I note also that this dude deliberately left off the list all the Church Fathers who lived and wrote about that time (and since he seems to be going well into the second century, that’s half a dozen or so at least).
So basically his argument is “nobody wrote about Jesus … except this bunch of people over here, but they don’t count because they thought he was important enough to join his religion, as well as write about him.”
Uh-huh.
Atheist here. Whether or not Yeshua bar-Yusuf actually existed, the fiction surrounding him is so entrenched that the reality is irrelevant.
Yeah, I mentioned the resurrection of the Saints in my first post as an example of a story about Jesus that would have have wider textual support. But as I also pointed out, that story is fairly atypical of the miracles attributed to Jesus. Most of them are relatively small in scope. If Jesus really did turn water into wine set the wedding in Canaan, do you think that’s going to attract any notice from people beyond the local area? How is someone writing a history of the region supposed to separate that particular story of miracle working from all the dozens and dozens of similar stories being circulated by frauds, lunatics, and the just plain gullible?
People like a good story.
Jesus Fucking Christ folks, have you never heard that absence of evidence is not evidence of absence?
I’m just a Jew with no background in history, but why should lots of people have run out and written about Jesus? Back then, most people couldn’t read. If you wanted to spread the word, much more effective to tell people.
This is not strictly true. If something has a large effect, and you expect to be able to observe that effect, then absence of evidence IS evidence of absence. That’s the argument this guy is making. A (supposedly) remarkable guy existed. Should have had the effect of getting him noticed and recorded in history. Not so, ergo he didn’t exist. Of course, everyone in this thread is making the argument that he could have existed and just not been remarkable. Which in my mind should be just as effective an argument against Jesus the lord and saviour as his non existence, but what do I know?
He did get recorded in history - we have multiple secondary sources for him, starting from abut twenty years after his death, give or take. And this is because, after his death, he had a community of followers making noise about him and getting noticed. And in fact it’s his followers who produce most (but not all) of the secondary sources about him.
But where somebody is only recorded because of his notable impact on his society, then secondary sources are all you’re likely to get. People write about him because of the wider consequences of what he said, did or taught, and already you’ve got editing, interpretation, selection, etc at work. The writings of Paul, etc, are a primary source for the existence of the Jesus movement, and a secondary source for the existence of Jesus himself. This would be true even if Paul had started writing while Jesus was still alive. There is no primary source for the existence of Jesus because why would there be?
Keep in mind there were dozens of supposed miracle workers wondering around the Roman Empire. There were lots of people who were supposedly being raised from the dead by magicians. It’s even an argument that’s been used by some people who say Jesus didn’t exist. They say the early Christians just took the common stories being told about other magicians and invented their own magician. Which rebuts Paulkovich’s argument that stories about miracles were so unusual that everyone in the empire would have been talking about somebody who supposedly performed them.
And arguing about miracles ignores the central point. There’s a big gap between arguing that Jesus didn’t perform miracles and arguing that Jesus didn’t exist. The likeliest explanation is that Jesus was an ordinary human being who went around preaching until he was arrested and executed. His followers told people about Jesus after his death and the stories about him grew in the telling. Miracles got added to his sermons because people expected miracles back then.
But the argument is no contemporary historical source (also secondary sources) mentions him. The only ones that mention him are, as you mention, 20 years after his death, by people attempting to start a religion. That’s not very good evidence. At the same time, like I said, I don’t give a shit if he was real. His life and achievements weren’t remarkable, because no one saw fit to remark upon them. The stories made up(and we do agree they’re mostly made up, right?) about his life by the people who wanted to start a cult around and put in the Bible were remarkable, and those people were able to use them to start the cult and over time it became successful. Jesus’s historicity is not at all critical in undercutting Christianity and its claims.
I have been in the camp of Jesus never existed for decades. Glad someone is catching up.
You would think so, wouldn’t you? But then, you would also have thought that about the Crab Supernova. There you have a genuine miracle, that we’re 100% certain occurred, half as far into antiquity as Jesus: A never-before-seen star so bright that it could be seen at high noon. And yet, there are no records of it from anywhere in all of Europe, or indeed from anywhere else in the world other than China and maybe (debatably) the American Southwest. If the Crab Supernova could go unnoticed, then maybe the Star of Bethlehem could, too. And that’s even aside from the possibility that the Star was some subtle phenomenon that the astrologers would have noticed, but that Matthew, not being an astrologer, bungled the details.
Most of the sources Paulkovich says he checked were written a hundred years later than that. So why are they considered legitimate sources when the earlier works are not?
Paulkovich seems to have adopted a self-proving standard. There obviously are early works that mention Jesus. But Paulkovich dismisses any work that does so as not being a legitimate source. And then having done this, he declares that no legitimate source mentions Jesus. It’s a circular argument.
Yes, Jesus’s historicity is not at all critical in undercutting Christianity and its claims. But this thread is about Jesus’s historicity, not about Christianity and its claims.
As for Jesus not being mentioned in “contemporary historical sources”, what contemporary historical sources do you have in mind that you would expect to mention him? There are no newspaper/archive-type records to record unremarkable events; events don’t get recorded in the history of the period until they have become remarkable. And what makes Jesus remarkable is the Jesus movement, and this really only got going in an organised way that might be noted after Jesus’ death. So, no mention in the historical sources which are contemporary with Jesus.
As for agreeing that the stories are “mostly made up”, no. I’ll grant you that the miracle stories are mostly made up, but the bulk of the material we have about Jesus - whether we accept it or not - is not miracle stories.
The first writings we have about Jesus are the writings of Paul, which predate all the gospels. Paul is very light on biographical detail - he tells us practically nothing about the life or career of Jesus - but he is equally light on miracle stories. The miracle stories mostly come from the gospels, which are later compositions. The one miracle Paul does mention is the resurrection of Jesus himself, but he gives little colourable detail, and the author of the research that gives rise to this thread claims that Paul’s mentions of the resurrection - and indeed of the crucifixion - are intended metaphorically.
And this gives us a problem. Because while the writings of Paul are only secondary evidence for the existence of Jesus, they are primary evidence for the existence of a Jesus movement, dispersed across the region, with functioning communities in many different cities. How are we to account for the existence of this movement?
You can argue that Jesus was a fictional character, and that the movement was sustained not by anybody’s memory of a real person but by dramatic miracle stories told about the fictional character. But this has two problems. First, we have no evidence, primary or secondary, that most of the dramatic miracle stories existed at this time, and I don’t see why you would accept without contemporary evidence the existence of the stories any more than you would accept without contemporary evidence the existence of Jesus. Secondly, the evidence is that the Jesus movement was present in Jerusalem well within the lifetime of many people who would have been there during the events of Jesus’ life. We need to explain why, if the story that Jesus travelled, preached, gathered followers and was crucified by the Romans was wholly fictional, it achieved any traction with the very people best positioned to know that it was wholly fictional?
The parsimonious explanation for the existence, with 20 years of Jesus’ supposed death, of a Jesus movement in Jerusalem and other cities of the region is that Jesus was a historical figure, and the stories which suggest that he travelled, preached, etc in the region before being crucified are not made up. It’s true that there is no contemporary evidence of this, but alternative explanations also require postulates for which there is no contemporary evidence, and which on the whole make less sense.
If your standard for contemporary is “within 20 years of Jesus death” then that’s a very different standard to the one the author of that article is using. The vast majority of those authors either weren’t even born at the time Jesus died, never went to Palestine, or weren’t writing history/current affairs in the first place.
As a scholar of Roman history and early Christianity, I find the “Jesus never existed” folks have a pretty puzzling lack of understanding of what ancient documents represent, as well as a bizarre standard for historicity.
There are lots of people whom we know existed for whom there is equally little contemporary historical evidence, but because they didn’t instigate a major world religion, nobody is really worried about that. We have almost no evidence at all for the first 4 centuries of Roman history, and there are definitely some “mythical” figures in our sources, but there are plenty of historical figures too.
We have vanishing little evidence for anything from that time period. What evidence we do have is frequently compromised in various ways. Most people, including most obscure religious figures, were either not written about at all, or only vaguely in reference to other things, much later.
Josephus may not have told the truth, but his work is not a “forgery”.
What is the explanation for Paul’s writings, dateable to 50s-60s AD? Interacting with followers in the living memory of Jesus? It’s nonsensical, unless you are really into conspiracy theories, to imagine Paul was “inventing” Jesus, unless you imagine all of these people are also invented.
None of this has any bearing on the truth of claims made about Jesus, but I really don’t get why this is a tactic at all.
Also, I think it is a misunderstanding of the origins of Christianity to suggest that Paul and the other founders were “attempting to start a religion”. They were attempting to make specific claims about Jesus within Judaism for a long time before there was a definitive split, which is not the same thing at all.
Also, one point to consider: the followers of Jesus (until Paul came along) were primarily not of the upper classes. Very few people in this time and place could read, and even fewer could write. In Judaea, a large percentage of people who could do those things were closely tied into the Roman and/or Jewish power structures – not likely Jesus fans, in other words. The fact that the first followers of Jesus wrote little or nothing which has survived is not really surprising in that context either.
Actually, by the standards of classical history, it’s pretty damn good. Your assumptions about how things should work is not a substitute for historical methodologies devised over decades and centuries by people who have devoted literally their entire adult lives to these problems, who are intimately familiar with the kinds of evidence available and the questions surrounding them, and who actually know what they’re talking about.
To all the people in opposition to this study which found lack of evidence for a real historical jesus… how DO you establish the historical validity of a historical figure apart from their inclusion in accurate historical texts???
Are the writings this guy scoured particularly obscure or previously-unread? If so, I could sort of understand him saying “OMG, Jesus isn’t in any of these!!!1”, but it sort of sounds like this was more a case of “Let’s go and look whether Jesus really isn’t mentioned in a load of documents where we already know he isn’t mentioned”.