[Similarly, you can tell that Jesus never existed by looking carefully at the things he allegedly said and did. Virtually every detail of the life of Jesus is piecemealed together from stories, phrases, characters, and events in the Old Testament. He’s obviously a work of fiction.]
hmmm, there is more evidence supporting the historical person of Jesus Christ of Nazareth than there is for Plato or Socrates or even Napolean for that matter....(according to amount of accepted ancient manuscripts and secular parallel history)
but..
Because Jesus is so controversial in HIS teaching we have to somehow marginalize HIM out of existence
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Ugh, I'm so tired of hearing this fucking lame-ass line. We have portraits painted of Napolean IN HIS LIFETIME. Where are the similar images of Jesus? Where is his personal correspondence? Nowhere, because IT DOESN'T FUCKING EXIST.
"hmmm, there is more evidence supporting the historical person of Jesus Christ of Nazareth than there is for Plato or Socrates or even Napolean for that matter....(according to amount of accepted ancient manuscripts and secular parallel history)"
Please provide this evidence.
"Because Jesus is so controversial in HIS teaching we have to somehow marginalize HIM out of existence"
Controversial? Controversial how? It appears to be a rehash of various other religious teachings. Or is that the controversy, that your religion is stolen?
Napolean was around during the eighteen hundreds. People can still visit his tomb, hell, they still have his royal apartments set up for visiting in the Louvre! There is way more evidence for Napoleon's (not to mention Socrates and Plato) than the Biblical Jesus. This, of course, is not to say that there wasn't a great, enlightened man named Jesus (there were many), but the son of God is not historical fact.
"there is more evidence supporting the historical person of Jesus Christ of Nazareth than there is for Plato or Socrates or even Napolean for that matter....(according to amount of accepted ancient manuscripts and secular parallel history)"
Sure there is, now go back playing in your sandbox like a god boy...
There's about as much evidence for Bigfoot as there is for Jesus. Hell, probably more, since no one's got any supposed hair samples, footprints, photos, or videos of the latter...
The thing is, it doesn't bloody well matter if Plato or Napoleon ever existed or not. The dialogues attributed to Plato or Socrates stand on their own, and the arguments they make would be no less valid if they'd been written by somebody else, even if we had no idea who wrote them. The collective political and military wisdom we have today that may have been inspired by Napoleon is similarly self consistent and can easily be tested in practice, and would be no less valid if Napoleon had been entirely fictional. Besides, in Napoleon's case, we have plenty of physical evidence for his existence - paintings, archaeological evidence from battlefields, etc. Furthermore, the time since his alleged existence is an order of magnitude less than that since that of Jesus, so his historical records have had far less time to become corrupted (and were also made in an era of massively improved literacy, communication, education and rationality compared to Jesus' time, making them far more likely to be reliable)
Your religious assertions, on the other hand, are pathetically weak because they are the purest form of argument from authority; they have no obviously inherent value or usefulness in and of themselves, they have no consistent internal logic with which to imply their validity, they cannot be verified empirically (they even assert that they cannot, as if this were some kind of virtue), and, unlike your other examples, they collapse entirely if Jesus never existed, or even if he did exist but was just a man and not the impossible superbeing you need him to be.
Meh.
By volume it's possibly true, at least in the case of Plato and Socrates.
The quality of the evidence is disputable though.
Napoleon? NO WAY.
Socrates, actually that's a pretty good comparison. Like Jesus, we don't have Socrates' own writings, but his teachings written down by his followers. (In fact, unlike Jesus, mostly by ONE follower - Plato.)
Socrates you definitely have something to debate about. Plato or Napoleon though? Come on. Both of them, aside from being chronicled about by an assortment of sources, also wrote things themselves, leaving first hand information.
So you're saying that because Jesus is more popular than other deities, he's true?
McDonalds is more popular than healthy foods, that mean we should eat more McDonalds?
There is not a single shred of evidence for the existence of the biblical Jesus as a real person in the first century Middle-East.
There are a few, vague hints in some later non-biblical writings, but they are either later insertions or downright forgeries.
Actual evidence? None! From historical perspective, Jesus never existed.
LOL, talk about a stretch. Look, just admit the only "proof" for your Jesus is in the bible, and like he said, its inconsistant.
WHAT??????????????????????????????????????????????
Come on, somebody give these ignorants a reality check please!!!
No, Laughing Man, there is no Roman birth record for a Jesus of Nazareth. There is no recorded reference to Jesus whatsoever during his supposed lifetime. No contemporary mention of a person who defied Jewish religious authority and Roman civil authority, drew huge crowds, worked numerous miracles and rose from the dead.
"hmmm, there is more evidence supporting the historical person of Jesus Christ"
hmmm, you don't seem to know the meaning of the word 'evidence'.
"Because Jesus is so controversial in HIS teaching we have to somehow marginalize HIM out of existence "
Because the evidence of Jesus existence is so WEAK you somehow have to marginalize the importance of EVIDENCE.
Except we know what they all looked like, where they lived, exactly how long they lived, and more than the first few weeks and last year of their life. And no, there are no PARALLEL histories of Jesus, only roman texts remarking on his followers' actions a hundred years after his death. Btw, the Josephus text was obviously tampered with/rewritten.
there is more evidence supporting the historical person of Jesus Christ of Nazareth than there is for Plato or Socrates or even Napolean Napoleon for that matter.
You didn't back this up with citations, bucko, because you can't, as this statement is false.
Just because you say it doesn't mean its true.
And again, where is this evidence? We don't even know what the man looked like, let alone if he actually lived.
"hmmm, there is more evidence supporting the historical person of Jesus Christ of Nazareth than there is for Plato or Socrates or even Napolean for that matter....(according to amount of accepted ancient manuscripts and secular parallel history)"
Nope. Better get your money back from that matchbook-cover correspodence history degree. Now, go check with some real historians about that Jesus assertion you just made.
The best evidence for the actual existence of Jesus of Nazareth is in the New Testament itslef... but not the evidence fundies would prefer.
The argument goes like this - if Jesus were a complete fabrication, then every element of the Gospels would be in accord with the prophecies concerning the Messiah, or Son of God or Son of Man, whatever. You wouldn't have cases of Matthew making huge leaps and stretches to connect obscure and irrelevant scriptures to Christ, or even deliberate mis-translations to make connections to OT prophecies (or, even better, treating some verse as prophecy that clearly is NOT prophecy). You wouldn't have an embarassing event for every Gospel writer to have to explain away - the fact that Jesus went to John to be baptised, when no Son of God or Messiah should want, need, or require a baptism. You might not have agreement between the Gospels themselves, but you'd have complete accord between the Old Testament and the picture of Jesus portrayed in the Gospels.
But this accord is absent. Why are they absent? The best, most logical explanation is that Jesus DID exist, and some of these events did happen, with plenty of witnesses - and the writers therefore HAD to include such events, and provide a rationale for them.
Usually Controversy immortalizes a historical personality, not marginalize them.
You know, back then it would not be hard at all for someone to just write a whole bunch of manuscripts that are supposedly authored by Jesus. If done covertly and consistently, even with a complete absence of a man named Jesus, the forged manuscripts could have been passed on into history because no one could positively rule them out due to the lack of knowledge of proper authorship. With relatively little effort, fundies around the globe would have the "evidence" they need.
Alas, no such manuscripts exist. Do you wonder why? I sure don't and attribute it only to the lack of foresight and the gullible nature of man. The fact of the matter is that Jesus did not exist and your stupid cult wasn't even creative enough to fabricate the evidence.
There are probably birth records for a person called Jesus living in Judea in the time of the Roman occupation - it was a popular name at the time.
But records for THE Jesus are incredibly likely to be non-existent.
"there is more evidence supporting the historical person of Jesus Christ of Nazareth than there is for Plato or Socrates or even Napolean for that matter....(according to amount of accepted ancient manuscripts and secular parallel history)"
Well,,, if you're referring to 'ex post facto' documents and manuscripts, you may be correct. However, could you please provide us with ONE, just ONE, non-biblical document or manuscript contemporary with Jesus? (A hint, Josephus doesn't count, that single reference to him has been proven a fake later insertion).
,,,waiting
,,,waiting
You see?
There isn't even a historical record of Nazareth outside the Bible until the 4th century AD, echoes, much less historical evidence of Jesus Christ.PS Napoleon? Either this is a joke or you are an idiot!
"Turn the other cheek"? "Let he who is without sin cast the first stone"? "Love thy neighbour"?
Yeah, that's pretty darn controversial all right. Well, at least to his followers.
I have to say that the atheist author of the OP (and some commenters here) is actually wrong in one respect: most historians in the field accept that the Jewish preacher and cult leader Jesus probably existed, and was crucified by the Romans, at around the time and place claimed in the Bible. They also mostly accept that the New Testament account of him is heavily, perhaps mostly, fictionalized. And of course they rightly ignore or dismiss the supernatural stuff.
"It's been proven that Jesus didn't exist" is a canard, and I wish my fellow atheists would be more careful about throwing around a falsehood based on ignorance or dogma. That's what a fundie would do.
Which Emperor Napoleon is Echoes referring to, Napoleon the First, who died in exile on St.Helena, of Arsenic poisoning, who'se remains are buried in Paris, or his grandson, Napoleon the Third, who overthrew the Second Republic in a coup in 1848, & who died in in exile in London, after being overthrown as a result of the disasterous (for France, anyway) Franco-Prussian War...?
You do know we have Napoleons preserved penis floating in a jar somewhere, right?
Is there a Church of the Holy Genetalia somewhere that I haven't been informed of that has the J man's dick preserved?
Socrates, yes.
That would be true if the bible was the sole reference. However, it isn't, which is just as well because as a history book it is as useless as the toilet paper I flushed down the loo this morning.
Pardon the Godwin, but Hitler was more than slightly controversial in his "teaching". Have we marginalized him out of existence? This is not the Middle Ages trying to shut Galileo up. Your Jesus isn't even worth the effort of trying to "marginalize out of existence" anyway. First, we need some real evidence that he ever existed in the first place.
Echoes was of course full of bullshit.
But the quote that Echoes was replying to overstepped things a bit.
Based on the 1st-century accounts of Josephus and Tacitus, we can reasonably conclude that Jesus and John the Baptist were two of a number of schismatic Jewish teachers active in the decades immediately before the 1st Jewish-Roman war.
Beyond the fact of his existence, his very approximate age, and that he was a sufficient annoyance to the Roman authorities to be executed, we know basically nothing about the historical Jesus. The lack of mention in the accounts of Josephus and Tacitus of miracles, of resurrection, or of any particularly dramatic activity associated with Jesus death suggests those were all latter inventions, added to the early Christian literature in the late-1st to late-2nd century. Plainly spoken: they most likely never happened .
I give references:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tacitus_on_Christ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Josephus_on_Jesus
But, Jesus was much less controversial and much less original, than Socrates, surely.
What's so controversial about "love thy neighbor as yourself", "it's easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to get into heaven". Appart from the fact that no fundies seems to have read those verses, that is.
It's not so much a question of marginalization, as a total lack of Bible-unrelated citations or evidence about the existence of Jesus.
Confused?
So were we! You can find all of this, and more, on Fundies Say the Darndest Things!
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