Was Jesus Worth Following?

Is there a text transcript? I can’t load videos.

That was the best thing my eyes have ever seen on this subject. Clicking the hell out of the Like button on this one.

WOW! The truth is always harsh but oh so liberating. I think it would have been more effective though if Peter hadn’t invoked Godwin’s law right off the bat.

Scholars tend to agree that many of the supernatural stuff were later additions to the Gospels. So when people say that they like Jesus, they mean “Jesus in the sense that the Jefferson Bible” portrays him.

True, that portrayal may well be fiction, so one might say that they like the Jesus character.

Ollie

So when people say that they like Jesus, they mean “Jesus in the sense that the Jefferson Bible” portrays him.

How do you know?

I think it is good to cause people to question the images that have of Jesus (and of others) that they have simply accepted from someone else. It is also good to work against championing a 2,000 year old culture, which so often happens within the church.

That said, here are a few thoughts I had as I watched:

1. There is very good scholarship being produced that actually argues that Jesus (and his father Joseph) would have been a stone mason, not a carpenter. The word typically translated as “carpenter” is “tekton,” which generally means a worker and can include wood-working or stone-working. Further, basing the translation of the term off archaeology and what we know from (extra-Biblical) historical sources, a stone mason makes the most sense. There was a massive building project going on in Sepphoris around the time that Jesus would have been growing up and it was only ~3 miles from Nazareth. It makes logical, archaeological, and historical sense that Jesus would have seen his “dad” working with stone and would have learned that trade, not wood working skills. Moreover, this would account for the abundance of stone metaphors and the relative lack of wood metaphors attributed to Jesus throughout the New Testament. (NB: At the beginning of Part 2 he does call him a “Palestinian blacksmith,” but why not use that terminology consistently?)

2. Why exactly does saying that someone’s moral teaching isn’t original to him/her negate that person’s morality? Surely, my morality is not lessened by following the teachings of Gandhi, MLK Jr., Confucius, etc. simply because I didn’t come up with the same teachings on my own or produce original moral tenets.

3. Brietbart argues on behalf of just war theory, which is ironic to me considering the Christian roots of this theory. Also, why does he choose to leave out Gandhi and MLK Jr’s examples of pacifism where they did practice a version of “turn the other cheek”? True pacifists (as I believe Gandhi was) would maintain that there is some good inside of everyone (how else could he hold out hope that change was possible if he didn’t?). The just war theory is a more common moral guide for people, but it is still a moral guide among others.

4. He states at the outset that he is judging Jesus as a human, but then wants to make that point that if he was God, then he committed a heinous moral act by not teaching 1st century people about antibiotics and that if he was God his death meant nothing because he wasn’t really dying anyway. If you’re judging him as a human then these points are frivolous and take away from the stated argument.

This guy has no idea what he is talking about in terms of Christianity. All of his accusations have simple answers to them and as a Christian I can say his understanding of the bible is pretty weak by the evidence of his sad misunderstanding of some of the verses that he quotes. Although he may sound very convincing because he has a nice camera crew and a cool accent, his arguments hold no water and a first year bible college student could refute every one of those arguments.

Thank you for posting this. This post inspired me to write the following short piece entitled ‘Christians Need To Stop Underestimating Themselves’:

http://spencertroxell.blogspot.com/2011/06/christians-need-to-stop-underestimating.html

My mind has been going to this place with increasing frequency lately. It’s a convention to give it to christians that ‘Jesus was a great guy!’ and to opine with them about how poorly most christians live up to his standard. Personally, I think christians underestimate themselves, and overestimate how great jesus was considerably.

Nathan: “All of his accusations have simple answers to them”

Example please. I realize a blog commment is too small for a thorough rebuttal, but giving a simple answer to one or 2 of his accusations would greatly increase the credibility of your statement.

@reformedholyroller – to assert that if someone is not convinced of this guy’s argument it must be that they are ‘indoctrinated’ is a case of fallacious begging the question.
I too found his arguments to be full of strawmen, bad logic and rhetoric – ultimately, it’s a seriously flawed endeavour to assess somebody’s words while ignoring the context they spoke them in (and worse, imposing your own definitions on what was meant by them).
I’ll leave a link to my blogged response when I get it up.

@grung0r – trust me, the whole “so easy I won’t bother” is NOT the sole domain of Christians..

Truth suffers from too much observation.

Jesus’ teachings suffer from too much observation also.

So personally, I do not believe in Atheist.
If they did exist though, I believe that most likely their understanding of all things regarding love and morality, as well as their superior intellect, would far exceed that of any deity, much more so any “follower” of that deity. Or at least many of them would think so.
But again, I personally do not believe Atheist exist.

Wow, so much fuss over stuff that was never said by someone who never existed.

@Atom Jack & @d’Armond – I’m afraid the evidence says otherwise, as do the overwhelming majority of historians – even those who reject the miracles. Sorry.

@grung0r – I made no argument from ease of refutation. Look it up – wrong guy. And argument from authority is only fallacious when you claim the authority cannot be wrong. I made no such claim – the overwhelming consensus of experts might be wrong, but that more than a simple, unevidence claim is needed to demonstrate that – especially when the scholarly view is based on the extant textual and historical evidence. That is, if the evidence AND the scholars agree that an itinerant preacher called Jesus was put to death by the Romans in C1st Palestine, sorry, but I’m not just going to accept an unsupported claim that he never existed (see http://thinkingdoesnthurt.blogspot.com/2011/05/problem-of-historical-jesus.html )

Andrew:

An argument from authority is one in which you use the beliefs of others(in authority)as evidence of why your claim is correct. It does not matter how many people in whatever field state this or that. If their arguments are so good, then why not make them?

That is, if the evidence AND the scholars agree that an itinerant preacher called Jesus was put to death by the Romans in C1st Palestine, sorry, but I’m not just going to accept an unsupported claim that he never existed

What is the evidence, if you don’t mind me asking? All I’ve ever heard when I ask this question is Josephus, Josephus, Josephus, oh and “Alexander the great doesn’t have any contemporary sources either!” Please,if you have ANY extra-biblical evidence(Or a reason why gospels, written 50+ years after the fact, and filled with magic and fictional constructs should count as history) for this person, I would love to hear it.

If I say I should take a certain medication because my doctor says to – that’s argument from authority, but it’s not fallacious

It is neither. It’s in fact not an argument at all, unless you have multiple personality disorder. Now, if you said I should take a medication because your doctor says so, then that is an argument from authority, and it is fallacious. In discourse, why can trust whomever we like as authorities on whatever topics we choose, but no one else is under obligation to trust the same authorities we do. Instead, we must make an actual argument(you are certainly free to parrot your chosen authority if you like), but that the people that you trust think this or that and totally would agree with everything you say is irrelevant, and always fallacious as evidence.

you present a false dichotomy of ‘it must have no meta-physical claims to be history’ – good luck with texts regarding most ancient rulers in that case!

Absurd, I claimed no such thing. To use Alexander the Great again, he claimed to be the Son of Ra(or maybe it was Achilles, I’m not sure) amongst other supernatural claims, and like Jesus, there is no contemporary historical source attesting to his existence. The difference is, of course, that Alexander is tied into history. The history of Greece, Macedonia, Eygpt and Rome make no sense without him and his doings. the same is true for any of the other rulers you(failed to) mention. This is simply not true of Jesus. If Jesus were mythical, history as we know it would be the exact same.

I’m not going to go off on a tangent of why historians treat the NT documents they way they do other ancient texts

What a shocker.

I don’t say there was no historical Jesus because I don’t like miracles. I say he didn’t exist because there’s no evidence he existed. Believers make the claim the existed and provide evidence, and I have reviewed and rejected that evidence.

@Andrew, I have followed and examined the links you provided. In the first, an atheist blogger reviews a book by Bart Ehrman that presents a scholarly analysis of the origin and historicity of the Bible. Ehrman concludes that the Bible is not inspired or divine (no duh). He also concludes that almost nothing can be said about the life of Jesus, but still presents the premise of an historical Jesus as fact. Considering that Ehrman was a Catholic altar boy, attended a fundamentalist bible college and is a professor of New Testament studies, I don’t find this surprising (his job kind of depends upon his point of view, doesn’t it?).

I reject the bible as a historical source. This is not the same thing as saying that there’s nothing in the bible that resembles history. I would characterize it as historical fiction. So, how do we separate actual history from the fiction? Typically with external, contemporary evidence. In this category this is nothing. For example, all of the references cited on the Wikipedia page listed from your first link point to authors who were writing long after the supposed time of Jesus’ alleged lifetime (and many of them were obviously forged). So again, no evidence.

The sum of the argument from your atheist blogger is that the bible should be accepted as history, short of the miracle claims. That’s just not good enough.

The 2nd link you provide is for a research fellow at the Tyndale House, a Christian residential community near Cambridge University, who presents “new evidence” that the gospels were based on eyewitness sources. What is this new evidence? He compared the usage of names, cities, and details used in 4+1 Gospels Matthews, Mark, John, Luke + Acts compared to Gnostic Gospel Mary, Thomas, Judas, and Philip. Wow. So there is actually no new evidence, just another claim from someone (with an agenda) reviewing texts that were written long after the lifetime of who he is trying to justify. This is what passes for scholarly from apologists, but for those of us who value, you know, actual evidence, it’s amusingly insufficient.

Do you have one piece of reliable evidence, one substantiated claim, even one archaeological find that supports the claim that Jesus was a real person? I’m not asking to be snarky. I’ve read tons of stuff on both sides, and the proponents of an historical Jesus, when they’re not being dishonest, can only point to things that either were not contemporary to Jesus’ lifetime, or to things that don’t actually bear on whether he existed. Those of us who doubt the historical existence of Jesus are just asking for evidence, any evidence, that would support that claim, and there doesn’t seem to be any at all.

@d’Armond – I’m really not interested in any kind of discussion where evidence is demanded and then, what is considered evidence by serious scholars is not considered but dismissed as ‘apolgetics’ (that’s ad hominem btw -and you do realize that Ehrman is an atheist, right? or didn’t Wikipedia tell you that?) and then the demand for evidence repeated as if you haven’t actually seen any. (You also seem to have no idea about what constitutes acceptable time frames for documents of antiquity or you’re goal-shifting). If you don’t find the evidence for the existence of an historical Jesus sufficient, good for you. I’m not interested in trying to discuss something with someone who is simply shifting the goal-posts.

(why is it only people with an anti-theist agenda who seem to claim that Jesus never existed?)
@Randy Tyson – you’ll note that I wasn’t actually making any claim except that a poster’s position was at odds with mainstream scholarship, which is factually true. I was making a response to the claim that Jesus never existed – which the claimant did not back up. The burden lies on the claimant. It is a fact that such a view is at odds with mainstream scholarship. That is NOT a claim that mainstream scholarship is unable to be mistaken, but simply pointing to the fact that the person claiming non-existence and no evidence is very much at odds with what those who actually study the area say.

In regards to the Gnostics, they were later. In fact, as Williams shows in the link I provided, the Gnostics were clearly much more removed from the time and place than the gospels. In any case, the claim that Jesus was crucified (and resurrected, but that’s not our issue at this point) is there in the earliest references and there is NO evidence that this was a progressive development. But as you say – you’re not suggesting that Jesus didn’t exist, which is the issue I am responding to. Those who say there is no evidence that he even existed are either ignorant of how ancient historians work, or shifting the goal-posts.

In regards to the extant reference to Jewish polemic – it is Jewish apologetics: they are trying to account for the empty tomb by saying that the disciples stole the body. They could just have easily said that this supposed Jesus never existed, instead, they admit that he did, and that his tomb was empty.
” “Christians say…” is not a validation of what Christians claim.” – of course not, but it IS external attestation to the man’s existence if it says “Christians stole the guy’s body”.

“I find the output of any “telephone game” a very uncredible source.” – the gospels are nothing like ‘telephone’ (http://www.thingsfindothinks.com/2010/11/telephone/)

” even if we had eyewitness testimony for such extraordinary claims, would this be sufficient? I. Don’t. Think. SO!!! ”

I don’t buy Hume’s axiom and argument that testimony is never sufficient for accepting ‘extraordinary’(a very subjective term) claims. The fault was pointed out in his day – that by his reasoning a pacific tribe would be justified in refusing to believe europeans that water could freeze, and even if their chief went himself, the tribe would be justified in not believing until each had seen it themselves. They would, of course, have been quite in error!

“barbarous, sheepherding, tribal and very, VERY superstitious society”
That’s quite a strawman. Wright has showed that neither the predominant Greek or Jewish views of the time allowed for the claims the disciples make. A C1st Jew would have been just as likely to laugh at the claim of Jesus’ resurrection as a modern sceptic. Nor were they shepherds, tribal nor barbarous.

But I don’t simply accept the claims because they are alleged to be eyewitness – the point is to use normal historical methodology of argument to best explanation. That is, what is the best explanation of the known historical data (and there are about 12 things which scholars, even those who reject the miracles, agree most likely happened. Any explanation needs to properly account for these – though of course, that is well beyond the scope of a blog comment!) – which explanation has the most scope, power and least reliance on ad hoc. I happen to think that the earliest explanation given does that. You may disagree, but I’m yet to see any kind of naturalistic explanation that has more scope, power and less reliance on ad hoc. That’s my position, and if that goes against naturalist presuppositions, then ok. My point in this thread is NOT to argue for the resurrection (you brought up the ‘extraordinary claims’) but was to point to the fact that mainstream history accepts, because of the sufficient textual evidence and historical impact, that Jesus was an itinerant preacher put to death under Pontius Pilate (who, incidently, was also considered for some time to have no external corroboration, only for some to turn up in the 60s). To argue that Jesus never existed involves far too much ad hoc, especially when it comes to accounting for the early, rapid and unlikely growth of the Christian movement. I really don’t see how accepting an historical Jesus is any kind of threat to atheists or anti-theists.
It wasn’t me who said he was a stone-mason btw.

@Anna – it seems a very dangerous view to take that anyone who has influenced previous generations should not be taken seriously and just ignored because you don’t accept those views. Should Aristotle be similarly ignored?

andrew:

who, incidently, was also considered for some time to have no external corroboration, only for some to turn up in the 60s

Pontius Pilate’s historicity is well attested to, and has been well before the 60′s. Josephus and Philo(who was his contemporary) both mention him, a fact well known before 1961. What the Wikipedia article that you scanned was suggesting is that the Pilate character in the Bible is mythical, something that a stone inscription saying he was the prefect of Judea does nothing to counter.

Clearly, this was just a misunderstanding on your part. But misunderstandings are yet another reason why arguments from authority are fallacious. When you appeal to “scholars”(a job title that only seems to come up during Mythical Jesus discussions for some reason), you may have misunderstood their position, the consensus, or the nature of that consensus(this in addtion to the fact that the concesus of experts could still be very, very wrong). You will agree, I expect, that many Christians will make this EXACT same argument, using the same words even(“All Historical scholars agree that Jesus existed”) to mean the son a deity who was born from virgin, who did some impressive magic tricks, gave the sermon on the mount, and was then crucified to atone for the mistakes a rib woman who ate the wrong piece of fruit, and then floated up to a magical place in the sky to judge us for all eternity. Now, I say that isn’t what they(scholars) mean at all. You probably agree. But how can we judge who’s right? How is it any different from yelling on a children on a playground arguing about who’s dad could beat up who’s dad? It isn’t. Authorities supposed agreements with you aren’t evidence, except of your own hubris.

d’Armond,

To tie this back to the OP and to respond to @Anna’s criticism, eventually I don’t actually care whether Jesus was a real person. However I’m not going to sit down and shut up just because someone asserts that “most scholars agree” (as if that were a sound argument) something that is actually quite controversial.

True enough. I don’t want to dissuade people from tackling the subject, but many evangelicals live for this kind of thing. It gives them an opportunity to go on at length about Jesus, feeding into their sense that he is of ultimate importance. Wouldn’t it be great if every time a Christian mentioned Jesus, secular people just said he was irrelevant and changed the subject? It’s like creationism. If no one took it seriously, maybe it would just go away. I realize society isn’t quite there yet, but perhaps someday we won’t even think Christianity’s assertions are worth responding to.

Anna:

If no one took it seriously, maybe it would just go away. I realize society isn’t quite there yet, but perhaps someday we won’t even think Christianity’s assertions are worth responding to.

Now, that’s a future to aspire to.

Not that I wish to shut anyone up, but I do think it feeds into their belief that even atheists find Jesus (his historicity, his morality, etc.) to be of importance.

I find your subscription to the “ignore them and they’ll go away” school of thought to be an incredibly myopic and ignorant way of looking at things . It seems to me that every advancement secular society has made from the enlightenment on has been by punching dogmatic, superstitious thinking in it’s stupid little face. Everything from gay rights to Heliocentrism has become the dominant view via confrontation, not cowardice. Besides, I don’t think Christians get much of a kick out of defending Jesus’ historicity. As far as I can tell, Jesus as myth is the most offensive view one can hold in their eyes, more so than atheism even(at least non-mythicist athiests think they are worshipping someone real).

AndrewFinden says – July 1st, 2011 at 2:17 pm –

it seems a very dangerous view to take that anyone who has influenced previous generations should not be taken seriously and just ignored because you don’t accept those views. Should Aristotle be similarly ignored?

Of course the stories have been influential. No-one has provided a sound argument for the central character being largely based on a real person or real events.

Squealing fallacy, such as ad hominem, every 5 lines does not really do your arguments any good, especially when you do the same, such as when you comment on Ehrman [possibly] being an atheist.

It is the premises and the argument around those that is more relevant. There has yet to be a sound argument for a single Jesus Christ person. Even the sayings attributed to his character before his death suggest he was not who the rest of the Bible says he was, so there are theological grounds to reject the claims.

@d’Armond
” just give me one example of something you find credible and convincing and why”

The crucifixion. It is multiply attested, from the earliest sources, there is no competing account, the accounts contain embarrassing details, it is not implausible. Given the prevailing Jewish views, it’s highly unlikely that someone would invent a messianic figure who would appear to the reader to have been cursed by God (as crucifixion would certainly have been seen). Secondary details show accuracy.

Your argument is basically an argument from ignorance. You claim that ‘contemporary’ evidence is required – that is, someone writing within the life-time of Jesus, but this is goal-shifting. Most ancient figures have no contemporary attestation. Further, when we’re dealing with an oral tradition, not a written one, we shouldn’t expect it. You further compound the argument from ignorance by saying we should expect writings in several contemporary authors (and why would we expect people interested in rulers and generals to write about a condemned criminal in the outskirts of the empire?) – but this is a faulty argument. We have extant around 1% of what was written in antiquity. It’s needle in haystack stuff. Even if we had a list of people crucified between 29-33AD we might not expect to find Jesus name on it. We can’t dictate what ought to turn up from antiquity and then claim that because it hasn’t the person must not have existed.

You simply write ‘the bible’ off as historical fiction, though you give no basis for this. Surely you can understand that if you view a document differently to the way the majority of the actual field do, then you must give good reason.
In fact, I’m not even interested in ‘the bible’ – later collation into a single volume is entirely irrelevant to the issue, what we are looking at is some of the New Testament documents – which all date before the end of the C1st, the earliest reference being within 20 years, though it most probably references a text that dates to within 2-5yrs of the crucifixion (is that contemporary enough for you? Certainly is for real historians). The attestation are all within the lifetime of possible eye-witnesses and compared to other ancient sources, positively early. Of course, you can’t even begin to talk of ‘contemporary’ without an historical Jesus from whence the term gets its meaning.
But to repeat – what kind of literary criticism are you using that makes you conclude that the gospels are of the genre of fiction? Because they include meta-physical incidents?
No, it is very obvious that writer like Luke are writing what they believe to have actually happened, therefore, the normal tests for historicity must be applied: are the claims multiply and independently attested? Is there a competing account? etc.

You repeat the rhetoric that I’ve not provided any evidence when the reality is that you’re simply dismissing the evidence and then claiming to have never seen any.

You dismissed Williams’ presentation as apologetics without bothering to actually interact with his point – which is that we know the gospels were written outside of Judea, yet, as the recent name & geography data show, show an intimate knowledge of the region. If you were to write a fictional story set in 1920′s Paris, without the help of modern data records etc, would you get the names and flora right? What’s more likely, that the story they were writing down originated in Palestine from the 30s or that they were amazingly clever researchers and writers (who were simultaneously ‘barbarous sheepherders’?

You ask

“If you were to write a story about the life of someone who died before, say, 1940, but were able to provide no contemporary evidence for this person (no photos or paintings, no birth or death certificate, no news stories, no references in the writings of others, or any other kind of actual evidence at all), what would be the basis for me accepting your claim that this person existed?”

If you had five different people attesting to the person’s existence, based on having spoken with people who claimed to have known the person (i.e. a brother) then that is a sufficient basis. Further, if we were writing about someone called Jimmy Jimson, and there was a community group called Jimson’s Joggers who had began in the 40s (but lost all records in a fire, just to help the analogy along) then we have historical impact as well. Your question is, of course, loaded in assuming that testimony is not a kind of evidence, when it is, in fact, one of the most common and valuable kinds of evidence for antiquity (see Judge on this: http://www.thingsfindothinks.com/2011/06/prof-edwin-judge-testimony-a-basis-for-history/).
We also have much more access to recent historical data, and have a totally different mindset about keeping records than in antiquity, so the comparison is always going to be fairly faulty on that account.

You say Josephus didn’t write any reference to Jesus – false. There are two references, one is undisputed, the other was almost certainly edited, but is not a wholesale interpolation, and he almost certainly said something about Jesus. He doesn’t tell us much about him, but it is a further (if unnecesary really) attestation to Jesus’ existence. It certainly is not too late to be useful.

Ultimately your argument boils down to your rejection of the source documents (though you’ve given no reason why they shouldn’t be subjected to the normal criteria of assessment expect that you reckon they’re fiction.. I assume because they have claims of miracles?). You say you don’t care about the consensus of mainstream scholarship, but when you ignore the source document that peer reviewed historians assess, there’s something amiss, and my bet is that it is with your approach, and not theirs.

@grung0r

“Authorities supposed agreements with you aren’t evidence,”

At no point did I say it was!

My appeal to authority is NOT in this case fallacious. I am pointing to the disparity between a view presented here and the view of those who actually study the issue. Such disparity ought to give us pause to think – that is my point. And the issue is purely about the existence of Jesus. I recognise that not all historians accept the resurrection (though some eminent historians do) but that is not the issue under discussion. You’re getting hung up on my reference to the scholarly mainstream while failing recognise a) the point in my reference to it and b) that I’ve actually referred to the reasons why they treat the NT documents as historical documents.
If I had said that ‘scholars think this, therefore it must be right’, it would be fallacious and you’d be right to criticise that. I did no say that, however.

” The fact of the matter is, there is simply no reason to believe that this person existed in any meaningful sense,”

That’s not a fact – it’s your opinion, one which is highly disputed.

” You can tell that Andrew (who is normally rather quiet) is enjoying the discussion immensely.”

Normally rather quiet? I’ve commented on a number of posts here.
I’m not enjoying this – I’m finding it incredibly frustrating, and should not have let my SOIWOTI syndrome have kicked in, and ought to have realised that if someone is going around posting on internet forums that Jesus never existed, then they’re probably not really that fluent in normal historical methodology or current scholarship. That’ll learn me

“It seems to me that every advancement secular society has made from the enlightenment on has been by punching dogmatic, superstitious thinking in it’s stupid little face. ”

Heliocentricism was the prevailing Aristotelian view. Galileo’s persecution was due largely to his provocation and ego. But if you don’t consider the Christian views of Galileo, Keppler, Newton & Bacon etc. ‘dogmatic, superstitious thinking’ then good btw, Have you read James Hannam’s book (The genesis of science) on how the middle ages influenced the rise of science? Worth looking at.

Now that is all far too long (inevitable when it becomes 3vs1)and precisely why I didn’t want to get into this big tangent in the first place (now there’s a shocker!)

Unless either of you can show good reason why the normal historical approach to the NT documents and the conclusions thereof should be discarded or simply ignored, I think that’ll do me.

You say Josephus didn’t write any reference to Jesus – false. There are two references, one is undisputed, the other was almost certainly edited, but is not a wholesale interpolation, and he almost certainly said something about Jesus. He doesn’t tell us much about him, but it is a further (if unnecesary really) attestation to Jesus’ existence.

Both are disputed, and the one less disputed is a passing reference when referring to his alleged brother, a brother the Catholic tradition strongly disputes.

grung0r,

I find your subscription to the “ignore them and they’ll go away” school of thought to be an incredibly myopic and ignorant way of looking at things.

You’re certainly entitled to that view. Given the state of the society we live in, perhaps you’re right. But my strategy hasn’t been tried. Your method of engagement is in widespread use, but I’m not sure how well it works. If you take creationism, it seems to have become even more entrenched over the past few decades. If the secular world simply ignored Ken Ham, for example, maybe he wouldn’t be a household name. Evangelicals want attention. They thrive on attention. If we refuse to give them attention and refuse to engage their talking points, it’s possible we could take some of the wind out of their sails.

It’s not that the debate is not worth having, but my personal view is that Christians should be dismissed rather than encouraged. By taking Jesus seriously, we’re playing right into their hands. Of course, it’s just my opinion, but I feel that engaging Christians on their favorite topic (Jesus) does nothing other encourage them. Maybe it would be possible to have a fruitful discussion among atheists, but I’m just not hopeful that evangelicals take anything away from it other than the feeling that Jesus is of incredible importance.

Andrew:

The crucifixion.

You said there were 12 events that were well-attested as evidence of Jesus’ life, and the evidence you cite are the gospels? Putting aside for a moment the authorship and timing of the gospels, are you saying that there are only 12 events described there that you accept? I find your choice confusing. Is there a single, accepted reference to the crucifixion of Jesus apart from the gospels or the bible?

The gospels and the rest of the bible do contain fiction (unless you’re an inerrantist, in which case this conversation is over). So, we have to apply sound historical methodology to separate fact from fiction. I don’t automatically assume that anything written in these sources is fiction, but I am obviously skeptical, for good reason. They are written to convince the reader of supernatural powers and impossible events; they have dubious motives. Thus it is a reasonable question to ask what is historically sound and what is fiction intended to persuade. I don’t accept that something written in the gospels is accurate just because it’s written in the gospels. I am not that gullible, and asking for evidence is not out of place.

You place the writing of the gospels within a couple of years of the cruci-fiction (by which I assume you’re referring to mainly to Mark, as the others came after), but this is too early. They have to have been written after Paul’s letters, placing them after 58 CE, and more likely after the Jewish-Roman war of 66-70 (since Mark alludes to the destruction of the temple in 70 CE). But they’re probably later than that even, because other early Christian writers (e.g. Clement of Rome, Ignatius of Antioch) make no mention of the gospels in their writings dating to 95-107 CE. Do you have any reason to place them so early?

Most ancient figures have no contemporary attestation.

We’re not talking about most ancient figures. We’re talking about someone who was supposedly celebrated, commanded large crowds of followers, and whose resulting fame sparked the largest spiritual movement in history. The writings of historians and record-keepers from the time took note of lesser individuals and events. I’m not asking for something extraordinary, like a photograph (anachronistic) or historical records from a time when historians did not keep records (more seriously); I’m asking for the kind of evidence one would expect from the time if the events were accurate.

You say Josephus didn’t write any reference to Jesus – false.

I’m not going to review the arguments against Josephus, but will point out that sound historical methodology has demonstrated the 2 references from Josephus to be (1) and interpolation and (2) not a reference to Jesus. I suspect your continual call for me to accept historical methods is merely a call for me to accept methods that demonstrate your conclusions, without analysis. This is why I asked about Josephus, and the sources for the 12 events you believe to confirm Jesus, to see if you were serious, which you are apparently not. Sorry for wasting everyone’s time, I’ll drop this thread now.

Very strong statement about this character, Jesus.
I read all through these comments hoping someone would bring up Joseph Atwill and his Caesar’s Messiah hypothesis.
What was said in this video is true but there is still the question as to who created this character. There is the other question about why this character was useful.

As an atheist,I study the different sects of “Christianity” it amazes me the how one can blindly follow an absurdity such as a “virgin” mother giving birth to the son of “god”,was there Christians at that time…nope,it wasn’t untill 3 decades after his “resurrection”and that was by word of mouth,sheep being led by the shepherd.