Question: Is there historical evidence for Jesus outside of the Bible?

Estragon is on the right track here....

Sure Jesus said he wasn't the mesaiah that the Jews were expecting. They were expecting someone in the style of a David, someone to come and free them from the Romans, to restore the kingdom again.

Jesus didn't fulfill any of those popular desires. But by his own words his divinity is not in doubt, to suggest and argue for it means that not only you don't understand the bible, but you don't understand christianity.

For how can a 'man' forgive sin? And if Jesus didn't forgive sin then you might as well throw away christianity.

What man can say this?

When the seventy-two disciples returned, they joyfully reported to him, "Lord, even the demons obey us when we use your name!"

"Yes," he told them, "I saw Satan falling from heaven as a flash of lightning! And I have given you authority over all the power of the enemy, and you can walk among snakes and scorpions and crush them.

Nothing will injure you. But don't rejoice just because evil spirits obey you; rejoice because your names are registered as citizens of heaven."

So in the light of what the bible teaches there is no argument that Jesus was God....


[Edited on 23-11-2002 by Netchicken]

BUMP!!!

Originally posted by JamesG
So were the egyptians. Yet, I don't know of any recorded event of the exodus by them or of moses... I've only seen it in the bible... That was a pretty big event for them. They definatley would have recorded it..

To answer your question about the Exodus, I believe a documentary on the History Channel apparently points to Pharaoh Ramses the Great (a personal fascination of mine) being the Pharaoh from the story of the Exodus. The problem is that Ramses was notorious for not having any record of his defeats.

We know a lot about Ramses' accomplishments, but little of his failures that would give us concrete evidence on this particular question.

There is a Roman Historian, I don't remember his name, that rote about Jesus. A quick search on Google gives this:

www.christian-thinktank.com...

There are lots of links for this topic.

Originally posted by Estragon
It's an old topic so I'll not add much unless new interest manifests itself: but you'll ahve no trouble finding Josephus or Pliny in decent translation (neither wrote that much that has survived) - bear in mind that the relevant sections of Josephus have long been regarded by many as fraudulent later interpolations.

So that leaves us only with Pliny, who was reportedly born in 61 A.D. That puts him well after Christ, therefore making him someone who was not a contemporary of Christ. This means he was writing his own works based on someone else's tales, correct?

So who did they come from? Or are these writings just as subject to corruption and fraud as the writings of Josephus?