How certain are we that Jesus was historical?

[Bunyip]

If I could remind members of the OP at this point.

I asked for an open an honest discussion, if all you can muster is popping in to fling some childish insult - please resist the temptation.

Kinldy engage on the OP, not on the contributors to the OP

Cheers.

 

[mahasn ebn sawresho]

Nah mate, the 5 mill had their own homes, but the Jesus Boys simply pulled into diners and motels on the road..

"And Jesus went about all the cities and villages" (Matt 9:35)

This picture is beautiful
Yes if Jesus present in these days it is possible to wear these clothes
This is a very beautiful image of Jesus talk
But ask Muslims
If such a picture of the Prophet of Islam
What will happen
Will the swords and declare fatwas
Note that image only
I haven't angered them

 

[Shuttlecraft]

(re Jesus witnesses)..Shame none of them left a note. Indeed if any of those 5 million witnesses left some kind of record, you may have had a point.

Same with Elvis, millions of people saw him, but why would they want to write anything?
It's common knowledge that Elvis existed, and it's common knowledge that Jesus existed; the similarities are uncanny..

"Everybody tried to touch Jesus because power was coming from him" (Luke 6:12-19)

 

[Desert Snake]

Jesus makes all these pop stars look like chumps.

 

[Ingledsva]

No.


he has you there.



It depends on context and which book is using said statement. many books anointed specifically refers to jesus the Christ


Jesus son of Damneus (Greek: Ἰησοῦς του Δαμναίου, Hebrew: ישוע בן דמנאי, Yeshua` ben Damnai) was a Herodian-era High Priest of Israel in Jerusalem, Iudaea Province.[1]

In the Antiquities of the Jews (Book 20, Chapter 9) first-century historian Josephus states that Jesus ben Damneus was made high priest after the previous high priest, Ananus son of Ananus, was removed from his position for executing James the Just.[2] Jesus ben Damneus himself was deposed less than a year later.

While the authenticity of some passages in Book 18 of Antiquities of the Jews has been subject to debate, the overwhelming majority of scholars consider the discussion of the death of James in Section 9 of Book 20 to be authentic.[3][4]

The works of Josephus refer to at least twenty different people with the name Jesus, and in chapter 9 of Book 20, Jesus the son of Damneus is distinct from the reference to the biblical "Jesus called Christ", who is mentioned along with the identification of James.[5] John Painter states that phrase "who was called Christ" is used by Josephus in this passage "by way of distinguishing him from others of the same name such as the high priest Jesus son of Damneus, or Jesus son of Gamaliel" both having been mentioned by Josephus in this context

And since you studied this, you know that there are scholars on the other side of that.


People before, and after Jesus, claimed to be the Messiah, the Anointed (Christos.)


I might add that James, Son of Alphaeus, is the James that was stoned to death.


Herod had James, Son of Zebedee killed with a sword.


This appears to be jumbled bits of repeated old stories.


And NOT a history of Jesus of the NT.


*

 

[Bunyip]

Same with Elvis, millions of people saw him, but why would they want to write anything?
It's common knowledge that Elvis existed, and it's common knowledge that Jesus existed; the similarities are uncanny..

"Everybody tried to touch Jesus because power was coming from him" (Luke 6:12-19)

Mate we have countless eye witness accounts of Elvis. Please try harder.

 

[Ingledsva]

Look for your real HJ if you like but I am not referring to OT prophesy, I am referring to scenes in the gospels taken from the OT such as the crucifixion scene that is lifted from Psalm 22 line for line. This rules out oral tradition.

There is nothing from the OT about Jesus.

Isaiah and Psalms are not about Jesus, and we have posted the verses showing this, recently.

*

Emmanuel is Isaiah's son by the Temple virgin.

*

"k'ari b'yadai v'raglai" - "Like a lion (they) are at my hands and feet." The disputed word here is "k'ari" which is spelled kaph - aleph - resh - yud. Ari is a lion, and that "kaph" before it means "like" or "as."

And they know it is actually “lion” – look at - 22:21 Save me from the lion's mouth:


Though of course - they did lift them - and try to make them about Jesus.


*

 

[roger1440]

What do you think the word "evidence" means?

evidence
“…something which shows that something else exists or is true…. something that furnishes proof…” Evidence - Definition and More from the Free Merriam-Webster Dictionary

 

[Desert Snake]

There is nothing from the OT about Jesus.

Isaiah and Psalms are not about Jesus, and we have posted the verses showing this, recently.

*

Emmanuel is Isaiah's son by the Temple virgin.

*

"k'ari b'yadai v'raglai" - "Like a lion (they) are at my hands and feet." The disputed word here is "k'ari" which is spelled kaph - aleph - resh - yud. Ari is a lion, and that "kaph" before it means "like" or "as."

And they know it is actually “lion” – look at - 22:21 Save me from the lion's mouth:


Though of course - they did lift them - and try to make them about Jesus.


*

..........

You know the torah wasn't compiled until after Jesus's time, right? 'Lift them' from where?

Anyways, was Jesus a greek, Jew, Roman or what, were his followers greeks with Jewish names or what, none of this criticism is making sense.

 

[Shuttlecraft]

Mate we have countless eye witness accounts of Elvis. Please try harder.

Jesus was almost as big as Elvis..
"Large crowds from Galilee, the Ten Cities, Jerusalem, Judea and the region across the Jordan followed him" (Matt 4:25)
And he pulled crowds of over 4000 and 5000 at two gigs alone (Matt 15:32, Matt 14:13)

“Come, follow me,” Jesus said" (Mark 1:17)

 

[roger1440]

The name Jesus is the Greek translation of the Hebrew name Joshua. Joshua and Jesus literally mean God is salvation. It seems to coincidental some Jewish chick in the early part of the first century named her kid by a name that literally means God is salvation. This kid then grows up gets himself executed by the Romans and afterward people believe he was God sent here to save us from our sins. What’s up with that?

 

[steeltoes]

There is nothing from the OT about Jesus.

Isaiah and Psalms are not about Jesus, and we have posted the verses showing this, recently.

*

Emmanuel is Isaiah's son by the Temple virgin.

*

"k'ari b'yadai v'raglai" - "Like a lion (they) are at my hands and feet." The disputed word here is "k'ari" which is spelled kaph - aleph - resh - yud. Ari is a lion, and that "kaph" before it means "like" or "as."

And they know it is actually “lion” – look at - 22:21 Save me from the lion's mouth:


Though of course - they did lift them - and try to make them about Jesus.


*

No one said the OT was about Jesus. Lines were taken from the OT and used to make the story about Jesus.

 

[LegionOnomaMoi]

1 and 2 - And you again, are being disingenuous.

I'm not, actually. Josephus uses a grammatical method to identify James as Jesus and Jesus as Jesus the Christ vs. Jesus son of Damneus that is so common it is often called the "genitive of kin(ship)" not just in Greek but among many languages with grammatical case: ""In the following, we analyze various relations that are typically expressed by genitives in languages, such as kinship (§3.1), part-whole (§3.2), material (§3.3), and measure (§3.4)."
Viti, C. (2008). Genitive word order in Ancient Greek: A functional analysis of word order freedom in the noun phrase. Glotta, 84(1-4), 203-238.

A central reason that
1) we don't suspect interpolation here
&
2) we are have excellent reason for not only differentiating Jesus of Damneus with this brother of James, but the brother of James with the historical Jesus, is due to the use of Greek grammar as well as identification methods common in Latin, Greek, Hebrew, Aramaic, Sanskrit, Old English, and so on.

YOU mentioned a second text.

Both references to Josephus in our extant manuscripts are from the same text (Antiquities).

I asked if you meant the "Jesus son of Damneus" text.

There is no such text. There are two references to Jesus Christ in the same text: one's 20.200, the other 18.63ff. One reason that the majority of scholars believe the longer passage in Josephus was originally about Jesus but was altered by Christian scribes (rather than interpolated/added in its entirety) is because Josephus uses "Jesus, the one being called Christ" to identify this particular "James" (Greek Ἰάκωβο&#962 from the multitude of others. In antiquity, everybody had "first name" that was extremely common, so it was even more vital than today to have some way of distinguishing individuals of the same names.

The most common was patronymics. It was so common in Greek that authors often dropped out "son of" and just said things like Θουκυδίδην τὸν Ὀλόρου (lit. "Thucydides of Olorus") to mean "Thucydides the son of Olorus".

However, titles, places of origin, nicknames, etc., were all used as substitutes particularly when the father was unknown or for married women who were generally then identified by their husbands.

In 20.200, Josephus introduces James, and in order to identify which James he uses the genitive of kinship: τὸν ἀδελφὸν Ἰησοῦ (the brother of Jesus). However, identifying James as Jesus' brother is useless without identifying which Jesus, so the entire identifier is τὸν ἀδελφὸν Ἰησοῦ τοῦ λεγομένου Χριστοῦ ("the brother of Jesus the one called Christ").

Having identified which "James" we're talking about, Josephus can continue to speak of him by "James" only. He could do the same for Jesus, unless of course he wanted to refer to a different Jesus.

So having just identified Jesus as "the one called Christ" he needs to use another identifier if he wants to refer to another person named Jesus, and he does. In 20.203, just a few lines after identifying Jesus as "the one called Christ", he refers to another Jesus and makes this clear by using a patronymic genitive kinship construction: Ἰησοῦν...τοῦ Δαμναίου ("Jesus [son of] Damneus"). There is no point to doing this if the Jesus son of Damneus were the Jesus just identified as the one called Christ. It wouldn't just be unnecessary but confusing. The entire point of identification, whether titular, kinship, etc., was to distinguish among those with the same name.

It's true that the same individual could be identified differently, but only within certain contexts. Even then, however, it created problems not only for ancient authors but modern historians. For example, there is a famous orator, Antiphon of Rhamnus. He wrote several defenses (including those used for teaching rather than actual defenses of those charged with crimes) which we have. However, there are also two philosophical texts written by a certain "Antiphon the sophist" (mentioned in Xenophon's Memorabilia) whom authors have speculated is the same Antiphon since before Jesus was born. We still don't know, because while Xenophon could be assured that his readers would know exactly who "Antiphon the Sophist" was simply by using the identifier "the Sophist", a few centuries later Didymus argued that the speeches written by Antiphon were so stylistically different from the philosophical works by "Antiphon the Sophist" that the two authors must be different people. This situation only became more and more confused as various pseudoepigraphical works and Lives of Antiphon were written (almost all of which are lost to us except for some quoted fragments).

It is ludicrous to suppose that Josephus should expect his audience to think that a Jesus identified as "the one called Christ" is the same as a Jesus mentioned a few lines later but this time identified by a patronymic construction. To do so would be to suppose that Josephus used standard methods to identify individuals backwards or to conflate rather than differentiate individuals.

Then there is the problem of how James is identified. Josephus identifies him by his brother. If this brother were Jesus son of Damneus, than James would be "James son of Damneus", not as the brother of a Jesus who then himself had to be identified as "the one called Christ". He could have simply said "James of Damneus" and simplified the entire line by dropping out most of it and adding an genitive article and noun.

It doesn't stop there. In order to clarify exactly which James he refers to (and probably because he didn't expect all his Roman patrons to know who this James was) he begins to introduce James with "the brother of Jesus, the one being called Christ" and follows this with actually using James name: Ἰάκωβος ὄνομα αὐτῷ (lit. "James name to him" but meaning "James by name"). Were James the brother of a son of Damneus (and therefore also the son of Damneus) than not only could we drop the entire identification by his brother and then the identification of that brother, BUT ALSO the dative construction Ἰάκωβος ὄνομα αὐτῷ. We'd need only Ἰάκωβος τοῦ Δαμναίου instead of τὸν ἀδελφὸν Ἰησοῦ τοῦ λεγομένου Χριστοῦ, Ἰάκωβος ὄνομα αὐτῷ.

I responded by posting the WHOLE TEXT that included your fragment, and then underlined the "Jesus son of Damneus" to show that I was correct.

The "whole text" would be all of Antiquities. You didn't include this. You simply quoted more of a part of a translation that you referred to as

the "Jesus son of Damneus" text.

This Jesus does not die. He is made High Priest.

He is also not the Jesus in 20.200.

3. Christos just means anointed.

No, it didn't, at least not for Jews. And until Jesus, nobody was ever referred to or identified by as "the anointed" or "called Anointed" in Greek. We don't even find this used as an identifier in Aramaic and Hebrew, as "the messiah" is almost never identified with a particular person, and when it does it is not used to identify that person (e.g., no "David the Anointed).

There were lots of philosophers, kings, and individuals from Tyana. However, when Philostratus wrote about Apollonius of Tyana, he identified him as from Tyana because there was nobody his audience could confuse this Apollunius with (even others of the same name from Tyana, as apparently none of these were noteworthy enough to be THE Apollonius of Tyana). The same with "Alexander the Great" even in modern English, and even with "the poets" (Homer and Hesiod). Even were you correct about what the Greek meant, it only works as the identifier it is used as if Josephus' audience could distinguish a particular "Jesus, the one called Anointed".

The fact that it is a Jewish writer using the Greek equivalent of a Hebrew term makes this far, far more than simply meaning "Jesus, the one called Anointed" but rather "Jesus, the one called 'the one chosen by YHWH to lead all of Israel and restore it to its people'".

Kings, Priests, Special people were "anointed."

The term in Greek has no such significance. It is actually used almost always as a verb (χρί&#969 except in Jewish translations of Jewish scriptures (the LXX). Also, the thing about terms which refer to "kings, priests, [and] special people" is that when someone has such a title it distinguishes them. Thus to call someone e.g., Jesus the King makes it very clear which Jesus you are talking about. That's what Josephus did: made it clear which Jesus he meant. He does this again a few lines later in order to make it clear that he means another Jesus, this one being "Jesus the son of Damneus".

These are the names of the sons of Aaron, the priests which were anointed, whom he consecrated to minister in the priest's office.

1) The ancient Greek translation doesn't have the word "Christ" or even the verb (χρί&#969. It reads ηλειμμενοι, from the verb "ἀλείφω".
2) Notice that it isn't used to identify anybody, and is a verb.

Psa 89:20 I have found David my servant; with my holy oil have I anointed him:

Sorry, again the verb is ελαιω, not some form of χρίω (and not Χριστό&#962.

because the LORD hath anointed me

3 strikes and you're out: εχρισεν. Still no Χριστός, and still no noun (let alone an identifier)!

 

[LegionOnomaMoi]

Isaiah and Psalms are not about Jesus, and we have posted the verses showing this, recently.

Nor did they use the word Χριστός (or Χριστοῦ, for that matter).

It's kind of hard to analyze the text or grammar of a language you can't read.

 

[Ingledsva]

No one said the OT was about Jesus. Lines were taken from the OT and used to make the story about Jesus.

Indeed, - - which is why my last line was this -


Though of course - they did lift them - and try to make them about Jesus.


*

 

[Desert Snake]

Indeed, - - which is why my last line was this -


Though of course - they did lift them - and try to make them about Jesus.


*

Nah you need to explain how they were 'lifted', in a religious context, who lifted them, from what writings etc. This isn't cutting it.

 

[Ingledsva]

Isaiah and Psalms are not about Jesus, and we have posted the verses showing this, recently.

Nor did they use the word Χριστός (or Χριστοῦ, for that matter).

It's kind of hard to analyze the text or grammar of a language you can't read.

Stop this ridiculous crap.


I obviously did NOT say they used a Greek word in Tanakh!


Both words mean anointed - as you well know.


Jesus is claiming to be the Jewish Messiah, - The Anointed.



*

 

[outhouse]

Jesus is claiming to be the Jewish Messiah, - The Anointed.



*

The Anointed


You do not think it took on a different meaning as the mythology grew in text?


Jesus never claimed this as far as we know.

 

[Desert Snake]

Stop this ridiculous crap.


I obviously did NOT say they used a Greek word in Tanakh!


Both words mean anointed - as you well know.


Jesus is claiming to be the Jewish Messiah, - The Anointed.



*

We get it, you're not a Xian. But you have to understand, unless the early Xians were unfamiliar with THEIR OWN RELIGION, they were relating Jeshua to the Messiah. They didn't 'lift' the references because IT WAS THEIR OWN TEXTS.

 

[outhouse]

People before, and after Jesus, claimed to be the Messiah, the Anointed (Christos.)


*

Yes, but does that not mean we have to use the context of the source to make said definition?