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).
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Philosophy/religion
The Great Jesus debate. Did he exist at all - and if he did, what reasons do we have to believe he was divine?
EllieArroway · 05/03/2013 13:51
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.
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.
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
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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.
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)
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