The problem is not “me being satisfied”. The problem is there is no proof Jesus existed.
Which is perfectly fine, when they’re assessed critically and contextually.
Which, incidentally, is what actual historians (i.e. people who have some semblance of a clue what they’re doing i.e. not you) do with any source anyway.
1- none of the church fathers wrote about him or met him while he was living
2- they are biased source anyway
name me a historical figure whom we have 100% certainty existed that no first hand accounts exist for
There’s never any proof of anything in history. History doesn’t work that way–for that matter, neither does any other academic field outside of mathematics and logic. All you ever can do is make a claim of probability based on the preponderance of evidence.
And? Doesn’t make their work useless.
And? There is literally no such thing as a non-biased source. Bias (or, more properly, “perspective”) is an inherent element of anything produced or done by humans.
You’re literally just pulling standards out of your ass, because you have no idea how history is done, because you’re interested in pushing your agenda rather than actually thinking about things and acquiring a rigorous, reality-based understanding of the past.
Alexander the Great.
it makes their works entirely useless. i see TV preachers and street corner preachers make stuff up ALL THE TIME. to think that they were not doing this wholesale 2000 years ago is, how do you put it, having an agenda that ignores reality
interesting…
so there’s no proof george washington existed?
In 2000 years time there will be no proof you existed. Does that cause you to vanish in a puff of unsmoke now ?
Well most of the material about Pythagoras was penned centuries after his death. While he was an author, none of his writings survived. Gutenberg wouldn’t invent the printing press until the 1400s: it’s not like we can just pull the newspaper clippings.
no, it doesn’t
but, if 2000 years from now someone wanted $100 to help put into stained glass windows for the church of Robert163, a smart person would ask for some type of proof that i did exist
That is a problem in its own right, yes. But it’s not necessarily a rebuttal of the critiques of methods used by the linked author.
I think the authors point was, if, you had someone who regularly healed leprecy, blindness and other diseases, raised people from the dead and himself returned from the dead, and, finally, floated up to the heavens, that such extraordinary events would be recorded somewhere by someone
Compare the evidence for Jesus with that of others. I’ve already mentioned John the Baptist, whose historicity is generally accepted but, like Jesus, has little or no near-contemporanenous mention outside the Bible and Josephus.
A more interesting example might be King David. This man wasn’t an alleged healer from the backwater of Galilee, but a great king who unified Israel and Judea. Did he really exist? Many scholars think or thought that David was mythical but recent discoveries may have turned opinion: a scrap of stone from the 9th century BC mentioning a “king of the House of David”, a large wall excavated in Jerusalem, dateable by accompanying pottery to the time when Jerusalem was either a small village or housed a great King.
I realize David lived 1000 years before Jesus, so evidence was much scanter. Even so, when the non-Biblical evid encefor the great hero-King David comprises only a piece of a wall and a stone fragment that mentions “House of David”, is it reasonable to argue that absence of evidence for Jesus is evidence of absence?
the reason why people have a hard time finding bigfoot is because big foot uses a force field of invisibility. its true. because, after all, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence…
That’s a perfectly reasonable argument.
Only if you ignore the fact that claims that he did these things date from 40 to 50 years after his supposed death. Claims that he lived at all, however, are much earlier. Scepticism about the later claim does not affect the credibility of the earlier claim.
I can be sceptical about the claim that the infant George Washington chopped down a cherry tree without going to the extreme of denying that he was ever born.
not the point. religious people want to assert the existence of jesus as a historical figure as an indisputable fact. well, they don’t get to make such claims, not without proof.
The existence of a historical Jesus of Nazareth does not require that any particular alleged miracle, or any miracle whatsoever, actually occurred. If the more spectacular bits of the story are later accretions, what’s left is the account of a local rabble-rouser whose failure to make it into surviving secular histories is not at all surprising.
so basically, what you are saying is, disproving the existence of superman would not necessarily disprove the existence of clark kent… ?
What about evidence? Will you take evidence?
i’m quite interested in what you are gong to provide as evidence…