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Comment by bhaak | Hacker News Reader

We lost a lot of historical records between late antiquity and the early middle ages. Most devastating for Italy was probably the Gothic War.

Then the records that were in Constantinople were also lost, not only by the fall of Constantinople itself but also by the sacking of it by Christian crusaders.

Lots of records that could have shown such a descent are lost.

Now Confucius was an important historical figure.

It's not surprising that he is one of the few cases where an uninterrupted descent could be true. If Jesus or Caesar had a family line run into modern times or if the Papacy was hereditary, we might have such a line for Western civilization as well.

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China also has kept a fairly robust set of records compared to the rest of the world.

Would be hard for Jesus, given he didn't exist.

That is an extremely fringe belief, in disagreement with most scholars of antiquity.

But the gradient is positive.

What's that supposed to mean?

In 1900, no historians thought Jesus was like Moses, Abraham, and Adam, made up from whole cloth. In 2000, some did. Today, more.

The scenario as I understand it is that Paul's writing came first. But to get a congregation to pay attention they found they had to invent a corporeal Jesus to have said their things, then apostles to have heard them, then a bio for where and when, and finally gospels to tell it in.

For those who object that such a thing wasn't done, consider Moses and, really, all of Genesis and Exodus. Iliad. Thor'n'Loki. It was not just done, but positively demanded.

True, but that's because history as a discipline has incredibly low standard of evidence. They collectively decided that since reliable evidence is often very difficult to produce, they will settle for what they can get. A lot of antique or even medieval historical figures are known from a single sentence in some chronicle written 100 years after their death.

That would make it unknowable whether he existed, it would not mean we have reason to believe he didn't.

This is not like physics where it's natural to assume something didn't exist if the proof for its existence is not strong enough.

Only because a lot of people want to believe.

We are all confident Adam, Noah, and Moses were made up, with none of the proof positive that you are demanding for this one case.

Adam, Noah and Moses were only attested and believed to exist by groups living in the Kingdom of Judah.

For Moses, people have looked a lot for any kind of evidence that there was some significant Jewish presence in Egypt, or Egyptian migration to the area of Israel, and nothing of the kind has been found, either in Egyptian documents or in archaeological evidence - which is actually evidence of absence when expecting a significant population to have migrated that way. Further accounts from the books of Exodus and Deuteronomy, such as the battle of Jericho, have also been somewhat conclusively debunked (the city of Jericho hadn't existed, at least not worth walls, for a few hundred years before the time of the conquest is supposed to have taken place).

Similarly, we have looked long and hard for evidence of a massive flood that could have lent some credence to the story of Noah, and nothing of any significant magnitude was found for that time - and here, we know for sure that a flood would have left significant geological evidence, so we know the flood can't have existed.

Adam has so little information associated with him that it's hard to even define what it would have meant for him to exist. We do know for sure, based on DNA evidence, that there is no single father + mother pair from which all humans living today have sprung, definitely not anyone living anywhere near close to the Jewish account of Adam.

In contrast, the idea of a founder of the Christian sect, one who was killed under Pontius Pilate around the year 33, has no major evidence against it, and is a somewhat plausible account of how the Christian sect could have come to be. There are no sources asserting a different origin, and there are no sources that contradict the possibility that Pontius Pilate and the Jewish authorities would have punished someone behaving like Jesus did. So, the neutral position is to say that he may or may not have existed, we don't know.

If you further believe the biblical or non-biblical sources attesting to his existence, even if you think they are weak, you can even say that it's more likely that he existed than that he didn't.

No one who lived then and wrote anything about Jesus, including the (unknown) authors of the Gospels, ever claimed to have met Him.

We can be confident Paul existed, or anyway somebody we know of as Paul, who wrote his Letters. Likewise Homer, the Iliad. Tacitus, Pliny, Horace, Plato, Euripides. But there is nothing traceable to any Jesus. You certainly can choose to believe He existed, but objectively, the evidence is too thin to support it.

Funny thing about Noah's flood. The water is all still there. We call it the sea. Sea level rose 120 meters in the past 20,000 years, up until 8000 years ago. Many millions of square miles of what was rich river bottom land is now sea floor. People whose family had lived there for tens of thousands of years had to keep moving inland (where other people already lived!) as the sea swallowed their ancestral homes. For 12000 years. It must have made an impression.

Even the most ardent Christian biblical scholars admit the overwhelming majority of writings claimed to be 1st century are much later forgeries. They have picked out a few scraps they have not been able to prove were forged, and based everything on those.

But the most favored bit of positive evidence is a single paragraph that everybody agrees was badly doctored up. They have "reconstructed" what they think the original must have actually said. But the text before and after it would flow neatly one to the next without it.

Next best is a line in Paul where he mentions somebody is Jesus's brother.

Both pieces of evidence are from Josephus' Antiquities. Not the best evidence but also not the worst.

I don't think it is a fringe belief. I have not heard of such a consensus among "most scholars of antiquity." What are you basing that on? A discussion I heard in the past few years which mentions that is an open question is here: https://theness.com/neurologicablog/index.php/the-evidence-f...

The Wikipedia article [0] has a lot of quotes pointing to this. Even modern supporters of the theory, like Robert M. Price, recognize it as a fringe position within academia.

Of course, it is an open question in some sense, as the evidence is nowhere near as powerful as, say, Newton's laws of motion, or the existence of Julius Caesar.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historicity_of_Jesus#CITEREF...

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