| Steve Edwards' website |
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Nobody wrote about him when he was supposedly alive.
The accounts in the Bible about Jesus' life comprise the work of a few men writing in a language foreign to any possible Jesus of Nazareth,1 years after the time of his purported existence.
It is thin evidence indeed. The attestation of a few people who agree with each other on most of the main points is not reliable. Considering that some of them apparently copied2 the work of others of them, it appears even more dubious.
Of course there were men living at the time of the Gospel stories with the name that translates into English as "Jesus" — but that's not a real argument.
The real question is whether "this Jesus" existed — Jesus of Nazareth, born of a virgin; King of the Jews; the Son of God; crucified and risen.
It may be generous to allow that he existed while disputing his divinity — but that's dishonest, because Jesus without his divinity is not Jesus.
The truth is that evidence of Jesus' mere existence is not credible.
The most-cited so-called evidence of the historical Jesus is a piece of writing by Flavius Josephus — a paragraph, the Testimonium Flavianum.3
Yes — a paragraph with a title. That paragraph, though, is the strongest non-biblical evidence for the story of Jesus — a story of key importance in Western culture.
The Testimonium, a paragraph — three sentences — is clearly at least partially forged.
These facts and possibilities imply that a short reference, no more than a comment of dubious origin, is the principal external element of support for the Holy Bible's assertion that Jesus even existed.
All of this appears to show that even the enormously powerful church — curator of knowledge for centuries — could do no better than to produce one small piece of text dishonestly and poorly inserted into a real historical document as the evidence for the basis of its mythology.
Flavius Josephus was born in or around the year 37 — after any Jesus of Nazareth was dead.
Which comes back to this: Nobody wrote about Jesus during the time that he was supposedly alive.
The story of Jesus in the Bible tells that he was famous. The Jews and Romans were literate.
The Jews and Romans were literate.
But nobody wrote about the King of Kings, the Son of God? ...
It's almost impossible.
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2. It's not any wonder that the Gospels are "synoptic," or of similar perspective. What is notable is that they do not concur with each other more fully.
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Return to "copied" ...
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3. The Testimonium Flavianum was written (probably, mostly) by Flavius Josephus, a Jewish man who produced a voluminous history of the Jewish people in the late 1st century.
The Testimonium Flavianum:
"Now there was about this time Jesus, a wise man, if it be lawful to call him a man, for he was a doer of wonderful works, a teacher of such men as receive the truth with pleasure. He drew over to him both many of the Jews, and many of the Gentiles. He was the Christ;* and when Pilate, at the suggestion of the principal men amongst us, had condemned him to the cross, those that loved him at the first did not forsake him, for he appeared to them alive again the third day, as the divine prophets had foretold these and ten thousand other wonderful things concerning him; and the tribe of Christians, so named from him, are not extinct to this day."
Return to "evidence of historical writing" ...
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*Josephus was a practicing Jew who never believed the "Christhood" of Jesus Christ. It would have been for him a serious lapse of reason to write that "[Jesus] was the Christ." The phrase is more likely to have been fabricated by somebody else.
Return to "Testimonium" ...
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1. It's possible that Nazareth did not exist in the first century AD.
Return to "language foreign to any possible Jesus of Nazareth" ...
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