Solid Non-Biblical Proof That Jesus Existed

by White Dove 74 Replies latest watchtower beliefs

• 

  hillary_step

  Burn,

  Your posts obscure, mine illuminate. ;) I answered your post, line by line.

  How many surviving documents have been transmitted the 1st century? Precious few. We do not have a daily news archive from the era. What we know of a great many historical figures from antiquity would only fill a single page and what has been transmitted to us regarding them contains a great deal of the supernatural and miraculous. Do we jettison these sources? The simple fact of the matter is that it is impossible for us to know a great deal about ancient people, we do not have the data, and that the argument from silence is a poor one in this case.

  I have yet to read such rubbish uttered in the name of historical accuracy. Your arguments are ridiculous and followed to its rightful conclusion would have us doubt the documented existence of historical figures that are written in blood. You have no idea what you are talking about Burn.

  Thousands of documents exist from the C1st. The British Museum itself has hundreds just from the Middle East itself, though numerous documents that ar far earlier than the C1st exist from all over the world.. The least documented era is strangely enough in more recent times, the Dark Ages for example, when the churches virtually banned any non-religious writings.

  You have lost the plot on this one.

  HS
• 

  snowbird

  "...broad and spacious is the road leading to destruction...."

  ... Spoken by a Realist who knows that many will choose destruction over living under His rule.

  Sylvia
• 

  BurnTheShips

  Thousands of documents exist from the C1st.

  "Document" was a poor choice of words on my part. What I should have said is "works"--a great percentage whose subject matter would have nothing to do with Jesus. This narrows an already narrow field of supporting documentation considerably. But I think you knew this before your retort. Or you never even found the plot to begin with.

  I will repeat myself,

  Other than arguments from silence, there is no good evidence that Jesus did not walk the earth, as I and others have demonstrated earlier. The alternative is that a span of two or three decades saw the development a coherent set of doctrines and a body of believers about a person that never existed along with a large number of martyrs among which were those that claimed either first-person ocular evidence or close association to those that did. Apparently some put their money where their mouth was in the first century. The alternative is some of these speculative hypotheses that get floated about attempting to erect a different first cause for the Christian religion. Truly, this is a conspiracy theory worthy of gracing the pages of JWD along with JCanon dumpster rantings, 9-11 "troofs" and reptilian bloodlines. The more parsimonious explanation is that there was a Jesus that existed and acted and taught in a manner that approximates what the gospels attribute to his life and ministry.

  BTS
  
• 

  Shawn10538

  I think White Dove hit on an important point. We are not asking here whether some common carpenter named Jesus existed. There were no doubt many carpenters named Jesus from Nazareth at the time. We are asking if Zeus, Appollos, gnomes, fairies etc. existed, because that is the class of things the Jesus CHRIST would be listed with, magical imaginary gods. He has all the attributes of magical fairy gods: magic powers, raising the dead, levitating.
  
  So, would this be a discussion if the only claim about Jesus was that he was the best carpenter in Palestine at the time, or even an artistic carpenter of the ilk of Michael Angelo or Da Vinci? No. No one really cares if a great artist was real or not because there are great artists who are alive today. It is not supernatural for an artist to exist. It is when we start saying that Jesus walked on water and changed water to wine that we begin to suspect, as with Zeus and Appollos, that Jesus never existed.
  
  We don't rally care if Aeschylus or Shakespeare really existed. It's possible I suppose that they did not exist. But people aren't dying and killing for Shakespeare, they are for Jesus. So if Jesus is real and we are going to have to start killing and dying for him once we establish his existence, then we must make darn sure he really existed before we give away our lives for him. After all, he is asking for no less than our lives, is he not?
• 

  Narkissos

  Back to the same problem of identity I have often unsuccessfully tried to point out.

  How far can the "who?" be distinguished from the "what?"

  Or, what's the real difference between # 1: "there was a historical Jesus, but not quite like the Gospel character" (which is what practically every historian means who assumes that "Jesus was a historical person") and # 2: "the Jesus of the Gospels never existed as a historical character"?

  The so-called "quest for the historical Jesus" always starts from the Gospels. Whom we are looking for is entirely dependent on what we have been told about "him" from the New Testament and other early Christian literature. The first stage of the quest (which is actually the only one) necessarily consists in picking and choosing, in the Gospel portraits of Jesus, what might be historical. Because of the contradictions between those portraits it is simply impossible to add them up to a consistent, let alone historically likely picture. So the historian proceeds by substraction. What seems secondary, impossible or even unlikely to him he leaves out of the very object of his quest.

  So depending on his interpretation of scripture (i.e., exegesis and eisegesis) he will look either for a (real or fake) miracle worker, or an apocalyptical prophet, or a teacher of wisdom, or a mystic, or a political activist -- in any case not a god or semi-god which would lie beyond the scope of history. All the above characters are historically plausible. Many such characters have actually existed. But choosing between them is ultimately arbitrary, and the more you choose to include into the "Identikit picture" the less historically likely it becomes.

  Whatever the case, does the historian find (in independent sources) anything suiting what he has chosen to retain? No! So the quest really ends at stage one. We end up with a historical possibility at best.

  What has been gained through this process? Nothing imo. What has been lost? The actual "Jesus(es)" of the Gospels, which, along with his (their) mythical features, are the only one(s) which matter(s) to both Christian faith and post-Christian culture. Fortunately this remains intact in the texts, from which the historical quest has started and to which it eventually has to come back empty-handed.
• 

  BurnTheShips

  So depending on his interpretation of scripture (i.e., exegesis and eisegesis) he will look either for a (real or fake) miracle worker, or an apocalyptical prophet, or a teacher of wisdom, or a mystic, or a political activist -- in any case not a god or semi-god which would lie beyond the scope of history. All the above characters are historically plausible. Many such characters have actually existed. But choosing between them is ultimately arbitrary, and the more you choose to include into the "Identikit picture" the less historically likely it becomes.........

  ........What has been gained through this process? Nothing imo. What has been lost? The actual "Jesus(es)" of the Gospels, which, along with his (their) mythical features, are the only one(s) which matter(s) to both Christian faith and post-Christian culture. Fortunately this remains intact in the texts, from which the historical quest has started and to which it eventually has to come back empty-handed.

  Which me minds me of your recent thread:

  So I suspect that future thinkers will not indefinitely be content with deconstructing texts and will attempt at "breaking through" to the "real" in some fresh ways, which will have to integrate the present stage of deconstruction but "surpass" (or "relieve," as Derrida translates the Hegelian Aufhebung ) it, too.

  BTS
• 

  Narkissos

  BTS,

  I'm unsure about how you construe the relationship between those quotations on very different topics... but awaiting your explanation, let me make plain that by "real" in that other thread I didn't mean history, which is a "text" of its own kind, although of a different genre, method and status than the Gospels... Now thinking the core of religious experience as some sort of subjective and intersubjective "real," distinct from though related to its own texts, is an entirely different matter.
• 

  Meeting Junkie No More

  Shawn 10538:

  Great post!
• 

  BurnTheShips

  Now thinking the core of religious experience as some sort of subjective and intersubjective "real," distinct from though related to its own texts, is an entirely different matter.

  Something along those lines, although I am sorry I lack the language to elucidate it. I have only a passing familiarity with postmodern thinking. I think textual criticism is a sort of deconstruction that strips away meaning and leaves little else.

  BTS
• 

  hamilcarr

  *waiting for the onslaught on Hamilcarr and Burn*

  I'm in the christian camp today. That feels warm and cozy.