All the historical evidence for Jesus in one room
this post was submitted on 03 Sep 2023
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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".