Jesus Christ v Julis Caesar

Factual Questions
21

<< The idea that there was no Jesus is preposterous >>

That’s not the point. The point is that there is no documentary evidence of his existence other than the gospels… second-hand accounts written between 50 and 100 years later, by people writing with an obvious bias.

You want to believe in his divinity or not, that’s fine. You want to believe in his existence or not, that’s fine. But it’s the “pretending” that we’re focused on here – pretending that there is outside evidence of his existence, when there is not. That’s cheating.

Now, there’s a reason (assuming he existed) for the lack of documentary evidence. He wasn’t a king or a prince or a rich landowner who would have kept records, or about whom others would have kept records. They didn’t keep track of who was executed, those people were all riff-raff anyway, they only kept track of important people in the social strata.

Jesus’s followers repeated his words and told his stories orally, because they expected him imminent return – his death and resurrection were supposed to usher in the New Era, all the dead would arise, etc. There’d be no need to record his words, he’d be back any minute. As time went on and this expectation wasn’t met, there was an effort to write down his story before it was forgotten by the next generation (or misquoted in oral translation.)

So, the presence of independent, outside documents would be pretty conclusive evidence of his existence; but we don’t have that. The absence of such independent, outside documents is by no means conclusive (or even indicative) evidence of non-existence.

That help clarify?

22

I’ve never heard the arguments that there is more “documented proof” for Christ than Caesar, but I believe that your friend may have been misremembering something.

In Evidence That Demands A Verdict by Josh McDowell, a fairly standard evangelical reference work, he comments on the issue of textual attestation–that is, can we trust that the Bible has been accurately passed down to today (which I am not addressing here.).

McDowell makes the point that in comparison to some other ancient historical works, there are much more New Testament fragments manuscripts available, dated much closer to the time that they were originally written. The oldest source manuscript that we have for Caesar’s book on the Gallic Wars, he writes, is a manuscript dating from about 900 AD.
(Such a long gap between the original source and the oldest available manuscript can raise many of the objections seen earlier in this thread–that stuff was changed, made up, etc., because the original people who could say “Hey, this is not true. I was there when it happened, and…” were now dead.)

Your friend’s point should have been that if you believe that the New Testament has had a lot of hooey added to it, then you should also be sceptical about other ancient historical works, as the oldest manuscripts we have from many ancient historians and philosophers date from the Dark Ages. Oversimplified, this could be stated as “There is more historical evidence for Christ, than Julius Caesar.”

Of course, whether you believe this argument has validity is up to you. But this is the closest sort of thing I’ve read to what was in the OP. (McDowell’s book is now a bit old, so I anticipate correction.)

Hope this is helpful.

23

FWIW, Christian apologist Josh McDowell cites second-hand accounts of Christ from this period (70-150 AD) from people who were not Christians, and thought the faith was ridiculous. He cites Tacitus (Annals XV. 44), satirist Lucian of Samosata, and Suetonius (Life of Claudius 25.4).

Interestingly, each of these three writers, while refusing to concede that Jesus was more than an ordinary human, did concede that he did exist, as an obnoxious pain-in-the-butt to Rome.

24

Almost, but no cigar. When Jesus came upon the prostitute about to be stoned and the Pharisees tried to trick him by asking what should be done, he wrote or drew something in the dirt (we don’t know what) and said: “Let he who is without sin cast the first stone.” They let her go. Damn fine defense.

25

Jesus isn’t in the book of Genesis. Thus it’s a moot point.

26

just a random tidbit that doesn’t prove anything, but i think is interesting nonetheless. Jesus talks about caesars in the Bible:

27

You don’t happen to have a copy of that dirt do you DPWhite? Not wishing to take sides here, but I assumed that Sofa King was talking about documents that were kept afterwards and can be used today as evidence.

28

I wish to point out, for the avoidance of doubt, the Caesar you refer to, however theoretically, is Tiberius Julius Caesar Augustus (42BC - AD37), formerly Tiberius Claudius Nero, and not the Gaius Julius Caesar (c100 BC - 44BC) mentioned in previous posts.

29

The historical existence of Christ is generally accepted. The historical existence of Julius Caesar is universally accepted. Julius Caesar’s likeness was placed on busts and coins in his lifetime. His name was placed on numerous inscriptions which are still standing. His activities were recorded and commented upon by contemporary historians and politicians, and those activities had repercussions which affected the whole known world in his lifetime.

It was Caesar who placed Cleopatra (a person whose existence is likewise well documented) on the throne of Egypt. It was Caesar who put an end to the Roman Republic. Augustus Caesar (mentioned in the Gospels) and Tiberius Caesar (likewise mentioned in the Gospels) followed in his line

There are no contemporary records known which mention Christ. The Epistles and the Gospels were written after the Resurrection. The earliest known representations of him are statues from the second century A.D. which are taken to be variations on the standardized image of Apollo (and which, interestingly, look nothing like the image of a bearded Christ with which we are now familiar). In addition, graffitti has been found which show a donkey nailed to a cross, and this is taken as a slur on Christians.

Aside from The New Testament, the written mentions of Jesus in the generation which followed his are few, brief and insubstantial.

A report on executions in Judea published years after Christ would have been crucified mentions that a man named James who had recently been crucified was the brother of Jesus of Nazareth. No further explanation is given, which suggests that the writer assumed people had heard of him.

The Jewish historian Josephus mentioned Jesus exactly once, but the passage was almost certainly doctored later, as Josephus refers to Jesus as having been the true Messiah, and all of this other writings suggest he was not a convert to Christianity.

The historian Suetonius, who was born in 69 A.D., mentions Jesus exactly once in The Twelve Caesars, a book upon which Shakespeare apparently relied when writing Julius Caesar and Antony and Cleoparta. He does not mention him by name, but rather says that the Emperor Vespasian was the first emperor to systematically persecute the Jews who followed “The Good Man”.

This insubstantial record can be taken as a tribute to Christ and the early Christians rather than the reverse; so humble were the beginning of Christianity that the dominant religious movement of the past 2,000 years was not considered large enough or important enough to draw the interest of historians and record keepers at the start.

And the strident insistence of some Christians that the reverse is true is a poor reflection on them; what is the value of berlief which needs to be shored up by fabrications and misstatements, that even denies it requires faith to stand?

30

Addendum: it was Claudius, not Vespasian whom Suetonius listed as persecuting the Christians.

31

About point A), after a certain amount of exposure to human beliefs, no. As for point B), I’m pretty certain Nature published it as a letter to the editor, a forum in which provacativeness possibly counts as a virtue. It wasn’t a peer-reviewed paper.

32

Make that “provocativeness”.

33

Isn’t there a saying in the Catholic Church, “the details of history are irrelevant to the faith”? Something Protestants should adopt in order to get rid of fundamentalists. The saying means that it is the Spirit of the Lord that influences what people believe, and whatever they as the legitimate Church believe must be true. God communicates the Truth to mankind not only by historical incidents, which are actually unascertainable anyway, but THROUGH LITERATURE. And the literature doesn’t have to be literally true. Did not the ancient Old Testament prophet book writers who wrote and rewrote what the prophets said later on, and subsequent writers who revised that-- credit the old prophets with prophecies that prophesized what had happened by the time of the revisers? So what? It is all part of God’s inspiration. Or so a believer can claim, no matter what some historical finding comes up with. Such a relief from the fundamentalistic need to “prove” everything and hold onto literalism.
Let this be a lesson to us all to take NOTHING literally, whether it has to do with religion or not. For example science opens up its doors to ever new theories of the atom and if people took the previous theory literally there would have been trouble in science accepting the new theories. (Of course I know there always IS resistance in science to new theories, but at least there is no pope or Billy Graham of science that can enforce archaisms).

34

When I saw the original thread title I thought,

hmmm, Jesus Christ v Julius Caesar,

I wonder which would win in a straight fight, no weapons allowed?

When it comes to Jesus, I don’t think you can say the NT is not evidence. It is evidence. It may be slightly flawed in that the people who wrote it were trying to promote their religion but if it were entirely made up and Jesus never existed we would probably have ancient writings telling us this.

The earliest gospel was only written 40 years after Jesus’ death. There would still have been people around who would have known if it was all a crock of shit.

I think there’s only two possibilities:

  1. Jesus existed or

  2. Jesus didnt exist and the NT (and possibly the whole bible) is a massive conspiracy. It was all written a hundred or so years after the most recent events described when all the eyewitnesses had died.

Since option 2 seems unlikely then we must go for option 1, the more likely scenario.

But there’s no way that there’s more evidence for Jesus than Julius.

Although, personally I think Jesus would have won in a fight - he grew up on the streets whereas Julius was pampered.