"Established Facts."

[Blog of Reason]

Discussion thread for the blog entry ""Established Facts."" by theowarner.

Permalink: http://blog.leagueofreason.org.uk/reason/established-facts/

 

[AndromedasWake]

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A great essay. And one which underscores the necessity for all of us to examine the sources of information we may later reference in our defence.

 

[Th1sWasATriumph]

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Ah, WLC. He's the master of this kind of ersatz authority statement, and I'll always approve of him getting taken down.

 

[DeistPaladin]

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Most scholars who write about the ancient world feel obliged to warn their readers that our knowledge can be at best partial and that certainty is seldom attained. A book about a first-century Jew who lived in a rather unimportant part of the Roman empire must be prefaced by such a warning.

I often hear statements like this when apologists answer why there is no contemporary cooberation of the Jesus story by any non-Christian sources (or, indeed, much of any non-Christian testimony regarding Jesus at all). The argument is that Judea was, as one Christian on Holding's forum put it, "like the wild west", and there's no reason to think anyone of note would have cared about this wandering rabbi out in the middle of nowhere.

I call this argument, the "Jesus-of-the-gaps" defense.

Putting aside the issue of how the Bible depicts Jesus as having a grand and successful ministry that spread like wildfire to the surrounding countryside and captures the attention of the highest ranked nobles and clergy. Jesus is at once an epic revolutionary who shook the political and religious foundations to the core and also an obscure wandering rabbi that no one paid any attention to, depending on the need of the apologist at the time. Let all that go for now.

Is it true that Judea was such a backwater province? That Jerusalem was a po-dunk town in the middle of nowhere? My understanding is that it was a prized possesion of many empires because of its location at the cross-roads of three continents. It was of critical value for trade routes. It was in a location of the world that contained the oldest civilizations. No wonder Rome fought so hard to keep control of it.

 

[TheYoungAndRestless]

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:?

Is it true that Judea was such a backwater province? That Jerusalem was a po-dunk town in the middle of nowhere? My understanding is that it was a prized possesion of many empires because of its location at the cross-roads of three continents. It was of critical value for trade routes. It was in a location of the world that contained the oldest civilizations. No wonder Rome fought so hard to keep control of it.

I would say that it was. Judea, as I understand it, was like a "county," more than a "country." Rome did have much trouble controlling it, however. Their tendency to appoint Roman governors was not uncommon and aside from not flaunting Jewish traditions, most of them were pretty good. Judea, all things considered, was benefited by Roman occupation. But, to some extent, the whole issue of religion to come up from time to time. The temple was desecrated, that sort of thing. So, perhaps a bit of an irritation but nothing out of the ordinary. Nothing that couldn't be handled by Rome. As for Jesus, he was a wandering preacher. He preferred the little towns of the country side. He was one many and by all accounts, popular towards the end of his life. His claims became increasing political nature in language (not necessarily in their content) and this annoyed the Jewish establishment. So, when Jesus went to Jerusalem (a moderately sized city... definitely urban) he was arrested, interrogated, tried, and executed. The whole "who killed Jesus" is not an historical fact. Almost certainly Roman authority could have trumped Jewish authority and Roman authority preferred to have a strong Jewish authority. So, almost everyone in power was happy with people with radical claims were executed. The resurrection claims and post-resurrection visitations are hard to establish. To approach it as a miracle is not the job of an historian. And, there is much uncertainty. Cool stuff, though.

 

[Orkaney]

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Through my searches for contemporary historians while discussing Jesus with a real live certified one, I came across contemporary historians, Jews, one living in Jerusalem, the other somewhere in Egypt, none of them of which mentions Jesus with a single syllable. I continue searching, locating a man named Yaeshu Nostri, a magician of sorts, a sharlatan, definately up to no good, who got stoned to death 100 years before our time rechoning. My opponent didn't really understand the word contemporary and presented me with known faked evidence from the 2nd, 4th and 5th century. He finally got so pissed off with me for getting back at him and asking nasty questions, especially for calling his fakes, his response was: You use Wikipedia, known to EVERYONE for lack of seriousness, I can't continue talking with you, if not in those words. I threw him a "smite me god" to get him back on track but he was never the same after that.

My conclusion was that Jesus, as described in the bible, never existed. I've never considered the bible remotely accurate, there are to my knowledge 28 testaments missing from the new testament, the 4 remaining tend to contradict each other.

I'm sorry for lack of sources, I've since then tried to get back to them but my memory fails me, as usual. Either I forget the names, the place, the time or the issue. This happened on Liveleak around a year ago or so, as comments to one of Pat Condells videos.

 

[lonelocust]

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I'm interested, Theo, in whether your research on this topic shed any light on why the mainstream historical (including secular history) view is that Jesus as a specific person at about the right time period even existed at all? The Christ Myth hypothesis seems far more supported to me, though I'm also academically satisfied with "There's no particular evidence, but we wouldn't expect much due to Jesus and Christianity being obscure until later, so we can't make much of a statement one way or the other", yet I repeatedly read that the existence of a specific Jesus who had disciples and was executed by Rome at about the right time is the mainstream view. You also seemed to take that as a given in the essay.

I'm loathe to dismiss the accepted view of countless academics who have made this their life's work, but I have never seen presentation of sufficient evidence for the historicity of Jesus, period, before one even reaches the point of empty tombs, eye witness accounts, etc.

 

[Marcus]

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Judea, all things considered, was benefited by Roman occupation.

 

[TheYoungAndRestless]

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I'm interested, Theo, in whether your research on this topic shed any light on why the mainstream historical (including secular history) view is that Jesus as a specific person at about the right time period even existed at all? The Christ Myth hypothesis seems far more supported to me, though I'm also academically satisfied with "There's no particular evidence, but we wouldn't expect much due to Jesus and Christianity being obscure until later, so we can't make much of a statement one way or the other", yet I repeatedly read that the existence of a specific Jesus who had disciples and was executed by Rome at about the right time is the mainstream view. You also seemed to take that as a given in the essay.

I'm loathe to dismiss the accepted view of countless academics who have made this their life's work, but I have never seen presentation of sufficient evidence for the historicity of Jesus, period, before one even reaches the point of empty tombs, eye witness accounts, etc.

Well, if you've never seen sufficient evidence for the historicity of Jesus' existence, you have strange definitions of the words "sufficient" and "existence." Setting aside the Gospels, letters, and non-Biblical Gospels, we have four secular mentions of Jesus, Josephus being by far the most prominent.

In other words, it is not that we have gathered enough information to proof in some empirical way that Jesus' existed; we have evidence and no reason to doubt the evidence. The doubt that historians bring to the table when it comes to the Resurrection, however, is a very simple assumption that it is not the business of historians to make theological decisions/judgments. Thus, when they report that Paul saw Jesus, the word "saw" is used very judiciously and any good reader knows that it doesn't mean that historians buy into the Resurrection myth.

Jesus' birth, life, and death, however, are pretty well evidenced. I don't know how to doubt that or why, considering the evidence, anyone would.

I should add that the Jesus Myth has never particularly impressed me. And I have not see The God Who Wasn't There.

 

[DeistPaladin]

Re: Evidence for Jesus?

we have four secular mentions of Jesus, Josephus being by far the most prominent.

I'm curious what these other three are, Josephus being a glaring Christian forgery.



Tacitus seems the strongest piece of evidence. It's late, brief and oblique as a reference and contains one error but it might be legitimate as a reference. Were it combined with anything else, I'd conclude that there was a wandering rabbi on whom the story is based. In isolation, I'm more inclined to think Tacitus was passing along a plausible story he'd gotten from the Christians. Pilate was real enough and he hung many Jewish leaders on the cross, after all.

 

[TheYoungAndRestless]

Re: Evidence for Jesus?

we have four secular mentions of Jesus, Josephus being by far the most prominent.

I'm curious what these other three are, Josephus being a glaring Christian forgery.

Tacitus seems the strongest piece of evidence. It's late, brief and oblique as a reference and contains one error but it might be legitimate as a reference. Were it combined with anything else, I'd conclude that there was a wandering rabbi on whom the story is based. In isolation, I'm more inclined to think Tacitus was passing along a plausible story he'd gotten from the Christians. Pilate was real enough and he hung many Jewish leaders on the cross, after all.

Well, I'm afraid I don't agree that it is a "glaring Christian forgery." I quote E.P. Sanders:

Jesus was mentioned in Jesephus' Antiquities of the Jews. Josephus (as we saw above) was born in 37 CE, just a few years after Jesus' death, and he wrote the Antiquities in the nineties. The Jewish historian certainly knew something about Jesus, and there is a paragraph on him in the Antiquities (18.63f.). But, Josephus' works were preserved by Christian scribes, who could not resist the temptation to revise the text and thus make Josephus proclaim that Jesus 'was the messiah'; that he taught 'the truth'; and that after his death he was 'restored to life'. Failing a fluke discovery, we shall never know what Josephus actually wrote. He was not a convert to Christianity, and he did not really think that Jesus was the Messiah. But, there is a good news: the Christian scribes probably only rewrote the text. It is highly likely that Josephus included Jesus in his account of the period. Josephus discussed John the Baptist and other prophetic figures, such as Theudas and the Egyptian. Further, the passage on Jesus is not adjacent to Josephus' account of John the Baptist, which is probably where a Christian scribe would have put it had he invented the entire paragraph. Thus the author of the only surviving history of Palestine Judaism in the first century thought that Jesus was important enough to merit a paragraph - neither more nor less.

The critic of Christianity is well-advised to accept this perspective. Baselessness in the Christian mythology can be asserted by placing Jesus along aside those other wandering prophets of no significance. To imagine a conspiracy that reached Rome with a hundred years is to aggrandize the first generation of Christians, aggrandize their ordinary zealousness to an extraordinary machination.

I spoke too early when I said four secular sources. I seem to recall hearing that, but, obviously... it is a vague statement. Four sources when? What did I mean by secular? Personally, I can't believe I made such a sloppy statement!

So, the question is: what do we mean by source? Suetonius in The Lives of the Twelve Caesars knew that someone who was executed by Pilate was causing unrest among the Jews and Suetonius dates this, although it was authored as history some what later, within ten years of Jesus' death. The importance of this comment is that it precisely constitutes what you would imagine the perspective of Rome. Someone who was dead was a minor irritation in a minor part of the Empire. And there is considerable evidence that Nero was persecuting Christians thirty years after Jesus' death.

I think it's worth saying that this is about all the evidence you'd find. Jesus died in relative obscurity. His followers born the burden of preserving his history and sharing it. We assuredly know that they did not do with an eye to historicity in the same way that modern man does.

I'm not convinced that Jesus did not exist.

I will conclude with E.P. Sanders again, making, I think, a modest statement:

Ancient history is difficult. It requires above all common sense and a good feel for the sources. Our sources contain information about Jesus, but we cannot get at it by dogmatically deciding that some sentences are completely accurate and some are fiction. The truth will usually lie somewhere in between. As I have already said more than once, and may repeat several more times, we have very good knowledge about Jesus at a somewhat general level

 

[DeistPaladin]

Re: Evidence for Jesus?

The critic of Christianity is well-advised to accept this perspective [of E.P. Sanders].

On what grounds? What evidence do the Christians have that the TF (Testimonium Flavianum) is not a complete addition instead of just a modification of material that was originally there?

I have asked Christian apologists to present evidence for their case. Since alteration is admitted, the burden of proof is on them that any part of the TF should be taken seriously.

Do they have earlier copies of the TF prior to the alleged interpolations by zealous Christian scribes? Not exactly.

Do they have earlier Christians who quoted the TF prior to Eseubius who quoted the version we now have, word-for-word? Not exactly.

What do they argue? "It uses words that Josephus might have used and stuff." I'm only slightly paraphrasing.

So, the question is: what do we mean by source? Suetonius in The Lives of the Twelve Caesars knew that someone who was executed by Pilate was causing unrest among the Jews and Suetonius dates this, although it was authored as history some what later, within ten years of Jesus' death. The importance of this comment is that it precisely constitutes what you would imagine the perspective of Rome. Someone who was dead was a minor irritation in a minor part of the Empire.

Seutonius says "Chrestus" (the good one), not "Christus" (the annointed one). Further, he is speaking of Jewish unrest that this Chrestus caused in Rome during the reign of Claudius, which would put JC in Rome around 50 CE.

Even Holding admits that Seutonius is not referring to Jesus and this should not be used as secular corroboration of the historical Jesus.

And there is considerable evidence that Nero was persecuting Christians thirty years after Jesus' death.

Aside from Christian folklore and propaganda, this considerable evidence is...?

I think it's worth saying that this is about all the evidence you'd find. Jesus died in relative obscurity. His followers born the burden of preserving his history and sharing it. We assuredly know that they did not do with an eye to historicity in the same way that modern man does.

For a long time, I accepted the idea of the minimal historical Jesus. Several years ago, I would have thought the idea of the mythical Jesus to be a crackpot idea. It wasn't until I read the Bible, read Christian apologetics and did some research searching for what the "real story" might have been that I began to realize just how paper thin their whole case is.

And what of the "Jesus-of-the-gaps"? How likely is it that an insignificant wandering rabbi who never wrote down any of his own teachings, who failed to be noticed by anyone in his time, who was in competition with a host of far more famous religious teachers, doom criers and messiah wannabes, somehow managed to become the towering legend he became?

And what part of the Gospel story do you think is real? The miracles are obviously fiction. The ministry is clearly exaggerated. The teachings are lifted from the OT or pagan sources. Some of the events are acknowledged to be allegory.

And if Jesus really did exist, why did so many early Christians think otherwise?

See 1John 4:1-3 and 2 John 1:7

In not one but two separate epistles, the alleged disciple of Christ (if it were written by him), rails against "false Christians" who didn't believe Jesus was a real flesh-and-blood person. He uses the language of faith ("believe" and "confess") to admonish true Christians to say that Jesus existed in the flesh. Reading between the lines makes it clear that early Christianity was not so united as the folklore suggests and these "gnostic" Christians were a big problem.

Ancient history is difficult. It requires above all common sense and a good feel for the sources. Our sources contain information about Jesus, but we cannot get at it by dogmatically deciding that some sentences are completely accurate and some are fiction. The truth will usually lie somewhere in between. As I have already said more than once, and may repeat several more times, we have very good knowledge about Jesus at a somewhat general level

And what do we know about Jesus outside the Bible? Even Tacitus, by far the best (and only) piece of evidence that even suggests a historical Jesus doesn't mention him by name. All he says is that the Christians get their name from their "anointed one" who was crucified by Pilate. That's it. Even if this Gospel character had a real life rabbi as a source, good luck ever knowing anything about him for all the mythology he's buried under.

 

[Tom S. Fox]

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"There's no particular evidence, but we wouldn't expect much due to Jesus and Christianity being obscure until later, so we can't make much of a statement one way or the other"

There is also no evidence that I have an invisible, intangible, heatless-fire-breathing dragon in my garage, but then again, we wouldn't expect any, so I guess you can't make a statement one way or the other.

Well, if you've never seen sufficient evidence for the historicity of Jesus' existence, you have strange definitions of the words "sufficient" and "existence." Setting aside the Gospels, letters, and non-Biblical Gospels, we have four secular mentions of Jesus, Josephus being by far the most prominent.

In other words, it is not that we have gathered enough information to proof in some empirical way that Jesus' existed; we have evidence and no reason to doubt the evidence.

We have no reason to doubt the Gospels? Seriously?

 

[Marcus]

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The nature of the Jesus story and the relatively short time between his (supposed) lifetime and the early flourishing of his followers would lead me to believe, a priori, that Jesus is based on either a historical person or an agglomeration of several such. There seems to be about as much evidence for his existence as we have of a number of figures from antiquity. For example, the earliest sources we have that talk about Pythagoras are from a couple of centuries after his death. As was the custom at the time, all the works by his school and followers were attributed to him, and none of those survive in primary form anyway. A number of legends grew up about him. He is even mentioned by Josephus. In short, the evidence for the historicity of Jesus is actually better than the evidence for the historicity of Pythagoras. And yet, it seems likely to the overwhelming majority of historians that Pythagoras existed, though there is less agreement on much beyond that. I contend that the same is the case with Jesus, and that those seeking to deny at least some historical basis for the mythological figure tend to be doing so purely in order to render the question of his divinity moot.

 

[DeistPaladin]

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He [Jesus] is even mentioned by Josephus.

No... he... wasn't!

Can we please stop taking the Christian forgery of the TF seriously?

The apologists themselves have confessed reluctantly to Christian tampering of that document. Their only defense is to try to spin it as an accidental forgery by zealous Christian copyists (an explanation for which they provide absolutely no evidence in support). And Josephus makes it clear that the Jesus of his so-called "Jamesian Reference" is Yeshua Bar Damneus. He specifically spells out that name.

Don't get me wrong. If you want to say there must have been some source for the legend, that's fine. You're entitled to your opinion. But if I were a Christian, I'd be ashamed to even mention "Josephus". The tampering is admitted. It's contaminated evidence. It's outta here.

those seeking to deny at least some historical basis for the mythological figure tend to be doing so purely in order to render the question of his divinity moot.

I denied the divinity of Jesus long before I even looked into the story.

Would people tell exaggerated tales of their cult leader? Certainly, it happens all the time. Washington was barely in the ground before the folktales began to spread. There really was a "Davey Crockett" but no one seriously believes he, as the song goes, "killed him a bear when he was only three". I've heard there might have been a real King Arthur of history. Maybe so (I've not seen the evidence aside from a photo of what was believed the "round table") but that won't do anything to convince me of a magic sword or a companion wizard.

Would people have believed a resurrection story? Don't some people believe Elvis is still alive (or at one point they did)? In a more superstitious time where fact-checking was less of an art, it's not hard to believe at all.

Would people have "died for the lie"? It happens all the time in this age.

My motive for not accepting the historical Jesus is simple: I've yet to see proof and what I call "the smoking gun" in the Bible (John's Epistles) tell me otherwise.

 

[Marcus]

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He [DP inserts "Jesus" despite the quote being in a section about the historicity of Pythagoras] is even mentioned by Josephus.

No... he... wasn't!

Can we please stop taking the Christian forgery of the TF seriously?

Nice quote mine. Look again. I never maintained that Jesus was mentioned by Josephus. I said that Pythagoras was, which is true. Unless you maintain that rabid Pythagoreans inserted that reference.

I denied the divinity of Jesus long before I even looked into the story.

I never said a thing about the chronology of denying divinity and historicity, only about the motivation. The reason I brought up Pythagoras in the first place is because nobody puts any effort into denying his historicity. There's no reason to do so, despite the fact that the early Pythagoreans had as much reason for inventing and aggrandising their founder figure as the early Christians. The default position is that the Pythagoras of legend is at least based on a real person. The main reason why people try to deny the existence of Jesus, despite the (marginally) better evidence for his existence over that of Pythagoras, is in order to argue against the possibility of his divinity. If Christianity had flourished briefly and died out after a century or two, I strongly suspect that historians studying it would consider Jesus likely to be based on a real person or persons, in the same way as we consider Pythagoras to have probably existed.

 

[ImprobableJoe]

Re: Evidence for Jesus?

I'm not convinced that Jesus did not exist.

Sure, right, whatever... it would be difficult to pin that down conclusively. The question I have is "why does it matter?"

Establishing the existence of Jesus doesn't really get the Christians nearly as far as they think it does. It is that case that we should be making, as opposed to getting bogged down as to whether or not brief non-contemporary mentions of Jesus establish his existence. It has been awhile since I tracked down and read the sources apologists usually cite, but I think most of them boil down to something along the lines of "The Hebrews are all stirred up about some rabbi, but I guess he's been executed. All sorts of weird Hebrew messianic stuff has the rabble all riled and stuff." That doesn't really get the Christians where they want to be, so there's no reason not to allow the possibility that their superstition is based on a real person. I mean, we know that David Koresh was a real person, but that doesn't validate HIS religious claims. So why get worked up about Jesus?

 

[DeistPaladin]

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I never maintained that Jesus was mentioned by Josephus. I said that Pythagoras was, which is true.

Sorry, my misunderstanding.

 

[TheYoungAndRestless]

Re: Evidence for Jesus?

I'm not convinced that Jesus did not exist.

Sure, right, whatever... it would be difficult to pin that down conclusively. The question I have is "why does it matter?"

A fair point.

Assuredly, were there to be discovered conclusive evidence that Jesus did not exist (I can't imagine what it would be), the religion would be in hard sharp. So, I suppose it matters in that regard. My instinct, though, is to say that those persons who push for the Jesus Myth are practicing bad history with a poor method for personal reasons; I doubt that I can prove it to them, although that seems to be what actual historians have to say about the Jesus Myth and its proponents. So, the question 'did Jesus exist?' may (or may not) be easily dismissed. Personally, I'm not intrigued by it.

 

[TheYoungAndRestless]

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But if I were a Christian, I'd be ashamed to even mention "Josephus". The tampering is admitted. It's contaminated evidence. It's outta here.

It's this quote, DiestPaladin, which makes me wonder if you understand the historical method. You are right that apologists and historians both acknowledge that Josephus' account of Jesus has its problems. "Forgery" is too strong a word, however. And to dismiss it entirely as "contaminated evidence" is clearly uncalled for. This is not how history works. It is not a court of law where the fruits of a poisoned tree can be excluded from the record and a find of fact made otherwise. This is history... we gather up as much as we can, apply common sense, expertise, and experience... and see what we have.

Fundamentalism, which it comes to reading from antiquity, is easy to dismiss. Their belief that the scripture (or any text) is the unvarnished truth is obviously wrong. Likewise, there is another stripe of fundamentalism: the belief that scripture (or any text) is an varnished lie. The truth is in between and we can, if we're balanced and temperate about it, arrive at it.