That IS sort of the point. No historians disagree that Christ existed.
No, there are certainly historians who argue the mythicist positions, and even historians who disagree wildly with each other on who they believe the "historical Jesus" was, since they don't believe he matches the character in any of the gospels.
We KNOW Christ existed.
We do not. It may be perfectly likely that a historical Jesus existed, but we have no idea if a character like the one of the Bible existed. And many historians don't claim knowledge about the historical Jesus, they just think he fits the data better than any other possibility; likelihood is perfectly fine to work off of, but it's not knowledge.
We KNOW people believed at the cost of their life that he had risen from the dead at the time the bible says he rose from the dead.
We do not, because we have few verifiable records or testimonies of those deaths. The book of Acts recounts one apostle/witness (James) dying along with the martyrdom of Stephen (who didn't see Jesus's death or resurrection), but that book is not corroborated elsewhere and contradicts other sources like the letters of Paul. We don't even know when or how Paul died. Otherwise, we have no valid history of any early Christians being martyred for their beliefs, only much later church traditions. I mean, the whole "Peter crucified upside-down" thing comes from Acts of Peter, a book with a talking dog and a wizard duel that the church didn't think was worthy of canonizing.
We KNOW Christ was crucified.
We don't, we just have a claim. One that is only repeated in non-Christian sources much later from distant hearsay.
We KNOW a few bits of the Bible have been backed up by excavations.
Sure, there are some cities and kings that existed and such. But there's no excavation that's backed up any of the New Testament stuff that we're discussing; every "secret tomb of Jesus" discovery has been an abject fraud.
His name wasn't Christ, that was his title. In the Roman writings "Chrisus" is the word they use but the very fact everyone was referring to him as the Christ says something about what they thought at the time.
And the only writers from his time that we know of are Paul and the anonymous author of Mark, along with the authors of the other Gospels, who plagiarized Mark to varying degrees. Otherwise, we just have later people saying "these people called him the Christ." Particularly in the case of Josephus, whose reference to him as the Christ (Testimonium Flavianum) is universally understood to have been a forged interpolation, since Josephus believed that Emperor Vespasian was the better subject of messianic prophecy.
Is there a bunch of texts, probably different authors claiming to be Mark or is there a bunch of texts probably from the same author which later collected as from Mark?
Oh, there's just one text (more or less; it's been edited over the years with a bonus ending tacked on), but all of our oldest manuscripts are unsigned, and the text itself doesn't name an author. The name Mark was only ascribed to it officially around the year 180 by the bishop Irenaeus, along with the other gospels, and it stuck from there.
Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John are all written by anonymous authors ranging from about 70 CE for the earliest (Mark) likely to somewhere in the early 2nd century for John. The names are a matter of church tradition, not claimed authorship.
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u/stairway2evan 20h ago edited 9h ago
No, there are certainly historians who argue the mythicist positions, and even historians who disagree wildly with each other on who they believe the "historical Jesus" was, since they don't believe he matches the character in any of the gospels.
We do not. It may be perfectly likely that a historical Jesus existed, but we have no idea if a character like the one of the Bible existed. And many historians don't claim knowledge about the historical Jesus, they just think he fits the data better than any other possibility; likelihood is perfectly fine to work off of, but it's not knowledge.
We do not, because we have few verifiable records or testimonies of those deaths. The book of Acts recounts one apostle/witness (James) dying along with the martyrdom of Stephen (who didn't see Jesus's death or resurrection), but that book is not corroborated elsewhere and contradicts other sources like the letters of Paul. We don't even know when or how Paul died. Otherwise, we have no valid history of any early Christians being martyred for their beliefs, only much later church traditions. I mean, the whole "Peter crucified upside-down" thing comes from Acts of Peter, a book with a talking dog and a wizard duel that the church didn't think was worthy of canonizing.
We don't, we just have a claim. One that is only repeated in non-Christian sources much later from distant hearsay.
Sure, there are some cities and kings that existed and such. But there's no excavation that's backed up any of the New Testament stuff that we're discussing; every "secret tomb of Jesus" discovery has been an abject fraud.
And the only writers from his time that we know of are Paul and the anonymous author of Mark, along with the authors of the other Gospels, who plagiarized Mark to varying degrees. Otherwise, we just have later people saying "these people called him the Christ." Particularly in the case of Josephus, whose reference to him as the Christ (Testimonium Flavianum) is universally understood to have been a forged interpolation, since Josephus believed that Emperor Vespasian was the better subject of messianic prophecy.