Lack of evidence Jesus existed. Do we typically have evidence of historical figures from that time?

Factual Questions
101

My impression, for what it’s worth, is that mythical-Jesus is pretty much a fringe theory; it’s the classical historian’s equivalent of being an anti-vaxxer or a climate change denialist. According to Bart Ehrman, in fact, a Jesus-mythicist is about as likely to get a position in a university department of religious studies or classical studies as a six-day creationist is to get a position in a department of biology.

Whether Ehrman’s claim is true or not, I can’t say. But, if it’s untrue, it can easily be refuted by pointing to mythicists holding appointments of this kind.

102

Sorry, missed this earlier.

I don’t know a huge amount about this. SFAIK the Gospel of Thomas is the only apocryphal gospel which is or could be be as early, or earlier, than the canonical gospels and therefore the only one which, regarded as a historical source, might be comparable with them in terms of usefulness or reliability.

It is, however, a “sayings gospel” - a collection of teachings and saying attributed to Jesus, with little or no biographical information. Therefore it doesn’t tell us much, one way or the other, about the historical Jesus.

Plus, because it’s a sayings gospel, it’s hard to date. It doesn’t describe any events, etc that would help in dating, and the text is very sparse. And since it largely consists of speech attributed to Jesus, even the style of writing isn’t necessarily indicative of when it was written. So it could be as early as Paul, and some scholars suggest conceivably even earlier. On the other hand, it could be as late as John, or a fair bit later.

It would be relevant in establishing, as a matter of history, what Jesus actually taught vs. teachings that were later attributed to him (which might or might not be developments rooted in things he actually taught). Some of the sayings attributed to Jesus in Thomas correspond to sayings attributed to him in canonical gospels; this tends to increase our confidence that he did in fact say them, or something like them. Others have no parallel in the canonicals, and then you can argue (a) that they are likely inauthentic, or (b) that they are authentic, but were forgotten or actively supressed when the Christian movement took a distinctively Pauline turn, or (c) something else.

As far as the historical Jesus goes, Thomas does contribute to the case that, at the time of its composition, there was a community out there - the community that produced this gospel - that regarded Jesus as a person to whom sayings could be attributed. But since we don’t really know when it was composed, that doesn’t get us very far.

103

Jesus did exist, the name means Saviour and it’s truly a fact that he is.

His name was Emmanuel and this means, God with us.

Any true Israelite knows who Jesus is, just as Nathanael knew who he was directly because he was a true Israelite !

Jesus is a Prophet and not only that, but much more, the Son of God !

Jesus is not God the Father, but it’s within the Trinity that one can comprehend that he is “God with us” and it’s the Holy Spirit that convinces us truly indeed of this fact.
If you don’t have a comprehension of the Holy Spirit then you are just lost as to how the three work as one and not only that, without such a comprehension then your just truly lost to the comprehension of most things in the Bible, remember Jesus said one ‘must’ be born again of the Holy Spirit.
Baptism is the path that is hoped to lead one to the Holy Sprit, Water Baptism is not the end but the start for the repentance of sin.

Jesus is the Holy Sprit and without such, one can not comprehend God the Father, but through his Son, such is in the Light of the Holy Sprit. bingo ! Grace under Christ Jesus is salvation the way and the Light.
It’s Emmanuel working within us.

Fact is that Jesus exist today and not only that but to the end of the world, He is the beginning and the end.

104

Ah, ask the true Israelites, the Caananites.

According to them, The true gods are given here

105

Well this is plainly, blatantly not true since the publication of peer-reviewed scholarly research in books such as On the Historicity of Jesus: Why We Might Have Reason for Doubt.

Richard Carrier addressed some of this on his blog:Bart Ehrman Just Can’t Do Truth or Logic.

106

Richard Carrier described the correct process for determining historicity in great detail in Proving History: Bayes’s Theorem and the Quest for the Historical Jesus, both explaining why the consensus is often based on an incorrect process and how to do it right.

107

To the OP, do you believe in Atlantis?

108

Umm, cite?

109

I’ve looked into this some, and even took a college class on the history of the time of Jesus, and another about Bible history. I believe the answer is that we don’t have much evidence for the historical figure, Jesus, but we really wouldn’t expect to, other than through dumb luck. Very few people from that time were well documented, other than princes and such.

But this is a very strange claim. Alexander is very well documented, even if the primary sources haven’t survived. Several secondary sources exist which clearly name their primary source, and if course we have political and archeological evidence of Alexander’s empire.

A short Google search will give you lots of evidence. Here’s one summary source:

Socrates is also pretty well attested, say, by Plato.

but this!

We have tons of evidence that a cult of Jesus grew up shortly after he is supposed to have lived. Sure, someone could have made up “Jesus”, but Occam’s razor suggests the guy was a real historical figure.

I don’t know about you, but I have zero doubt of the existence of John Smith and L. Ron Hubbard. I am not a Christian. I don’t believe most of the claims made about Jesus. And I don’t even think his existence has been conclusively proven. But I think it is much more likely than not that he existed, came from Nazareth, preached to the poor, was a rabble rouser, and was crucified for disturbing the peace. (Lots of false messiahs were, that’s a very non-extraordinary claim.)

110

I believe that a technologically advanced culture on the island now known as Santorini was destroyed by a volcanic eruption. I’ve seen the remnants of that culture, and the ash.

111

Richard Carrier compares Paul writing about Jesus to John Smith writing about Moroni.

Since we have tons of evidence that a cult of Latter Day Saints based on the teachings of Moroni grew up shortly after he is supposed to have met with John Smith, does your Occam’s razor suggest Moroni was a real historical figure?

We have evidence of many cults rapidly growing about mythical figures.

112

Jesus isn’t those guys, he’s Moroni or Xenu. He’s the one the story’s about, not the one telling the story. Not even mythicists doubt the existence of Paul.

113

Moderator Note

Commodore, witnessing to your religious faith is not appropriate to General Questions. Please limit posts like this to Great Debates. No warning issued, but don’t make another post like this outside of that forum.

Colibri
General Questions Moderator

114

The revelation Smith claimed to have received wasn’t a story about a real person Moroni. The supposed messiah Jesus Christ and Moroni have in common the supernatural/divinity. The supposed historical figure Jesus of Nazareth and Moroni have nothing in common. Nobody claimed Moroni was a real human. Moroni is more analogous to the angels who appear at various times in the Gospels, Satan where he appears in the Gospel to tempt Jesus in the desert, or the Holy Spirit in the Acts of the Apostles. But we’re not discussing whether the supernatural/divine aspects of either story have evidence.

This seems a persistent problem in this debate. People say ‘yeah I understand, it’s whether there was any such person, not whether the divine/supernatural aspects of Christian belief are true’, but many people don’t seem to really stick to that distinction as they make their arguments. In the parochial Western Christian v Post-Christian conflict, people have trouble getting past the implications of the historic Jesus about the Christian religion. That is, a real historical Jesus is a basically necessary though not sufficient condition for any traditional form* of the Christian religion to be valid. Claiming there was no person Jesus basically* invalidates the religion. And a lot of people of each side, and no not just on the religious side, have a lot personally invested in that.

*it’s possible in theory to believe in the teachings of Jesus and their divine origin without caring if there was such a person or not, but the existence of a Jesus-person still has major implications in the theistic/atheist split in Western society.

115

Not a fair comparison, because, among other reasons, the “cult of Christians” was already well established before Paul got involved.

116

Moroni isn’t described as just a spiritual being, he had concrete effects (golden plates) subject to the same empirical analysis as a human Jesus. But that’s besides the point - judging the attestation is about the textual evidence for both, anyway, so the human-ness or angel-ness of the referent is irrelevant.

117

But Paul specifically refers to the other side as false gospel. The word “gospel” means “good news”. If Paul’s rivals were going around saying you have to follow the laws of circumcision, kosher diet, et cetera, in what way is that “news”? That’s just same-old same-old Judaism, not any kind of “gospel”. Whatever the other side of that argument was, it must have been something different.

118

Uh, no. That does not prove UDS wrong. If anything, it suggests that he is right.

A theory can be a fringe theory, even if it supported by publication of peer-reviewed scholarly research. If a theory is supported by only a tiny amount of peer-reviewed research, while the overwhelming majority of peer-reviewed research contradicts that theory, then that theory is a fringe theory. That’s pretty much the definition of a fringe theory, is it not?

There are certainly peer-reviewed papers and such from the climate change denialist position. They just don’t constitute a majority of the research on the topic; they represent a small minority. If you can name one scholarly book arguing that Jesus was not a historical figure, but only one, then it would seem that you have confirmed what UDS said.

There are several peer-reviewed academic journals dedicated solely to the study of the New Testament documents and early Christian history, and hundreds in fields of history, archaeology, ancient literature and so forth that sometimes deal with those topics. A vast amount of academic material is published there every year. Earlier I asked you: “How much is ‘a lot’? Of all the scholarly articles and books written in the past generation about Jesus and the New Testament, what percentage support the mythicist position?”

You don’t seem to be in any hurry to answer.

119

I never said it wasn’t a minority position. I said it wasn’t on the level of the anti-vaxxers or climate change denialists. The peer-reviewed scholarly research for the anti-vax position has been thoroughly debunked. Likewise any climate change denialist research. That just isn’t true about the published mythicist position. On the contrary, the published research has pointed out major flaws in the methodologies that have historically supported the historicity position.

120

To the OP, should he be reading, I’d just like to note that information about Jesus was specially conserved through to today. In many senses, he’s actually quite well attested.

I don’t know enough about Alexander the Great to comment about him, but if you compare Jesus to other figures who were in the same class of the time, John the Baptist, Simon Magus, Dositheos, Ebion, St James, Ananias, Judas, etc. we have far more information that we’re fairly accepting of (3-4 sentences worth) than we do of these other figures, way more information about Jesus which is plausibly true (paragraphs), and potentially that information only exists thanks to the Jesus connection. (The sections of the Ginza Rba that I have read make me think that it’s no earlier than a late 2nd century work. So I wouldn’t currently accept any biographical information about John the Baptist from it as being very worthwhile.)

One of those things about archaeology and textual history is that we don’t know the things we have no information about. We’re not even aware of the gap. If there was a giant warehouse in the middle of Jerusalem, that had collected every single piece of testimony on the visit of extra terrestrials to Earth, in 65 AD, and that building was destroyed and burned in 70 AD, we would have no inkling that ET had visited.

Take, for example, the Great Hedge of India. This is something that existed only 200 years ago, but was rarely discussed in print and few of those writings were preserved, just through random luck. We almost lost all record of it, and didn’t know that there was such a gap in our knowledge, until a single sentence that referred to it was found in 1995. (There ended up being more information about it available, but it was all in obscure, old works that may have all ended up one day being recycled for space, or who knows what.)

Overall if, say, the population of Judea around 30 AD was 1 million people (a random, plausible number), but all of the names of all of the people that we have from that time and place is a few hundred, then that’s not a particularly good set of records. Particularly not if, for most of the hundred, we have nothing more than a name and maybe a profession. And if we say that we really only care about the 1% most important people, then we’d be hoping for information on 10,000 people. And, as the most important 1%, we would probably expect to have more than just their name and profession. We certainly don’t have that.

We probably do have a few hundred people from the 1st Century, in Judea, where we can say both what their name is and what their profession was. Adding in gravestones, maybe we could get a number more names, but not much else. But that probably means that we’re missing 90-99% of the people most likely to be historically notable. And that’s just a complete blind spot. With that many people missing, significant changes to our view of what the world was like at that time, in that place, could be revealed. We’re limited to the not-necessarily-truthful views of a few individuals who wrote about a small, select subset of the group we want to know about, who are themselves just a small subset of the whole population at that time.

By that standard, the information we have on Jesus is extraordinary. The fact that we can debate extensively and track information from Christian sources to Roman to Mandaean to Arab, and find some amount of all of it slightly elucidating, is impressive. It could all be a lie, or an extreme distortion of something true, but the works that we have which are plausibly from the right time and place, about this one man, is actually quite expansive given what we would expect from the information we have on everyone else of the time.

Lives aren’t really at stake, when it comes to the historicity of Jesus. So the lack of similar animosity would make sense. At the end of the day, debates over the historicity of Jesus are liable to have about as much impact on the quality of life of humanity as debating whether your least favorite rugby team cheated in that game in '67.