Paul's comment needs to be taken very seriously, as it applies to a lot of the debate. But still, looking at some of the specifics . . .
The gospels were written by people who lived in Rome perhaps just a few decades after when Jesus would have been around and the fact that they knew about something like the census - I mean, why wouldn't they know about the census? That's saying Sweeney Todd was a real barber because boats exist. Christianity came from a very small group of apocalyptic Jews talking about a new prophet that no one else in Rome seemed to have heard of before, and in the period of time it took for the story of Jesus to be written down in records we have today, they already disagreed wildly. The gospels and their beliefs that are canonized don't agree on a damned thing.
This looks like a response to an argument of some sort. Was someone claiming that because the gospel writers knew about the Census of Quirinius that therefore they are historically accurate? I'm not sure why anyone would make that claim. It was a pretty widely known event, especially in Jewish circles. Josephus certainly talks about it and notes how angry it made the Jews. If that is the context, though, an interesting point we
can draw from this is (once again) how it evidences Luke's accuracy as a historian. See
this article by John Rhoads for an excellent discussion of how Josephus misdated the census but how Luke got it right.
I'll grant you that when you arrange the gospels chronologically, even breaking it down into source Q and all that, the earlier stories of Jesus are distinctly non-supernatural (that seems like it was almost the point since Jesus was a prophets whose struggle was that he was a mere man).
I wouldn't grant this at all. Moreover, we have to be very careful against using the "supernatural" Jesus vs the "historical" Jesus as a means to date the proposed sources behind the gospels, because you end up with a circular argument. The argument ends up being that the supernatural materials have to be dated late, and therefore, the early material shows a naturalistic Jesus! Clearly you can see the fallacy in that thinking.
That makes it sound like Jesus started out as a real historical account that was interesting and meaningful and then overtime got simplified largely into "well, Jesus was magic that's why he's so important."
This is such trite analysis that merits exactly the same effort in composing a response as a person who said to me once (and this is totally true) that the reason Jesus was able to be resurrected was because an alien race stole His body and impersonated Him for the next several weeks.
Still, just for the sake of readers, the assumption here is that the real Jesus was something of a Socratic, cynical philosopher who never said or did anything supernatural and certainly never claimed to be the Messiah or God in the flesh, and yet somehow managed to get Himself crucified, and somehow managed to predispose His disciples into believing that He rose from the dead. And that this totally natural Jesus turned into magic man after years and years and years of legendary development.
And how many years and years and years do we have to develop all those legends? Turns out, less that forty. And that's simply no where near enough time for legendary development to make that much of an impact on the basic story of Jesus. As Craig writes
elsewhere
- For in order for these stories to be in the main legendary, a very considerable length of time must be available for the evolution and development of the traditions until the historical elements have been supplanted by unhistorical. This factor is typically neglected in New Testament scholarship, as A. N. Sherwin-White points out in Roman Law and Roman Society tn the New Testament. Professor Sherwin-White is not a theologian; he is an eminent historian of Roman and Greek times, roughly contemporaneous with the NT. According to Professor Sherwin-White, the sources for Roman history are usually biased and removed at least one or two generations or even centuries from the events they record. Yet, he says, historians reconstruct with confidence what really happened. He chastises NT critics for not realizing what invaluable sources they have in the gospels. The writings of Herodotus furnish a test case for the rate of legendary accumulation, and the tests show that even two generations is too short a time span to allow legendary tendencies to wipe out the hard core of historical facts. When Professor Sherwin-White turns to the gospels, he states for these to be legends, the rate of legendary accumulation would have to be 'unbelievable'; more generations are needed.
As an aside, when you factor in the time related to the development of legendary material, you expect to start finding such stories at the beginning to middle of the third century. And guess what you start to find right about that time? The apocryphal "gospels." There's just NO WAY that you can dismiss the supernatural events described in the gospels as legendary if you want to be taken seriously.
But at the same time, the philosophy of Jesus is directly lifted from contemporaneous philosophy movements and specific accounts were generally incredibly fanciful or mundane.
Not even close. Someone needs to go read
The Resurrection of the Son of God. It's long and tedious but very important. The "philosophy of Jesus" is simply unparalleled in either Jewish or Greek thought. To take but two examples, the Greeks not only rejected but tended to openly mock the idea of a physical resurrection from the dead at the end of time. For reasons of their own philosophies, the body was something to be freed from, not raised again into. So to take but one literary example, Aeschylus, a fifth century Greek playwright, had the god Apollo state explicitly: “But when of murder’d man the dust hath once the blood suck’d up, he riseth never more.” (cf A. Swanwick, tr.
The Agamemnon, Choephori, and Eumenides of Aeschylus (London: Bell and Daldy, 1865), 166, click
here to see online.) You also can't look to Jewish philosophy for the origin of Jesus' ideas around the resurrection, because while they looked for a physical resurrection, it was to be at the end of time, not in the middle of history. This actually creates a very serious historical problem for the non-Christian. There is absolutely no doubt whatsoever, historically speaking, that Christians were proclaiming that Jesus had physically resurrected from the dead and that He was the firstfruit of a more general resurrection of those who placed their faith in Him, and that they were teaching this in the early second century AD
at the very latest, with a strong historical claim to be made that this teaching was the very essence of the faith in the mid first century! But so the problem: where did this "mutation" of Jewish theology come from? What historical event can explain such a MASSIVE shift in theology? You may not appreciate how big of a shift that is, but to use a contemporary example, it would be like waking up tomorrow and discovering that millions of Muslims were claiming that Mohammed had returned to earth and was now converting Muslims to old Judaism in preparation for the earthly reign of Allah. Where the heck would
that idea come from? It would certainly need some kind of explanation, and so here too.
Another example would be the idea that salvation is by grace through faith. Ignore the inter-Christian debates over what constitutes faith and what constitutes works. There is no doubt that the earliest Christians were claiming that it is faith in Jesus, and not fidelity to the Mosaic Law (or even Abrahamic lineage) that brought salvation and the hope of eternal life. Where does
that come from? It certainly has to have its roots in something Jesus said, but there is absolutely on such parallel of any kind anywhere in Jewish or Greek philosophy. It certainly would, though, be the philosophy of a man who believed Himself to be God in the flesh. So write Him off as a crazy man who claimed to be God (in a unique way, mind you--not some demi-god common to Greeks, but the Creator of Heaven and Earth, YHWH Himself in the flesh). But such an approach, while taking the evidence somewhat seriously, requires we reject as foolish and naive the stupid claim that Jesus' philosophy was just lifted from surrounding cultures.
Even if the gospels ultimately derive from a real event which was meaningful to the Jewish cults of the time, if the accounts are off-the-wall, non-objective, contradictory, possibly third-hand, then can you really say he was a real person if nothing about him can be known and no events or actions can be definitively tied to him?
Depends? When did the writer stop beating his wife?
My God, can people not see the rhetoric being employed here. This doesn't even pretend to be a serious analysis and consideration of the evidence. As a point of fact, no serious NT scholar denies that the gospel account derives from real events. This sounds like the ranting of some "jezis neber xistd!!!" fool. Beyond that, the accounts are decidely NOT "off-the-wall, non-objective, contradictory, possibly third-hand." Against that, they are so uniform that the argument is that the stories depend
too much on each other.
At either rate, we don't know he existed.
True story: I had not read this line when I wrote the above. I hope you didn't write this, Ice. Because if you did, I'm going to ask you to stop reading the idiocy you're looking at (and if you didn't write it, stop reading this idiocy--it's a waste of your time). I mean, in all seriousness, before you take seriously the claim that Jesus never existed, I would invite you to consider that exactly the same methodology demonstrates that [
Napolean never existed.
It seems to be a reasonable guess.
No, it isn't a reasonable guess. It is as established a historical fact as any historical fact can possibly be established. That's like saying, "Well, it's a reasonable guess that there really was a Roman Empire." Fool.
But there's no smoking gun for him.
This is becoming mind-numbing . . .
No serious and respected historian records him, nothing corroborates his existence, and there's nothing implausible about a group of tightly-knit apocalypse cults telling stories that aren't factually accurate.
And these are just talking points. My God, this guy is an idiot.
Seriously, IceMobster . . . if you have honest questions about the real historical questions and historical methodology around Jesus, go look at some real scholarship on the matter. You can even get popular stuff. Let me quote John Dominic Crossan--you can Google him to realize that he is a heavy hitter in this field and to note that
he is not a Christian. He says,
- Jesus’ death by execution under Pontius Pilate is as sure as anything historical can ever be. For, if no follower of Jesus had written anything for one hundred years after his crucifixion, we would still know about him from two authors not among his supporters. Their names are Flavius Josephus and Cornelius Tacitus.
See his book, John Dominic Crossan,
Who Killed Jesus (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1995), 5. Or even more interesting, go read Pinchas Lapide's
The Resurrection of Jesus: A Jewish Perspective. He was, again, non-Christian and an actual historian. I really and truly suggest you read that book, as he concludes (and again, I have to insist you remember, he was NOT a Christian) that it is historically conclusive that Jesus was actually crucified and was resurrected three days later. Pure history, Ice.
So, yeah, correct the mistakes since I have insufficient knowledge of that, I suppose. I am especially skeptical of these 2 quotes and asked the person in question to provide examples of that:
the story of Jesus to be written down in records we have today, they already disagreed wildly. The gospels and their beliefs that are canonized don't agree on a damned thing.
I'll grant you that when you arrange the gospels chronologically, even breaking it down into source Q and all that, the earlier stories of Jesus are distinctly non-supernatural (that seems like it was almost the point since Jesus was a prophets whose struggle was that he was a mere man).
You are right to be skeptical of those. I take it as obvious, then, that you did not write the post in question. Don't know who did, but you're clearly dealing with a fundamentally unserious person.
