Who claimed to have met a historical Jesus ?

Originally posted by debris765nju
I am confident that Paul never met Jesus as He was dead and atoning for the sins of the world...

Yes,
even Christians realise Jesus was dead long before Paul came along.

Having a visions, seeing a ghost, decades after someone dies - that's not meeting Jesus at all.


G

Originally posted by Greenfly13
Yes,
even Christians realise Jesus was dead long before Paul came along.
Having a visions, seeing a ghost, decades after someone dies - that's not meeting Jesus at all.
G

That's not true. The resurrected Jesus appeared before the disciples and talked to them. Thomas put his finger in the holes of Jesus's hands and in His side.
Thomas wasn't doubting anymore.

Hi,

Originally posted by fooks
is it me or do people forget about Pontius Pilate?
if i missed his name in this thread, forgive me!

Well,
Pontius Pilate existed, that's for sure.
But that doesn't prove anything about Jesus, does it?


Sometimes believers say that sceptics had argued Pilate did NOT exist, and that finding the inscription in 1961 with his name on itn proved them wrong. As if that shows the "mythers" were wrong about Pilate, so they are wrong about Jesus.

But it turns out the believers believe the myth in this case - in fact there was never anyone who claimed Pilate wasn't historical. Pilate is mentioned in almost every century - always as historical.


Sceptic

reply to post by texastig


...um...that's not a historical record, that's a book written a few decades after the fact based on second hand accounts...

There's not a single shred of historical evidence for the existence of Jesus. If there were such a historical figure it would probably be a mythicized person or amalgamation of persons. We do have historical accounts of other so-called 'messiahs' from that same period, but not one of Jesus.

Odd, eh?

We do have historical accounts of other so-called 'messiahs' from that same period, but not one of Jesus.

Odd, eh?

Since you asked, not really.

The claim is that Jesus was a protege of John the Baptist's. John's attested only once in the received corpus of non-Christian writings. None of his other proteges are attested outside the Christian canon, although what is attested about John makes its plausible that he had some.

In the synoptic Gospels, Jesus is very vague about who's the Messiah, until his symbolic entry into Jerusalem. He's dead within a week after that. Being "Messiah for a week" just might get lost among the accounts of the many who lasted longer.

Only in the Gospel of John is there any insistence that Jesus was positioned as Messiah by his mentor form the outset. It is uncontroversial that John was written by a non-Jew, for a non-Jewish audience, well after the fall of Jerusalem, at a time when interest in who might have been the Jewish Messiah was of diminished urgency. I suspect that Gentile opinions about who was the Jewish Messiah never were a serious factor in Jewish politics anyway.

I imagine an alternate Universe in which the canon includes a Fifth Gospel which comprises exceprts from "I Did it My Way" by Pontius Pilate, "A Temple is only a Building," by Caiphas, and half a dozen other autobiographies of non-Christian contemporaries of Jesus, all recording their encounters with him.

In that Universe, atheist activists post on ATS that the Fifth Gospel is obviously fake, because important people like that would have taken no notice of yet another Messiah.

reply to post by eight bits


...we have Josephus' accounts which are less ambiguous than on the claims of Jesus. I'm not going to say that they're entirely accurate, but they are certainly more detailed. I'm also not going to defend them as entirely true because they're single references. But they're there and they're certainly more detailed than the vague references to some guy.

The other issue is that, at least according to the Biblical stories, there was at the very least speculation about this character named Jesus. He supposedly had a large throng of followers as well...you'd think it would have been noticed.


...and you're an atheist, get over it. You don't believe in any deity, so don't try to separate yourself from the rest of us.

He supposedly had a large throng of followers as well..

Funny, the story I heard was that while he might draw crowds in some places, he wandered around with only a small group of followers. Good idea if you're always one step ahead of the posse.

Anyway, the issue wasn't whether everything said about him was true. The issue was whether it was odd that we hadn't received secular testimony about his claim to be the Jewish Messiah, when we had heard about other claimants.

...and you're an atheist, get over it.

Yeah, I saw your other thread.

My religion isn't on-topic in this thread, however.

Besides, the idea that you and I would agree on anything complicated is sufficiently absurd to require no other refutation.