Do You Think Jesus Really Ever Existed?

I agree. However, to be clear about what we're talking about, I believe on the basis of slim evidence that it's more likely than not that the man known as Yeshua ha-Notsri walked the streets of Capernaum in the first century, and (with somewhat less confidence) that he preached a gospel of peace, love and compassion and was crucified by the Romans. The rest--the story about the son of God who came to earth to die for our sins, was born of a virgin, performed wonderful miracles, rose from the dead, and ascended into heaven to come again to judge the living and the dead--is a matter of faith.

We're talking about a figure of ancient history, from humble background, with a mostly illiterate following in a backwater region of a backwater province of the Roman empire. There were no news services, photographers or video cameras back then, and the records are admittedly sparse for anyone who was not royalty. Writings of authors who claim to have known Him directly while he was alive, like Peter and James, may not be the authentic Peter and James, and others like Paul claim to have known him only in visions. The rest is hearsay, which is admissible in administrative proceedings but excluded in courts to protect lay jurors who may not be able to judge its probity.

The answer is necessarily a judgment call, and that will depend as much upon us as the evidence. How easily satisfied are we with evidence, falling short of conclusive proof, that someone of the past did or didn't exist? There are folks who claim that the Holocaust did not happen, that Obama was not born in the U.S., and most recently, that the assassination of Osama bin Laden never occured. We live in a skeptical age. But historian Micahael Grant says that if we use the same standards applied to other historical texts, "we can no more reject Jesus' existence than the mass of pagan personages whose reality as historical figures has never been questioned." Even the Jewish rabbis who opposed Jesus said he was a magician or a charlatan leading Israel astray, but not that He didn't exist. Most scholars in the field, with doctorates and peer reviewed publications, who have studied the subject, are convinced Jesus probably was an actual man who lived in Galilee in the first century {Bart Ehrman (2012) Did Jesus Exist? Stanton Graham (2002); Houlden. ed. Jesus in History, Thought, and Culture Van Voorst Jesus Outside the New Testament } There are some who aren't--Jesus mythicists like Richard Carrier and Robert Price, but these are outside the mainstream of scholarship. That doesn't make them wrong, but the evidence they've put forward doesn't convince me. In a much earlier post (# 26 back in 2015), Okiefreak (myself under a different moniker) set forth reasons for believing Jesus existed, and I still think these are valid.

However, I also must say that I'm not convinced by evidence-based arguments that Jesus was a miracle-working god man. That would be a hard sell to me, since I ascribe to Hume's proposition that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. That makes me suspicious of all claims ot miracles. I'm more convinced by the message of unconditional love for all, including society's rejects, and the central heuristic of paramount love for God and neighbor that seems to permeate the Jesus tradition.

 

i think it unlikely for the roman empire to have given him a grave of his own to rise from.
as for his existence, he could have been just a story written by essene monks, as the dead sea scrolls seam to suggest.
but there's certainly no reason such a person, or composite of persons, couldn't have.
no reason he couldn't have, like moses, (and the rest of them, before and after) been an otherwise mostly ordinary human leader,
whom god, or whatever there is close enough to it, choose to be channelled by.

but i also don't believe, that whether or not he existed as an actual individual human or otherwise person, is really the central question to anything.

certainly not as central as how we treat our world and each other, and what conditions we experience individually as a result of how all of us combined do so.

 

I don't think anybody claimed that. Supposedly, the tomb was created by Joseph of Aramathea, who made his historic debut for the occasion., and then exited quickly from history. It was the Roman custom to leave the corpses of crucified criminals to scavenging birds and animals.

If you're talking about the Teacher of Righteousness, that's a stretch. Eisenman thinks the monks were talking about Jesus' brother, James, whose existence is well-documented..

I agree with you there. That's the important point.

 

The question Did Jesus Exist needs to be prefaced by a discussion about evidence. How much evidence would we need to believe that He did. As I said earlier, I'd need quite a lot of evidence to believe that a god-man came to earth to die for my sins, was born of a virgin, performed lots of miracles, rose from the dead, and will come back again to judge the living and the dead. But to believe that there was a religious leader named Jesus of Nazareth who lived in Galilee in the first century, A.D., preached a gospel of peace, love and understanding, got into trouble with the Temple authorities and the Romans, and was crucified--not so much. There are several different levels of evidence needed to support various government decisions. Substantial evidence is all that's needed to support most government regulations; reasonable suspicion, for a valid stop; probable cause to make an arrest; preponderance of the evidence (more likely than not) to win a civil lawsuit; "clear and convincing" evidence (substantially more likely than not) where civil liberties are at stake, and beyond a reasonable doubt for conviction of a crime. Which level of proof we require depends on what is at stake. I call myself a Christian because I believe in the core teachings that are attributed to Jesus: love of God and al peoplel, including society's rejects. I'd believe that regardless of whether they were taught by Jesus of Nazareth or Joe Blo from Kokomo, on the basis of my own judgement and personal experience. And I think they're the most important things I believe to give meaning to my existence. Other sages and religious leaders have said things similar to what Jesus said, but in my opinion, nobody did it as well as Jesus, whether or not He existed.

But on the academic question "Did Jesus of Nazareth exist?", I still think He did, based on substantial evidence (which I presented in Post #26). Substantial evidence is "enough to convince a reasonable person, even though other reasonable people may not be convinced, or may be convinced otherwise." I call it an academic question, in the same sense that I consider the existence of Socrates and the Buddha academic--since the truth of the teachings attributed to them is the important thing. Admittedly, though, His existence is of paramount importance to many Christians, cuz they're concerned about whether or not they'll go to heaven to see grandma again when they die. I doubt that the evidence I've presented will be substantial enough to convince die-hard skeptics, but they convince me, which to me is the important thing, and possibly might convince someone else.

 

I'm assuming you're referring to my Post #26. Keep in mind, as I explained in Post #465, that I'm not offering proofs, but only "substantial evidence"--enough that a reasonable person might be convinced, even though other reasonable persons might not:

1."The notion of a crucified god went counter to Jewish beliefs about the Messiah, and therefore they would not make such a Messiah up." So you're saying I can't know this? I'm basing it on what we know from Jewish history, which I know pretty well, and from Jewish scripture. Deuteronomy .21:22–23 tells us: “And if a man has committed a crime punishable by death and he is put to death, and you hang him on a tree, 23 his body shall not remain all night on the tree, but you shall bury him the same day, for a hanged man is cursed by God. You shall not defile your land that the Lord your God is giving you for an inheritance." Paul finds it necessary to address this in Gal.3:13.

Jews expected that the Messiah would be either of two types: a conquering military hero or a priest who would cleanse the Temple.
Messiah
The Messiah
Tutorial: Moshiach Ben Yossef (Moshiach.com)
Indeed, the Essenes expected two messiahs--one of each type. the most common Jewish expectation for the Messiah was as a "Son of David", to come as a conquering Messiah, restoring the political fortunes of the Jews. Ezekiel 37:24-25. Jewish eschatology, saw the Messiah is a future king of the Jews from the House of David who would rule over the Jewish people as Melech Messaih (King Messiah). According to Acts 1:6, Peter asked Jesus "Are you now going to restore the kingdom". (Acts 1:6). Most Jews rejected Jesus because he seemed to be a failure in the Messiah role. If Jesus were a purely fictional person, couldn't they have come up with a more convincing Messiah? The alternative explanation is that his devastated followers persuaded themselves he had risen from the dead, and set about combing the scriptures for evidence that maybe the Messiah could have died and risen from the dead.

 

2. The notion of a Jewish Messiah who was baptized by John the Baptist was inconsistent with the notions that (a) Jesus was superior to John and (b) Jesus was born without sin; the fact that this is reported in the gospels and strenuously explained away suggests that it was real. The baptism of Jesus by John is recorded in three of the gospels. Most scholars think this event is highly plausible.
The Gospel of Matthew
Glenn Jonas, Kathryn Muller Lopez (2010) Christianity: A Biblical, Historical, and Theological Guide , pp. 95–96
Bruce Chilton, Craig A. Evans (1998) Studying the Historical Jesus: Evaluations of the State of Current Research , pp. 187–98
Mark Allan Powell (1998) Jesus as a Figure in History: How Modern Historians View the Man from Galilee, p. 47.
John Dominic Crossan, Richard G. Watts (1999 ) Who Is Jesus? pp. 31–32.
Why do these scholars find the event so plausible? Mainly because of what is called the criterion of "embarrassment". The event involves the baptism of Jesus, supposedly the superior of the two figures, by John the Baptist, supposedly his inferior. And baptism was a rite to cleanse a person from sin, which Jesus was not supposed to have. Mark, considered the first gospel, simply recounts the baptism. The other synoptics then go through the contortions of trying to explain how that could have happened. If Jesus were purely fictional, why would his fans make up such a story in the first place?

 

3 & 4.. Paul mentions the meeting between Paul and James, whom Paul calls "the Brother of the Lord".(Gal.1:19) True, there is no independent corroboration of the meeting outside the Christian tradition. There does seem to be substantial corroboration by other Christian writings, esp. Acts.,that James was the head of the Jerusalem church, presiding over the Council of Jerusalem, and had a strained relationship with Paul. Eisenman (argues that he was also head of the Essene community (James the Brother of Jesus). We might ask how this came to be, since James was not one of the original Apostles, was known to have had differences with Jesus, and exemplified a Judaizer approach to Christianity. A plausible explanation was his blood relationship to the late Messiah. Paul had subsequent relations with James, and it's clear was in a subordinate position to him, and that James advocated a position toward The Law which was at variance with Paul's. There are also references to James' leadership role by Papias., Hegessipus, and Clement of Alexandria.

But the biggie outside the Christian tradition is Josephus. Your dismissal of him as "no independent corroboration" is puzzling. You don't think Josephus existed? The greatest Jewish historian of the period, author of The Jewish War and Antiquities.? That's pretty hard core. With that level of skepticism, we could probably doubt the existence of most figures of the ancient world. I assume your skepticism extends only to the passage referring to James as Jesus' brother. Josephus makes the comment in a passage referring to two men named James. The first is James, who Josephus refers to as "the brother of Jesus, the so-called Christ".Antiquities, Book 20, chp.9). This passage is not the so-called Testimonium Flavianum, which scholars think was doctored by Christians, but one which most scholars think is authentic and not a Christian interpolation. Van Voorst, 2000, p. 83; Bauchham, 1999, 199-203; Painter, 2005; Feldman and Hata, 1987, pp. 54-57. So Paul and Josephus seem to be in agreement.

Was James really Jesus' brother? Wells, before he gave up the idea that Jesus was a myth, argued that James might have been the member of some special fraternity of Christians called "Brothers of the Lord", but it is clear Paul is distinguishing James from Peter with that designation. Is it likely that there would have been such a brotherhood to which Peter didn't belong but James did? And since nobody ever heard of such an organization it would seem Wells pulled the rabbit out of a hat to cast doubt on James being the brother of Jesus. And if Paul was simply using the term "brother" in a generic sense to describe a fellow Christian, it is again strange he'd single out James for special attention. Of course, there is also the Catholic objection, based on the dogma that Mary was a perpetual virgin, that James was really the stepbrother or cousin of Jesus. Be that as it may, it doesn't have much bearing on the basic point. Ordinarily, if a person's brother exists, it's evidence that the person also existed, and same goes with stepbrothers or cousins.

 

5, 6, and 7. These are admittedly weaker arguments. I agree that the Christian sources are biased. So might also be the modern scholars who have studied the subject, but I'm impressed by their scholarship. Keep in mind that these are not just "Christian" scholars but secular ones as well, and there are quite a lot of them. Bart Ehrman, an agnostic, concludes " "He certainly existed, as virtually every competent scholar of antiquity, Christian or non-Christian, agrees". Ehrman, Did Jesus Exist? Historian Michael Grant Jesus: An Historian's Review of the Gospels (1977) remarks that if conventional standards of historical analysis are applied to the New Testament, "we can no more reject Jesus' existence than we can reject the existence of a mass of pagan personages whose reality as historical figures is never questioned." Appeal to authority is another way of saying appeal to expertise, and I happen to think it's reasonable to give consideration to the expertise of reputable scholars rather than brush it aside. They're not just giving opinions but are carefully backing them up with available evidence. In fact, I think that's what we do with other histories, unless we want to do all the independent research ourselves. As for #7, I don't know why you don't follow that. You may not agree with it, but I thought my point was clear enough. I'm pretty familiar with the parallels alleged between Jesus and various pagan deities, and none really seems to fit, although I think it's reasonable to conclude that in developing their miracle stories, followers of Jesus turned to the pagan myths in circulation at the time. I was thinking of the writings of the various mythicists--Carrier, Acharya, Price, etc--which I think are simply farfetched. We could go through them if you like. We're talking here about the existence of Jesus the man, not Jesus the miracle worker. It doesn't seem unlikely to me that a Galilean Jew of the first century got caught up in the messianic fervor of the period, clashed with the Temple authorities and the Romans and got himself nailed up. In fact, it seems more likely than the alternative, which is that he was entirely made up.

 

Yes, for generals and emperors there's plenty of evidence--as you say, coins, monuments, pyramids. For peasants in backwater provinces, not so much. But some were important enough to be recorded by historians like Josephus. One of these was James the Just, who was the acknowledged head of the Christian (or Nazarene/Ebionite) community in Jerusalem and was reputed to be the brother of Jesus. He could have made it up, but if Jesus was nobody, why would he do that? Another was John the Baptist, who Josephus tells us was arrested and executed by Herod Antipas because of the huge following he attracted with his baptisms. As I said, the multiply attested parts of the gospel that have Jesus baptized by John are not helpful to the idea that Jesus was a sinless god man, so are unlikely to have been included for a purely fictional legend.

Not exactly. We have the epistles of Paul, James and Peter, the non-canonical gospels, and that detail in Josephus about the stoning of James the Just, the brother of Jesus, the so-called Christ. And the Gospels aren't chopped liver. In fact, I've been using them to show that they wouldn't have included certain details if they had been talking about a purely imaginary man. There are also writings by the critics of Christians in the Jewish and Roman communities--the Babylonian Talmud and Celsus. They call him a bastard, a fraud, a magician, and a rabble-rouser, but what they don't call him is a myth or legend.

 

Obviously that isn't the issue. Most of us have given names that we share with people across the country. To narrow it down, we have surnames, and in the first century they did that in two ways: who you were the son of and where you were from. Yeshua ha Nosri is the Jesus we've been talking about.

Well, as I said, substantial evidence is enough evidence to convince a reasonable person, even though other reasonable persons aren't convinced (that's how it's legally defined). The reality is that the "Jesus myth" theory remains a fringe theory in contemporary scholarship--either because the vast majority of scholars specializing on the subject are blinkered or the mythicists are. It would seem presumptuous to me, though, to conclude that one or the other group of scholars who have spent their lives studying the subject are unreasonable. The nice thing about substantial evidence is that both sides can win the argument.

 

If you'd read my earlier posts, that is not the issue for me. The issue is whether there actually was a man, Yeshua ha nosri, who lived in first century Galilee, attracted a following as a teacher and healer, was hailed by his followers as the Messiah, was crucified by the Romans, was believed to have been resurrected from the dead, and became the founder of a world religion. Why is that important? As i explained in the passages preceding this discussion, which you may not have read, I think the important thing about Jesus is what He has come to stand for, not whether or not He existed, and that the question of his existence is academic. I enjoy academic exercises, however, and think there is sufficient evidence on this question to believe that Yeshua ha Nosri probably did exist. I made abundantly clear that I wasn't talking about the claims to divinity here. Believing those is purely a matter of faith, and I personally follow Hume's maxim that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Note what you're doing. You frame the argument in terms of claims about a godman and the supernatural that I didn't make, and than trivialize the whole thing by claiming it's just about any old guy named Jesus. There is nothing particularly extraordinary about a Galilean of the first century with messianic pretensions attracting a following and getting himself crucified. What was extraordinary about this one is that He kept His following after death, and grew into a world religion.

What I've claimed in my arguments is that the scriptures, true or not, provide clues to the existence of a real man. If you chose not to engage the arguments on the basis of your conclusion that a source contained errors, that's your choice. To be consistent though, you'd have to throw out much of ancient history--and even modern news, which we're told is "fake". I think my arguments are plausible.

 

I quoted two authors who generalize about others. I could cite more if you wish. Do any reputable scholars believe that cyclops or griffins exist? Name one. There are some who believe King Arthur, the Buddha, and Robin Hood existed or had some basis as historical figures, but of course not as the larger than life figures presented in legend.

I suggest that you might read some of the scholarly books and articles on the subject and see what you think then. You might try Bart Ehrman (2012) Did Jesus Exist?; Robert Van Voorst (2000) Jesus Outside the New Testament: An Introduction to the Ancient Evidence; Mark Allen Powell (1998) Jesus as a Figure in History; Maurice Casey, Jesus: Evidence and Arguments. Your skepticism toward experts seems downright Republican. Sure at the end of the day, their opinions are "just" opinions, but they are opinions formed after years of study mastering ancient languages, pouring over ancient manuscripts, and trying to put the pieces together in the most plausible way.


Jesus Outside the New Testament: An Introduction to the Ancient Evidence.

My point, first of all was not to "prove" the existence of a Biblical Jesus, which would be to convince any reasonable person of his existence, but simply to show that there is evidence by which a reasonable person might be so convinced. And I brought them up because so many of the Jesus mythicists do. Disproving the parallels doesn't prove Jesus, but only removes an argument that's been presented as disproof of Jesus.

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