Do You Think Jesus Really Ever Existed?

does anyone have some proof of jesus? i dont even know if the person existed

 

There was probably a man named Jesus at some point. But he himself is not important like Buddhism it's the idea. There can be many Buddhas you could be Buddha if you are wise and disciplined enough. Jesus is the same because you are form god you are god. But by making him into something you could never be you need the church. This lead to all the corruption and evil the Catholic Church brought upon Europe in the following centuries.

 

The evidence is extremely, extremely weak; weak enough to comfortably conclude non-persuasive.

Here is Hitch offering an interesting reason for why he thinks there probably was a historical jesus while delivering his typical artillery strike of analysis

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JjcWkhqScBI

 

Proof is of course THE thing to make something sure, but this doesn't always mean that if there isn't direct proof it is certain the person never existed at all. Especially when it is about a time before 1500 when there is rarely a complete historical record (except maybe about nobility/royalty).

Even though compared to the centuries after the roman decline (in the west anyway) the roman historic records are rich they're still mostly snippets, or it focusses on a general history of an entire empire. Jesus didn't became that important for most romans until decades after his death.


About those letters of his apostles that are in the bible: I think they were first just those letters. The bible was compiled later and then they were included and became part of the bible. So yes, it seems some of them did prevail (unless they're all forgeries of later times).
There are no other sources, so now the original sources that were included in the bible become less credible (to some) just because they became part of the bible later on.

A funny and intriguing sidenote: it is certain the authenticity of some of these letters were already doubted in the third century.

 

So what about the Buddha?

 

I guess he has less trouble with the Buddah because he doesn't have a problem with the religion/philosophy and/or followers associated with the guy. It is likely if Buddah was the one who spawned christianity and not Jesus, Writer would be rallying against the existence of Buddah instead.

 

Watch the video; it doesn't matter to me one lick whether or not the buddha was a real person or not (he was a well documented indian prince btw, if you cared to spend a minute on google), what matters are the lessons that arise from this tradition.

with christianity, the whole point is that there must have been such a person as christ, or the entire notion of salvation makes no sense. watch the hitchens video if you actually want to engage with me because he already covers all your points.

Here's him at his best IMO

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ndNsE7dL5Q

 

Watch the video; it doesn't matter to me one lick whether or not the buddha was a real person or not (he was a well documented indian prince btw, if you cared to spend a minute on google), what matters are the lessons that arise from this tradition.

If you spend a little more time on Google, you can see that there were many buddha's just as there were many jesus', and that Gautama's existence is just as precarious and mysterious as Christ. It's not certain whether he actually existed or not. You can't use Google as a crutch for an argument.

What matters are the lessons that arise from this tradition? You can argue that about any religion, and it is also most likely unknown whether any of the founders of any religion truly existed or not. Gnostics look at the entire view of Resurrection differently than Christians. There's infinite interpretations.

The Gospel of Thomas shows the words of Christ aren't what Christianity portrays but the words are very similar to that of the Buddha's.

 

So I was right in how I put it or not? It's not merely just about if this person (the human being) called Jesus existed, it matters to you that he didn't existed at all because it would discredit the belief of his followers

It is simply so that the lessons in Buddhism matter more to you than those of christianity. But this thread is not about the lessons and/or the religion that came from one of these people and how credible they are.... It is wether we think the person themselves existed or not.
It is of course logical to also pay attention to the divine and miraculous aspects associated with this person, but as pointed out earlier in this thread by several people: there's a difference in the miracles and divinity aspect not being real and concluding for sure that the person never existed. It is very likely the Jesus in the bible is based on a real person (perhaps more than one, and yes maybe he didn't walk on water and stuff, but he sure seems to had so much wisdom to share that we still know about him today).

 

Oh I understand,
Only YOUR assumptions should be considered as correct.
I get it now.



it is kinda interesting the number of extra-biblical historians that recorded the darkness and apparently it was known even then it was not an eclipse, seemingly in direct opposition to your claims/assumptions. Hmmm......curious.

did you read the sources you linked?

 

He sounds a bit preacher-esque. watching the other video now.

 

You need to dig a little deeper than just Christianity. Even if Christ existed, 2000 years later and a major religion formed around him is bound to twist the truth a bit. Christianity used him as a form of control is how I feel. He was a revolutionary who stirred the foundations of Judaism but when Christianity formed it became the new Judaism. Early on, however, the very earliest Christians known as the Gnostics approached his teachings differently than how we understand Christian teachings today. Whether he existed or not, however, just as with the Buddha, certain lessons and teachings have arisen.

Another interesting point is that 30 years after he died there was nothing written about him, and this is said to be when the earliest Christianity first formed. Interesting as it was also the 30 year war in the 1600s which was the transition from the Medieval world to the Scientific world.

I'm watching the video and he's using the argument that because Women viewed the Resurrection that certainly we can't believe it? This is his argument, because he's a sexist? Lame video overall.

 

I don't see the significant connection between these 2 things?

 

It's just interesting to me because they both highlight a new way of living life for a lot of people and it forming in a 30 year span. The shift from the Medieval world of Kings and Alchemists to the switch to Parliaments and Science was a completely radical shift in a short amount of time. The generations that led up to that point basically became deemed as nothing more than a subject of history. Unthinkable for those generations.

The transition from the death of Christ to the birth of Christianity in a 30 year span also marks a significant shift. Just found it interesting.

 

Many Christians are fanatical about getting others to believe in Jesus....many atheists are fanatical about getting others to not believe in Jesus.
Doesn't matter what anyone believes....only what is real is relevant.
I asked my captain on a shrimp boat what he thought happened when someone dies....he said "you turn to shit and become worm food."
If, If, If, people don't have a soul, becoming recycled food might be what it's all about.
"What if the hokey pokey is what it's all about?"...you put your left foot, you put your left foot out, then you put your left foot in and you shake it all about......

 

It matters to me that if Jesus Christ never existed, then over two billion people on this planet thinking that a man named Jesus Christ existed, and is God, are wrong. And are structuring their lives around a titanic error. Does this not trouble you? Do you view my problem with this as a moral defect?

Christianity presented zero new lessons to the world. The golden rule is the only salvageable part of christianity that matters, and it predates christianity, so cannot be credited to christianity.

Buddhism has never had anything like it before in history and we haven't been able to improve upon it very much at all. In fact scientists and philosophers are, as we speak, experiencing a rennaissance of understanding and exploration into the teachings of buddhism. Improving upon christianity is laughably easy. You can start with removing the first few commandments, and replacing them with "Thou shalt not rape" and "Thou shalt be kind to children", just as a quick beginning.

But of course we can't improve it, because the bible is the perfect word of the creator of the universe.

Buddhism does not have this issue; if someone finds a problem in buddhism, buddhism will change.

They really shouldn't be compared in the same category at all; it's like comparing chess and kickboxing, because they are both "sports", yet how much do they really have in common.

I cannot make this any more clear, and if you do not understand this point, you are either deliberately obtuse, or you do not understand the basic tenets of christianity:

If Jesus Christ never existed, then that is a fatal blow to Christianity, which is the belief that Jesus Christ existed on earth, and is actually God in Heaven, the creator and ruler of the universe, and our souls are his for eternal life should we do x, y, z.

It doesn't matter to christianity whether or not there was a "wise man" in bronze age palestine who was somewhat more morally intelligent than the average barbarian; christianity is not a position of casually admiring the moral teachings of a particular jew. It is the position that a particular moral jew is the creator of the universe and that we must follow him through our lives and unto eternity.

If you can't imagine how a lack of evidence for his existence is damaging to christianity, which forms itself from a written document about Jesus' supposed life, then you simply don't understand what most of those 2 billion people believe.

You act as though the literal existence of jesus does not matter to a religion based upon the literal existence of jesus.

 

I'm not acting like that. I was pointing out how your motivation for coming to your conclusion in this (and every other thread relating to Jesus, christianity and/or its followers) thread is guided by your urge to debunk it. It simply is not certain Jesus did not exist at all. But same with you and Buddah: I don't care either if Jesus (or Buddah for that matter) existed or not. I am just inclined to think he did or at least was based on a real person.

Maybe it matters to you that the lessons in christianity are not new at their core. To me that simply doesn't matter. Who cares that there was a similar way of thinking/believing or a similar deity before? Well, I care about that a lot to be honest but not because it makes the newer thing less credible on itself. That's between your ears my friend. It's about the lesson, not how old or new it is or how many times it got recycled.

About your question: I don't care either that people believe in Jesus regardless of that. People believe in all kinds of things. The art is not to get everyone in a society to think/believe like you but to live with them, either through the art of acceptance and otherwise tolerance The problem you have with religion is at first instance YOUR problem. If it is not problematic for you or anybody else it's not a problem. You see that?
Sure it may annoy me too at times that people believe completely different things as I do, because they don't make sense to me or agree with me. But I'm not going around making claims with certainty about things that are not certain because of that.

I do not view your problem as a moral defect, but I see how you are handling this problem (the same as an evangelistic christian would handle such a problem from their POV) and it is just as annoying and repetitive as anybody else with a big dislike for something and an overly strong conviction of they themselves being right. And yes, sometimes it is indeed getting immoral tendencies (although just in a verbal way as far as I know)

 

You can't prove whether Christ existed or didn't. You just don't want him to exist. If he did exist, that's a fatal blow for you.

 

Thank you, Mr. Writer, for providing us with an additional reason to believe in the existence of an historical Jesus: that the gospel writers go through contortions to have Jesus born in Bethlehem to fulfill prophecy when (if he was completely fictional) they could have had him born there to begin with. Hitchens finds this to be evidence that Jesus was "not a wholecloth fabrication". Yet Hitchens is not completely accurate (or honest?) about this. Only Luke bends over backwards to have Jesus' family travel to Bethlehem for the birth. Mark has no birth account at all, and Matthew does have Jesus parents living in Bethlehem at the time and moving to Nazereth later. But the bigger problem with Hitchens' account is that he extols the merits of the contributions attributed to Socrates but denigrates those attributed to Jesus. After all, he tells us, Socrates gave us the Socratic method, while all Jesus gave us was a bunch of miracle claims. This completely ignores the aspect of Jesus that makes Him (along with Socrates) my role model: Jesus the Sage, who gave us the Sermon on the Mount, the parable of the Good Samaritan, the emphasis on love of God and neighbor as the keys to the law, and the splendid example of love for society's rejects. I agree with Hitchens that the important thing is the truth of those things rather than the existence of the person who said them. But the main reason I think Socrates actually existed is not the testimony of Plato (who also gave us the Lost Continent of Atlantis) nor that of Xenophon, who might have gotten it all from Plato, but Aristophanes' Clouds, where Socrates is satirized as a spacey charlatan. Hitchens leaves out the charges that Socrates was a Spartan fifth columnist who was prepping his youthful disciples for fascism. The controversy over Socrates' character adds credibility to his existence.