I think that we should first look at all of the contemporary literature outside of the Bible that talks about Jesus. If half the events listed in the New Testament concerning his exploits are true, there must be dozens, if not hundreds, of verifications from other sources, right?
Why? We don’t have that many documents from that period to begin with.
On the other hand, look at how little information is in general circulation regarding individuals in social minorities in our current society. Had not the Civil Rights movement spurred a minor cottage industry in spotlighting the works of many black Americans, many of their efforts would have been lost to history. (In fact, many of their efforts never made it into a published work until the 1970s or later, despite the fact that many of them had died as much as 50 to 100 years prior to any biography written about them.)
This is not to argue that Jesus was, indeeed, the wonderworker described in the Gospels, but the argument that he was most likely not because we have few writings about his life is flawed.
So, if Meher Baba was born in Palestine?
Shit happens. So does God.
Speaking as if I were a secular historian, any study of Jesus Christ should include all “contemporary” documentation, including those references that are presently canonized. The only really “non biased” source that I am aware of is the Antiquities of the Jews by Josephus, wherin he reports that such a man as Jesus claiming to be the Christ performed miracles and has a following.
To ignore what Jesus claimed or was claimed to be as well as the miracles attributed would leave very little else to study.
How do we know we have an accurate narrative of what Jesus of Nazareth did, though? Every religion, every philosophy of life, and even every nation turns its founders into legends.
In 1800, just after George Washington’s death, then again in 1806, Rev. Mason Weems wrote a biography of him, which included stories such as the famous cherry tree story, the “throwing a coin over the Potomac” story, and a bunch more, and Washington was made out to be a model of courage, piety, and intelligence. Much of the information in the book is false. Weems invents incidents, gives Washington speeches he never made, and portrays a Washington with a radically different temprament then those who knew Washington described him as having. All this comes from a book written only a few years after Washington’s death! Of course, Weems’ “Life of Washington” isn’t meant to be a biography so much as it is designed to impart moral lessons and serve as a model for its readers. It sets up Washington as the individual with all the qualities we should emulate, but we know from a myriad of other sources, it isn’t good history.
However, what if all the other information we had about Washington was lost to us, and the only sources we had were the “Life of Washington” and works derived from it? We would then, for lack of an alternative, have an inaccurate image of Washington that we would assume to be true.
Well, legends did arise regarding Jesus, as recorded in the (highly apocryphal) Gospel of Peter, Gospel of Thomas, and others. These writings were rejected by the early church.
If you want 100% absolute assurance, well, that’s simply not possible – not even with modern historiographic techniques. In brief though, we do have writings from early church fathers, where they recognized certain writings and not others. We can also examine the NT documents for historical consistency.
In addition, we can consider the authorship of these writings. The Gospel of Luke and the Book of Acts, for example, are generally attributed to the physician Luke, who was known to be a travelling companion of Paul. As such, he was in a favorable position to report what Peter, Paul and company said regarding Jesus and the early church. Ditto for the Pauline epistles, which are generally attributed to St. Paul.
I think it is possible to separate Jesus, the carpenter’s son of Galilee, from the Savior of Man. I think that doing so is deliberately missing the point. If He was not the Son of God, and Savior, then He would be dead, and of no real importance. But the importance of the Lord is not that one can, or cannot prove His existence.
I am not a theologian, nor a historian. However, even aside from the life of Jesus, here on earth, away from the matter of faith, there is a body of works attributed to Him, a view of life, and a dedication to the love of all mankind. Don’t get bogged down in historicity, bibliolotry, and dogma. None of that has much to do with Christianity. Proof that He lived is not available. Proof that he died is not available. Proof that He was resurrected from the dead is not available. For provable philosophies, you must be content with science, which isn’t a philosophy at all. Sadly, history isn’t even a science.
If you ignore the question of His life, and simply live your life as if His admonition were good advice, you would live a life dedicated to love, and compassion for all others, and respect for every soul you meet. Leave the God part of it to Him. You and I will be challenged enough just trying to be good people, and live good lives. Philosophy is too hard, just love everyone. Even if we are wrong, it will still be a good thing.
This being right thing is waaaaay over rated.
Tris
“He deserves Paradise who makes his companions laugh.” ~ Koran ~
Just to follow up on Captain Amazing, there is another, roughly contemporary example which I think should be considered.
Did Alexander the Great really exist?
There is one source from which virtually all of our knowledge of Alexander derives. It’s the Anabasis, by Arrian, and that link tells us pretty much most of what we know about him.
Arrian, in turn, tells us his authoritative biography of Alexander, four hundred years after the fact, was created by combining the narratives of Ptolemy and another guy who I can’t remember who was a navigator for Alexander’s fleet. In cases where the narratives differ, he defers to Ptolemy, because a head of state wouldn’t lie, would he?
Worse still, Arrian loved the historical works of Thucidides and Xenophon, who coexisted with the flowering of ancient Greece. So, he wrote his history in the style of those already ancient writers, but apparently not as well as they did. There are complications in translation which may very well stem from Arrian’s own mistakes the scripts.
And of course, the major repository of knowledge of that time, Alexandria (founded, of course, by Alexander), was sacked and destroyed. So, we don’t have Ptolemy to refer to, directly. There is no firsthand account of Alexander the Great’s life known to us.
And yet, we never questioned Alexander’s existence. Later, someone noticed that a mole in the harbor of Tyre must have been the one that he had built in order to destroy the last vestige of Phonecian seapower, and we’ve found evidence of his outposts, and perhaps even his burial site. And of course there are a dozen cities named after him, and one or two even named after his horse. Nevertheless, the evidence is weak.
We’re talking about a guy who might have been responsible for the death of one percent of the total world population in his time.
What we know about Alexander is mostly bullshit. Scholars agree upon it. What we are taught is carefully filtered, and constantly thought about, and reconsidered about every twenty years.
Alexander The Great died less than 250 years before Jesus was born. Jesus didn’t have anything built, Jesus didn’t command the resources of a regent of the “known world,” Jesus didn’t write.
But people wrote about him. And that’s what we’ve got. If you’re going to believe in the myth that is History, you have to believe in the existence of Jesus. And no, I wouldn’t want to have to prove it in court.
There are standards for deconstructing the objective data from material known only from polemic or anecdotal accounts.
You presume (in the legal sense) the supernatural to be an invalid add-on. You convert terminology specific to the age, place, and/or culture to that more congenial to ours. You suppose material claiming to be verbatim dialogue (by our standards) to be indirect reportage of what was said if it was written at a time when that distinction was not drawn. You adjust as appropriate for a perceived bias in the reporter. And, in the absence of sound reason to think otherwise, you presume the remainder to be a quasi-factual account of actual events.
Given this, a reconstruction of the Historical Jesus seems quite possible, but extemely difficult to do, owing to the propensity for bias in the sources and in the analysts. (To what extent do you adjust? Is that not driven by your own views?)
And, of course, the presumption of the absence of supernatural occurrences becomes extraordinarily strained in the particular case of Jesus, since aside from the Feeding of the 5,000, the one series of events stressed by all four principal sources is the Passion/Resurrection story. (Note: I grant there are apparent contradictions based on the fragmentary reportage of specific occurrences during the time span covered; these need not concern us, since the claim that A., B., or C. was “first at the grave” and was accompanied by D., E., or F. is the sort of detail common to eyewitness accounts everywhere. Though the majority of us have seen the footage of the Kennedy assassination, I suspect seven persons describing it from memory would come up with seven different accounts, differing in minor details.)
However, my key point is that some event appears to have happened on the first day of the week following Jesus’s death that caused major character changes in his former disciples, and which they report, variously phrased, as his return to life. Subtract this, and the “historical Jesus” question becomes one of identifying which of several interpretations (radical humanist, apocalyptic preacher, reformer of Judaism, etc.) to place on an itinerant Rabbi who spoke in figures of speech. But it is not true to the accounts. Supernatural in implication they may be, but what happened on “the first Easter” appears to be key to the accounts. Resolution of this question, whether it be by skepticism, faith, or open-minded reading of the original texts with an eye to “normal reality,” is important to the question.
Here is Libertarian’s favorite website on reconstructing the historical Jesus:
http://www.concentric.net/~Mullerb/index.shtml
It’s pretty good, but I did have one concern: the site spends a lot of time discussing the books of the New Testament, but spends little or no time discussing those early Christian writings which did not make it into the New Testament (e.g. the Infancy gospels, the two gospels of Thomas, etc.).