Comment by alentist | Hacker News Reader

Comment by alentist | Hacker News Reader

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> I'm under the impression that Chris-as-singular-historical-figure is accepted based on lighter evidence than we require for other historical figures.

You're under a false impression, and are spreading a myth [0][1]. In fact, your claim is exactly backwards: Certain laypeople (you seem to be among them) demand more evidence for the historicity of Jesus than for other famous people of antiquity.

> And that the Bible was mostly written hundreds of years after Jesus supposedly existed.

First, this is complete nonsense, given that ~77% of the Bible is the Old Testament, whose books have been dated to centuries BCE [1].

Second, if we charitably reinterpret your comment as referring to the New Testament, it is also false. The Book of Revelation is generally accepted by traditional scholarship to have been written during the reign of Domitian (81–96 CE) [1]. A handful (3-4) of other books are dated to 110 CE at most.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christ_myth_theory

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historicity_of_Jesus

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dating_the_Bible

My understanding is based on the wikipedia article called "Historical Jesus", which confusingly is different than the "Historicity of Jesus". Also, a book I read a long time ago, called "Who Wrote the Bible".

I'm not purporting to be a biblical scholar, but it's clear to me that the evidence for Jesus is not as strong as, say, the evidence for Julius Caesar.

The fact that there is no direct evidence points to at least some haziness about the character. The same could be said for a number of other historical figures. It's pretty clear there are limitations to the evidence, from Wikipedia:

"The historical Jesus scholarship is bound by the following limitations:

- There is no physical or archaeological evidence for Jesus; all existing sources are documentary.

- The sources for the historical Jesus are mainly Christian writings, such as the gospels and the purported letters of the apostles.

- All extant sources that mention Jesus were written after his death.

- The New Testament represents sources that have become canonical for Christianity, and there are many apocryphal texts that are examples of the wide variety of writings in the first centuries AD that are related to Jesus.[33] The authenticity and reliability of these sources have been questioned by many scholars, and few events mentioned in the gospels are universally accepted.[34]"

So it seems that no writings about him survive from his life, by or about him. There is no physical evidence of his existence. Most of the evidence was written by early Christians, and few of the events they write about are universally accepted. And given the propensity of religious followers to exaggerate, I don't personally put a lot of stock in much of the motivated reasoning exhibited.

His is a resume with some holes in it. Smarter and better informed people disagree with me, but I'm just processing the evidence as I see it.

What do you mean by "physical evidence"? As Bart D. Ehrman (a non-Christian New Testament scholar) explains:

The reality is that we don’t have archaeological records for virtually anyone who lived in Jesus’s time and place.

Who was the most important Jewish figure in Palestine for the entire first century (who wasn’t, say, the actual king)? There’s no doubt. Flavius Josephus. Highly placed aristocrat, military leader, political figure, eventually made a court historian by the Roman emperor himself, and our principal source of information for the Jewish people and history at the time. And how much archaeological evidence do we have of his existence? None.

So too, who is (by far) the best known Jewish cultural figure outside of Palestine in the first century? Again, not much competition: Philo of Alexandria, brilliant philosopher, massively prolific author, political activist, known even at the highest levels of government in Rome itself. How much archaeological evidence do we have of his existence? Again, none. The lack of evidence does not mean a person at the time didn’t exist. It means that she or he, like 99.99% of the rest of the world at the time, made no impact on the archaeological record.

The most detailed record of the life and death of Jesus comes from the four Gospels and other New Testament writings. "These are all Christian and are obviously and understandably biased in what they report, and have to be evaluated very critically indeed to establish any historically reliable information," Ehrman says. "But their central claims about Jesus as a historical figure—a Jew, with followers, executed on orders of the Roman governor of Judea, Pontius Pilate, during the reign of the Emperor Tiberius—are borne out by later sources with a completely different set of biases."

Within a few decades of his lifetime, Jesus was mentioned by Jewish and Roman historians in passages that corroborate portions of the New Testament that describe the life and death of Jesus.

Regarding the apocryphal texts, they're called apocryphal for a reason, and do not form part of the Biblical canon.

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