this post was submitted on 03 Sep 2023
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That's the thing, we really don't have evidence of that. The Gospel of Mark shows borrowings from the letters of Paul, Greek and Roman stories, and Jewish writings. We can even see parts where the author looks to be siding with James over Paul like the curtain ripping.
As for the other three they all borrowed from Mark and again from different stories around. There just isn't a need to invent an oral tradition when we have a written one.
That really isn't my problem. You can't produce evidence doesn't mean I have to lower my standards of evidence. Besides which the Gospels you are invoking mention word of Jesus spreading all over the province and yet silence. Everyone likes to quote that one sentence in Josphius but no one likes to mention that he went into multiple paragraph details about other would be Messiahs. And again Paul was in Jerusalem during the events and yet he saw nothing.
Oh? Because we have letters of Pilot's enemies talking about other acts of cruelty. What evidence do you have that the Romans would have destroyed records of an uprising? They don't seem to have a problem with noting other ones.
Speculation. You have no proof of this bonfire of the evidence.
That doesn't prove that there was a Jesus that proves that Christians existed a century later.
Ok? I mean we have more than that might want to look into Pilot a bit.
I am not following your logic here. I am too accept lower standards of evidence because if better evidence exists it would be too hard to find so...yeah help me out with this one. If tomorrow someone digs up say a family genealogy that lists Jesus being born in Nazareth that would disprove he existed? This sounds a bit like the Babble Fish logic in the Hitchhiker's guide to the universe.
With the gospels, I don't think there's any debate that it comes from an oral history. As for their influences - ever notice the old testament has 2 overlapping creation stories? People spend their lives analyzing the text through various lenses, there's tons of material on how Jewish oral tradition worked and picking apart the markers of it. The rest of the new testament starts to diverge, there's a pretty stark difference between them and the rest of the books
As for lowering your standards of evidence, I really don't understand your point. There's no pictures of Caesar or George Washington, if they existed today the lack of pictures would be pretty suspect.
Jesus was an artisan and orator from an age when writing was expensive and only available to the nobility, and the vast majority of it was lost to time. It's expected that there's no written records of him during his lifetime - he was just some backwater carpenter whose importance wasn't clear until after his death
Context is everything in history. It's like asking "where is his birth certificate?" when someone is born in a time and place where that wasn't a thing
The time frame matters because Pompeii is a time capsule - human hands couldn't have manipulated the evidence past that date up. That's one generation - there would have been people around who met the guy (or should have).
And yet, neither followers or opposing institutions ever questioned his existence, details of the account of his life line up with historical records
Ultimately, what's more likely: there was a man known as Jesus of Nazareth (even if he took up the name and role in someone else's plan), or there was a conspiracy to fake the existence of a man who was a threat to both the Jewish leadership and Roman rule, and neither of those parties (who had people still alive as the movement became a problem) "what do you mean I had him executed? I never met the guy"
Maybe he died, maybe a stand in died, maybe he faked his death with the help of Roman soldiers and fled to Asia. But someone had to have played the role - otherwise a lot of people would have had to flawlessly keep up a conspiracy, many of which weren't believers
You can spend hours digging into every single detail I've brought up, it's literally the most studied historical subject ever with a ton of secular historical work done in the last century. But the consensus is that he definitely existed, there's just too many corroborating details that line up