Christians come to this forum to make wild claims. The latest is that there is strong evidence accepted by many authorities of history and among them even atheist historians.
The fact is there is no historical evidence of jesus. I cite this article that explains this in great detail please read.
https://www.atheists.org/activism/resources/did-jesus-exist/
Researchers have discovered that there are no eyewitnesses of jesus. None of the gospels could have been written by any eyewitnesses. Saul/Paul never met jesus and his letters came some 80 years from the time that he claimed to have had "a vision".
The claims that Josephus and Tacitus's accounts are problematic because they could not have been eyewitnesses and there is evidence that what they wrote was rewritten by christian scribes centuries after the fact.
So the claims that a historical jesus validates the claim of a biblical jesus are pure falsehoods.
There is no historical jesus not a shred of evidence to support such a claim that there was a historical jesus.
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If I do this quickly enough, the Christians won't feel the need to respond.
* But what about the trees?
* What about design?
* Where do you get your morality?
* Who started the big bang?
* Jesus's existence is self evident anyway.
* I had a personal experience once and Jesus talked to me.
* You just don't understand the Bible.
* 3 billion people can't all be wrong.
* What if your wrong?
* The apostles suffered and died for Jesus. They would not do that if he wasn't real.
* There were witnesses to the resurrection according to the Gospels, so Jesus was real.
@Cog
You totally forgot about his being born of a virgin.
Damn! Me to hell.
Lol. I have become less and less tolerant of the Jesus freaks over the years
Enough already. I have a little issue still wrapping my head around the size of the universe and coming to grips with inevitable death. And that there is nothing after.. but I don't sit around and fixate, we go in with our lives. Not loosing sleep over nothingness!
Succinctly put mykcob4.
Bravo. I did a lot of research on this very subject in my earlier years and nothing has changed, Not one jot or tittle of valid evidence for the existence of a Yeshua bin Josef, son of Miriam that was an itinerant preacher and was crucified exists. Not one scribbled note or verifiable account,, Anywhere.
Plenty of unverifiable claims by modern day "theologists" with a profit in mind but nothing, nada, zilch that means anything.
I personally haven't read much into the idea of Jesus existing vs not existing. Thanks for linking the article, I will have a look at that when I am finished with my homework.
those are good arguments. I wonder what people on here would have to say about Mike Licona, according to him there is an abundance of evidence by scholars that the bible is true, but I would like him to read this.
The "scholars" referenced by most of these charlatans have "degrees" in theology granted by dodgy "christian colleges" and some are outright purchased. The only qualification required is money and a proven church attendance for a masters and for more money, they even write a paper for you for a PhD,go figure. Like the rest of your video stars, RT, they are all BS.
There is not ONE verifiable piece of evidence for an historical Jesus.
Mr Licona almost tanked his career in theology for mearly keeping open the possibility that the bible is not in fact true.
So I'd guess you are putting words into his mouth.
Instead of just referring to a nutcase apologist who uses humor, why not just put forth the arguments you believe carry weight? Give an argument , don't pass the buck.
@David Killens,
Near death experiences (if proven) in my opinion would be the only proof of Jesus. Other than that, I can't find any evidence that could even come close to convincing
"Near death experiences (if proven) in my opinion would be the only proof of Jesus."
It's hard to know where to start with this kind of muddled reasoning. Firstly wild speculation of what might be real if evidence is forthcoming is intellectual masturbation. Secondly near death experience does not in any way evidence Jesus, why would it? What exactly do you find evidences Jesus historicity when a dying oxygen starved brain forms unreliable memories that nearly always reflect beliefs already held or known by the person involved?
Near death experiences only prove that the individual had a weird dream, at best. And even if one was valid, that still does not prove Jesus. You are relying on third party testimonials as proof to support your belief. In a court of law, hearsay is not admitted because it is unreliable.
I hope you understand that everything you have submitted is just third party testimony, with no way of validating or checking these claims. You have placed your beliefs on extremely shaky ground, and I can not even come close to believing them.
In a previous post I described my near death experience, where I dreamed I was on the Bismark. I was deep in the bowels of the ship,in an ammunition passage, during the battle. It was noisy, people were running everywhere, smoke and dust being thrown up. So here is the question, was I on that ship at that moment? Be honest, I request an answer.
I happen to agree with the stated proposition. The Jesus myth is a sham and nothing more. What I can prove is that there is no good evidence supporting the life of the Christian Version of Jesus as a man or as a God. There is of course much less for the God claim than the man claim. Jesus was a God? I have to say that I am about as sure as I can be (99.999%) your version of Jesus was not a god. I'm at least 90% sure that the Jesus character of the bible is a myth that was constructed from Old Testament passages. There was no real Jesus. If you have any facts that you think can sway my opinion I am open to hearing them. But please do not bring up the old tired worn down and already nullified arguments from Josephus. Tacitus's. Pleny the Younger, or the tired worn out apologetics of failed Theologians. Jesus is myth until proved otherwise.
Yahbutt....
Brian of Nazareth is real!!
Signed
The People's Front of Judea
Bullshit!
Heretic.
The Judean Peoples' Front.
@Cronus and Grinseed
You are both wrong! It was the Starbuck's Store Front of Piccadilly Square! Viva la mocha!!!
Saint Pauls letters go back to the 50 ad so it certainly wasn`t 80 some years like you mentioned. And another thing is that there were eyewitnesses right from the outset Paul had the vision on the road to Damascus read Acts chapter 8 and following to confirm this .The early church was indeed quite early, And not when the authors coined the Gospels that was a little later on..
please cite your sources.
Oh that's right you don;t have any. Just bald nonsensical assertions that have no basis in research or reputable scholarship. You then have the unmitigated gall to refer us to an edited text containing unevidenced, uncorroborrated assertions from a person who stood to gain from his lies? Do you not see the problems AB?
The life and teachings of Jesus were passed on orally by word of mouth .That`s how we came to the conclusion that it was valid. When it became clear that the writings were conveyed by word of mouth. That is nothing unusual about ancient statements here .That was the norm for the day not the exception.
What part of uncorroborated, for self promotion do you not understand? If you cant answer with a decent rebuttal on point why bother typing?
Also you are lacking citations once again and making assertions that are risible at best and imbecilic at worst.
Nope AG you are wrong. We have written history from the Egyptians that predate christianity by thousands of years. So why is christianity only an oral history for so long? Why wait more than 300 years for a written claim about jesus. Certainly the jews record things by writing them down. The early christians were all jews, to begin with. Why wouldn't they write things down? They didn't because the christian accounts are made up. There were no eyewitnesses.
There was no need to write anything down for future generations of believers. If Jesus existed he seemingly preached for people to repent because the Kingdom of God would come to them before they died.
Only later, as the church became an end in itself, roles were created (presbyters, deacons, bishops) and there was a concern of registering the words that circulated in oral tradition.
Okay, let's go with that. How many copies of written history do we have from ancient Egpyt? They need not be original. They just need to be authentic.
Try this JoC from the turn of last century, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_Records_of_Egypt, or you can look at the Archival records of the British Museum, the Museum in Cairo ( ancient Egyptology).The records held in Paris, Washington and New York...enough> Certainly more and better corroborated than anything in the "bible'
Going to answer any of the outstanding questions yet? or just slink around in corners hoping we forget?
"Try this JoC from the turn of last century"
-You kinda missed my question. I asked how many early copies of these histories do have? How many are original? Maybe a few early copies. None original. Also probably written years after the facts. So how many early copies do we have? Compare that to other ancient works as well.
Plato's works whose earliest copy we have dates to 895AD, we have 210 early copies.
Tacitus Annals whose earliest copy we have dates to 850AD, we have 33 early copies.
Pliny the Elder's Natural History dates to the 5th certury, 200 copies.
Thucydides' History dates to the 3rd century BC (was written in 460-400BC) with 96 copies
The Greek New Testament whose earliest copy we have was written in 130AD (a mere 40 years after everything was written) and we have 5,795 early copies.
See the disparity? That's not even fair though. I mentioned only the Greek NT. We have 2000 Armenian, 1000 Coptic, 6 Gothic, 600 Ethiopian, 10,000 Latin, 350 Syriac, 43 Georgian, and 4,000 Slavic copies of the New Testament.
So, if you're willing to throw away all the New Testament books, the only intellectually honest thing to do would be to throw away everything else we know about the ancient world from works like Annals, Histories, Antiquities, etc.
Quantity of text is not evidence of a truth. Provenance is required for all historical documents, corroboration is required for statements in historical documents. A trail of events, independently reported is required to validate claims.
The difference is JoC is that many of the histories and early annals are corroborated in other early books, tablets and archeology. Otherwise they are nowadays rightly discarded as myth or "unproven" until evidence is produced to corroborate them.
I suggest you do archaeology 101 for a good primer into scientific method when it comes to history.
There were only two copies of Tacitus made in the 11th century the others are later copies. But many events in Tacitus have been corroborated by other contemporaneous writers and confirmed by archaeology.
If you have provenance and independent corroboration then we can proceed to the claims. Same procedure for all early texts/tablets/inscriptions, from Sumer onward.
The "gospels" are entirely without provenance, verifiable authorship or contemporary corroboration. I would love to have one verifiable corroborative account, then I would reconsider, but there are none so far.
On the basis of researched and corroborated evidence Tacitus, Philo, Josephus, Catullus, Caesar, Voyages of Erik the Red, the Babylonian tablets, the Sumerian tablets and the roman records stay.
The "gospel texts" go in the "probably untrue" "Unverified" basket.Like the legends of King Arthur and those of Valhalla.
To re-iterate, quantity is not indicative of quality.
Actually, just took at a look at your Records of ancient Egypt. First of all, it is amazing. Crazy the things we can find out from the ancient world.
Chapter 1 of the book states his sources. They're usually from inscriptions on monuments found from during the time (meaning, we have one copy). And sometimes when he mentions sources for another topic, he'll mention two copies that have today. Several times he'll mention he has "few" copies referencing certain events but that's it.
I'm not saying in any way we should throw these histories away but you have to admit, that if we have only one source, and the few copies we have might have scribal errors, that's not quite as reliable as the other texts you're so willing to throw out the window because they mention "Jesus" or "Christus"
Nobody is saying "throw them out". Tacitus' mention of Christus (The anointed one) is Tacitus reporting what the converted Jews (Christians) believe, He is not reporting an historical event. Clear?
The paragraph in Josephus that refers to "jesus" was a very clumsy later insertion as agreed even amongst rabid christian scholars.
As I said, there is not evidence enough to say the "gospels" are original, contemporary or describe actual events. They MUST be disregarded. Do you get it yet?
I am glad you have read some modern historical texts with attributions, the reasons for their conclusions, corroborrating archeology...its makes a difference from someone half educated saying "I believe so it must be true" . I can recommend the University of Tel Aviv (archeology) some brilliant papers and journals that will give any bible scholar pause for thought.
Nobody is saying "throw them out". Tacitus' mention of Christus (The anointed one) is Tacitus reporting what the converted Jews (Christians) believe, He is not reporting an historical event. Clear?
- That's clear. But he mentions Christus. Why would Tacitus mention a non-existent person?
"The paragraph in Josephus that refers to "jesus" was a very clumsy later insertion as agreed even amongst rabid christian scholars."
- That's also clear. There were parts which are regarded as later insertions. Remove those parts and you still have Josephus mentioning Jesus as a real person. He even references Jesus when talking about his brother, James.
"As I said, there is not evidence enough to say the "gospels" are original, contemporary or describe actual events. They MUST be disregarded. Do you get it yet?"
- What are they supposed to be recording then? These scripts exist. They must exist for some reason. Most of the early Christians died proclaiming these were true. No one would willingly die for something they believe is false. I'm not saying it's true as well. I'm saying, if this was all fiction, it would've been clear from the first century that it was all made up. These gospel writers aren't claiming to write fiction. They're claiming to write history.
I am glad you have read some modern historical texts with attributions, the reasons for their conclusions, corroborrating archeology...its makes a difference from someone half educated saying "I believe so it must be true" . I can recommend the University of Tel Aviv (archeology) some brilliant papers and journals that will give any bible scholar pause for thought.
- I've always done research. I just find it taxing sometimes to mention each and every single one every single time. And just as you're doing now, throwing it out the window.
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