Did Jesus Christ Actually Exist?

[joelr]

This is the problem with Carrier he frequently distorts his sources.

Read the paper yourself and see if you can think independently enough to see how Carrier is misrepresenting what Mason says here.

It’s really not difficult.

Go ahead, show me.

You might want to read your own posts and see if you can spot the same you are complaining about. But I suppose pointing out your hypocrisy would be "gaslighting".

As usual, no examples. Pointing out hypocrisy is in fact not gaslighting if one is being hypocritical.

Making up acusations to change reality in your favor is gaslighting. Such as:
" constantly insist those that disagree with Carrier need to write a peer reviewed paper "


"I will listen to your advice. What does the top scholar Steve Mason say on this? (mythicism)(hint - it's in the video above)"

He is not a scholar on mythicism, yet, you seem to think this will confuse me.

I already explained, in detail the mis-leading content of your post. Your response is to say "uh uh, you are gaslighting".

Uh huh.

For once I agree. You don’t think (hence you pretend you are simply presenting scholarship neutrally rather than parenting an opinion based on an evaluation of competing evidence)

And yet, you present no evidence to counter it. It's not my fault you are not up to speed on historical scholarship. But further gaslighting, pretending I'm giving a bias opinion, isn't true. Where is your evidence? Not here?

You can’t form any opinions on much of history if you simply take everything said by a phd at face value as much of it is mutually incompatible. For example on the question of whether Constantine was genuinely a Christian .

Uh, if the PhD field is currently having trouble agreeing, then the matter is too complex to currently solve with the best scholars studying ALL the evidence.
Why this is so hard for you, I have no idea. You seem to want an amateur to pick a side when experts cannot. Absurd.
THEN, you make it like it's a problem with me. The person who is respecting what scholarship is saying.

Oh, don't take these PhD SCHOLARS at face value???????? You have to make up an amature opinion, asif that is even close to reality?

Here, there is no other possible explanation for this bizzare and ongoing strange idea except you are a Christian fundamentalist and insist Constantine was also Christian.
Sorry, scholarship doesn't agree. Your problem. Deal with it or not. I. do. not. care.

Historians almost never agree. As such you always have to choose which ones you find more persuasive and why. So when I ask what you think, just saying "one scholar said X" in defence of why you are promoting one view over another is silly.

All or nothing fallacy. In light of this evidence, there isn't an answer. You know where else there isn't an answer. IN QUANTUM MECHANICS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

NO ONE in physics says stuff like "you HAVE TO PICK AN INTERPRETATION". Copenhagen, Many-Worlds, Decoherance, Hidden Variables.
No, you do not. You can champion one if you find it compelling. But a specialist in atomic theory just says there are many interpretations and does their work. The end.

Go away with this nonsense.

I wrote extensively about this before and asked how you were judging technical arguments beyond your abilities, but you ignored it multiple times.

Uh, what arguments? I'm letting the experts make conclusions. If you need heart surgery are you going to read some medical texts and advise the surgeon which method you find more reliable?
Are you going to corner Gordon Ryan at his next match after watching a bunch of instructionals then tell him how to submit his opponent?

Ridiculous.

Again, you posted a wiki that as much supported my argument as yours. Pretending otherwise is silly (you would whine about gaslighting probably)

Exactly, as I said, that is why it has no solution. You just admitted it. And, if someone gaslights you , then later makes a redundant claim and says "uh oh, are you going to "whine" about gaslighting". Is just more gaslighting.
This is like striking someone and then later say "oh are you going to call me an "abuser" again if I assault you?
You can continue to dig your hole deeper. It's on you , not me.

And when I did post peer reviewed scholarship, you flat ignored it (as usual).

And, no example or explanation. Yawn.

The point is you must form opinions that go against some experts on any area of ancient history, I explained why I found the “cynical realpolitik” argument silly, and favoured the arguments supported by the scholars who consider he was Christian.

Wow, good for you. Many experts in history don't agree. So I don't care about your amateur uneducated opinion.

You just seem to want to find an excuse not to explain what you think and why while posting sources that all align in one direction is evidence of your noble pursuit of truth.

Yes, on this one matter of Constantine. In fact, Bart Ehrman says the same thing.
Now that's a funny thing to say - "while posting sources that all align in one direction". ........huh, you JUST SAID, my source supported your opinion just as much as mine? Wow, it's like you are ,making stuff up as you go?

This is what you kept ignoring, but if you won’t answer it it’s pointless to discuss anything as simply pasting stuff without comment gets nowhere as there is no scholarly consensus on most aspects of ancient history.

True. Oh wait, no not true at all.

Exodus
Markan Priority
Matthew is a creative rewrite of Mark
Genesis is a reworking of Mesopotamian myth
Moses is a literary character
Paul wrote in ~50AD
Mark is 70 AD
7 Epistles are later forgeries

Shall we keep going?

So what heuristics do you use when forming your opinions on matters you lack the technical skills to evaluate yourself?

Yeah, as if, scholars don't talk about and write about what is consensus in their field and what is still debated.
In case you need help with this, You can read The Case Against Q, Goodacre or R. Stein - The Synoptic Problem, an Introduction to see how we know the consensus on these topics.


Do you want the consensus of Biblical archaeology? Israel Finklestein, The Bible Unearthed.
Do you want the consensus on the Dead Sea Scrolls in historical studies? I'll give you the Kipp Davis to study.

Class over.

 

[joelr]

Directly followed by his explanation of why he personally believes Constantine’s conversion was genuine

Something he describes as “crystal clear” (even if he also used it politically)

Do you just assume folk won’t bother to fact check you or do you simply not understand either what you post or what arguments you are replying to?

No I would assume you would continue to use confirmation bias and goal-post moving to desperately stop getting booted all around this forum.
Unfortunately, it's going to happen some more.

You seemed to forget something important (confirmation bias?), there is no such thing as a "religious vs political" conversion in the 4th century.

" The narrative of how Constantine became a Christian is both intriguing and complex. It involves issues that we today would consider strictly social and political and other issues that we would consider strictly religious. But in the early fourth century – as in all the centuries of human history before that time – these two realms, the socio-political and the religious, were not seen as distinct. They were tightly and inextricably interwoven. On just the linguistic level, there were no Greek or Latin terms that neatly differentiated between what we today mean by “politics” and “religion.” On the practical level, the gods were understood to be closely connected with every aspect of the social and political life of a community, from the election of officials, to the setting of the annual calendar, to the laws and practices that governed social relations, such as marriage and divorce, to the administration of civil justice, to the decisions and actions of war, to all the other major decisions of state. The gods were active in every part of social and political life, and the decisions made and actions taken were done in relation to them."



"crystal clear" huh? LOL.

"fact check"??? LOL!!!

Haha, he agrees with what I said. So by your own assertion, your disagreement with him is hubristic.

You are either deliberately dishonest or incapable of understanding the material you post.

Either way, it makes what you say worthless and boring.

Bye bye

Heh. I'm sorry losing is so hard on you. Maybe next time you can argue honestly. He agrees with both ideas because it's an anachronistic view to think of it like you are. I already pointed this out. Something (confirmation bias?) shut it out from your mind. But maybe someday you can relax, stop trying so hard to expose me and read up on some history.


" The narrative of how Constantine became a Christian is both intriguing and complex. It involves issues that we today would consider strictly social and political and other issues that we would consider strictly religious. But in the early fourth century – as in all the centuries of human history before that time – these two realms, the socio-political and the religious, were not seen as distinct. They were tightly and inextricably interwoven. On just the linguistic level, there were no Greek or Latin terms that neatly differentiated between what we today mean by “politics” and “religion.” On the practical level, the gods were understood to be closely connected with every aspect of the social and political life of a community, from the election of officials, to the setting of the annual calendar, to the laws and practices that governed social relations, such as marriage and divorce, to the administration of civil justice, to the decisions and actions of war, to all the other major decisions of state. The gods were active in every part of social and political life, and the decisions made and actions taken were done in relation to them."


AND, trying to convince others they are worthless and boring is a way for a "certain type" to manipulate and control the narrative. I can't say who is what, but it's not a reflection of me anyways.

 

[joelr]

Err, as I already clarified after your initial mistake that comment was about Paul.

That you made the initial error then doubled down on it by ignoring the clarification and constructing a monumental strawman is par for the course with you.

The answer you are commenting on was regarding Antinous who wasn't written in the lifetime of their contemporaries.

Again, let's review.

"So now you want me to go to your argument and remind you? What is happening here?


I said:


"Antinous , wasn't the lifetime of their contemporaries."


You said:


"According to scholarly consensus it was.


If you disagree, write peer reviewed papers, etc bla bla"



So I provided information, with sources, to which you pretend you can't remember that you got shown to be incorrect.



Straight up, you were wrong and mysteriously can't remember the topic. Uh-huh. Of course you try to attack the source. Forgetting the argument is give ANY SOURCE besides vague speculation."



And your response is about Paul and nonsense? Ok. Yeah you don't make stuff up to try and wiggle out of being cornered.

You copy pasting some random bibliography of sources you’ve never read and have no idea what they say to “refute” a strawman of your own creation is why it’s just getting too boring to continue.

If by "boring" you mean "desperate", then sure.
I have read the summary and calling it a "random bibliography" even though it's compiled by a historian doesn't minimize it at all. Unless you value the opinion of an amateur over experts.

You could refute it.

But you can't. What you can do it try to hand-wave it off. If you can't engage honestly.

You write lots but read little as you just want to confirm your own biases.

Says the random internet person with ZERO sources. Who hurls random accusations with no proof. Please tell me, what don't I read?
I missed the part where there was substance or evidence to your words.

That’s pretty clear from your repeated failures in comprehension.

Like your incorrect ideas about Antinous?
Like your entire posts of making stuff up?
Like your failure to provide evidence?

Please demonstrate one "failure in comprehension". You once again, provide no evidence, examples, just butt-hurt-ness. Having to jump on the fact that I reversed a fraction is hilarious. This brings back memories of trivial high school relationship arguments.

Hence it’s pointless trying to actually discuss anything with you as you will just misrepresent and say whatever most chimes with your personal biases.

Uh huh, after post after post of making up a fantasy world, gaslighting, which I explained each example in detail, and you failed to respond.
Maybe engage honestly and you won't get smoked next time. Too easy. 90% of my posts were ignored for made up stuff and personal attacks.

and what do people do when they can no longer continue misleading posts, attacks, and claims without evidence?
Blame it on the other person, as if it isn't themself to blame. "It's pointless trying to discuss......".

Boom. Right into the stereotype. The answers lie in the mirror.

 

[blü 2]

The only reason I might believe that Jesus existed 'possibly' is through the Pilate stone finding by archaeologists in 1961 which was dated between AD 26-37. And this is the correct time frame for the events described in the Gospels. But this is not evidence for Jesus but for Pontius Pilate.
[...]
So, what is the evidence for Jesus?

I looked at the HJ question to some depth earlier this century, and concluded that no definitive answer is possible. Some time after that I was impressed by Ehrman's argument that none of the opponents of the very early church ever used the argument that Jesus hadn't existed. And I also found the argument from the criterion of embarrassment (a term used by historians) likewise persuasive ─ in this case my observation (no doubt others have made it too) that in all four gospels Jesus fights with his family and is routinely nasty to his mother Mary, the sole exception being John's Jesus instructing the Beloved Disciple to look after her. Check out Mark 3:31-35, Mark 6:4-5, Matthew 10:35-37, Luke 11:27 and John 2:3, contrast John 19:26.

So these days I incline to think it more likely than not that there was a real HJ. If so, we could reasonably suspect he was part of the apocalyptic movement of his day, that he was an itinerant preacher, that he was executed by crucifixion by the Romans as an actual or more likely potential troublemaker, that he was buried, and that he had followers who kept on meeting, and who as the result perhaps of dreams declared that he had risen from the dead.

But as for Mark, the earliest gospel, which serves as a template for Matthew and Luke, and at a greater distance for John, its literary category appears to be more like a historical novel ─ at the least, a deliberately structured storytelling, rather than any kind of historical record ─ about a former cult leader. It's apparently based on what was repeated among Jesus' early followers, about whom we know not quite nothing, but very little.

 

[joelr]

​

So, what can we learn?

Well, for one, the inputs to Bayes’s Theorem matter. Particularly small inputs. When we’re dealing with rare evidence for rare events, then small errors in the inputs can end up giving a huge range of outputs, enough of a range that there is no usable information to be had.

And those errors come from many sources, and are difficult to quantify. It is tempting to think of errors only in terms of the data acquisition error, and to ignore errors of choice and errors of reference class.

These issues combine to make it very difficult to make any sensible conclusions from Bayes’s Theorem in areas where probabilities are small, data is low quality, possible reference classes abound, and statements are vague. In areas like history, for example....

Carrier joins that latter debate too, in what he describes as a “cheeky” unification of Bayesian and Frequentist interpretations, but what reads as a misunderstanding of what the differences between Bayesian and Frequentist statistics are... But given the lack of mathematical care demonstrated in the rest of the book, to me it came off as indicative of a Dunning-Kruger effect around mathematics.

I had many other problems with the mathematics presented in the book, I felt there were severe errors with his arguments a fortiori (i.e. a kind of reasoning from inequalities — the probability is no greater than X); and his set-theoretic treatment of reference classes was likewise muddled (though in the latter case it coincidentally did not seem to result in incorrect conclusions)...

But ultimately I think the book is disingenuous. It doesn’t read as a mathematical treatment of the subject, and I can’t help but think that Carrier is using Bayes’s Theorem in much the same way that apologists such as William Lane Craig use it: to give their arguments a veneer of scientific rigour that they hope cannot be challenged by their generally more math-phobic peers. To enter an argument against the overwhelming scholarly consensus with “but I have math on my side, math that has been proven, proven!” seems transparent to me, more so when the quality of the math provided in no way matches the bombast.

I suspect this book was always designed to preach to the choir, and will not make much impact in scholarly circles. I hope it doesn’t become a blueprint for other similar scholarship, despite agreeing with many of its conclusions.

Source 1 and 2

source 1 - This person didn't read OJH but read Proving History and the review he links to is a Christian site. The reviewer has zero knowledge of historical studies and keeps mentioning how much he hates using Bayes to do history. Yet can't show why. Nonsense apologetics.

This scientist, who is it? Carrier may have written about this. I'll send it to Carrier if he's wrong. There are many papers on using this to do history.


On Matt Korvacs claims about the math he did:

Matt Kovacs Demonstrates What's Wrong with Atheists Clinging to the Historicity of Jesus • Richard Carrier Blogs

I’ve commented a lot lately in my articles on the historicity of Jesus that critics themselves are now demonstrating why historicity is a bankrupt paradigm: they never have a sound or valid argument for it. Instead, they kneejerk oppose it emotionally, doing no work to even understand the peer...

www.richardcarrier.info

 

[Augustus]

Please demonstrate one "failure in comprehension"

I said:


"Antinous , wasn't the lifetime of their contemporaries."


You said:


"According to scholarly consensus it was.


If you disagree, write peer reviewed papers, etc bla bla"



So I provided information, with sources, to which you pretend you can't remember that you got shown to be incorrect.

Hadrian literally built a city in honour of his cult, yet you still want to claim he wasn't deified by his contemporaries??

The city, as we have seen, was not to be just a personal
memorial to his lost love or a cult centre for the risen god but a political bastion
of Hellenism in Middle Egypt. 'The new Greeks of Antinous', as the Emperor
officially designated those recruited to this impressive new metropolis,w e r e
to embody the civic and cultural values of Hellas which he had done so much to
revive. At the same time, the ancient culture of the Nile which, after all, had
first recognised the divinity of Antinous as Osiris, was to be honoured and
indeed, through an approved admixture of native blood in the citizenry, to be
fused into that of Greece.
Hadrian officially declared the city founded on 30 October 130, but it was
still not completely built or settled at the time of his death eight years later.

Beloved and god - R Lambert


If archaeological evidence is not good enough, there is also literary evidence:

The citharode Mesomedes of Crete was one of the poets at the court of Hadrian. In late antiquity a selection of his poetry was assembled, and this corpus survived in transmission until medieval times, partly with musical notation. But of course the oeuvre of Mesomedes was much greater, as we see from two poems transmitted by the Greek Anthology and a lost encomium on Antinous,..

In verses 1-2 the poet evidently addresses the dead Antinous, who in Courion was worshipped after his death as the new Adonis, identified with Osiris. It is interesting that there was a centre of worship of Adonis/Osiris in Amathous, 20 km east of Courion. But the dead Antinous was identified with other gods also:11 an inscription from Rome attests that the worldwide associaton of Dionysiac artists (Ἁδριανὴ σύνοδος), which had its centre in Rome since Trajan and Hadrian,12 worshipped Antinous as the new Hermes.

The Hymn of Mesomedes on Antinous (Inscription of Courion, Mitford No. 104) - Egert Pöhlmann


No point in addressing the rest of your shrill misrepresentations and nonsense if you can't even accept you are wrong on this point despite such overwhelming evidence.

 

[Andrew Stephen]

Peace to all,

To me existence of Jesus rationally is how God delivered His Mind to creation. What becomes from created is from the spirit through the flesh for the soul becoming reborn from the manifestation through The Power of the Holy Spirit Person for becoming again, saved, united being.

The failed spirit of choice created the greatest gift, Love and through His Passion eternal life from the Holy Spirit through the flesh of all beings as Sons and Daughters of God for the souls of all mankind, become united.

To me the Christ is the Mind of God in the flesh of a human, Jesus becoming from the New Eve, Mary in the Immaculate Conception through the Virgin Birth of The Christ, immortality through the flesh and incorruptibility from the "Holy" spirit delivered in the Ark of the New Covenant conceived by the Person of the Holy Spirit to become the Christ in all mankind. The Christ is transformed two people in one, and is the Will of Creation carrying the intelligence that will never fail and follows the pattern of infallible certainty containing the logic through The Word becomes flesh in the Body of Jesus as The Christ answering "What would Jesus do in all cases of fulfilled faith and morality through the New Living Sacrifice". Becoming transformed mankind is created corruptible from the spirit through the corruptible flesh for the failed soul to go through the becomings of immortal and incorruptible transformations and then re-sanctified and glorified and through transfiguration become again united as one in being in the new image of creation from God for the Father. The logic of truth is in the story that never changes from created failed life, spirit and flesh that becomes transformed into immortality and incorruptibility and becomes again glorified and transfigured, reimaged, from the spirit through the flesh for Our Christ from all of the wondrous mysteries of The Faith in the Body of The Christ.

What existed before creation is the Word, the eternal authority of spirit and life. The Three Divine persons of the Trinity are the persons in beings of The Powers of Creation and Transformation and Glorified Transfiguration and are The Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit respectively, each equal and separate in the powers and together In One Power as One God in being.

We know Fiat is Latin for Let it be the Will of The One in Power.

Peace always,
Stephen