Do we even know he was a real person and not combination of 2 or 3 men with similar fate?
Pretty interesting:
> Virtually all New Testament scholars and Near East historians, applying the standard criteria of historical investigation, find that the historicity of Jesus is effectively certain ... with very few exceptions such critics generally do support the historicity of Jesus and reject the Christ myth theory that Jesus never existed.
See Richard Carrier's youtube videos on this topic. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LTllC7TbM8M
There's not compelling evidence for the historicity of Jesus. Yet there's compelling motivation for early Christians to say he was a man who lived and not simply a god. Being related to someone who knew him in real life actually could bestow power and influence in the early Christian community.
https://www.quora.com/Did-any-of-the-Bibles-contributors-act...
I cannot verify it all right now, I'm more of a practical guy when it comes to Christinanity, but a few of the writers from the new testament were followers, and two (?) were his step (if you belive in it like me) brothers.
For a common bloke from 2000 years ago multiple written sources from people who met him first hand should count as pretty well documented.
I'm not saying you should believe everything they wrote (although I do) I'm just pointing out that the basic facts are very well documented given the circumstances.
https://www.quora.com/Do-credible-historians-agree-that-the-...
TLDR; the evidence that Jesus was a real person is very strong, and stronger than many other historical figures (the article mentions Hannibal), whose existence is not considered controversial.
As a religious figure Jesus is inherently controversial, which is what probably attracts the skepticism and interest in trying to cast doubt on his existence.
Richard Carrier actually counters each argument in the Quora post pretty convincingly.
I'm not necessarily trying to pull your point apart, just pointing out that it's not clear-cut. Personally I've never really made my mind up, but at the moment I lean more towards a conglomeration of folk-tales and the lives of several men. I'll probably change my mind again soon.
I think you are probably remembering a (disputed) claim based on an edit made in a particular later copy that Tacitus (one of the earliest independent sources on both Christ and the early Christian community, particularly in Rome) referred to the Christian community in Rome as “Chrestians”, immediately before using the standard rendering of Jesus title as “Christus”. Even if Tacitus did use “Chrestians”, that name for the early community is attested in other sources (and even tied and used alongside Christian in some inscriptions from that community, IIRC), his reference to Christ did not use any alternate title,
https://www.ex-christian.net/topic/65072-richard-carrier-chr...
People today can’t even agree on the details of Elvis’ life... now imagine if Elvis had lived a few hundred years ago, and we’re all working from quaternary+ sources. Then fast-forward a thousand or so years of very intentional document editing and re-editing, translations and re-translations, and all of the incredible wealth and power hinging on it for centuries.
How accurate would accounts from those times be expected to be?
That doesn't seem quite fair because it's almost certain that the guy named Jesus was not behind the upheavals of that time. That was about the Jewish revolt against the Romans which Jesus was not involved in at all. Also, while Christianity didn't start in earnest until about two hundred years after Jesus' death, stories of his life were written down as early as 60 years after his death.
It's very difficult in a society like ancient Israel to fake the existence of a person, people had clan allegiances, they kept track of genealogies and would be able to tell right away if the writings concerned someone who didn't exist.
There were translations but that's irrelevant because we have the original dead sea scrolls with the earliest ones dating to a few decades after his death. A time when wealth and power did not hinge on this. We're not solely working with edits and re-translations.
I think there's a bias against religious figures that inform people's arguments when they say it's all uncertain - when in reality the evidence is pretty good that he did exist.
There are several Christian writings dated from the first century after his death. Paul's letters, the didache, Flavius Joseph, some talmudic writings, John's disciples writings to name a few.
1. "Yeshua" or "Yeshu" were relatively common Jewish names at that time (it is just "Joshuah" in Aramaic), so vague references in non-Christian writings to a "Jesus" of some kind may not refer to the same person. How many people named "Joshuah" might have led a group of disciples during a period where dozens of messianic claimants were trying to rally followers to one cause or another?
2. It is well known that the bible was subject to extensive editing prior to its official canonization, which makes it somewhat questionable as a historical document. At best we can only derive vague information about big social movements IMO -- no doubt there were Jews who taught the things attributed to Jesus, but I personally hesitate to go further and claim that the bible is an accurate account of a single person's movement.
3. The chaotic schisms in the early centuries of Christianity makes me doubt that useful historical information about the founders of the movement actually survived. The different Christian movements preserved the documents that best supported their cause. Who knows what historical information is not available today that would totally change our views on the topic.
I've never heard this claim before.
The Dead Sea Scrolls prove that written copies made through the centuries were accurate copies.
The only editorialization of the Bible was church councils deciding which books/letters to include in the Bible, not to edit them.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two-source_hypothesis
This all would have happened before the various councils decided what would be considered canonical, and the councils themselves probably had no idea that it had happened.
As for the dead sea scrolls, all it shows is that the final forms of the books in the Hebrew bible and related extrabiblical works existed prior to the canonization. It is pretty clear that the Hebrew bible was edited in prior centuries:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Documentary_hypothesis
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Book_of_Isaiah#Authorship
etc.
“Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth is a book by Iranian-American writer and scholar Reza Aslan. It is a historical account of the life of Jesus and analyzes the various religious perspectives on Jesus as well as the creation of Christianity.”
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zealot:_The_Life_and_Times_o...
Surely not any Christian or any atheist. Not any Muslim either. I suppose Buddhists wouldn't have any particular stake in whether a historical Jesus existed.
The consequences of being able to prove with certainty either that Jesus existed and is who Christians claim him to be, or did not exist or was not divine would have tremendous consequences on the lives of hundreds of millions people who do not ascribe to the proven belief.
They could say "I am intellectually honest and will change my beliefs depending on the evidence," but we both know that 1. Concrete evidence strong enough to convince someone to change their beliefs, beyond what is already known, likely does not exist. And 2. Their current beliefs already match their known evidence so any additional information is unlikely to radically change their beliefs, only be accounted for and integrated into their current belief system.
I'm not trying to say all scholarship is biased or we shouldn't believe anything. In all likelihood, most people are not deliberately lying or falsifying anything.
What does that mean about which scholarship to trust? I have no idea.
Christians (ignoring some defunct or very rare forms) have it as an article of faith that Jesus was a real historical human who was also divine.
Atheists would deny that Jesus or anyone else was God, but there is nothing about atheism that is opposed to duly considering possibly trustworthy evidence that the Jesus whom Christians believe on faith was/is God may have indeed existed as a real historical human.
At the same time, unlike (for example) Muslims who believe Jesus was a human prophet but not himself divine, atheists don't have any specific belief about Jesus's human historical reality at all. If the evidence shows that he was made up by combining bits of multiple people's teachings, atheism is unaffected.
Therefore, an atheist's writing about this question is, all things being equal, more likely to neutrally consider all the available the secular observable facts about the question, without influence from religious motivations, than a Christian's.
However, that italicized precondition is usually false.
Real writers vary in their approach to scientific and historical rigor, being imperfect humans themselves and not abstractions. So an individual Christian could well be a more trustworthy source on this than an individual atheist, or vice versa.
As for his book, I realise that book publishers like to give their products sexy titles, but the title can't possibly be paid out in any non-fiction sense as we have exactly zero contemporaneous written accounts of Jesus' life. Anything he has written could only be a further digestion of the already contentious writings haphazardly collected into the book we now know as the Christian bible.
https://www.kcl.ac.uk/artshums/depts/trs/events/jandb/index....
https://soundcloud.com/kings-college-london/jesus-and-brian-...
The Church today follows the teachings of Paul, that the Law is obsolete, nailed to the cross and no longer binding. The Church teachings give the Chuch great authority in determining what people should do, church leaders are called Father etc. The Church was supposed to be for all nations.
And yet... Jesus is described in the gospels exactly saying the opposite! “I came to save the lost sheep of Israel.” When a young man asked how to be saved, Jesus said “follow the Law”. He always taught to follow the law, and never once said it would be obsolete after his crucifixion.
Why would the Church invent a person so inconvenient to their own dogma? It is the ultimate criterion of embarrassment — of the very canonizers themselves!
They only would have done it if the original founder of the Way realy existed and was a Jewish teacher who taught Jews. Why else would they invent something so seemingly at odds with their own teachings that people throughout the centuries (like Thomas Jefferson) called Paul “the great corruptor of Christianity”?
I would further say that the original Church of Jesus existed in Jerusalem and was led by his brother James and also by Peter. They told Paul that rumors have come that he is teaching Jews to turn away from the Law, and told him to pay for some purification rites to show this is not true. Paul obliged. They also penned a letter to Gentile Believers which Paul was to take to them, invoking the Holy Spirit and instructing them in essentially the Noahide Laws. Paul in his letter to the Galatians however said they had “nothing to add” to his message excep that he “remember the poor, something I have been eager to do all along”.
In short, the founder existed, the Church existed, and would have been the dominant Church if not for the Judaic wars and the destruction that happened as a result.
I think that Christianity as we know it today, came from those beginnings and then spread to other churches.
He said the law would not change until all is accomplished. After drinking the vinegar, before dying, he said "all is accomplished". Paul's teachings are thus consistent with this.
The original context is from Matthew 5:18, which could potentially have been written in Hebrew:
"17 “Do not think that I came to destroy the Law or the Prophets. I did not come to destroy but to fulfill. 18 For assuredly, I say to you, till heaven and earth pass away, one [a]jot or one [b]tittle will by no means pass from the law till all is fulfilled. 19 Whoever therefore breaks one of the least of these commandments, and teaches men so, shall be called least in the kingdom of heaven; but whoever does and teaches them, he shall be called great in the kingdom of heaven. 20 For I say to you, that unless your righteousness exceeds the righteousness of the scribes and Pharisees, you will by no means enter the kingdom of heaven."
Notice a few things:
1) Heaven and Earth have not yet passed away, many Christians ignore this part completely, but it needs to be explained why it was mentioned. It would seem the obvious reason is that "all will be accomplished" around the time that Heaven and Earth will pass away, including spreading the gospel to everyone. In another place Jesus says "And this gospel of the kingdom will be preached in the whole world as a testimony to all nations, and then the end will come."
2) Notice that even those who ARE in Heaven will be called Least if they set aside even the smallest commandment and teach others to do so. Thus, even Christians need to be concerned with the Law. Literally nowhere did Jesus even bring up the idea that the Law will be obsolete. That is an idea originated by Paul.
yet he healed on the sabbath.. sooo..
> Jesus said “follow the Law”. He always taught to follow the law, and never once said it would be obsolete after his crucifixion.
I've always interpreted those conversations to be Jesus attempting to spread an idea that the religious institutions of the time had lost sight of the message of love and peace in return for control and power.
If you read it with Jesus speaking knowing that members of his audience are members of those power groups, you get the sense that he is very, very carefully choosing his words.
There's little doubt among scholars that there was a specific person at the start of this (and not some BS "Dan Brown"-like conspiracy).
Yes, but to play... eh, Messiah's advocate... this doesn't discount the possibility of Jesus having been one of those claimants leading one of those movements, he just wouldn't have been the only one.
It doesn't lend credence to anything either, but it's not impossible that Jesus happened to lead the cult that won out, thanks eventually to Rome and the British Empire.
The British Empire? How so?
Rome obviously was instrumental for the success of Christianity, spreading along the roads of the Roman Empire, having a large population with the same language so you could reach lots of people with one translation Although Christianity wasn't alone in using these advantages. It eventually won out but Mithraism was a similar positioned religion.
After the rise of the Islam reduced the area of Christianity, European colonialism spread it over the whole world. If I had to single out one European nation with the most influence, I would have said it was the Spanish Empire and not the British.
For one, the burden of proof would be on proving it was "multiple" people.
Second, we have a couple of references to a single person (Josephus, Tacitus).
Third, we know many other cases of a single founder, from Mohamed to Joseph Smith, Jr.
>there were plenty of messianic claimants at the time and plenty of Jewish religious movements competing for followers.
How is that relevant. There were many, but one of them got off the ground. Why should there be 2 or 6 of them getting popular simultaneously?
Tacitus makes a vague reference to a "cristus" that could have referred to any messianic claimant (as "christ" is just a Greek word for "messiah"), and Josephus makes a similarly vague reference to people with very common Jewish names (Joshua i.e. Jesus, Jacob i.e. James). In both cases there are reasons to doubt that the references refer to the specific Jesus in the biblical or quranic accounts (the latter unquestionably having been written centuries after Jesus supposedly lived). In both cases the claims are not based on the authors' first-hand knowledge and the authors based their writings on what the earliest Christians had told them, something that may have already been merely a legend.
Again, it is possible that Jesus was really a person who led a religious movement two thousand years ago. I am only saying that other explanations cannot be ruled out because there is almost no evidence at all. At best all we can say is that the earliest Christians lived about two thousand years ago and by that point believed some version of the Jesus narrative. Beyond that I am not seeing the evidence for a historical Jesus.
Sure, no reason to rule it out, just many reasons to rule it improbable.
These references have been largely debunked.
1. Josephus: https://www.richardcarrier.info/archives/7437
"The evidence that the Testimonium Flavianum (or TF) is entirely a late Christian forgery is now as overwhelming as such evidence could ever get."
2. Tacitus: https://www.quora.com/Was-Tacitus-a-Christian
"With ultra-violet examination of the Second Medicean manuscript 'the alteration was conclusively shown', even though it wasn't possible to say 'who altered the letter e into an i'. The examination was made by Dr. Ida Giovanna Rao of the Laurentian library in Florence, in 2008. The alteration is also visible in an ultra-violet photograph."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sabbatai_Zevi
Nor would violating mainstream religious views be a terribly unique event when a new movement is picking up followers:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacob_Frank
It is also not as "bizarre" as you might think. Judaism two thousand years ago was highly fragmented, with many different movements all competing for followers and converts; there was no single body of "Jewish thought" at the time. There were different interpretations of the prophecies, and the earliest Christians followed one tradition of interpretations (this is clearly reflected in the gospels -- e.g. Matthew follows the Greco-Jewish tradition and the Septuagint).
i doubt stealing would be as severe a crime as treason, so this would indicate that it was a common form of punishment
Meanwhile, bible scholars acknowledge that the books weren't written by people who had personally met Jesus, and don't even know precisely who the authors were—they are in fact anonymous—the names Matthew, Mark, Luke and John are just traditional.
Which "historical accounts" support this idea? I've never such those among what we know...
Any of his talks on YouTube are a good introduction, if you want to learn more and are willing to have your opinion and assumptions challenged.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WUYRoYl7i6U
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Carrier
You don't have to 'believe' in the guy, however his methodology, knowledge of history and enthusiasm for the subject is not something you find in the priesthood.
He does not rate the probability of Jesus being a real person as that high, neither does he rate the existence of Ned Ludd as that high. He does trace where ideas were borrowed from and has read the bible extremely thoroughly. If you are interested in Christianity because it is part of our culture and history then I highly recommend taking time to hear what Dr Richard Carrier has to say.
It's not something you find among any credible scholar in the field. Carrier is fringe for a reason.
After 2000 years of the indoctrination the defenders of the bible have got the art of defending the make-believe that is the bible down to a fine art. I did not say that everything that has ever came out of Richard Carrier's mouth is tantamount to the word of god and definitely to be believed. My point was that he asks the right questions, has done a lot of research that the bible bashers of this world haven't bothered to do and he has ways of discussing things in a non-black-and-white dualist way, going for probability and giving a value to how likely something is likely to be true.
Anyone with a serious interest in questioning assumptions long held by them about the bible needs to hear him out, to believe him or not, it is that questioning of faith that matters. There are plenty of atheists that believe that Jesus really did exist but he was an ordinary guy rather than of virgin birth and the son of god, an 'anti-capitalist rebel' of sorts.
What Richard Carrier does is to open up the idea that the whole bible is a contrivance, that this Jesus character did not exist and that his story was weaved together by religions that had gone before.
Logical fallacies are something we are all capable of. Your 'where there is smoke there must be fire' comment does not stand up to scrutiny.
Just twenty years ago it was not possible to talk about climate change in the world of weather forecasting and meteorology. That was actually way to controversial, and I am talking from being in the field twenty years ago. Yet by that point in time the idea had some scientific credibility for twenty years, and a century before that some had wondered what the consequences of pumping ever increasing quantities of carbon dioxide into the air might lead to, positing the 'crazy' global warming idea.
With the agreement of the Paris Accords the other week we have moved on from that, the 'fringe' view that was not considered 'credible' has moved on. Yet a mere twenty years ago people were saying 'climate change is fringe for a reason'.
There may be much to dislike about Richard Carrier, but to dismiss him without at least a link to a decent review of his work by one of these italicised credible scholars is a poor show.
Look, that’s not the point. Consensus undoubtably can change. The majority of historical scholars in this field are religious. I would love it if better evidence could verify the historical Jesus, rather than appeals to authority like you are using. There is compelling lack of evidence to prove Jesus as a historical figure. I never personally questioned it until seeing the lack of evidence.
Furthermore, if it's an appeal to authority to rely on scholars in a given field (many of whom are agnostic or atheist, yet still realize that there probably was a historical Jesus), I hope you don't believe in anything science says. After all, saying you believe in global warming is just an "appeal to authority". And so is trusting Carrier. Speaking of which here's one (of many) sources detailing why Carrier's ideas fail [0] and are basically dogmatically motivated -- which is hilarious since it's exactly what you accuse religious scholars of.
Also, Galileo did not believe it was flat, and there's plenty of sources during the Late Middle Ages that basically state they knew the earth was a sphere.
[0] https://www.patheos.com/blogs/euangelion/2017/12/peer-review...
It's the exact point so many (apologists) make. Unfortunately it's not true.
Source: https://www.richardcarrier.info/archives/7924
> Furthermore, if it's an appeal to authority to rely on scholars in a given field (many of whom are agnostic or atheist, yet still realize that there probably was a historical Jesus)
Exactly how what percent are atheists?
> After all, saying you believe in global warming is just an "appeal to authority". And so is trusting Carrier.
Yes, but the difference is we have evidence for global warming, but we don't for Jesus.
> Speaking of which here's one (of many) sources detailing why Carrier's ideas fail [0] and are basically dogmatically motivated -- which is hilarious since it's exactly what you accuse religious scholars of.
Did you link to the right article? This is a religious website, which merely shows one journal disagreed with Carrier. It has no mention of evidence against Carrier's claims nor does it show Carrier is dogmatically motivated. Is this all you got?
> Also, Galileo did not believe it was flat, and there's plenty of sources during the Late Middle Ages that basically state they knew the earth was a sphere.
FYI Galileo was imprisoned in the 1600s by the Roman Inquisition for promoting the idea that the earth was a sphere that revolved around the sun. Just because plenty of sources knew the earth was a sphere doesn't mean it was consensus. Plenty of scholars believe Jesus is made up, yet here we are.