How Do We Know Jesus Existed On Earth?

How Do We Know Jesus Existed On Earth?
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There are still many people today who make the claim that Jesus never existed, that He was only a mythical character.

Bertrand Russell puts it this way, "I may say that one is not concerned with the historical question. Historically, it is quite doubtful whether Christ ever existed at all, and if He did we do not know anything about Him, so I am not concerned with the historical question, which is a very difficult one. I am concerned with Christ as He appears in the Gospels" (Why I Am Not a Christian, p. 11, note 8).
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However, those who make such an accusation are certainly not historians, but are surprisingly ignorant of the facts.
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The New Testament contains twenty-seven separate documents which were written in the first century a.d. These writings contain the story of the life of Jesus and the beginnings of the Christian church from about 4 b.c. until the decade of the a.d. nineties.
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The facts were recorded by eyewitnesses, who gave firsthand testimony to what they had seen and heard. "What was from the beginning, what we have heard, what we have seen with our eyes, what we beheld and our hands handled, concerning the Word of Life" (I John 1:1, NASB).
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Moreover, the existence of Jesus is recorded by the Jewish historian, Flavius Josephus, who was born in a.d. 37, "Now there was about this time, Jesus, a wise man, if it be lawful to call him a man, for he was a doer of wonderful works—a teacher of such men as receive the truth with pleasure. He drew over to him both many of the Jews, and many of the Gentiles.
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"He was (the) Christ; and when Pilate, at the suggestion of the principal men amongst us, had condemned him to the cross, those who loved him at the firs did not forsake him, for he appeared to them alive again the third day, as the divine prophets had foretold these and ten thousand other wonderful things concerning him; and the tribe of Christians, so named from him, are not extinct at this day" (Antiquities, XVIII, III).
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Although this passage has been contested because of the reference to Jesus being the Christ and rising from the dead, the fact of His existence is not in question.
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Cornelius Tacitus (a.d. 112), a Roman historian, writing about the reign of Nero, refers to Jesus Christ and the existence of Christians in Rome (Annals, XV, 44). Tacitus, elsewhere in his Histories, refers to Christianity when alluding to the burning of the temple of Jerusalem in a.d. 70. This has been preserved by Sulpicius Severus (Chronicles 30:6).
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There are other references to Jesus or His followers, such as the Roman historian, Seutonius (a.d. 120) in Life of Claudius, 25.4, and Lives of the Caesars, 26.2, and Pliny the younger (a.d. 112) in his Epistles, X. 96.
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This testimony, both Christian and non-Christian, is more than sufficient to lay to rest any idea that Jesus, in fact, never existed. In light of the evidence, it is absurd to hold such a view. We know more about the life of Jesus than just about any other figure in the ancient world. His birth, life, and death are revealed in much more detail than most ancient figures whose existence is taken for granted by historians.
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After examining the evidence about the life of Christ from contemporary sources apart from the New Testament, Roderic Dunkerley concluded, "In none of these various testimonies to the fact of Christ is there any slightest hint or idea that he was not a real historical person.
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"Indeed it has been argued—and I think very rightly—that myth theories of the beginnings of Christianity are modern speculative hypotheses motivated by unreasoning prejudice and dislike. ‘It would never enter anyone’s head,’ says Merezhovsky, ‘to ask whether Jesus had lived, unless before asking the question the mind had been darkened by the wish that he had not lived’" (Roderic Dunkerley, Beyond the Gospels, pp. 29, 30).

 

I suppose you are refering to the facts that you have like the "hidden desires" of nuns...

 

FedUpAmerican: I believe you will find that, assuming you really are American (since I don't have proof) that your country is rooted in Christianity. The laws, morals and customs of the good ol' US of A were written up by - you guessed it - Christian folk. And there are about a billion Catholics and another billion Protestants among the 6 billion people on this planet right now, let alone throughout the past 2000+ years. Even our calendar is separated by his birth. No other person living or dead has had that amount of influence.

 

Do you need eyewitness accounts for something to be true and anything written is not valid? By that knowledge... the War of 1812 never happened.

There are eyewitness accounts of Jesus...

 

There is no reason to doubt the reality of Jesus as a historic figure. The gospel accounts are four different accounts from four different people. They were penned by either eyewitnesses or under the direction of the eyewitnesses. These same gospels were distributed throughout the region very quickly and we have no account anywhere on any of the contemporaries attempting to refute any of the facts written in them -- including those accounts dealing with the miracles of Jesus.

In order for Jesus to be a myth, it would have to be shown that the gospel accounts were highly embellished and inaccurately copied and transmitted</SPAN>. But, considering that there are other, non biblical accounts mentioning Jesus, it would be very difficult for anyone to demonstrate that He never lived.

 

Yeah... ummm.. you never got back to me on the John Rylands Fragment... dated 125 - 135 AD... has verses from John on it.

Please provide your source for stating (rather dogmatically) that the gospels were written 200-300 years after Christ lived cause.. well, what about the Chester Beatty Papyrus, the Bodmer Papyrus and p67?

Just for argument's sake...

We can't. Oh, wait. So what? You want to say that it is a myth? That's great. Except that... well, that would mean that ALL ancient history is myth. Period. We have more reliable (meaning "textually pure") evidence for the existence of Jesus Christ than for any other person in history. Want to say it's unreliable? Okay, but then so is all history. Let's look at the people that you have religated to myth:

Aristotle, Plato, Socrates, Alexander the Great, ALL the ceasars, Josephus (and anything he ever wrote), Pliny, Homer, and the list goes on.

Again, this entire line of reasoning yelling hearsay hearsay is really poor argument from silence. Do you not realize that there is more manuscript evidence for Jesus Christ than there is for the authors of all the histories of the time? If Christ might be a myth, then Josephus certainly was because there is more manuscript evidence that Christ existed than there is that Josephus did.

 

Because He was crucified.
Because He was a historical nobody (at the time).
Because He wasn't Roman.
Because He didn't do anything that a historian would consider significant.
Because the historians were biased.
Because there are no "contemporary" historians from the *three* years of Christ's time from His rise in popularity to His death.

Do you realize that Jessica Simpson has been popular longer than the entire ministry of Christ? Do you really think that a historian trying to capture the history of movers and shakers in the *world* is going to mention Jessica Simpson? Jesus Christ was executed by a back-woods Governor of a relatively minor province far away from Rome. When you take that into consideration, the question becomes, why *would* any historian mention Him?

To turn your argument from silence on its ear, consider this:

We have so *few* copies of the texts from those "contemporary" historians, it is entirely possible that they did state that Christ existed but that those texts were distroyed/lost (especially by the Romans that were trying to exterminate Christianity).
(This next part follows the same leap of logic that you seem to be employing.) Since we don't have anything from them stating that Christ did *not* exist, we can safely conclude that they believed He did as was recorded in scripture (because surely an objective, non-Christian historian would be compelled to point out that He was a fable).

It is. But, it isn't the autographa either. Given the length of time texts took to circulate in the first century, it is possible that the autographa was written some 40 to 60 years prior, well within the range of an eyewitness account.

 

Matthew, Mark, and Luke were disciples... shows how much you think you know about the Bible

 

Oh God, not this again. No it isn't, and no they weren't. American was founded by a collection of humanists, deists, unitarians, and atheists. There were no fundamentalists involved, no not one. If you people would actually read the Declaration of independence, the constitution, and the federalist papers you would know this. The idea that America is based on the Bible is just a plain ol' LIE. Maybe your preacher or even Pat Robertson has said that Jesus, God, and the Bible play an prominant part in the founding documents of our nation; but this is simply not true. God shows up I believe once in the Delcaration of independence, maybe twice I'm not sure. As for the rest there is not one mentioned anywhere ever in even one of the founding documents of the U.S.A.

And as for you FedUp. You seem to disregard the NT as a source for proof of Jesus for the reason that all the documents are in one book; you're forever asking for "non-Biblical" sources. Have you considered that perhaps they are all in that one book for the very reason that early Christians decided to put all the proof of Christ together in one place so it would be easy to find? That was the original reason for putting the thing together after all. It would be like discounting a one volume collection of the complete works of Plato as proof of Socrates simply because they were all in one book.

 

FYI Professor Jumbo:

The first president, George Washington, the "Founding Father" was an Anglican
The current president, George W. Bush, is a born-again Christian.
76.7% of Americans identify themselves as Christians, with 52% of Americans identifying a specific Christian denomination. 46% of Americans attend a Church service at least once a week. Each of these percentages is more than twice that of Britain.

Fact is, the United States of America is a Christian nation through and through.

 

FYI, Isaiah. George Washington was an Anglican, not a fundamentalist and nothing like any of the fundamentalist leaders today; I didn't say there were no Anglicans, I said there were no fundamentalists. The current president, George W. Bush was NOT one of the founding fathers regardless of what he and his cronines claim. The topic was the foundation of the U.S.A., not the lunatic rantings of a vocal minority. While the majority of Americans today indentify themselves as Christian, only a few indentify with people like Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell, and Dubya.

 

Information on the Founding Fathers go to :

http://www.foundingfathers.info/

 

We DON'T. That's why it's called FAITH. Among normal people who don't hear the god of Abraham speak to them and tell them to do incredibly stupid things, like invade Iraq.

If we KNEW Jesus existed on earth, it wouldn'tbe FAITH. It would be HISTORY and we'd all be in History Class on Sunday mornings instead of Church.

Except me, I'm a heathen and damned proud of it.

PS- I dont care if you find me humorous or not, I find the lot of you ridiculous for wasting your time arguing about this.

 

I wasn't off topic, I answered the original poster's question.

So there.

 

FUA, you obviously don't take yourself seriously, pay me the same courtesy please.

I'm only here to point out the facts and poke fun at them. Nothing more.

 

Matthew did not write Matthew? Show me

 

Good site tramp, here is an excerpt from the Declaration of independance.

We hold these truths to be self-evident: That all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; that, to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed; that whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles, and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness.

God is not mentioned here, though he is mentioned once earlier. The term here is the intentionally vague and generic "creator" which could be anything from one's parents to Zeus. From where, Isaiah, does the government dervies it's just pwers? Is it from God, Jesus, or Bible law? Nope, it's from the "consent of the governed". What principles are the foundation of gvernment laid on? Is it Bible law? again, no.

 

Josephus wrote a few lines referring to Jesus. He is accepted as the earliest non-biblic source to mention him. In no existing document from Jesus' time and place is there any account of him, his followers, or family. Many writers were there at the time, but we have nothing about Jesus from any of them. That proves nothing, and it is notable that a number of writers mention him shortly after his life. We don't know. That is not a surprise. What is hard to grasp is how important it is to some people whether he did or not. The message doesn't change. If it was proven Jesus never lived, would Christians change? If so, how?

 

Is that what you're interested in proving FedUp?

 

This is how the hardcore thumper works. They tell you that God propped up the founders of our nation, you disprove them, and then they say, "Well, true or not, it's what I believe." Which is precisely why this thread is OH! so entertaining.

I'm thinking of forming a new nation state based entirely on Riley Martin's work. We'll call it "Beovia" and rule peacefully by a council of seven. Who's with me?