|
Post by Dead Hoosiers on Aug 29, 2007 16:08:54 GMT -4
Maybe I will, but first admit that when you made your statement that there wasn't any evidence of Jesus outside the Bible, you hadn't really checked.
Yeah, sorry about that. I posted and then modified. You were too quick for me.
Because they were written by acknowledged historians who lived during the time not long after the gospel events took place. Maybe I'm not understanding you. Are you claiming that Jesus never lived or are you asking whether or not there exist extra-biblical accounts that would prove He was the Messiah? Whether or not He lived is a no-brainer. Whether or not He is the Messiah? Not even the Bible can prove that to you. You need to examine the evidence and make a decision.
|
|
Jason
Pluto
May all your hits be crits
Posts: 5,579
|
Post by Jason on Aug 29, 2007 16:18:33 GMT -4
I would like to see the other extra-Biblical confirmations of Jesus' existence too.
|
|
|
Post by Dead Hoosiers on Aug 29, 2007 16:27:11 GMT -4
I would like to see the other extra-Biblical confirmations of Jesus' existence too. Okay. I won't hold out for a response from wdmundt because I don't know when I'm going to get back here. Here's one list: www.rationalchristianity.net/jesus_extrabib.html#tacitusI don't know if Mary was a hairdresser. But I'm sure her name wouldn't be confused with Mary Magdalene's.
|
|
|
Post by wdmundt on Aug 29, 2007 16:47:21 GMT -4
That is an odd thing to say. You are wrong in your assumption.
From the link you provided:
That is a list of people who were not born until after Jesus is supposed to have died. How can they be witnesses?
|
|
|
Post by Ginnie on Aug 29, 2007 17:08:54 GMT -4
The Mythras Mysteries I'll cross out the Mythraic Mysteries. Some quotes from the author of The Origins of the Mithraic Mysteries:
...reconstructing the beliefs of the Mithraic devotees has posed an enormously intriguing challenge to scholarly ingenuity.....we possess almost no literary evidence about the beliefs of Mithraism. The few texts that do refer to the cult come not from Mithraic devotees themselves, but rather from outsiders such as early Church fathers, who mentioned Mithraism in order to attack it, and Platonic philosophers, who attempted to find support in Mithraic symbolism for their own philosophical ideas. ... our literary sources for Mithraism are extremely sparse, an abundance of material evidence for the cult exists in the many Mithraic temples and artifacts that archaeologists have found scattered throughout the Roman empire, from England in the north and west to Palestine in the south and east. The temples, called mithraea by scholars, were usually built underground in imitation of caves. These subterranean temples were filled with an extremely elaborate iconography: carved reliefs, statues, and paintings, depicting a variety of enigmatic figures and scenes. This iconography is our primary source of knowledge about Mithraic beliefs, but because we do not have any written accounts of its meaning the ideas that it expresses have proven extraordinarily difficult to decipher.
|
|
|
Post by PhantomWolf on Aug 29, 2007 17:36:42 GMT -4
That is a list of people who were not born until after Jesus is supposed to have died. How can they be witnesses?
So historical writings are only acceptable if the person was there to witness it? Does that mean we can disregard anything Jay says about Apollo?
|
|
Jason
Pluto
May all your hits be crits
Posts: 5,579
|
Post by Jason on Aug 29, 2007 17:49:16 GMT -4
Actually this list quite handily confirms my earlier idea that gentile historians (and one Jew, Josephus) wouldn't bother to mention yet another messiah cult in that crazy Jewish country until it started to become noteworthy outside of Judea - mostly because of its reputation as troublemakers.
|
|
|
Post by PhantomWolf on Aug 29, 2007 18:02:53 GMT -4
Well that's the thing, Jesus' story took place in the backwater of a backwater, it's not like CNN was there to cover it and people were blogging it within hours of every speech. Luke himself specifically states:
He had to go and research it and talk to the eyewitnesses and figure out what happened, just like any other historian did and most still do. Most people outside of the growing church wouldn't have cared until Christianity started to make a splash, at which point they might have been interested in it, but unlike today there wouldn't have been newspapers covering his every word or TV cameras following him around. To the authorities of the time he was just another one in a string of them and to expect that (a) there'd be a lot of writings about him done at the time he was alive, and (b) for such to have survived the past 2,000 years, is really a bit out there. We do have four texts by four different authors that have survived, but because 300 years after writing they were gathered into one place that somehow eliminates them apparently. Of course even if there was a document found that purported to been originally written at the time and spoke of him, certain people still wouldn't accept it for the same reasons they don't accept the Gospel, because there would be no way to prove when it was written or who wrote it. Under that standard we can't even prove that J. K. Rowling really wrote the Harry Potter series, after all we only have her word for it and Luke's isn't enough to prove he wrote Acts and Gospel of Luke, and Paul's isn't enough to prove that he wrote the letters he claimed to and James (brother of Jesus) saying he wrote the letter of James obviously isn't enough for proof either.... I guess we just can't prove anything.
|
|
|
Post by wdmundt on Aug 29, 2007 18:07:17 GMT -4
I’m not the one making an extraordinary claim, here. Others claim that Jesus was the son of God. If, when asked for independent evidence of his existence, the best that anyone can come up with is writings of people who were not yet alive, then I would say there is no evidence. That is, instead, what we call hearsay. In addition to the listed writers arriving late to the scene, the content of their writings is disputed by scholarship.
It is not disputed that believers existed in the time of the listed writers. But to say that what they wrote proves that Jesus existed would also mean that writings about Zeus from hearsay prove that Zeus existed.
If that is your threshold for what constitutes evidence, then your threshold is very low.
That's a false comparison. In this debate, I'm playing the part of the debunker. I am merely asking for evidence. As with HBs, it is on believers to prove that your claim is not just wishful thinking.
|
|
|
Post by PhantomWolf on Aug 29, 2007 18:12:20 GMT -4
In this debate, I'm playing the part of the debunker. I am merely asking for evidence. As with HBs, it is on believers to prove that your claim is not just wishful thinking.
I'd debate that, when given proof you demand tighter and tighter proof, you keep moving the goal posts until you get to the fugitive "photos of the flag through a telescope."
There is no reason for a document with all the characteristics you demand as proof to exist, and you rule out any document that doesn't meet your exactly standards, standards they if applied to any other document on the planet, even one written today, it's fail. That's not acting as a debunker, that's pseudo-scepticism.
|
|
|
Post by Ginnie on Aug 29, 2007 18:14:19 GMT -4
Jesus would not have been mentioned by historians until his life, or legend influenced citizens to such a degree as to disturb the Roman peace. It's pretty amazing that we have what we do have.
Pliny edit - PHILO - was a Jewish contemporary of Jesus, but he was a philosopher, not a historian. Given that the Gospels weren't written until 20-40 years after Jesus' death, the new Christian movement would have been small and relatively unnoticed by Roman historians until Tacitus (ca. 56 – ca. 117) Tacitus writes in his Annals: Consequently, to get rid of the report, Nero fastened the guilt and inflicted the most exquisite tortures on a class hated for their abominations, called Christians by the populace. Christus, from whom the name had its origin, suffered the extreme penalty during the reign of Tiberius at the hands of one of our procurators, Pontius Pilatus, and a most mischievous superstition, thus checked for the moment, again broke out not only in Judaea, the first source of the evil, but even in Rome, where all things hideous and shameful from every part of the world find their centre and become popular. Accordingly, an arrest was first made of all who pleaded guilty; then, upon their information, an immense multitude was convicted, not so much of the crime of firing the city, as of hatred against mankind. Mockery of every sort was added to their deaths. Covered with the skins of beasts, they were torn by dogs and perished, or were nailed to crosses, or were doomed to the flames and burnt, to serve as a nightly illumination, when daylight had expired.
Tacitus is not the only person to mention Nero's persecution of the Christians: Tertullian, Lactantius, Sulpicius Severus, Eusebius and Augustine of Hippo also do, and they don't source Tacitus when doing so. Therefore it may have been a fairly well know incident, but we don't have first hand original accounts of it, just like a lot of historical events. Rome burned in 64 A.D. I know that is after Jesus died, but it just shows that Christianity had spread quite a bit in thirty years, enough to put the event into the known historical record.
EDIT - by the way, Tacitus did not like Nero!
|
|
Jason
Pluto
May all your hits be crits
Posts: 5,579
|
Post by Jason on Aug 29, 2007 18:15:51 GMT -4
What proof are you asking for exactly? If you want proof that Jesus was a historical personage, we've got better than you would expect for nearly any other person living in his time and place. If you want proof that he performed miracles, the only evidence that possibly could still exist would be the accounts that we have in the Bible.
When the only evidence available confirms or does not oppose the Christian conception of who Jesus was and there is no evidence to the contrary, what more do you want?
|
|
|
Post by PhantomWolf on Aug 29, 2007 18:45:37 GMT -4
we've got better than you would expect for nearly any other person living in his time and place.
Well for a commoner who was an itinerant preacher and leader to little more than a handful of rabble, located in the back of beyond and bumped off after just 3 years, I'd say we did pretty good.
|
|
|
Post by Ginnie on Aug 29, 2007 19:23:53 GMT -4
What proof are you asking for exactly? Are you asking me, Jason? I'm not asking for any proof that Jesus existed at all. I'm looking for evidence that the myth-similarities exist in reliable documents and researched and interpreted in a scholarly way. There's tons of it relating to New Testament documents. I've tried to get the thread on track a few times - it's not about Jesus really, it's about the claims by people that there are numerous similarities between ancient myths and Jesus' life. e.g. I've seen a few times on the web and in print that Horus was born of a virgin. And they list The Egyptian Book of the Dead as their source. Yet, I can't find that mentioned in the Book of the Dead, although I haven't read the whole thing. I've been using the 'find text' feature of the browser to search the Book of the Dead online (there are a few parts to it) to find references to different words pertaining to all this and always seen to come up blank.
|
|
|
Post by wdmundt on Aug 29, 2007 19:24:59 GMT -4
Show me where I've moved the goal posts. My statement of purpose here (in response to you, Jason) is that "because (Jesus) can't be proven to have existed, claims that he was definitely the son of God seem dubious."
In response to that, a number of members have claimed that there is much independent evidence that Jesus existed. When pushed to provide that evidence, members have offered up:
Yet the Talmud "evidence" is only hearsay. It was written well after the fact by a non-eyewitness.
Then I was given a list of other non-witnesses who were not born until well after the events of the New Testament:
The writings of the above can only be seen as hearsay, as the writers were not alive during the time at question -- which I stated was no evidence at all. At which point Jason claimed that I had moved the goal post. How's that?
Also, the evidence provided by the above writers is disputed and flimsy at best.
If by contemporary you mean "someone who was born 30+ years after Jesus was supposed to have died," then I guess they were contemporary.
|
|