The Sum of Awe
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I think there was some figure that maybe resembled Jesus, kind of like the Guatama Buddha, just all of the spiritual stuff is legend.
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Historicity Of Christ?
- Thread starter Vyruufin
- Start date
The consensus of scholars is that the less remarkable reference to Jesus by Flavius Josephus (the one that discussed the trial of a man named James and refers to him as "brother of Jesus, who was called Christ") is considered to be authentic. I don't see any reason not to accept this as true, though by itself it's not that remarkable: there were a number of people claiming to be the messiah around that time.
The references by Josephus are considered to be likely authentic, but the problem with them has more to do with their value than their authenticity.
His work with the short references to Jesus was made in 93 AD. Josephus himself wasn't even born when Jesus had already died, and wrote this roughly 60 years after the time when Jesus is said to have died (and around 30 years after James died). At that time there were already documents like Paul's letters and the early Gospels.
But like I said, I still think it's probable that some element of Jesus was a read dude.
Jordan St. Francis
Well-Known Member
Thanks Penguin. For my part– according to the kind of internal criteria which Legion questioned in post #16– I am confident of certain aspects of Jesus' ministry. Most obviously his reputation as a healer,but also his conflict with the Temple authorities, a prophetic denunciation of the Temple cult in the line of the Hebrew prophetic tradition, his proximation to the Pharisees ( combining something like the radical critique of the Essene community and the Baptist without the attendent withdrawl from the world), in relation to them a certain laxity in the application of the law (healings on the Sabbath, ect), a messianic proclamation (freeing of the captives, ect), an inversion of values (blessings on the poor, the meek, the mourning) in conformity with an eschatological vision, the proclamation of the fatherhood of God (abba, "our Father"), that proclamation's related relativizing of family ties, and, of course, his crucifixion at the hands of the Romans.
As it appears to me, the historical elements of the Gospel allow us to say a great deal more, even if in the end we are left with more probablities and speculations than we would prefer, than the view prevalent among many people today; the kind of "Family Guy" view, whereby the Jesus of history, having been so thoroughly elided into the Christ of faith, is consequently historicized as the kind of empty hole of our contemporary society's faith life. Since we can't say anything about Jesus, the truth of his life is fair game for everyone who would bypass history straight into the realm of pure spirituality. But I do think we can say things about him, and the above is a starting point when we hear the now familiar "Jesus received his teachings from India", and other similar sentiments.
If I read too much into your statement, I apologize. It does help me clarify my own thoughts!
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What about the 60 years or the presence of early Christian writings lessens its value?
RedJamaX
Active Member
I think the entire character of Jesus is just that... a fictional character in a fictional book, and I used to be christian, and believed the whole damn thing... even 900 year old people 
(I was a child at the time)
At that time in history, for many of the events laid out in the bible, equivalently significant events almost ALWAYS have multiple contemporary sources that confirm the events. All records of the events regarding Jesus in the bible are NOT contemporary, AND not confirmed by any other contemporary source. Confirmation of the events in other sources occurs only long after it had become legend, and at that point the new source is really only confirming the legend, and not the historicity of the event.
(I was a child at the time)At that time in history, for many of the events laid out in the bible, equivalently significant events almost ALWAYS have multiple contemporary sources that confirm the events. All records of the events regarding Jesus in the bible are NOT contemporary, AND not confirmed by any other contemporary source. Confirmation of the events in other sources occurs only long after it had become legend, and at that point the new source is really only confirming the legend, and not the historicity of the event.
Nonsense.
There are precious few ways you could have expressed how complete your unfamiliarity with this subject is than the above.
But I offer you a chance to make me look more ignorant: how many authors from antiquity wrote "biographies" of people while these people still were alive? Why are you discounting non-biblical sources? How much evidence should we expect to find? Once you have addressed these, and (on the assumption you actually have) realized how incredibly inaccurate your statements are and how uninformed, childish, naïve, and baseless your statements would appear to actual historians, then we an discuss why they're all wrong (with the exception of a few among several thousands).
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RedJamaX
Active Member
"equivalently significant", and "almost" are key words there. I'd say the son of god being born, coming to earth to save everybody from the eternal torture inflicted by his father, being crucified and COMING BACK FROM THE DEAD , along with an army of walking dead would be a VERY VERY VERY significant event... Equivalent to say, "War".
Even the Trojan War is still being taught as MYTH even now that archaeologists are pretty sure that we have found the city of Troy. So why does Jesus get a pass??
RedJamaX
Active Member
You're right... I have wrongly singled out one specific point regarding ht existence of Jesus when I should addressed it from a more broad picture of the events. The bible is a story... the whole thing, all of it. People didn't live for 900 years, earth wasn't created in 6 days, humans didn't start as Adam and Eve (from sand and a rib), snakes and donkey's don't talk (and never have), people cannot live inside the belly of a fish, there was never a global flood, and even the MOST plausible story in the bible, Exodus (just the slavery part is "plausible") has no evidence of being true despite the decades of excavation of the ancient Egyptian empire and all of the records kept just on the walls of their cities...
The prophecy of the coming savior, Jesus, falls in line with all of those other fairy tales, and so does the actual coming of the Jesus. Because honestly, how they expect people to keep buying into the story if they never produced the savior, right... I mean, you can't defeat Ganon in the Legend of Zelda without the light arrows, right... it's fictional prophecy and only makes sense if it's fulfilled.
Combine the logic of the entire rest of the bible being completely fictional along with the lack of contemporary support... and that's why Jesus never actually existed...
Unless it was some guy who was mentally ill, raised with the teachings of the god of Abraham and self proclaimed himself as the savior... in which case... He's still NOT Jesus.
Jesus may have been an amalgam of persons to whom his sayings were attributed. Homer's existence as an individual is questioned, as is Lao Tzu's, but their writings are among the world's greatest. Even in our own times quotes are mis-attributed to persons other than the ones who spoke them, or similar quotes made by different persons and amalgamated into one. If this can happen within the past 100-200 years, how more in the past 2,000 - 3,000 years?
It establishes that there was already a living legend, and therefore Josephus was basically talking second-hand information.
Josephus describes a trial in which James, Jesus' brother, was found guilty. It happened while Josephus was alive and connected to the higher ups.
Imagine that - a historian taking second hand information. What an ignorant scoundrel!
Dang ... and I was just about to throw my Josephus out the window!
RedJamaX
Active Member
Another point of consideration to the claim of who actually existed and who didn't is the profound effect the very existence of that person has on society. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
If Homer, Lao Tzu or Sigmund Freud never existed... or they posed as those individuals but they were really Huey, Lewey and Dewy... who cares?? Their existence alone has no effect on society, only their writings, and only in a few aspects of life.
But the very existence of Jesus, Mohammed, or even Horus has a profound influence of the daily lives of a huge portion of society even if it was proven that they were just mentally ill individuals making ridiculous claims. The point is that most people in society are like sheep... you have proof that "some guy", existed in the first Century with the name Jesus, and some group of people followed him as though he were gods son... even if he was just insane.... it doesn't matter... In the eyes of the the bulk of society, you have confirmed the existence of Jesus, the Garden of Eden, Jonah and the Whale, Exodus, The Great Flood.. etc...
The existence of any person in history, who was to be identified as the "Son of God", Messiah, Savior, followed by disciples and all other claims made by the gospels has a profound influence on our society at a global level. This is true even if you remove ALL supernatural claims made by the gospels. This is why the very simple existence of "Jesus" (as identified by the gospels and treated as such), must be verified with extraordinary amounts of evidence that supersede the levels which are required to know if "Plato" was a real person.
If "Plato" wasn't real... so what, we still have the books and writing regardless of who actually wrote them. The Idea of the "existence of Jesus" is far more than just the teachings. Thus, currently, there is not enough evidence to suggest that any person identified as the Jesus of the Bible ever existed at all, in any respect (supernatural or not).
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There's no there in your therefore. The argument is vapid nonsense.
I agree that the "existence of Jesus" is far more than just the teachings. I am reminded of G. A. Wells who's current position is such that he "insists that this figure of late first-century Gospel stories is distinct from the sacrificial Christ myth of Paul's epistles and other early Christian documents, and that these two figures have different sources before being fused in Mark." wiki
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Historians and those who are interested in history. I already went over the treatment of historicity in Homer here, but as for Socrates? If you look in the collection Mémoires de literature tires de l’Academie Royale des Inscriptions et Belles Lettres depuis l’anness 1761 jusque et compis l’année 1763, you'll find a paper by M. L'Abbé Garnier titled “Caractére de la Philosophie de Socrate.”. The lecture (published by the academy it was for) was given in 1761. It concerns something that had become problematic: who was the historical Socrates? Before Garnier, Fréret gave a lecture himself read to the same academy on the same issue in 1736. Only two years later Dresig's De Socrate iuste damnato came out and addressed the same issue (who was Socrates?). 4 years after that, the first part of J. J. Brucker's Historia Critica Philosophiae was published. And these are just some of most important early works, not all of the 18th century scholarship on the historical Socrates.
Thanks to the English translation of Schweitzer's von Reimarus zu Wrede we now talk about the "quest" for the historical Jesus. There's an equivalent for Socrates, known as "the Socratic problem". Schleiermacher, Hegel, Schweitzer, Taylor, Bertrand Russell, Burnett, and hundreds of historians whose work is now known only to those who do care about the historical Socrates have produced a mass of scholarship. Nor have the various links between Socrates and Jesus studies gone unnoticed.
Schweitzer, in the above mentioned book, says we have more evidence for Jesus than for anybody in antiquity, but he singles out Socrates as an example: “Für Sokrates liegt die Sache viel ungünstiger: er ist uns von Schriftstellern geschildert, wobei der Schriftsteller selbst schöpferisch war.” Why are we in such a better position when it comes to Jesus? Schweitzer's use of "Schriftsteller", literary authors rather than historians, is deliberate. He was neither the first nor the last to say that all we have of Socrates are literary depictions. The approach to recovering this historical Socrates in the 19th century had simply ensured that for every argument that a particular source was trustworthy, there were dozens more saying that it wasn't.
That's because historians had continued trying to argue in the tradition set down by Garnier: compare the sources, and try to show all the ways that one author is correct and all the others are not.
Finally, we have lots of arguments that none of the sources could be trusted because relative to those that x source can. Also, thanks especially to those like Gigon and Dupréel, it wasn't just a matter of which was more reliable because all belonged to a specific type of fiction, not history. Dupréel is a perfect example of this view. For him, we artistic literature that is both artful and complicated (“une composition très travaillée”
. Like Homer’s heroes, Socrates was just another legend, a philosophical version of Achilles. If there was history anywhere were weren’t going to find it: “Le très authentique personnage du nom de Socrate ne fut ni l'homme ni le penseur qu'en a fait la légende.”Aristotle, in his discussion of poetry, refers to τούς Σωκρατικούς λόγους, a “genre” of Socratic dialogues. Like the gospels, many modern scholars have argued that the logoi Sōkratikoi belong at least in many ways to a specific genre. Diogenes Laertius, writing centuries later after Socrates, claims that a certain Simon the Shoe-maker invented the genre, and even gives us an origin story: ἐρχομένου Σωκράτους ἐπὶ τὸἐργαστήριον καὶ διαλεγομένου τινά, ὧν ἐμνημόνευεν ὑποσημειώσεις ἐποιεῖτο [“Whenever Socrates came into his workshop and they discussed something, he would remember these talks and would take notes”].
Thus, the idea that all we have are on Socrates is a genre of fiction was around long before Schweitzer. And it continues today for a few scholars.
More importantly, the scholars in 19th century historical Jesus studies are often also scholars in 19th century historical Socrates studies. F. C. Bauer's Das Christliche des Platonismus (1837) has plenty of comparable works, but most authors didn't combine a study of Jesus and of Socrates to that extent. More common was the numerous references to Socrates in a founder of mythicism David Strauß.
The point is that interest in Jesus isn't simply a religiously inspired quest. There are those who are interested for religious reasons, but if that were it we wouldn't find books like Socrates and Jesus: The Argument That Shaped Western. Nor would we find centuries of studies on the historical Socrates.
The difference is that for Socrates, we don't have legions of internet amateurs quote-mining websites and other nonsense to make points about issue the don't have the background knowledge to understand.
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RedJamaX
Active Member
Ok, perhaps "who care's" was a little brash...
My point is that THE WORKS of historic figures like Socrates are the bulk of their importance, not the individuals themselves. This applies to all persons in history who achieved, and or contributed great things.
But this is not the same with "Jesus"... For Jesus to influence things like murder, burning people alive, violent conquests, war, suppression of knowledge, or the most recently popular idea of restricting the rights of other individuals based on a particular groups beliefs based on faith....
The only requirement is that he existed at all.
That's why proof if his existence, at all, should be scrutinized so heavily. And if an individual with such a significant social influence as Jesus actually did exist... it shouldn't require mounds of research, or years of study and scholarship to determine that.
Popularity of legend does not provide evidence. Horus influenced the beliefs of the Egyptian empire for more than 5000 years... Do most scholars, or even a significant percentage, belief that Horus actually existed?