Just curious. To what extent is there any irrefutable, concrete historical evidence that Jesus was an actual flesh and blood person that really, truly existed?
I should think the first books of the New Testiment by Peter, John, what’s-his-name, and that other guy, would do. It doesn’t really seem likely that they’d just get together and make up the story about some invented guy out of whole cloth.
I also seem to remember that there was some mention of the cruicifixon in the Roman records.
It also seems to me that I’ve read of some other contempories writing about him.
Hmmmm, not much is it?
Somebody will come tin and give a much more educated answer than me, but I wanted to point out the the absolute verification of many historical figures is actually pretty dicey. While the contemporary accounts of Jesus are, at best, thin, so are the contemporary accounts of Socrates, but no one really doubts that he exisited, though we may argue a great deal about the details.
It is absolutely, 100% certain, that Jesus exists.
It truly depends on what your criteria are. And that’s not a “non-answer” but a recognition of how data validation has changed over twenty-odd centuries.
Consider: we have a few Roman records of followers of him being brought into legal question for one reason or another, and one almost-certainly-forged letter alleged to have been written by him. That’s the sum total of non-Christian writings on which one can rest one’s case. Pretty slender, no?
Now, let’s take a quick excursion. Socrates is considered one of the seminal figures in Greek thought, the watershed between half-baked attempts to work philosophically that average high school students could refute from their own knowledge, and the advanced philosophical thought that followed from his teachings. Almost nobody questions his existence.
What do we have regarding him? One reference in a satirical play by Aristophanes, and writings by two of his followers, who are certainly known to have invested what they attributed to him with their own ideas – if for no other reason, because they disagree on what they say about him.
What do we have regarding Jesus from his followers? A slanted biography written by a man who was a kid when he was alive, who may possibly have known him casually, who attached himself to several of his followers after his death. An expanded version of that biography allegedly written by a tax collector who was one of his closest followers, who ties a whole lot of what he said or did into being the fulfillment of Old Testament prophecy, in ways that would embarrass most of the preachers who would attempt that today, and who clearly rewrote it to make it more palatable to Jewish readers. Another expanded version of that biography, with details that don’t quite match the other guy and are almost universally set in different contexts, this one supposedly written by a physician who supposedly was close friends with his mother after he converted to following him, and who claims to have sifted through a lot of urban legend and recorded only the truth about him, as pieced together from the most reliable sources; and finally, a biography with very few details the same as the first one, supposedly written by the youngest of his close followers in his own old age, and representing him as a transcendent figure who nonetheless had great compassion.
Can any of this be verified from external, unbiased sources? No way!
But the point is that that’s true for a wide range of ancient figures – our sources are fairly limited and almost certainly biased in one direction or another. Nobody in the Bible before Omri appears in other non-Israelite records, save for one questionable contemporary reference that may or may not be David. Homer, Pindar, Hesiod: they’re so nebulous that we don’t know for sure where or when they lived. Most of the Egyptian and Mesopotamian kings that are more or less household names: one or two historical accounts that are not contemporary, and if we’re lucky a contemporary inscription or two. There are exceptions to this, of course, but for most of them it’s true.
So the question is a bit trickier than it sounds. Absolutely verifiable objective records are something scarce as left-spiral periwinkles until you get down to fairly recent times.
No. Then again, there’s no irrefutable, concrete, historical evidence that you exist either, or that I do for that matter. Be very careful around words like “irrefutable” and “absolute”.
I appreciate your somewhat pedantic point, but I think most readers understand that in using these words I am talking about a fairly high degree of historical certitude, and not some formal ontological proof.
Right. But as Polycarp explained so wwll, most non-historians don’t realize how low the bar for “historical certitude” actually is for almost everything.
What is the evidence that we’re working with?
The outside evidence falls into three categories:
O1) Records and histories of the Roman occupation of Judea.
O2) Records and histories of the Jewish inhabitants of Judea.
O3) Records of the individual events written down in the Gospels and other books of the New Testament.
O1) and O2) are fairly strong. We know both bits and pieces of the lives of some of the Romans involved and a good deal of both the Roman occupation and the contemporary teachings, practices and customs of the Jews.
O3) is weaker. My understanding is that all of the outside records that refer to specific events and people in the biblical tales are later, usually by generations, than the current scholarly consensus dates of the Gospels. This presents a problem. By that time, 2nd century C.E., the Christians were actively proselytizing their religion and to a wide range of groups and cultures. We don’t know, therefore, whether the comments made are because of the stories being told to convert outsiders (whether directly from the Gospels or from a body of oral tradition from people who were there passed down to children and acolytes) or because these outsiders have other sources of independent knowledge. None of the latter exist today, but that does not prove that they didn’t at some earlier time.
So the evidence has to fall back a step to the New Testament itself, and mostly - though not exclusively - to the Gospels.
So what of the provenance of the Gospels?
There are four basic categories, with variations, into which the biblical evidence can fall:
B1) They are entirely a series of propagandistic parables and morality tales.
B2) They are based on a composite of real-life characters’ preachings, with more or less invention added.
B3) They are based on an individual real-life character, with more or less invention added.
B4) They are accurate renderings of the life of a divine character, although individual details may have gotten garbled or mistold or misunderstood to account for the discrepancies among them.
Is there any outside, rational way to pick among the four choices that doesn’t involve a large measure of faith which the OP appears not to want?
I don’t know of any. Textual analysis is of less use than in many cases. It seems clear that the writers, whoever and however many of them there might have been, were familiar with the local political and social situation. They were probably right there, not trying to imagine the situation from a distance. Preachers, seers, scryers, rebels, rabbis of every stripe were available for models. Creating a figure who would say exactly what was felt to be needed would be easy for a group of writers, easy enough to be indistinguishable from the actual sayings of a charismatic individual or group whose words and actions could be recorded. Miracles would be what every reader would expect to see; that the final product has miracles therefore does not weigh the evidence in any direction.
As said earlier, different people can reasonably set their bars at different heights. However, without any reason to anoint one set of possibilities over any of the other I can’t see any rational way to come down except upon
a) there is no way to make any determination until and unless more and sounder evidence appears or
b) go with the default supposition, which has to be that all claims of miracles must be rejected until and unless sounder evidence appears, meaning that the important parts are made up of whole cloth.
Cecil, BTW, wimps out with a one-paragraph hash of the evidence and comes down seemingly on my B3. If he wrote all his columns this way then Little Ed must do a heck of lot more editing than anyone suspected.
I don’t see how anyone can claim other than by faith to be able to decide between my cases a) and b). And they leave very little room for a historic personage.
If you exclude the gospels, there’s no historical evidence about Jesus. A handful romans authors mention Christ of christianism around 110-120 AD. But besides being long after the facts, these are all quick mention or footnotes (one asking how to deal legally with christians, another mentionning that several decades befores there had been riots in Rome by Jews led by someone named “Chrestus”), only one actually saying something about Jesus : he briefly explains that christians are called this way after the name of Christ, crucified under Pilatus. But it’s more likely that he knew that because that was what christian said than because he personnally investigated the palestinian archives just in order to write this footnote.
So, you’re left with only one source : the jewish historian Flavius Josephus, who entions Jesus twice. Unfortunately, the longest quote, that mentions that this Jesus worked miracles,had many followers, etc… is considered by the overwhelming majority of scholars as an interpolation, added later by christians to Josephus work. Maybe the original actually mentionned him and said something about him, but what is anybody’s guess (and many have made guesses about what could have been this quote originally. I never found any of the arguments supporting one or the other of them particularily compelling).
So, eventually, you’re left with the second quote from Josephus that only mentions the execution of James “brother of Jesus”. That’s not a lot of information, and even in this case, some believe that the “brother of Jesus” part could have been added later.
So, no. Besides the gospels, there’s close to no evidence of his existence. Only a few short, vague, weird (Chrestus instigating the riots in Rome) mentions by romans 80 years later and some dubious words by Josephus. You can only base your belief/opinion/guess concerning Jesus on the existence and content of the gospels.
I don’t think that’s true.
Mark, the earliest Gospel, was written about A.D. 70-75. Presumably there were many Nazarenes over the age of 55-60 who could have verified or dispelled the existance of the Jesus of Nazareth presented in Mark.
It’s also worth noting that even the harshest Roman and Jewish critics of Christianity in the first and second centuries never claimed that Jesus did not exist.
There is a long Wikipedia article on the Historicity of Jesus. It’s not written neutrally right now, but it does have a good bibliography to read from.
What was the life expectancy in those times?
I imagine it was lower than today’s, so there may not have been very many people in the age range of 55-60.
I don’t think 60 was outlandish back then. If you didn’t die in infancy or the first few years, you probably stood a decent shot of getting to about that age.
55-60 wasn’t outlandish at all really. When you had a huge number of people dying before age 10 or so it lowers the overall life expectancy.
A human’s maximum life span really hasn’t changed from about 120 years maximum sense we’ve been recording history in detail. And just from my cursory experience of reading about historical figures from the middle ages a lot of the famous ones who die of natural causes seemed to go in their 50s to 60s, and I doubt medical science was that much better in 13th century England versus Roman era Israel.
We don’t have any primary source material on Jesus. We have reports at the earliest (according to Cecil) written 40 years after his death.
Now, in that forty year time span a lot of details could have been changed. But from our understanding (and we do have some good understanding) of the typical progression of folklore, oral histories, stories et cetera 40 years isn’t enough time to completely invent someone.
So someone with the name of Jesus (or some very close proximity in the native tongue) who did some preaching almost certainly existed. Is it possible he was completely fictional? Yes.
But our ancestors, while living without the Straight Dope really weren’t that stupid. There were a lot of smart people around the Holy Lands at that time and especially throughout the Roman Empire as a whole, I think considering the .profound impact Christianity was having on the Empire at the time if anyone really thought Jesus flat out never existed we would have heard something about it sometime in the 100-200 years after his death. Yet we don’t have any real serious reports.
And I’d be surprised if a lot of Jewish elders weren’t writing stuff down about how Jesus was a fictional character en masse within 20-30 years of his death if he really never existed.
Using loose historical standards it’s hard to say the man never existed, but damn near impossible to say what he actually did in his life other than a general impression that he was a religious figure.
Ah, that would explain the lower overall life expectancy. Of course! Our better health care, and some other stuff, makes it more likely for people to reach higher ages. Why didn’t I think of that? :smack:
Life expectancy is an average number (obviously.)
All I was trying to say is, the life expectancy, in the ancient world, for someone who lives out of childhood was not equivalent to what the “average life expectancy” really was.
If we even had the ability to calculate average life expectancy back in the year 4-6 BC or so when we think Jesus was born then that’s only the life expectancy for someone who’s born that year. Once that person lived past age 12 or so his life expectancy was extended dramatically.
That’s why you see the common figure that the average life expectancy going into the 20th century was something like 48 years. Well, if you factor out child deaths you’d see how you can have a life expectancy of 48 years but tons of people living to be 60+, and I can guarantee that despite that life expectancy people who lived in the 19th century didn’t consider it normal to live through childhood and not at least live to be mid to late 50s.
Nice work on the condescending sarcasm btw, it really added to the debate.