things that interest you that others dont care about probably thread

[sral]

Originally Posted by uh-oh

josephus was a jew, who literally wrote the history of JUDEA during the 1st century, and made one passing mention of a guy people called christus. christus=messiah. so he makes reference to a man named jesus people called the messiah.

that doesn't mean the man existed. it means people referred to a man they call jesus the messiah. the greeks referred to a man called the son of god, hercules. did he exist? maybe. where is the proof?

jesus was allegedly crucified in 29ish AD. josephus wasn't born until 37 AD. in 64 BC nero was blaming fires on and executing christians, IN ROME. christians were in rome 35 years after the death of the alleged jesus. in a big enough number to be mentioned by the emperor. meanwhile josephus is still jewing it up in judea, getting ready to fight in the jewish rebellions against rome. before losing and defecting to rome, and then writing the history of judea during the time of jesus

you would think such a giant historical figure would get more than a passing mention

tacitus is the same deal, only less credible because he is from the south of france (or belgium or northern italy) and is speaking from even further from the events

the point being that when these men are writing the history of a region they need sources, sources are people. if christians already proliferated the myth of jesus, those sources would speak of him as if he existed because people talked as if he did

First of all, we will need to establish what you/we mean by "proof he existed".

In the ancient world, historical records were rather thin on the ground, and were often written several generations or centuries after the fact. As a few examples:

Much of what we know about the foundation of Athens, the early history of the Persian Empire, and the war between Greece and Persia comes from a single source, namely Herodotus. Herodotus wrote around 430 B.C. and covered events from well over a century earlier, up to events fifty years prior.

Josephus, the only Jewish historian of the first century, wrote in 90 A.D., covering events in Jewish history ranging from Old Testament times up to the first century. Most of the people and events he covered, we know about only from him.

For most of the pre-Socratic philosophers, and many from later times as well, all we know comes from biographies or fragments written anywhere from 200 to 1,000 years later.

In comparison to that, with Jesus we have the first biography, Mark's Gospel, probably written about 35 years after the fact, and three further biographies, the gospels of Matthew, Luke, and John, written probably 40-60 years after the fact. By the standards of ancient world history, this is a phenomenally large amount of evidence, not even including mentions of the life of Jesus in the epistles.