You really need to do some homework.
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What evidence is there of Jesus?
- Thread starter Tiberius
- Start date
bigbadgirl
Active Member
There is no untrue statement in my last post. If there is, please show me the truth. And the proof.
outhouse
Atheistically
it was already explained to you correctly by Legion
fallingblood
Agnostic Theist
Maybe you want to address the posts that offered a rebuttal to your statement then. Show why your statement is true, instead of ignoring the rebuttals.
bigbadgirl
Active Member
Evidence of Jesus, NOT CHRISTIANS!
fallingblood
Agnostic Theist
What?
bigbadgirl
Active Member
This thread is about evidence of Jesus outside the Bible. Not about evidence of Christians outside of the Bible.
The secular evidence are the manuscripts that survived. Evidence for what, likely just stories or embellishment of a real person at the very least.
fallingblood
Agnostic Theist
I don't know who is arguing for Christians though. The stuff I posted as a rebuttal to you dealt with Jesus. The stuff others posted to you was about Jesus.
bigbadgirl
Active Member
The dead sea scrolls are not originals, but they predate Christianity. Not everyone believes Hebrew scriptures are cherished works, then or now.
Yes, documents disentegrate, yet many documents are written on stone, as in Egypt, or fired clay as in Sumeria, and are much older and intact. They wanted them to last, in their original form.
The originals may not have been the best for early Christians, but it may be because the originals did not mesh with their own beliefs, so they altered them accordingly.
Still no historical evidence of Jesus here.
Yes, documents disentegrate, yet many documents are written on stone, as in Egypt, or fired clay as in Sumeria, and are much older and intact. They wanted them to last, in their original form.
The originals may not have been the best for early Christians, but it may be because the originals did not mesh with their own beliefs, so they altered them accordingly.
Still no historical evidence of Jesus here.
fallingblood
Agnostic Theist
Not everyone believed the documents that compromise the NT were cherished documents. In fact, most didn't even think of them as scripture until sometime down the road. So there would be no reason to think that they wanted the originals in tact, when they could just copy them.
And the historical evidence for Jesus exists regardless of whether or not we have the originals. The originals would be nice, but they are not necessary. We can be fairly certain when they were written anyway, especially if we treat them as other similar works.
True, but we're talking about a growing community trying to disseminate information which became increasingly textually based. That means making copies and sending them places. It's one thing to carve symbols into a pyramid or temple wall. You do it once and leave it be. It's quite another to get hundreds or thousands of pounds of rock so that you can chisel Matthew into who knows how many different "sheets" of rock and then send it out to an ever growing and ever more geographically dispersed population of christians.
Interestingly enough, most of the clay tablets we have survived by accident. The reason clay was often used is so that you could erase it like a chalkboard. However, during invasions many such tablets became hard thanks to the invaders burning down bulidings (turning them into kilns). We're actually lack information about the city of Athens because they seem to have resisted pre-classical invasions, and thus no accidently hardened clay tablets.
Quite the contrary. Which is why if you've ever studied Hittite or a similar language you end up reading a lot of really boring stuff. It's a mostly bureaucratic.
Or, far more likely, an originally small movement which was itself a subsect of a largly illiterate poplution, managed to ensure their most important manuscripts were the best attested of all ancient history, which means they cared very much about ensuring these texts survived. And the fact that, like pretty much every single author or collection we have from the ancient world, we don't have the NT autographs, doesn't mean anything other than that we shouldn't be suprised. What we have is expected given the astronomically small probability we would have the originals
Me Myself
Back to my username
I think to sum up all of this would be:
there is evidence of Jesus existence. Maybe he didn´t exist, because the evidence isn´t 100% certainty (no evidence is), but there is the reasonable amount of evidence for a person of his time, and the same amount of evidence for any other figure would be deemed appropiate to determine it´s existence to be most likely than his non-existence.
More or less?
there is evidence of Jesus existence. Maybe he didn´t exist, because the evidence isn´t 100% certainty (no evidence is), but there is the reasonable amount of evidence for a person of his time, and the same amount of evidence for any other figure would be deemed appropiate to determine it´s existence to be most likely than his non-existence.
More or less?
Tiberius
Well-Known Member
How do you determine these facts about the originals without actually having the originals?
fallingblood
Agnostic Theist
In the same way that we would with any other work. Part of it is textual criticism.
By making your determination provisional. An historical Jesus is simply the best inference available given the evidence.