“Given that Jesus was supposedly a very noteworthy figure who died in a noteworthy way founding a major religion, the total absence of any historical record of him or anyone substantially resembling him would be very surprising if he was real.”
Documentary evidence that dates from the time of Jesus’ supposed life and death, which describes a religious leader called Jesus who started a splinter sect of Judaism would do it.
I wouldn’t be in any way upset if such evidence emerged tomorrow, but I think it’s very unlikely. Pious researchers have been looking very hard for a very long time for even a shred of contemporary evidence for a historical Jesus that isn’t forged, and they’ve come up with nothing so far. When people have looked long and hard for evidence and found none the probability that there is no evidence to find gets very high.
There were quite a few troublemaking preachers who fell afoul of the law in Judaea at the time, many of whom were called Jesus—it was a very common name at the time.
However, one of the big problems with assuming one of these fellows (or another we have no documentation of) was the human seed for Christianity is the early Christian tradition of docetism—that Christ had no corporeal existence at all, and was just an idea. Paul of Tarsus certainly seems to think along these lines, despite the later caution against said notion in John.
This also helps explain the curious lack of non-Biblical evidence for such a person, in histories where one would expect it.
It is often noted by apologists that scholars think there’s enough evidence to say there was a human seed for Christianity. However, “scholar” in this context is a weasel word—most are Christians and theologians, who would have tremendous trouble (personal and professional) coming to the opposite conclusion at all. The epistemological standards accepted in Biblical history in particular are generally bloody awful and an embarrassment to other ancient historians.
For a pile of stuff on this issue I recommend the RationalWiki article, which I have worked extensively on. (One of the other main contributors just so happens to be an atheist who was a student of Biblical history.)
(I find this stuff fascinating, if only for the psychopathology. And, as such strident atheists as Mencken, Dawkins and Hitchens have noted, you can’t be highly literate in English without knowing the KJV, much as you need to know Shakespeare and Greek mythology. The trouble is that … well, it’s like you wanted to study the Odyssey or the Iliad but the only people to learn from were people who (a) actually believed in all the gods named therein (b) really wanted you to as well.)
We have pretty good records of letters from Paul from the second half of the first century (as well as a bunch of frauds, but AFAIK there are several that stand up under analysis as being written by the same person at a very early date), who (in several of those letters) was adamant that his sect believed in an individual Christ in the flesh. So if the legend of the historical Jesus sprang from whole cloth, it did so pretty quickly- not to mention the synoptic gospels, which the most skeptical of scholars still date to around 100 AD.
More generally, I’d caution fellow atheists against getting drawn into the existence-of-Jesus debate in meatspace: unless you’ve done a lot of relevant study (and why on earth would you?) you won’t be able to point to basic evidence that your interlocutor has heard of, only to the statements of experts that they won’t trust. Better to say “Well, I’m not sure there’s enough evidence even to conclude that there was a historical Jesus- but even granting that there was, and that there came to be a group of followers convinced of his divinity, that’s still nowhere near the kind of evidence to make Christianity a viable hypothesis, compared to the hypothesis that it was just a rabidly successful example of what happens within cults.” That’s a much better place to draw up battle lines, IMO.
The overarching problem you outline in your second paragraph—the more general problem, faced in many fields, of having to compress a degree into a few sentences to properly answer an objection—is sadly well known. This is why the RationalWiki article (which is still patchy as heck) is a sea of nuance and caveats—it attempts to get it right in less than a book for an audience who are frequently just realising that there’s actually historical thought on this matter (and look how that line of inquiry worked out for Lukeprog!). I’m very much looking forward to Richard Carrier’s book on the historicity of Jesus later this year. (And not just so I can crib furiously from it.)
That stuff is very interesting. Your point about motivate teachers is fruitful. I’m adjusting my belief that there was a Jesus. That said, I learned of the historical Jesus thesis from my Rabbi, who I don’t think had a motivation to be pro-Jesus. And he didn’t sugarcoat religion with me (he introduced me to such anti-religious ideas like the problem of evil and the problem of miracles).
That said, I can’t give very much weight to docetism, (or Gnosticism generally) because they lost the ideological/theological battle. (Wikipedia is quite coy, saying that “some Christians” think it’s heretical. The Nicene Creed is a flat-out rejection of docetism, so I think it’s safe to say most Christians reject it).
And generally, I don’t expect much historical evidence of Jesus, because he wasn’t that important in his lifetime. As ArisKatsaris says
There exist only two non-biblical pieces of evidence for the existence of Pontius Pilate—and he was the damn Prefect of Judaea for Cthulhu’s sake. How much “direct evidence” do you expect for a rather Jewish-cult-leader, one of possibly dozen such groups the time?
In other words, the assertion in Mark that Jesus was followed around by scribes is a pious lie that can easily be explained without asserting that Jesus never existed.
That docetism lost out isn’t really the key point.
Consider the general case: there’s some property P that is observable (for example, having a physical body). At time T, there’s no agreement that I have P. At time T+ 200 years, there’s agreement that I had P at T.
It seems to me that the lack of agreement about P at T is important evidence here, regardless of what agreement other people come to about P at (T+200).
The people arguing not-P are theological mystics, who have substantial reason to assert not-P despite any observation, That is, a substantial amount of the motivation for asserting not-P can be explained without reference to observation.
I’m on shakier ground on the specific contents of the theological position, but Wikipedia leaves the impression was that the dispute was not about what was observed, but what was actually there. It seems consistent with docetism that Pilate believed there was a seditious preacher named Jesus, who he ordered crucified. Docetism just says that the image Pilate saw was an illusion, not a man (or even matter).
Ah! I hadn’t realized that. Yeah, if the docetics were making the same claims about the observable world, then my argument above is irrelevant.
Not quite. It’s not irrelevant, it just becomes an argument in favor of historical Jesus, rather than against it.
If a lack of agreement among early Christian about the observable world was relevant as evidence AGAINST the existence of a historical Jesus, then by Law of Probability, agreement about it must constitute evidence in its favour.
Sure. Needn’t be anywhere near that complicated, though.… the existence of people who believe in the existence of a historical Jesus is evidence of a historical Jesus, albeit not particularly strong evidence. If it weren’t for those people, we wouldn’t even be talking about it, any more than we’re talking about a historical Clark Kent.
(Restricting myself to two quibbles, for the sake of time):
I believe your description of Docetism gives the wrong idea; Docetism (as I learned it) did not say that Jesus was not there at all, but rather merely asserted that his corporeality was an illusion. The Docetists did not think of Jesus as “only an idea”, but as somebody who staged a form of divine theater, as it were. (Research “Christological Heresies” for more on Docetism and its cousins.)
Quibble #2: not all biblical scholarship is as bad as you say—much of it is quite rigorous and would be right at home in a secular university anthropology department.
Documentary evidence that dates from the time of Jesus’ supposed life and death, which describes a religious leader called Jesus who started a splinter sect of Judaism would do it.
What documentary evidence for any other religious leaders that started other splinter sects of Judaism at the time do you have?
If you don’t have any direct evidence for any specific one of those leaders, does that mean there didn’t exist any such splinter sects at the time?
Thank you. This is a concise representation of the general objection I was going to make.
Finding evidence of ANYTHING in that era that meets modern standards is often very difficult, if not impossible. Nearly all history from that era can be, and is, challenged.
I have yet to see a statement from PhilosophyTutor justifying his choice for a standard of evidence on this question.
“Given that Jesus was supposedly a very noteworthy figure who died in a noteworthy way founding a major religion, the total absence of any historical record of him or anyone substantially resembling him would be very surprising if he was real.”
What would you accept as evidence? Seriously.
Documentary evidence that dates from the time of Jesus’ supposed life and death, which describes a religious leader called Jesus who started a splinter sect of Judaism would do it.
I wouldn’t be in any way upset if such evidence emerged tomorrow, but I think it’s very unlikely. Pious researchers have been looking very hard for a very long time for even a shred of contemporary evidence for a historical Jesus that isn’t forged, and they’ve come up with nothing so far. When people have looked long and hard for evidence and found none the probability that there is no evidence to find gets very high.
There were quite a few troublemaking preachers who fell afoul of the law in Judaea at the time, many of whom were called Jesus—it was a very common name at the time.
However, one of the big problems with assuming one of these fellows (or another we have no documentation of) was the human seed for Christianity is the early Christian tradition of docetism—that Christ had no corporeal existence at all, and was just an idea. Paul of Tarsus certainly seems to think along these lines, despite the later caution against said notion in John.
This also helps explain the curious lack of non-Biblical evidence for such a person, in histories where one would expect it.
It is often noted by apologists that scholars think there’s enough evidence to say there was a human seed for Christianity. However, “scholar” in this context is a weasel word—most are Christians and theologians, who would have tremendous trouble (personal and professional) coming to the opposite conclusion at all. The epistemological standards accepted in Biblical history in particular are generally bloody awful and an embarrassment to other ancient historians.
For a pile of stuff on this issue I recommend the RationalWiki article, which I have worked extensively on. (One of the other main contributors just so happens to be an atheist who was a student of Biblical history.)
(I find this stuff fascinating, if only for the psychopathology. And, as such strident atheists as Mencken, Dawkins and Hitchens have noted, you can’t be highly literate in English without knowing the KJV, much as you need to know Shakespeare and Greek mythology. The trouble is that … well, it’s like you wanted to study the Odyssey or the Iliad but the only people to learn from were people who (a) actually believed in all the gods named therein (b) really wanted you to as well.)
We have pretty good records of letters from Paul from the second half of the first century (as well as a bunch of frauds, but AFAIK there are several that stand up under analysis as being written by the same person at a very early date), who (in several of those letters) was adamant that his sect believed in an individual Christ in the flesh. So if the legend of the historical Jesus sprang from whole cloth, it did so pretty quickly- not to mention the synoptic gospels, which the most skeptical of scholars still date to around 100 AD.
More generally, I’d caution fellow atheists against getting drawn into the existence-of-Jesus debate in meatspace: unless you’ve done a lot of relevant study (and why on earth would you?) you won’t be able to point to basic evidence that your interlocutor has heard of, only to the statements of experts that they won’t trust. Better to say “Well, I’m not sure there’s enough evidence even to conclude that there was a historical Jesus- but even granting that there was, and that there came to be a group of followers convinced of his divinity, that’s still nowhere near the kind of evidence to make Christianity a viable hypothesis, compared to the hypothesis that it was just a rabidly successful example of what happens within cults.” That’s a much better place to draw up battle lines, IMO.
The overarching problem you outline in your second paragraph—the more general problem, faced in many fields, of having to compress a degree into a few sentences to properly answer an objection—is sadly well known. This is why the RationalWiki article (which is still patchy as heck) is a sea of nuance and caveats—it attempts to get it right in less than a book for an audience who are frequently just realising that there’s actually historical thought on this matter (and look how that line of inquiry worked out for Lukeprog!). I’m very much looking forward to Richard Carrier’s book on the historicity of Jesus later this year. (And not just so I can crib furiously from it.)
That stuff is very interesting. Your point about motivate teachers is fruitful. I’m adjusting my belief that there was a Jesus. That said, I learned of the historical Jesus thesis from my Rabbi, who I don’t think had a motivation to be pro-Jesus. And he didn’t sugarcoat religion with me (he introduced me to such anti-religious ideas like the problem of evil and the problem of miracles).
That said, I can’t give very much weight to docetism, (or Gnosticism generally) because they lost the ideological/theological battle. (Wikipedia is quite coy, saying that “some Christians” think it’s heretical. The Nicene Creed is a flat-out rejection of docetism, so I think it’s safe to say most Christians reject it).
And generally, I don’t expect much historical evidence of Jesus, because he wasn’t that important in his lifetime. As ArisKatsaris says
In other words, the assertion in Mark that Jesus was followed around by scribes is a pious lie that can easily be explained without asserting that Jesus never existed.
That docetism lost out isn’t really the key point.
Consider the general case: there’s some property P that is observable (for example, having a physical body). At time T, there’s no agreement that I have P. At time T+ 200 years, there’s agreement that I had P at T.
It seems to me that the lack of agreement about P at T is important evidence here, regardless of what agreement other people come to about P at (T+200).
The people arguing not-P are theological mystics, who have substantial reason to assert not-P despite any observation, That is, a substantial amount of the motivation for asserting not-P can be explained without reference to observation.
I’m on shakier ground on the specific contents of the theological position, but Wikipedia leaves the impression was that the dispute was not about what was observed, but what was actually there. It seems consistent with docetism that Pilate believed there was a seditious preacher named Jesus, who he ordered crucified. Docetism just says that the image Pilate saw was an illusion, not a man (or even matter).
Ah! I hadn’t realized that. Yeah, if the docetics were making the same claims about the observable world, then my argument above is irrelevant.
Not quite. It’s not irrelevant, it just becomes an argument in favor of historical Jesus, rather than against it.
If a lack of agreement among early Christian about the observable world was relevant as evidence AGAINST the existence of a historical Jesus, then by Law of Probability, agreement about it must constitute evidence in its favour.
Sure. Needn’t be anywhere near that complicated, though.… the existence of people who believe in the existence of a historical Jesus is evidence of a historical Jesus, albeit not particularly strong evidence. If it weren’t for those people, we wouldn’t even be talking about it, any more than we’re talking about a historical Clark Kent.
alternatively...:-)
(Restricting myself to two quibbles, for the sake of time):
I believe your description of Docetism gives the wrong idea; Docetism (as I learned it) did not say that Jesus was not there at all, but rather merely asserted that his corporeality was an illusion. The Docetists did not think of Jesus as “only an idea”, but as somebody who staged a form of divine theater, as it were. (Research “Christological Heresies” for more on Docetism and its cousins.)
Quibble #2: not all biblical scholarship is as bad as you say—much of it is quite rigorous and would be right at home in a secular university anthropology department.
What documentary evidence for any other religious leaders that started other splinter sects of Judaism at the time do you have?
If you don’t have any direct evidence for any specific one of those leaders, does that mean there didn’t exist any such splinter sects at the time?
Thank you. This is a concise representation of the general objection I was going to make. Finding evidence of ANYTHING in that era that meets modern standards is often very difficult, if not impossible. Nearly all history from that era can be, and is, challenged.
I have yet to see a statement from PhilosophyTutor justifying his choice for a standard of evidence on this question.