Evidence of what?
Evidence for the existence of Jesus as I made clear.
People are fond of saying that there is "no evidence", That is simply false. People saying this are seemingly pretending that the Pauline Epistles, the Gospels and the rest of the NT don't exist. They are certainly not the most reliable evidence, to put it mildly, but to pretend that they don't exist is asinine. Same for the References to Jesus by Josephus and Tacitus. They exist. They are evidence. You are not compelled to take them at their word, but the claim of zero evidence is false.
Believers have interpreted every part of the Bible in a multitude of ways.
Of course, but I'm not suggesting we give the job to candle2 or something. Modern historians and textual critics hold to a higher standard than those who torture the Bible for their own weird purposes. There are also agnostic, atheist and Jewish scholars, with no axe to grind, who are not under the same pressure for the text to conform to some presupposition. It would not be fair to compare someone like Bart Ehrman to a fundamentalist apologist.
Or since there was no such person as Jesus it was necessary for the story's conclusion to include his disappearance, otherwise his absence from the world would have been difficult to explain.
Not what I'm talking about. It's easy to kill your fictional character off at the end, and that would indeed be convenient for a fraudster. But that's not what I meant.
I'm talking about places where the Gospel authors tie themselves in knots trying to make problems go away, when need not have created the problem in the first place were they simply writing fiction. Take the narratives of Jesus' birth for example. The early Christians had a problem. They had come to think of Jesus as Messiah, but he didn't fit the bill in a number of ways. One of those was Micah 5:2, which was taken as prophecy.
quote:
But you, Bethlehem Ephrathah, though you are small among the clans of Judah, out of you will come for me one who will be ruler over Israel, whose origins are from of old, from ancient times.
So the Messiah was supposed to come from Bethlehem, whereas Jesus was from Nazareth. Worse, he had probably gone by "Jesus of Nazareth", a common way of identifying individuals in a world where few people had surnames. There was no hiding it, certainly not from the people of Galilee, where Jesus was known and where his followers would have been based. This was a problem and the solution was to invent the story of the census, the journey to Bethlehem and everything that goes with it. The problems with this story are well known, it contains much that is spurious or ahistorical, censuses did not and could not work that way, etc. The versions presented in Luke and Matthew are highly contradictory. I think we can all agree that the story is made up and indeed that is the majority opinion of scholars. Why go to all this trouble? If one was creating a wholly fictional Messiah, why not simply have him born in Bethlehem? Why bother with the story at all? The most parsimonious answer is that Jesus was real and he was inconveniently from Nazareth. People knew this. He was "Jesus of Nazareth". Jews of the time would have made this objection, just as in the Gospel of John;
quote:
41 Others said, “He is the Messiah.”
Still others asked, “How can the Messiah come from Galilee? 42 Does not Scripture say that the Messiah will come from David’s descendants and from Bethlehem, the town where David lived?
To get around this, the idea was planted that he was born in Bethlehem. It's quite clever really. Even if most people who had heard of Jesus knew he was brought up in Nazareth, very few people outside of sleepy little Nazareth would be in a position to deny that he might have been born elsewhere. If the whole thing is a fabrication, why even include an insignificant detail like Nazareth at all? It was an obscure little place that hardly anyone had heard of and no-one cared about. Why not just cut it from the narrative altogether? The most parsimonious explanation and in my view the most likely, is that Jesus did indeed come from Nazareth. It was a known fact and the early Christians couldn't make it go away, so they had to create a workaround.
Don't forget Peter.
Ah! Thank you. That should of course read "James and Peter were both leaders of that church before Paul".
I also forgot that Paul claims to have met John the Apostle as well in a later visit to Jerusalem and he alludes to Jesus' other siblings. Are all these people made up? Is everyone Paul mentions made up? This seems unlikely. These are letters to other Churches after all. He is writing to people who would be in a position to know if none of these people or proto-churches didn't exist.
But "an obscure religious mystic" is not the Jesus people of faith believe in. Generally, Christians believe in the Jesus of the gospels, and I'm saying that Jesus didn't exist.
But I'm not talking about that. I'm talking about a plausible historical Jesus and you know that. Why insist upon responding to a claim I'm not making? It's obtuse, it's unnecessarily confusing and in my opinion it's just sloppy rhetoric . Your doing the same thing as Theodoric, addressing only the lunatic claims of Christians and ignoring the far more plausible claim that I am making. This matters because a bad habit of Jesus Mythicists is a sort of bait and switch. They claim to address a plausible Jesus but then switch to arguments that only matter for the magical Jesus. It's infuriating. Saying "Jesus didn't exist" when you're really talking about the magic Jesus is just confusing and contrary. It has no place in any sensible conversation about a plausible historical Jesus. It's a waste of time; we're all already agreed that no-one walked on water. People who are not onboard with that aren't engaged in any recognisable kind of scholarship. I don't care what Christians believe; I'm not interested in that conversation.
I don't understand why you insist upon framing it like this. I know that you don't believe in magic. You know that I don't believe in magic. I just don't get it.
Mutate and Survive
On two occasions I have been asked, – "Pray, Mr. Babbage, if you put into the machine wrong figures, will the right answers come out?" ... I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question. - Charles Babbage
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