Yep. I’ve been following this thread for a while and understood what you were saying right away. ambushed seems to have forgotten that he jumped into this thread with the statement that the historical Jesus “never existed,” which is very different from saying “historicists have failed to prove that he existed.” His was an affirmative statement of non-existence which places the burden on him to back it up. As he later admitted, though, he can’t prove an existential negative and has backed off of that initial position. So I’m not really sure what his beef is now with what you’re saying. It has been fun to follow, though.
Maybe he just likes pissing on other people’s arguments. I can appreciate and respect study and research.{without the bad attitude} He eventually shared his own story of studying this subject and also admitted it’s too complex to express on a message board like this one. That’s the impression I got in trying to wade through Doherty’s writings. It’s a subject that would take more study than I have time or interest for. All that could have been established easily early on but then you don’t have the fun of mocking other people’s opinions.
It’s annoying that while eagerly mocking my posts he mistakenly assumed I was a Christian and made the repeated error of thinking I was arguing for a historic Jesus. {shrugs} Ah well!! Glad you got some fun out of it. 
But what do I do if I lack the double standard that allows “there’s no such thing as fairies” to be said, but not “Jesus never existed”? I can’t prove either existential negative, and the evidence for the latter is better than for the former (fairies being more plausibly elusive that a mortal Jesus re Josephus) - what if I lack the ability to understand why the first statement is okay but not the second?
What recourse is there for we that are so afflicted? 
You seriously would be more shocked to find out that Jesus existed than that fairies exist? If you really think that Jesus is as improbably as fairies, you certainly can make that argument. You may not be able to prove an existential negative with 100% certainty, but you can absolutely show that something’s existence is improbably to any arbitrary degree. Fairies are a case in point. I’m as certain they don’t exist as I am that ice is frozen water. I’m happy to call that proven, but others aren’t. You can certainly present as much evidence as you can muster for the claim that Jesus didn’t exist, but you’d have to do much better than ambushed has to convince that he’s as unlikely as fairies.
I didn’t say it would be more shocking - I’d say the evidence is better. There’s a difference, largely because I’ve been raised in a culture that’s up to its eyeballs in Jesus-lore - despite the fact that the Jesus everybody talks about does the same sort of impossible crap that fairies supposedly do. (Only moreso.)
What’s your evidence against fairies again? “We ain’t found any,” right? Do you have anything more? Keep in mind that maybe they’re not magical - maybe they’re just little secretive critters with bones made of fragile material that decomposes and doesn’t fossilize, that went extinct 1200 years ago. What’s your evidence against them? Certainly it’s not a shortage of claims they exist; fairy stories of various kinds are common. The fact that they’re now considered fictional is irrelevent, of course.
For Jesus, we have arguments casting into doubt the veracity of all the accounts claiming his literal existence, and Mr. Josephus. We don’t expect the romans or Pilate or Herod or any of them to have taken note of Jesus, but we can reasonably expect that Josephus would have mentioned him. The ancient Christians thought so too, which is why they edited his document.
Are these arguments ironclad beyond all reason, to the degree of verifiability that when you melt ice you get water? No. But your proof against fairies is worse - only you don’t notice because of cultural acclimatization.
My evidence against fairies is a basic understanding of biology and physics that make anything I would regard as a fairy scientifically impossible or very nearly so. Of course, if you call a lemur a fairy, then there you go, but I don’t want to get into a semantic argument. Magical fairies are impossible, as are non-magical beings who look like tiny humans with insect wings. They are as unlikely as ice being angel shit, and there is no logical principle that makes it impossible to disprove the existence of Jesus to the same degree. It’s just harder, because a non-magical Jesus isn’t impossible. He isn’t even extremely unlikely. A magical resurrected Son of Man is just as unlikely as fairies, so it’s not like I have some special double-standard for Jesus.
The plausibility of a hypthesis that the Jesus mythos was inspired by a real (albeit non-supernatural) person is far greater than for the existence of magical, flying entities called “fairies,” simply by virtue of not being physically impossible.
There is also some evidence for a HJ, even if it is not very much, and arguably unpersuasive. All of these points are debateable, but we have a primary claim (from Paul) that he personally met someone named James who he called “the brother of the Lord.” We have two references in Josephus. One of those is widely believed, even among most conservative academia, to be at least partially interpolated. Josephus also includes a refernce to the execution of James, “the brother of Jesus, the [so]-called Christ.” This passage is generally not believed to be interpolated, but it’s not undisputed. We also have a reference by Tacitus, which gives us two non-Christian historians with some reasonable temporal proximity to Jesus who (arguably) believed he existed.
I would also throw in the existence of a core, independently attested common sayings tradition, which means that there existed some kind oral tradition attributing the some of the same sayings to the same person attested by multiple individuals who did not know each other.
Even collectively, none of this proves that Yeshua ben Yusef, late of Nazareth treally existed, but I could submit that it’s more evidence than we have for fairies, and that nothing about the hypothesis of a genuine historical figure being at the root of Christian origins is innately impossible, or even implausible. Unproven, maybe, but far from disproven.
I’ve chased my own tail on this for a long time, wavering back and forth, and I finally just threw my hands up and decided there isn’t enough data to know either way.
The question I always ask when I hear that there is no historical evidence of Jesus is: Should there be any? Is the absence of evidence an evidence of absence?
How good where the records of that time (and how much of them have reached us today) and how reasonable is it to expect to find some hard evidence of the existence of Jesus?.
There is no Jesus of Nazareth on the Social Security Registry, but that is because there is no Social Security Registry for Nazareth on that time. What would be the pertinent records that would show some evidence of the existence of Jesus and of his fledging movement?
I’m sorry, I don’t recall seeing your biological argument that non-magical beings who look like tiny humans with insect wings are impossible. Nor did I see your argument that the fairies might not have been three-foot tall humanlike entities without insect wings - as long as we’re going to ignore 80% of the supposedly relevent historical material describing Jesus’s properties and activities.
The double standard isn’t magical fairies vs. magical Jesus - well, it isn’t for you; lots and lots of people actually do have that double standard. But that’s not the one I’m talking about here - it’s the double standard of non magical fairies vs. non-magical Jesus.
By the way, am I allowed to state that Napolean didn’t have a twin borther who died in childbirth? If I assume that a certain small number of people were negligent or innatentive in their records, and/or that there was a small conspiracy of silence, then it suddenly becomes possible - the same arguments used to defend the historical Jesus work for the historical Fredpolean. So am I allowed to assert his nonexistence, or not?
I didn’t present the evidence for those arguments. I have it, but they are not the subject of this thread. If you wish to debate the existence of fairies, start another thread. You can make any claim that you want, you just have to present evidence for it. It is possible but unlikely that Napoleon had a twin brother. It is possible that Jesus existed and we’re debating how likely or unlikely it is. It is possible that fairies are based on small hominids like Homo florensis, though I personally consider it unlikely (and will present the evidence for this assertion in another thread if requested). It is impossible for magical beings to exist. It is very nearly impossible for creatures that appear like tiny humans with insect wings to have existed on earth. No double standards here, and no limits on what can be claimed. Just be prepared to back it up.
Well apparently Josephus mentioned a bunch of other people who were like Jesus, so if Jesus had existed, he absolutely beyond any doubt would have mentioned him. Which he might have, but someone else could have writen that instead. Therefore Jesus could not possibly have existed and anyone who thinks he could have has been duped by the Christian establishment. QED.
Also, Paul talks about Jesus a lot and about things that he did and people he met. If Jesus had existed, there is absolutely no doubt that Paul would have carefully preserved the documentary evidence showing that the things he tlaked about as if they were real people and events weren’t really descriptions of obsucre myths, which they could have been, because Paul was a supergenius who had deep occult knowledge of every ancient myth, which we know because his apparent descriptions of ordinary people and events are really descriptions of them. It’s so obvious! 
Snippedy out the stuff about fairies - am I allowed to assert that Napolean didn’t have a twin brother? If so, am I allowed to assert that Jesus didn’t exist? What single standard is used here?
I already answered this a few posts upthread. No, there is no reason to expect any contemporary documentary evidence of Jesus. No, there are no records from Nazareth (even the very existence and location of Nazareth are disputed). There are no files to check in which we would expect to find Jesus. You are correct, this does not, in itself, disprove the existence of a Historical Jesus, nor have I alleged that it does.
It also doesn’t change the fact that the historical existence of Jesus cannot be proven. As I said, it can’t be proven either way, but anyone who wants to assert that it CN be proven has the burden to demonstrate it. The point about the lack of records for virtually anybody time in place is a valid response to anyone saying it should disprove historicity, but has no value at all in proving historicity.
It’s a free country. (Offer void in China, Thailand, North Korea, United Arab Emirates, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Indonesia, Singapore . . . .) Assert whatever the hell you want. Doesn’t mean anyone will believe you.
I’m not really clear on what you’re asking here. You’re allowed to assert whatever the hell you want to assert. If you’re going to make any kind of affirmative statement like that, however, you should be prepared for people to ask you for your evidence.
And, of course, if you have no evidence, you probably shouldn’t be making the assertions. Just because something may be extremely unlikely (such as Napoleon having a long-lost brother that nobody’s ever heard of before) doesn’t make it an absolute.
So, if you’re asking what the overlap is between “absolute truth” and “commonly accepted beliefs and/or knowledge that we can state as factual positives without corroborating evidence,” my opinion is that isn’t any such overlap.
Yes, I’d be a moron to expect people in this near-theocracy to apply a single rational standard to assessing the validity of claims, inclusive of both ones agreeing with and ones contrary to their preferred religion.
It is indeed true that we can’t be dead certain that some guy named Jesus (or something like it) existed at the time Jesus supposedly did (or, some other time) and did the stuff Jesus supposedly did (give or take most or all of it, especially the parts most people focus on). However, there is a surprisingly strong argument against it, in my opinion, based entirely on Josephus’s peculiar hobby. The surprise of course is that Josephus had this odd hobby at such a conveniently relevent time.
Absent Josephus and his odd hobby, what we have is a vague mishmash of conflicting and suspicious information, on a par with the information on Paul Bunyan. In other words, not enough to draw a firm conclusion on, but certainly enough to be highly dubious. And then Josephus shows up and nudges us just inside the “Okay, looks like he wasn’t real” line. In my not-so-humble opinion.
I’m mostly asking that the hypocritical double standard stop, just stop. The evidence against a historical Jesus is surprisingly good - better than you’d expect for anybody from that period of time! Seriously, is there any other person from that century that you can make as strong an argument for the nonexistence of? I think if you limit yourself to mortal human people that anybody seriously claims existed, the answer is very likely a resounding no.
Yet somehow if I start saying that Brian of the Monty Python movie was a historical figure (or at least had an approximately matching historical analogue), people can tell me “no he ain’t real”. How does that work?
Well, we searched for him, but all I found was this spoon, Sir!
I’m not seeing the hypocrisy. If anyone flatly asserts that Brian has no historical analogue, they might well be called to produce evidence to support their statement.
Put another way, I’m reasonably certain that the squirrels in my backyard have never sent a manned (squirreled?) space flight to Venus and returned with a lifetime’s supply of Venusian acorns. And if I said they’d never done it, I wouldn’t expect anyone to call me out. But that doesn’t change the fact that I can’t actually prove they’ve never done it. That’s just the nature of proving a negative - it’s usually very difficult to do, even when it seems obvious.
I think your affliction and double standard are as imaginary as anything you’ve mentioned.
Was the story of JC which contains mythology based on an actual individual who lived in that era, is a much more legitimate question than the existence of fairies and you know it, even if the discussion is purely scholastic rather than religious.
There’s no good solid evidence that Jesus was historically based on an individual may well be an accurate statement but since scholars don’t agree on what is more likely then that leaves a layman like myself to believe that we really don’t know.
You,** ambushed **and his hero at welcome to draw any conclusion you wish from what little data we have. You are certainly welcome to say Jesus never existed as much as you like. I maintain the right to correct you and say, that’s only your opinion and you really can’t know that with certainty. I happen to think “we just don’t know” is a more accurate answer, at least for the time being. In this thread I tried to address very specific arguments and facets of specific arguments and that’s all.
You’ve mentioned twice that Josephus never mentioned Jesus. I didn’t think we were certain about that either. Why do you seem to be?