palou said:
We know that there was oral tradition (or lost written tradition) confirming the existence of a religious figure that entered Jerusalem, around the time of Jesus, from 70 years after - that's evidence, even if not the strongest. It's strengthened by the fact that we don't have any information about *other* origins for the christian religion, which you could reasonably expect to leave some traces (since a religion usually starts from an event of some importance.)
Yes, it's not confirmation, by any means - but I think, it is normal to take as fact whatever answer to a question has the highest probability - I think, to the question "what is the origin of Christianity?" supernatural aside, the persona of Jesus seems like the best we have. |
Oral tradition is incredibly weak evidence. We know how unreliable eyewitness testimony is, even when it comes to something that occurred within several hours.
As for probability.. it doesn't really work like that. For two reasons. Firstly, we can't always take probabilities as fact... That's actually contrary to the concept of probability. Suppose I told you I flipped a coin three times and I told you it landed on heads three times. If you were going to simply take the most likely outcome as fact, you'd have to conclude I'm lying. The odds of the coin getting three heads(1/8) is less than the odds of of any other combination (7/8). But obviously, it is possible to get three heads in a row, so calling me a liar wouldn't be justified. Likewise, if it was a higher probability that Jesus existed, you couldn't take it as fact. All you could say is that it's a higher probability.
More importantly though, probability requires some actual math. A number of trials, and the likelihood of a particular outcome. I have no idea how one would calculate the possibility of Jesus existing. Maybe there is some formula historians can use, but I'm not aware of one.
Until we have something like that, we can't even argue based on probability, and the best answer would be that we don't know.
