this post was submitted on 11 Jun 2024
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Notice how it says people agree but doesn't say there is any evidence.
The best we have is letters from a whole generation after his death, and it's only people saying "these guys say there was a dude a while back" , second hand comments, no living first hand account.
Not really even "letters". But literally 2 accounts. One we're attributing doesn't even mention the correct name at the time. Jesus was often referenced as Yoshua at the time... So why the fuck did the account call him James? And the second account doesn't mention a name at all.
Edit: I need to clarify something since my phrasing is self-defeating (on purpose)... "often referenced as Yoshua at the time" as believed by biblical scholars who are almost universally religious. But the point remains. If the information we have now doesn't line up with what the accounts state (or the bible)... then how much of this shit is just made up bullshit?
And the 2 accounts are Tacitus (116 AD)
and Josephus Flavius (95 AD)
And by the way... Josephus' account is under heavy scrutiny and is general considered unreliable at best... and downright forgery at worst. The wiki articles linked are a good read and well sourced.
A really damning case in my opinion is:
So other early authors that were Christian referenced Josephus works, but ignore the one that actually mentions Jesus directly? That seems odd no? Almost like the work was fabricated AFTER 324AD.
Scholars agree on stuff there is no evidence for...? What? Did you even read the article?
That's literally what first-hand evidence is: an account from someone who met someone irl - e.g. John, Peter, Luke, Mark, etc.
Also in that historical context, the fact that there are letters at all is somewhat astounding, if Jesus were just some rando. At the very least they seemed to think that He was important.
The letters were not written until later though - b/c why would they be, if you had John + Peter + Luke + Mark all in one room, why would they be writing texts / emails / chats at one another? They still wrote it within their lifetime though, so "a whole generation after his death" is disingenuous - time passed, but those people who met Jesus were still alive, and wrote the letters, thus making them first-hand recordings of fact.
Not that I'm advocating that you become a Christian over all of this, just wanting to get that part of the story straight:-).
None of those are first hand. The gospels were written by other people more than a generation (60 years) after, not by people who were alive in that period of 30 years.
The gospels were dictated to someone who physically wrote the words down...
Oh wait, no I see the problem. Yeah at some point early scholars did get the timeline wrong and thought that the gospels were written 60 rather than 30 years after the death of Jesus. But there are TONS of holes in that theory - e.g. why not mention that the Jewish Temple had been torn down, which is like the largest event for them for thousands of years? I thought that this has been more or less universally debunked, but I could not swear to that especially for it to have permeated throughout the entire world.
Wikipedia both backs me up on that one point:
While in the very next sentence also debunking my claim that they are first-hand accounts:
So if we use that article as a surrogate for "world-wide consensus", then it sounds like we both need to read up on our knowledge of this theology:-D. I for one am fascinated - does this mean that those "first-hand accounts" were merely written in the style of a first-hand account, but also including someone in the community who really was there (they would have been about 60 years old at that point?) - at which point, what is the difference, really? - or... maybe the people were older & feeble (in their 70s?), so merely the result of prior conversations with them over the course of a few years?
The "gospels were dictated by first hand witness" idea is a massive problem because that's not first hand account at all, that's actually someone claiming that someone else told him "dude I swear I saw it happen in front of me as clear as I see you" (or worse, the guy who wrote it claims that he found this text written by someone else 50 years ago) and we somehow chose to believe both the guy who wrote it and the supposed guy who told him that. Having something dictated is second hand account, not first hand, because that's just changing the pronoun of the person speaking. And there were extensive analysis of the text itself to try to figure out what kind of person would have phrased this or that in certain ways, whether it says "I saw that myself" or "my uncle who works at Nintendo told me he saw it himself", and that analysis, done for the entirety of the Bible, has gone pretty far, including the gospels. As far as I know about it, the biggest point about that analysis is which gospel was written first and which ones copied from which ones or added their own thing, rahter than 4 different people recounting their memories of the same events.
I don't know about the timeline of the temple; I've heard it brought up before, but I haven't heard that it was considered conclusive evidence for dating the text, so I don't know more than that and how it holds to the text analysis.
Oh it's way worse than 50 years. One of the "direct" claims of writing was Josephus. With the text written 65 years after Jesus would have lived... and the next reference to text of [Josephus' writing on] Jesus being from 350AD... ~250 years later. With the actual direct references showing up 100 years later. So somehow we have a supposed account... That writer writing about it 250 years later write about... Just for what was mentioned to change 100 years after that. We literally have a documented accounting of the evolution of the text over time which couldn't happen if the original source was maintained.
Edit: omitted words I meant to type... In brackets above.