Can you tell me how many papers you can find on the serious inquiry of the existence of Abraham Lincoln? You're not going to find a single scholarly work addressing that question, so I guess that means that he didn't actually exist.

They may admit that, but that's a false claim. Historicity of persons is established by an extremely low bar. A name on a ship manifest or diary is sufficient to establish historicity. It is more than sufficient that Josephus wrote of Jesus (even though there is evidence that the specifics of what Josephus said regarding Jesus *WAS* tampered with).

See above. You're chasing down a false criterion. The absence of debate over the issue does not imply the absence of evidence.

Huh? Can you provide any evidence?

Perhaps you should be aware that the Jesus Project (a follow up to the Jesus Seminar) was a laughing stock by basically the ENTIRE community of historians. The ability to generate media attention is not the same as the ability to generate credibility.

honestly, Aaron, I've named you numerous times as one of the theists who I applaud as being capable of putting theists in a positive light. I am fully confident you are capable of having an intelligent conversation. If you think there's any comparison in the historical evidence of Abraham's existence and that of Jesus then I retract all positive comments I've had in the past.

Since I truly believe you are aware of the difference I have to question if you're just being intellectually disingenuous? But to what end.

Its such a crappy retort that I expect this to come from Splendour or Gunth.

Honestly, its really disappointing to see this from you.

Obviously that's (Josephus) not sufficient hence the controversy.

Would we be so lucky as to have Jesus name on a manifest or a diary. We all know that outside of the Bible, whose books were written decades after Jesus death, there's really no first hand evidence of his existence.

correct... the absence of evidence is the issue.

http://www.bibleinterp.com/opeds/hoffman1044.shtml

Hoffman's own words.

No... it IS sufficient, and the controversy is contrived.

*facepalm*

if you say so. As I'm sure you're aware, there's plenty of scholars who content that Jesus was a myth. Furthermore, there's no compelling evidence that he was real. You keep hinting that there's evidence yet you provide none.

I'll continue to trust the multiple sources I've seen (from both church scholars as well as non) that state that the evidence isn't there. If you have some compelling evidence you should show it. Heck, you should go on a media tour because it would be huge news.

You clearly do not understand what's going on here. You've erected a certain standard:

I have shown how that standard is nonsense in the realm of historicity by pointing to its failure to be applicable in another setting.

You are clearly not following your own procedures (similar to lawdude's so-called "consistent standard"). *OF COURSE* Abraham Lincoln existed. But have the scholars that accept this claim "done any scholarly research to reach that position"? What does it even mean to pursue the question of Abraham Lincoln's existence in a "scholarly" manner?

Until you can answer that question, the question of the scholarly pursuit of the historical Jesus is meaningless.

I see... Josephus mentions Jesus according to 11th Century texts which many scholars believe have been tampered with... , is sufficient evidence that Jesus existed. And despite evidence of it being tampered with, the controversy is contrived.

I'm afraid I have to retract my previous promotions of you.

I just don't find such intellectually bankrupt discussions all that interesting. After the Abraham Lincoln thing in this... its just sad.

The original challenge still stands. So far, all you've got is a wikipedia link.

This shows a huge level of ignorance. More from Hoffman

That's BS and you know it. There's reasons that scholars don't have to do research to verify that Jesus existed;
for starters, the evidence is all around them; photographs of the man, his writings are preserved, 1st hand testimony of people who worked with him, etc.

2nd; he's not associated with fantastical stories doing impossible things.

The fact that there is sufficient documentary evidence to LOCATE and DETERMINE that there had been tampering, and enough to FIX the tampering, and despite the tampering find that Jesus's HISTORICITY IS INTACT according to a CONTEMPORARY HISTORIAN is still not sufficient? What will it take to convince you?

Hoffman, re-quoted but emphasized differently:

Thinking that the fantastical stories are an intentional creation of a mythical person demonstrates ignorance.

PS - LOL @ all the ad hominem.

This is true in one sense and anti-intellectual in another.

It's true. Indeed, almost analytically true. Most of history has happened without us knowing anything about what happened. If Caveman X roasted deer meat over a fire with Caveman Y in a cave that no longer exists in southern New Mexico exactly 11,423 years ago, we don't know it. It happened, it's a historical fact, and there's no existing evidence of it.

But it's anti-intellectual, because what you are IMPLYING is that therefore we are entitled to assume that things that are posited without any decent evidence actually happened. And that's precisely contrary to critical thinking.

Lots of things happened that we don't have any evidence of, but that doesn't mean we are entitled to conclude that specific things did happen absent any evidence for them. If a tree falls in the forest and nobody ever finds any evidence of it, yes, the tree still fell, but we don't get to assume it because we would also never find any evidence of it if the tree did not fall.

And this is also nothing but pure relativism. Yes, there's some gray area and room for disagreement as to what claims constitute extraordinary claims. Guess what: there are gray areas in any epistemic system. Nonetheless, I think you are being intellectually dishonest here-- you know damned well, for instance, that if a housemate of yours told you that your neighbor knocked on the door while you were out, that would not be an extraordinary claim, and he told you that an extraterrestrial knocked on the door while you were out, that would be one. You wouldn't say, in response to that, "well, how do you really know if the extraterrestrial claim is extraordinary?".

And so it is with resurrections, appearances of God, etc. Those are extraordinary claims.

Again, I think there's pretty good circumstantial evidence of Jesus' existence, but the claim that Josephus wrote about him is contested, and in any event, the Antiquities were written six decades after the traditional date of Jesus' death at a time when everyone agrees that some form of proto-Christianity / Jesus cults were spreading in the region. The Gospels of Matthew and Mark were probably floating around in some form as well by this time. This is hardly contemporaneous eyewitness reporting.

Source please.

I mean, this could be true, but as a non-historian I am extremely hesitant to accuse these scholars of this level of ineptitude. Anyway, more to the point, the arguments in favor of Jesus existing seem pretty strong.

This is what I suggest, since you and a couple other people seem to view the Jesus Myth arguments with favor (even if you don't accept the conclusion), instead of us continuing to argue about the consensus of historians, why don't you start a thread laying out an affirmative case for the non-existence of Jesus.

So a historian is discredited unless he lived in the time of the events that he's writing about? Does that mean that any scholarship of World War 1 is now impossible?

So by challenging you to present a consistent "hermeneutic" (so to speak), I've suddenly become a relativist?

Aaron, this short comment demonstrates exactly what you are about-- and it isn't flattering.

"Historian", nowadays, means trained scientist who investigates the past, pulls together vast resources of documents and materials from archives, interviews primary witnesses, publishes his or her work under peer review, enters into the public debate where others can criticize and point out flaws in his or her work, etc. So yes, when a 2010-style "historian" writes about World War I, his statements (so long as they do not go beyond what the evidentiary record can support) are entitled to serious weight.

"Historian", in the ancient sense, means anyone who wrote something that purported to describe things that happened in the past.

Saying that you can put some trust in the findings of a 2010-style historian regarding an event that happened decades ago does not establish that an ancient historian's writings regarding events that occured decades before the authorship of his history can be considered similarly reliable.

It may be fun to "challenge", but it's cheap. If you want to set out your epistemic theories, be my guest, instead of intellectually dishonestly pretending to find fault with mine.

*Yawn* I win, and you don't even realize it. Modern historians piece together history from the writings of people like Josephus. How do you think Josephus put together his historical accounts? Do you think he just sort of sat in a room by himself and made it up? Or perhaps he

I'll grant that "peer review" didn't happen back then, but I'll also tell you that "peer review" of modern scholarship has nothing to do with follow-up interviews with the subjects of a study in order to verify that the person actually said the things that the historian claimed he said.

Out of curiosity, how much do you know about "peer review" with respect to historical scholarship?

Aaron,

I haven't followed this thread super closely, can you expand on what you mean by this:

Are you saying that the bar in which you decide whether a person actually existed is very low? I find that odd ... should we just assume that every person that any historian mentioned (or is mentioned in a ship's manifest) was a real person?

Actually, Aaron, WE DON'T KNOW. That's right, we don't know. Modern historians use ancient historical accounts, sure, but they piece them together with other evidence to form an incomplete mosaic from which tentative conclusions can be made about the past.

But what did any specific ancient historian do? We really have no idea. It's possible he interviewed eyewitnesses. It's possible that he consulted whatever documents were available. It's possible he went to historical sites.

It's also possible that he simply quoted from whatever legends / rumors were floating around at the time. Or that he simply made parts of it up.

WE DON'T FRICKING KNOW, Aaron. And note-- it isn't that we don't know ANYTHING about the past, which is what you are implying in your trolling. We know broad strokes. We know things we can corroborate. We have pieces of the mosaic.

But we DON'T FRICKING KNOW the details, which include how Josephus compiled his histories, what they are intended to reflect, and how reliable they are. All we have is a text and we have to try the best we can to hypothesize how it all fits with the other things we know.

Now, having said all that, I've had enough of this. Why? Because this entire conversation is in complete bad faith. What you seem to be looking for is some sort of historical permission to believe extraodinary, fanciful claims that you wish to believe anyway. And what I am telling you-- and you refuse to listen to-- is that there is no historical permission that can be granted. People who want to believe things that clearly were unlikely to have happened are on their own. History doesn't help them.

If you want to believe things about Gods who came to earth 2,000 years ago, go ahead and do so. But don't pretend it's anything other than religous faith. Don't pretend that Josephus, or Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, or St. Paul can bail you out and give your beliefs support. If you aren't satisfied with the support that your faith gives to your beliefs, then stop believing. If you are satisfied, then stop trying to claim the mantle of history. And seriously, stop trying to pretend that if you can't have your historical interpretation, everyone else's have to fall with you.

It really is, in the end, a toddler's whine. "If I can't history for my purposes, I won't allow you to use it for yours!" Only the rest of us are trying to find out what may have happened; you are just trying to "prove" what you already believe.

/thread

Basically, yes. You can't go very far beyond that person's name without other information, but a single mention is enough. I'll give you a really dopey example.

Suppose you're digging through your grandparents' attic and you find a diary. The diary belongs to your great-grandfather (because he wrote his name on the inside cover). You don't know much of anything about him other than his name, so you start reading. You find the following passage:

"I'm mad at Joe right now. He's my brother, but I can't believe that..."

and the rest is too faded to read.

You would conclude that your great-grandfather knew a man named Joe. And regardless of whether you can find a single piece of corroborating evidence, there is no particular reason to believe that in this diary your great-grandfather would make up an imaginary "Joe" to be mad at just because he was bored (though it could have happened).

The relationship is probably a brother, but there's a chance that he was a "brother" in some sort of church-like setting. So you would have to find out more information about the culture of the area at the time, to see whether it would be reasonable to say that this brother was just a "brother." But not knowing the exact relationship between your great-grandfather and Joe does not mean that Joe is an imaginary person.

By the same reasoning, if you were to find a ship manifest that listed passengers, there's no reason at all to believe that the manifest is full of made up names, and that people who went by those names did not actually exist. Their historicity is established, though you may not be able to conclude anything in particular about them. Does this mean that there have never been imaginary names used to fill a ship's manifest, or that nobody every gave a pseudonym? Of course not. Have historians probably mis-identified someone as a result? Probably.

But those caveats don't really apply to Jesus. Jesus was a public figure, not just a random passenger for whom we have but a single mention. We have multiple writings from different types of sources (both sources that speak favorably of Jesus and those that don't), and we have entire bodies of contemporary people who claim some sort of knowledge of him, many of those having known him personally. There is simply no comparison.

LOL

I actually wanted to rid myself of this thread, but since you finally made an argument here rather than trying to be junior Socrates asking questions over and over against about mine, I'll respond to this.

Now, I agree with part of this. Jesus was a public figure. That happens to be a huge argument in favor of his historicity. You generally don't have a bunch of people running around claiming to be followers of someone who didn't exist, arguing about his teachings, until councils have to be convened to clear it all up and settle on a story. In that sense, it's much stronger than a name on a ship's manifest.

But everything else you say is actually categorically false. We actually don't have one shred of historical evidence written contemporaneously by ANYONE who knew Jesus. The closest we get is if you accept Peter's authorship of his letters. If that's the case, we have one non-contemporaneous source. We don't have a single letter attributed to Peter written during the time that he supposedly knew Jesus. They were all written later.

But whoever wrote the canonical gospels? Didn't know Jesus. They were all written years after his death, and weren't written by the claimed authors. They also borrowed from each other and from other sources, and thus contained multiple layers of hearsay.

The non-canonical gospels? We don't have any evidence as to who wrote them. Also, again, written years after Jesus' death. Nothing contemporaneous.

St. Paul? He never met Jesus. Not even once. Everything he said about Jesus is either made up out of his own hallucinations or came from hearsay. Plus, some of his writings weren't even written by him.

Other authors of parts of the New Testament? No evidence they ever knew Jesus, we don't know who wrote them, and they were written years after the fact.

Early Church leaders? We don't have any writings. The Catholic Church claims there were 3 or 4 1st century Popes who were all ordained by Peter. Any evidence of this? One disputed letter attributed to Clement. That's it. And, of course, Clement never knew Jesus (and probably didn't meet Peter).

Josephus? As noted above, it's likely he didn't even write what he is claimed to have written, but even if he did, it was written decades after Jesus lived and after the Jesus story circulated. And, as I said, we have no real idea what the source of his information was.

Not one authentic contemporaneous writing exists that refers to Jesus while he was alive or even in the initial years after his death. NOT ONE.

I will repeat. Not. One.

There is no ship's manifest, Aaron. That doesn't, in the end, mean he didn't exist, because, you see, I don't make historical claims that I can't back up, and I do agree with you that the fact that he was a public figure makes the idea that all these people started running around believing in a complete myth all at once-- and not even agreeing as to exactly what the myth was!-- rather difficult to swallow.

But the ship's manifest? Let me know when you find it. But let's be clear what you are looking for-- a ship's manifest is written by someone who personally or through his direct subordinates identifies the passengers, and it is recorded contemporaneously with the voyage. A ship's manifest written from triple hearsay reports 60 years later is not evidence of anything.