I certainly don't doubt the existence of Christ Jesus but the historians, which are few, are pretty mum about the whole affair. Do you really think that Christianity spread from the East and throughout Europe through traveling minstrels or some such historian ?

The Christ is an Impulse and the spread was through Christ Himself and this Impulse would have been evident even if nothing was written , nothing at all. No one should have to apologize for the lack thereof or paucity of historical writings for to expect that the route was through the written word is to totally underestimate the Christ inbeing and Self.

Is that really your best response? A self-published non-peer-reviewed book that doesn't rely upon actual scientific literature?

http://www.paleolibrarian.info/2012/...of-mental.html

Ooooh... a negative book review from a webpage from someone selling a book trying to make the opposite argument. You really know how to pick 'em.



Also, this doesn't support your first case at all. So are you abandoning that one?

Right. Because someone whose primary qualification is that he is an "atheist activist" is really going to match up well against a professor of religious studies. Keep 'em coming! Every time you trot out one of these no-name folks, you only provide more evidence of how bad of a position you're taking. Just like all conspiracy theories, you can find random people who also believe, but that doesn't make your argument any stronger.

I'll also point out that at this time, you have not actually presented any particular argument in favor of your beliefs. Instead, you're just providing Amazon links to books from people that nobody has heard of and have no qualifications that make them believable.

I like how you expose your ignorance but don't realize it.

I think you misunderstand. Let me lay it out for you. OP said this:

And I said this:
He is wondering why there aren't records of people during Jesus's time and shortly after saying he wasn't divine. I'm telling him that there aren't even contemporary non-biblical records of Jesus!! So to use the argument that there is no surviving records of people arguing against Jesus' divinity is just ridiculous. There is no contemporary non-biblical mention of him even existing, or of anyone even saying anything at all about him (divine or not).

That's all, my friend. I'm not arguing that Jesus didn't exist. Other people took that ball and ran with it.
The only surviving pieces of non-biblical mentions we have that Jesus ever lived are from two writers several decades to a century after his death - one of which in part is widely believed to be sloppy fraud by Christians (historians would never catch good frauds - how would they? It's a small bit of text on a page in a copy of a copy). The earliest actual physical record we have of these pieces of evidence are copies of copies of copies dating to the 11th century, long after Christianity had Europe deep in its grip.

It's not a settled question whether Jesus lived or not. It is impossible to prove or debunk. What we have are flimsy assumptions and suppositions that academia weaves into an assumption filled standard view - one assumes that a historical figure, assumed to exist when written about, actually existed unless there's hard evidence to the contrary. There's little science or even logic to it - it's just what the field has to do to not be ridiculed. That's the nature of ancient history when so little survives about a particular figure. Don't pretend like anyone knows whether Jesus existed. We have no clue and probably never will.

Might as well just say that Abraham Lincoln didn't exist while you're at it.
Makes about as much sense...

"If we ignore the contemporary evidence, then there's no evidence."

And who are these other "minor figures" for whom we have detailed records? You have not supported this at all.

I stand by my claim that you're overstating the argument. On both counts (the non-existence of records of Jesus and the existence of detailed accounts of other minor figures), your argument does not proceed successfully.

Well, except that if you ask academic historians who have studied the history of the time, they would say it's a settled question. But if you ignore those people and listen to the loud voices of fringe folks, you can come to the conclusion you've reached.

You're welcome to say that, but I'll just respond by reaffirming that your position is grounded in an overstated argument, and I'll further argue that you're just being ignorant. I am fully confident that you have no idea what academic historians actually do when they reach their conclusions. You're like the anti-vaxxer clinging to the gmosareevil website as your sole source of information.

Kooky Kenneth Humphreys who you cited, who wrote that jesusneverexisted.com website aligns himself with holocaust deniers. Are you going to deny that existed also?

Two points. First, others have alluded to this, but there are historical mentions of Jesus (Tacitus was mentioned, Josephus is another, the authors of the gospels, etc.).

Second, I actually don't see why we should expect there to be detailed records of Jesus. He was a relatively minor religious figure in a relatively minor corner of the Roman empire of little political significance. The fact that we have the writings about Jesus we do is primarily due to his followers punching way above their weight in later history.
Two points. It is an important element of Islamic theology that Muhammad is not divine. This obviously doesn't mean that legends won't arise or that critical comments won't be censored, but I don't much reason to think this view will change in the view.

Second, I think the historical consensus has shifted away from claiming that Christianity caused the Dark Ages (if that ever was the consensus). Instead, I think the more common view is that the biggest cause of the intellectual decline of the post-Roman centuries was due to the collapse of the Roman Empire and the corresponding loss and decentralization of power and wealth that is usually a prerequisite for a thriving intellectual culture. In fact, I think medieval historians typically think of Christianity as having an overall positive force during this era because of its preservation of many of the ancient Roman and Greek texts (Peter Brown's History of Western Christendom is an excellent resource on this question).

This means you have a bad theory about religiosity.

Pretty sure all tooth was saying is that the lack of evidence we see for people arguing against jesus being divine is not surprising because the evidence for jesus is equally lacking and any evidence for the former has probably previously been destroyed. He is not however, arguing that either people arguing against jesus being divine or jesus himself did not exist during the early days of christianity.

Sure. I was disagreeing with his claim that we'd expect historical records for Jesus.

This is an interesting hypothesis, but it's unlikely to be true. Very early Christianity was very decentralized. This meant that there was a wide spread of theological beliefs. It took time for that theology to become centralized in a meaningful way. It would be highly unlikely that such a systematic process would have been possible until Constantine, when Christianity got state support behind it for the first time and the first Council of Nicea happened to build a true theological consensus.

There's a lot of history in that 300 year gap, and it's unlikely that Constantine would have been successful at completely eliminating all writings to that deny the divinity of Jesus. (Not to mention that there's really not much to support that he engaged in that specific behavior, as the systematic destruction of opposing cultures *IS* something that history tends to be good at recording.)

Indeed, if you look further into the history of Christian theology, and look at the debates within the Council of Nicea, there is plenty of evidence that theological diversity existed that wasn't systematically destroyed. This would mean that if such a systematic destruction took place, it would have been particularly selective so that we would have evidence of other (now understood as heretical) beliefs but absolutely no evidence of this particular (now understood as heretical) belief.

If you wanted to look even more closely, the Council of Nicea specifically took on the question of the nature of Jesus' divinity when they looked at Arianism. This dispute is not quite what I think Tooth had in mind, but it stands as evidence that such disagreements did exist and were not destroyed in the suggested manner. It would be very hard for this particular strain to be fully maintained and intact while some other belief that is similar is completely wiped out.

So the systematic destruction of writings that deny Jesus' divinity is such a historically implausible scenario that there's no reason to believe that it happened.

I think if he were the person as portrayed in the bible we should expect more but if he was just a Jew who got crucified then I would agree with you.

It is historically interesting that the records we do have of Jesus have been as well maintained and are as numerous as they are. Even without a conversation about the nature of Jesus (myth, person, divine, whatever), he is a historically curious entity.

I think that some would like to see non Christian records of Christ Jesus in order to agree to existence. Tacitus and Josephus (Jewish historian ?) make note but of course Tacitus was born 25 years after Golgotha. It appears that some would only settle for a middle east firecracker, at least. LOL

I guess. My own view is that Jesus is the most over-studied person in history. He didn't write anything himself, and was neither a systematic or deep thinker. There are some interesting moral ideas in the Gospels, but it isn't clear how much of those derive from Jesus himself. Theologically, what seems most important is not his actual theological views (insofar as we can even identify them), but rather the closeness he seemed to feel towards God. Even his historical importance is strange, as it is mostly the result of things that happened after his death (i.e. the rise of Christianity).

As a comparison, I regard Mohammad as a vastly more important person.

Really? What aspect of the portrayal in the Bible are you referring to? If Jesus went to Rome and performed magic in front of the emperor on a grander scale than most of the miracles in the Bible, then I would agree with you. But someone who claimed to heal the sick in an obscure province, who is killed after a couple years of publicity? I'm not so sure.

Even today faith healers are pretty obscure. Most people just think they are fakes, as no doubt most would have believed of Jesus. Part of the point here is that one of the things that Christian theology has to explain is this obscurity. Why, if God decided to become a human, did they decide to do so in such a relatively minor fashion? Why not go to Rome, China, or India? It seems to me that in a vacuum you would expect the Incarnation to be a bigger deal than Jesus' life actually was.

People certainly had a different attitude towards faith healers and miracles back then than they do today. We can't compare the reception they receive today to what it must have been like 2000 years in a superstitious pre-scientific society.

This is a little misleading. It is true that Arianism was a non-Trinitarian view that explicitly stated that Jesus was not God. However, they did view Jesus as a divine or semi-divine being who, while created by God, existed prior to the creation of the universe. One Arian proposal was that Jesus was made of the same kind of substance as God, while still being a distinct and lower being.

Arianism was also not clearly heretical even after the second century (Arius himself wasn't born until the third century). For instance, Geza Vermes says this:

I think it's tricky because in all of the pre-nicene texts I've read, there really isn't much in the way of systematic or philosophical reflection on the nature of Christ per se. We're used to thinking in those terms, following the trinitarian councils, but it didn't seem to occupy Clement, Tertullian, Justin Martyr, or Ignatius (to name a few) in the same way.

So on the one hand they all seem to refer to Jesus in a way that can and probably should be taken to emphasize his humanity, but they also all ascribe to him an importance and station far different from any other human, and sometimes seem to ascribe some kind of divinity. For example in the epistle of Ignatius to the Ephesians:

The most convincing arguments I've read with regard to some form of early high Christology posit that the Jewish monotheism of the time tended to consider a kind of identity of God as more important than a philosophical classification as substance or nature, and that early Christians sort of included Jesus in that identity without worrying too much about the kind of philosophical contradictions that would bother the later more Greek church fathers. N.T. Wright argues this, as does Richard Bauckham.

The idea seems to make sense of Paul and some of the other ante-nicene fathers pretty well.

This theory seems consistent with my claim about Arianism. If the ante Nicene fathers held contradictory and unformalized views on the nature of Jesus and God, then it seems very plausible to claim that while the Athanasian branch emphasized one part of that tradition (the high Christology part), the Arians emphasized another--the lower status of Jesus, or a strict monotheism. But then both of these views are merely different formalizations of an initally contradictory collection of ideas by pruning out some of the inconsistencies.

Thus, Arianism isn't really a heresy except retrospectively, as it isn't deviating from a set orthodoxy.

It's not that simple man. You're not thinking about this rationally, which is understandable given that most people don't look at history from first principles, but rather narratives.

For nearly all historical records, the only copies we have are things that are copies of copies of copies (done by Christian monks). For example, the earliest writings we have of Tacitus and Josephus that concern Jesus are the 9th and 11th centuries. The vast (vast) majority of writing that existed on anything is filtered through the copying choices of monks who belonged to religion that killed people for blasphemy for over 1000 years.

Meanwhile, we know that Christian monks have deliberately inserted false passages into the works of Josephus rather than copy it faithfully. We know this because they were total morons and made the forgery obvious. Imagine what a non-idiot scribe could do? Or multiple over centuries? We know for a fact that the will is there. Historians would have no way whatsoever of knowing what was and wasn't said in the histories if a Christian scribe, worried about lack of any historical mention of Jesus, decided to spruce up Tacitus a little, as someone else did sloppily with Josephus. Indeed, the argument of some in this thread is that it's odd that Jesus would even be mentioned given how minor he was (I don't agree, but they make that argument).
It wouldn't be "hard" at all, let alone "very hard". They simply wouldn't get copied by Christian monks and would rot away.

Seriously, what Christian monk, selecting a tiny handful among tens of thousands of writings to laboriously copy and preserve, is going to maintain records and writings that provide evidence or arguments that Jesus was a fabrication? That's pure blasphemy.

Even if such a thing wasn't true, pure numbers alone mean that it's extremely unlikely any non Church source of commentary about Jesus would survive. Look at parallels with today. Nearly all of the stuff written about Mormonism, the Book of Mormon, and Joseph Smith is written by sympathetic minds. Why? Because Mormonism is a fairly small cult, everyone who doesn't believe in it thinks it's bull****/obviously absurd and is not going to take time to debunk it. Meanwhile, fervent believers write copious material from the perspective of the correctness of Mormonism, since it's vitally important to them. Thus 99+% of the written content on Mormonism is sympathetic. Think about that, then ask yourself: which of the above are Mormon monks going to preserver and copy over a 1000+ years where they control all scholarly activity?

This is why people like the OP. When you imagine the same scenarios with say Scientology or Mormonism taking over the world and 99.9% of writings being lost (and the choice of the ones that survive being decided by Christian monks), it becomes obvious very quickly that anything critical is gone.
You really, really haven't thought this through. Even forgetting about the above, there's no way the Church wouldn't have destroyed critical writings as they consolidated power. This is an organization that burnt people alive for blasphemy. Forced scientists to retract statements that were at odds with their theology. You think they're going to leave around writings that argue Jesus didn't exist (or wasn't anything but an ordinary man?)

So which is the longer shot here... Jesus not existing or Jesus being God incarnate.