This isn't really true. I would say the evidence for Jesus would be enough to win a civil case (proponderence of evidence) but not a criminal one (beyond reasonable doubt). There are many people in antiquity whose existence is certain to a reasonable doubt (Aristotle, Pythagoras etc), and even some contemporaries of Jesus (Herod, probaby Paul).

The main pieces of historical evidence for Jesus are few and just a couple of pieces of new evidence (a newly found earlier version on Antiquity of the Jews with no references to Jesus or ancient Jewish/Roman texts claiming Jesus didn't exist) could sway the consenses historical view to nonexiestence. This isn't possible for people even from antiquity with a ton of evidence in favor of their existence.

I would like to see you argue the distinctions between Jesus being not strong enough to win a criminal case while Pythagoras can.

This paragraph makes me question how much you know regarding the evidence of Pythagoras' existence and the general level of understanding of historicity. But I'll await your argument before proceeding with that.

The historical evidence for Jesus is at the level of individual sources. If here is a reason to start doubting Josephus or Tacitus there is close to 0 reliable historical evidence for Jesus. I don't really care what category Pythagoras fits into, he was chosen as a random name.... substitute Euclid or Archimedes or whoever else has a myriad of reliable contemporary evidence towards. There is simply not a ton of evidence that Jesus existed even at the level of antiquity.

I think you've pretty much made my point for me. You really don't have a lot of evidence to back the claims you're making here. That you even jumped to Pythagoras as a "random name" "whose existence is certain to a reasonable doubt" just doesn't provide much credibility to your general level of knowledge of these types of claims.

You really have not elucidated anything specific that puts Jesus in one category but puts these other people in another. Vague assertions just don't carry much weight.

My claims aren't vague, I cited the 2 authors who are most important for historians in thinking Jesus existed. I also cited the fact that there is little if any writing from antiquity claiming Jesus was made up. Those things are major parts of the current consensus. If the validity of those things was in question the consensus would change.

There are people from antiquity who we have a ton of evidence for the existence of. Jesus isn't one of them. There is no contemporary archaeological evidence and just a handful of literary ones, believed to be accurate later translations of texts written shortly after his death. There are many figures from antiquity who have tons of archeological/physical evidence that essentially prove their existence. There aren't a handful of middle age copies of ancient texts that, if proven unreliable, would seriously call into question the existence of (say) Alexander the Great.

Its bizarre that you are attacking my credibility when I haven't even claimed any authority. If you think what I am saying is wrong, you can just say why. I'm not claiming its correct just because I am saying it. I'll probably bow out unless your posting gets alot better.

Those two authors are not the most important for historians in thinking Jesus existed. Even if neither Josephus nor Tacitus mentioned Jesus, there would not be any particular challenge to Jesus' existence. The volume of other evidences is more than sufficient.

The primary reason that those two are brought up is in counter to the "Yeah, but all those writings were by *CHRISTIANS* and shouldn't count" argument (which is an absolute failure when it comes to debating the subject).

It's true that there is more evidence for kings and rulers than there is for Jesus. But that's not the position that you put forth. I did not claim that there's more evidence for Jesus than every other person in antiquity.

You argued that the level of evidence is insufficient for the measure of "beyond reasonable doubt." And I will assert again that you gave nothing specific in support of that distinction.

The first sentence is literally an affirmation of my statement: "Short answer, yes. There's tons of it. Unless you've defined "evidence" to be a very specific collection of things that is so narrow as to preclude the existence of most people in antiquity. In which case, no."

How many people from antiquity are there for whom we have "contemporary archaeological" evidence for? By and large, such evidence isn't even the primary means by which we learn about specific people in history. We tend to learn more general things about cultures through specific archaeological findings.

You've claimed no authority, but you've attempted to speak authoritatively. You've made very specific claims about being able to distinguish this particular historical character from that one, and have not provided much in the way of a reasonable supporting argument. I've challenged those claims, and you still have not shown yourself to be knowledgeable.

So yes, I'm attacking your credibility because you've offered very little else than just your opinion. Your opinion is wrong for the types of reasons I've cited. I gave you a chance to clarify, and the strength of the position put forth in that clarification does not provide reason to even give credence to your opinion.

This is an odd quote. Ponder for a moment that you're trying to both defend your credibility when it's scrutinized (and surprised by the challenge) while simultaneously trying to admit that you're not even claiming to be correct.

Whether you choose to engage is up to you. But I'll say that it's silly to think that your posts have been good thus far.

Here's the longer argument for why I think you're wrong.

You came in claiming that you were able to make various types of distinctions between different historical figures, citing specifically Pythagoras. I would argue that Pythagoras in particular has a weaker case for historicity than Jesus.

In both cases, we have the creation of a particular collections of "followers" based on what could be broadly characterized as both intellectual, cultural, and religious influence. You have "Pythagoreanism" and "Christians." This, on its own, is sufficient reason to at least accept the plausibility of both people. It is unlikely in both cultures that a person could be made up out of nothing and still have enough influence for movements like these to take hold.

We have no writings directly from either Jesus or Pythagoras. We know of no verifiable grave locations or other pieces of "hard" evidence for either person. So at this level, they are roughly the same.

However, unlike for Pythagoras, we have a volume of contemporary writing about Jesus (note: "contemporary" here is being used to mean within a generation, so that people who could have directly known about the individual would have been alive during the time of the writing). For Pythagoras, the first more detailed accounts come about 150 years later. Setting aside the gospels and letters written about Jesus (which are often thrown out for no particularly good historical reason), we also have Josephus' writings, and he is contemporary to Jesus. Tacitus' writings are a little further out from that, but it's still within a century.

This last paragraph would place Jesus' historicity to be significantly more likely that Pythagoras'.

similarly, some of the things he reportedly said seem kind of awkward to just be made up

Yeah. It's also completely absurd that there are "Chinese" people born in America.

lol, it's not the assertion that a guy called "Jesus of Nazareth" was actually born in Bethlehem which is absurd. It's the specific stories. Luke 2:1-4

The idea that there would be a census where everyone was required to go to the home towns of distant ancestors is ludicrous, and historical records confirm that this was not done when the Romans took census.

Matthew contains an equally fanciful story about the holy family taking a post-natal holiday to Egypt to escape an infanticidal Herod and settling in Nazareth after that.

The fact that these two stories are contradictory (Luke has Joseph living in Nazareth pre-birth and travelling to Bethlehem for the census, Matthew has Joseph settling in Nazareth only after Jesus was born) is further evidence that they are awkward attempts to reconcile the Bethlehem prophecy with the fact that Jesus was known to be from Nazareth.

You don't think he would be at least an agnostic if he lived now?

The bolded is a little bit of a forced reading. There's nothing specific to indicate that the "only after" part is true.

But in general, this is not new and relatively uninteresting. I guess if someone holds to an absolute textual inerrancy of the gospel accounts, one might struggle with this. Reading it as the document that it is, it's not nearly as exciting or dramatic from the "gotcha" angle.

There are other problems, such as some of the geography being not quite right in the gospels and Acts. But again, it's not that interesting.

It takes a certain level of pure incredulity to think that statements like these could be completely made up and that somehow, nobody noticed. I think the most reasonable historical reasons for discrepancies would fall into the realm of normal types of recording errors of the time. For example, the perception that "all the world" was doing something may be an artifact of information not getting around that well. If something impacts your region as the result of a government decision, you might think that it was happening everywhere.

I submit the following link as a counter-position. This is admittedly not a topic that I'm well-versed in, but merely hold that there are better and worse interpretations of both the Bible and of history. We do not have comprehensive records of all regions from the time period. So in both directions, there's a fair amount of conjecture into the dark, and we should be hesitant on both sides to try to forcefully assert conclusions into that void of information.

http://www3.telus.net/trbrooks/firstcensus.htm

I think this is a bit glib. Taking thematic elements of other myths (virgin births etc) is one thing. A specific name like "Jesus of Nazareth" getting co-opted is something else. If the "oral history" you think the Gospel writers sourced this from was Messiah-related, then the argument about not coming up with a guy who was from Nazareth, some village nobody has heard of, still applies. And they can't easily have sourced it from an older oral history, because they were placing Jesus quite recently in time, so it would ruin the credibility of the story to borrow an older name. Not to mention, we simply have no evidence of these older stories. To avoid the conclusion that a guy called Jesus of Nazareth existed - something we do have some limited evidence of - you're instead proposing the existence of a whole bunch of other things we have no evidence of at all. Occam's Razor says the simplest explanation is that there existed a guy called Jesus of Nazareth.

Like I said, there are other examples of the Gospel writers writing around inconvenient facts. Each one of these will require some separate complex explanation. All of them can be solved at a stroke by accepting a very limited core of truth in the Gospel stories (there was a guy called Jesus of Nazareth, he was an end-times preacher who fomented unrest, he got crucified by the Romans for his trouble). None of this is proof of course, but it's enough for me to say that the existence of this guy is probable.

I haven't read Carrier's treatise on the historicity of Jesus and likely never will, so I could well be wrong. But I think this argument is pretty good as far as it goes.

Mmm. Matthew records that Jesus was born in Bethlehem, which of course is in Judea. After the jaunt to Egypt, Matthew says:

Not only is Nazareth simply introduced as "a city called Nazareth", with the implication that it has not been important in this story before, but Matthew clearly implies that the natural thing for Joseph to do would have been to return to Judea. You could argue that Matthew simply didn't know that Joseph was from Nazareth, but then you're left with him fabricating a reason why Joseph couldn't "return" to Judea after exile, something that contradicts Luke's account that he was only visiting anyway.

Edit: Rereading this, I was a bit unclear, so here's the simplified version: It is inconsistent that Joseph both lived in Nazareth (Luke) and yet had to be warned by God in a dream not to go "back" to Judea when returning to Israel (Matthew). Once again the conclusion is that Gospel writers were making **** up.

I have no idea what this means. The Gospels were written down a generation after the events. Who are these people who are supposed to "notice" and what is this source of truth they are comparing the accounts to?

That people made up stories and wrote them down in Gospels is not a theoretical possibility, it is a fact regardless of your religious persuasion. There are plenty of early apocrypha which are wildly different to the accepted Gospels and many were not disavowed until Nicaea. Why didn't people "notice" before then that these stories were made up? It's not a question that makes any sense.

Even being as generous as possible to Habermas (for instance, allowing the tortured and frankly silly translation of Luke as saying that the census was "the one before the first one conducted by Quirinius") his chronology does not make sense. Habermas argues that Joseph may have been required to visit Bethlehem because the census was for an inheritance tax and the inheritance records would have been there. His problem is that Luke places Jesus' birth in the time of Herod, who died in 4 BCE, and Augustus did not declare the tax until 6 CE. No problem, says Habermas, because the tax had been imposed once before. Quoting Dio Cassius:

Not only is there, to my knowledge, no other evidence of this prior incarnation of the inheritance tax, but for Habermas's purpose, it would need to have happened earlier in Augustus's reign. Augustus could not then claim that he "had found this tax set down in Caesar's memoranda". There is a gulf the size of the Pacific Ocean between Habermas quoting a Roman historian in ~200 CE claiming that such a tax had been levied earlier, and demonstrating not only that this happened, but that it happened precisely when Habermas needs it to to support his story.

Note that if you back-pedal and accept the vastly simpler story that Luke is simply wrong that the reign of Herod and the census of Quirinius coincided, we can conclude that people did not "notice" that Luke's chronology of major events was out by a decade. Hopefully that answers your question of why people didn't "notice" that the stories of Jesus' birth in Bethlehem were made up.

The city was first introduced at this point. You could argue lots of things about it. What I'm saying is that the conclusion that Joseph has never been there before is forced.

I'm saying that the level of specificity in the details makes it really hard to make things up. The gospels might have been written down a generation after the events, but that doesn't mean that the stories weren't already being told before then. There's also the fact that we don't see huge numbers of variants in the story, which indicates that there's some consistency in how the stories have been passed along. If there was some detail that was so stupid that you'd have to be a moron to have accepted it, that would probably have been sniffed out before anything was ever committed to writing.

Let me back up a bit and rephrase that. I can accept that some stories were possibly made up, especially with regards to specific incidents/conversations/interactions.

But let's take the whole taxation thing and consider it at face value through the lens of someone living at that time. We have a specific name of someone in government. If that name were made up, there's no way that the story goes anywhere. If the idea that a taxation census requires people to report here or there is so far outside of the norm for the government, someone would have said "That never happens" and the story dies.

So to just try to wash over the whole thing and assert that the whole thing was all made up just to match some prefabricated plot detail sounds like something that probably ought to have failed.

I can accept that some details got muddled or confused as being part of a reasonable explanation for things that don't exactly align in these narratives. I think those are normal sorts of things that happen in ancient documents.

You can claim that the gospel writers really, really, really needed Jesus to be born in Bethlehem, and so made up a bunch of stuff to make it happen. I just find it to be such a cynical reading that I barely even know where to begin with it.

Again, I'm not that knowledgeable in this particular topic and these particular questions, so I'm not going to try to go deep with the details. The page I quoted seems to make specific references to specific documents. I have no reason to think (for example) that among all of the research that has apparently been done, that he's also just randomly making up other things along the way.

Just as above, it comes off as blindly cynical that I don't even know how to address it. Should I read what you've said and think, "ChrisV is clearly fully knowledgeable of all the historical writings of Dio Cassius and so since he doesn't know anything about it, I should trust his judgment that this is a completely made up reference"? It may be true that "to your knowledge" certain things don't exist. I wouldn't expect you to know of all the references unless you were a scholar of the era!

The type of leap I'm challenging you on is the one that says "Because I don't know about this, it's more likely true that this guy is just making stuff up." It's just really hard to take you seriously when you do that sort of thing. The reflex to "this has to be made up" isn't one that matches how historians look at history. They certainly do take into account the biases and perspectives of the writer, but they don't treat everyone as being so insincere about their efforts that they must all be trying to lie about things all the time.

I know virtually nothing about Ancient Rome. My research consisted of looking up "inheritance tax" on Wikipedia and the entry for Ancient Rome says this:

According to that, there's no evidence of a prior inheritance tax. Habermas just quotes a single Roman historian alluding to the possibility, but giving no specifics. His whole argument turns on this, yet he never attempts to address the question of whether it could have happened when he needs it to, chronologically. A prior introduction of the tax during the reign of Augustus should appear somewhere in Roman history, and Cassius's account of the 6CE introduction of the tax seems to preclude Augustus having introduced it before. While, per Wiki, there's no evidence of the tax having been introduced in the days of the Roman Republic, it would not help Habermas's argument even if that had occurred.

If Habermas could have made the case for even the possibility of an inheritance tax during the reign of Herod specifically, he would have done so. Instead he cites a single source saying that such a tax had been previously introduced, at some vague point in the past, then proceeds to smoothly elide the distinction between that and what needs to have happened to make his account possible. It's just deliberate dishonesty.

You're expecting people to be able to distinguish fact from truth in events that happened 70 years ago! Suppose you talked to an average person in Europe today. What do you think the chances are they would be able to spot falsehoods slipped into accounts of how European governments conducted their affairs circa WW2? And Europe now is educated and literate. We're talking about credulous, illiterate people with much shorter lifespans.

I'm saying that Luke's account flies in the face of what we know about how Roman censuses (censi?) worked. That, Habermas's argument aside, it contains big chronological errors. That there are obvious motivations for someone to have made up the Bethlehem story. It's standard practice when looking at ancient accounts to compare them to what else we know and distrust the sections that aren't in accordance. When Herodotus says that in some battle the Persians had 150,000 men and the Athenians slaughtered them all with the deaths of only three hoplites and someone's pet dog, we look at that very skeptically given what we know about how possible that is and what Herodotus's biases are. We don't desperately try to bend known facts in an effort to render the story plausible.

Also, this is not just my opinion about the story in Luke, it's historical consensus. This is from Wikipedia on the census of Quirinius:

"Made an error" is pretty polite language for a story that makes no sense from start to finish.

First, Wikipedia is not the all-knowing source of information. Especially as you get into more and more technical territory, it becomes less and less reliable. But that's not relevant in this case, because in your haste you literally completely misread what was stated.

Did you notice that "the Roman Republic" is not actually the Roman government when Jesus was supposedly alive? Did you recognize that Augustus' last decade coincides roughly with the time of Jesus' birth?

In your haste, you're missing all sorts of details, and it's causing you to be wrong. Like, straight up wrong.

Edit: Direct links, so that there's no possibility for confusion.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_Republic

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Augustus

Nope. You're conflating the time of the earliest available writings to the start of the telling of the stories. This is one of the huge mistakes that non-historically minded folks make over and over again. By the time these stories were committed to writing, they were basically canon. Otherwise, we'd find huge variations in the copies of the text.

And I'm also not saying that the memory needs to be perfect! There's just lots more going on that you're missing because you're putting way too much weight on your own speculations.

It flies in the face of what we know about large scale Roman census worked. But it's not as if that's the *ONLY* way that taxes were taken (extorted) from the people under Roman rule.

Be specific about the chronological errors. After all, you've literally been shown to have made very obvious chronological errors of your own.

Ummmmm... it's common practice to consider biases in writings, but to "distrust" them requires a bit more than "well, they had a motivation." Everyone has a motivation all the time! And things aren't out of accordance nearly as bad as you keep assuming they are.

Right. And therefore, the whole episode is entirely made up and nothing at all resembling that ever possibly happened. There is a huge gap between distrusting the details and distrusting the entire incident.

It's historical consensus that there was no nation-wide census. Yes. I agree with that 100%. But that's not the same as saying that the historical consensus is that there was absolutely nothing resembling some sort of taxation census that ever happened in or around the area at that time.

You need to stop using such a broad tool when looking at find details.

In that case, I'd say that you "made an error" in your analysis. You have demonstrated a high propensity in this conversation of greatly overstating your position, and it's on display right here.

You talk about biases, but your bias towards thinking that everything has to point towards the gospels being totally made up must be the answer to all the questions. I cannot help you get past this. You have to find your own intellectual honesty and come to that yourself.

Grunching..
I don't believe in miracles in the biblical sense. But these days the word miracle gets thrown about for all kinds of scenarios that seem improbable but when accomplished bring much joy to others. And I do believe these things occurred in biblical times.

The water into wine for instance I'm pretty sure was just Jman sprinkling a bit of the up until then unknown go fast powder in and 20-30 doods tripping balls for few hours. No one was much hungry so the loaf of bread n 2 fish on hand tied everyone over aswell even though there was some (usually) huge appetites in the crowd. Great story tho

Come on man. Read my frigging posts before you accuse me of not knowing when the Roman Republic was. I'm not THAT clueless about Rome.

It's becoming clear that you have not read and understood Habermas's argument either. He requires this tax to have been introduced TWO SEPARATE TIMES DURING THE REIGN OF AUGUSTUS, the first time in 4BC or earlier so as to coincide with Herod. If you don't agree with Habermas here you should outline your own position.

You don't have a point here beyond "it's impossible to prove a negative". I can't prove there isn't a teacup orbiting Jupiter, you're right. But:

1. The story of travelling for the census appears in no other text, including the other Gospels
2. According to every translation of the Bible ever, Luke places the birth both during the census of Quirinius and the reign of Herod, a decade apart.
3. The census of Quirinius was Judea only and would not have affected Joseph.
4. If you want to disregard every translation of the Bible ever, we have no record of any earlier census.
5. No known Roman census required people to travel.
6. Judea was not a Roman province under Herod, but rather a client state. Even assuming it would be possible, why would the Romans conduct a census of a client state? The census of Quirinius was precisely because Judea had just become a Roman province.

The story appears in one source and is contradicted in every conceivable detail by everything we know from other sources. I'm genuinely bemused by your accusation that I am distrusting it for no reason. Aside from a primary source documenting the birth of Jesus not in Bethlehem, can you suggest a way in which the story could be less credible than it is?

WE DO! The church had to convene a meeting in 325 CE to throw out a bunch of material they didn't like. According to you, this material should never have survived in the first place, because people would just obviously recognise what was true and what wasn't? And there are entire books written about how even the canonical Gospels were altered over time. That there have never been varying accounts of Jesus' life is a pretty jaw dropping assertion. We have literally just been discussing varying accounts of his birth in even the surviving documents.

I remember NotReady used to cite Habermas all the time and I never read his stuff. If this is a representative example of his work, then lol. His argument here is that because Augustus introduced an inheritance tax in 6CE and Cassius says it was introduced before, then maybe it was also introduced during Herod's reign, even though we have no evidence of that and it contradicts what Cassius said, and maybe there was a census of Judea then, even though there's no evidence of one and Judea wasn't a Roman province at the time, and maybe people had to travel for that census, even though nobody ever had to travel for any census. Sure bro. Maybe.

He's not arguing that. He's quoting a source for that.

http://www3.telus.net/trbrooks/firstcensus.htm

So if you want to say that he's making up his source, then do that. Say that this guy is just an utter fraud. But you can't sit there in your professed level of ignorance and say "There's no way this could have happened" when the guy is quoting a source that says "this happened." (And no, wikipedia doesn't count as a source.)

Nope. I'm challenging that you can forcefully assert your negative conclusion into the void of information. There are multiple things going on.

1) You're insisting on a particular way of reading the text.
2) You're insisting a specific motive AND asserting actions as a consequence of those motives.
3) You're rejecting external references.

There's not much I can do with that.

Right. Because we have no evidence that those things existed, or that there was debate/discussion about those texts or anything. <sigh>

The texts that were rejected were rejected for all sorts of reasons. Among those reasons, many of the gnostic texts were written much after the time of the canonical books and so would (for all the historical reasons that you can imagine) be viewed as being less reliable. But now you're arguing that these books that were written later deserve to be treated as if they were as reliable as the original writings so that they undermine the consistency of the earlier writings?

(Incidentally, we know that they were altered over time because we can track those changes by finding earlier and earlier manuscripts. This is not new. Or interesting. Many of the "changes" that people tend to count are misspellings and other such errors. What you're not seeing are people inserting a bunch of extra details randomly in those counts. The various gnostic texts are not things like minor modifications of stories. They're literally a completely different style of text containing completely different theological perspectives that look and feel a lot like the philosophy of a different time and location. It's not even close to the same thing.)

This whole position is quite stupid because you're using information to make an argument that's utterly unrelated to the actual argument at hand.

Augustus would not be "representing that he had found this tax set down in Caesar's memoranda" (saying essentially that it was Caesar's idea) in 6CE if he had already introduced the tax once before during his reign. That makes no sense. Cassius is saying the tax had been introduced once before prior to Augustus being Emperor. Cassius is right in the middle of writing a complete history of Augustus's reign! If he meant that Augustus had introduced this tax before, he would have noted it earlier in his history, and would make specific reference to this earlier event when discussing the 6CE tax.