Kasz216 said:
Which is generally why most secular historians do agree Jesus existed. People who make the "Jesus never existed" arguement more or less don't understand how archaelogy and history works from a critical perspective, espeically from that early a time period.
To quote atheist historian Michael Grant. "This sceptical way of thinking reached its culmination in the argument that Jesus as a human being never existed at all and is a myth.... But above all, if we apply to the New Testament, as we should, the same sort of criteria as we should apply to other ancient writings containing historical material, we can no more reject Jesus' existence than we can reject the existence of a mass of pagan personages whose reality as historical figures is never questioned. Certainly, there are all those discrepancies between one Gospel and another. But we do not deny that an event ever took place just because some pagan historians such as, for example, Livy and Polybius, happen to have described it in differing terms.... To sum up, modern critical methods fail to support the Christ myth theory. It has 'again and again been answered and annihilated by first rank scholars.' In recent years, 'no serous scholar has ventured to postulate the non historicity of Jesus' or at any rate very few, and they have not succeeded in disposing of the much stronger, indeed very abundant, evidence to the contrary." |
The likelly hood of some messianic jewish figure in early 1st century pallestine and/or gallalee... pretty darn high. Jesus was a common name at the time (Josephus mentions the name 20 or so times attributed to various individuals), so some figure combining the two is entirely possible. Messianic jewish groups and early christians in the mid 1st century, that we have credible historical evidence of. Speaking with certainty about life events and atriibuting them with certainty to a figure mentioned in passing 30 to sixty years post mortem, well that is what I have issue with.
When scholars consider the reality of pagan figures, even more recent ones like Ragnar Lothbrok it is always with a certain scepticism as to the events surrounding the figure. The two pagan historians in the quote were not writing religious texts but rather extensive histories of the Roman and Greek periods according to the standards of the time. We don't atribute the same credibility to Homeric odysies or the Hyms of Orpheus for example in the helenistic period of Polybius. Nor are Plutarch's works on Isis and Osiris given the same creedence as his Lives of the Roman Emporers.
The reason I chose ahistorical rahter than mythical as a term was because I don't consider the argument from absence to be substantive proof. Calling a 1st century figure a myth requires much more proof than that line of reasoning.
The historian you quoted is very credible, but the work you quoted from Jesus: A Historians Review of the Gospels recieved this criticism from a christian historical critic who rather liked the work:
"By which I am certainly not arguing that there was no Jesus. I fully believe in Jesus and his ministry, although not entirely as it has come down to us through the Gospels. But I would be more comfortable with the work of an author designating himself a historian, calling his work a history, if he indeed relied on original sources. Of which there are none. Grant himself notes this, and seems to have realized the challenge any historian faces with this subject, as he ends his book with just such questions of validity as I am posing here. Any study of Jesus employing sources that come anywhere near to his own lifetime is limited to the Gospels. Moreover, we cannot even depend on the oldest versions of the Gospels as truly accurate evidence of the life of Jesus in that Jesus, his companions, and the people around him must have spoken primarily Aramaic, Hebrew, or Latin, while our oldest forms of the Gospels are in Greek. So already we have been as distanced from Jesus from a linguistic standpoint as we have been from a temporal one. Consequently, from my perspective at least, this book would have been better described as a literary analysis of the figure of Jesus within the Gospels rather than a history."
