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I have said this many times-
It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter if there was a "real" Jesus. The Jesus of the Bible, the Jesus that is worshiped is an impossibility. A fiction. His life is full of details that defy basic biological and physical laws. On top of that, nothing he supposedly said was written down at the time, so we have no idea if what is recorded to have been his sayings in the Bible are things he actually said.
I always relate it to Ian Fleming having a schoolchum who's father's name was Ernst Stavro Bloefeld. So was there a real Ernst Stavro Bloefeld? Yes. Was he a supervillain fighting the world's greatest secret agent? No.
I don't think this answer is really in the spirit of "no stupid questions".
Ok, if you want me to sum up in a way that addresses it: Because the Jesus OP is very likely thinking of is fictional, there is no real physical proof of his existence.
It doesn’t matter.
I'd say the "Real Historical Jesus" matters at least as much as a Real Historical Julius Caeser or a Real Historical Abraham Lincoln.
I always relate it to Ian Fleming having a schoolchum who’s father’s name was Ernst Stavro Bloefeld.
That's different in so far as Fleming was simply borrowing a name for a totally independent character. But Fleming was, himself, a Naval Commander and intelligence officer who leveraged his own biography to inform James Bond's personal traits. What's more, he borrowed heavily from the reports and anecdotes of other intelligence officials both during and after WW2 to inform the behaviors and attitudes of his side characters in his original novels.
It actually is pretty interesting to talk about "The Real James Bond" from a historical standpoint, because British intelligence services were pivotal in maintaining the imperial and international financial controls necessary to run a globe-spanning empire.
In the same vein, you might be curious to read about "The Real Julius Caeser" after working through the Shakespearean play or "The Real Abraham Lincoln" after getting through the stories where he's a Vampire Hunter. These biographies inform all sorts of cultural and economic norms of the era. And reading about historical individuals can be both entertaining and illuminating, particularly when you begin to consider how your own world ended up as it is today.
"Why is Christianity a globe-spanning religious movement going back 2000 years?" is a question worth interrogating. And you can't really interrogate that question without asking who this Jesus guy was or how he got so popular.
There's nothing to read about when it comes to any real Joshua, son of Joseph the Carpenter of Nazareth because nothing has been written about such a person.
Quite a bit has been written on the possible siblings of Jesus.
Written while Jesus was still alive? If so, please present said writings. If not, that doesn't really change my point.
Written while Jesus was still alive?
You could disprove the existence of Socrates with this line of reasoning.
Are we talking about whether or not a historical person the Jesus of the Bible is based on existed or are we talking about whether or not there were any contemporary accounts? Because those are two very different things.
As I suggested in the beginning, whether or not a "real" Jesus existed is not really relevant, because if we did, we know nothing about him except what was written a long time after he would have died, which we can't trust. Which is the same reason not to trust Plato's dialogues even if Socrates existed. Plato wrote them long after Socrates died.
if we did, we know nothing about him except what was written a long time after he would have died
Hardly the first instance of a historical figure with unreliable historical accounts. You could make the same criticism of Egyptian pharaohs. They were deified in their eras, too. Their monuments were not completed until many of them were long dead. I guess we should just ignore them and pretend they had no impact on the course of history.
Where on Earth do you get the idea that monuments to pharaohs were not built within their lifetime? That's absolutely untrue.
It also misses my point.
Where on Earth do you get the idea that monuments to pharaohs were not built within their lifetime?
Consider the Boy Pharaoh, Tutankhamen. He was dead at the age of 17, before the completion of his tomb. And thanks to repeated grave robberies, his tomb had to be repaired and refortified on subsequent occasions. His elderly successor and family advisor, Ay, was buried who died four years after his own ascension to the throne, effectively swapped Tutankhamen's intended tomb and claimed it as his own, but never lived long enough to see it completed.
Numerous unfinished or partially completed tombs dot the Valley of Kings. And even the Great Pyramids have several chambers that were started but never filled out before the builders were retasked to the next Pharaoh in line.
It also misses my point.
The standards by which we hold "historical Jesus" would disqualify a litany of other historical figures of antiquity, as the bulk of our knowledge comes from reprints of reprints of surviving accounts of other accounts which are themselves often politicized documents intended to score contemporary points.
The Hellenistic Era might as well not exist, for all the first party accounts of the era that survive. Herodotus was dead before Darius the Great was even born, and yet his histories are fundamental to understanding the Achaemenid Empire during his reign. The only surviving copy is dated fifty years after the events it claims to document. That's roughly as reliable as The Gospel of Mark, which is dated some 30 to 80 years after the death of its primary subject matter.
If you want to hold historical figures to equal standing, you're going to write off everyone from Archidamus II to Cyrus I. Obliterating huge swaths of history with a single pen stroke, because Herodotus is an unreliable narrator.
That's a terrible argument. That was one pharaoh and the monument would have been finished within his lifetime if he had lived a normal lifespan for a pharaoh.. Most Pharaohs had monuments to them- not just tombs, but temples- built within their lifetime. We know because they tell us so right on the walls.
And, again, I was talking about the Jesus of the Bible, which is obviously who OP is asking about. That Jesus, who has magic powers and is the son of a god, did not exist. So there is no evidence for him even if he was based on a real person. A point you are still missing because you seem to think I am saying that there was no real person the character was based on, I am not. I thought I made that clear when I mentioned Bloefeld.
If there was a real Jesus, we have absolutely no idea what, if anything, said about him in the Bible actually happened or was something we said because there is no evidence of it outside the Bible and the Bible cannot be trusted. Which is why I maintain it doesn't matter if the Jesus of the Bible was based on a real person, because it tells us nothing about that person that we can confirm as being true.
So, to answer OP's question, there is no real physical proof that Jesus Christ ever existed. The name OP gives is a hint. "Christ" means messiah and "Jesus" is the Greek version of the name. A real Jesus would have a name similar to Yeshua and his full name would have been similar to Yeshua bin Yosef. Nazareth might be appended to the end. That wasn't who OP was asking about though. They were asking about a messiah.
We aren't out here trying to prove Socrates existed.
Listened through a history of rome podcast and learned an interesting thing where win was basically like a concentrate so you would mix it with water to drink. Aka. water -> wine.
Using reasoning like this to remove the supernatural from the Bible rather defeats the entire point, doesn't it? If Jesus just made Gatorade like anyone else would, that's a rather unremarkable thing to describe. Hardly worth committing to writing.
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I am sure there are countless mundane tasks that are pretty unremarkable.
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Does the Bible really have a point? I guess other than brainwashing masses?
That's what I'm saying. There's no record of him wiping his ass or playing cards. If it's in the book it must be intended to present something exceptional. Explain his actions as something mundane and there isn't really any reason to write it down.
But equally, the fantastic supernatural elements make the whole thing into a fairy tale to be completely disregarded as a dubious source of folk wisdom at best by any thinking person.
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Isn't that just port then?
I hope not, because port is my wine of choice and I would be like, "fuck you, Jesus. I wanted to drink that!"
It was common practice to dilute wine.
a schoolchum whose* father's name
You go that way, I'll goto Jesus!
His life is full of details that defy basic biological and physical laws.
Which is perfectly sensible given that he was given the power to perform wonders by god to establish that he is indeed a messenger of god. The entire point of wonders is them defying the otherwise imposed limits of the physical world. Because the only one who can grant this power is the source of the physical limits themselves and that is god.
This is logically consistent under the axiom that god exists. Which is what the scriptures are all about.
You can set the axiom that god does not exist. But as there is no proof of that, it is equally axiomatic. So given that your logic works on an unproven assumption you should not use it to criticize a different logic based on another assumption.
There's nothing "perfectly sensible" about defying the laws of physics just because a book says he could.
Again you are making an assumption as the base of your logical construct.
That assumption is that the "laws of physics" are absolute in the sense that you know them. This is already problematic from a scientific point of view because our understanding of what the "laws of physics" are were and are under a constant change.
The scriptures are based on the axiom that god created everything including the laws of physics so when he chooses to, these laws can be defied. You can disagree with that axiom, but that does not mean that the logic is inconsistent.
So if you want to be honest your argument is "I don't believe the scriptures, so i don't believe in Jesus" which is perfectly valid, but very different from "I know Jesus is impossible and i can prove it."
Maybe to make an example in science to wrap it all together. Before the invention of microscopes some doctors theorized about bacteria and viruses as the source of diseases. They often got ridiculed as "some invisible animals making us sick? Yeah you drank too much wine again" . Then the telescope came about and it could be seen what used to be unseeable for humans. Nowadays if you would claim there to be no bacteria you'd be rightfully ridiculed. But we also saw in human history that knowledge got lost and things that were established knowledge became bold theories subject to ridicule again.
So being honest to science and human knowledge the valid position is "I don't believe in Jesus like described in the bible, as it is inconsistent with what i can observe today, but i have no proof in either direction."
But this position is not more or less valid than "I do believe in Jesus like described in the bible." Or "I do believe in Jesus but not like described in the bible."
It sure is convenient that the omnipotent and wise God decided to send his son to earth and perform wonders to prove he is the messenger of God long before humanity had advanced enough to create better records and spread that truth. I wonder why God has not wisely re-upped on this, given technological advancement, which God should be pretty caught up on.
You make good points. May i introduce you to Islam?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muhammad
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muhammad_in_Islam
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quran
The final prophet Mohammed s.a.s. whose life and effect are well documented as well as the direct word of Allah s.w.t., preserved as original in the Arabic language of revelation in the Quran. You should not though that according to Islam Jesus was merely a human messenger as Allah neither was born nor gives birth. In the same wake Allah is one and not three. But these concepts were added by the church to the Christian theology four hundred years after the life of Jesus.
I appreciate your confidence.
You're making an incorrect assumption that says the burden of proof is not yours. I'm not making absurd claims about things that defy all logic and physical limits.
You are. The burden is on you.
Your invisible helper cannot carry this burden for you.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burden_of_proof_(philosophy)
the burden of proof lies with the one who speaks, not the one who denies) is the obligation on a party in a dispute to provide sufficient warrant for its position.
Flying Squid said it is impossible what is described in the bible. So he or you if you take his side are the one burdened with proof. In fact the bible provides a very straightforward reasoning. Jesus was granted the power to do wonders by God so people would recognize him as a messenger of God and listen to him spreading the message of God.
You can say you dont believe in that. But it is not a proof of it not having happened. Especially as a lot of people who lived at the time said otherwise.
If it's possible, reproduce the claims. Until you can produce evidence of something, they are unfounded claims.
The Heaven's Gate cult wrote things down and had a whole group of folks that would confirm the beliefs they had.
According to you, the burden of proof is on society.
So I challenge you in the same way you're attempting here.
Prove the Heaven's Gate cult wrong. They made very reasonable claims(according to them) and it's up to you to prove them wrong.
That's what you are doing. Until you can prove someone is able to do the things in your text(s). It's a fable. You're still arguing in bad faith.
New topic: provide your initial rules and conditions for entering responses.
No, I am assuming that a book written in the iron age was written by people with no knowledge of physics and I am also assuming, like every other iron age religious text, there's no need to accept it as truth.
Your whole "you can't prove it isn't true" argument is not how anything works. The burden of proof is on the claimant. In this case, my claim is I have no reason to believe any of it is true based on modern physics. And telling me I can't assume that the laws of physics work all the time doesn't really compel me to think otherwise since I've never seen any modern documented account of the laws of physics not working.
If your god wants me to believe he exists, he knows what he can do about it. I guess he's fine not providing a shred of evidence he exists outside of an iron age book, which means I'm fine assuming he doesn't exist.
was written by people with no knowledge of physics
So why would they write about it and describe it as wonders? Do you think they did not understand that walking on water, giving life to the death, curing diseases on the spot and other things ascribed to Jesus as wonders were defying the conventional laws of nature?
The burden of proof is on the claimant.
Exactly. You claim to know that Jesus as described in the bible is an impossibility. So you have to proof that. All i want you to acknowledge, is that you are making an assumption, not providing proven knowledge.
And telling me I can’t assume that the laws of physics work all the time doesn’t really compel me to think otherwise since I’ve never seen any modern documented account of the laws of physics not working.
Ever heard of modern Physics? Relativity theory? Relativistic effects? All of these are the results of observations in defiance of classical Newtonian physics. There is an ongoing revolution in physics since a hundred years because we keep observing things inconsistent with our prior assumptions about the laws of physics.
Science is about testable repeatable actions and concepts. Science describes what can be observed.
What can be observed and tested in your claims?
Where did i say that it should be scientifically proven? I merely reject the idea that it is scientifically disproven or to claim that what has no scientific proof does not exist. This kind of thinking has rejected microorganisms, atoms, gravity and many other nowadays established things. Heck people acknowledge it to be perfectly reasonable to theorize about the existence of dark matter that is unobservable to us and holding the universe together.
It is simply unscientifc to claim to have "facts" against what is written in the scriptures as they describe events from 1400 to 5000 years ago. Not believing in them is perfectly valid, but it needs to be acknowledged as a matter of believe, a matter of faith and is in such in no way more valid than the believe that a scripture is true.
Things that exist, can be scientifically proven. We have evidence for the presence of dark matter. This is a placeholder for something we don't know what it is yet.
We don't have evidence of gods in any way that can be tested.
"What can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence" - hitchens razor
So why would they write about it and describe it as wonders?
The same reason the authors of the Vedas, the Quran, the Book of Mormon and any other religious text you'd like to mention. I assume you don't think Vishnu is a god as well as your god. I look forward to the special pleading of why the "wonders" of the Bible are true and the "wonders" of the Trials of Hercules are not though.
Also, you're "ever heard of" thing doesn't change the fact that there is not a single documented account of the laws of physics not working. You are describing things being more complicated than was thought, not things not working.
But feel free to show me video of a modern-day miracle your god is responsible for. You know as well as I do that there is no such thing, but I'm sure you've got some amusing excuse for why your omnipotent god no longer performs those miracles of his.
So do you believe the people 2000 years ago knew nothing about the laws of nature or did they? Did they understand that walking on water was something regularly possible or not? Did they understand raising the dead was something not normally possible?
Because that is your claim. And i strongly disagree because we have plenty of evidence that people understood the laws of nature quite well, even if they couldn't verbalize them in math yet. We have many ancient buildings and technologies that only work with a profound understanding of how physical matter behaves under normal circumstances.
EDIT: By the way i do not believe the bible to be an accurate description of Jesus, as there is an accurate description in the Quran. Still i don't claim to have proof that Jews, Christians or Hindus are wrong, because i have different theological believes. I acknowledge that my believes are that. And Atheists should realize that they also have theological believes, which is fundamentally different from knowledge about natural sciences.
Atheists do not have theological beliefs, atheism is characterized by a lack of religious faith. If one is lacking in faith then they cannot still have faith, that is an incoherent position.
Yes they do. They believe, without evidence, that no god exists. This is specifically different from agnostics, who say that they do not know. So atheism is a form of faith, because they choose to believe something about the nature of the divine, even if that is the absence of any divine.
Interestingly there is also religious atheism for instance in some forms of Hinduism and Buddhism.
I always find it silly, when atheists proclaim to "believe in science" violating the very principles of scientific research by proclaiming something as factual and absolute they have no evidence for. If someone is true to scientific principles he'll say he does not know hence he is an agnostic. An Atheist however is always a person of faith, even if many people fight tooth and nail to deny it. Which brings me back to what i wrote here somewhere earlier in the comment chain that my impression is most atheists to be traumatized by bad religious practice or actors abusing the religion to harm them, and not having found a healthier way to address their trauma yet.
I think you're operating on a different understanding of the words 'faith' and 'belief' here. Do you believe that Tuesday comes after Monday? Do you believe the Earth orbits the Sun, or that puppies are cute? Belief in something does not require faith, faith is a specific kind of belief. This is the kind of belief I have when talking about God.
I do not need evidence to disprove the existence of God, much the same way that I do not need the same for Dragons, or Magic, or the Flat Earth. I am not claiming these things do not exist, I am simply not going to believe they do until there is some evidence of their existence. I would suspect you do not think that I am religious in my lack of belief in dragons.
I also do not "believe" in science. That is a misunderstanding of science, which is simply a methodology. One cannot believe in it any more than they can math. It just is.
Fact: when science holds an incorrect idea, based on observable evidence - the idea changes to match reality. If there were observable evidence of your imaginary sky guy, scientists would update their idea or theory to match the observable evidence.
Saying that there might be elephants living on top of clouds doesn't make it true. Entertaining the idea without proof is not science or even theory.
Even with perfect faith, elephants still live on terra firma.
Ah, I see, rather than special pleading as to why the Bible is true and the Vedas are false, you're just going to ignore the whole thing.
I suppose that's a way to maintain that your god is the one true god though, ignore any challenges from other god beliefs as if they don't exist.
The Bible is a bunch of self-contradictory folk-tales. Which makes it useless in knowing any real Jesus. So, while one cannot say historical Jesus absolutely didn't exist, one cannot cite the Bible as a credible source of any knowledge about him. One might as well contemplate historical Hercules.
Did i ever cite the bible as that? I also think the bible has many inconsistencies and looking at concepts like trinity or Jesus as literal son of god being introduced hundreds of years later, are things i also disagree with.
But i understand that theological differences are something different from scientific differences. And i think it is important to separate the two.
Because scientific differences can be analyzed with repeatable tests and empirical evidence. Theological differences are either a simple matter of different faith or they can only be discussed in whether the theology is consistent in itself. But that again relies on certain axioms, like math relies on certain axioms or many social sciences need to use axioms because of the complexity of empirical information.
Even with godly powers, you aren't capable of contradictions.
This person is currently trying to argue with me that it was definitely true that when iron age people wrote in a book that Jesus walked on water decades after the event supposedly took place, it really took place because quantum physics tells us more about the universe than Newtonian physics, therefore something? I'm not sure. Somehow that makes walking on water possible but I just don't have the faith apparently.
Can you elaborate what you mean by that?
That god couldn't change the rules he himself created according to the scriptures? That seems pretty consistent to me.