How do we know for certain Jesus really lived?

[septimus]

I might attempt an essay on why I think the probability that there was a Jesus of Nazareth who was crucified by Pontius Pilate is at least 95%. In this prequel, however, I’ll just lay out some of the supporting facts or ideas and quote from old threads on this topic. (It comes up once a year or so.)

@Smapti

… All this tends to suggest that the earliest Jesus cults didn’t consider Jesus to have been a man who walked on Earth within recent years, and that as Christianity evolved he gradually came to be viewed as a historical personage.

The Gospel of Mark is dated to 33-37 years after the crucifixion, but is probably based on earlier drafts. It is comparatively matter-of-fact in its treatment of Jesus. It barely mentions the Resurrection!

[QUOTE=Wikipedia]
The earliest and most reliable manuscripts of Mark end at Mark 16:8, with the women fleeing in fear from the empty tomb: the majority of recent scholars believe this to be the original ending, and this is supported by statements from the early Church Fathers Eusebius and Jerome. Two attempts were made to provide a more satisfactory conclusion. A minority of later manuscripts have what is called the “shorter ending”, an addition to Mark 16:8 telling how the women told “those around Peter” all that the angel had commanded and how the message of eternal life (or “proclamation of eternal salvation”) was then sent out by Jesus himself. This addition differs from the rest of Mark both in style and in its understanding of Jesus.
[/QUOTE]

Given this, it can be seen that the evolution of Jesus was NOT myth to man, as Smapti suggests, but man to myth. Paul the Apostle’s writings make an exception, but recall that Paul never even met Jesus. The writings of John the Apostle may also be viewed as exceptional. (Note BTW that many feel the writings of “John” may have been influenced by Essenes and/or followers of John the Baptist.)

Summary of some relevant evidence:
[ul][li] Hypnotic methods were used as remedies for medical and psychological conditions early in Egypt’s Middle Kingdom, in ancient Greece and Rome, and in Islamic Persia.[/li][li] Earlier I mentioned that expensive sheepskin would have been used for manuscripts. In fact, cheaper papyrus would probably have been used — but papyrus deteriorates far more easily than parchment. Anyway, whether parchment or papyrus very few documents from 1st century Palestine survive. (The Gospel’s dates are inferred — the earliest surviving manuscripts are much later than those dates.)[/li][li] Paul began his ministry about 48 A.D. The “Q Source” is dated to about 50 A.D. Even the Gospel of Mark (probably based on earlier, now-lost documents) is dated to 64-70 A.D. These are all dates when many of Jesus’ followers would still have been alive.[/li][li] There is documentation of schisms in the early Christian church no later than 20 years after the Crucifixion. This doesn’t conform to a myth made after the details of Pilate’s victims had been forgotten.[/li][li] Some of the evidence for Jesus depends on the evidence for John the Baptist, and for James the Righteous. How well is their historicity agreed? Was James the brother of Jesus? Paul says so in one of his Epistles.[/li][/ul]

Here are some posts that turned up when I skimmed some of the old threads:

@septimus

My $0.02 worth about a subtopic:

When trying to guesstimate the probability that there was an historic Jesus, one must work with a priori probabilities.

To take but one example, consider the reaction Jesus gets when he visits his home town: “A prophet is not without honour, save in his own country, and in his own house.” Were such accounts fictions added for some didactic purpose? Or are they simply a true chronicle? What are the chances a fiction writer would invent such a story? What are the chances that such incidents would have occurred in a real life? There are several incidents in the Gospel that have a “ring of truth” simply because they have no clear purpose for a fiction writer.

Why did Jesus, if fictional, say “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” on Calvary? For that matter, why invent a fictional Jesus in the first place when there were real “messiahs” to choose from, e.g. John the Baptist?

What are the chances that a 1st-century Galilean could turn water into wine and walk on water? Low, I’d think. What are the chances a zealot(?) could be charismatic enough to heal, teach, hypnotise, and inspire? Even inspire Gospel writers to make up fantasies about him? Not low at all, I think.

See? It’s all about guessing probabilities. Now the huge net of probabilities is too complex and the probabilities too uncertain to dream of actually applying Bayes’ Theorem arithmetically. (And anyway I reach the opposite conclusion as Carrier.) But having a feel for a priori probabilities is essential.

Once or twice on this and another message board, I myself have avoided a tedious paragraph about “comparing the chances of hypothetical priors and causal chains” with a terse phrase mentioning “Bayes Theorem.” And thereby caused confusion… :smack:

I’ve not read Carrier’s book; if he tries to develop actual numbers to plug into Bayes Theorem he’s probably being silly. But contemplating a priori probabilities, however fuzzy, is the correct way to approach many questions. If someone introduces Bayes’ Theorem to make this point, I have no problem with them.

Originally Posted by tape recording 39 A.D., recorded in a Jericho tea shop, found in cave 1973 years later
[translation]

Judas the Essene: Have I told you my friend Mark is writing an inspirational story? He wants to base it on Melchi and the cute parables he tells. The hero of the story will be a miraculous healer.
Eliacim the Essene: Melchi, that drunken klutz? Mark had better change the name.
J: Yes. For one thing he wants the Messiah to die a martyr’s death, but Melchi will probably die of syphilis. He said if I help him with the story, he’ll write me in to the plot as one of the disciples.
E: Well, that Baptist guy, John, would be an obvious choice. But so many people remember him that Mark wouldn’t be able to take any poetic license. It would be nice to base it on a real guy though.
J: Wasn’t there a fake Messiah crucified by Pilate on Passover Day a few years back? What was his name? Yehoshua or something?
E: Yeah, I remember that. That guy was from Galilee. That would be perfect. Galileans are all illiterate: there’d be nobody to contradict the story details.
J: Which village in Galilee?
E: Does it matter? Just pick one of the tiny villages few have heard of. It sounds like Mark’s going to have a lot of fun. I hope he writes a lot of thieves and whores into the story.
J: Sounds good. I wonder what kind of role Mark is going to give me?

@Sage_Rat

…I almost entirely read the ancient sources and not the writings of historians, beyond Wikipedia summaries while searching around for more ancient sources, so I can’t conclusively say that historians generally agree that Jesus was a real person who was crucified. But I would expect them to as it explains what we see from what remains fairly well.

There are two things that I think we can be relatively certain on, with Jesus. He was baptised by John the Baptist and he was crucified. And I should note that I’m not using those terms as umbrella terms to refer to a baby baptismal nor a trial, being called the King of the Jews, etc. All of the specific details are up for grabs. All we can be certain of is the minimal declaration, that he was baptized at some point in his life by John, and he was crucified.

For both of these, we would tend to believe them because of all of the various competing organizations with different takes on the life of Jesus, where everything else changes, those two points remain constant. They’re true across the Orthodox gospels and across all of the Gnostic and Jewish-Christian gospels and writings that we have or are summarized for us by the early Christian commentators.

Much of the early writing, while “lost”, is pretty geared around stamping out heresies - Jewish-Christian and Gnostic sects. Much of what is in the Bible is Paul and others in his circle writing letters to discourage these heresies either by warning against them or clarifying the “orthodox” beliefs. And we know (though I don’t recall from where at the moment) that the “heresies” were writing similar works at the same time. We have a couple of names of works that were setting out to declare Paulian Christian a heresy and lay out the alternative orthodoxy.

Just from the Bible, it’s relatively clear that before 100 AD, there were already large schisms of belief, and that these groups were actively hostile to one another. And they’re not just hostile to other Christian groups, they’re also hostile to other groups which are descended from John the Baptist.

Overall, theories that Jesus was a fictional character made up by Paul don’t seem very plausible, because it seems strange for widely spread groups to take over a character created by him and then compete with him on it, so differently. Paul never gives any indication of knowing about or caring about John the Baptist, and it’s not clear why he would invent a past about prosecuting Christians if he’s the inventor of Christianity.

Similarly, it’s unclear why a group of Jews would create a fictional successor of John the Baptist. And note that early Jewish Christian/Gnostic works did not include the virgin birth, the trip to Bethlehem, etc. They largely stated things along the lines that Jesus was imbued with the power of John upon John’s death (similarly to how Paul claimed divine revelation from Jesus). Why create a realistic sounding leader, putting him in competition with Simon, Dositheos, and other competing successors of John? Presumably James the Just would have been the one to lead such an enterprise. But Jesus, minus the magical birth, gives no better story than James claiming the title for himself. They were brothers after all.

And this brings us to an area of historical criticism called the criterion of embarrassment. So whereas the interaction with John the Baptist is simply attested to from multiple, antagonistic groups, in the case of the crucifixion, we can go one step forward and point out that it’s a rather embarrassing eventuality for the early church.

As I noted, the description of what all occurred is not flattering to Jesus in any way. He almost literally cusses out a bunch of people at the temple, and topples over some pots of money, like an angry toddler. When the police come to pick him up, all of his followers flee the city and no one is willing to come to court to try and argue in his favor. After his judgment is proclaimed, the people of the city show no awareness of who this man - who supposedly has already crafted a number of miracles, affecting hundreds or thousands of people - and they choose to let some other bastard survive rather than Jesus - who they make fun of for his purported egotism.

Obviously, the Bible presents this all in the best terms. And the Christian argument that this was all some poetic end that had all sorts of religious importance seems to have been strong enough to pull a lot of people in (by which, I would assume that Paul is to thanks for the presentation, since he was the Man). But the reality is that someone like Mohammed or Joan of Arc can point to actual, verifiable results in the real world. Jesus barely had any impact outside of his immediate family, from what we can tell from the Gospels. If Paul hadn’t come along, it’s likely that Mandaeism and other religions descended from John the Baptist would have swamped out the same territory (in Jewish circles). Instead, one presumes that Paul’s success helped to raise Jesus’ cred among the Jews to start taking up Jewish Christianity and Christian Gnosticism.

Jesus’ death, at the hand of the Jews, is a really hard hurdle to leap. You’ve got to explain why the Messiah didn’t become the King of the Jews except by self-declaration. You’ve got to explain why God had him killed just a few months into his ministry. You’ve got to explain why, if Jesus was a Jew and the Jews killed him, that all that stuff in the Old Testament about the Jewish people being the select precious children of God is up on its head now.

If Jesus had become the King of Israel and rebuilt the temple, that would make everything so much easier. Instead, his end is sort of ignominious and sort of justified.

There’s really nothing good about it that an author would choose to work with if he wanted to create an ideal founder for founding the Christian religion.

@Hector_St_Clare

I would actually disagree with your argument here. For different reasons both traditional and historico-critical scholars tend to date John in the 90s AD. (Traditionalists because that’s when Irenaeus seems to date it). I take the minority position of Carsten Theide, Robinson, Daniel Wallace and a few others that it was written sometime in the 60s AD (after the death of Peter and before the fall of Jerusalem). Regarding the expulsion of Christians from synagogues I’d just say that a quick look at history shows us that religious bodies issue repeated anathemas against the same things all the time, that the anathema banning Christians from synagogues might have been a local rather than universal one, and that there’s no reason to think the anathema described in John is the same one as the anathema issued at Jamnia.

The reasons why I think it was dated early are because 1) it fails to mention the fall of Jerusalem as an example of fulfilled prophecy, even though John loves to point out other examples of fulfilled prophecy (including the death of Peter, betrayal of Judas, etc.), 2) it talks about the city in the present tense, and 3) goes to some length to point out that John the Baptist wasn’t the messiah, which seems to argue for an mid- rather than late-first century date. As for the high Christology in John this is only really a problem if you beg the question and assume that Jesus was a purely human figure who later became divinized (which is something that not just orthodox Christians but also neo-gnostics and mythicists, for different reasons, would all dispute).