did jesus exist?

[angellous_evangellous]

Fantastic.

:takeabow:

 

[Oberon]

Right, think of the OT stories themselves. Even today a vast majority believes there was literally an Adam and an Eve, There was a World Wide Flood even though science has shown this to be incorrect.....and others believe in other various biblical characters, places, events....even though, from what we can tell from what we have as a historical record, a lot of it is false.

The differences is that, just as with myths about Osiris or Hercules, these are harder to prove false to believers because they are placed so long ago. Our earliest sources for Jesus come from a contemporary. And Mark wrote a mere 35+ years later. Even if Mark weren't born when Jesus died, other people were certainly alive even when Mark was written. In other words, you are trying to argue that people believed a story while there were still living people who could say "that guy never lived. I was there." There is a reason why actual myths are placed in an unverifiable setting. Jesus was certainly legendary, and certainly his story is filled with mythic elements. But to posit that so much occured from the time Mark has jesus die to the composition of Mark that no one could tell this man had never even lived, even though people were still around who were there, is ridiculous.

 

[Oberon]

I do understand that scholars had to go through a mountain of paperwork to get what little the do know.

What you don't understand, or aren't familiar with, are the results. Which makes your statements about this work pretty useless.

 

[angellous_evangellous]

Even if Mark weren't born when Jesus died, other people were certainly alive even when Mark was written. In other words, you are trying to argue that people believed a story while there were still living people who could say "that guy never lived. I was there."

Interesting. I've never thought about that before. There are two collections (that I know of / use) of all of the fragments of "pagans" talking about Christians and Christianity for the first three centuries.... and you're right, no-one said that Jesus never existed.

Apparently, there was no tradition floating around in educated circles (like Galen or Celsus, for example) that Jesus never existed.

 

[Smoke]

To be confident in a used car, you need Carfax.

To be confident in the historical Jesus, you need Jesusfax.

I don't know about that, but somebody shoulda done a background check on Paul.

 

[Ilisrum]

Interesting. I've never thought about that before.
Apparently, there was no tradition floating around in educated circles (like Galen or Celsus, for example) that Jesus never existed.

This is one of the primary reasons I can't support the theory. For nearly 1700 years nobody ever questioned his existence and then about 200 years or so ago a couple enlightened European guys thought "Hey, maybe this guy is a myth after all".
But... I'm probably the least informed person in the room anyhow.

 

[angellous_evangellous]

This is one of the primary reasons I can't support the theory. For nearly 1700 years nobody ever questioned his existence and then about 200 years or so ago a couple enlightened European guys thought "Hey, maybe this guy is a myth after all".

But... I'm probably the least informed person in the room anyhow.

The thing is that people in ancient times did have the ability to know if a person did or did not exist. There were plenty of frauds back then who peddled counterfeit philosophy, rhetoric, and teachers such as Jesus.

The opponents of the Christians did not point out Jesus as a fraud or a made-up character, but said that he was a magician or a wise man.

Some of the opponents read the Gospels and a good deal of the church fathers, and if they had said that Jesus never existed, wouldn't that be cannon fodder for people now who don't believe that he existed? But instead they assent to Jesus's existence as do most historians both in the past and today. And that is significant.

 

[outhouse]

This is one of the primary reasons I can't support the theory. For nearly 1700 years nobody ever questioned his existence and then about 200 years or so ago a couple enlightened European guys thought "Hey, maybe this guy is a myth after all".
But... I'm probably the least informed person in the room anyhow.

people have questioned this since it was written

people were murdered with a different view, bat an eye against the bible and you were dead.

as people became more civilized and not murdered for opinion, opinion became known

 

[angellous_evangellous]

people have questioned this since it was written

people were murdered with a different view, bat an eye against the bible and you were dead.

as people became more civilized and not murdered for opinion, opinion became known

Which time period are you talking about?

 

[Dirty Penguin]

The differences is that, just as with myths about Osiris or Hercules, these are harder to prove false to believers because they are placed so long ago. Our earliest sources for Jesus come from a contemporary. And Mark wrote a mere 35+ years later. Even if Mark weren't born when Jesus died, other people were certainly alive even when Mark was written. In other words, you are trying to argue that people believed a story while there were still living people who could say "that guy never lived. I was there." There is a reason why actual myths are placed in an unverifiable setting. Jesus was certainly legendary, and certainly his story is filled with mythic elements. But to posit that so much occured from the time Mark has jesus die to the composition of Mark that no one could tell this man had never even lived, even though people were still around who were there, is ridiculous.

You got me all wrong...in a way. I'm not throwing out Mark, Matthew or Luke. What I will throw out is fantastical claims and try to review what can be considered "historical" or possible. Case in point would be Yeshua's trial or any other non-fantastical interactions. To me the writers seems to take stories/events I've read from the OT and attribute it to a biblical Yeshua. As far as Paul, what I can say for certainty is that he seemed to never have met an earthly Yeshua and in various places seem to think of Yeshua as a spiritual being and due for an appearance in his lifetime.

I'm kind of interested to know if Paul knew for a certainty that James was a supposed (blood relative of an supposed earthly Yeshua) or was he simply told by James or whomever that he was....While I suspect Yeshua was a mythical character I do acknowledge the slight possibility of a real 1st century man that was not as important as the 4 gospels portray him. Ultimately, for me, if he wasn't all the rage then what's the point in all the seemingly special pleading for the existence of a nobody.....

 

[Ilisrum]

people have questioned this since it was written

What was written? The idea that Jesus is a myth is a fairly modern idea, and if people in ancient and medieval, or even early modern times, believed it, there's no record of it.

people were murdered with a different view, bat an eye against the bible and you were dead.

That all occurred after Christianity became the official religion of the Roman empire and the church began hunting down "heretics". It really had more to do with power than faith and has no relevance before the 4th century.

as people became more civilized and not murdered for opinion, opinion became known

Actually, there were always people willing to die for their beliefs. We're just living in a much more secular society now.

 

[outhouse]

What was written

the NT has been in question and its authenticity debated early on.

That all occurred after Christianity became the official religion

were not in disagreement then

 

[Oberon]

What I will throw out is fantastical claims

Does this mean you would throw out a priori any claims that Jesus was thought to have healed the sick or cast out demons? In other words, a great many "fantastical" claims could have been interpreted as fanstatical when in fact they were not. This happens even today.

and try to review what can be considered "historical" or possible.

Fair enough. But using what methods?

I'm kind of interested to know if Paul knew for a certainty that James was a supposed (blood relative of an supposed earthly Yeshua) or was he simply told by James or whomever that he was

Given the centrality of kinship ties not only in community organization but in personal identity, it isn't really possible for someone to have gone around a group of people and claim to be related to someone they were not. If you know someone well, you know their family. It is perhaps hard to understand this given modern western community organization, but family as a means to not only identify yourself but also to be identified by others was vital in the ancient mediterranean. It is unlikely people would go around claiming to be related to people they weren't, but far less likely that people who knew them would be fooled. Again, knowing a person meant knowing their family.

 

[dogsgod]

Given the centrality of kinship ties not only in community organization but in personal identity, it isn't really possible for someone to have gone around a group of people and claim to be related to someone they were not. If you know someone well, you know their family. It is perhaps hard to understand this given modern western community organization, but family as a means to not only identify yourself but also to be identified by others was vital in the ancient mediterranean. It is unlikely people would go around claiming to be related to people they weren't, but far less likely that people who knew them would be fooled. Again, knowing a person meant knowing their family.

Which explains why Paul was referring to James as a fellow believer of the Lord.

 

[Oberon]

Which explains why Paul was referring to James as a fellow believer of the Lord.

Once again, not only is James, as Jesus' brother, independently attested to elsewhere, Paul met him. He uses a specific syntactical construction to identify James by his kin (Jesus). You haven't made produced a single argument on how this grammatical construction should be understood in a different light.

 

[Pegg]

apologist christians use “after-the-event writings as evidence for the event itself” which “violate the rules of historiography.”

Every modern historian alive today who traces past events and recalls them is doing exactly that. When you watch a documentary on the history channel do you believe that they actually witnessed the events they are discussing???

Historians are called historians because they are recalling 'past' events....not current ones. If they were writing about events they witnessed they would be called journalists.

 

[dogsgod]

The Liturgy of St. James called him "the brother of God". It uses a specific syntactical construction to identify James by his kin, (God). That's some family.

 

[Oberon]

The Liturgy of St. James called him "the brother of God". It uses a specific syntactical construction to identify James by his kin, (God). That's some family.

You clearly don't get it. Grammatical/syntactic constructions are language specific. I have asserted, and use several reference grammars to back up my view, that the syntactical structure, X the [familial relation] of Y, where "of Y" is placed in the genitive, is a method of identifying X by kinship. If I am wrong, then there ought to be similar uses of the genitive in greek literature that did not do this, i.e. used this same syntactic construction without identifying X by familial ties.

Referring to a translation, particularly one by people who clearly literally viewed James as the actual brother of God, shows nothing.

If you want to argue that the construction Paul uses is NOT a means to identify James by his brother, then 1) what is the genitive doing here and 2) how can you show this by other examples in Greek?

 

[dogsgod]

OK, so James was the brother of God. Got it. God had a brother, therefore God exists.

 

[Oberon]

OK, so James was the brother of God. Got it. God had a brother, therefore God exists.

Right. That's not illogical at all.

Jesus was a historical person with a historical family. His later deification means that his brothers were thought to be the brothers of God. The same is true for other deified historical people. The family of Augustus didn't cease to exist simply because Augustus was deified.