That quote indicates that they saw the “Arabs of Muhammed” - in fact it was written 5 years after Muhammed had died. So no, the writer didn’t indicate that he saw Muhammed.
The point that it’s all rather silly? He puts it forwards as some big new revelation, when in fact those very same texts he poured over have been read a thousand times before and any mention of anything that could remotely be linked to Jesus noted and discussed ad nauseum. It would have been news if he had found a mention of Christ, not finding it is common knowledge.
Then I note he uses the celestial title Christ, rather than the more earthly Jesus of Nazareth. Of course he’ll find no proof of Christ anywhere. Only Christians believe in a Christ, and they’re not going to be swayed by a non-mention in some texts on the subject of sewers in Rome or whatever topic, or the ruminations of a historian. Which leaves his audience to be non-Christians. Preaching to the choir of non-believers. How impressive.
And what of it all, what does it really matter if a historical person was in fact a historic invention? Not a lot I’d say. If Newton turns out not to have lived we’d still have gravity. If Shakespeare turns out to be an alias of somebody else his works would be just as brilliant. If Jesus or Muhammed did not live we’d still have the Testament/Koran and the billions of people who have been inspired by them.
To be fair, there are references, not to “Christ”, but to “Chrestos” in Suetonius. So it is not out of the question that someone else may have used the same or similar nomenclature.
Your other points are almost beyond dispute - apart from the Gospels, Jesus is not mentioned any more often than most figures of the period.
Regards,
Shodan
What book? AFAWK, he didn’t write any books.
Covered upthread: I was misinformed about the authorship of the Koran.
But the New Testament isn’t just a set of books of inspirational stuff. If Socrates wasn’t a real person, it doesn’t matter because it’s the content of what he supposedly did that matters. Same with Newton.
But with Jesus, if we found out that there never was a Jesus, Christianity would stop. It’s all about his physical resurrection, and without that, Christianity offers nothing.
It doesn’t seem to have been a ‘fixed’ star. After the Wise Men consulted Herod, it, mol, reappeared. Something like that. Don’t have the text with me.
All indications, tho, are that it was a ‘special’ star.
Also, what kind of records from contemporaneous astronomers do we have? That has piqued my curiosity.
Anyone who claimed to be the Messiah (or was claimed by others to be the Messiah) would have that title.
I’m a Christian who thinks Jesus was a real person who was not paid any attention to outside of his followers and his enemies during his time.
And we really don’t need anyone sampling ancient texts. Christians have combed every ancient text and inscription available for two millennia for every non-Christian reference to Jesus and the only one is Josephus. New author doesn’t have to do a study. This is well trod ground.
What isn’t there are contemporary texts that say he didn’t and never existed. You would think if Paul was going around raising trouble everywhere, and he was, that his enemies would collect evidence that Jesus son of Joseph the carpenter from Bethlehem was a fiction. The Romans might not have cared had this remained just in Judea, but the Jewish officials sure would have.
Well, if they did have evidence of Jesus at one time, they certainly don’t now that they’ve been poured over!
The word that “Christ” is based on is a Greek word, but Jesus and his followers spoke Aramaic/Hebrew. The Hebrew word for that is messiach (or something like that), so at the time they wouldn’t have been using a word based on “Christ.”
Would Seutonius, writing in Latin, use a bastardized version of a Greek word that translates to messiah, or is it more likely that he was talking about somebody with the name Chrestus, which apparently was a somewhat common name?
I don’t know, it just doesn’t sound plausible to me, but if someone can explain it, I’ll listen.
I checked wikipedia, the top 100 best selling books on Amazon, and the back of my box of Fruit Loops and could find no mention of Michael Paulkovich. All of these works were published near the time of his alleged article. Yet I found nothing.
Obviously the argument in the OP doesn’t exist. QED.
The Hebrew word which gives us “messiah” and the Greek word which gives us “Christ” (and gives Latin Christus) both mean the same thing; anointed. So any Jewish figure who was hailed as a Messiah by his followers might end up gatting called Christus in a Latin text. Or he might end up getting called *Chrestus *by a Latin author who misheard the name, or who assumed that the common name was intended.
From this you can argue that any Latin text referring to *Christus * is not necessarily a reference to Jesus of Nazareth unless there is something further in the text or its context to suggest him in particular.
Anyone who makes this line of argument is projecting modern ideas onto an ancient civilization.
Right now, we take it for granted that when a major event occurs, people will start writing about it immediately. We have many thousands of people employed by thousands of sources–newspapers, magazines, and the like–whose job is to do exactly that. We take it for granted that this is true. It’s easy to forget that this wasn’t always true.
In ancient Rome, there were no newspapers, no magazines, no websites. There was nobody who had the job of writing about current events. Not even the most major events. Regardless of how big and influential a figure Jesus was, there’s no reason to expect any contemporary writer to write about him.
As an example, consider the slave revolt lead by Spartacus. That was a pretty major event, wouldn’t you agree? And yet nobody wrote about it while it was happening. (Nobody we know of, at least.) The historical records about Spartacus all come from a century or two after the event.
Once we understand these facts, there’s no reason to puzzle over the small amount of material written about Jesus in the first century. Indeed, for those who understand how rare writing was in Roman times, it’s remarkable how much was written about Jesus during the first and second centuries.
No offense intended, but none of those reasons seem valid, let alone compelling.
Nazareth was unearthed? So was Troy. Interesting, but no reason to make me believe that Zeus and Aphrodite ever existed.
Oldsters could have contradicted Josephus? How do you know they didn’t? After all, early Christianity seemed to find much more fertile ground among people who were too far from Palestine to know anything about it, than among people who weren’t. But the number of people with personal knowledge of early first-century Nazareth who read Josephus was probably very small, and the subset of that small number, who would feel so strongly about contradicting the few lines Josephus wrote about Jesus that they would write a competing text, was almost certainly nil.
And as for the paucity of sources from that time, well, sure, but if “absence of evidence is not evidence of absence,” it also isn’t evidence of presence.
My personal belief (I’m an atheist) is that Jesus of Nazareth existed. If he was completely mythical, he would be Jesus of Bethlehem. I can’t think of any reason that Matthew and Luke would make up two ridiculous and contradictory stories to get the Messiah born in Bethlehem (as he had to be) and yet raised in Nazareth, unless there actually was a Jesus raised in Nazareth.
Ummm…no hand-waving involved. The Josephus paragraph has been acknowledged as a forgery for a long time now.
As a general statement, and not necessarily related to this discussion, absence of evidence of something you expect to find is highly significant. It is hardly the only matter that should be considered, but if you find in an ancient civilization no art, or little art, for a two hundred year period, that makes you sit up and take notice. Why? What happened to the Minoan civilization is just one example.
A better source on the question. Looking at the OP’s article again, what I was reacting to was the sentence “Paulkovich says that only one of the 126 texts he combed through contains any mention of Jesus — and that, he says, is a forgery.” The antecedent of that seems to be “mention of Jesus,” but I initially read it as “one of the texts.” The text is certainly not a forgery, but the mention of Jesus may be; scholars are not as unanimous on the question as you imply.
I am changing my opinion
if the reference “james the brother of jesus the christ” is legitimate, it seems acceptable proof, since you wouldn’t probably reference the brother of a made up figure
Do you have any examples of Messiahs other than Jesus who were referred to as Christ or Chrestos?
Regards,
Shodan