The Great Jesus debate. Did he exist at all - and if he did, what reasons do we have to believe he was divine?

[EllieArroway]

Madhairday and I have been plotting behind the scenes to have this debate as we think it will be interesting, both for us and for others.

Mad is a Christian & I am an atheist. I will leave it entirely up to her to present her case.

Mine is:

It's impossible to conclude that Jesus actually existed at all given that there's simply no evidence to work with. I am aware that the majority (although not all) of scholars, both secular & religious, have concluded that he did exist, but this is for inferential reasons not evidential ones, so the issue is nowhere near as cut and dried as many people suppose.

While I am generally happy to accept that there was some man, probably called Yeshua/Joshua/Jesus, who lived in the Galilean region at the beginning of the 1st century & who may have died by crucifixion at the hands of the Romans - I don't feel that this is particularly significant or justifies anyone in believing that he was divine.

I also believe that nearly all of the "Jesus story" - the nativity, the miracles, the resurrection etc is complete myth and never happened at all.

I have continually pointed out on many threads that "There's no evidence that Jesus existed" and been called ignorant and so forth. So, this is my opportunity to make my case and demonstrate that this is, in fact, a correct statement.

So, I'm kicking of this (hopefully) interesting discussion with:

There is no evidence that Jesus the man existed. Discuss

(By the way, this is an open discussion for anyone to join in, ask questions, make points etc, it's not just for Mad and I).

We have a multiplicity of early material, fragments of papyrus dating right back as early as the first century AD. The amount of material we have far, far surpasses any other ancient evidence for anything else

I?m not sure why you think this is significant. The sheer number of copies there are says nothing at all about the veracity of the claim within it. Even if there were a trillion perfectly preserved copies - so what? Christianity was a fast growing religion, one of the first to use holy books - this says something about the religion, but nothing at all about whether it?s based on anything true. This is an Argument from Numbers??there are gazillions of xyz, therefore it?s all true. No. Sorry.

The fact remains, however, that we have not a single original copy of any of the NT books. Whether it?s reasonable or not to expect to have is neither here nor there - we just don?t. So you cannot know what the originals actually said since none of us have ever seen them. The best guess for the very, very earliest piece we have (and it is just a piece) is that it?s a copy of a copy of a copy. At least third hand.

With other stuff, like the Illyad, this wouldn?t matter quite so much. But let?s not forget what these books are supposed to be - words either written by (if you?re a literalist, and I know you?re not) or inspired by God. His message to the world. If he wanted his message preserved, why not begin by preserving the books?

We're just not talking about some meandering writings written way after the time and lost in the mists of time and legend here

No, we?re not - and I?m not suggesting that. I?m talking about four accounts that give four different versions of just about everything. You?re assuming, by the way, this wealth of oral tradition handed ?lovingly down? etc. How do you know this? The very first thing we have is Mark - how do you know that he didn?t get together with the author of the Q source and make the whole thing up, like Joseph Smith did or L. Ron Hubbard? You are assuming that Christians were milling about prior to Mark - why? Who says they were?

There?s a 40 year gap (at least) between the death of Jesus & Mark?s gospel. We have not the vaguest idea what was going on then since there?s no source we can access to tell us. This is an assumption on your part that can?t be properly supported.

I think I've addressed everything. That's me done for the day.

:)

Ellie, to go back to the Greek thing - yes, it's a very minor point, but...when I say that scholary opinion is divided as to whether or not Jesus knew Greek, I am stating verifiable fact. I have read about this stuff! You say that you don't think opinion is divided. What are you basing that opinion on? I'm genuinely puzzled.

Which scholars have you read on Luke-Acts? If the honest answer is 'none' that's fine, most people haven't!

Can you tell us about any of the whopping changes that have been made to copies of the NT? Which passages? When were they altered? Why?

And re. the Jesus sacred rites - the obvious answer is 1 Corinthians 11, written in the 50s.

Lurchers, the Arthur / Jesus analogy; so, Jesus and Arthur were not similar people, and their traditions did not develop in similar ways. So how does the analogy work? Surely when you say 'it's an analogy' what you are really saying is 'these two people remind me of each other.' Nothing more precise than that. Some analogies are stronger than others, and I can't see that yours is very strong, tbh. Why Arthur rather than anyone else who lived before about 1000CE? Surely there are very few people indeed from that period of whom we do have any 'evidence'?

Oooh 'eck, Ellie, a lot of stuff in there, I'll have to come back to it, have had a manic day and run out of spoons I'm afraid.

Just a quick one on Tacitus - you're right, he didn't mention sorcery That was the Talmud. Your point about his lack of material on Jesus becomes moot really when you consider that we only have a couple of his manuscripts, dated from something like the 9th/10th centuries, and the great majority of his material is completely lost.

Be back when I have some brain power.

I thought there was some record of one of the early English kings having been a King Arthur, but happy to accept I might be wrong on that. And I was thinking of the way Arthur is supposed to be the most special of kings and the one who will rise again, though I don't know how old that superstition is.

BTW I have heard that there is a similar superstition attached to Francis Drake, that he and his boat will pop out of the sea if England is in dire peril. WHich is sort of mildly interesting given that there is a lot of historical evidence for the existence of Francis Drake...

I picked on Arthur because he was suggested upthread (and i know more about him than Robin Hood). The point is that when there is little historical fact about someone's life there is scope for that life to become mythologised. Obviously the way in which they become mythologised is going to be different given that they are operating in completely different spheres. Maybe Hengist and Horsa would be a better analogy, or not. Re Drake - i think the legend is that if England ever needs him someone needs to beat his drum (at Buckland Abbey) and he will answer the call (just in case we should be in need of a slave trading pirate!).

Holo I can give you dozens of changes in the NT - a long post that I don't have time for now, but rest assured you'll let a rather long list.

I'm faintly offended by your grilling me about what I've read/know. Why does it matter to you? Do my posts strike you as being written by someone completely clueless? I doubt you mean it in that way, but you are coming across as slightly patronising. I am not interested in either yours or anyone else's qualifications, I'm responding only to the points being made. Can you please do the same.

I should think it fairly obvious that I have read quite extensively on this subject and I'm not just making it up as a I go along . If I'm flat out wrong - and I'm sure I am at times, as is anyone, then tell me. But the insidious, "do you know anything about this subject" is rather rude. Yes, Holo, I do.

Literacy in any language at that time was extremely low. Fact. Scribes tended to be contracted to copy things out for people who couldn't write themselves. Fact. The lower down the social scale you were, the less likely you were to be able to read or write since it wasn't a necessary skill like it is today. Fact. A carpenter/fisherman would be a) very unlikely to be able to read and write in his own language & b) exceptionally unlikely to be able to do so in another language. Fact.

The lingua franca of the time is irrelevant. The possible literacy of the disciples is irrelevant. And we know (from the gospels) that Jesus could at least read, which makes him unusual. Could he write? Who knows? If he could - how did he learn? School? That was expensive, how did Joseph afford it? And if Jesus could write, why didn't he?

Your point about his lack of material on Jesus becomes moot really when you consider that we only have a couple of his manuscripts, dated from something like the 9th/10th centuries, and the great majority of his material is completely lost

Mad, please don't go down that route, it's a dead end. If we're going to start hypothesising materials that might exist but haven't been found or did exist but have been destroyed, then I may as well suggest there was a document written by Jesus saying "Ha ha, fooled you all! Suckerzz!" but got burned in a house fire in AD33.

Does anything we have from Tacitus demonstrate an historical Jesus. No. Same goes for Pliny the Younger, Jospehus, Seutonius et al. That's it.

1 Corinthians 11 is widely considered to be a later insertion. As well as 14, by the way.

Ellie, I wasn't meaning to grill you - I am genuinely interested in all of this, and how people relate to it, so I am genuinely interested to know whom you've read. I'm not doubting your credentials - I don't know your credentials! But neither am I going to roll over and say 'Oh, Ellie says it so it must be true'. That's not how debate works.

I am still slightly puzzled by the way in which you relate to the question of Jesus' knowing Greek (or not), though; it's a very minor point and would never mnake or break anyone's faith, but to me it's historically interesting and I'd want to try and answer it to the best of my ability. So I read about koine Greek - I know it's a complex subject, people write books and books about it - I read about literacy among Jews and Gentiles in the 1st c., familarity with particular types of Greek (e.g. the Greek translations of the Hebrew scriptures), and I read scholars who write about wheter Jesus knew Greek or not, and I find that some think yes, some think no. Both sides can argue their case pretty well, and the whole thing is intresting but as I say not earth-shatteringly important. So this is why I find it a bit odd that you discount so quickly the other side of the argument.

And the changes in the NT - yes, let's talk about them - if you started this thread to debate the historical Jesus, let's do it! Let's take each example and talk it through.

Is it too combative for me to ask you to substantiate your post of 18:45 wrt 1 Cor. 11?

Lurchers, I can't think of a single person, believer or not, who'd want to or be able to deny that Jesus was hugely mythologised. Same with Paul, and the apostles - just read the wonderful but completely apocyphal Acts of Paul and Thecla! Stories sprung up left, right and centre about all the major players in the development of the early Christian tradition. Same with all sorts of people throughout history who have made an impact on their surroundings. I'm not sure whether this observation has any bearing on the historicity of the people mythologised, though.

Ellie I'm also interested in knowing what evidence there is around 1 Cor 11 being a late insertion.

From books that I have read, my understanding is that variations between different manuscripts of the NT are extremely minimal - most limited to spelling differences and mistakes. There are thousands -not hundreds- thousands of very early manuscripts of the NT and again, the variation is very small. Many more manuscripts than, say, there are of the writings of Aristotle. Funnily enough I don't think anyone here doubts that Aristotle ever existed.

Am so happy to have stumbled upon this thread and plan to read it all properly when I am on a computer not this little phone!

Looks like a rare example of civilised debate. Unless someone got arsey on page 3... Ellie - love your name! (It is from Contact isn't it?)

Was literacy at the time certainly among the Jews as low as all that, considering that Jewish boys were required to study, indeed to learn, the Torah?

Paul, for example, a tent maker (so not very different in social status to a builder/carpenter/craftsman (carpenter isn't an exact translation of techne), clearly knew all the Hebrew Scriptures very well and wrote some of the letters ascribed to him himself. So I think the question of Jesus's literacy is much more open than you suggest, Ellie. As to why he didn't write, it seems pretty clear that in a ministry of perhaps two or three years most of the time he was speaking, not writing - he wasn't trying to communicate with anyone far away as Paul was, for example.

Literacy in any language at that time was extremely low. Fact. Scribes tended to be contracted to copy things out for people who couldn't write themselves. Fact. The lower down the social scale you were, the less likely you were to be able to read or write since it wasn't a necessary skill like it is today. Fact. A carpenter/fisherman would be a) very unlikely to be able to read and write in his own language & b) exceptionally unlikely to be able to do so in another language. Fact.

Except none of the above is a fact. None of us were there at the time to do a quick survey and find out whether people could read, whether there was scribes doing contract work or whether this one carpenter did not know how to read...

They are all assumptions made based on very old writings of which we probably only have copies now, and based on what historians today have been able to from the records that are available. I think that if we're not ready to accept what is written in thousands of manuscripts of the New Testament about Jesus as a , then it might be wise to be a bit more strict with how that term is used.

I am going to bed and unlikely to return to this thread... Mostly because regardless of how much we discuss Jesus remains the most important man of all times, and the Bible the most influential book in human history, so in the words of Charles Spurgeon, who was once asked how did he defend the Bible:

"You might as well defend an uncaged lion"

(Also can I also suggest a brilliant book I'm reading, written for both Christians and non-Christians, about Jesus' influence in today's world: Who is this man, by John Ortberg)

Niminy, imo the passage which is really interesting wrt Paul's languages, and the worlds between which he moved, is the end of Acts 21. More on that tomorrow maybe!

Also, why didn't Jesus write? For me the answer has to be that in 1st c Judaism, writing was second best, a poor substitute for personal presence. So to flip it on its head, why would Jesus write? He wS with his disciples all the time, so there was no need to write. Hence also why the gospels were written when they were; the written gospel being second best, a poor substitute for the shared memories of the first generation of Jesus' followers, so the timing of their writing from the late 60s onward makes sociological sense from the POV of the anciient preference of the spoken word over the written word, and also, really interestingly, from the sociological POV of how 'cultural memory' develops and grows out of 'communicative memory.' Oh I could talk about this all night! :)

GingerandCocoa: please bear in mind that there were centuries when more than half the world had not only not heard of Jesus and the bible, but had their own special myths and legends. Large parts of the world have always been resistant to Christianity, because their own indigenous myth systems suit them (eg SIkhism, Hinduism, Islam, Shinto and whatever the Chinese went in for before COmmunism).

And the main reason for the spread of Christian mythology over so much of the world was not that Christian myths are any more special, significant, beautiful or true than (for instance) Hindu or Muslim myths. It was basically to do with the Roman Empire conquering so much of the world and having picked Christianity rather than Islam when someone or a few someones worked out the usefulness of monotheistic systems rather than pantheistic ones as a tool for conquest.

I don't think the Roman Empire could have had much to do with the spread of Christianity in China. Prior to communism there were missionaries in the country but I think the vast majority (if not all) were thrown out during the communist era. the church in China has grown in very large numbers very rapidly, despite persecution.

According to the gospels, Jesus could read. If he was the lowly son of a carpenter, this was unusual. But he was unusual in some respect because he was able to travel around the place instead of working - who funded that? Maybe there was some mentor that paid for him to be educated & supported him financially later (just made that up, I don't know).

There are many, many reasons to suppose that the general literacy levels at that time were very low - under 10%, perhaps as low as 3%. Bear in mind the rarity of books and written material - for most people, it simply wasn't a required skill.

The Jewish law did expect people to "read" The Torah - but there's some debate about what this actually meant in practice. It's possible, probably likely, that children were taught chunks to memorise and recite.

But we don't know.

Jesus and his disciples would have spoken Aramaic, with a few Latin & Greek Koine words thrown in. That was pretty standard. If Jesus could read it was probably in Hebrew primarily, given what it is that we are told he was reading. He may also have been able to write in it, we don't know, because no one says. He may have been able to read Greek - again, we don't know.

But we do know that an average working Palestinian man in the 1st Century usually could not read or write. Jesus & his disciples were apparently average working men - you do the maths

There's one very important reason that Judaism survived & Christianity grew - books. Both religions were unusually bookish (after 40 odd years) so the stories were preserved in a way that nothing purely oral ever does.

The oral traditions died a death, the ones with the holy books thrived. Without the gospel writers, Christianity would have disappeared along with the thousand or so other mystery cults that were around at the time.

And yes, the support of the massively powerful Roman Empire played a key role too.

None of us were there at the time to do a quick survey and find out whether people could read, whether there was scribes doing contract work or whether this one carpenter did not know how to read...

There are people who have spent their lives studying this. But let's ignore it all because none of them were there at the time. Ludicrous thing to say.

And how do you know that Jesus was the most important man who ever lived? How do you know he lived? Were you there? Huh?

FFS.

From books that I have read, my understanding is that variations between different manuscripts of the NT are extremely minimal - most limited to spelling differences and mistakes. There are thousands -not hundreds- thousands of very early manuscripts of the NT and again, the variation is very small. Many more manuscripts than, say, there are of the writings of Aristotle. Funnily enough I don't think anyone here doubts that Aristotle ever existed

Just seen this.

Erm, there's evidence that Aristotle existed - the least of which is his "writings". What an odd comparison. Beats Julius Caesar, I suppose.

There are 25,000 bits of copies of the NT. I never said there were hundreds of thousands - did I? If I did, it was a mistake.

I said there were hundreds of thousands of discrepancies between them, which there are. Like I said, there are more differences than there are words in the entire NT. This is a well known statistic, look it up.

The Corinthians verse is divisive - some scholars think it was an interpolation, some don't. But I don't know - I wasn't there. Were you?

But we do know that 5 of the 13 letters that bear Paul's name weren't written by him at all. So, Christians weren't above a little, shall we say, creative writing at that time.

I'm taking over this thread because I'm trying to address every point made to me. Can we try not to meander too much - let's talk just about the gospels for now & who wrote them, then we can move on to something else. Yes?

But this is keeping me awake which I need to be at the moment - so thanks for that :)

Lots there, Ellie!

Before we move on to who wrote the Gospels, let's draw a line under the 'did Jesus know Greek?' question. Martin Hengel (heavyweight NT scholar) thinks yes. You think no. One academic book published last year is called 'Jesus and the Gospel Traditions in Bilingual Context' which deals with the question of how many of the early Christians were bilingual. It's well worth reading if you can. As I've said, it's not a deal-clincher, but to me, it's important that we answer these questions the best we can.

On 1 Cor 11, are you thinking of the passage in that chapter referring to headgear (11:2-16)? If so, yes, you're right, ome people do see that as a later interpolation - but I was referring to the passage later on (11:23-26) on the institution of the Christian sacred meal. We were talking about rites that developed pretty quickly centred on Jesus, to which 1 Cor 11:23-26 refers. I don't think any scholars see this as a later interpolation. Maybe I should have been more precise when I first mentioned this chapterbut yes, I was talking about the sacred meal, not the headwear! (I don't actually think that the headgear bit is later; I think it's often misunderstood).

If you are going to mention the authorship of the Pauline letters, that is another biggish subject and can't just be done away with by saying 'Well he didn't write some of them anyway'. Pseudepigraphy (writing in the nbame of another, usually famous person) was a literary convention that deserves to be understood properly. Maybe we can come back to that, if you are wanting to talk about the Gospels. Also, the fragments of text; another huge, fascinating area of study. Let's talk about them!

Lots of stuff here. I'm sorry I didn't come back last night. Not too well, back on antibiotics. Joy.

Will endeavour to address some points - not sure I'll get to them all

And do you really believe that 40 years of people passing on stories they've heard to each other is likely to result in a consistent & reliable account? No one, out of those hundreds and hundreds of thousands of people would have over egged the pudding? Made a mistake? Lied to make it sound more exciting or convince their loved ones? Stories were passed from country to country, language to language - no mistranslations, no misunderstandings? That the story began in this way does not favour your case, it does exactly the opposite. We already know how useless we humans are when it comes to detail - ask any police officer. This is, essentially, a game of Chinese Whispers played with hundreds and hundreds of thousands of people. The results when you've got 10 kids sitting in a circle is comical enough - what do you get when you widen the circle that considerably?

40 years is not a long time. In our times, 1973 is very clear in memory. Now, it is easy to say that is because of modern media etc, but the oral tradition was the main way of communication in the first century in this culture, and, as I have said above, cannot be compared in any way to a game of Chinese Whispers. People learned great chunks of scripture completely verbatim - hard to get our heads round how this could be possible, but it was done, and likewise the accounts handed down were learned. They were not passed down in scraps and vague memories, or in whispers whereby the listeners were not sure what they had heard - there were checks made at every level and tellers would be brought up on inconsistencies. Added to that was the fact that the gospel accounts were at the most second hand, if not more (will be going into this later) and therefore there was no way in which things could be changed to the degree you are suggesting.

I don?t know how you?ve concluded when Luke converted to Christianity, there?s no indication of when that was that I can find.

I didn't say Luke had converted, I was talking about Paul. Some of the passages show how Christians had consolidated their beliefs and practises very early on and how they had even formed early creeds. This was in the time of eyewitnesses, both those who followed Jesus and more hostile witnesses, yet this thing grew and the central claims remained unchallenged by those living at the time and generations soon after.

And Luke as a witness is not particularly valuable, given that he was copying most of his information from other sources, mainly Mark & Matthew - and he was also guilty of making up important information (the fake census came from Luke).

Hmmm. I'm not sure the fact that Luke may have used Mark and others for source material can be used as a charge that he as a witness was not particularly valuable. There's plenty of extra material in Luke, and as for the census, there's another thing altogether, maybe something we can talk about in a while.

No, it?s not a myth, and I?m really surprised that you would say that. All of the books of the NT have been subject to considerable amounts of mistranslations, mistakes, forged passages, interpolations, deliberate & accidental textual changes etc etc. This is without question and the result is that there are more differences between all the copies that we have than there are words in the entire New Testament - they run into the hundreds of thousands.

I think I used the word myth because I hear this argument quoted so often from people who have not studied anything of this and believe what they hear. I am not in any way saying that this applies to you - I admire your knowledge and know you have studied in a great deal of depth. It does therefore surprise me a little that you think that the NT has been changed around enough to ensure that it cannot be used as historically viable material. A good amount of scholars do not think this is the case.

Let's take the differences that 'run into hundreds of thousands', for example. This number is very misleading. The way differences are counted means that if one word is spelled incorrectly in, say, 3,000 manuscripts, this is then counted as 3,000 variants. It is easy to see how the variants can build up to a seemingly huge number when you take factors like this into account.

It's also worth noting that no actual doctrinal statements are variated, even in these thousands of 'mistakes'. No central tenets are changed. And if we are talking about the changes between the gospels, I think I said something earlier about this - that no central material differed between them - that the differences were secondary points, according to audience, theological interpretation, linguistic device etc etc. I have compared the gospels in parallel, as you suggest, and far from finding too many variants as to make the whole thing untenable, I am struck again and again how much consistency there is, as well as finding the different 'takes' fascinating. I don't find the differences a stumbling block, but do think it is important to examine them and look to why they may be so.

Regarding the oral tradition, it's worth remembering that for several hundred years until the Ancient Greek rediscovery of writing in 7-6th century BC the entire tradition of Greek epic poetry was transmitted orally. So people memorised the whole of the Odyessy, the Iliad, all of Hesiod, and a great deal more, and transmitted them orally. Indeed, learning how to memorise accurately was a vital skill in the ancient world. When we talk about the oral tradition in the ancient world we are emphatically not talking about Chinese whispers - we are talking about cultures who valued their central cultural artefacts and viewed their preservation as essential.

I?m not sure why you think this is significant. The sheer number of copies there are says nothing at all about the veracity of the claim within it. Even if there were a trillion perfectly preserved copies - so what? Christianity was a fast growing religion, one of the first to use holy books - this says something about the religion, but nothing at all about whether it?s based on anything true. This is an Argument from Numbers??there are gazillions of xyz, therefore it?s all true. No. Sorry.

But the fact remains that no other work of antiquity even comes close in terms of number of copies preserved. I don't think this can be dismissed as insignificant. The fact that such a multiplicity of material all agreed on so much - across cultures, languages, countries - surely points to the authenticity of the source. The more documents you have, especially the more in agreement with one another, the more that can be cross checked to find out about the originals. Then there is the unprecedented number of manuscripts from very early on, again not to be dismissed - a copy of a copy of a copy, perhaps, but that is very different to thousands of copies over centuries, as in the case of most other works of antiquity. There is something different here.

With other stuff, like the Illyad, this wouldn?t matter quite so much. But let?s not forget what these books are supposed to be - words either written by (if you?re a literalist, and I know you?re not) or inspired by God. His message to the world. If he wanted his message preserved, why not begin by preserving the books?

I think that, given the information we have explored above, there has been a rather good job done in preserving the books. Thousands and thousands of documents, far surpassing any other work of the time? That's not a bad job really

You?re assuming, by the way, this wealth of oral tradition handed ?lovingly down? etc. How do you know this? The very first thing we have is Mark - how do you know that he didn?t get together with the author of the Q source and make the whole thing up, like Joseph Smith did or L. Ron Hubbard? You are assuming that Christians were milling about prior to Mark - why? Who says they were? There?s a 40 year gap (at least) between the death of Jesus & Mark?s gospel. We have not the vaguest idea what was going on then since there?s no source we can access to tell us. This is an assumption on your part that can?t be properly supported.

But I am not making unfounded assumptions. The Pauline material cannot be discounted. At the risk of being tedious and repeating myself, there are passages describing the practise of early Christianity from well before the gospels were written down. Many scholars think that Paul's letters represent a great deal of valuable verification of the early traditions about Jesus, and of Jesus himself, his life, death and resurrection. We do have a much more than vague idea of what was going on between the death of Jesus and the gospel of Mark (which incidentally could have been closer to 30 than 40 years, but that's an aside)