I’ll grant you there are coins with the name of Alexander on them. But Alexander was of course a common name; in the ancient world the sources tell us that there were five kings of Macedon alone with that name, plus two kings of Epirus, plus Alexander of Troy, Alexander of Corinth, Alexander of Pherae, two Alexanders who ruled Judea, two who rules the Seleucid Empire, one Roman emperor of that name and one pretender.
Many of these, of course, could not possibly be the Alexander names on the coins (on dating grounds alone) but many could. How do we so confidently link the coins to Alexander III of Macedon? The answer is, largely, because we are persuaded by the textual sources - the third-hand, two centuries later textual sources.
Musicat, all historical texts are dependent on accounts already in existence. Anthony Beevor, born in 1946, has written a masterly, and possibly definitive, book on the Battle of Berlin, 1945. How do you think he did that?
That’s not what historians mean when they talk about “independent sources”. Two sources for the same event are independent if they don’t draw on one another. Our two sources for Alexander are both third-hand - they draw on accounts of accounts of accounts - but they are considered to be independent sources because they don’t draw on one another or on the same intermediate accounts. Mark, Q, the Fourth Evangelist, Tacitus and Josephus are independent sources for Jesus because none of them draw on any of the others.
It’s possible that Q was an eyewitness to Jesus, but we have no reason to think so.
Q seems to have been a “sayings gospel” - a collection of sayings attributed to Jesus, with possibly some context for some of the sayings (e.g. information about where he said something, what he was responding to) but not much else by way of biography. There are many other such sayings gospels known, all of them much later than Q would have to be, so obviously it’s possible to compile a sayings gospel without being an eye witness.
All we can say is that Q, if it existed, is sufficiently early that it could have been written by an eye-witness.
Yes, and yes. But as we don’t have those texts, or any texts which claim to quote them or be drawn from them. (We have texts which might draw on them, but that’s not the same). So we can’t really count these as sources that we have.
If we accept that the texts which are said to have existed did in fact exist, that’s evidence for the existence of a community of Jesus-followers who produced those texts, and for whom they were produced. But the issue in this thread is not whether the existence of the Christian community is well-attested but whether the existence of Jesus himself is well-attested, and these later-produced and now-lost texts are at best very indirect evidence about that.
I was going to skip this thread because thought it was one I commented on several months ago…
The general thought about Josephus:
The general thought is that the parts I highlighted are later additions, the Christian establishment’s version of Dave Letterman’s “writer’s embelishments” - added to convert a plain description into a testament of faith by adding what Josephus appeared to have forgotten to say. Early writing is full of this crap.
(For example, the bit about “Let his blood be upon us and upon our children” was an obvious later addition by someone promoting Christianity to the Roman empire. Better to blame those pesky Jews than to explain to the Italians and others why they should revere a man their government tortured and killed.)
A good summary of the evidence and inference of Jesus’ existence is “Zealot” by Reza Aslan.
If you are a glutton for punishment, go to the nearest big library and look for John P. Meiers’ “Marginal Jew” books (all 5 volumes).
Basically, their premise is this - Jesus was a wandering preacher in the Galilee area, who was a follower of John the Baptists and adopted much of his point of view. “Messiah” is a standard job description (“I say you’re the Messiah, and I should know, I’ve followed a few!”) It meant deliverer -applied to a number of people around that time who sought to deliver the Jews from ROman oppression and corrupt Temple priests. Most were bandit guerillas. Jesus seems to have preached a more esoteric blend; at a certain point he waltzed into Jerusalem, scoured theTemple merchants, and scared the bejeezus (so to speak) out of the Temple hierarchy. How he expected to remove the ROmans, who knows A combination “Arab spring” and Holy Lightning? Anyway, the igh priests persuaded Pilate he was a threat to order (because of the crowds when he arrived) and to dispose of him.
His message must have been sufficiently tame that years later the apostles and their followers hung out around the temple still. Paul/Saul had a bad day (stroke? Fit?) on the road to Damscus and decided that Jesus had personally selected him to spread the good word around the gentiles. He made up what is now the official Christian religion completely on his own, and had an ongoing feud with the more orthodox group in the temple. (He has some very nasty things to say about them in his epistles). Eventually, the apostles agreed to let him do what he wanted ith the gentiles, as long as he stayed away from Jewish adherents to whom Jesus real message applied. Paul’s zeal, and a much larger market of gentiles, meant that once the Jerusalem church was wiped out during the Jewish rebellion, his brand won.
It would be rather hard to have a Christian community without a Christ.
The dominant no-real-Jesus theories seem to be that:
Paul made it up
There was a popular legend that Paul picked up on.
The non-Paulian Christian communities strongly go against #1.
That the non-Paulian Christian communities started in the 1st centuries and stated that they were based on the teachings of a person or being named Jesus, strongly implies that either there was a Jesus in the early 1st century or someone else spreading the legend. There’s no pre-1st century Jesus legend.
Maybe there was one individual who came up with the Jesus story and spread it, but that person isn’t Paul and they would have needed to have lived at the same time Jesus did, in basically the same location as Jesus, and caused the creation of a widening circle of Jesus following groups that argued with one another, until swamped by Paul’s variant.
If that person existed, I’d be inclined to call them Jesus. It’s like if Joseph Smith, instead of saying that the Angel Moroni was talking to him in spiritual visions, he instead explained that Moroni was always standing right by his side, talking to them via his mouth, eating with his hands, and making babies via his body, and so the religion is actually founded on the spiritual being Moroni, rather than the prophet Joseph Smith. But that basically just makes Joseph Smith into Moroni. Anybody writing about what Moroni did is writing about the acts and images of a single man, who popularized the religion. Most of the stories might be bunk, told by that single man, so technically the life of Moroni might bear very little resemblance to Smith, but we’re still not talking about Joseph Smith co-opting King Arthur or some other famous legend. It’s definitely localized to one, single person as the originator.
If someone wants to be pedantic and call that person J instead of Jesus, because we can’t be certain that the real originator was the character, then fine. But if someone wants to argue that Jesus was just a modernized Horus legend, it’s a load of rubbish. There might be one guy who took the story of Horus and expanded on it, but that one guy lived during the time of Jesus, in Jerusalem, and is the founder of the “Jesus” religions. There’s no strong value in calling him something other than Jesus.
And, if there’s no reason to think that a non-Paulian originator would come up with a story about a real man, living at the same time, in the same location as himself, then fundamentally, it’s not really worth considering that option. The only evidence against a historical Jesus is the magical nonsense in the New Testament and the fact that Paul and his church are unreliable narrators. But, the first can be explained by credulity, and the latter countered by the existence of the non-Pauline churches.
The difference is that Jesus isn’t a figure from the mythic period of history. The Jesus movement grows up well within the lifetimes of people who would have been contemporaries of the historical Jesus, and expresses a detailed biography and an account of his teachings. None of this is true of Zeus, Odin, etc. The origins of Christianity are not really that similar to the origins of the Greek or Norse cults; they look much more like the origins of Islam or of Buddhism.
The fact is that we have an account of Jesus as a putative historical figure which can be critically assessed with the disciplines employed by historians of the period. We have no such account of Zeus, etc. The fact that a religion can be based on myth doesn’t mean that all religions are, and to answer the question of whether Christianity is, we can employ the usual techniques of historians of the period.
Given what we know about the Jesus movement, it’s very hard to explain its existence if there was no historical Jesus-figure. Those who dismiss the historicity of Jesus for paucity of evidence really need to offer an alternative account of the origins of Christianity which is better-evidenced, and I’m not seeing much attempt to do this. And on what basis can the dismiss a story which they consider poorly evidenced but accept a story which is unsupported by any evidence at all?
I do note a number of paragraphs, in my post, after the sentence you quoted. I think they explain why it would be difficult for there to be no Jesus-like person in Christianity, based on the data we have.
There are more than two available sources and they reference more than two contemporary sources. Arrian for example is at worst a second-hand source, as he directly references the works of Alexander’s contemporaries and officers. In addition the Decree of Philippi is rather difficult to hand-wave away, since it dates to the Big A’s lifetime.
Back to the OP, we know more about Jesus than almost anyone else from that time, if we are limiting it to people who were in his station; i,e a religious leader on the fringes of the Empire.
He was important enough to be mentioned by writers as the ones mentioned above. Its not like the ancients were unaware of myth and both Tacitus and Josephus would have lots of motivations to identify it as myth if they could have.
We also have a potential earlier mention in 73AD in a private letter by a pagan by the name of Mara bar Serapion
Who stated
[QUOTE=Mara]
? What advantage did the Athenians gain from murdering Socrates? Famine and plague came upon them as a punishment for their crime. What advantage did the men of Samos gain from burning Pythagoras? In a moment their land was covered with sand. What advantage did the Jews gain from executing their wise king? It was just after that their kingdom was abolished.
[/QUOTE]
Many scholors cosider this to be a reference to Jesus.
I have to disagree; it looks like special pleading.
We have examples within much more recent times of fantasies that are taken to be true, such as the miraculous origin of the image of the Virgin of Guadalupe, and other angelic visitations. It isn’t convincing to argue that this proves the existence of angels or miracles.
(Actually, I do agree with what you say here, as you have changed the phrasing just a little, and allude to a “Jesus-like person.” I don’t have any question in accepting that there probably was a Jesus-like person. John the Baptist may have been real. The two might even have been the same guy, in stories told by different people.)
I think a point worth making explicitly is that the evidence we require to establish something does depend on what that something is.
The claim that Jesus rose from the dead, for example, is a startling one, and I can’t begin to think what kind of evidence we might require in order to it that as an established historical fact. Certainly, the evidence we have comes nowhere near to anything sufficient to establish the resurrection as a historical event.
On the other hand, the claims that Jesus was born, that he was an itinerant preacher, and that he was executed are much less startling, and therefore we might reasonable accept evidence that wouldn’t establish the resurrection as a historical fact as sufficient to establish these biographical details. And, I still maintain, by the standard generally applied by the academy to establish events from this period of history, these biographical details are pretty well established. It’s very much the majority view of historians of the period that Jesus was born, that he was an itinerant preacher and that he was executed.
But the same historians who accept this would not accept the resurrection as a historically-established fact, or the miracles attributed to Jesus, or indeed some of the biographical information which appears in only one of the sources, or the attribution of certain teachings to Jesus. In some cases these events are so extraordinary that they would require extraordinary evidence; in others the events are not inherently extraordinary, but they’re just not sufficiently well-attested in the sources. (Did Jesus actually say “I am the way, the truth and the light”? We only have one source that says he did. Did Jesus actually have a brother called James? We have two independent sources that say so (Paul, Mark) plus a source in which James appears as a significant character in his own right (Acts) plus a source which says that Jesus has a brother, but doesn’t name him (Jude). So, yeah, this is looking a bit more solid.)
There was a dude named Jesus. He was born in a slum to a single mom and, when he grew up, he got chased out of town, being accused as a charlatan and scoundrel.
He wandered around Israel for some years, practicing as a mystic and faith healer.
When he was about 30, a religious leader named John was immensely popular in Jerusalem and Jesus was favorable to his teachings, even going so far as to get baptized by this man. When John died, Jesus completed against several other mystics to attract John’s followers. But, in the end, Jesus probably only got a few dozen, even though John’s followers probably numbered in the hundreds of thousands.
Jesus mostly hung out in the sleazy, disreputable parts of Jerusalem. He preached mostly to the poor and hated of society, prostitutes, leapers, tax collectors, etc. He told them that they were actually the great ones and wealth and success were sins. He was so violently anti-wealth, he went to a church where they had a market running out front, destroyed everything in a fit of rage, cursed out the priests in no uncertain language, and ended up bringing down the authorities in himself for the public display.
At his trial, he acted like a jackass telling them all that he was the real King of the Jews and they had no authority over him. None of his followers are willing to give testimony at his trial, and in fact, most fled the area or pretended not to know of him.
When Jesus was put up on a stage, where he could seek the crowd’s good will, he continued to act like a jackass, and the crowd chose to pardon a random rabble-rowser instead.
He was subsequently executed.
The followers that he left behind were mostly just his family, and a few of John’s former followers. When a named Paul came and said he’d had a vision of Christ, John’s former followers, Peter, St. John, and Andrew all left the Jewish church to join Paul, leaving probably just Jesus’s family and a few women, of which at least one was a prostitute.
James, Jesus’s brother, allowed Paul to preach a non-Jewish religion, using Jesus’s name, after receiving financial support for the church/family, during a famine. Paul would later ease the requirements for non-Jews even further, without the blessing of James. Some years later, when Paul visited the Jerusalem church again, some members of the local community had him taken up on charges for making the local Jews angry (though it’s unclear why any Jews other than the Christians would care) and subsequently, he ended up on his path to eventual execution.
I’m not predisposed to discount this take.
If you take just the Orthodox account, in the Bible, and remove the magic, the story you are left with is not particularly glamorous. It’s basically the story of a few groups of competing lowlifes.
One of the criteria for determining historicity is the Criterion of Embarrassment. If something is unfavorable to the person telling the story, and seems to serve no other purpose, then it is probably a true account. Similarly, I might add a Criterion of Boring. If something is tedious minutiae without much point, like the name of various followers of Jesus who never do anything and serve no purpose in the story, again, it makes more sense to conclude that it is being written because it is true.
If there is an angel in the story, if Jesus performs miraculous acts in front of the multitude, but no one of the day could be bothered to write about it, and the roster of Jesus’s followers doors not seem to be inflated by it, then it’s probably safe to draw a line through those portions.
I recognize the desire to say that if Jesus isn’t great and he wasn’t magical, then he’s not Jesus. That Jesus isn’t what people mean when they say Jesus. But the description I just gave is purely from the Orthodox Gospels and Acts. That is what you get from the most popularly accepted works, if you remove the magic, and don’t sugar coat anything.
Now obviously one might complain that I’m giving the worst possible reading, but firstly I am not. There are a few more layers I could add to diminish the view of the historic Jesus. But mostly I’m not adding any positive interpretation. It’s good to support the poor and to rage against a classify society. Based on the Jesus of the New Testament, we probably had an easier time of moving to a meritocratic society that looks after the poor. Jesus’s hanging out with the scum of the Earth could be a righteous and amazing thing that he did, possibly the principal thing that set him aside from other cultists of the time. But he could also have been a whoring, gambling, con-artist. I don’t mean to offer a negative no interpretation of the story in the Bible, but there are many things in there that really open up the story for the worst possible interpretation, and I wanted to highlight those to demonstrate that if we take these Criterion of Embarrassment, there’s a lot of questionably content that really could have been cleaned up if you wanted to have a good guy to base your religion on. If nothing else, the Gospels are pretty clear that he just wasn’t very likable nor very popular. It’s very hard to read them, even with a positive outlook, and not notice the glaring disparity between his purported miracles to the number of his followers and their loyalty to him during the trial.
A smarter person, hell bent on making a good legendary founder, would give a more consistent story and go with something more like the Buddha - a former Prince who slowly let go of everything of value in life until hitting on a mystical vision that predisposes him to everyone, high and low. You don’t start with, yeah, God knocked up a girl living in a shanty town. :dubious:
So no, I’m not supporting the idea that Jesus was actually JESUS. I’m just saying that the basic, non-magical biography is probably correct. There was a man who was born in Nazareth. He was baptised by John. He was executed in Jerusalem. Paul based his religion, for some strange reason, on this man. Though, likely, Paul knew almost nothing about him or his teachings, and that had corrupted or knowledge of him.
Paul, as already noted, doesn’t say a huge amount about Jesus’s life and times. Nor does he say a huge amount about Jesus’s teachings. A plausible explanation for this is either (a) Paul didn’t know very much about Jesus’s life and teachings, or (b) he knew a certain amount, but his readership knew more, or had more authoritative sources than Paul available to them if they wanted to know more.
There’s the occasional sign that Paul may know more than he writes. For example, when it comes to marriage and divorce Paul lays out a set of teachings and he distinguishes with some precision between those which he attributes to Jesus, and those which he attributes to himself. That does point to some familiarity with what Jesus had to say about divorce, at any rate.
What this suggests is that, possibly, Paul’s comparative silence about biographical and doctrinal matters may not be down to ignorance, or entirely down to ignorance; it may simply be that addressing such matters is simply not part of his purpose for writing. He doesn’t need to tell the Galatians (or whoever) about Jesus’s life or his teachings, because they are already informed about these things.
What Paul mostly writes about is (a) the theological or mystical significance of Jesus’s death and resurrection, and (b) the implications that this has for how Christians should live, what they should esteem or value, etc, etc. Neither of these themes are what we would recognise as historical themes, and therefore the techniques of historical criticism are of limited use in evaluating them.
Perhaps we need to stop thinking in simple binaries here. If we accept that there was some person, if not more thane one person, who is the subject of the texts we have that refer to Jesus, then we could rephrase the OP as “how much of what is said about Jesus can we take to be historically established?” And then you could perhaps draw up lists of things that are broadly accepted as historical or probably historical, things that are generally regarded as not established, things about which there is dispute or disagreement, etc.
If we accept a “Jesus-like person”, one question we might reasonably ask is “was his name actually Jesus”? My gut feeling is yes, because (a) why change his name? And (b) it’s embarrassing to the synoptic gospels, who try to link him to the prophecies of Isaiah, that he isn’t called “Emmanuel” (and doesn’t come from Bethlehem). They solve the latter problem by fabricating a nativity-in-Bethlehem story, but they can’t solve the former problem because (we surmise) the fact of his name is already too well-established. (Similarly, despite the nativity story, they make no attempt to conceal the fact that, in adulthood, he was spoken of as someone from Nazareth - again, because this was likely well-known.)
Is he the same person as John the Baptist, in stories by different people? Unlikely, if only because most of the stories about them are by the same people. (As in, most of our sources for John also mention Jesus, and vice versa. And they all distinguish between John and Jesus. We don’t have any source attributing to John something that others attribute to Jesus.) What seems much more likely is that he was a follower of John, who later broke off (amicably or otherwise) and ran an independent ministry.