Do You Think Jesus Really Ever Existed?

No one that says it's fake has come up with how the image was made....not debunked.

 

I can't remember his name, it's hidden away in a mythology book of mine called "the temple of Wotan". Quite a nasty and lying book about the Norse. Anyway, I'll have to read it when I get back if this is still posted in thread. From memory there was a Mediterranean man and his life was almost a replica of Jesus without the added magical powers etc. sounds dumb but I just can't remember it. But it is interesting. So like others before said, he could have been a real man. The bible shouldn't be regarded as religious book to many, it's almost the best history book we have of the times.

Like I always say about mythology is that the events and people referenced we often real events and real people. We are learning this in today's studies.

 

Like Beowulf for example, archaeologists have found massive great Mead halls to almost suggest without the Dragon and the rest, it really may have been a real story. Using the dragon as a metaphor for the politics in Denmark of the time. Who knows.

 

I think Jesus existed. Note, this doesn't mean that I can prove that He existed, nor does it mean all the things people said about Him (Son of God, walked on water, rose from the dead, etc. ) are true. I think he existed because the weight of the admittedly sparse evidence seems to point in that direction. (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; (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. (3) Paul refers to his meetings with Peter and James the Just, the brother of Jesus. Both men were thought to have been close to Jesus, and affirmed his existence first hand; (4) Josephus confirms the role of James the Just as brother of Jesus;(5) The existence of Jesus is corroborated in a sizeable number of independent first century sources, including Paul’s letters, the canonical gospels, the Q-gospel, the L and M sources, the Gospel of Thomas, and the non-Pauline epistles; (6) Most scholars in the field, those with doctorates and publications in peer reviewed journals in their disciplines, are convinced that Jesus was real; (7) The alleged parallels to Jesus in pagan sources don’t hold up under close scrutiny, and the mythicists have shown no evidence that they were in fact the models for the Jewish followers of Jesus. So mainly for these considerations,I think it plausible we are dealing with an actual man who was crucified by Pontius Pilate at the behest of the Jewsl

 

Romans did not keep records of people executed in the backwater provinces like Galilee. Why would they? If they did, where are they? And yet we know they executed lots of them. Of course we do have letters about Jesus not long after His death. Paul's letters make up a big chunk of the New Testament. Jesus' immediate followers consisted largely of Galilean fishermen, and Jesus himself was a carpenter. These men were probably illiterate. And the Roman scholars weren't likely to have been writing about an obscure apocalyptic prophet out in the boonies. There are many such figures in the United States today, preaching on street corners, and CNN, MSNBC, and FOX News pass them by.

 

It seems that at least a significant minority of Jesus' followers during his lifetime remained quite devoted to him after his death, even though they were often mistreated for doing so. Actions speak to me much louder than words. Anybody can say anything, but when people are willing to suffer for their beliefs, I believe that they are sincere. Some of those individuals knew that Jesus was a real person because they had heard him speak, and they believed that he was somebody special.

The largest group of these followers were involved in the original Pentecost, the mass conversion event brought about by Peter's preaching. James, who claimed to be a half brother of Jesus, was also a leader in this group. They continued to live by Jewish religious laws and customs, but separated themselves from the rest of Jewish society, at the site where the Dead Sea Scrolls were later found. The newer documents included in that collection describe the beliefs and lifestyle of that settlement, from which there were no survivors after a siege.

In his writings, Paul alludes to a face to face meeting he had with Peter, in which they agreed that their groups of followers should remain separate. Paul was telling non-Jews that they didn't need to follow Jewish law in order to be a Christian, while Peter was leading Jewish Christians who were still following all the dietary laws, the Sabbath, etc. Also, Peter was running his community as a commune, which was a concept that held no interest for Paul.

While it is possible (but unlikely) that all of Peter's followers were Pentecost and post-Pentecost converts who never saw Jesus in person, you can't reasonably make that allegation against Peter and James. If everything about Jesus had been made up, those two would have been better off to go back to fishing and forget the whole thing. Modern scholars who have studied the Dead Sea Scrolls and archaeological studies of the area where they were found have no doubt that Peter was running the settlement. That's enough to convince me that Peter once knew somebody that we currently know as Jesus (a Greek translation of his name) who led a religious reform movement for a while, and taught things that Peter considered to be worthwhile.

I trust that information much more than the four gospels and Acts, which were written after most of the eyewitnesses had died off. As the stories were handed down by uneducated, superstitious people, I would assume that they exaggerated the hell out of everything, because people still do that with rumors. Human nature hasn't changed.

 

[SIZE=10.5pt]I read the book The Christ Conspiracy: The Greatest Story Ever Sold back in 1999 and it certainly opened my eyes to the possibility that he never existed[/SIZE]



[SIZE=10.5pt]Hotwater[/SIZE]

 

The image wasn't visible until a photographer saw it on the negative of a picture he took sometime in the mid 1900's. Ridiculous that a fraud from supposedly the 1400's would know that photography would be invented.


"The stitching pattern, which she says was the work of a professional, is quite similar to the hem of a cloth found in the tombs of the Jewish fortress of Masada. The Masada cloth dates to between 40 BC and 73 AD.
This kind of stitch has never been found in Medieval Europe."

"Pyrolysis-mass-spectrometry results from the sample area coupled with microscopic and microchemical observations prove that the radiocarbon sample was not part of the original cloth of the Shroud of Turin. The radiocarbon date was thus not valid for determining the true age of the shroud."

"If the shroud had been produced between 1260 and 1390 AD, as indicated by the radiocarbon analyses, lignin should be easy to detect. A linen produced in 1260 AD would have retained about 37% of its vanillin in 1978... The Holland cloth, and all other medieval linens gave the test [i.e. tested positive] for vanillin wherever lignin could be observed on growth nodes. The disappearance of all traces of vanillin from the lignin in the shroud indicates a much older age than the radiocarbon laboratories reported."

"New experiments date the Shroud of Turin to the 1st century AD. They comprise three tests; two chemical and one mechanical. The chemical tests were done with Fourier Transform Infrared Spectroscopy (FTIR) and Raman spectroscopy, examining the relationship between age and a spectral property of ancient flax textiles. The mechanical test measured several micro-mechanical characteristics of flax fibers, such as tensile strength. The results were compared to similar tests on samples of cloth from between 3250 BC and 2000 AD whose dates are accurately known."

"No one knows for sure how the images were created. The images are scorch-like, yet not created by heat, and are a purely surface phenomenon limited to the crowns of the top fibers. The Shroud is clearly not a painting; no evidence of pigments or media was found. The blood was on the Cloth before the image (an unlikely way for an artist to work). There is no outline, no binders to hold paint, no evidence that paint, dye, ink, or chalk created the images, and there are no brush strokes. According to world-renowned artist Isabel Piczek, the images have no style that would fit into any period of art history. The images show perfect photo-negativity and 3-dimensionality. It is not a Vaporgraph or natural result of vapors."

"Note: some microscopic particles of paint exist on the Shroud, but these do not constitute the image. During the Middle Ages, a practice called the "sanctification of paintings" permitted about 50 artists to paint replicas of the Shroud and then lay their paintings over the Shroud to "sanctify" them. This permitted contact transfer of particles, which then migrated around the cloth with the folding and rolling of the Shroud when it was opened for exhibit and closed again afterwards.
STURP determined that the image was caused by rapid dehydration, oxidation and degradation of the linen by an unidentified process, coloring it a sepia or straw yellow. Several Physicists, including Dr. John Jackson of the Colorado Shroud Center, suggest that a form of columnated radiation is the best explanation for how the image was formed, leaving a scorch-like appearance (the scorch caused by light versus heat, as the image does not fluoresce). Dr. Thomas Phillips (nuclear physicist at Duke University and formerly with the High Energy Labs at Harvard) says a potential miliburst of radiation (a neutron flux) could be consistent with the moment of resurrection. Such a miliburst might cause the purely surface phenomenon of the scorch-like (scorch-by-light) images, and possibly add Carbon-14 to the Cloth. As Dr. Phillips points out: "We never had a resurrection to study" and more testing should be done to ascertain whether a neutron-flux occurred.
The coloration on the linen fibers of the Shroud is extremely thin. Sticky tape samples taken from different parts of the image on the Shroud's surface in 1978 were too thin to measure accurately with a standard optical microscope, which means they were thinner than the wavelength of visible light, or less than about 0.6 micrometers. A more recent measurement of the coloration on one of the fibers was found to be about 0.2 micrometers thick (or one-fifth of a thousandth of a millimeter)."

"Most bloodstains on the Shroud are exudates from clotted wounds transferred to the cloth by contact with a wounded human body.
The blood on the Shroud is real, human male blood of the type AB (typed by Dr. Baima Ballone in Turin and confirmed in the U.S.). This blood type is rare (about 3% of the world population), with the frequency varying from one region to another. Blood chemist Dr. Alan Adler (University of Western Connecticut) and the late Dr. John Heller (New England Institute of Medicine) found a high concentration of the pigment bilirubin, consistent with someone dying under great stress or trauma and making the color more red than normal ancient blood. Drs. Victor and Nancy Tryon of the University of Texas Health Science Center found X & Y chromosomes representing male blood and "degraded DNA" (approximately 700 base pairs) "consistent with the supposition of ancient blood."

more...
http://www.newgeology.us/presentation24.html

 

I wonder how many here question the existence of the city of Troy.
The only record of it was in a story/poem written over a thousand years after the fact.
Yet archaeologist were intrigued enough to look and it was found in the 1800's.

My point being there are a lot of things that have been accepted as true with much less supporting documentation than the story of Jesus.

building on what Okie said, the fact that Jesus is mentioned by a few extra biblical sources is pretty friggin' HUGE in light of how much WASN'T recorded.
think about that one.
Why are there references to a person who didn't exist in historical documents penned by persons that had NO interest in keeping his story alive?
It's because they were merely reporting events as they occurred.

 

Thing is though, the story surrounding Troy and the Trojan war is almost certainly not historical fact. Unless we believe in the Olympian gods.

Maybe the same thing applies in the case of the historical Jesus - even if it could be proven that he existed, it wouldn't mean the stories were all true.

 

the war and circumstances surrounding it could all very well be true, no need to believe in Olympian gods in order for the war to have happened.

the question of this thread is if Jesus existed, IMO the evidence is as strong or stronger than many things that are/have been accepted as fact, the existence of the city of Troy for example.

 

What you say about Qumran and the Dead Sea Scrolls is news to me. I think the scholarly consensus is still that the occupants of the Dead Sea settlement were probably Essenes, a sect of Judaism that opposed the incumbent priesthood in Jerusalem and retreated to their Dead Sea sanctuary. Some scholars, including former Pope Benedict, think that John the Baptist, Jesus, and the early Christians might have been Essenes--one sect which Jesus left unmentioned when he attacked other sects, like the Pharisees and Sadducees. Eisenmann even identifies James the Just, Jesus' brother, as the Teacher of Righteousness identified in the scrolls. James fit the Essene profile of keeping Jewish law better than the Pharisees (Jesus did not). But I think these are still minority opinions. I don't know of any evidence connecting Peter to this community. The account in Acts indicates that he left James the Just in charge of the Jerusalem Church and left the country to do missionary work after escaping from prison after his arrest by Herod Agrippa.

 

Okay, so a guy with long hair and a beard was buried in a shroud around that time period. So what?

And I don't even see the point of trying to convince people that the guy never lived at all, because that has nothing to do with anything important.

It's easy to believe that there was an upstart religious leader with a following among the common people in that time and place if you understand that this sort of thing was not uncommon. Statistically, it's more likely that there was more than one such leader and movement at the same time, because throughout the Middle East and Far East, archeologists have found evidence of thousands of religious sects that never amounted to much. Nearly all have been forgotten. So, the idea of Jesus as a locally popular teacher and reformer isn't anything radical or unusual for that time. The real question is whether or not he was significantly different from all the others.

Similar things can be said about Buddha. People who find it hard to believe that there was once a wise and insightful teacher called Buddha need to ask themselves if they are sufficiently imaginative to put themselves back in a culture and society where starting a new religious movement (usually doomed to failure) was something that happened regularly.

The book I read about it may have talked about that aspect of it, but it's been too many years. I have no idea. I wish I could remember the name of it.

The main thing I took away from it was that not everything hinges on what Paul wrote and did. Those who aren't finding sufficient direct proof of the Jesus teacher and leader may have an easier time finding indirect proof through the actions of the group led by Peter and James. Paul never claimed to have met Jesus; Peter did.

I find it interesting that God did not intervene to allow any of Peter's followers to survive and pass anything down to future generations. The significance of that could be debated endlessly.

The best information that we have indicates that Peter did not view Jesus as the founder of a new religion so much as a radical reformer of Judaism. Since his group died out and Paul's did not, Paul's perspective on this became dominant.

 

S. Acharya (aka D.M. Murdock) is hardly a reliable source. Her credentials are a bachelor's degree in classics and attendance at the American Shool of Classic Studies in Athens for a year. She draws mainly on the decades old research of discredited scholars, mainly the amateur Egyptologist Gerald Massey, notorious for his conclusion that the amply documented King Herod in the New Testament was derived from an ancient Egyptian deity Herut.

 

I agree with this and always felt the same way...
ever play the telephone game?
tell one person something.....a story or something....and then have a line of 9 other people...the person you told will whispeer in the ear of the next person, etc....until the last person.....whatever was the original story is never the same at the end....and that is in a span of a few mins......same principle...inflated stories.etc.....Why do people need to believe in an omnipotent being is my question.......If there is, i have a lot of questions as to the many failures here......the cruelities of this life for many.....including other life.....I would be very challenging to any god....I believe in my own power, and if i can find people I respect in this lifetime...that is good enough for me.....I am in no need of omnipotent powers....

 

I find it interesting that the gospels report the Roman authorities saying that a guard for the grave of Jesus is needed, because if somebody steals the body and claim he was resurrected from the dead, there will be no end to his followers. I'd say that's exactly what happened. They should have sent more than two guards. It doesn't cost all that much to bribe two guys to go away for a while.

I also find it interesting that so many people are quick to reject any theory that involves a real story being greatly embellished and altered by a group to serve their own purposes, when life experience has shown me that this happens all the time. Most people aren't creative enough to come up with a believable story out of thin air.