Felix wrote:Regarding Josephus calling Jesus the Christ. It could be that Josephus just accepted the title, like when a Protestant calls the Pope the Pope, and then explained the Christian belief regarding Jesus. It could be, contrary to what we've been told, that Josephus himself became a Christian.
In another thread, I pointed out the miraculous-like growth of the church in the first century, in spite of the Jews hating Christianity. If Jesus didn't exist, why didn't Jews of the first century point that out? If in fact Jesus didn't exist, why wouldn't they have used this most powerful fact against Christians?
Why didn't Pontious Pilate ever say, "I didn't execute a Jesus claiming to be Christ". Why didn't the Jewish authorities ever claim "There was no Jesus claiming to be the Messiah that we might have turned over to the Romans." Why no record of any first century Judean saying "I lived there and never heard of this Jesus person being in town"?
The purpose of history isn't to remind ourselves of what
doesn't exist. It's not like every century we need to remind our historians to write down that dragons don't exist just so that future generations know. History returns
positive evidence that someone in fact did exist. This could be in the form of people agreeing with said person OR disagreeing, because that would still tell us that this person did exist but people had differing views about said person.
With Jesus, there's not a single contemporary account of him apart from the NT. No historian thought it was worth writing about the Son of God OR the
alleged Son of God walking around performing miracles? I find that highly suspicious and unlikely.
Jewish tradition, as recorded in the Talmud, claims the Jews killed Jesus, rather than claiming Jesus didn't exist.
On the contrary, we have at least tradition, as solid as most any other ancient history, of a number of men who claim to have been eyewitnesses to Jesus giving their lives, both figuratively and literally, to spreading the word about Jesus. People don't do this for something they themselves made up. Paul wouldn't have suffered as he did for something he made up himself.
Key word here being
tradition. The authorships of the Gospels can't actually be verified. No one even questions how these Gospels got their names but everyone assumes Matthew, Mark, Luke and John wrote them because those are the names that the early Church tacked onto them. Most historians say the authors are anonymous. No one knows who actually wrote them because the authors don't identify themselves.
Take Matthew for example. There's evidence within the manuscript itself that tells you Matthew the Apostle didn't write it.
Matthew 9:9 wrote:As Jesus passed on from there, he saw a man called Matthew sitting at the tax booth, and he said to him, "Follow me." And he rose and followed him.
When you're sharing your witness account, you don't ever refer to yourself in 3rd person. It's just logically not intuitive.
Another example is the start of Luke.
Luke 1:1-4 wrote:Inasmuch as many have undertaken to compile a narrative of the things that have been accomplished among us, just as those who from the beginning were eyewitnesses and ministers of the word have delivered them to us, it seemed good to me also, having followed all things closely for some time past, to write an orderly account for you, most excellent Theophilus, that you may have certainty concerning the things you have been taught
It is known that Mark was written first and then Matthew and Luke. What the author is directly confessing here is that he was never an eyewitness but instead already had a text where he gathered his information from i.e. Mark. These 3 Gospels are called the Synoptic Gospels and they share a 'triple tradition' i.e. much of the content is the same. A very small percentage of Mark is original, and the rest of it can be found in Matthew and Luke. Mark as you may know only has 16 chapters compared to Matthew which has 28 and Luke which has 24. So the authors of Matthew and Luke clearly used Mark as their starting point and added on to it (including resurrection accounts, as the earliest manuscripts of Mark end at 16:8 with the empty tomb).
So there are a lot of reasons for thinking that even the Gospel authors never saw a Jesus, let alone any contemporary historian of the time.
