All the historical evidence for Jesus in one room
this post was submitted on 03 Sep 2023
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Who is this for? What point are you trying to make? There is arguable evidence for a jesus-like character (as seen in the comments), so this post really helps no one and makes you look like an uninformed, angsty, immature person.
And maybe you are and will grow out of it to be helpful to any sort of community, but this post isn't part of that.
May I see it?
Will personal attacks produce the evidence?
Simple Google search. Feel free to read a bit at your leisure.
No, but elementary Google searches and critical thinking will
Is the plural of opinions evidence? Is something about history true because the majority of people say it is true or because it did happen?
Why not just present evidence instead of an argument ad populism?
That's like saying there's no evidence of Alexander the great, Julius Caesar, Plato, Socrates, Shakespeare. Sure we don't have photos or anything, but we assume the historical records is accurate enough.
Except we have evidence of those men existing and in the Socrates the story is believable enough and consistent and there is a direct eyewitness. We can't say either about Jesus
The only evidence that Socrates existed are the writings of Plato. Socrates can also be interpreted as a purely Socratic device rather than a literal person.
Which is more than what we can say about Jesus. Name a single eyewitness of him while he was alive who recorded it. Paul admits never seeing Jesus while he was alive, the twelve wrote no books, the Romans have no notes on the events. No one who supposedly saw any of the events managed to find quill and parchment. And what's more no one who heard second hand during the events recorded it. The Gospels are clear that news was spreading all over Judea and yet people writing about other would be Messiahs and political rebellions are silent about Jesus.
Besides, and again this important, Socrates is a consistent believable story. We don't have multiple versions of his life that all go against each other, often within the same text.
I mean if you are going from the evidence of the Bible that you cannot corroborate from other records, then both Socrates and Jesus have exactly equal evidence for their physical existence.
If it's a consistent believable story, it could be because Plato wrote it that way. It isn't a synthesis of dozens of writers drawing on thousands of oral traditions. It's a single coherent voice of a single author with a clear vision of their character.
Again. Socrates had an eyewitness, Jesus did not.
Exactly. There was a recent episode of Within Reason where the guest discussed the methodology for piecing together historical fact about Jesus.
In his (expert, mind you) opinion Jesus is a real historical figure who likely claimed to be a prophet.
i don't think it matters how expert of an opinon one has when considering confidence on whether someone truly existed or not.
being an expert in history wouldn't help you confidently confirm that anything you read wasn't part of a big popular information conspiracy unfortunately.
their examples of Shakespeare, Socrates, etc. are much more strongly suggestive of being true because of a larger sample size of "historical evidence" from people claiming to exist at the same time as those who wrote about them, and the several events popularly known to be directly caused by them, and not some 50 years removed gospels which may very possibly have been hear-say. (told indirect information, then made a claim based on that)
regardless, it pretty much doesn't matter in philosophy whether someone exists or not since the important thing is the idea associated with the person. the issue is that theology is associated with Jesus, and since theism is a confident belief position, it just doesn't make a ton of sense to live and believe by historical evidence alone. i think complimenting historical evidence with empirical science is a lot more reasonable
to me this would be like if someone had a box, and i really wanted to know what was in it, and they told me it was a carrot and sent me off. now i can believe it was a carrot because they were right there and if they were honest then it should be a carrot in the box, but to personally commit myself to that belief, i would have the see inside the box myself.
How did this expert determine which model of the events was true vs which was false? What experiments did they run? What primary evidence did they study?
There are as many versions of historical Jesus as there are people studying the subject. All of them can't be true, but all of them can be false.
It was Within Reason #35 that I was referencing, if you have time I would highly recommend it.
Hey so I listened to it. I thought the first part was interesting where they repeated all the arguments from authority arguments ad populism and special pleading basic fallacies that most Jesus literalists make. The interesting part was that they seem to be aware of it but don't actually retract it.
The second part of the episode they try to build a minimum Jesus and made a mistake about John the Baptist.
Thanks for recommending it. It was nice knowing that the best argument this side oft he debate has is "because I said so".
So this is all bad faith then, eh? What would qualify as evidence for you?
* or we can cut this short. I'll concede you have a good point and are correct if you will agree that viruses aren't real cause we have no evidence to your standards in this thread for them.
The polite thing to do is mention when you edit your comments, just a fyi.
What I would like is a contemporary written account.
non sequitur. Also I am curious why the first part of your comment was asking me what my standards were while the second part is you telling me what they were. Is this an example of arguing in bad faith? Maybe ask the "majority of scholars".
If anything, what I did was a false equivalence. God, you sound like me 15 years ago, and I was a twat. You also sound like my mum and she's an antivaxxer.
I marked my edit with an asterisk, as is/was standard for the Internet for a long time.
I assumed your position from the rest of your comments: groups of experts (or a consensus of experts) are not reliable, contemporary sources as considered in the general field are unreliable unless you want to use them to further your point (tacitus or Josephus). And contemporary sources are the only thing that matter.
So by these standards, what do we know of history? Not much, I'd argue. And I'd also bring it back home: what's the fuckin point of your post except to be an angsty lil kid? Who are you impressing here
Attack the argument and not the person.
You know what they say about assumptions. Why not just ask me? I am right here.
Neither men were contemporary.
Really not my problem that historical research is difficult. Theist complain about this a lot, that it is really difficult to prove God.
Attack the argument and not the person. You don't want to give people the wrong idea.
Now, how is that contemporary evidence of Jesus going, find it yet? Also I noticed you neglected to answer my questions in the last comment. Feel free to have a go at it again.
You're a teenager, aren't you?
You thought that was an attack when it was an honest question.
You answered the question though, so it's all good.
Just to be clear here, you won't even acknowledge that I made a false equivalence argument instead of a non sequitur (since you seem so singularity focused on rhetorical fallicy)?
* < EDIT MARK
Or that I followed your editing etiquette and you didn't recognize it?
Discussion is useful when one is able to listen to others and progress a line of thought. You might want to take a beat and pay attention to what a lot of other people are trying to tell you in this comment section.
I am not sure that you did but if it matters so much to you fine I will acknowledge that you committed one logical fallacy vs a different one.
Right so it seems you have moved on to the part of the debate where you have given up personal attacks, and now are entering argument about argument. How I am arguing my point doesn't suit you, instead of what my point is.
Maybe we can steer this back a bit? Can you please provide contemporary evidence for Jesus' existence.
So now the argument about arguments thing is important to you? What about the last 3 hours of you whining Latin at people?
And I gave you the place to start at the beginning. If you want to push a fringe theory, then disprove the items in that first article. If you can do it, you'd change human history forever. And I'm not being sarcastic here, you'd be a hero in the understanding of the human journey. But, until you can or are willing to do that, you're spouting nonsense and demanding your own standards of evidence and this is a useless endeavor.
Almost the same conversation I had with my mum about covid.
If you're a troll, well done. If you're not, I hope you're young and this is just general inexperience talking.
Didn't find the evidence I take it. Also a fyi the Gospels and Letters were written in Greek ;)
It's mostly due to inertia, because the entire system used to be 100% Christian, historians obviously believed in Jesus.
That has resulted in the scholarly consensus carrying over until today, plus many places you can't work, if you deny the existence of Jesus.
It would be interesting to see what the consensus is among scholars from Japan, or some other non traditionally Christian country.
jeez you gotta close some tabs, but also "existing historically" literally means that it's essentially hear-say whether Jesus existed or not, which in my opinion is incredibly weak evidence.
historical evidence never claims to be proven evidence, you're incorrectly interpreting it to be that way.