Is there really any difference between a piece of papyrus with a name written on it, and a statue with a name chiseled onto it?
Re: the OP, I’m pretty sure this specific point - the contemporaneous historical evidence of specific individuals - has been done here before. I’ll just offer my understanding as - well, I’d be a strong Capital A Atheist, if I thought theism were anything special in terms of supernatural claims. So I’m a nontheist, or a rational Humanist.
What reading I’ve done on this does indicate that there is often VERY LITTLE contemporaneous documentation of specific individuals, or significant events. I recall being surprised at how indirect and inferential was much evidence pertaining to Alexander and his campaigns. So the lack of a surviving census report of Joseph and Mary going to Bethlehem, or Roman records of Jesus being convicted and crucified, certainly does not prove that he never existed. Of course, proving a negative, extreme claims, yadda yadda…
I’m willing to acknowledge that an individual named Jesus lived at some time back then. (AFAIK, Jesus was a common name. What is acepted as The Jesus, could have been an individual, or an amalgamation.) Sure, I can think it odd that there were no contemporaneous mentions of some of the more extreme supernatural events, but hey - history!
There are a couple of later sources mentioned here and elsewhere. I tend to see the problems with them, others feel otherwise. The same arguments keep getting trotted out by both sides, and I don’t see any reason those arguments would cause anyone who has considered them to change their interpretation.
Of course, that only gets you a teensy step towards the guy being anything other than a preacher/rabble rouser/mystic/radical PERSON. Which for me is the reason I really don’t care anymore. I looked into it, found evidence of Jesus the man weak, and the evidence of Jesus the God nonexistent. And, none of it is any way relevant to any aspect of my life.
Sorry if I didn’t add much to the discussion.
There isn’t a lack of evidence for Alexander. There’s enough evidence to convince pretty well everybody that Alexander is a historical figure.
The point is, there’s more evidence for the historicity of Jesus. Consequently Jesus is also widely accepted as a historical figure, and not just by the religiously-motivated.
You can conjecture that the evidence for Jesus, though it does exist, is the product of ideologically-motivated fraud, fantasy and/or delusion, and is in fact misleading. You can make similar conjections about the evidence for Alexander, if you care to. In both cases the conjectures cannot be disproven, but they are themselves completely unevidenced and not very plausible, and they tend not to carry much weight in the judgments of historians. They carry much more weight when applied to specific hagiographic stories about the characters concerned. (Did Jesus really rise from the dead? Was Alexander really sired by a thunderbolt?)
There’s a note hereon the sources for Alexander. Basically, the sources we have date from around three centuries after his death, but they claim to be based (indirectly) on earlier, now lost, sources.
For figures from the mythic period of history, “fictional” and “historical” are not neatly separated categories. A couple of historical figures can get combined into a composite, and more detail gets added which may relate to yet other figures, or which may be wholly invented. Or material may be invented to link into a coherent (or appealing) narrative a number of episodes which are basically true. Or material may be invented to exemplify something about the character which is, in fact, correct. Or almost any other permutation or combination that you can think of. Generally for mythic figures (like David) it’s impossible to know with any certainty what’s true and what’s invented, and we have to say that most of all of what we have can’t be known to be true.
But generally whether it’s true or not is not the most interesting question; the interesting question is why the story was told, and recorded, and what significance it had for the culture that remembered and recorded the story.
(Just to clarify, neither Jesus nor Alexander is considered to be a figure from the mythic period of history, but David is.)
There are conflicting accounts of the life of Barack Obama and he’s still alive. I’m not a historian but I would be surprised if you had ancient accounts that match to some degree of precision and were truly independent.
And, once again, Paul had nothing to give on the historical life of Jesus because he never met the guy. His only supposed contact was with the supposed ghost of Jesus. It is easy to see why nobody drew on his material to expand on the life of Jesus, since the only “Jesus” he knew was post-living.
But with Obama, we don’t have conflicting official stories that we are supposed to accept at face value, and the more ridiculous ones are just dismissed out of hand.
Plutarch is over 150 years after the people he wrote about and is often used as a source. Even if Paul never met Jesus, he was certainly met those who did.
Yes, but not neither one is very strong evidence in itself. The statue requires more effort to make and is somewhat more indicative of belief or knowledge that extends beyond just the sculptor’s mind. At the same time the name may have been carved into the statue at a later time and the representation of the statue could be someone else altogether. Writings can include much more information than a name that can provide a greater context to establish the validity of the reference.
Is it really the job of the historian to establish the factual existence of a person who lived long ago? Or instead to present that evidence that does exist and evaluate it’s validity to whatever level of certainty we have about anything that happened in times so far back that there is little direct physical evidence remaining?
You keep saying this as though it’s a startling fact, although I pointed it out myself in my first post.
What of it? We’re not citing Paul as evidence that Jesus taught this or that, or that he was born here or there, or that he approved or disapproved of divorce,or whatever. We’re citing Paul to show that there were people talking about Jesus - quite a lot of people, actually, given the diversity of Paul’s readerships - in the period from 20 to 30 years after his death, and the fact that Jesus lived and died seems to have been widely accepted. Paul doesn’t devote any effort to persuading anyone about this; it’s evidently already accepted by both Paul and his readers.
Sure, Paul never met Jesus. So what? We have no reason to think that he invented Jesus; it’s clear that by the time he’s writing lots of people knew about Jesus, and whatever Paul did know about Jesus he presumably learned from them. (In fact, Paul seems to hint that he learned about Jesus from Ananias.)
What we DO have evidence for is the fact that, sometime before 55 CE, there existed a religious movement whose members believed that that Jesus the Messiah had been raised from the dead and would be coming back very very soon (certainly within their lifetime), and that there existed people who spent considerable effort trying to persuade other people to join this new religion.
It seems to me that trying to compare this to “historical figures” like Alexander or Socrates is comparing apples and oranges. In one case you have people discussing ideas and events but in the other you have people who are strongly motivated to persuade other people to join their movement. We all learned about Alexander and Socrates in school, but nobody comes knocking on our doors trying to get us to join their church and threatening us with damnation if we refuse.
Forget the telephone analogy. I say it’s more like a chain letter. “Read this or else you will suffer. Now pass it on to everyone you know, or else they will suffer.” The existence of the chain letter doesn’t prove anything about the accuracy of the specific events described in the chain letter.
If you got a letter trying to convince you that John F. Kennedy was actually an extraterrestrial, would you consider the letter to be more likely to be true or less likely to be true if it contained threats against you for not believing it?
What do you mean by “official” here? None of the sources we have about Jesus were in any sense “official” when they were created. Some of them were subsequently officially endorsed by the church, but that can’t affect their value as historical sources and is something historians would simply ignore in their evaluations.
And I don’t know why you say we are supposed to accept them at face value; those who evaluate them as historical evidence certainly don’t accept them at face value.
…except for all those coins Alexander minted in his lifetime, and the epigraphic inscriptions that mention him* in his reign.*
Questioning the historicity of a religious figure obviously causes controversy and stirs up emotions which makes it an appealing thing to do (and dangerous at certain times and in certain places).
If an otherwise somewhat respected scholar cooks up the idea that the Roman emperor Nero actually wasn’t a real person, this would cause a heated debate among historians but the general public wouldn’t really care or take it personally (except maybe card-carrying members of the Emperor Nero appreciation society).
How can you assume that “it’s clear that by the time he’s writing lots of people knew about Jesus”-you yourself said that Paul hinted that he learned about it from Ananias…Who, I believe also received his marching orders from a Jesus that had already passed on. Whatever Paul learned about the life of Jesus he learned from disciples later on, and there weren’t that many at that time.
There are lots of coins featuring Alexander, but most of them are known to have been produced long after his death. Can you produce a coin that you know to have been produced while he was alive? And, given that we have lots of coins of the ancient world which feature figures known to be mythical, how does this coin prove that Alexander was historical?
Not his face so much-What was done back then was that the current ruler put gods on one side of the coin and his name on the other-and Alexander did this to coins during his reign, as did those who followed him.
I’m not assuming it. It’s clear from the tone of the letters that they are addressed to people who accept the historicity of Jesus, and don’t need to be told about it, or to be persuaded of it. Therefore, communities of such people must have existed. If they didn’t, Paul’s writing of the letters is simply inexplicable.
I don’t know why you assume that there weren’t many of Jesus’ disciples at the time Paul was writing. Paul was writing between 20 and 30 years after Jesus’ death; a large chunk of the people who would have known Jesus would still have been living. If Paul was making stuff up about Jesus there would have been plenty of people around able to debunk it authoritatively (which is possibly one of the reasons why Paul tells us so little of Jesus the man).
Paul’s own letters, and the Acts of the Apostles, record his dealings with Peter, James and others. Are those figures, too, fictional creations, cooked up in a conspiracy between Paul and Luke? Or is this a massive conspiracy, featuring not only Paul and Luke but also Peter, James and the others that Paul names as witnesses to Jesus? Or is Paul actually the secret author of Acts, and he invented not only all the figures just named, but also Luke, thereby avoiding the need for Paul to conspire with an actual human being ? This theory is becoming more elaborate (and more fun) but, I have to say, not any more convincing.
I repeat; the parsimonious explanation for the sources that we have on Jesus of Nazareth is that Jesus of Nazareth is a historical figure, and the sources do refer to him. Alternative explanations for the sources are much, much more fanciful than this.
Who is talking about as conspiracy, massive or otherwise?
I disagree, I don’t think that’s clear at all. I’ll agree that it’s clear that his intended audience accepts the axiom that Jesus is the Messiah. But consider the fact that, during is first two letters (1 Corinthians, 1 Thessalonians), Paul never says a word about Jesus being born or living or walking or preaching. And then in his third letter he says that Jesus “had an earthly life” and was a descendant of David (Romans 1:3) and he had “human ancestry” (Romans 9:5). One reasonable interpretation of this is these three letters is that Paul, after writing his first two letters, heard that some churches out there were teaching the idea that Jesus was an angel rather than a human and Paul felt it necessary to correct them on their wrongness.
I’m not saying it’s definitely true that some of Paul’s audience thought Jesus was an angel. I’m just saying it’s far from clear that Paul’s audience accepted it as a given that Jesus was a human. Either is possible.
Paul keeps warning his readers to beware of people who are preaching a false gospel. He mentions this over and over again, telling them that if someone preaches a gospel different from what Paul is preaching then those people are dead wrong and you shouldn’t listen to them. So what’s clear to me is that, by 55 CE, there were already schisms between people who had different views on the fundamental tenets of christianity. It’s not a stretch to think that one of these schisms might be over the question of whether Jesus was a human or an angel.
Okay, the communities existed. I agree with that.
Yeah, and another possible reason is that there was nothing to tell because Jesus wasn’t a man at all. If I went around writing books about some fictional character named Joe Schmoe and said he died in 1992, the fact that some of the people reading my books had been alive in 1992 doesn’t prove that none of them could possibly have been fooled by my fiction.
Anything to say about the link in post #36?