Yeah, I don’t know how he could have disappeared from the tomb on Saturday night/early hours of Sunday morning when nobody would have been around, if he didn’t really rise from the dead.
I’m not sure how to approach your attack. the gospels don’t match up evenly to each other, nor do they match up to Isaiah’s prophecies. If they did, I would take it as back-fitting out of whole cloth, because supernatural claims are false.
Further, I do think the story is bullshit, in the sense that Jesus didn’t do anything supernatural. So I feel like you’re attacking a position I don’t hold and then posing a “Gotcha!”
I think the writers of the gospels suffered from confirmation bias, and saw all the similarities they could but not the differences.
If by “positive evidence” you mean “contemporaneous evidence”, you are correct. There is no contemporaneous evidence that a person Jesus ever existed.
There is evidence, though its quality is questionable - namely, the gospels, and a couple of other scattered references (though some of the mentions in Josephus are clearly fraudulent later interjections).
Thing is, that’s not unusual for persons from the ancient world. We have hardly any proof, other than stories about them (often written long after they were dead), that almost anyone ever existed. Often, the only hard evidence actually contemporaneous with them is not very informative: we know the emperor Caligula (actually, more properly, Gaius Julius Caesar Augustus Germanicus) because of statues, dedications on monuments, and coins; almost everything we know about him otherwise is from much later gossip - for example, in Suetonius - much of which may well be deliberate slander.
Pretty well the only actual contemporary accounts of Caligula’s reign is from two sources, both of who have personal reasons to exaggerate Caligula’s insane malevolence: Seneca and Philo of Alexandria. So a reasonable debate exists as tow whether Caligula really was the lunatic tyrant he’s portrayed in the existing literature.
If such a debate could exist about a Roman Emperor, how much less are we likely to know for sure of an obscure Jewish Rabbi troublemaker?
Well I said in the same post that Jesus is not the author, and that gives me a little more cause to doubt his existence than Muhammad or L. Ron Hubbard. But I still think the burden of proof is on those who claim he didn’t exist. There’s not much evidence either way, but the evidence we do have, as poor as it is, points to a person named Joshua existing and being the subject of many religious tall tales after his death, rather than a conspiracy of early Christians to make the whole thing up. Sure, they made up everything else – virgin birth, resurrection, miracles, etc – but I still think it’s safe to say there was an actual person who inspired all those stories, as exaggerated as they are.
Sort of like urban legends. When somebody tells me he heard from a friend about gangsters leaving unattended baby carriages on the side of the road to trap unwitting young women, I may doubt the story, I may doubt the facts, but I don’t doubt that that person’s friend exists. It’s just a step too far in my mind. The story is bunk, but the person who told it most likely exists. Either they’re fooling themselves or they’re fooling others, but the person who shared that story exists. I might be wrong. I’m certainly not wedded to the conclusion either way. But I think it takes more evidence than we currently have to switch my provisional belief from “he probably existed but didn’t perform miracles or rise from the dead” to “he probably didn’t exist at all and the stories were attributed to a fictional character”, especially considering that fiction as we know it didn’t exist at the time.
My conclusion might be different if we’re talking about stories that weren’t written down until the religion was in place for hundreds if not thousands of years already. I don’t think Zeus was based on a real person, for instance, except maybe in the much more indirect sense of prehistoric ancestor worship slowly evolving over the centuries into the Greek Pantheon. And I’m more skeptical of Moses and Abraham and Noah existing than I am of Jesus, for similar reasons.
After Jesus died, he left a group of followers behind him in Jerusalem, several of whom were his family.
When Jerusalem was suffering a famine and people are dying, Paul went to Jerusalem and used money that he had collected to support the Jerusalem church. He also comes away from this having been pronounced the leader of the gentiles and certified as having had visions of Christ.
One of Jesus’ (and St John the Baptist’s) former followers, Peter, jumped ship to follow Paul.
Peter later becomes a central figure in the gospels, being nominated as the rock upon which Jesus will build his church, despite all evidence pointing to it being Jesus’ brother, James, who took over the church after Jesus’ death. And Peter also becomes the only one to come back and witness Jesus’ trial.
When Paul later returns (not during a famine) to Jerusalem, the church there sends him to be murdered.
You have it backwards. Matthew tried to find a verse that “prophesied” the known fact that Jesus came from Nazareth.
One thing that almost every Biblical scholar, Christian and non-Christian alike, agrees on is that the book of Mark was written before the book of Matthew. Mark refers to Jesus being from Nazareth many times.
See, I guess I find it much more plausible that a bunch of well-intentioned people fooled themselves, rather than there having been a knowing, deliberate attempt to deceive.
I can believe one person intentionally deceiving, like a Joseph Smith or Mohammed. but a whole group? And then, if we want to say, well, Paul was a master bullshitter and hoodwinked the cult (that already existed), he sure did it in a dumb way. That is, if any of Acts is to be taken as true. He spent the rest of his life evangelizing and writing letters and traveling and going in and out of prison, and not collecting money or concubines or whatever most bullshitters do. If I didn’t believe in what I was doing, I’d rather have stayed a tax collector.
I recognize your username, and I remember reading posts from you that seemed thoughtful, and I share your skepticism of religion. But I think that is the stupidest post from you I’ve ever read. The only point it makes is that there is no use in debating this subject with you.
But the writing down of the gospels was not the start of the religion - it came relatively late in the founding of Christianity. The fact that the stories were being written down was a reflection of the reality that thousands of people had already converted to Christianity and the religion was growing beyond the community which had personal knowledge of Jesus.
But all those early converts didn’t need people like Mark or Luke to tell them who Jesus was - they were living in Jerusalem and the surrounding area. They had known about Jesus and his followers. All they needed to be convinced about was the religious meaning behind the secular events they had heard about. These were people who had seen Jesus preaching and witnessed his trial and execution.
Now let’s say hypothetically that Jesus didn’t exist. How were you going to tell these people that he did? How could you convince them that Jesus had been preaching for three years all around Judea when these people had been living in Judea during that time? You or I can’t say what was going on in that time and place but these people were there. And they accepted the idea that Jesus had really been there. A lot of people may have argued that Jesus and his followers were wrong but nobody was claiming Jesus wasn’t real.
That’s a bad argument. Christians were not a bother when the records were available, so there was no reason for the Romans to have done anything. The Jews were. In fact there weren’t many people in Jerusalem who gave a shit either. But there was a small Jesus cult, which seems to indicate that there was a person, but I suspect the supernatural stuff was added a lot later.
I really think you’re mistaken in finding this unlikely.
Poor Schmuk: I wish the Messiah would come.
Early Christian: He already has, and come back from the dead and rose into heaven. He’s brought a message of eternal life and prosperity!
Poor Schmuk: Tell me more…
You really think the average person is going to say, “Well, I need to check some crucifixion records to see if this is legit.” He’d think, “wow, they do crucify a lot of dudes, I can’t believe they did it to the Messiah, he bled for me!”
Nitpick. This off-by-one error, apparent in the French “huit jours … quinze jours” for week and fortnight, predates the rise of modern travel agencies:
“Offer includes Paid Lodging for THREE days[SIZE=“1”] (and two nights)[/SIZE]”
There’s good reason to believe that there was an original Gospel of Matthew (probably completely unrelated to the one we have) floating around before 100 AD, which ultimately became known in different forms as the Gospel of the Hebrews, Gospel of the Nazarenes, or the Gospel of the Ebionites in its post 100 AD editions.
The Ebionites are, of course, the descendants of the Jerusalem church that Jesus founded, lead to Pella by Ebion.
Wait - you’re saying that the person who wrote the Gospel of John actually met Jesus? That’s certainly an extraordinary claim. I’ve seen dates on John (the gospel) having been written anywhere from 90 AD to 120 AD. How long did those folks live?
That was the tradition, that the author of John’s Gospel was John the Apostle. There’s no evidence to suggest this is correct though and there’s probably very few biblical scholars who still argue it. John’s Gospel itself appears to be a compilation of multiple sources, so it makes no sense that it would’ve been written by the actual Apostle.
When I was a kid in Catholic school, I was taught a legend that John the Apostle never died and may still be walking the earth. There’s an allusion to this legend and a rejection of it in the Gospel of John too. Maybe the priest didn’t clarify that we weren’t supposed to believe this anymore, or maybe I was too young to understand, but I spent a couple days after that wondering if I might run into old Johnny.
There is no “appears” about it; Matthew, especially, breaks his neck to twist verses of the Tanakh into Messianic prophecies. Compared to many, his citation of Micah is one of the more plausible, although he quotes it incorrectly.
As for Jewish belief, I will defer to your expertise on what Jews believe currently, but it seems only natural that they would want to take a very narrow view of verses that Christians claim are about Jesus. But if Wikipedia is correct, the Jerusalem Talmud was compiled around the 4th or 5th centuries, so it’s hard to know what was believed centuries earlier.
And even if a Messiah born in Bethlehem was never the “official” belief, it still must have been a popular belief, or why else would Matthew and Luke go to such great lengths to arrange it? They were clearly working independently, since their stories are completely different, and they were clearly desperate to have him born in Bethlehem, since their stories are both highly improbable. Why would they do that, if it wasn’t a common belief?
That is a complete non sequitur. Whether George Washington threw a dollar across the Potomac, or even chopped down a cherry tree, is a different question than whether he existed.
The skeptics’ motto is: “Extraordinary claims demand extraordinary evidence.” You are perfectly correct to demand stronger evidence before you believe that Jesus performed miracles, but tales of his miracles should have nothing to do with whether you believe he existed. The claim that a Jewish itinerant preacher started a cult that persisted after his death is mundane, and doesn’t require any more evidence to believe (provisionally, of course) than what has already been shown here.
But how much can you cut away before he’s not Jesus.
Was there actually a crucifixion? A manger birth? Was he a carpenter? A sermon on the mount? A money-lender’s table? I’d say it’s more likely that Jesus is a pastiche of dozens of fake-ass messiah/healers that were around at that time. You hear a cool story about some preacher from you dad? I bet that was Jesus. Oh, your nana got cured by a preacher back in the day? I bet it was Jesus!