So, leaving aside all the magic stuff, if I understand correctly, there is no evidence that a man named Jesus Christ existed some 2000 years ago.
Is that typical of ANY historical figure from that time frame?
And what would such evidence be anyway?
/curious atheist.
What kind of evidence are you looking for? Both Tacitus and Josephus mention Jesus in their writings, admittedly a generation later, but neither doubted he existed, which for Tacitus would have been easy to find out, he was a member of the body which regulates foreign religion in Rome. We are not likely to find a death warrant for instance, so not much direct evidence there.
Some people in that story are have more direct evidence for their existence. The Pilate stone attests to Pilates existance for instance.
How curious that we’ve never discussed this topic before. Oh, wait:
Did Jesus exist?
did jesus exist?
Did Jesus Exist?
Resolved: Jesus did not exist
Did Jesus really exist? And what’s with the Shroud of Turin?
Did Jesus really exist? And what’s with the Shroud of Turin?
Mmm, love the smell of snark in the morning. Thanks, but that’s not really the question I’m asking.
I’m asking is LACK OF evidence is any moreso than other historical figures of that era.
No. On the contrary, he’s better attested than many figures of the era who are accepted as historical. He’s much better attested than Socrates, for example, or Alexander the Great.
In addition to Tacitus and Josephus, mentioned above, he’s attested by Paul, by Mark, by the Fourth Evangelist and, hypothetically, by Q. There is no evidence that any of those writers copied from, or were even aware of, any other of them, and the likelihood that they are all part of a conspiracy is vanishingly small.
Well, for, say, Caesar, we have coins Caesar minted and stuff people wrote about him in his life, rather than afterwards. For Herod, we have coins he minted, and the remains of the Temple he built. As you drop down in fame, the less evidence there is. Pontius Pilate is attested fromone stone inscription, for instance.
Paul can only count as having met the ghost of Jesus, and his descriptions of the teachings of this entity seem to differ with those of the other apostles.
None of the authors I mentioned, so far as we know, met Jesus; all their accounts are at second hand. (It’s possible that Q met Jesus, if only because we have no idea who Q was, but we have no reason to think that he did.) But none of our sources for Socrates ever met Socrates, and none of our sources for Alexander ever met Alexander.
What’s significant about them is that they are independent of one another, so we have five people who all heard about Jesus, and not from one another. And they are all writing within the lifetimes of Jesus’ contemporaries. And we can’t say anything like that about Socrates or Alexander. Hence, Jesus is better attested.
Well he is attested in Tacitus and Josephus, with the later having some more information about him beyond his involvement in the Crucifixion.
Its a bit of a crapshoot about what exactly survives. Surena, the man who made Crassus his bitch is hardly attested outside of Plutrach, 150 years after his death.
There is very little direct evidence for lots of otherwise well known figures. Basically unless;
You really only exist in secondary sources.
So unless by some miracle we find some contemporary document referring to Jesus (an intelligence report, the actual death warrant, both of which undoubtedly existed but would not be kept very long term) we are out of luck.
The claims against Tacitus generally are on not authenticity, but how much is he simply repeating what he would have been told by Christians at the time (there is little dispute that Christians existed on Rome at the time and held such beliefs). One arguement that he did not simply repeat what he was told is the fact that he was (as I state above) a member of the quindecimviri sacris faciundis; the body which regulated foreign cults, so its very likely that he would have had the ability and the inclination to investigate further. Its unknowable if he actually did, but you can make a good prima facie case.
As for Josephus, the reference to Christ is thought to be genuine, the words praising him are considered suspect by some.
I have no knowledge of anyone claiming the( not very flattering) portrayal of Pilate in that is not authentic.
That works if the accounts match. Otherwise, what you might have going here is an ancient game of “Telephone”.
Umm, Plato. Or Xenophon. Now one can certainly argue - and people have - that “Socrates” was a literary mouthpiece made up by Plato, but both of our main sources for him do claim to have been his student.
No. Where are Jesus’ writings? Where are the independent sources? We have them for Socrates (Plato and others).
I’m sure many “facts” about Alexander the Great are exaggerated, but his existence is not in doubt. It’s hard to forget someone who noisily invades multiple countries with a large army.
Far from reliable. The brief and passing mention in Josephus is widely thought to be added by a religious editor later.
First of all, Q has never been shown to exist. At this time, it is only hypothetical. Not a good source to rely upon here.
Paul, by all accounts, never met Jesus, except in a vision. For all we know, Mark made the whole thing up, and he (whoever “Mark” is) never met Jesus, either, which is true of all the gospel writers.
On the contrary, it’s pretty obvious that all gospels copied copiously, sometimes verbatim, from Mark and each other. The later works are more elaborate, adding “facts” not mentioned in the earlier ones. The tale grew with the telling, but supporting evidence is nonexistent. Only the gullible think that it ever did.
Luke, Mathew, and John can be explained as a writer (or writers) who took Mark and “Q” (or some other lost work(s)) as their model, and expanded on the story. Their imaginations ran wild. It’s likely they made everything up as they went along, as none of what they write about (zombies coming out of graves, stars moving in the heavens, earthquakes, etc.) can be verified from other, non-religious sources.
I’ll agree with you there, in the modern sense of “conspiracy.” But remember that all the biblical works were heavily influenced by pious authors and redactors who had a religious ax to grind and thought they were responsible to God for the story being accepted. Not so for Socrates’ or Alexander’s historians.
No. If the accounts match, then you begin to suspect that one is based on the other. We don’t regard Matthew and Luke as independent sources, for example, because they contain significant amounts of material drawn from Mark, which they are clearly using as a source.
Paul is our first source, since he is writing before any of the others. (Though in terms of biographical information about Jesus or the events of his life, Paul gives us very little.)
Mark is our second. He’s writing after Paul, but doesn’t appear to draw at all on Paul’s texts (and the parsimonious explanation for this is that he doesn’t know of them). He’s drawing on some other source (he must be, since he doesn’t claim to be an eye-witness) but that other source doesn’t seem to be Paul, and may not be a written source. (He may simply be interviewing people who knew Jesus, many of whom would still have been alive when Mark was writing.) Hence, he is a source independent of Paul.
Then we have Matthew and Luke. Neither of them claim to be eye-witnesses; Luke says explicitly that he’s not. They draw on Mark, so we don’t count them as independent sources. We can regard them as “telephone” from Mark if we wish. They don’t draw on Paul. They draw on another, now lost, source which we call ‘Q’. (Q accounts for the material which is common to Matthew and Luke but which they didn’t get from Mark.) Q is an independent source, since he has material not drawn from either Mark or Paul.
Finally we have John. He’s writing later than any of the others, but he doesn’t appear to draw on any of them and may not have known about them. The text does not claim to have been written by an eye-witness. Religious tradition says that he was an eye-witness - the apostle John - but the weight of scholarly opinion rejects this. Most likely the text is based on an oral tradition, which may originate with the apostle John. On this view, the text is produced by the community of John’s followers, either late in John’s life or after his death.
So, in summary, Paul, Mark, Q and John are four independent sources - independent of one another, that is - of which we know, and three of them have survived. None of them are first-hand sources.
“Telephone” explains accounts which partly match, or where one is an extended or embroidered version of the other. (I’m looking at you, Matthew.) But where one account doesn’t seem to draw at all from the other, you’re probably not looking at “telephone”.
You’re quite right, and I was wrong on this point.
Basically, what it comes down to is that other than the sources we have for Jesus’ existence, there are no sources for Jesus’ existence. But then, of course, the same could be said of anyone else.
EDIT: Oh, and of course we have evidence for the existence of all historical figures, because that’s what “historical” means.
Where are Alexander’s? Where are Socrates’? None of these figure are attested by their own writings.
I have listed five independent sources for Jesus, four of which survive. For Socrates we have two, both of which survive - three if you count Aristophanes, who employs Socrates as a character in his plays, but doesn’t pretend to give us any biographical or historical information about him. For Alexander we have two - Callisthenes and Cleitarchus, both long lost.
So, whether you count independent sources or surviving independent sources, we have more for Jesus that we do for either Socrates or Alexander.
Yes, nobody doubts the historicity of Alexander. That’s pretty much my point - we accept Alexander as a historical figure, and by any measure Jesus is much more amply attested than Alexander; therefore the OP is mistaken in thinking that by the standards of ancient history Jesus is not well-attested.
I think the majority opinion is that it was embroidered by a religious editor, but I don’t think many scholars take the view that the whole reference to Jesus is a later interpolation. We do have versions of the text which contain the unembroidered reference, and while it’s possible to conjecture that a religious editor inserted the simple refernce and a second religious editor later embroidered it, so far as I know there’s no evidence at all for the first part of that conjecture.
True, but it doesn’t matter. If Q doesn’t exist, then the Q material must have originated with either Matthew or Luke, in which case either Matthew or Luke must be regarded as an independent source for that material. So this wouldn’t affect the number of indepdent sources that we would count.
It would be an astonishing coincidence if Mark “made the whole thing up”, but happened to make up a thing about someone with the same name as the character Paul had already written about. You could conjecture less extravagantly that Mark had read Paul and decided to make up a biography about the character named by Paul, but it’s complete conjecture; there’s no evidence at all the Mark had read, or even knew of, Paul’s letters. You’d also have the problem that, if Mark did make up this biography, he was inventing events that supposedly occurred in public well within the lifetime of many people still living at the time he was writing, so he was making up a story which would be very easily debunked. Which raises two questions. One, why would he do this? If he were going to invent a story, wouldn’t he invent one less easily debunked? Two, if it was wholly fictional, why wasn’t it debunked? (And, come to think of it, three: Why would Mark make up any biography of Jesus? Mark’s decision to write is explained if there was already a community of Jesus-followers who had traditions and memories to record, and who would value such a text, but if there was a community of Jesus-followers then Mark can’t have invented Jesus. If there was no such community, why was Mark writing, and why would anybody pay any attention to anything he wrote?
So, yeah, you can conjecture that Mark made the whole thing up, but as a conjecture it’s completely unevidenced and not very plausible, so it’s not a conjecture that carries much weight with the historians of the period. The parsimonious explanation for the multiplicity of apparently independent sources attesting to Jesus is that Jesus was a historical figure.
Well, you can’t say that all the gospels copied each other, since Mark, the first gospel, did not. Matthew and Luke both draw on Mark, and they both draws on Q (or, if not, either Matthew or Luke draws on the other, but obviously they can’t both draw on each other, your rather overblown claim notwithstanding.) John doesn’t appear to draw on any of the other three; if you think he did can you supply examples?
As for “supporting evidence” being non-existent, if you discount everything later writers have written on the basis that it could either have been invented or copied, then the supporting evidence for Socrates and Alexander is also non-existent.
Remember, the issue in this thread is not whether you find the historical sources for Jesus convincing, or even plausible. The issue is whether Jesus is better-attested or worse-attested than other figures of the period. And the answer is that, for a figure of the period, Jesus is well-attested. We have more independent sources, and more surviving independent sources, for Jesus than we have for Alexander. All of the surviving sources for Jesus are closer in time to Jesus than any of the surviving sources for Alexander. And several of our sources for Jesus are plausibly second-hand sources, whereas the best sources we have for Alexander are (by their own account) third-hand. And while religious motives might have corrupted what was written about Jesus, political motives might equally have corrupted what was written about Alexander.
Conclusion: Jesus is better-attested than Alexander. If you can find a reputable historian of the period who says otherwise, now would be a good time to name him.
I’m no scholar of history, so I’ll accept that you’re correct. But I find the fact amazing! Can you point to a discussion of this lack of evidence for Alexander?
Of course, a King would be expected to leave more evidence than a random carpenter. I thought it was interesting that King David — one of the most important persons in the Old Testament — was widely thought to be fictional, and still is so suspected despite a recent archaeological discovery.
There’s a lack of hard evidence of the existence of Jesus, the kind you’d need to make a scientific determination. I assume that can be said of many historical figures since history includes the history itself, even when there are no contemporary writings about a person, no physical evidence such as statues, graves, etc., the later writings and and practices of people are historical elements also. We just can’t say with absolute certainty based on confirmed evidence that Jesus existed, and based on what others say here apparently the same holds for other historical figures of that time. In the case of Jesus and Alexander we are left with a situation where if they didn’t actually exist we do still have a remarkable phenomenon of large numbers of people believing in their existence without a solid explanation of how that could be. In the case of Jesus there is the possibility that he represents one or more people for which a composite character developed over time, which in itself may or may not be considered evidence of his existence depending on your definition. I don’t know if that can be said for other such historical figures, but certainly we have questions about the validity of even contemporary writings about Caesar and Alexander. Surely we can have different levels of certainty in our knowledge about historical figures and accept that as we go further back in time we will have less scientific certainty of their existence while still maintaining reasonable conclusions about strength of historical evidence.