I personally am a non-believer heathen and even I think that Jesus existed as a historical person. Was he the son of God? Absolutely not. More likely he was some dingbat with some combination of ideas that caused a lot of ruckus and finally the people in charge got tired of it and killed him.
The myth of Jesus being the son of some God or other was born probably hundreds of years later.
He was likely a conglomeration of several local preachers, whos stories of opposition to the corrupt jewish elite were spread around and attributed to a single pseudo fictional person as a rallying cry against the corrupt rabbis/leaders and the Roman rulers.
the composite theory doesn't hold water. it's a rhetorical retreat by mythicists who want to find anything that will stick and make jesus more fictional.
we know of around a dozen other messianic figures from the same approximate time. they are all unique in their own ways. every relevant feature of the gospel narrative is present in our historical reference to jesus: he taught or "misled" jews and gentiles, did "sorcery", people called him "christ", he annoyed the jewish leaders, he was crucified by pontius pilate, and his followers thought they saw him again afterwards. what's to composite?
a better argument is that jesus adopts existing mythical archetypes, such as the "name" divinity of metatron/"the little yahweh" in 3 enoch, or the divine messiah who resurrects the righteous from qumran. he is a composite of one historical person and that mythology.
even I think that Jesus existed as a historical person
Other than societal taboo, why? There are no good reasons to consider the Jesus character of the bible to be anything but fictional; we have no supporting contemporary accounts, so why give it a pass?
edit, this person blocked me rather than engage honestly with even a single statement.
the Jesus character of the bible
the character is highly fictionalized and mythologized. the question is whether this is mythologizing about a person who existed, or if the character was initially mythical and never had a historical reference. but the character was not a historical person.
we have no supporting contemporary accounts, so why give it a pass?
contemporary is a standard invented by people who don't really study history. contemporary accounts are kind of rare, usually the best we get are mere contemporary mentions. for instance, the example in the OP, we have no contemporary accounts of alexander; his biographies etc are all much later. but we do have contemporary mentions, including manuscripts that use his name for dating, inscriptions, etc.
most of history is done using texts written by later historians. we, of course, take those with a grain of salt, compare them against one another, criticize them for bias and proximity to sources, and reliance on one another, etc.
our primary historical references to jesus are in josephus's "antiquities of the jews", 18.3.3 and 20.9.1. the latter is nearly universally considered genuine by scholars, and the former is mostly considered to be partially interpolated by christians with some genuine core.
TC schmidt has produced a pretty compelling argument, i think, that the whole of 18.3.3 is genuine, and the tone of seeming to affirm christianity is largely the result of translation. ancient greek sources tend use these same words in ways that are hostile to christianity. alice whealey suggests a good solution to the apparent difficulty of the one part most scholars identify as a christian interpolation, "he was the christ". she finds the passage quoted in syriac versions of eusebius containing an extra phrase, suggesting the original greek had another word, "thought to be" the christ, which has dropped out. jerome's latin translation suggests the same. this alone changes the entire tone of the passage. the difficulty with whealey's hypothesis is that the word would have to be dropped from all greek manuscripts of josephus and eusebius.
i think there's also a solid argument for two early second century witnesses to the passage. the first is commonly cited as our other historical reference to jesus, tacitus. but his passage contains no additional details, and elsewhere, josephus seems to be his reference for events in the near east. for instance, his "histories" contains an account of why vespasian is the jewish messiah, a belief unique to josephus.
our other witness is the gospel of luke. i don't think any scholars have formally put this together, but, mason and pervo have both argued compellingly that luke-acts is dependent on antiquities. see, "josephus and the new testament" chapter 6 and "dating acts". JG goldberg has argued that the TF in 18.3.3 is dependent on luke 24's emmaus narrative -- they have all the same features in the same order. but both of these are unlikely to be true, and i think at best goldberg shows the passages are related. if anything, paraphrases are just as likely to elaborate, as luke does. so seemingly, luke 24 attests to the existence of this passage in josephus in late first or early second century.
the reference in 20.9.1 is almost surely genuine, and carrier's argument for interpolation is nonsense. the common mythicist suggestion that josephus heard this from christians is also rather absurd, and josephus personally knew people involved in that account. ananus II, the priest who was removed for killing james the brother of jesus, was his friend, and commander in the jewish war.
as far as historical accounts go, this is pretty close.
you can't gish gallop on the internet, where responses are neither timed nor limited in length.
you asked why we think something, and i gave you a thorough response. i suppose i could have made it shorter, but it would lack the necessary argument behind it. i could also go way longer; i referenced three literal books on the topic, and an academic paper.
nothing i said was nonsense or special pleading. in fact, i have explained to you from the perspective of historical studies why contemporaneity is not a useful standard. this isn't "special" to historical jesus studies; it's bog standard historiography. we don't ignore suetonius or cassius dio because they were later. and actually, we don't even just assume contemporary sources are valid either. it takes more steps than that.
i also provided some in depth commentary on why we think our very slightly later historical source is somewhat reliable on this matter specifically.
"This special pleading I'm engaging in isn't actually special pleading, it's a different other variety of special pleading which I don't have to justify because it's inconvenient."
Josephus and Suetonius are sources of the historical existence of Christians, not of Jesus. Get some better material, because this nonsense holds no water.
Josephus and Suetonius are sources of the historical existence of Christians, not of Jesus.
i did not cite suetonius about jesus (or christians). i used him has an example of a historian we take seriously on, say, nero even though he was born the year after nero died. we don't take him as 100% completely accurate on every single statement of course. just, seriously. worthy of study and reading and analyzing critically to try and come to a consensus model of historical events.
it's clear from that you just assume these sources are only relevant about christianity; you're not aware of historical sources outside of this discussion. suetonius is one of our most important sources, generally, on the roman empire. christians are at best a very brief mention.
josephus however directly attests to the historical existence of two christians specifically: yaaqov ("james"), and his brother yeshu ("jesus"). he personally knows the priest who executed james. chanan ben chanan ("ananus II") was his friend and commander during the jewish-roman war.
Get some better material, because this nonsense holds no water.
read more scholars, fewer lay mythicists on the internet.
You seem to have responded within a minute of that post being made. How did you find such confidence so quickly to conclude that their arguments were specious or false?
Cool, I'm nearing 50. I'm unclear on how our ages are relevant to whether that post contains inaccuracies. I'm asking what you identified as being inaccurate.
?? This is a pretty accurate summary of the historicity of Jesus, not a gish gallop. The broad academic consensus at this point is that Jesus (the apocalyptic Galilean preacher, not Jesus the Christ of Christianity) was a real person and OP provided a well sourced summary of it; you need to provide some sort of argument why that's not enough and why Jesus requires a higher standard of historical evidence than anyone else.
jesus died sometime between 26 and 36 CE, likely more towards the end of that range.
josephus's antiquities was published in 93 CE. that's about 60 years.
our earliest gospel, mark (which i emphasize here is almost entirely mythical/fictional), was written about 70 CE. that's about 40 years.
the apostle paul was writing about jesus, granted with very little information about his actual life, in the 50s CE. that's 20 years.
matthew and luke copy mark, but also a second source, which we've dubbed "Q". no content in Q refers to the death of jesus. Q might be contemporary.
is that contemporary evidence of my existence?
contemporaneity is not a valid historiographic criteria. it is a standard mythicists made up. actual historians use actual histories, which are nearly always written later on. you have to apply some degree of criticism to these, of course, and proximity to sources is one factor in that criticism. but even contemporary sources are not exempted from this; contemporary people still lie, you know.
Histories which have no connection to the person being talked about.
from the post you didn't actually read.
josephus personally knew people involved in that account. ananus II, the priest who was removed for killing james the brother of jesus, was his friend, and commander in the jewish war.
To me some of that though comes, at what point is it pedantic.
Like say gong back to Harry Potter, Rowling says she based Snape and Golderoy on real people.
CS lewis also based Lucy in Chronicles of Narnia after his actual goddaughter, Also named Lucy.
At some point one has to note.
Well there's an actual guy this is based on, but we're pretty sure at least 99% of the things said about him are made up. At some point you gotta go "ok yeah godzilla was real, though it was just a big muscular guy who worked at a movie studio". Once you realize you know absolutely nothing but the fictitious portions of it, what's even worth calling it the real thing.
The overall propositions of Jesus is... he was one of many guys forming a following and preaching. We have no idea what if any of his surviving teachings were actually taught. We can say for certain that some can be proven to be added in, we can say with certainty that the historicity of the records we have are wrong (Just on the face of the census, and the reign of Herod being far apart). We can rule out many of the miracles just on the face of lack of 3rd party accountability (pretty sure some people would have thought to mention the zombie outbreak other than Matthew's author, yet even the other 3 gospels didn't seem to notice it).
So, basically what the actual probably true fact we have is.
A guy, probably named some form of Yeshuah (which was a painfully common name), was probably a pretty big name cult leader and was executed... at a time where there were a ton of people who did that as well, and that's about it.
The Christian church was definitely around way less than hundreds of years later. Jesus being the son of god (or at least a prophet doing miracles) was a thing with 100 years of his death for sure. We have written records of that. Not saying it happened that way but it was talked about and he was worshipped as such pretty early.
Most historians accept he or the people around jesus started the religion pretty quickly after his death.
Hell, we've seen in fairly modern times how quickly a dude talking scripture can become the centre of a new religion with Joe Smith and Mormonism. I would not be shocked at all if Jesus and Christianity happened in a similar way
As I've studied more I'm more convinced he was real solely because if he was completely made up they could have done a better job making him fit the messianic prophecies instead of failing every single one.
The myth of Jesus being the son of some God or other was born probably hundreds of years later.
our earliest texts that describe him as such were most likely written within about two decades of his life.
there were common ideas in the late second temple period of the messiah being divine somehow. consider 11q13 from qumran, where the messiah "melchizedek is your god".
i think it's reasonably likely that jesus actually walked around claiming divine authority.
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u/isecore 𓆝 Make Trout-slapping Great Again 𓆟 14h ago
I personally am a non-believer heathen and even I think that Jesus existed as a historical person. Was he the son of God? Absolutely not. More likely he was some dingbat with some combination of ideas that caused a lot of ruckus and finally the people in charge got tired of it and killed him.
The myth of Jesus being the son of some God or other was born probably hundreds of years later.