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this post was submitted on 23 Jun 2024
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No Stupid Questions
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I don't believe that, and since it's impossible to show evidence something doesn't exist, the people claiming evidence Jesus existed is gonna have to do some linking...
You mean evidence?
Evidence isn't the standard for things existing?
What exactly is the standard in your mind for whether a historical figure existed?
Hard evidence has never been the standard for proof that a historical figure existed. Corroborating records are. It's great if you can find some hard evidence, but if that was the standard then most people in history wouldn't have any historical proof of their existence. And even when there is a corpse, we still rely on burial records to be certain that the corpse is who we think it is. Or if there are letters, we can't confirm they were written by the same person we think they were.
Like a third of the bible as well as several contemporary documents all point to the existence of a guy named something like Joshua (which we now translate as Jesus) who traveled around Palestine preaching and was crucified in around 33AD. There are plenty of historical figures who we mostly agree existed despite having approximately the same amount of proof as for Jesus.
IIRC, there's really only a single mention of a possible link to someone of this name that was crucified at the supposed time, and that single mention happened at least 50 (maybe 100?) years later, and there's evidence that this passage was added even later.
So I didn't think it's true that there are "several contemporary documents" like you claimed...
And there's not enough to prove that Jesus Christ existed...
There's a Jesus that got crucified, but no mention about him being able to perform miracles
I don't think any of it was written till decades after he supposedly died tho...
Like, there's lots of information about Bilbo Baggins in Lotr, that doesn't mean it was written in the third age of Middle Earth homie.
Name one and I'll disporve it.
You just 100% conceded. /thread
There was a Paul that lived in Midwest America
Is that proof he had a big blue ox?
Like, you know the Romans were pretty big fans of crucifying people for pretty much anything?
Like, we have that elusive physical evidence that 6,000 of Sparticus' followers were crucified...
There's a pretty good chance at least one of those guys was named Jesus too mate, it was a pretty common name
I do not understand.
Go on then. Show us the evidence.
Not all the texts use that name. Some say Christus or Chrestus, ha-Notzri, Yeshu, ben Stada or ben Pandera.
That is clear.
You want me to physically show you? Like roll up to your house with it?
Can't I just give you a link that provides the info about it?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crucifixion#Ancient_Rome
And you definitely didn't understand that last bit you quoted...
You haven't understood all of this.
I get it man, you have "faith" but that's not evidence.
It doesn't mean anything
You don't
I don't.
The evidence we're talking about is the textual references in Pliny etc.
Say we have a textual reference like this: "In the year of the consulship of Caius Vipstanus and Caius Fonteius, Nero deferred no more a long meditated crime. Length of power had matured his daring, and his passion for Poppaea daily grew more ardent.".... would you say that a person called Caius Vipstanus existed from that evidence?
I think we are in agreement on the major points:
"There’s a Jesus that got crucified, but no mention about him being able to perform miracles"
We know this from somewhat later annals. The texts are closer in the timeline to the historical figure than in the case of Diarmait mac Cerbaill, and are more numerous.
We share a general contempt for Christians and Christianity.
You just made up #2 and apparently don't know what contemporary means...
But I don't think explaining is going to help.
What are you driving at bringing up the semantics of 'contemporary'??
The only time that word was used was when you said (incorrectly), "That is contemporary literary evidence of his existence." – the annals are centuries after the 6th-century reign of Diarmait at Tara. We don't have any 6th-century manuscripts. The situation in the Roman Empire is quite a bit better, lots of texts.
Would you say that a person called Caius Vipstanus existed because Tacitus mentioned him in his annals a few decades later? Isn't that valid inference from the text?
Obviously miracles aren't real. I wasn't claiming otherwise. We're talking about whether or not the person Jesus existed, not if magic is real.
It sounds like we agree
Okay but it was written by people who claim they were there and met him personally.
To borrow your asinine LOTR analogy, it is more like you are claiming Thorinn Oakenshield never existed simply because Bilbo only wrote "There and Back Again" after he got home from memory.
Not really, and definitely not the 1/3 you were claiming...
Like, where are you getting any of this?
It sounds like what they teach at one of those "bible colleges"
A bunch of the books in the new testament are letters written by Jesus's followers. We can't prove whether they really are that, but they all agree that a dude named Jesus existed. If a bunch of people all wrote about a guy they knew, and most of the details match, that guy probably was real.
Yeah I'm not arguing with that. You're just nitpicking semantics because you have lost this argument. Literally the very next sentence after the one you quoted I qualified that by saying it's debatable.
What?
So you're arguing that "anything is possible" and that means you "won" if someone can't prove something isn't real?
You can't prove I'm not 6 year old baby Jesus on a time traveling Blackberry...
But anyone that believes that doesn't have a rationally sound mind.
I don't have a horse in this race, but man, let it drop. The person who's fighting for ridiculous improbabilities here is you. Nobody you're arguing with in this thread is even making a claim that Magic Jesus existed. Just that the man named Jesus who is talked about by the early Christians likely existed (which is scholarly consensus, not even a niche claim). They're specifically not claiming that the fantastical claims made by the early Christians about that man are true.
You replied to a day old comment telling me to drop it...
shrug it's a post currently showing up in "all".
Go ahead and get another last word in if you like - you're arguing with your own ghosts, mostly. Have a good night.
The conceit of the LOTR appendices is that Lord of the Rings, as published in English, is really just the Red Book that Bilbo writes at the end. Dr. Tolkien merely found the manuscript somewhere and has graciously translated it from Third Age common language into English for the benefit of us modern people.
Says who?
Diarmait mac Cerbaill
Yes.
His life was written about while it happened in the Irish Annals...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irish_annals
That is contemporary literary evidence of his existence.
Not just some dude named Diarmait existed in Ireland at some point.
Right. I think we're in agreement. There was a historical Diarmait. There was a historical Jesus. We know this from textual sources dated a little later than the historical figures.
We have no Irish texts as old as Diarmait's reign. CELT date the Orgguin trí mac Diarmata Mic Cerbaill "Created: Possibly in the Old Irish period. Date range: 700–900?" So we rely on things written 100+ years after the historical figure. And that's referring to when it was originally written; it's know from later transcriptions; the oldest physical Irish manuscript we have (Lebor na hUidre) is around 1100. So how do we know there was a historical Diarmait?
In the case of Yeshu the Nazarene, it's similar, though some texts are a little nearer his historical period than in Diarmait's case.
Quality of the evidence matters. I'm personally not a historical expert on the topic and in such situations, I'm inclined to believe whatever the people who are experts say - and as far as I gather, most experts are in the "Jesus was a real historical person"-camp.
Of course not. There are millions of examples of false claims for which there is more than zero evidence. e.g. I can claim I know which stocks will rise tomorrow, and point to various data of times I've been right. You can't correctly say "There is zero evidence Frightful Hobgoblin is prescient about stock movements".
There often exists evidence of two mutually incompatible propositions. This is basics.
If you want to research the historicity of Jesus it's easily done. If you want to argue on the internet..... you know what they say about that.
I will say that while evidence existing isn't definitive proof, the total lack of evidence would be convincing (in the other direction). That said, evidence does exist in this case, so
Edit: clarity
That's the opposite of how it should work
Well, no. Perhaps I've been misunderstood.
If no evidence whatsoever for a claim exists, then there is no reason to favor that claim. This is an effectively rare situation, and basically only applies to things someone has made up whole cloth just now.
Likewise, the existence of some evidence is not necessarily definitive "proof" of a claim, merely enough of a reason to consider it further (such as considering alternative explanations or how well said evidence matches what we might expect)
In this case, there is evidence that somebody named Jesus may have existed, and however ideal that evidence may or may not be, it is about the amount of evidence we would expect to find of any given figure from his time.
Ah, yeah I must've misunderstood. Cheers