The question is typically described as “the historicity of Jesus”. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historicity_of_Jesus
There are similar debates for other famous ancient figures.
The general academic consensus on Jesus (and many similar figures) is that they did exist and many of the details have been fictionalized.
The new testament stories were written well over a hundred years after. That would be like someone today writing an account of the civil war based solely on stories.
Girl gets married
Girl gets shitfaced and sleeps with someone other than her husband
Girl is pregnant!
Girl makes up some dumb shit to avoid jealous rage
Shit gets waaaaay out of hand.
There are many Jesus’s in the world.
Christianity exists. Religions don’t tend to spring up from nowhere. Every myth has its nugget of truth. Was there a preacher back then whose followers later spread around the world? Almost certainly. Where else could Christianity have come from?
Was he the son of god though? Was he capable of all the miracles the bible claims? Is the god he preached even real? There is no evidence that the answer to these three questions is anything but no I’m afraid.
Physical proof? No. But if that’s the criterion for proof that someone existed, then that mean 90% of historical figures can’t be proven to have existed. We don’t have the remains of Alexander the Great or any artefacts we can be sure are his. We have no remnants of Plato, none of his original writings remain.
Did a person name Jesus live sometime during the first century AD? Scholars are fairly certain of that. We do have textual evidence other than the bible that points to his existence.
It is highly unlikely that he was anything like the person written about in the bible. He was likely one of many radical apocalyptic prophets of the time.
We don’t have too many details about his life but because of something called the criterion of embarrassment we have good reason to believe he was baptized by a man named John the Baptist and was later crucified. (i.e. most burgeoning religions seeking legitimacy don’t typically invent stories that are embarrassing to their deity)
then that mean 90% of historical figures can’t be proven to have existed
Well for most of those we tend to use independent verification for their existence. And in the case of jesus, we have literally zero Credible examples of independent verification.
If you mean Jesus as described word for word in the bible? Yes you are right. Such a mythical figure never existed.
A man name Jesus from the first century AD? Who preached in the Levant? Who was baptized by a man named John and was later crucified? There is good enough evidence of such a person existing. This isn’t even a debated question among new testament scholars anymore.
I see you are familiar with Bart Ehrman, Even he doesn’t dispute that a historical Jesus existed.
Here’s an even deeper dive from Bart Ehrman.
And in the case of jesus, we have literally zero independent verification.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sources_for_the_historicity_of_Jesus
Even assuming the passage is totally genuine, two fires had destroyed much in the way of official documents Tacitus had to work with and it is unlikely that he would sift through what he did have to find the record of an obscure crucifixion, which suggests that Tacitus was repeating an urban myth whose source was likely the Christians themselves,[3]:344 especially since Tacitus was writing at a time when at least the three synoptic gospels are thought to already have been in circulation.
https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Tacitus
According to Bart Ehrman, Josephus’ passage about Jesus was altered by a Christian scribe, including the reference to Jesus as the Messiah
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Josephus_on_Jesus
Scholars have differing opinions on the total or partial authenticity of the reference in the passage to the execution of Jesus by Pontius Pilate.[15][30] The general scholarly view is that while the Testimonium Flavianum is most likely not authentic.
Respected Christian scholar R. T. France, for example, does not believe that the Tacitus passage provides sufficient independent testimony for the existence of Jesus [Franc.EvJ, 23] and agrees with G. A. Wells that the citation is of little value
A. The first line of the Tacitus passage says Chrestians, not Christians.
Suetonius says Chrestus was personally starting trouble in Rome during the reign of Claudius.
Suetonius is writing years after Tacitus yet doesn’t mention that Chrestus died.
So Chrestus can’t be Jesus because it’s the wrong decade, wrong continent and missing a death.
B. The second line in Tacitus that mentions Christ and his death was never noticed until after the mid-fourth century. So this second line is fake.
P.S. Even if the second line was somehow authentic, the information would have come from Christians. This would be the equivalent of deriving Abraham’s biography by talking to Muslims.
This is why Bart Ehrman specifically dismisses Tacitus and Josephus. As do most other biblical scholars.
In the immortal words of Christopher Hitchens, if this is all you got, you are holding an empty bag.
Even assuming the passage is totally genuine, two fires had destroyed much in the way of official documents Tacitus had to work with and it is unlikely that he would sift through what he did have to find the record of an obscure crucifixion
Why? If it was a popular myth, why assume he wouldn’t try to confirm/deny it
According to Bart Ehrman, Josephus’ passage about Jesus was altered by a Christian scribe, including the reference to Jesus as the Messiah
So? I’m not presenting evidence for him being a Messiah. I am saying there is some independent evidence of him existing.
B. The second line in Tacitus that mentions Christ and his death was never noticed until after the mid-fourth century. So this second line is fake.
I agree that is bizarre, but not proof of it being fake. Though should be taken with a grain of salt.
This is why Bart Ehrman specifically dismisses Tacitus and Josephus. As do most other biblical scholars.
Who is Bart Ehrman and why relay his beliefs rather than speak for yourself?
We do have textual evidence other than the bible that points to his existence.
Idk why you would need textual evidence besides the Bible to be certain the guy existed. It’s not like these are magical books that sprung from the earth. They have historical reasons for existing and the most likely reason includes the existence of the dude.
No. But physical proof is not the standard we use for determining someone’s historical existence.
Literary proof is, but also doesn’t exist for Jesus Christ.
There’s a few mentions of just a “Jesus” but its not like no one else was named Jesus, and those don’t really make any mention of him being remarkable in any way.
There’s just no evidence
AFAIK most historians/scholars agree that Jesus was a real person (even if a lot of the Bible’s claims about what he did are not true). But I’m not a historian. What are you basing your opinion on?
Exactly this. The person did exist. There’s proof of that. It wasn’t the son of god and didn’t perform miracles, but he was real nonetheless.
Important notion that Jesus never claimed to be the son of god and that entire line of thinking was established some four hundred years after.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Council_of_Nicaea
So we have to differentiate between what is the actual Gospel and life of Jesus and what the more creative parts of the churches invented on top of it over time.
Jesus said unto them, Verily, verily, I say unto you, Before Abraham was, I am. John 8:58
Which is from one of the original 4 gospels. Apparently there’s evidence of it being written as early as 70AD. There’s a couple other quotes I found in a link some other person linked in this thread but this one seems most direct.
I think this is a terminological confusion. The original Gospel as in the life and teaching of Jesus, that got lost as it wasn’t documented in his lifetime.
The four gospels that made the choice are as you said collections written later. And there were many more Gospels that the early church decided not to put into the bible. On top of that there is the issue how those gospels got translated multiple times and each translation inadvertently adds a layer of interpretation.
Alright but he quoted a gospel from 70AD, and the idea that in the “true gospel” he wasn’t the son of god or never claimed to be is a concept present in opposing religions like Islam first written down 500 years later, which famously mistranslated Marry with “she flowed like a river” instead of “she was chaste” when the region was constantly caught between Phoenician based alphabets like Greek, Hebrew, multiple Arabics, and much later on Cyrillic.
The Roman’s artistic licenses aside, their accounts of history are the most reliable source on all of this.
Ah, okay. But then we can’t really make a claim either way, can we? We don’t really know who he was or who he claimed to be.
Sure, but that doesn’t change the fact that there was (most likely) an actual historical person who is the origin of these stories, i.e. Jesus. He’s probably not really as fantastical as the Bible would have you believe, but he did exist, as opposed to being just an entirely fictional character.
There exists documented proof in many bits of literature from around 200 BCE to around 100 CE of numerous different figures in what is called ‘Jewish Apocalypticism’, basically a small in number but persistent phenomenon of Jews in and around what was for most of that time the Roman province of Palestine, preaching that the end would come, that God or a Messiah would return or arise and basically liberate the region and install a Godly Kingdom, usually after or as part of other fantastical events.
Jesus was one of many of these Jewish Apocalypticists. Much like the rest of the movement’s key figures, they were wrong, and their lives were greatly exaggerated in either their writings or writings about them or inspired by them.
This seems to be the (extremely condensed) opinion of most Biblical Scholars.
There are a very small number of modern Biblical Scholars that are ‘Mythicists’ of some kind, who believe that Jesus was completely fictional and wholly invented by certain people or groups.
This is an unpopular view amongst scholars and historians of that time and region, as most believe it more plausible that Jesus was just another example of a radical Jewish Apocalyptic preacher, which again, was fairly common for roughly 300 years in that region.
Its like how if you go to a big city theres always that one guy with a megaphone preaching imminent doom. 99% of people think this is silly and ignore them, but tons of people know that people like them exist and do have small followings.
I’ve heard theories that key people probably had hallucinations of Jesus a few days after he was killed, which was the big thing that helped launch him from yet-another-apocalyptic-preacher to (eventually) God himself. I don’t know how well these are accepted, though.
This stems from the fact that, so far, the earliest dated written fragments we have from what is now the New Testament are some of the writings of Paul.
Paul was not one of the
ApostlesEDIT: Disciples, and it seems possible that, after persecuting earlier, existing Christians, he could have basically had a stress induced psychotic break and hallucinated the vision of Jesus that he had, then converted.Thing is though, Christians would have to … you know exist and already be a real thing first, for that to make sense.
It does explain why Paul does not mention some very key elements of the narrative of the Gospels: He just had not actually read about or heard of those parts yet.
This creates some theological problems down the line, and some of those problems were ‘remedied’ by what a good deal of scholars and historians believe to be forgeries… chapters of the Bible that modern Christians attribute to Paul, but do not seem to actually have been written by Paul.
It is also possible to some of the empty tomb accounts in some of the Gospels as similar kinds of trauma induced hallucinations.
Mark famously originally just ends with an empty tomb, and nobody said anything about this because they were scared… and then the last bit of verses giving Mark a more satisfying ending have been shown to be added … decades later.
The explanation I heard was that it was likely Mary and Peter hallucinated Jesus only a few days after he died. That’s a very common timeframe for when people hallucinate seeing dead loved ones, and the early descriptions in Bible match the flavor of dead loved-one hallucinations people typically have, with the figure assuring the person everything will be all right and whatnot. Other descriptions (like Jesus appearing to all twelve disciples or crowds of people) seem to have been written later more as persuasive arguments, with doubting Tomas acting as the stand-in for the skeptical listener. This is all from “How Jesus Became God” and I have no idea how mainstream or fringe the author’s views are.
I think it is more likely that they refer to the minimum witnesses argument put firth by a youtuber Paulogia. He has done a lot to popularize it as a response to the criticism that sceptics have no singular explanation for the proposed evidence of Jesus provided by the spread of christianity and the accounts of early cristians.
I thought Paulogia’s minimum witnesses argument is basically that Paul could have hallucinated, and that those who witnessed an empty tomb basically did see an empty tomb, but circumstantial confusion led them to misinterpret what they saw?
I’ll have to rewatch some of his vids.
Also, hey, Goju Ryu! I trained in Shito Ryu =D
Aah okay, that makes sense. Paulogia does however put forward at least one more person having an experience, possibly due to a grief hallucination. If I remember correctly he suggested Peter being the one to have it.
I also don’t remember him ever suggesting that the empty tomb is an actual fact in need of explanation. I think he sees it as likely that Jesus would have been unceremoniously put in a mass- or ditch grave as was common for crucifixion victims. The tomb would then be a detail added on later by other christians, likely through narrative evolution.
I may misremember some of it though, so maybe I should go back and rewatch as well.Oh nice! :D
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=z8j3HvmgpYc
Satans Guide to the Bible for more apocalyptic felt Jesus.
I agree with you that Jesus wasn’t God, who doesn’t exist, and that there were no miracles, which are impossible. However, this is not the same thing as saying that there’s no evidence for the existence of Jesus, the Jewish apocalyptic preacher.
The earliest documents about Jesus, such as the Pauline Epistles, were written by people who knew people who knew him. In a mostly illiterate society 2,000 years ago, this is about as good as evidence gets. It’s also the exact same kind of evidence as a journalist or researcher writing an account based on interviews with people. This was how, e.g, Herodotus wrote his histories. When Herodotus says ‘A guy rode a dolphin once’ we dismiss that. But we don’t say ‘The people in the Histories didn’t exist, except those for whom there’s physical evidence, which is about three of them, not including the author’. We do much the same with Jesus and the miracles.
If the Apostles had wanted, for some reason, to make up a guy, that would have been risky. Other people would have just said, ‘That guy didn’t exist’. If they had anyway decided to make up a guy, they’d have invented someone who actually fulfilled the Jewish propehcies of the Messiah, instead of inventing Jesus, who obviously didn’t. This suggests they didn’t invent him, which strengthens the plausibility of the evidence we do have.
A third way of looking at this is to ask if there are any comparable figures, religious founders from the historic era, who we now think were wholly made up in the way you’re suggesting. But there aren’t. The Buddha, Confucius, Mohammed, Zoroaster - they all certainly existed. Indeed, I can’t think of any figures form the time period who were actually imaginary.
Personally, I think it’s most likely that he’s composed of many people. It’s a bunch of stories which all got attributed as one person, which isn’t uncommon. Personally, though I’m far from an expert, I think there wasn’t a singular Jesus figure who actually existed, but rather a story of a figure named Jesus that rose from stories about other events.
Like you said, it’s almost certain that something was happening around that time. In fact, there are many more Messiahs who were mostly forgotten. I just think it’s most likely that people told stories and those stories all merged together into another larger story, which then became the story of Jesus.
It’s certainly possible that sayings of other people were later attributed to him, but to really make this case you’d need to have quotations that were attributed to multiple sources, including him, if you see what I mean. Absent that, it could be true, but there’s no particular reason to believe it.
There are enough specific biographical details about Jesus of Nazareth to make it likely that there’s a specific, real central figure. For example, the fact that he was from Nazareth was a problem for his early followers (it didn’t match the Messianic prophecies), which is why they invented the odd story of the census, so that they could claim he’d been born in Bethlehem, the hometown of King David, from whom Jesus was supposedly descended. That seems unlikely to have happened if there hadn’t been a real, central historical figure.
Also, none of the early non-Christian sources claim he wasn’t real or that he was a composite, which they surely would have done if there was any doubt on the matter.
… The four Gospels?
deleted by creator
They are still comprehensive documents about Jesus written in the lifetime of His followers
Written up to a couuple of centuries after his supposed existence.
The Gospel of John, the latest Gospel, was written between 90-100AD
There’s just no evidence
I have a pet peeve about this phrase. A) yes there is. B) that’s not the standard, e.g. it would be incorrect to say there’s no evidence aliens abduct and probe people: there are eyewitness accounts
A) yes there is.
I don’t believe that, and since it’s impossible to show evidence something doesn’t exist, the people claiming evidence Jesus existed is gonna have to do some linking…
that’s not the standard
You mean evidence?
Evidence isn’t the standard for things existing?
What exactly is the standard in your mind for whether a historical figure existed?
Evidence isn’t the standard for things existing?
What exactly is the standard in your mind for whether a historical figure existed?
Hard evidence has never been the standard for proof that a historical figure existed. Corroborating records are. It’s great if you can find some hard evidence, but if that was the standard then most people in history wouldn’t have any historical proof of their existence. And even when there is a corpse, we still rely on burial records to be certain that the corpse is who we think it is. Or if there are letters, we can’t confirm they were written by the same person we think they were.
Like a third of the bible as well as several contemporary documents all point to the existence of a guy named something like Joshua (which we now translate as Jesus) who traveled around Palestine preaching and was crucified in around 33AD. There are plenty of historical figures who we mostly agree existed despite having approximately the same amount of proof as for Jesus.
several contemporary documents all point to the existence of a guy named something like Joshua
IIRC, there’s really only a single mention of a possible link to someone of this name that was crucified at the supposed time, and that single mention happened at least 50 (maybe 100?) years later, and there’s evidence that this passage was added even later.
So I didn’t think it’s true that there are “several contemporary documents” like you claimed…
Corroborating records are
And there’s not enough to prove that Jesus Christ existed…
There’s a Jesus that got crucified, but no mention about him being able to perform miracles
Like a third of the bible
I don’t think any of it was written till decades after he supposedly died tho…
Like, there’s lots of information about Bilbo Baggins in Lotr, that doesn’t mean it was written in the third age of Middle Earth homie.
There are plenty of historical figures who we mostly agree existed despite having approximately the same amount of proof as for Jesus.
Name one and I’ll disporve it.
There’s a Jesus that got crucified, but no mention about him being able to perform miracles
Obviously miracles aren’t real. I wasn’t claiming otherwise. We’re talking about whether or not the person Jesus existed, not if magic is real.
It sounds like we agree
I don’t think any of it was written till decades after he supposedly died tho…
Okay but it was written by people who claim they were there and met him personally.
To borrow your asinine LOTR analogy, it is more like you are claiming Thorinn Oakenshield never existed simply because Bilbo only wrote “There and Back Again” after he got home from memory.
If your only requirement is that a man once existed by the name of Jesus and was crucified, then the bar is on the floor. Jesus was not a rare name, and the Romans crucified many, many people. It is not out of the realm of possibility that these two common data points would overlap and give us a crucified Jesus.
Is there proof that it was THE Jesus though? Do we have corroborating evidence of a man travelling the countryside with his posse, changing the minds and hearts of the masses?
Okay but it was written by people who claim they were there and met him personally.
Not really, and definitely not the 1/3 you were claiming…
Like, where are you getting any of this?
It sounds like what they teach at one of those “bible colleges”
There’s a Jesus that got crucified, but no mention about him being able to perform miracles
You just 100% conceded. /thread
There was a Paul that lived in Midwest America
Is that proof he had a big blue ox?
Like, you know the Romans were pretty big fans of crucifying people for pretty much anything?
Like, we have that elusive physical evidence that 6,000 of Sparticus’ followers were crucified…
There’s a pretty good chance at least one of those guys was named Jesus too mate, it was a pretty common name
Like, there’s lots of information about Bilbo Baggins in Lotr, that doesn’t mean it was written in the third age of Middle Earth homie
The conceit of the LOTR appendices is that Lord of the Rings, as published in English, is really just the Red Book that Bilbo writes at the end. Dr. Tolkien merely found the manuscript somewhere and has graciously translated it from Third Age common language into English for the benefit of us modern people.
And there’s not enough to prove that Jesus Christ existed…
Says who?
Name one and I’ll disporve it.
Diarmait mac Cerbaill
Yes.
His life was written about while it happened in the Irish Annals…
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irish_annals
That is contemporary literary evidence of his existence.
Not just some dude named Diarmait existed in Ireland at some point.
Quality of the evidence matters. I’m personally not a historical expert on the topic and in such situations, I’m inclined to believe whatever the people who are experts say - and as far as I gather, most experts are in the “Jesus was a real historical person”-camp.
Evidence isn’t the standard for things existing?
Of course not. There are millions of examples of false claims for which there is more than zero evidence. e.g. I can claim I know which stocks will rise tomorrow, and point to various data of times I’ve been right. You can’t correctly say “There is zero evidence Frightful Hobgoblin is prescient about stock movements”.
There often exists evidence of two mutually incompatible propositions. This is basics.
If you want to research the historicity of Jesus it’s easily done. If you want to argue on the internet… you know what they say about that.
I will say that while evidence existing isn’t definitive proof, the total lack of evidence would be convincing (in the other direction). That said, evidence does exist in this case, so
Edit: clarity
That’s the opposite of how it should work
Well, no. Perhaps I’ve been misunderstood.
If no evidence whatsoever for a claim exists, then there is no reason to favor that claim. This is an effectively rare situation, and basically only applies to things someone has made up whole cloth just now.
Likewise, the existence of some evidence is not necessarily definitive “proof” of a claim, merely enough of a reason to consider it further (such as considering alternative explanations or how well said evidence matches what we might expect)
In this case, there is evidence that somebody named Jesus may have existed, and however ideal that evidence may or may not be, it is about the amount of evidence we would expect to find of any given figure from his time.
I’m pretty sure without the fossilised bones we would think dinosaurs weren’t a thing
Its easy to put bones together and say that it existed but there’s no way to guarantee “these are certified bones of Jim the stegosaurus, religious figure”
Are you doubting about the existence of our Lord Jim the stegosaurus?
Can I apply, for the Jim Stegosaurus religion?
Hail Jim Tri dinos in one.
Bones prove you existed.
But the absence of bones does not mean that you didn’t.
Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence
That’s because there weren’t multiple people around to write down what they saw. You’re confusing paleontology and history. They have very different standards for proof.
There are tons of historical figures for whom we have no physical evidence. But we have tons of written evidence from people who all experienced those people.
History is known by:
-
Archæological evidence
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Oral interviews with eyewitnesses
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Texts
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Archæogenetics
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Historical linguistics
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Myth (euhemerism)
-
Maybe some others I’m forgetting
Dino-history isn’t comparable to tthe literate Roman period.
Yet we have dozens of proof about empires and people BEFORE Jesus. Like the Egyptians
The tone of this comment makes it suddenly seem like you’re not asking a question but trying tp prove a point.
The Egyptians also mummified their dead, preserving the corpses into the modern era. “Older” ≠ “more evidence”
We have loads more records from the Romans than from the Norse for example, even though the Norse came later, because the Norse didn’t keep as many records as the Romans.
There are 20th century figures whose historicity is disputed.
Okay now you made me curious, do you have any particular in mind? Sounds interesting
Which Egyptians are you referring to? We have lots of archæological proof of the Judaeans.
People. Not person. There is HUGE difference.
-
We don’t have the bones of gengis khan either
That’s prehistory. Everything we know about history comes from written accounts. Historians study written documents and argue whether or not the available evidence makes it more likely that something (or someone) was real or fiction.
Most historians agree that there was a Jewish man named Jesus (yehoshua), who preached in Judea and the Galilee in the early first century, who gained followers and was crucified by Rome. There are also historians who examine the same evidence and conclude it is more likely that no such person existed, because that’s how academia works.
See also for comparison: Genghis Khan
The point is that you are asking the wrong question sort of. If we only accepted physical remnants of someone or their life to prove they exist, Jesus wouldn’t be the only one we would have to throw out.
Not to say I know how to prove stuff historically, it does sort of seem like magic sometimes. If we found out today that carbon dating was off by a magnitude I would not be shocked, so that’s all the faith I have in it due to my bad understanding of it.
Dinosaurs aren’t people.
They are, in accordance with the teachings of Jim the Stegosaurus.
Archaeology in good at giving us clues about the living thing. References to people existing is almost purely based on text people wrote. The proof would be someone writing down “Chrestos, popular among the poor was crucified for his crimes for spreading heresy” as a contemporary. But since the earliest reference we have is a century after his death it’s not necessarily accurate or true.
You won’t find fossilized Jesus, he apparently got resurrected and became wine & cookies, so some people started eating him on Sundays. And he doesn’t want us to say fuck, or shit, or do it in the butt. But that’s not really related to the question.
There most likely were a bunch of people called Yeshua back then.
As an atheist I believe Jesus existed, I just don’t think he was the son of god or that he was resurrected.
It would have been far easier to start a religion around a real man with actual followers than if he was a figment of someone’s imagination.
I like to picture my Jesus as a desert hippie that people liked and told tall tales of in order to give people living in that harsh environment some hope and meaning.
I like to think of Jesus with like giant eagles wings and singing lead vocals for lynyrd skynyrd with like an Angel Band, and I’m in the front row, and I’m hammered drunk.
This is what He wanted.
And he has a beard you could have gotten lost in if it hadn’t been wrapped around a tree
IIRC, the religion didn’t get anywhere is Palestine after Jesus supposedly died and it wasn’t until decades later that it picked up in and around Greece thanks to Paul, but no one was around that saw any of the events attributed to Jesus - it was all heresay.
I mean the bible is how many pages and how much of it actually takes place during Jesus’s life? And what is the timespan of the small part that does? Like a year? And the 4 gospels that talk about it are all rehashings of the same stories (more or less) and even contradict each other at times.
That’s a story with a lot of gaps and plot holes to base a belief system around - and that doesn’t even include all the baggage and hate that comes along with it.
People nowadays lose their mind and make death threats to the creators of stories that don’t fix or create new plot holes in canon. And we’re supposed to smile, nod, and happily accept one of the worst constructed stories ever just because some old white men that live the opposite way they tell us to live say so?
Religion is the OG fandom war
There aren’t any contradictions between the Gospels
I’d argue there are contradictions all over the Bible.
Here’s a list:
What about all the other ones? There’s dozens. Including ones where there’s no room for interpretation like with those ones.
Any examples? I’m not going to go through every single one
One simple one was one apostle saying Jesus told them to go barefoot and with no staff and another saying he told them staff + sandals.
There most definitely is.
Where?
The fact that there’s so many different versions of the Bible is one.
… Really? You know it wasn’t originally written in English, right?
That’s like saying we cannot be certain about what happens in Harry Potter because it has been translated into 88 different languages 🤦
Except they don’t say different things happened.
What do you mean by physical proof?
Some history is known by digging up physical stones n bones. Some is known by digging up texts.
There are multiple texts dated to the 1st century that all corroborate the story that a person called Jesus was crucified around 33AD
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sources_for_the_historicity_of_Jesus
It’s weird how many people in this thread are vaguely debating the validity of the historical research into this question when one person has posted a link to a well cited article on this very very heavily studied subject.
There’s even a link to a well cited article examining the skepticism of the historicity of Jesus: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christ_myth_theory
I don’t feel compelled to argue an interpretation. The facts are well documented and their interpretations by experts available. What anyone chooses to do with these are of no real concern to me.
In my experience, when it comes to debating the validity of religion, people tend to get far more emotional than other topics. People who are normally level-headed and quite logical tend to completely lose their ability to think rationally. And I mean both the people who argue for religion and against it.
Pretty clear that’s the case here in the comments on this post.
Yeah there are plenty of historians who have done good work studying this and the academia is mostly settled. Not to say there’s no controversy, but there’s definitely an orthodox opinion.
Yep. This is one of those posts that should have just been a web search instead.
A literature search. The web is full of rubbish.
It’s almost like Christian Scholars (people that have dedicated their entire lives to this idea) have access to write for Wikipedia too…
The citations are from the same people we see over and over again on this topic (specifically on Wikipedia).
I shouldn’t bother responding to this, but I have to point out that this weird assumption that scholars of Christianity are all Christian partisans seems pretty similar to people who say that climatologists are all biased in favor of a global warming hoax.
You don’t think anyone goes into studying a field to challenge the orthodoxy? That’s the fastest way to get famous. Even if the rest of your field hates you, you can make an incredibly lucrative career out of being “the outsider”. I literally linked to a collection of experts who agree with you.
If you don’t believe the experts, I guess it’s fine. But it’s weird when people use expertise on a subject as proof of bias to discredit expertise. It’s just such a silly thing to do.
I think it’s a weird to assume the wiki-link that you posted is in support of the “Christ Myth Theory” (as they call it).
Read the contents of the wiki link you sent and check all of the citations, you’ll see that the Christian Scholars that contributed to writing the article aim to dismiss the theory by citing their own books.
Kinda cringey.
I don’t feel compelled to argue an interpretation. The facts are well documented and their interpretations by experts available. What anyone chooses to do with these are of no real concern to me.
but then
It’s weird how many people in this thread are vaguely debating the validity of the historical research into this question when one person has posted a link to a well cited article on this very very heavily studied subject.
Well cited article aren’t proof of existenceof a man. Is spiderman real if enough people cite the comics? A group of influential people could gather and make their own circle of these myths and present it as a fact. And it isn’t fucking new.
https://www.chronicle.com/article/the-dark-world-of-citation-cartels
Religions and all their influence could force a lot of heavily studied subject to be skewed for their benefit. Hell, there were studies that were treated as standard making sugar and alcohol heavily beneficial for human beings. And we’re talking about a person.
I didn’t say which side I come down on. I just said that there is lots of information with plenty of high quality citations.
I’m really happy that everyone is a winner.
The evidence isn’t even that strong, there i just aren’t that many people willing to risk becoming a pariah to dispute them.
If you are a Christian, there is no doubt Jesus existed. Any oblique reference to a rabbi who was persecuted hundreds years ago is considered evidence that Jesus existed. But no contemporaneous documentation exists.
If you’re not a Christian, debunking all of those vague references that might be proof of a Jewish leader named Jesus just isn’t particularly important, won’t persuade anyone who believes Jesus was(is) God, and will paint a target on your back for terrorists.
Wait… you mean to tell me there’s not a collective of atheist Wikipedia writers that have dedicated their lives to the absence of religion and citing themselves on refuting evidence on Wikipedia?!?
Wouldn’t it be weird of every Wikipedia article on the historical validity of Jesus was written by Christian scholars that have dedicated their lives to their religion? It would be wild if they were just citing themselves in these Wiki articles in order to sell some books, wouldn’t it?
No, there arent a lot of texts from the 1st century AD about him. The majority by far stems from the second century or later.
There were a lot of people that shared that name, and a lot of people were crucified at that time.
The article you provided (if you read it) should actually serve to cast more doubt on the idea; it does not “answer the question to the affirmative.”
There were a lot of people that shared that name, and a lot of people were crucified at that time.
That implies each source says: “A man called Jesus was crucified”. The article you provided (if you read it) should have told you otherwise.
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Flavius Josephus: Antiquities of the Jews, year 93-94: “About this time there lived Jesus, a wise man, if indeed one ought to call him a man. For he was one who performed surprising deeds and was a teacher of such people as accept the truth gladly. He won over many Jews and many of the Greeks. He was the Christ. And when, upon the accusation of the principal men among us, Pilate had condemned him to a cross, those who had first come to love him did not cease. He appeared to them spending a third day restored to life, for the prophets of God had foretold these things and a thousand other marvels about him. And the tribe of the Christians, so called after him, has still to this day not disappeared.”
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Tacitus’s Annals, year 117: Christus, from whom the name had its origin, suffered the extreme penalty during the reign of Tiberius at the hands of one of our procurators, Pontius Pilatus
I didn’t provide any article. I read the one you linked.
In this most recent response, you are annotating sources from 93, and 117. Those years are notably (at minimum) 60 years after the supposed resurrection; and as such are not first hand accounts.
They very likely was someone named Jesus, because there were many people with that name. There was very likely someone named Jesus that was crucified, because many people were crucified. There’s 0 evidence or recorded documentation that a resurrection ever happened. That’s the big one.
They very likely was someone named Jesus, because there were many people with that name.
The second one doesn’t use that name. Read the sources.
There’s 0 evidence or recorded documentation that a resurrection ever happened. That’s the big one.
Well of course, but that’s common sense. Dead people stay dead as a rule.
I didn’t say the second one used “that name.” Read what I wrote.
There’s 0 evidence or recorded documentation that a resurrection ever happened. That’s the big one.
The question in question was “Is there any real physical proof that Jesus christ ever existed?”
Jesus Christ is very specific. Jesus Christ, the son of God, who was crucified and rose again on the third day… that is fake.
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No, and that is to even be expected.
He was a prophet whose movement had around 120 or so core disciples along with his apostles, plus thousands who followed him about and considered him a healer and revolutionary teacher.
There are people who have done similar things that are completely lost to history other than small records that vaguely outline the controversy surrounding them… We shouldn’t really expect more in terms of proof…
But what is unique is the fact that we have an extremely well preserved corpus of text surrounding him. We also have some good idea that a lot of his followers were prosecuted and killed, and never recanted in the process, which might incline you to believe in the radical truth that they lived by.
Of course I am biased - I am a Christian - but it really does just seem pointlessly antagonistic to dismiss His Existence at all.
As far as I know, we simply don’t have directly contemporary, first-hand evidence of him. Even the most ‘contemporary’ accounts of him that still exist were written at least 50 years after he would have died, and those are quite cursory. Perhaps primary sources were lost–or intentionally destroyed when they didn’t align with beliefs–or perhaps they never existed. There’s not even much evidence for Pontius Pilate (I think one source mentioning that he was recalled to Rome and executed for incompetence?), and there should be, given that he was a Roman official.
People that study the history of the bible–as in, the historical bible, not the bible as a religious text–tend to believe that a historical Jesus existed, even if they don’t believe that he was divine.
IMO, the most likely explanation is that Jesus was yet another in a long-line of false messiahs, and was summarily executed by Rome for trying to start yet another rebellion. Since cult members tend to be unable to reconcile reality with their beliefs, they could have reframed their beliefs to say that he was a spiritual messiah, rather than a physical messiah.
There are lots of people now today who claim to be god, claim to be jesus, claim to have magic powers. so it would appear this is just normal human behavior and has been for a very long time. But the main reason people continue to believe these ancient holy books and all the stories in them is literally because they are protected from inquiry. So Jeff down the street claims to be jesus? We can go test him and try to falsify his claims. But some guy 2000 years ago, ya its not possible to check that one out. And That is why they persist, its by design.
Let me see if I can explain what I mean.
A historical Jesus might have had a small cult following, enough that the Romans couldn’t ignore him. He would have been talking about Jewish liberation from the Roman rulers, and how he was called by god. And then boom, he gets executed. His followers probably believed that he was actually the son of god, sent to liberate them. But now he’s dead. How do they reconcile the belief with the reality? So they retcon everything; he was a spiritual messiah, and he’ll eventually return and free the Jews, once the people are spiritually prepared.
You can see traces of this in the way that the four gospels don’t agree with each other, but they all include bits of prophecies from earlier scripture about the messiah. They were written with the intent of making Jesus appear to fit in to older prophecies about who the messiah would be, since he ended up not being the liberator that they had been expecting.
You can see similar behaviors in cults now. It’s clearly visible with Q; Trump was supposed to be their messiah, but he hasn’t managed to make any of their prophetic beliefs come true. So they’ve invented reasons why Trump’s holy will has been thwarted, and changed their history, rather than accepting that he was a false messiah.
You just gotta have faith!
Then why is it that the message was so powerful that the Roman empire abolished its idol worship and chose Christianity? Especially as Jesus a.s. was supposed to be a rebel against the empire?
Do you think people 2000 years ago were all stupid?
The message of Christianity is excellent for subjugating populations, giving them purpose & hope, keeping people busy & out of trouble. I think that all sounds very appealing to rulers.
And the roman empire was not able to do that already? From my understanding mythologically/spiritually the Roman empire was perfectly settled with what it had before in terms of political power. Incidentally the roman empire declined and fell apart in the centuries after accepting Christianity.
And before the Roman empire there were the Egyptians. They seemed to fare much better in terms of power with their idol worship than later when they embraced Abrahamic religions, yet they did.
Do you think people 2000 years ago were all stupid?
If they behaved as you described, then yes.
Do you think people 2000 years ago were all stupid?
No stupider than people now. Christianity remains very popular.
Happened overnight too. /S
This isn’t an accurate account of history.
If you’ve studied any of the Roman empire in antiquity you’re actively acting in bad faith.
If not, why are you making things up? Why are you actively lying?
Constantine is reported as making it the state religion 300+ years after the alleged existence of yeshua.
Why do you accuse me of something i never said?
A message being powerful is not in contradiction to it taking time to establish. If you look at the timeline you will see that it grew exponentially. and that the critical point was in the fourth century, after which it became the dominant religion in many parts of the empire.
That is how exponential growth works.
Bad faith debating.
I have said this many times-
It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter if there was a “real” Jesus. The Jesus of the Bible, the Jesus that is worshiped is an impossibility. A fiction. His life is full of details that defy basic biological and physical laws. On top of that, nothing he supposedly said was written down at the time, so we have no idea if what is recorded to have been his sayings in the Bible are things he actually said.
I always relate it to Ian Fleming having a schoolchum who’s father’s name was Ernst Stavro Bloefeld. So was there a real Ernst Stavro Bloefeld? Yes. Was he a supervillain fighting the world’s greatest secret agent? No.
I don’t think this answer is really in the spirit of “no stupid questions”.
Ok, if you want me to sum up in a way that addresses it: Because the Jesus OP is very likely thinking of is fictional, there is no real physical proof of his existence.
It doesn’t matter.
I’d say the “Real Historical Jesus” matters at least as much as a Real Historical Julius Caeser or a Real Historical Abraham Lincoln.
I always relate it to Ian Fleming having a schoolchum who’s father’s name was Ernst Stavro Bloefeld.
That’s different in so far as Fleming was simply borrowing a name for a totally independent character. But Fleming was, himself, a Naval Commander and intelligence officer who leveraged his own biography to inform James Bond’s personal traits. What’s more, he borrowed heavily from the reports and anecdotes of other intelligence officials both during and after WW2 to inform the behaviors and attitudes of his side characters in his original novels.
It actually is pretty interesting to talk about “The Real James Bond” from a historical standpoint, because British intelligence services were pivotal in maintaining the imperial and international financial controls necessary to run a globe-spanning empire.
In the same vein, you might be curious to read about “The Real Julius Caeser” after working through the Shakespearean play or “The Real Abraham Lincoln” after getting through the stories where he’s a Vampire Hunter. These biographies inform all sorts of cultural and economic norms of the era. And reading about historical individuals can be both entertaining and illuminating, particularly when you begin to consider how your own world ended up as it is today.
“Why is Christianity a globe-spanning religious movement going back 2000 years?” is a question worth interrogating. And you can’t really interrogate that question without asking who this Jesus guy was or how he got so popular.
There’s nothing to read about when it comes to any real Joshua, son of Joseph the Carpenter of Nazareth because nothing has been written about such a person.
Quite a bit has been written on the possible siblings of Jesus.
Written while Jesus was still alive? If so, please present said writings. If not, that doesn’t really change my point.
Written while Jesus was still alive?
You could disprove the existence of Socrates with this line of reasoning.
We aren’t out here trying to prove Socrates existed.
Are we talking about whether or not a historical person the Jesus of the Bible is based on existed or are we talking about whether or not there were any contemporary accounts? Because those are two very different things.
As I suggested in the beginning, whether or not a “real” Jesus existed is not really relevant, because if we did, we know nothing about him except what was written a long time after he would have died, which we can’t trust. Which is the same reason not to trust Plato’s dialogues even if Socrates existed. Plato wrote them long after Socrates died.
if we did, we know nothing about him except what was written a long time after he would have died
Hardly the first instance of a historical figure with unreliable historical accounts. You could make the same criticism of Egyptian pharaohs. They were deified in their eras, too. Their monuments were not completed until many of them were long dead. I guess we should just ignore them and pretend they had no impact on the course of history.
Listened through a history of rome podcast and learned an interesting thing where win was basically like a concentrate so you would mix it with water to drink. Aka. water -> wine.
Using reasoning like this to remove the supernatural from the Bible rather defeats the entire point, doesn’t it? If Jesus just made Gatorade like anyone else would, that’s a rather unremarkable thing to describe. Hardly worth committing to writing.
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I am sure there are countless mundane tasks that are pretty unremarkable.
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Does the Bible really have a point? I guess other than brainwashing masses?
That’s what I’m saying. There’s no record of him wiping his ass or playing cards. If it’s in the book it must be intended to present something exceptional. Explain his actions as something mundane and there isn’t really any reason to write it down.
But equally, the fantastic supernatural elements make the whole thing into a fairy tale to be completely disregarded as a dubious source of folk wisdom at best by any thinking person.
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It was common practice to dilute wine.
Isn’t that just port then?
I hope not, because port is my wine of choice and I would be like, “fuck you, Jesus. I wanted to drink that!”
a schoolchum whose* father’s name
His life is full of details that defy basic biological and physical laws.
Which is perfectly sensible given that he was given the power to perform wonders by god to establish that he is indeed a messenger of god. The entire point of wonders is them defying the otherwise imposed limits of the physical world. Because the only one who can grant this power is the source of the physical limits themselves and that is god.
This is logically consistent under the axiom that god exists. Which is what the scriptures are all about.
You can set the axiom that god does not exist. But as there is no proof of that, it is equally axiomatic. So given that your logic works on an unproven assumption you should not use it to criticize a different logic based on another assumption.
You go that way, I’ll goto Jesus!
Pra ba jeeba
Nobody got my joke.
I’m by no means an expert but I was briefly obsessed with comparative religion over a decade ago and I don’t think anyone has given a great answer, I believe my answer is correct but I don’t have time for research beyond checking a couple of details.
As a few people have mentioned there is little physical evidence for even the most notable individuals from that time period and it’s not reasonable to expect any for Jesus.
In terms of literary evidence there is exactly 1 historian who is roughly contemporary and mentions Jesus. Antiquities of the Jews by Josephus mentions him twice, once briefly telling the story of his crucifixion and resurrection. The second is a mention in passing when discussing the brother of Jesus delivering criminals to be stoned.
I think it is reasonable to conclude that a Jewish spiritual leader with a name something like Jesus Christ probably existed and that not long after his death miracles are being attributed to him.
It is also worth noting the historical context of the recent emergence of Rabbinical Judaism and the overabundance of other leaders who were claimed to be Messiahs, many of whom we also know about primarily(actually I think only) from Josephus.
The part mentioning Jesus’s crucifixion in Josephus is extremely likely to have been altered if not entirely fabricated.
The idea that the historical figure was known as either ‘Jesus’ or ‘Christ’ is almost 0% given the former is a Greek version of the Aramaic name and the same for the second being the Greek version of Messiah, but that one is even less likely given in the earliest cannonical gospel he only identified that way in secret and there’s no mention of it in the earliest apocrypha.
In many ways, it’s the various differences between the account of a historical Jesus and the various other Messianic figures in Judea that I think lends the most credence to the historicity of an underlying historical Jesus.
One tends to make things up in ways that fit with what one knows, not make up specific inconvenient things out of context with what would have been expected.
In terms of literary evidence there is exactly 1 historian who is roughly contemporary and mentions Jesus
Misinformation.
There’s Tacitus’s Annals (year 117), Josephus’ Antiquities of the Jews (93-94), Mara bar Serapion’s letter to his son.
Seutonius (Lives of the Twelve Cæsars) and Pliny wrote about the conflict between the Romans and the followers of Christ (or Chrestus) around that era.
You are the one who is doing the misinforming. All of the sources you mention, except Josephus, were written up to more than a century after his supposed existence. With Josephus being written around half a century after his existence.
And as mentioned, the specific quotes from Josephus are of a dubious nature.
I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt here but both Suetonius and Pliny are talking about Christians in the 2nd century, Tacitus speaks about Christ only in the context of Nero blaming Christians for the great fire. These are literary evidence for the existence of Christians in the second century but are not direct literary evidence of the existence of Christ as an individual which was the question I was addressing.
I’d be delighted to be shown to be wrong but I believe my original post stands.
The thing is that compared to other historical people we kid of have similar evidence. Like we have records of Socrates existing and we have records of some Joshua existing.
The difference is that nobody claims that Socrates was a fantastical god being who defied death, which is a extraordinary claim, we just say he was a very smart guy, we se very smart guys on a daily basis, nothing special with that so we can just believe it and even if we are wrong it has no real life implications.
For the Joshua guy, that’s quite a different story. The claims about him are extraordinary and need extraordinary evidence. But we only have normal evidence. If the claims about him were true it would contradict almost everything we think we know about the universe, how it behaves, etc.
So again, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
The difference is that nobody claims that Socrates was a fantastical god being who defied death,
To use a more modern example, pretty much everyone agrees that Grigori Rasputin was a real person who played a crucial role in the court of the last Czar of Russia.
But there are some positively wild and unexplainable stories that have a decent amount of corroborating evidence that they happened. The story about him healing the prince via a phone call sounds like actual magic. However we all know magic isn’t real, there is definitely some kind of logical explanation. But that explanation is lost to time.
So where do historians land on Rasputin? Well, there was definitely a guy called Rasputin. Some of the stories about him are true. Some are probably false or exaggerated. There isn’t even a consensus on what colour the dude’s eyes were. But that doesn’t mean we dispute his existence.
But that explanation is lost to time.
One translation I read suggested a probable explanation.
Rasputin’s phone advice was the same as many modern quacks: keep the patient away from modern medicine and doctors.
So the hemophiliac prince was no longer given his normal cocktail of drugs, which probably included a new medicine for the time: aspirin.
Stop giving a blood thinner to a hemophiliac and his condition (temporarily) improved. The best explanation for the people at the time was “magic”.
Yeah I’ve heard that one too. It seems plausible. But we’ll never know.
It was a shame how he carried on.
His schlongs is in a jar somewhere. Best that, Jesus!
That was a sea cucumber
You’re a sea cucumber.
Thank you, I needed to laugh this morning
I’m hear four ewe, bay bee!
We have a lot more contemporay primary sources for the existence of Socrates than we have of Jesus (of which the number of contemporary primary sources is 0).
nobody claims that Socrates was a fantastical god being who defied death
Socrates literally claimed that he was a channel for a revelatory holy spirit and that because the spirit would not lead him astray that he was ensured to escape death and have a good afterlife because otherwise it wouldn’t have encouraged him to tell off the proceedings at his trial.
Also, there definitely isn’t any evidence of Joshua in the LBA, or evidence for anything in that book, and a lot of evidence against it.
No, there’s barely any physical evidence that anyone a few hundred years ago existed.
But if writing is enough, there are some. Tacitus basically said: “Nero blamed the Christians, followers of that Guy called Jesus who Pilatus executed a few decades ago.”
Wikipedia at least says both his Baptism and crucifixion are not disputed by historians.
