called Christians had a god they called “Christ”.

80

Personally I think that if one dictates a letter, but that letter is polished, it still remains your thoughts and ideas, even if not always your words.