Do You Think Jesus Really Ever Existed?

So what?

 

Good question. I think mainly for the sake of history and clarity of thought. Jesus is thought by the largest religion in the world to be their founder. Jesus mythicists say he didn't even exist, but was entirely made up--"plagiarized" even, from ancient pagan religions. I guess we could say "whatever". Alternative facts. But when folks go on to talk about virgin births, raising the dead and walking on water, on the one hand, and Horus, Dionysus, and Mithra, on the other hand, those of us who respect rationality and history can take only so much. The evidence for the man Yeshua ha-Nosri is slim, but in my opinion convincing. Placing him in the context of first century Judaism helps us to understand how a religion that began as sect of Judaism could develop into the faith of 2.5 billion people today. Jesus is a believable figure of first century Galilee, and understanding him and his historical context has little to do with ancient pagan fertility gods. And some of the mythicist arguments, truly cringeworthy as they are, are believed by casual purveyors of the internet blogosphere where the control of peer review is absent. In a recent post in the Christian forum, I examined the so-caled "sixteen crucified saviors" identifed by ninteenth century freethinker Kersey Graves and perpetuated by the influential twentieth century charlatan S. Acharya (Dorthy Murdoch). The interesting thing about those sixteen is that none of them was crucified. Some died of old age or never died at all. That should be embarrassing to the mythicists, but it doesn't seem to phase them a bit. Many stories told by the mythicists about Christianity are, themselves, myths, comparable to those fabricated by Q-Anon. We could take the position "So what?" Or we could call a lie a lie, whether fabricated by Christians or their opponents.

 

At this point I might mention some of the reasons I think Jesus was, at his core, a real historical person instead of a refurbished mythical construct.

• One of these comes from Paul, the first person to write about Christianity. He mentions his visit to James, the brother of the Lord. (Gal. 1:18-19). Ordinarily, if a person has a real brother, that means the person himself exists. Moreover, said brother happened to be the head of the Jerusalem church and a person with whom Paul had somewhat strained relations over the place of Gentile converts in the church. Now it is possible James made up his brother, or Paul made up James. Some atheists have argued that Paul is using "brother" to refer to a fellow Christian: "Brother James, Brother Billy Bob", etc. And they were all "Brothers of the Lord". But he doesn't say he visited the Brothers of the Lord" James and Cephas (Peter). He says: "I went up to Jerusalem to visit Cephas and remained with him fifteen days. 19 But I saw none of the other apostles except James the Lord's brother." He never calls other disciples "brothers of the Lord". If there was some secret fraternity of Christians that included James but excluded the other disciples, it’s unknown to history.
• Confirmation of this relationship comes from a non-Christian source of the period, the Jewish historian Josephus. I'm not talking about the notorious Testimonium Flavianum (Antiquites, Book 18) which most scholars think was doctored by Christian scribes. I'm talking about the passage in Antiquities, Book 20, chp 9, which practically all scholars think is authentic (Van Voorst ,2000, p.83; Bauchman 1999, p. 199-203; Feldman, and Hater, 1987, pp. 54-57) concerning the trial of James by the Sanhedrin, where the high priest "brought before them the brother of Jesus, who was called Christ, whose name was James, and some others; and when he had formed an accusation against them as breakers of the law, he delivered them to be stoned." This passage on James is found in all manuscripts, including the Greek texts.
• If someone were constructing an imaginary figure from pagan folklore to sell to Jews and Gentiles as the Jewish Messiah, it seems unlikely they'd offer a crucified itinerant carpenter from Nazareth in Galilee who was baptized by John the Baptist. Jewish tradition expected that the Messiah would be a liberator: either a warrior king in the tradition of David or a priest, not someone executed as a common criminal.
• The manner of his execution by crucifixion is particularly convincing, since Deuteronomy 21:22 says that such a person is "cursed". Why would fabricators include that detail in a mythical hero they were trying to sell as the Messiah.
  
• Moreover, saying he was from a hick town like Nazareth creates double problems--not only the obscurity of the place but the requirement of scripture that he be from Bethlehem. That is why we have two mutually inconsistent birth narratives (Matthew and Luke) accomplishing that. They could have spared themselves the effort just by eliminating Nazareth. And Nazareth was in Galilee where Jesus spent practically all of his life. The Jewishness of "Galilee of the Gentiles" was considered suspect by many Judeans. The Assyrians removed the original population and left it either vacant or resettled by foreigners. Supposedly, these had been forcibly converted to Judaism by the Hashmonean king John Hyrcanus only about a century earlier, and many Judeans moved back into the area. Galileans were considered marginal by other Jews. The Jerusalem Talmud records the disdain of the great rabbi, Yohanan ben Zakka about the time of Jesus:“O Galilee, “O Galilee, in the end you shall be filled with wrongdoers!” (Shabbat 16:7, 15d). Professor of relgion F. Dale Bruner explains: "Galilee was not just geographically far from Jerusalem; it was considered spiritually and politically far, too. Galilee was the most pagan of the Jewish provinces, located as it was at the northernmost tier of Palestine.This distance from Zion was not only geographic; Galileans were considered by Judaeans to sit rather loosely to the law and to be less biblically pure than those in or near Jerusalem. Judean Pharisees, in particular, were less than impressed with Galilean observance of the fine points of Jewish religious observance. While praised for their passionate identification with Judaism and the Jewish people, their ignorance in law and disinterest in study was an almost never ending source of fuel for Judean snobbery." Of course, it's possible that a bunch of Galileans concocted Jesus as their counterpoint to Judean snobbery, but it would certainly be a hard sell to Jerusalem and the rest of the country.
• And if Jesus is a fictional character, why have him baptized by John the Baptist, and then going through elaborate explanations about why a sinless person should be baptized at all, and why being baptized by John didn't imply Jesus' inferiority to John. Besides believing in Jesus' existence, most scholars agree on two other facts: he was crucified under Pontius Pilate and he was baptized by John the Baptist.
• No ancient authors, including Jewish and pagan critics, argued that Jesus did not exist. Celsus and Lucian criticized him as a scoundrel, and rabbis accused him of being a sorcerer and of leading the people astray, but they didn't question his existence. (A possible exception is Trypho, a probably fictional Jew from Justin Martyr’s Dialogue With Trypho, circa 155-60 AD).
• Add to these the expert opinions of historians and other scholars, both secular and religious, who have devoted themselves to this topic and have come to general agreement that the evidence supports the existence of an historical Jesus, including: atheist Maurice Casey (2014); agnostic Bart Ehrman, (2012);Stanton Graham (2002); R.E. Van Voorst (2000); M.A. Powell (1996), etc. Of course there are authorities on the other side, although they’re far outnumbered by the ones who are convinced there was an historical Jesus. I’m citing them not as an appeal to authority, but because I agree with their arguments, which they base on reasonable criteria: prioritization of early accounts, multiple independent attestation, dissimilarity, historical congruence with known facts about the society at the time, etc. The criteria are not infallible, just rules of thumb, but they’re probably as good as we can get. Historian Michael Grant notes that: “if we apply conventional standards of historical textual criticism to the New Testament , “we can no more reject Jesus’ existence than we can reject the existence of a mass of pagan personages whose reality as historical figures has never been questioned.” Jesus: A Historian’s Review of the Gospels (1992).

I hope this makes a prima facie case for the existence of the historical Yehsua ha Nosri—not necessarily the godman who came to die for our sins but a human who really lived in Galilee at the beginning of the last millennium, attracted a following and was crucified by the Romans.
It might be useful at this point to consider what the issue is here.

The usual issues in the debate between Christians and atheists over the historical Jesus have to do with two questions: (1) which came first, the man or the myth? and (2) was the myth a result of copycat plagiarists stealing directly from pagan sources, or was there substantially original material? In the previous post, I made out a case that Jesus did exist. However, I think the "Jesus of Faith" is significantly different from the historical Jesus, and I suspect that the Jesus of Faith is colored by myths. I think the most important of these came from Jewish scriptures and traditions, as the authors of the New Testament, as well as Jesus himself, turned to those to show that he fulfilled biblical prophecy. I think pagan mythical material may have played a secondary role in filling in gaps, but Jewish scriptures supplied the main narratives.

The evidentiary standard that I’m using is “substantial evidence” –the standard which is used for administrative regulations: enough to convince a reasonable person, even though other reasonable people might not be convinced. I rest my case, and await the arguments and evidence of opposing counsel.

 

Are you a Christian or want to be a Christian?
If you believe in the God of the Bible you know that God created the universe not just a little bit of it but all of it.
So, to someone capable of creating the entire universe, would a virgin birth be a big deal, would healing the sick, raising the dead and driving out demons be a big deal, would walking on water be a big deal and if Jesus was your son... wouldn't you raise him from the dead?
The big problem is people making a big deal out of these "miracles", Jesus came to teach us and instead of making a big deal out of what he taught, it's "all those miracles could never have happened so who cares what this guy has to say"?
Might I suggest, first learning who Jesus was, get to know him, how he treated others and why, and what did he want to teach us and then after you have a handle on that, just ask yourself would God love this person and the teachings enough to perform these miracles to show that he was indeed the Son of God...