Isn't it more likely that it had to do those who questioned Jesus as God? Why do you presume that it is aimed at the Manchicheans?

The more I look at this question, the more it seems that we have more reason than not to presume that Jesus did exist as a historical person.

Interesting article here written in 1912 by a scholar who denied the supernatural elements in the Gospels, but argued that there was a person named Jesus. It's a pretty long article.

An excerpt:



http://evans-experientialism.freewebspa ... case01.htm

It never occurs to me to doubt that Jesus was a real person. On the face of it, it just seems strange that these books about him, replete with inconvenient facts, would have been written about a ficticious person. I know that Frank has told us how skimpy or nonexistent the historical evidence is, but I don't think we'd necessarily expect to see Jesus mentioned by historians. Start with the fact that preaching as he did, as a fairly nationalistic Jew preparing people for the endtimes, he was probably not unusual. He also apparently didn't attract a great following during his lifetime. He then may not have been all that noteworthy. It was the surprising turn of events after he died that began to make him famous.

I'm leaning in the opposite direction. I had always assumed at the core of the stories there was a real figure.



These usual 'ways' in which the force of the arguments are avoided seem more practical to me, against the author's naysaying. In the first case, there is no reason for the Christian tradition to be shown to be fictitious. All that is being questioned is whether or not Seutonius repeated something he'd heard elsewhere. You don't need to show that his source was false to say that it was something he'd heard elsewhere, rather than experienced firsthand.

Jesus: Fact or Fiction?

David Kent
The Christian points in this article are all taken from Josh McDowell's compilation Evidence that Demands a Verdict (San Bernardino: Campus Crusade for Christ, 1972)

Christian point Rebuttal

Ch. 5, 'Jesus--A Man of History', pp. 84-89:

1) Thallus, writing about 52 CE, gives the 'naturalistic explanation' of a non-believer who witnessed the darkness accompanying Christ's crucifixion. 1) Thallus was a Samaritan freedman of the Emperor Tiberius who wrote a history of Greece and Asia, who mentions an eclipse of the sun. In 221 CE, a Christian writer, Sextus Julius Africanus notes that "Thallus, in the third book of his histories, explains away this darkness as an eclipse of the sun." Thallus does not refer to a Jesus, only to an eclipse, which a Christian used to bolster the Christian story.
2) Mara Bar-Serapion, writing later than 73 CE to his son, says, "What advantage did the Jews gain from executing their wise king?... He lived on in the teaching which he had given." 2) This Syrian was not an eyewitness of Jesus and does not mention a resurrection. He is retelling a story he has heard.

Verdict on the first century: "Apart from Thallus, no certain reference is made to Christianity in any extant non-Christian Gentile writing of the first century." (F. F. Bruce, Rylands Professor of Biblical Criticism and Exegesis in the University of Manchester, in The New Testament Documents: Are They Reliable?, fifth ed. (Ann Arbor: Eerdmans, 1960), p. 114)

3) Josephus ben Matthias ("Josephus"), writing in 93 CE, says, "Now there was about this time Jesus, a wise man, if it be lawful to call him a man.... He was the Christ, and when Pilate condemned him to the cross...he appeared to them alive again the third day." 3) Josephus never wrote it. Christian defenders as early as Clement of Alexandria (150-215 CE) never cited it. Origen (185-254), who dealt extensively with Josephus, wrote that Josephus did not believe Jesus to be the messiah nor proclaim him as such. Eusebius, in 324 CE, first mentions this passage (twice), and is likely the forger of it.
4) Gaius Plinius Caecilius Secundus ("Pliny the Younger"), wrote in 112 CE that Christians sang "a hymn to Christ as to a god." 4) Again, this is derivative, not an eyewitness account of Jesus.
5) Cornelius Tacitus, wrote in 120 CE, "Nero punished...a class of men, loathed for their vices, whom the crowd styled Christians. Christus, the founder of the name, had undergone the death penalty in the reign of Tiberius, by sentence of the procurator Pontius Pilatus." 5) Tacitus is repeating the story Christians had told him, not what he had found in official archives, since: 1) the title procurator was current only from the second half of the first century (Pilate's title was prefect); 2) Christus ("Messiah") would not have appeared as a proper name in the archives.
6) Gaius Suetonius Tranquillus, writes, "As the Jews were making constant disturbances at the instigation of Chrestus, he [Claudius] expelled them from Rome." (circa 120 CE) 6) Again, derivative, useless for evidence that Jesus was an historical person.
7) Lucian, writing about 175 CE, refers to "the man who was crucified in Palestine because he introduced this new cult into the world." 7) No eyewitness; retelling a story.
and 9) Tertullian and Justin Martyr and 9) Christian apologists, who claim material relating to Jesus would be found in the archives of Tiberius and Pontius Pilate. It wasn't.
10) Encyclopaedia Britannica: "uses 20,000 words in describing this person, Jesus." 10) The Encyclopaedia Britannica also contains articles on Hercules and Odysseus. This hardly makes them historical.


Verdict on the second through twentieth centuries: These writers, who lived at the time that Jesus supposedly lived, left a library of Jewish and Pagan literature, in which not one mention of Jesus or of his apostles or his disciples appears: Arrian, Plutarch, Apollonius, Hermogones, Appian, Damis, Aulus Gellius, Appion of Alexandria, Philo Judaeus, Petronius, Juvenal, Quintilian, Silius Italicus, Phlegon, Pausanias, Dio Chrysostom, Favorinus, Seneca, Dion Pruseus, Martial, Lucanus, Statius, Phaedrus, Florus Lucius, Columella, Lysias, Theon of Myrna, Pliny the Elder, Paterculus, Persius, Justus of Tiberius, Epictetus, Ptolemy, Valerius Maximus, Quintius Curtius, Valerius Flaccus, and Pomponius Mela. McDowell cites Otto Betz, author of What Do We Know About Jesus? (1968) as concluding that "no serious scholar has ventured to postulate the non-historicity of Jesus" (p. 9). Betz is either disingenuous or unaware of the work of Charles F. Dupuis, Robert Taylor, David F. Strauss, Kersey Graves, John M. Robertson, Thomas Whittaker, Robert Arthur Drews, Peter C. A. Jensen, William B. Smith, L. Gordon Rylands, P. L. Couchoud, and John E. Remsburg.

The ten sources cited are McDowell's only evidences outside the gospels for the existence of Jesus as an historical person. Except one, and here he planted the seeds of his own destruction, because it is the key to how the cult of Christianity was constructed:

11) The Jewish Talmuds, in which Jesus is referred to as "Ben Pandera". 11) Second-century Rome was the golden age of professional story-telling. Pliny the Younger says street-corner story-tellers would announce, "Give me a copper coin and I'll tell you a golden story." Their stories were of first century wonder workers, whose fantastic miracles delighted hearers. Favorites were the Transformations of Apuleius, Life of Apollonius Tyana by Flavius Philostratus, and Book of the Generation of Jesus (in Hebrew the "Sepher Toldoth Jeshu"). It was the latter from which the idea and name of Jesus came.
In 178 CE the atheist Celsus wrote the first attack on the Christian cult. In Alethes Logos, or True Word, Celsus refers to this story that Jesus was born of a country-woman, and that when she was pregnant she was turned out of doors by the carpenter to whom she had been betrothed, as having been guilty of adultery, and that she bore a child to a certain Roman soldier named Panthera who lived at Bethlehem; that Jesus, having served for hire in Egypt, and then coming to the knowledge of certain miraculous powers, returned to his own country, and by means of those powers proclaimed himself to be god. Every copy of the True Word was destroyed by zealous Christians, and today it is known only by Origen's attack on it, in which he had to quote from it. The story Celsus quoted from, the "Sepher Toldoth Jeshu", was mentioned in the Jewish talmud, and has survived. It refers to Janneus, the Sadducee king of Judea, who reigned from 106 to 79 BCE; and to Simeon ben Shetach, who lived in 90 BCE. The birth of the fictitious Jesus is placed at this time, and the rest of the book is filled with his wonder-working and miracles.


Creation of Christianity: At the same time this popular street story of Jesus, son of Joseph Pandira or Panthera, was spreading in Rome in the first century BCE, the cult of Mithra was introduced into the Roman empire and attracted the military and mercantile classes. This cultural influx of a Persian religion meshed with ancient Hebrew traditions to form what became the cult of Christianity. Anyone who doubts that the popular story of the Jewish Jesus was written into the worship of Mithra to become Christianity should look at Mithraic worship point by point. (See the link above for a summary by David of that religion).

Jesus acquired a biography in the so-called gospels just as Paul Bunyan would if four Americans separately tried to write down all of his history and wonder-working activities, in order to consolidate that aspect of American culture.

Final verdict: There is no historical evidence whatever that the Jesus of Christianity was an historical person.

Thanks Tat, this is sound analysis. The question of ‘twenty Joshuas’ versus ‘one Jesus’ suggests that messianic dreams were widespread in Palestine at the time of Christ. I think you are right that the Jesus of the Bible is a composite, but the spiritual drive of the story is another matter.

Think of it like a reality TV competition where the criterion is who is the real messiah. All the Joshuas slug it out, each with their own angle – the donkey trip from Zechariah, the suffering servant from Isaiah, the copy of Isaac willing to give his life for the faith of Abraham. As well, there is syncretic vision, such as the invocation of the Egyptian Gods Osiris, Isis and Nephthys in the story of Lazarus, Mary and Martha in the gospel of John.

Behind all these prophetic stories, the natural rhythm of the earth continued its eternal pulse. The Alexandrian Brotherhood knew intimately about the pulse of the earth, which provides the temporal framework for astronomy through the Great Year of the precession of the equinox.

My vote for the real Jesus would have gone to whoever came up with the brilliant idea of the loaves and fishes, which explains natural creation in terms of harmony with the cosmos by setting the New Age of Pisces-Virgo as an image of two fish (Pisces, sun and moon) and five loaves (Virgo, five planets) and 5000 people (visible stars). This cosmic vision is a foundation for the broader concept of messianic identity as the incarnation of the spirit of time. Easter is timed around the point when the Sun enters tropical Aries and the Moon enters tropical Libra. This point has precessed through the constellations of Pisces (Sun) and Virgo (Moon) over the two thousand years we call the Age of Pisces. We are now nearing the Age of Aquarius, when the Easter Sun will be in Aquarius and the Easter Moon will be in Leo. This time is predicted by Jesus in his story of the man with the jug on Palm Sunday, and correlates to the general theory of time in the Christian creeds. It makes sense to revisit these ancient myths and update them for our present time.

I find myself supporting most of what you say in this post and give you a thanks.

I said Manichean's and others. I can't copy and paste from the e-book but the what we're discussing here is covered in the beginning. The sources are cited in the book as well for further investigation. The point is that the early church fathers had to constantly address those who were deemed "heretical" for not accepting Jesus as a flesh and blood man from the time period suggested. The gospels were called out as fiction from early on. Rev Robert Tayor, who was jailed over English blasphemy laws, wrote extensively on the issue.

That makes sense too because the gospel stories are all over the place and fowl up a lot of historical and geographical details. People picked up on that and were skeptical of the history given. They also understood dying-and-rising God-Man stories as solar / organic life based mythology. This is why the apologists had no choice but to present the "Devil got there first" argument to everyone at the time. Had they been able to claim that myths about dying-and-rising God-Men were new and had come in just recently behind the Christ story then they would have. But they couldn't. They had to assert that the devil knew the scriptures and ran around trying to create Christ-like stories in advance of Jesus in order to trick people into thinking that the Christ had come, when he hadn't come yet.

But no matter what I've said here, it's still a matter of intuition. I can't provide hard historical evidence that Jesus didn't exist any more than some one can claim that he did. I can see traditions that held that Jesus wasn't historical and traditions that held that he was historical. It's all hear say the whole way through. Everything comes from well after the fact.

But Murdock presents a long theory based on investigating Philo and the Therapeutae which shows how much of the blue print for what was later used in the Christ story was going around in the first century. Philo is silent on an historical Jesus but over joyed with writing about "The Word" / Platonic Solar Logos. It seems that the writings of Philo served as a blue print for the creation of the Christ myth when investigating the issue thoroughly. She offers a lengthy chapter about this in "Christ in Egypt: The Horus-Jesus Connection" entitled "The Alexandrian Roots of Christianity". None of this is easily dismissed either.

I don't think that our goal is to make everyone believe that Jesus never existed, it's just a case of pointing out the probability that the whole thing is mythical through and through. A lot of people don't realize that questioning the historicity of the story is a long enduring issue.


Whether an historical Jesus gave out the story of the loaves and fishes or not, it is a very concise summary of the astrotheological events of the time. It does seem to be something of an expression coming from the priesthood through a storyline hero character in my view. But that obviously doesn't negate it's truth. The sun had crossed over into the Pisces-Virgo axis and that did represent a time of change according to astrological lore.

The e-book I've provided suggests that the orthodoxy took the mystical Joshua of the Gnostics and historicized him, which the Gnostics were not happy about and therefore rejected. Their hero figure could never take on human form, or "come in the flesh" as it were. So I can see how the orthodoxy could have come in to take over this tradition by historicizing it. By changing it around and trying to add an historical angle they managed to make the presentation less offensive to the authorities. They had been blatantly profaning the ancient solar mysteries and the shift to an historical setting tends to put the mysteries back into secrecy. Just look at popular discussion in this day and age. Most people haven't a clue about the parable of the loaves and fishes. The historical angle tends to keep people from seeing through to meaning of the allegory. The reference to precession goes by unnoticed, therefore the while the information is passed along through time the general public doesn't have access to understanding it. The mystery isn't necessarily profaned.

The issue is not a lack of evidence, the issue is denial and dismissal of any evidence. The Bible is dismissed because it is a composition of prejudiced individuals though those same individuals risked their lives by writing and promoting the NT.

Josephus is dismissed because Christian references were later additions by Christians, though no one can explain their motives or the benefit redounding as a result of the additions, or why there were more additions.

Tacitus, Suetsonis, fill in the blank for the dozen or more contemporary references are all dismissed as fakes, or forgeries.

Instead, it is more interested to fabricate connections to ancient mystic religions where none exist. You're building a wall around Jericho.

I agree there's very little in the historical record to document Jesus' existence. However, as DWill says, one would not expect to see much from an itinerant street preacher who left no writings of his own. As such, I'm inclined not to demand the same burden of proof for Jesus' existence as I would for other extraordinary claims. Because in this case it seems it is more extraordinary that Jesus was completely invented or that his persona was grafted onto the older mythological gods. For though his life was embellished and though the early church mythologists framed his life in accordance with Greco-Roman philosophical ideals, it would seem that for such myth-making to take hold the way it did would require something true at its core. Say a core group of people who followed him around like Grateful Dead groupies. Jesus must have been a very charismatic person and it could be his followers had a cult-like infatuation with him which later led to embellishment and fabrication. It seems that inventing a brand new persona would require quite another level of deceit and intentionality in pulling off what amounts to an elaborate hoax. It rather sounds like a conspiracy theory to me. Maybe it's feasible, but it just seems more believable that someone named Jesus actually lived and was martyred by Roman authorities for being a rabble rouser. This story rings true to me.

Admittedly, I'm no scholar myself and I'm a product of an extremely Christian-centric society. Which is exactly why I give a lot of credence to mainstream scholars who as far as I can tell don't take the Jesus myth notion seriously. Also, you pick up pretty much any history book and you won't find an asterisk next to Jesus' name. It is presumed by historians of the modern era that Jesus was an actual historical person. As such the idea that Jesus never lived is a fringe belief. As I've said, it's an interesting idea. I don't have a horse in this race and so I wouldn't really care if the Jesus myth turned out to be true. However, without actual evidence to the contrary I'm suggesting that we probably shouldn't take it too seriously.

Thanks tat. I just posted my response to Interbane and DWill before reading yours. It's an excellent point you make that the historical record is constantly being reassessed. I'm still skeptical, of course, but i'm willing to look into this issue. This is certainly an interesting topic to say the least.

The Bible is accepted as a collection of ancient texts based on religious dogma and are expected to be flawed and inconsistent. The only thing dismissed is a view that The Bible is literal truth and the word of God. This is not a reasonable position that can be taken seriously.

Is the implication that McDowell is a liar because he is with Campus Crusade?
Wikipedia has the following information about McDowell's background.
According to McDowell, he was as an agnostic at college when he decided to prepare a paper that would examine the historical evidence of the Christian faith in order to disprove it. However, he converted to Christianity, after, as he says, he found evidence for it, not against it.

Perhaps rather than quoting a third party's references to McDowell's book, Evidence Which Demands a Verdict, you would be well served to read the book, especially since the question discussed in that book is the central question to this and other discussions.

As for F. F. Bruce, he is widely heralded as a NT scholar, though I am not sure why. I suggest you check out my review of his book, Paul, Apostle of the Heart Set Free on Amazon.com



These are like urban myths that just keep going. The claims of forgeries and later additions are superious and it is funny that you holdup the Panthera claim, It is an attempt to discredit the growing Christian movement and has no basis in fact. Though Paul VanHovern (sp?) of Basic Instinct, and Starship Troopers fame buys into it along with his other cronies at the Jesus Seminar. Mr. V is even publishing a biography of Jesus in the next month or two where he reveals the Panthera fabrication as a discovery he made after 20 years of exhaustive research. Give me a break.



Nice try, but we didn't miss your slight of hand. Your conclusion assumes we accept your premise and no one believes that Paul Bunyan is anything more than a story. There are no Paul Bunyan churches. No one has composed contatas to PB or turned their lives around due to him, or few orphans and the poor ...

Much of your conversations seem to circle around people, and what they did. I'm more interested in the subject matter. I don't make up crude acronyms to attack people and whatever problems I rightly or wrongly see in their debate style. You do this ad hominem style debating far too often, and it frustrates me. The reasoning stands or falls on it's own. If a person I quote offers an opinion, it's taken as such. Opinions mean little to me, so don't feel the need to attack the people making them.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ad_hominem

PS - I'm not saying McDowell is a liar. I make no statements about him.



I have to point out that your accusation applies as much to Christianity as it does to the claims made against Christianity. In both cases, there are facts that are mentioned by the scholars. It's funny how you say some of the anti-Christian ideas are myths, when I personally see the entire Christian enterprise as a myth. Is that a matter of perspective?



If the entire world believes the world is flat, does that make it flat? I don't believe Jesus is anything more than a story.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appeal_to_tradition

Geo:


I agree. For the record, I do think Jesus could have existed, but not as the bible describes. If the core of the stories were a common person preaching to others on a street corner, it is likely they would never be written about. However, it is exremely unlikely that a person who did all the things the bible claims Jesus to have done would have avoided being written about by many different non-biblical sources. The claimed events are extraordinary.

Which means, either Jesus was little more than a common street corner screamer, or he never existed. The claim I reject is that there was a historical Jesus who existed as depicted by the bible.

We're all in agreement. I obviously don't believe Jesus performed miracles either. The man, Jesus, may have been a wise philosopher whose words and deeds were simply distorted by later church mythologists. It's telling that the gospels were written after the man's death by those who didn't even know him.

Likewise, there might have been a real person who was the basis for the Robin Hood legends.

You were the one who brought up McDowell and Bruce among others in your prior post. If you bring them up, be prepared for them the be discussed, criticized or defended as appropriate. I suppose that you might mistakingly believe that I am engaged in an ad hominem attack on F. F. Bruce. However, that is not true. I know nothing of the man personally. His books were recommended to me as scholarly works on the NT, particularly Paul and his background. I approached his book, PATHSF expecting to learn a lot. Such was not the case. Most of his book was repetive, speculative, and in many cases down right wrong. Under those circumstances, I am not going to say the Emperor's Clothes are wonderful, I will call it as I see it. Perhaps my next book will be a biography of Paul, afterall, if Paul Vanhoevern can write a biography of Jesus, I should be able to write one of Paul.




ok





Not when you read the text in the Talmud they cite no source, nor are there corroborating statements external to the Talmud and there is no way that the authors of the Talmud could know who the father of Jesus was if other than claimed by Mary.



Jesus is not a tradition. The Bible is not a tradition. There is an unbroken chain from today's believers back to the men and women who were with Jesus.



There is no claim that Jesus was ever a street screamer. He took on the most powerful men and forces of His time and established an organization which changed the world.

I won't prepare for such a thing. I couldn't care less about them. What I care about is the information they present. If you want to attack people rather than their ideas, feel free to do so. That's your perogative.







My point was that a person doesn't need to have been real for a story to be made up about him. The story of Jesus is meant to be taken as true, while the story of Paul Bunyan isn't. That is the only difference, and isn't relevant to the point I make. For example, there are things made up all the time, which you're meant to believe are true(and they aren't), such as the Thetan aliens of Scientology.

Also, there are some people who believe Paul Bunyan was real, and at the same time the majority of the world does not believe in Christianity.

When you mention that Christianity dates back to the first century, you are showing that Christianity is old, not that it is true. They are not the same thing, and to assume so is fallacious:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argumentum_ad_populum

[/quote]

Just because there is no claim that Jesus was ever a street screamer does not mean he wasn't. In fact, due to the lack of evidence, that(or some similar mundane personality) was all he could have been. Had he truly taken on the most powerful men, worked magic, and done all the hocus pocus you claim, there would be first hand accounts corroborating the bible. There aren't any.