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guy wrote:His statement:It is now generally considered a historical fact that Jesus existed (and has been for what? two centuries after a brief 'Jesus Myth' phase in the 18th century?)

guy wrote:



"Excuse me, I was mistaken with regard to the 'Jesus Myth' phase in 18th century. It belongs, seriously, to the 19th century, although there were a few French writers who classed Jesus and Christianity as myth in the 18th. According to the late NT scholar R. E. Brown[1] German historian B. Bauer was the first serious scholar to propose the idea that Jesus never existed in Christ and the Caesars (1877). Nevertheless, 60 years ago in the mid-20th century H. E. Fosdick could assert:

Doubt concerning the historicity of Jesus was a passing vogue of the nineteenth century; no serious scholarship now upholds it.
--The Man From Nazareth, Harper & Brothers, 1949, p. 22



Similarly, the Encyclopedia Britannica, after dicussing the various non-Christian sources (Tacitus, Suetonius, Pliny the Younger, Josephus, and the Talmud) for Jesus' existence, states:

These independent accounts prove that in ancient times even the opponents of Christianity never doubted the historicity of Jesus, which was disputed for the first time on inadequate grounds at the end of the 18th, during the 19th, and at the beginning of the 20th centuries.
--Ency. Brit. Volume 22, 1990, p. 360.



NT scholar Bart Ehrman discusses these same sources and suggests that Josephus alone is evidence enough that Jesus existed[2]. There is no real debate about this in contemporary scholarship and hasn't been for a long while. Scholars may debate what Jesus taught or what he did, or over various reconstructions of his life and message[3], but to say he never existed is out of the question. M. A. Powell expresses this quite forcefully:

Anyone who says that today--in the academic world at least--gets grouped with the skinheads who say there was no Holocaust and the scientific holdouts who want to believe the world is flat.
--Jesus As a Figure in History: How Modern Historians View the Man from Galilee, Westminister John Knox Press, 1998, p. 168.










[1] An Introduction to the New Testament, Doubleday, 1997, p. 818
[2] Jesus: Apocalyptic Prophet of the New Millenium, Oxford University Press, 1999, p. 61: 'From this reference we can learn that there was indeed a man named Jesus.'
[3] J. D. Crossan, for example, lists a few of the positions of modern scholarship in The Historical Jesus: The Life of a Mediterranean Jewish Peasant, HarperCollins, 1991, pp. xxvii-xxviii: 'There is Jesus as a political revolutionary by S. G. F. Brandon (1967), as a magician by Morton Smith (1978), as a Galilean charismatic by Geza Vermes (1981, 1984), as a Galilean rabbi by Bruce Chilton (1984), as a Hillelite or proto-Pharisee by Harvey Falk (1985), as an Essene by Harvery Falk (1985), and as an eschatological prophet by E. P. Sanders (1985).'
His own position is that Jesus was something like an itinerant Cynic preacher."

Darth Wong wrote:Quote mining is not research. None of those are contemporary sources, and one of the few contemporary sources who claimed to see Jesus (IIRC Josephus) also claimed that he saw Augustus ascend to Heaven upon his death (again, IIRC).

You'll have to look into that, but the point is that there are precious few contemporary sources who would attest to Jesus' existence or significance. If he existed, he did not make the big splash that his followers described in the NT, otherwise there should be more contemporary documentation of his life.

Darth Wong wrote:As I said, I wouldn't want anyone to use my vague recollection as a source, and I never advertised it as such. The point I was trying to make was that Jesus the Christian Saviour is not necessarily validated unless you can show that enough of the stories about him are based on factual events to say that he was a real person, rather than a mythic figure based loosely on a real person.

Thanas wrote:

Darth Wong wrote:As I said, I wouldn't want anyone to use my vague recollection as a source, and I never advertised it as such. The point I was trying to make was that Jesus the Christian Saviour is not necessarily validated unless you can show that enough of the stories about him are based on factual events to say that he was a real person, rather than a mythic figure based loosely on a real person.

Ah, I get that. But the question of the OP was not whether he existed in the biblical sense (aka Jesus the saviour), but whether there was a real person once called Jesus of Nazareth. And that is pretty much a given nowadays.

Akkleptos wrote:Considering that most of the written testimony that we've got from ancient times in Europe was -during most of the Middle Ages- almost exclusively in the power of the Church, in monasteries where they could copy AND edit them to fit Christian doctrine where they saw fit; and that few or no originals from that era have survived intact until today, it is highly doubtful that any reference to Jesus in any historical source we could find today could be regarded as faithful, since the copyst monks had quite a strong motivation to... er... retcon the stuff that didn't agree with the views of the Holy Church.

Thanas wrote:You will of course show that every source was influenced in such a way? Because I only know of one, and then of course in that one (Flavius Josephus) most only consider part of it faked. Meanwhile, Tacitus nearly drips with derison about the christians.

The New Schaff-Herzog Encyclopedia of Religious Knowledge, Vol. VI wrote:Thus "interpolation" seems to imply, first, a fixed text and, secondly, a conscious or deliberate purpose to alter or twist the meaning and intention of a text, the interpolator's aim being to slip his meaning under cover of a mind having greater authority or higher standing than his own, so securing for his own opinion or judgment a market-value above its intrinsic worth. For example, a Christian student of the second century inserted in the text of Josephus (Ant. XVIII., iii. 3) the well-known passage regarding Jesus. His object was to make Josephus a witness to Christ. This is an interpolation in the rigorous sense.

www.earlychristianwritings.com wrote:Werner Georg Kummel would like to view the letter to be a whole composed by the apostle Paul on one occasion (Introduction to the New Testament, pp. 287-293).

<snip, listing of opposing opinions and inconsistencies>

Kummel allows that 6:14-7:1 is interpolated yet still maintains that it is Pauline. However, Joseph Fitzmyer has argued that 6:14-7:1 is an interpolation from a document at Qumran in an essay reproduced in The Semitic Background of the New Testament, pp. 205-217. There are three reasons to posit that the passage is interpolated: "the paragraph radically interrupts the chain of thought between 6:13 and 7:2," the passage is "a unit intelligible in itself," and "six of the key-words in the passage are not found elsewhere in the New Testament." Fitzmyer argues that references to triple dualism, the opposition to idols, the temple of God, separation from all impurity, and the concatenation of Old Testament texts point to a Qumranic origin for the interpolated fragment.

4:2
This verse is too small to affect the page pattern, but it is clearly a late interpolation.
The Greek word for "although" (καιτοιγε) occurs only here in the New Testament, which is unusual for a document displaying such a limited vocabulary. Also the verse states that Jesus did not baptize, contradicting 3:22. Perhaps the interpolator was trying to portray Jesus as superior to John the Baptist here.

Akkleptos wrote:Also, about the classics, it's interesting how both Tacitus and Suetonius mention Christians... only once. Regarding what is arguably the same incident (the burning of Rome, Nero). And both never mention them again.

There's a nice list, complete with excerpts, here.

Also, there's this issue of an apparently over-eager monk who in the 11th century changed -in a rather clumsy way- the Greek "good guys" for "Christians", i.e. the Chrestianos issue @ textexcavation.com (PDF).

SancheztheWhaler wrote:Given that Jesus is the Hellenized version of Hebrew Joshua/Yeshua, at what point did people start referring to him as Jesus rather than Joshua, and why?

Thanas wrote:

Akkleptos wrote:Also, about the classics, it's interesting how both Tacitus and Suetonius mention Christians... only once. Regarding what is arguably the same incident (the burning of Rome, Nero). And both never mention them again.

Meh. We have little more references when dealing with germanic tribes.

TithonusSyndrome wrote:

Thanas wrote:

Akkleptos wrote:Also, about the classics, it's interesting how both Tacitus and Suetonius mention Christians... only once. Regarding what is arguably the same incident (the burning of Rome, Nero). And both never mention them again.

Meh. We have little more references when dealing with germanic tribes.

This does little to assuage any concerns I may have about the historical certainty of Jesus' existence... it simply makes me wonder if historians have low requirements if they'll accept the existence of certain Germanic tribes and Jesus based on equally slim pickings.

Thanas wrote:

TithonusSyndrome wrote:This does little to assuage any concerns I may have about the historical certainty of Jesus' existence... it simply makes me wonder if historians have low requirements if they'll accept the existence of certain Germanic tribes and Jesus based on equally slim pickings.

I am curious - what requirements do you think historians should have?

TithonusSyndrome wrote:Of course I'm not a professional and my opinion alone isn't enough to decide historical issues, I was prepared to concede that from the start. However, saying "we simply don't know" doesn't seem distinguishable in practice from "there's nothing convincing enough to say this happened and so our default assumption must be that it did not, for the time being." If there's some distinction I'm missing then I'm ready to stand corrected, but are two fleeting references in a sea of little embellishments built up over time really enough to overcome that default position and meet the burden of proof?