I don’t claim to be an historian, but according to this, I believe Plutarch documented the attack when it happened…
“On the 15th of March 44 BC, Julius Caesar was scheduled to meet the Senate. His wife Calpurnia tried to persuade him not to go to the meeting because of a prophecy by the seer Spurinna. Spurinna had warned him that he would not live past the Ides of March. Calpurnia had a dream in which Caesar was dead, which was possibly brought about by her fears of the prophecy. The Roman general and former politician Decimus convinced Caesar to continue with his journey. He escorted Caesar to the senate-house and, along the way, avoided Mark Antony, one of Caesar’s loyal supporters who could have prevented Caesar’s death.”
“Plutarch documented the senate meeting, which started with senator Lucius Tullius Cimber’s plea to have his exiled brother permitted to come back to Rome. Caesar dismissed this, and Cimber grabbed Caesar. At this point, Publius Servilius Casca revealed his dagger and stabbed Caesar. Caesar attempted to escape but lacked visibility due to the blood that stained his eyes, then he fell and was knifed to death by other conspirators. He was stabbed a total of 23 times.”
This is but one example of a historical event being documented at the time it happened. Are you suggesting such a thing has never happened?
He wasn’t there. Cicero was there, but he could have made the whole thing up.
Just because somebody writes that something happened doesn’t mean it did, and that goes for the Gospels. That’s the point I was trying to make. There’s no way to prove that Jesus did any of these miracles. You can choose to believe they happened or not. It doesn’t matter.
Jesus’s miracles and Julius’s assassination are not very different in their level of historical documentation: what we know or think we know comes mostly from stuff written down decades later by people who weren’t eyewitnesses.
Right, but Caesar’s assassination doesn’t involve miracles. Over the years, more than a few people have been assassinated, so there’s no reason to think it’s made up, although I couldn’t prove it happened…
On the other hand, the story of Jesus involves numerous supernatural events and miracles. The fact that they both happened a long time ago means there is no way to prove either one happened, but one is more believable than the other.
It boils down to whether you believe miracles are possible in our world. A miracle is something that science will never be able to explain.
There’s pretty good internal evidence to show when each gospel was written. Mark was written around the year 50CE, Luke and Matthew around 70CE, and John around 110CE.
Merely judging by the dates, and leaving aside evidence of other things, it’s remotely possible that Mark was written by an eyewitness, but unlikely; it’s pretty certain that Luke and Matthew were not; it’s impossible that John was.
However, there’s also evidence that oral stories in Aramaic lurk behind some of the stories in the gospels. So, stories about Jesus go back pretty far, and go back to the relevant part of the world.
That doesn’t make any of them true, but it does at least make Jesus a “real” folk figure, like King Arthur, as opposed to an entirely fictional character, like Superman.
It is also true that folk characters long thought to have been based on real people have ultimately been discovered to be the product of a single author; the reverse has happened as well, though, and folk characters thought to be composites of real people, or entirely fictional, have turned out to be a single, real person
The King Arthur comparison always rang the most true to me. Neither Doomsday prophets nor petty kings were rare during the relevant periods of time, nor were stories about those people. Clearly that is the origin for both stories. Whether they are based on archetypal kings and prophets, on a specific single king or prophet, or on a collection of different kings and prophets is impossible to say, but it is also a fairly academic question, not a very relevant one
Most of them were local. And the Holy Land was full of miracle workers at that time. Nearly all the records from that period are lost- for example, there are no records or documents that Pontius Pilate wrote or signed. In fact, other that the Gospels, there are no near contemporaneous records that Pilate even existed. (Recently part of an inscription was found). Pilate was pretty important, you’d think there’d be records of him or what he did- but nope.
Exactly.
John reached its final form around AD 90–110,[7] although it contains signs of origins dating back to AD 70 and possibly even earlier.
John died c 100AD, aged 93 or so, living among his apostles, in Ephesus That is where the Gospel of John came from. Most historians now think John at least dictated part of the gospel attributed to him. Doubtless, however, it was put into it’s final form by his followers.
There were about 900 or so Roman consuls, and 70 or so Emperors. Other than Caesar- how many of them do we have the writings of? How many copies of Roman laws, decree, etc are extant?
The "lack of evidence’ argument is really weak, and can only be made by someone who really does not know how little we have of ancient records.
I don’t think that you understand what the argument actually is. The argument is that, since there is little to no evidence, there is no reason to believe it.
The argument that you seem to be favoring, that a lack of evidence is evidence, is not just really weak, it’s completely fallacious.
Let’s say that I say that there was a woman named Roxy who live in 20 B.C. who performed miracles and rose from the dead. I have no historical evidence for this, which by your logic, makes it all but certain.
No, I’m pretty sure that’s not what @DrDeth is saying.
In this thread, and elsewhere, different people are making different arguments. But as I understand it, the “lack of evidence” arguments that @DrDeth is addressing are the ones that say:
If Jesus existed (or did certain things), then we would have evidence (perhaps of a particular kind).
We do not have evidence (of that kind).
Therefore, Jesus did not exist (or, did not do the things claimed).
I think this argument is flawed for several reasons (for example, even if they would have been “recorded for history,” that doesn’t mean those records would have survived to the present day).
Okay, even if there was written evidence of the most fantastic thing that ever happened on earth, but it is lost to time and no longer exists, then why are the Gospels considered proof of anything? Written by people many years after the fact who weren’t even there. The mere fact that they happened to survive doesn’t mean they are true. Lots of religious texts have survived since antiquity. Are they all true just because they survived?
I guess you could say that the Gospels are proof that there were people in the first century who thought it was worthwhile to record and pass along accounts of what Jesus was supposed to have said and done. Which is not the same as proof that Jesus actually said and did those things, or even existed. But the Gospel writers must have used some source(s) (there’s too much overlap for them each to have individually invented everything). And those sources might, or might not, have included written and/or oral testimony of people who were there at the time.
And here we are, right back to where this thread started. Did Jesus really exist? We can all agree that someone by that name, or multiple people by that name, probably existed around that time. That’s not improbable. I won’t even argue that someone with that name said at least some of the things he is supposed to have said. The details may not be right, but preachers preach many of the same things.
Where we part ways is at the “did those things.” There’s a massive leap from a preacher preaching at that time to someone performing 40 miracles, many in public, without proof, except that someone years later says they did. It’s like Moses parting the Red Sea. Nobody can make miracles happen at will. If you can show me someone who can, with no trickery involved, I may concede that Jesus and Moses could do it too. Your move.
Then the gospel writers were terrible transcibers. Just look at the most important part: the resurrection. Who was at the tomb Sunday morning? The accounts vary so widely as to be not trustworthy at all. And though three gospels speak of jesus ascending to heaven, the fourth does not, instead falling back on a lame-ass “he went on to do many other great things.”
To a skeptic, this very fundamental weakness in a key part of the story would be enough to make the whole narrative collapse. A believer will believe, and as “faith” itself goes, seeking proof shows a lack of confidence in that faith. If you want to believe, fine, but proving the foundation of your belief to others is an inherently risky enterprise.
Nonsense. We have evidence- The Gospels, Josephus, etc. Not a lot, but more than would be expected.
To expect volumes written by unbiased (there were no such writers back then) and contemporaneous eyewitnesses is ridiculous. We only have a few semi- contemporaneous about various freaking emperors fercrickiessakes. And none are unbiased.
We know that the Romans kept lots of records. We also know nearly all of them were destroyed. Hell, other that a coin, a battered inscription, and of course the Gospels- we have no evidence that Pilate even existed.
I’m going to go back to to what I said earlier, and try to head off this repeat again.
We have, and I think most people in the thread agree, no reason to doubt that a factual, actual being existed during the era that probably matched the gross details of Yeshua/Joshua, son of Joseph, a preacher most likely at odds with both the Romans and Temple priests of the era. This is a pretty low bar admittedly, as it’s not exactly an uncommon name and socio-political bent of the era.
We can argue his relation to other persons reported in antiquity and myth of the era, but this is all a low-stales argument. As discussed, we have very little surviving (key point) details and documentation of anyone who wasn’t at the highest ranks of society until the modern era, and very few of those older details and documentations can be considered even vaguely impartial.
Where we get in the weeds is the deeds/miracles ascribes to Yeshua. And at this point, we really should move beyond “absence of evidence is not evidence of absence” but “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.” Even if we ignore those miracles that can be explained by misunderstandings or minor cons, they remaining ones fly in the fact of everything mankind has experienced ever since we kept good records. Thus, contradictory, poorly sourced and certainly re-edited documents created after the fact would not fall within what I would consider “extraordinary evidence”.
So, to lay out what I perceive to be the main lines of thought in the thread again:
Yeshua likely existed as a factual being, or possibly a pastiche of multiple persons in the past, which formed a basis of the mythology that grew up in the decades and centuries after their death, but all supernatural elements attributed to such are either misunderstandings, manipulations, or fabrications to reinforce said mythology.
Yeshua was a factual being, and the Gospels are a predominantly factual representation of his attitudes, life, and philosophy, and distance from the source and final authorship of the gospels explain many of the contradictions between them. We cannot know which miracles happened, and whether they were supernatural in nature or other, but that doesn’t mean they could not have happened.
The Gospels are literal truth, with the contradictions being entirely the work of men who tried to share their understandings as well as efforts to recreate the oral tradition after the last (or most of) those direct witnesses have passed.
So we have entirely atheistic, agnostic, and theistic evaluations going on. Which will inform our answers. IMHO though, from the Saganistic viewpoint, I’m stuck with the atheistic argument. It is the simplest, and thus to me, most reasonable. But I’m not and never have been a Christian, and when examined in a spectrum of belief, it’s no less reasonable than any other mythologies of history or the modern area.
