The name they invented was “Christ.”
Hey, don’t diss Bob.
The commonality of the name “Jesus”/“Joshua” makes legitimate the argument that Jesus never existed because the Jesus under discussion never existed. Jesus spoke eloquently and did miracles and preached before crowds of thousands and had palm leaves laid down before his donkey when he rode into town. If some grubby dude named Joshua had a total of two dozen followers plus looky-loos in his lifetime and the only thing he did in his lifetime to distinguish himself from the other street preachers was to get arrested for going on a mad tear through the temple marketplace and get summarily executed as a result, does this really count? We don’t argue that since Saint Nicholas existed, Santa Claus is real. Why is Jesus different?
With all due respect, you haven’t been paying close attention if that’s what you think. It simply is not true that I am “unable or unwilling to acknowledge that.” Quite the contrary; I have repeatedly admitted that we lack contemporaneous accounts. In fact, I pointed out that one would not expect any such accounts, since Jesus did not become a major influence until AFTER he died.
A similar problem exists regarding your complaint about the lack of eyewitness accounts. I openly admitted that many historians do not believe that the New Testament contains eyewitness accounts of Jesus. (In point of fact, a significant number do, but I’m not resting my case on that.) If you think that I’m ignoring this fact, then you haven’t been reading what I wrote.
My point – and this is one that I’ve made repeatedly – historians do NOT demand eyewitness or contemporaneous accounts when evaluating history. Such accounts are valuable, but they are far from necessary. Instead, professional historians use such criteria as explanatory scope, explanatory power, the ad hocness of a scenario, degree of corroboration, presence or absence of competing accounts, and so forth. That’s why it’s tremendously naive to pin one’s case on the mere lack of contemporaneous, first-hand testimony.
This is why I’ve repeatedly urged you to do some reading into the methods that historians actually use. I’ve cited the criterion of embarrassment, for example. When a source openly admits something that would be embarrassing to the author’s cause, for example, then it’s generally considered to be reliable. (An example would be Paul’s admission that he was a persecutor of the Christians and an accessory to their murder, prior to becoming a believer.) They also consider what hostile sources have to say; for example, the early anti-Christian polemic contained heavy criticism of Jesus’s followers, but not a single one of them said, “You people are fools! This Jesus of yours never existed!” Historians take the totality of such criteria and evaluate them as a whole, which is why virtually none of them accept the claim that Jesus never existed.
But since you adamantly insist on being given a concrete example, I’ll take time out of my busy schedule to give you one. Have you heard of Alexander the Great? None of the historical accounts regarding Alexander were written by eyewitnesses, and they certainly weren’t written during his lifetime. They were all written centuries after the fact, and the primary source (Plutarch’s biography) was composed about four hundred years later. We also have vastly more information about Jesus than we do about Alexander. Nevertheless, only the most unreasonable skeptic would argue that Alexander the Great never existed. Historians don’t discount his biographies simply because Plutarch et al were not eyewitnesses to his life. They might weigh certain claims more heavily than others, and they might even allow for some development or uncertainty in these accounts – but they don’t dismiss them as unreliable from the get go.
Dinsdale, I’ve already written a great deal about this topic, and frankly, I have more pressing things to do. All I ask is that you first do your research into actual historical methods before you continue with protests such as “But there were no eyewitnesses!” or “But none of those guys were contemporaneous with Jesus!” There’s a reason why the overwhelming majority of historians disagree with you on this matter, and a wise man would educate himself first before insisting that they must be wrong.
Siddhattha Guatama, better know as the Buddha. We have no written records about him from within 300 years of his lifetime.
Vardhamana. For him there’s an even longer gap between his lifetime and the first written records.
Xenophanes. Everything we know about him comes from quotations attributed to him in texts dating from several centuries later.
And many of the other famous figures from ancient history. There’s no shortage.
That’s a title, not a name, and they didn’t invent it just for him. Christos is Greek for Messiah," which is Hebrew for “anointed.” The title of “anointed one” was used for all Davidic kings, as well as for high priests. “THE Anointed” was basically just a shorthand way to refer to the expected heir to the throne of David who would restore the Davidic/Solomonic kingdom, etc. The title preexisted Jesus.
Why? They weren’t written until starting a generation after in his supposed lifetime, they don’t agree on mundane biographical points and we can *see *the myth being developed in them from the lost source texts. Hell, they don’t agree with the archaeological evidence we *do *have.
Yes, there were people name Yeshua or close to it in Roman-occupied Palestine. Some of them were doubtless itinerant preachers with loyal followers. Some may even have been killed by Romans. Believeing that doesn’t mean I believe in a historical Jesus, though.
The more you know.
Did not Alex - and his dad - issue coins bearing their names and images while they were alive? I was also under the understanding that altho specifics of many/most specific acts differed, there certainly were contemporaneous descriptions by generals and others. But I am far from an expert.
As usually seems to happen, JT, it seems you and I are talking past each other.
ITR - I’m not entirely sure that the actual existence of the Buddha is all that important to Buddhists - but again, that is another area of my ignorance.
Vardhamana - again I plead ignorance. But it doesn’t seem to me to really help the cause of one questionable religious icon’s existence, by pointing to other religious icons.
Not sure about ancient authors either. Is it important that they existed, or that their writings exist. Perhaps the “historians” were simply writing under a pseudonym.
And I’m not at all sure as many people have as much riding on the existence of a Greek poet, as the supposed Messiah… 
Historians do not take it as a given that the first two figures were historical, and completely accepts the possibility that they are legendary.
Xenophanes existed by definition as the author of the poems atrributed to him.
There is a great deal of archaeological confirmation for the exploits of Alexander.
I would dispute that bolded bit, strongly.
There is plenty of contemporary *archaeological *evidence for Alexander - coins from his reign, cities he founded, islands he turned into peninsulas, his father’s tomb, that sort of thing. So it’s a bit disingenuous to compare the two as though there was an equal amount of evidence for both, and all of that textual.
Right, but with regard to Alexander himself – Alexander the person – virtually everything we know about him comes from biographies that were written centuries after the fact. Yet the fact that these were not eyewitness accounts - indeed, they were obviously way too late to have been first-hand testimony – historians accept these accounts as being basically reliable. This underscores the point that first-hand testimony is NOT required by historians. Indeed, I’d challenge anyone to produce even a single textbook on historical methods which says that anything other than a contemporaneous eyewitness account must be deemed unreliable.
Dinsdale, as for your claim that “there certainly were contemporaneous descriptions by generals and others” regarding the life of Alexander, that is simply incorrect. As I said, the only written accounts of his life that have survived were composed centuries afterwards.
As for coinage, some coins do indeed bear images that are believed to be those of Alexander. Obviously though, this falls far short of an actual written account, and they certainly don’t amount to eyewitness testimony. Moreover, my point is that the biographies of Alexander are accepted to be basically reliable, constituting evidence of more than just his mere existence. (As an aside, I don’t have a problem accepting that these coins do represent Alexander, but that’s because I believe in evaluating the totality of the evidence, rather than merely dismissing a claim simply because it’s not a contemporaneous, first-hand account.)
And if the argument were what Alexander’s personality were like, that’d be a good point. But the question of relevance is whether he existed at all as a non-mythical person, because that’s the question asked of Jesus.
The fact remains that far, far more than just Alexander’s mere existence is accepted, despite the gap of four centuries between his life and our primary sources. Moreover, if you’re going to talk about archaeology, there is a wealth of archaeological evidence that corroborates the details in the New Testament documents. One might not have coins that bear the image of Jesus, but that’s one the sort of evidence that one might expect of him anyway. Rather, we find corroboration for the incidental details in the NT accounts. One might question a bit of evidence here or there, but point remains that there is general archaeological corroboration for these documents, especially for the writings of Luke. (Archaeologist William Albright, among others, has written extensively on this topic.)
If anything, that point underscores what I’ve been saying – namely, that it’s naive to dismiss an account simply because it’s not an unbiased eyewitness account. Historians consider factors such as corroboration with other sources, whether documentary or historical. With regard to the existence of Jesus, you have the gospel accounts and the epistles, with considerable archaeological corroboration of the incidental details. I can understand how someone who’s unfavorably disposed to Jesus might continue to question certain incidental details, but to question the mere existence of this man is tremendously unjustified.
JT: I don’t think you’re making much of a case the AtG example. The question **Dinsdale **had was:
It’s a pretty straight forward question.
Were’nt there quite a few historians alive at the time who kept extensive records of events in that era? It would seem, to me, there would of been Some recording of events surrounding jesus, especially something as noteworthy as a miracle. The lack of any mention of him by other sources than the gospels (which I think were written later anyway correct?) seems proof enough there was no jesus, no?
The concept of history itself would not match modern concepts, and that area was a backwater relative to Rome.
Never mind that considerable records, records more important relative to the time (by then perception) were lost, so … no surprise marginal things perhaps recorded (maybe) were lost.
Well, miracles are another matter … although the rate at which miracles were claimed by various magicians, etc, rather makes it less extraordinary.
No, you started from false premises.
The only thing Albright confirmed were the existence of some cities mentioned in the NT. He confirmed nothing meaningful about the actual characters or narratives. It is not significant that the stories used real locations. So does Homer. So does the Epic of Gilgamesh. King Kong climbed up the Empire State Building. The Empire State Building really exists. That does not confirm that King Kong really existed.
That is both untrue and irrelevant. For example, skeptics believed for centuries that the court of Gabbatha (mentioned in John 19:13) never existed. Albright (who was by no means Biblical literalist) determined that it did existt, and did so in a manner that was consistent with the account in John’s gospel. As reported in his book, The Archaeology of Palestine, he determined that this court was in the Tower of Antonia, the Roman military headquarters in Jerusalem.
Moreover, even if your assertion were correct, that would be irrelevant. Remember, I said that Albright wrote about the archaeological corroboration for the New Testament accounts, and as the founder of the Biblical archaeology movement, he was more than qualified to comment on the broad scope of its scholarship, not just his own works. He is also just one of many prominent scholars (Dr. A.N. Sherwin White, Sir Frederic Kenyon, Sir William Ramsay, Dr. Bryant C. Wood and more) who have emphasized the extent to which archaeology corroborates the NT accounts. This does not mean that every single New Testament detail has been independently corroborated, as that would be unlikely to happen with any record of ancient history. Rather, the point is that we do have considerable archaeological corroboration of the NT documents, just as archaeological evidence exists to support the existence of Alexander the Great.
The detailed writings of Luke (the Gospel of Luke and the Book of Acts), in particular, are prime examples of corroboration by archaeology. Again, this goes far beyond merely getting the names of a few cities right. Rather, archaeology shows that Luke was meticulously precise, accurately reporting names, places, specialized titles, and even a census that skeptics insisted ,had never occurred. As E.M. Blaiklock said, “For accuracy of detail, and for evocation of atmosphere, Luke stands, in fact, with Thucydides. The Acts of the Apostles is not shoddy product of pious imagining, but a trustworthy record…it was the spadework of archaeology which first revealed the truth” (The Archaeology of the New Testament, page 96).
Before Dio raises his usual objections, does this evidence necessarily prove that the Bible is the inerrant Word of God? Does it prove the miraculous stories recorded in the Gospels? No, which is why I’m not attempting to argue for either of those cases. Rather, the point is that we do have abundant archaeological evidence that corroborates the accounts of Jesus’s life, just as there is archaeology which supports the existence of Alexander. Indeed, with regard to Luke, it would be completely implausible to suggest that he recorded the incidental details as specifically and accurately as he did, and yet completely failed to note that the man he wrote about never truly existed.
The old “skeptics insisted for centuries that X did not exist” canard. No they didn’t number one, and Albright did not prove it existed. There is a piece of 1st Century pavement which Christians like to identify as such, but that identification is speculative at best.
Having said that, even if it were hypothetically proven that a location mentioned by John really existed in Jerusalem, it would still mean absolutly nothing. Lots of places mentioned in the Gospels were real. So what? Lots and lots of fiction uses real locations. It is absolutely meaningless that a writer of fiction would make accurate use of names, titles and other details of the time and place he actually lived in. You can see accurate cultural references on South Park and Family Guy. It has zero significance.
I know Albright is a favorit son on apologist websites, but the reality is virtually none of his conclusions are accepted anymore, and while he was not a Biblical literalist, he was a believing Christian tainted by pro-religious bias and wishful thinking, and is is bolstyered by numerous other errors and clearly preposterous supernatural claims.
For centuries, “skeptics” said there was never a Troy. Schliemann proved there was. That does not make the Iliad less of a fiction.
Luke is NOT reliable, by the way, and this is evident from the very beginning of his Gospel with his ludicrous census and registration scenario.
One more thing – there is no such scientific discipline as “Biblical archaeology.” That is a religious endeavor, not a scientific one. Real ANE archaeology is just archaeology. Any archaeologist working from an agenda to prove that Bible stories really happened is doing it wrong.