Do you believe Jesus existed? (Jesus Christ, gospel, disciples, myths)

[eudaimonia]

Originally Posted by BUDDY

Do you believe in the historical existence of Jesus Christ? If not, why not? If so, why?

No, I don't, mainly for the sort of reasons presented in The Jesus Puzzle, in particular the curious lack of contemporary non-Christian citations of the existence of Jesus.


eudaimonia,

Mark

[Jayhawker Soule]

Originally Posted by ChrisP

Anyone who's spent some time looking into religion comes upon the unsurprising fact that legends myths and religious texts must have SOME grounding in fact. People can imagine anything, but they have to have some... context... to create their imaginings from.

Therefore, how could anyone doubt the historicity of Neptune?

You know, ChrisP, underwhelming observations become more than a little inane when fallaciously suggested as argument. There is a near unbounded class of myth, lore, fraud and fiction which "must have SOME grounding in fact", but that makes their subjects no less ahistoric.

[Jayhawker Soule]

Originally Posted by Halcyon

Just because Jesus was deified, does that mean he never existed?

Good grief! What a fine piece of strawman rhetoric that was! Who has argued that Jesus is ahistoruc because he was deified?

[Jayhawker Soule]

Originally Posted by Booko

So I find it more plausible to accept the historicity of the figure of Jesus as much as I do Moses, ...

Now there's an interesting sentence.

[Halcyon]

Originally Posted by Jayhawker Soule

Good grief! What a fine piece of strawman rhetoric that was! Who has argued that Jesus is ahistoruc because he was deified?

People who disbelieve in the existance of the historical Jesus because of the mythological similarities to Osiris/Dionysus.

[ChrisP]

You may care to look at the question in the OP which was :

Do you believe in the historical existence of Jesus Christ? If not, why not? If so, why?

I have shown why I believe. The humanity of historians, and the human inability to create something from nothing.

Other than a lack of anything that can be weighed on scales or have a tape measure wrapped around it, why DON'T you believe?

[Jayhawker Soule]

Originally Posted by Eudaimonist

No, I don't, mainly for the sort of reasons presented in The Jesus Puzzle, in particular the curious lack of contemporary non-Christian citations of the existence of Jesus.

The question becomes: Just how curious is this "curious lack of contemporary non-Christian citations"? Once you allow for the possibility of a heavily redacted legend with a good deal of exaggeration, the answer becomes "Not very".

Much of what we know about a number of mesianic claimants comes to us from a single source. In the absence of this singe source, Josephus, each of these claimants would similarly suffer. Conversely, given the political and theological turmoil that characterized the close of the 2nd Temple Period, it would be absurd to assume that Josephus represents an exhaustive study. So, the problem is not one of a "curious lack of contemporary non-Christian citations" but, rather, an unfortunate lack of contemporary history.

So, where does that leave us?

There is two pieces of circumstantial evidence that, in my opinion, tip the scales in favor of historicity:

1. To quote Kirby's Historical Jesus Theories on Wells: "Wells allows that such a complex of tradition as we have in the synoptic gospels could not have developed so quickly (by the end of the first century) without some historical basis; and so some elements ascribed there to the life of Jesus presumably derive ultimately from the life of a first century Galilean preacher. The essential point, as Wells sees it, is that this personage is not to be identified with the dying and rising Christ of the Pauline and other early documents, and that the two have quite separate origins. The Jesus of the earliest Christians did not, on this view, preach and work miracles (or what were taken for such) in Galilee, and was not crucified by Pilate in Jerusalem."
2. It strains credulity to suggest that the Jerusalem sect as found in Acts is some sort of Pauline (or Lukan) fiction, although we are clearly seeing it through Pauline eyes. Given the historicity of this sect and its "Pillars" - and, for that matter, the historicity of the early Ebionites - it seems far from unreasonably to infer a sect leader around which this group originally coalesced. Whether or not his name was 'Yeshua' seems of lesser importance.

What we end up with is a figure of no particularly unique insight or wisdom, a figure who possibly suffered the fate that so many Jews suffered at the time, and a figure who was used to construct a Pauline fiction that was later cynically adopted by Constantine.