We have writings that describe the contests at the Flavian Amphitheatre, as well as other facilities that had the same purpose. The design of the facility itself contained animal pens and rooms that were of the type used to house gladiators. We have artwork contemporaneously depicting the contests.

Again you know this and are trolling.

If you don't think that there is an enormous amount of evidence to substantiate gladiatorial contests in the colisseum vs the unlikely events in the Bible (Worldwide flood, Jesus walking on Water, The ressurection, etc.) then I have a bridge to sell you.

No, I'm challenging you to think more carefully about your claim:

I'm waiting to see you prove that this is what you actually do by first establishing your criteria for things we can agree upon. Once you've done this, we can look to see whether it's being applied consistently.

As of this point, you have established the following as "good" evidence: Writings and paintings. Is this correct?

Edit: By the way, this means that the answer to

Is no. This is a key fact in terms of your consistent application of the standard.

Earlier christians were much smarter than christians today, though they were much less educated. They realized that faith was really the only way to believe this stuff. Now that intelligent people are way less likely to be chrisitians, you get stuff like this thread.

I know this wasn't directed at me. Writings and paintings would suffice as ample evidence for something that could have happened 2000 years ago, if that something is well within the realm of possibility.

Once again, you are trolling. There are multiple pieces of evidence which are consistent with each other, including not only multiple CONTEMPORANEOUS (a key word, because every book in the New Testament was written way after the events were stale) writings and artwork, but also the design of the Flavian Amphitheatre / Collosseum itself (which contains the pens for gladiators and animals).

If you do not believe me, I invite you to visit Rome with any reasonably competent archeologist.

In contrast, if you visited Jerusalem with a reasonably competent archeologist, you would find-- absolutely no contemporaneous evidence of Jesus' existence.

It's a consistent standard of proof. Boiling it down to "written stories" is reductive. You use the mosaic of evidence to establish facts, and the facts that we can establish about things that happened 2,000 years ago are pretty general.

Honestly-- and maybe we should do a separate thread on this-- I think most Christians now know better than the Christians in this thread. I know plenty of Christians who don't make claims that you could establish the events portrayed in the canonical New Testament through historical research. They just have faith in God and that Jesus will save them.

And there really isn't anything wrong with that, as long as you don't start oppressing nonbelievers or engaging in violence based on your faith. It's harmless, not any different from somebody who reads the astrological forecast in the newspaper every day or someone who practices a couple of hours a day of yoga and meditation. Indeed, faith can drive people to do good works-- the soup kitchens and homeless shelters of America tend to be staffed by devout Christians.

But for some reason, a minority of Christians can't simply live with the concept that this is just something you have to hold on faith. They have to tell themselves that you really can use this or that fact to "prove" the Christian story. And in order to do that, they have to relax standards of proof, ignore contrary evidence, and minimize some gaping holes in the story.

Yeah, that is a valid point. The type of people you describe above probably wouldn't post on theology subforums, but probably make up some silent majority of chrisitans.

The worst part is that it is so easy to just say that "Ok so I believe that early christians were willing to die for their beliefs but there are many examples in history of people dying for things they couldn't be sure of or for reasons that I think are actually wrong so it is not that good of an argument." It's like talking to somebody who not only thinks "1+1=2" is a good argument for christianity but thinks "2+2=5" is good also.


EDIT: And to be fair, a few christians ITT did admit that it isn't really supper important, but that notion that christianity can be shown to be true based on evidence in 2010 seems to be a not uncommon view here and is pretty ridiculous.

It's amazing how rationally you can dismiss other people's false beliefs and yet have such a blind spot for your own.

It's not harmless if their faith freezes them into inaction on dire human issues (like global warming) where an otherwise rational person would feel compelled to do something.

Sure, but that's a separate question. All global warming denialists-- whether the denial arises out of religious faith, laissez faire ideology, or energy company profits-- are worthy of condemnation. But I suspect that most believers don't come to the conclusion that we don't need to do anything about global warming because of Christian doctrine. That's a fringe position.

To me, this counts as a head shot to your position. By basically all scholarly accounts (secular and religious), there is no doubt in the existence of the historical Jesus. I figured that you held such a position early on, and this seems to verify it.

Basically, this amounts to holding an "internally consistent" view that is incongruous with modern scholarship.

As a point of philosophy, good luck trying to come to terms with this. According to this standard, you have already predetermined what things you will and will not accept as possibilities, and therefore things that are not possible are not going to be accepted as possible, and you've completed your circular logic.

It has been said that only a fool will accept the validity of a claim on the basis of insufficient evidence. One must wonder what sufficient evidence can be presented to verify that claim.

blah blah blah...he won't accept a written account of a dude walking on water. call it circular logic all you want if it makes you feel better.

It's not that there's NO doubt. There are hypotheses of Jesus as a historical pastiche. I don't really buy them, but the evidence of Jesus' existence is more circumstantial than you might want to admit.

That said, you missed my point. When you are assembling a mosaic and you only have a few tiles, you can reach some general conclusions but not much in the way of specifics. The claims of Christians include a bunch of specifics that go way beyond what the evidence could possibly support.

I suggest that the evidence is stronger than you want to admit. This comes up repeatedly in this forum, and nobody has yet presented any significant evidence that within the academic community that there is a belief that there was no historical Jesus.

If you want to step up to that challenge, go ahead and take your best shot.

I agree with this, actually. Not every factual claim can be supported by evidence. I've even made this argument myself.

My point with you is that you're not nearly as consistent in your standard as you believe you are. I also assert that you don't actually have such a rigorous understanding of history that you can back up your claim of having this consistent standard.

excerpt from Jesus Myth Theory on wikipedia

This
and this

Yeah... do you think that nobody has looked this up on wikipedia before?

Fine. I'm not part of the "anything can happen" camp.

When someone claims to be able to walk on water or be raised from the dead, at first I most certainly will not accept it. If however, there is ample evidence showing these claims to be true, I will be forced to accept them.

This gets us right back to where we started. What is sufficient evidence? My standard is a lot higher than yours apparently.

You can say this, but it has no content. Indeed, it reeks of relativism-- as if the only two choices when it comes to historical evidence are to refuse to believe that we can know anything or to throw up our hands and pretend that anyone's historical claims are as good as anyone else's.

Historical claims require evidence, specific claims require more evidence than general claims, we can be more certain of even general claims when several independent, contemporaneous pieces of evidence can be fit together, and extraordinary claims (such as supernatural claims) require extraordinary evidence.

It's not that hard, and what you are insinuating (because you aren't actually arguing anything) is that what we should do instead is just pretend that anything that was written by any whackjob in the First Century gets a presumption of accuracy, at least if politicians at a church council decided they liked it a couple of centuries later.

Minor point probably, but I would say that the contrast between specific and general claims here is definitely wrong. A specific historical claim, such as "Jesus existed" or "Julius Caesar crossed the Rubicon" requires much less evidence than general claims like, "the cause of the fall of the Roman Empire was political instability and foreign invasion" or "Religious governments tend to be more tyrannical."

You realize that this implies that your "consistent standard" has no content, right?

Historical facts need not have existing evidence for them to be true.

I get annoyed by this. It's not an intellectually sound position insofar as it requires a preconceived notion of what is and is not extraordinary, and the user of this position ALWAYS has the intellectual latitude to say "that evidence is not extraordinary enough." I think it's actually a rather weak position to hold.

I suggest you increase your reading comprehension.

it would seem not. Since it addresses the lack of serious inquiry into the question of whether Jesus did in fact exist. It backs up what I stated much earlier in the thread when I countered the statement that most scholars accept that Jesus was real is meaningless when most have not actually done any scholarly research to reach that position.

Even many Christians readily admit that outside of the Bible there is virtually no compelling evidence to suggest that he's real.

When you state:
you should back that up because even in articles that support that there isn't a large amount of scholars contesting Jesus's existence, they also back up that there's really no strong evidence to build the case for his existence.

The fact that people aren't really contesting it isn't all that interesting when you realize that there's not a lot of evidence supporting the historical Jesus belief nor is there much serious discussion outside of apologists and other scholars to settle it.

Kurto, there are tons of scholars who study the historical jesus--which includes determining whether or not he existed. It is a lively research project. The reason why they don't talk much about the Jesus Myth hypothesis is because of the consensus in the field that it is wrong. Scholars are engaged in dialogue with other scholars. That means that they tend to focus on areas of disagreement, or where there is something original to add. Neither of these are the case regarding the Jesus Myth Hypothesis, which is an old theory that has largely been discredited.

I really don't know why this theory gets so much credit. There are lots of important claims in the New Testament with very weak historical evidence. It seems to me that we should focus on challenging those claims, not the few that are justified historically. It is difficult to not think that when people give this theory more credit than it's due that their motivation for doing so is ideological.

I think you're making some false conclusions here. Again, most scholars admit that there is really no substative evidence that proves Jesus existence. It would appear that most scholars take it as a matter of faith that he existed because there is not sufficient evidence to make a positive claim.

As I'm sure your aware, there was a project (the Jesus Project) that disbanded last year whose goal was to study this issue. Their conclusions at the time of disbanding:
I don't know what more you want?