Basically, this guy combed through ancient texts from around the time Christ allegedly lived and found no evidence supporting the claim that this person existed, deity or not. Now, I’m no expert when it comes to history. I can usually tell a bogus medical study, but history is not my field, so I don’t quite know what to make of this. Is this study well-designed? Can the conclusions really be taken from it? Any history buffs in here with comments? I think that it is certainly fairly damning that nobody found such events as the dead rising from their graves, feeding thousands with only two fishes and three loaves, or even just a political leader that was deemed dangerous enough to put to death worth putting down on paper… But I might be wrong.
Full disclosure: I’m an atheist, and think Jesus was probably a historical figure who’s mundane deeds were turned into divine deeds by authors with an agenda decades after he died. Just my opinion.
I read the article but couldn’t see the list of texts the researcher reviewed. Depending on those texts, it might not have been surprising: If one of the texts is “A History of Gaul”, then of course Jesus would not be mentioned in it. One the other hand, if one of the texts is “Jewish Religious Leaders in the Jerusalem Area”, then that would be quite odd.
Not to mention that there’s a huge amount of work from that era that is lost to the sands of time: Don’t we only have 7 of the 100+ plays Sophocles wrote?
All this is beside the point though: if someone is a Christian, this is not going to change their view. If someone is already not a Christian, this won’t change their view.
Yeah, if you go through the term papers I wrote in high school and as an undergrad, you’ll almost certainly find no mention of George W. Bush or Barack Obama.
That’s because neither of them were ever germane to anything I was writing about.
This seems to suit an agenda. Note the hand-waving of Josephus as “a forgery,” which isn’t a very nuanced understanding of the text. Further, Paulkovich claims that various ancient authors ought to have heard of Jesus and mentioned him in the writings because of Jesus’s “global miracles and alleged worldwide fame,” but that isnt responding to a claim about historical Jesus. That is responding to a claim about a Jesus who was not only historical, but also magical / divine / whatever. His claim falls flat when you ask “so would these people be writing about a random Jewish preacher making small-town headlines in Backwater, Palestine?”
I don’t really understand why this issue would matter to anybody. If there was a historical Jesus, it does nothing to validate the religious claims made by Christians. If there wasn’t, well, it still does nothing to validate the religious claims made by Christians. If you are looking to invalidate the claims, there are a lot easier ways than worrying about the historicity of Jesus.
Some reasons to believe Jesus (though not necessarily his fantastic miracles) existed:
[ul][li] A village at Nazareth from the time of Christ has been unearthed. Earlier, its alleged non-existence at the time of Jesus was used as an argument against historicity.[/li][li] If a new religion chose to invent a Messiah, Occam’s razor suggests they’d pick a real person, perhaps John the Baptist, rather than a fictional one. Josephus’ mention was early enough that oldsters still alive could have contradicted him, were Jesus fictional.[/li][/ul]
Historical references that early are just rare. IIRC, only one contemporary reference to Pontius Pilate, much more powerful in life than Jesus, exists outside the Bible.
John the Baptist was much more famous in life than Jesus and I don’t think his existence is disputed. How much evidence for him is there outside the New Testament?
I’m not a Christian myself, but… which “global miracles” is he talking about? And what worldwide fame? Jesus’s miracles were mostly pretty local affairs, weren’t they? He didn’t turn water into wine everywhere, just at that one wedding. He didn’t feed the entire world with seven loaves and seven fishes, just a hundred or so people who were hanging out with him. He didn’t raise the dead globally, just that one guy. Even if all these accounts were 100% true stories of things that actually happened, I wouldn’t expect it to come to the attention of the Emperor of Rome.
Well, I suppose the story of the wise men following a fixed star to the infant Jesus is the sort of thing that someone might have noticed, and probably that bit about the dead saints rising from their graves at the Resurrection would have been more widely noted. But people make up bullshit about real historical figures all the time. George Washington never chopped down that cherry tree, but that doesn’t mean the Battle of Trenton never happened.
And the supernatural stuff aside, Jesus never really did anything that was particularly noteworthy outside his small corner of the Middle East. He was a minor religious leader who pissed off the establishment, who sold him out to the Romans as a “dangerous agitator.” That basically describes about half the people we put in Guantanamo.
Especially since similar reports of similar miracles would be in constant circulation in every corner of the Ancient World. The claims about Jesus aren’t unique unless you’re a Christian who a priori believes Jesus’s miracles and doubts all others.
I agree with your larger point, that most of the ‘miracles’ were pretty small potatoes - curse a fig tree? whoa nelly there! - but raising someone from the dead seems like it would be a pretty big deal.
Then again, given the time period, there was probably a claim of some shaman in some podunk province raising someone from the dead twice a week.
Sophocles was just the first person from antiquity that came to mind. But yes, I’d put them in the same era. 4 centuries where the difference is 1600 to 2000 is a much bigger difference technologically/historically than 4 centuries difference in the BC timeframe. I mean, there are kings and emperors of places that are barely a footnote from all over that era. I mean, the emperor of the Wagadou (Ghana) empire in 1067 AD barely gets a two-liner in Wikipedia, and he was both much more recent and much more powerful locally than Jesus of Nazareth, who is really a very minor figure historically.
So he read 126 documents written in the first century that didn’t mention Jesus. If you wrote down every name that appeared in any of those documents you’re probably have a few thousand names when you were done.
Does that prove that the world was populated by those few thousand people? Of course not. The reality is that the first century was not an era of written records - which is why Paulkovich was able to claim 126 documents represents a significant sample.
Most people who lived back then wouldn’t have been mentioned in any written record but they existed nonetheless.
This I think is the key point. If Jesus were just another small-time failed apocryphal prophet, why would you expect to find anything written about him?
It doesn’t really establish that there wasn’t some Jesus all this was based on, BUT…
BUT… this work does invalidate the claims made by Christians, because if those stories in the Gospels were true, then you would expect to find something written about him contemporaneously.
And that’s all that’s important, right? I mean, I don’t really care, beyond simple curiosity, whether there was a real person that all these myths got attached to years and decades later. There were lots of failed apocryphal prophets, and lots of guys in the area named Yeshua - it’s the stories in the Gospels that matter, and this guy’s work does present a pretty strong case why all of that is false.
I wasn’t really talking about the usefulness of the miracle, as much as how widely the effects of the miracle would be directly noticeable. The fixed star in the sky guiding people to Jesus’s birthplace would have been noticed by astronomers around the world. The lack of any such mention in non-Christian sources is pretty good evidence that it never happened. The resurrection of Lazarus would have been witnessed by maybe a dozen people. You wouldn’t expect the story to appear in any contemporary source, unless it was specifically talking about Christians.
Nitpick: two guys and a girl. In addition to Lazarus there was also the centurion’s servant and some guy’s daughter.
Which always bothered me. If the disciples knew he’d brought no fewer than three people back from the dead, and he also prophesied his own murder and resurrection, you’d expect them to react to the events of the Passion with a lot more dispassion. When the Romans came to arrest him in the Garden, they’d have said, “Yeah, whatever dudes. You have no idea who you’re fucking with here.”
Why would you think that? Again, with a couple of exceptions, nothing attributed to Jesus (either supernaturally or politically) is particularly noteworthy given the time and place in which he lived. Lots and lots of people claimed to have divine powers and a pipeline to the Almighty. Lots and lots of people bitched about the government a little too loudly and ended up nailed to a cross because of it. Even if Jesus could work actual miracles, the evidence for it is still basically the say-so of him and his pals, the same as any other contemporary cult leader.
Because according to Paulkovich, if he really did all that miraculous stuff, someone would have noticed and written about it. Look at an extreme example - if a bunch of dead Jews had risen from their graves and walked around Jerusalem when Jesus was crucified, that would have been noteworthy. Other miracles would have been noteworthy too, to a lesser extent.
That always bugged me, as well. You would think that they would have confidence in the person who they had supposedly seen do all sorts of wondrous stuff.
Right, but again: if you want to invalidate Christians’ claims about their religion, there are better ways to do so. The resurrection, for a start. But attacking religion with logic doesn’t work: it’s a fundamental misunderstanding of religion, starting with the false and rather patronizing assumption that people are only Christian because they don’t know any better.
The rest of us aren’t claiming that historical Jesus was anything other than human, and so trying to invalidate that claim (which is what he purports to do) has zero effect on the Christians’ special pleadings about the guy.
In other words, he’s barking up the wrong tree, and kind of clumsily.
I would agree with that. Even if he existed that doesn’t prove anything. Muhammad existed, John Smith existed, L Ron Hubbard existed, Japanese emperors existed. That doesn’t even begin to prove that any claims they made or were made about them are true in any way.
Well it’s been known since basically ever that there are no contemporary historical mentions of Jesus. In fact if this study had found the opposite, that would have been an enormous, front page headline fine. Instead it confirms something long known, that we have no contemporary historical references to Jesus.
We can’t know anything for certain, but I think the reasonable historical interpretation is Jesus probably existed as the leader of one of the Eastern Mystery Cults / breakaway Jewish sects that were quite common in that era and he was simply too minor in life to get contemporary mention.
I don’t think we have a comprehensive list of every Roman Governor of major provinces, and those guys were all far, far more powerful and important than Jesus ever was in life.
While we have better support for his life, Jesus to me is probably a Socrates type figure. Socrates’s life isn’t actually well documented or known, but he had a very famous student who is very well known and who took pains to make Socrates himself well known. Paul sort of served that role for Jesus, and while scripture doesn’t indicate Paul ever met Jesus physically it’s unlikely Paul would have just randomly invented a messiah to start this whole religion around when he could have picked oh, himself, if it was that easy to just invent someone. Paul was almost certainly cashing in on the remnant notoriety Jesus already had among some small splinter group, and Paul turned it into a world religion.
If it had been another eastern cult leader instead of Jesus, we’d literally not know Jesus ever existed and there’d be this other guy whose existence we were questioning. There’s a lot of falsifiable stuff from scripture about Jesus because “history hates a vacuum” and some pagan myths have been ascribed to Jesus’ life, but in total I think the fairest historical analysis would suggest that it’d be “odd” for people to make up a mortal man to worship as a God a generation or so after his purported death.
There were indeed mortal men later worshipped as Gods, and all of them were a lot more impressive figures than the (non-miracle filled) account of Jesus’s life. I mean why not the Cult of Alexander or something? It’s weird that back then when things like noble birth, heroic deeds etc were what was sexy and sold that you’d make up a religion based on an itinerant preacher washing the feet of the poor and treating prostitutes and lepers with dignity. Something like that to me makes more sense if it came from an actual guy, preaching something out of step with a lot of religion in that area at that time (and thus what caused it to catch on, in the hands of a better proselytizer than historical Jesus.)