To do away with the historical Jesus, you have to throw out all of the Bible plus what little other writings there are from the time. To do so requires branding hundreds, perhaps thousands of scholars as religious kooks that allow their belief to color their work. Even after doing that, you still have the problem of neither the Jewish establishment or the romans ever denied he existed. It is little use presenting logic to those willing to do that.
It’s easy to harmonize if you omit the parts that cause the contradictions.
Luke says that Joseph takes Jesus home to Nazareth immediately after he concludes his business in Jerusalem, so either the Magi visited him in Bethlehem before the presentation in the Temple, which is impossible, or the Magi followed the Star of Nazareth to his house, which is silly.
There is simply no reason for Joseph to be in Bethlehem after the presentation, and therefore no danger from Herod’s soldiers in Bethlehem. So the Magi had to visit before the presentation, in which case there would be no presentation, because Joseph would be fleeing to Egypt, rather than walking straight into Herod’s den.
And Matthew has Joseph staying out of Judea for over ten years (however long he was in Egypt before Herod died, plus the entire reign of Archelaus), while Luke has him visiting Jerusalem every Passover after Jesus is born.
To quote GWB, “The math doesn’t work.”
That’s basically how I consider all pre-Enlightenment scholars, yes.
Why should they have? Christianity only became an issue later.
So much for Pythagoras, then.
That’s not what they thought; we have anti-Christian propaganda from both Jewish and Roman sources, some of it fairly virulent. But it doesn’t (that I know of) include any denials of Jesus’s existence.
I’d also point out that this miracle is multiply attested, IIRC, I think Seutonious also mentions it…
So, if you believe one, why not the other?
Um…What?
So then there was no miracle? Is this what you are claiming? If not, what precisely are you trying to say here?
Didn’t Koresh’s followers have a similar conversionary experience? Mansons? I think they’d also say that their beliefs changed them for the better.
Pythagoras on triangles? Writing that can be independently verified by anyone with a ruler and compass. Pythagoras on music? Sure, build some tubular bells and test it out.
Pythagoras on metempsychosis? Not so much. “Religous Kook” is about right. And that’s not just because I like beans.
Does it date to the first century?
The Bible is no evidence to begin with (because the veracity of the Bible accounts is exactly what’s being discussed and you can’t use the accounts as evidence for themselves), and the extra-Biblical evidence is thin indeed. Your appeal to authority is neither here nor there since they don’t make the evidence any better.
Your last point about the Romans and Jews not denying he existed is completely fatuous since they had no way of knowing and no reason to care whether Jesus existed.
Let’s suppose Jesus didn’t exist.
I’m not sure why historians in the early few centuries would have thought he didn’t. I mean, even if they did, how would they argue that he didn’t?
You are presupposing a modern view of skepticism on the first century. I could be wrong, but these people didn’t even argue that Perseus and such didn’t exist - people most modern people would think obviously didn’t exist.
It’s not like Christianity was a huge movement when it first started. It was only decades after the fact that it was a blip on the radar. So, a century after Jesus’s supposed death, how and why would someone argue that he didn’t exist back then?
Dio - are you aware of any historians during 100 BC - 300AD that argued that any mythical figure (hercules, perseus, etc) didn’t exist?
I’m not - but I’m not fully up to date on such matters. If their are some, I’d like to see how they argued such.
I’m not aware of such arguments, no. People just didn’t take a critical, empirical view of history then. Nobody argued for the non-existence of Romulus and Remus as the founders of Rome either.
The siege of Masada was during the War of the Maccabees, a few hundred years earlier. Sorry. Story doesn’t work.
See, the creationists are right!
No, Masada was 72-73 CE at the end of the first Jewish-Roman War.
The Maccabean revolt (163 BCE) was against the Greeks, not the Romans.
I believe the author of that book is talking about the First Jewish-Roman War(aka The Great Revolt), which was about 66-73 CE.
So was this book basically Biblical fan-fic, or was he seriously proposing that this might have happened?
No offense intended, but that sounds exactly like an ill-defined feeling to me.
I realize he’s not a historian, but weren’t people like Socrates executed for teaching that the Greek myths were just myths?
Not really. It’s a bit drawn out, but he was accused of either being an atheist (not believing in the countries particular Gods) or of corrupting the youth.
He was found guilty and the custom during the time was that the guilty propose one punishment and the other side (can’t remember) propose another (typically death). Socrates remarked that he should be treated like royalty (basically) and that ticked off the judges (the 200 or so people voting). So more people voted for him to receive death than voted that he was guilty.
That’s the story, VERY roughly, of the Apology.
Well, look at it this way.
We have Josephus, writing about the year 95. It’s accepted, I think, that what he wrote was, um, adorned by later Christian writers, and some people argue that the whole thing is later interpolation. But I think the mainstream view is that he did write something about Christ.
At the very least, I suggest, this is evidence of the existence of a Christian movement active in Josephus’s time, and not new then.
In the same vein, we have Suetonius, writing in the second century, but dealing with the reign of Claudius, which ended in AD 54. He talks about Jews in Rome creating a disturbance at the instigation of “Chrestus” and being expelled as a result. (The same event is referred to in Acts 18). Tacitus mentions Christians being persecuted in the reign of Nero, about AD 64, and Suetonius mentions that too, this time identifying them as Christians, not Jews.
This points, I suggest, to the existence of a Christian movement in the mid first century, which was large enough to have spread to Rome.
The significant point here is that this was at a time when there were many people alive who had also been alive at the time of the public ministry of Jesus, if he existed and if he ministered more or less as described in the Gospels. (The letters of Paul are also evidence for this; because the Christian communities to which he addressed them presumably existed.)
If Jesus was made up out of whole cloth, many people in the mid-50s would have been in a position to know this. People who were in Jerusalem for Passovers in the mid-30s would know that the crucifixion described in the Gospels had not occurred. People from Galilee would be aware that nobody in Galilee could remember Jesus travelling there, or teaching, or preaching, or working signs.
If you’re going to make Jesus up out of whole cloth, it makes no sense to invent a Jesus who was alive, and active in a very public way, within the lifetime and memory of many people still living. The detection and denunciation of your fraud seems highly likely. It makes far more sense to pick a historically real figure, and attribute to him either teachings that you have made up, or miracle stories that you have made up, or both. And if you do make Jesus up out of whole cloth, and your Jesus movement attracts controversy, what are the chances of nobody pointing out that nobody outside your movement has any recollection of the public events that you say happened, when if they had actually happened they would be remembered by many people?
I just don’t find the “Jesus is a complete myth” idea at all convincing or plausible. It seems to me far more likely that he is a historical character, but that some of the teachings and actions attributed to him by the gospels are made up.