The Case for the Historical Christ

[Paul of Tarsus]

Can we make a case that Jesus really lived? Whatever else you might think of him, the answer to this question is not hard to come up with.

The first and perhaps most commonly cited reason to believe Jesus lived is that we know that the popular majority of New Testament authorities think he lived. So in the same way you can be sure that evolution has occurred because the consensus of evolutionary biologists think evolution happened, you can be sure Christ lived based on what his experts think about his historicity.

Now, one of the reasons New Testament authorities are so sure Christ existed is because Christ's followers wrote of his crucifixion. The disciples were very embarrassed about the crucifixion, and therefore we can be sure they didn't make up the story. Why would they create a Messiah who died such a shameful death? The only sensible answer is that they had to tell the whole truth about Jesus even if it went against the belief that the Messiah would conquer all.

We also have many people who attested to Jesus. In addition to Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John; we also have Paul and John of Patmos who wrote of Jesus. If Bible writers aren't convincing enough, then we have Josephus and Tacitus who wrote of Jesus, both of whom were not Christians. Yes, one person might write of a mythological figure, but when we have so many writing of Jesus, then we are assured he must have lived.

Finally, we have Paul's writing of Jesus' brother James whom Paul knew. As even some atheist Bible authorities have said, Jesus must have existed because he had a brother.

So it looks like we can safely conclude that Jesus mythicists have no leg to stand on. Unlike Jesus authorities who have requisite degrees in Biblical studies and teach New Testament at respected universities, Jesus mythicists are made up primarily of internet atheists and bloggers who can use the internet to say what they want without regard to credibility. They've been said to be in the same league as Holocaust deniers and young-earth creationists.

[Difflugia]

The existence of James the brother of Jesus is attested by Paul who personally knew him and by Josephus who (if he didn't personally know him) was the next best thing, a longtime resident of the same city in which James was also a longtime fairly prominent resident.

I have little doubt about the existence of James or that Paul met him. I have little doubt that Paul accurately described him as "brother of the Lord," but I doubt that it's a literal sibling relationship. Josephus is an interesting bit of evidence, but isn't strong enough to grant historical reliablilty to the Gospels and Acts.

That's about as good as it gets for ancient historiography, better than for all but a very few other figures.

I'm willing to agree with that, but "good enough because it's all we've got" doesn't somehow make conclusions based on it more secure.

Plus there's the various other sources on James like the gospels and Hegesippus, weaker sources of course but obviously still noteworthy evidence added to the pile.

There are different ways to synthesize what we have. Here's mine in a nutshell:

• The genuine Paulines and perhaps some of the catholic epistles are the only information we have on Jerusalem Christianity prior to A.D. 70
• There is virtually no continuity between the traditions of the early Jerusalem Church and Christianity as it existed after A.D. 70.
• The canonical Gospels and Acts are fictionalized accounts based almost entirely on information found in the various epistles.
• The Jesus of the Gospels is a myth. Whether or not the James, John, and Cephas that Paul met knew a real Jesus, he was not a fisherman from Nazareth.

When it gets right down to it, I find it impossible to reconcile the way Paul describes the core personalities of Christianity with their Gospel characters. Cephas is an unaffiliated independent rather than a member of an original clique that followed Jesus around. When Paul convinced Cephas to give up eating Kosher, "men from James," whether men literally sent by James or of the "circumcision" faction broadly, convinced him back. That sounds to me like someone trying to navigate the same mystic space as Paul rather than someone that spent three years with the living, breathing founder of the religion. Furthermore, as far as we can tell, James and John never played the obvious "we knew Jesus" trump card. The argument is that Paul didn't mention it because he was embarrassed by it, but Paul didn't seem to have that sort of self-awareness when rebutting other things. This is obvious in 2 Corinthians when Paul is rebutting the apparent charge that he wasn't enough of an apostle. The assertions that he rebuts are that he's not a very good speaker and didn't perform miracles, or at least enough of them. If the other apostles knew Jesus before he died, that doesn't seem to factor into the criticisms that contemporary Christians were levying against Paul. The other side of the coin is apparent in the Epistle of James. Whether it's pseudonymous or not, even the tradition of James didn't rely on his closeness to the real Jesus when rebutting Pauline doctrine.

The weakness of mythicists' response to this evidence is very telling, it seems to me: In this case totally arbitrary speculation that maybe Josephus didn't write what's there or didn't mean the obvious, essentially doctoring the evidence in a way that turns a perfectly incongruous passage into a convoluted and confusing way of saying... something.

Yet this "incongruous passage" is the strongest evidence there is for Jesus being a real human being. If I accept what Josephus wrote as original and properly informed, I still have to somehow reconcile that with the James as described in the various epistles. It's interesting and is a bit of a wrench, but it seems no more fatal to me than Paul's apparent ignorance of the "original" apostles' acquaintance with the Jesus of the Gospels.

We are supposed to simply guess that maybe he didn't write "who was called Christ," on the basis of absolutely zero textual or contextual evidence.

The alternative is accepting that Josephus considered "the brother of Jesus who was called Christ" to be suitably identifying for his (Jewish? Roman?) audience. Perhaps Jesus (or at least Christianity) was already that well-known by the end of the first century, but the other reasonably contemporary sources (Suetonius, Tacitus) that mention Christianity (or Chrestianity, as it were) have to describe to their readers what Christianity is.

Another datum is that the only reason that we have Josephus in the first place is because Christians preserved his writings because of their import specifically to Christianity. While Josephus did mention other biblical figures (Herod, Pilate, John the Baptist), Jesus is only mentioned here and the Testimonium. If the Testimonium is absent in the earliest manuscripts, then the James reference becomes the most important reason for the earliest copies to have been preserved. Looked at from the other direction, if the James reference is either interpolated or corrupted, then we wouldn't expect early Christians to have preserved competing copies that lack the interpolation.

If we then also guess that "James the brother of Jesus" was the son of Damneus (which would not at all be clear) we'd be left to guess why he was identified so ambiguously and the eventual clues to his identity structured so strangely; and perhaps more to the point why Josephus didn't even bother to explain this deadly high-level feud within the priesthood.

The same argument applies to Josephus not explaining who "Jesus called Christ" was or why being his brother is the most identifiable feature of James. If Acts is correct and James became the leader of the Church prior to his execution, then "the brother of Jesus" is equivalent to "the leader of the Christian Church" only if Christianity and its relationship to Jesus is already well-known to the audience.

An equivalent modern situation that I can think of is Jeb Bush, brother of George H. W. Bush and former governor of Florida. Jeb is often described using either epithet, but that works because the audience is typically more familiar with George than with Jeb.

If we apply that situation to Christianity, James, and Jesus, then I question whether first-century Roman Jews would have been familiar enough for Josephus to use "brother of Jesus" as an identification epithet. A group that more plausibly would have done so, though, is second-century Christians.

We must then further guess as to how the extant text came to be, by assuming
a) the remarkable coincidence that both James the brother of Jesus Christ and 'James the brother of Jesus son of Damneus' were killed in Jerusalem in the years preceding the war (per Josephus and Hegesippus) and

It's only a remarkable coincidence if the tradition recorded by Hegesippus isn't based, at least in part, on a corrupted Josephus in the first place. Even so, there are already two other Jesuses mentioned by Josephus within a few paragraphs (Jesus ben Damneus and Jesus ben Gamaliel), so Jesus (Joshua) can't have been that uncommon of a Jewish name. Is two stories of Jewish brothers named Jacob and Joshua more coincidental than three Jesuses in the same story?

b) Origen mistakenly conflated the two and

We already know that he did that to at least some degree (or at least conflated Josephus with a tradition that also appears in Hegesippus, the siege of Judaea as a consequence of James' execution).

c) he himself came up with that particularly neutral phrasing "brother of Jesus who was called Christ" and

Which is already odd for the context, anyway.

d) some Christian scribe who'd read Origen 'corrected' the Josephus text with that particular phrase but none of the other details and

In general, interpolations tend to be modifications of specific words or phrases rather than rewrites, especially when it's correcting a particular detail. If nothing else, note the attempts to recreate the original form of the Testimonium Flavianum by excising particular words, rather than proposing a rewritten version.

Additionally, Origen may be the reason that Josephus has been preserved. As far as I know, Origen was the earliest mention of Josephus in any connection to Jesus, so a "corrected" text that supported Origen would be a natural candidate for preservation. Apparently (according to Eusebius, anyway), the Roman Empire promoted Josephus as a history of Judaism, but Jews themselves did not. After the value to the Roman Empire diminished, Josephus was destined to be forgotten. Whether original to the text or not, the support for Origen and later apologists shifted its preservation from the Romans to Christians.

e) by that stage over a century after writing there were still few enough copies of Josephus in circulation that the interpolation made its way into all extant families and versions.

This is, in fact, reasonable. If Josephus had no apologetic value, then extant copies were from Roman libraries and collections. In order for other manuscript traditions to survive, especially if interpolations to the TF came later, someone would have to have preserved one of the manuscripts lacking any reference to Jesus, despite (or because of?) its lack of apologetic value. We're in the same position as with "fine tuning" arguments in cosmology: we have manuscripts of Josephus preserved by Christians for its apologetic value. We therefore have no reason to expect conflicting copies to have been preserved, whether such copies existed or not.

This is the same lack of evidence that we have for things like pre-Markan gospel traditions. Speculative is speculative, but the lack of evidence cuts both ways.

All totally without a scrap of supporting evidence, and four of which (a, c, d and e) don't seem particularly likely even in isolation!

I have no problem provisionally accepting Josephus as written, but it's anomalous enough that its far from definitive to explain away other anomalies. Even "Josephus was reporting an incorrect tradition that he heard from Christians" is plausible enough that we can't take his reference as definitive.

Just to explain how the arbitrarily-speculated interpolation came to exist at all. We could substitute (a) for an alternative - and similarly unlikely - guess that James the Just wasn't actually killed in Jerusalem around that time, but rather Hegesippus or some other speculative source misunderstood Josephus and then proceeded to invent James' martyrdom legend out of otherwise thin air.

And this is exactly as plausible based on the evidence we have. We already know that Christian apologists did invent stories of martyrdom. We know they're invented specifically because they're implausible. Judas bloated up and was exploded by a chariot. John (the Apostle? the Revelator?) jumped unscathed out of a vat of boiling oil (technically a non-martyrdom story, I guess). We also know that personalities were both conflated and multiplied in the traditions. The accounts of Eusebius and (pseudo?) Hippolytus of the "seventy" from Luke 10 should be ample evidence of that. Pretty much every male name in the New Testament becomes one of the seventy, some multiple times. The Cephas of Galatians wasn't recognized as Peter by at least one commentator (Clement), so he became ("out of otherwise thin air," one might say) one of the seventy. Hippolytus does one better. He manages to list all seventy. He also managed to duplicate several people ("out of otherwise thin air"), with Mark the presumed evangelist becoming three separate members of the seventy ("Mark the evangelist," "John Mark," and "Mark, cousin of Barnabas").

Either version leaves us with a threadbare and frankly quite laughable feat of imagination from start to finish: And yet this is the sort of thing which folk partial to mythicism manage to convince themselves is "not certain but... might be likely."

The state of the actual evidence makes this look more than a bit like projection. Christian apologetics has a history of overstating dubious, harmonizing, interpretive conclusions as facts upon which new conclusions may be built. Conflicting accounts of names become harmonized (Matthew/Levi, Judas/Thaddeus). Unnamed characters in John are associated with names from the Synoptics even though the named characters don't appear in the Synoptics at all. The fact that these harmonizing traditions already appear in the earliest writings of the Fathers means that they were working with the same information (or lack of it) that apologists are now. We're back to equating possible with probable.

The point that I'm coming from is reading Paul before the Gospels. What is an apostle? Who does Paul call an apostle? Who are the Twelve? What are the relationships that the named characters in Paul's epistles have with him and each other? The reality that Paul describes is not the one from the Gospels, even in the broadest sense. If the Gospels are history in any meaningful sense, then Paul was either delusional or writing in such metaphors that we can't unravel them. If Paul was sane and using language compatible with our understanding of it, the Gospels and their Jesuses of Nazareth are fiction, written using the vocabulary of Paul, but in a profoundly different way.

If the James of Galatians had a brother named Jesus, that Jesus wasn't a Galilean carpenter. The only way we can read the Galilean Jesus out of Paul is by taking him from the Gospels and putting him in Paul ourselves.

There's no reason to suspect that "later Christian tradition" - most notably the gospel of Mark written c. 65-70 CE and the distinct sources used by Luke/Acts c. 76-100 CE - was mistaken.

I strongly disagree. The Gospel of Mark is a series of impossible stories punctuated by possible ones. In order to say that Mark wasn't "mistaken," you already have to mentally remove all of the impossible stories. If someone tells you a series of plausible stories, there's legitimately "no reason" to doubt them, but if most of them are impossible to start with, that in itself counts as a pretty good reason not to trust the others that are merely posible.

"Superman flew to Venus, defeated an alien supervillain, then took Lois Lane to the movies."

Paul unequivocally describes a real flesh and blood Jesus who "made himself nothing, taking on the very form of a servant," was "born of a woman under the law," "descended from David according to the flesh" and shed his blood as a sacrifice for mankind.

I think you're more-or-less good until here. I have no doubt that Paul believed all of those things to be true, but Heracles was believed to have been flesh born of a woman, too. Nothing that Paul wrote anchored Jesus in time or space. Jesus was crucified by the "rulers of this age" as God foreordained in secret "before the ages." Paul's description (or creed or whatever) in First Corinthians 2:9-10 is also consistent with an unknown, Jewish human being crucified and buried without anyone knowing that it happened until God revealed it to them. Outside of the Gospels and Acts, nobody is ever described as meeting Jesus before he died and was raised from the dead. Nobody knew Jesus before he appeared to Cephas, the Twelve, the "five hundred brethren," James, the apostles, then Paul.

While some of that is obviously theological and a witness more to Paul's beliefs than to historical fact, it remains a statistically highly probable inference from Paul's flesh and blood Jesus that he had siblings born of that same woman... and Paul specifically identifies one such person by name.

Out of 100 or so uses of "brother" or "brothers," Paul uses it twice where it coul possibly mean a sibling, both times ambiguously referring to "brother(s) of the Lord." Every other time, it's metaphorical. Statistically, it's a "highly probable inference" that the brothers of the Lord are metaphorical brothers, too.

Speculation that this was some kind of title in the church is not only baseless,

As is the speculation that Paul suddenly altered his use of language for that specific circumstance with no other qualification.

but more importantly runs headlong into the facts firstly that when Paul enumerates the various positions or members of the body of Christ there's no hint of "brothers of the Lord" as one of the roles in play (1 Cor. 12), and secondly that if it were not mere biology such a distinguished title would run contrary to the general egalitarianism expressed by Paul (including in that passage and his references to James) whose main exceptions are the rather defensive emphases on his own importance. According to Paul, apostles - literally 'emissaries' or 'those who are sent' - like him were "appointed first," but ultimately among a body of equals: We would not expect him to endorse or mention a much grander-sounding title like "brothers of the Lord" at all, unless perhaps he were claiming it for himself as he did apostleship, but if it were a title and Paul did mention it then we'd certainly expect to see it listed alongside all the other church roles he enumerates.

By any of Paul's standards, "brother of the Lord" is weird. Paul rarely refers to Jesus as "Lord" or "the Lord" without qualification. Jesus is "the Lord Jesus Christ," "Christ Jesus our Lord," or something similar. The one time he uses "brothers" to mean a physical, but still metaphorical relationship (Romans 9:3-4), he clarifies that he is talking about his "kinsmen according to the flesh." Saying that "James, brother of the Lord" means James, Jesus' brother goes against all of Paul's patterns. Maybe he did mean that, but for all your assertions of "likely" and "highly probable," it's also "unusual" and "uncharacteristic." Reconcile that how you will.

The fact that it is not listed as a church role, and the fact that Paul uses what would be a lofty designation for anyone besides himself at all, are both compelling reasons to conclude that "brother of the Lord" was not some kind of church title. Rather it simply reflects the statistically probable fact that Jesus, born of a woman, had some siblings born of that same woman... one of whom Paul was personally acquainted with.

I still think you're incorrectly using the word "statistically" here, but this is also in the context of Paul trying to integrate his own "church," whatever that means here, into the same church recognized by James, John, and Cephas.

All of which is obviously backed up by the unanimous and not-inconsiderable evidence from other 1st century and Jewish-Christian sources.

The Gospels, Acts, and Josephus.

We would be fully justified in concluding biological brothers of Jesus from Paul alone,

At least if we assume that the Gospels and Acts are historical, read that back into Paul, and claim it was in Paul in the first place.

but trying to maintain a contrary view in the face of the wider field of evidence available is almost - almost - as much of a reach as the supposed Josephus interpolation.

OK.

[Goat]

That would make the 'one called Christ' being a total insertion more likely, but the other can not be eliminated totally either.

Pretty much anything besides the conclusion which is most obvious, most parsimonious and supported by some actual evidence, right?

Supported by forgeries you mean.

[Mithrae]

Pretty much anything besides the conclusion which is most obvious, most parsimonious and supported by some actual evidence, right?

Supported by forgeries you mean.

Wait, now you're claiming that Origen's citation of Josephus on James and/or Hegesippus' account of James' death are forgeries? Maybe it's forgeries all the way down


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The existence of James the brother of Jesus is attested by Paul who personally knew him and by Josephus who (if he didn't personally know him) was the next best thing, a longtime resident of the same city in which James was also a longtime fairly prominent resident.

I have little doubt about the existence of James or that Paul met him. I have little doubt that Paul accurately described him as "brother of the Lord," but I doubt that it's a literal sibling relationship. Josephus is an interesting bit of evidence, but isn't strong enough to grant historical reliablilty to the Gospels and Acts.

That's about as good as it gets for ancient historiography, better than for all but a very few other figures.

I'm willing to agree with that, but "good enough because it's all we've got" doesn't somehow make conclusions based on it more secure.

That's certainly an argument one could make. So for example our reliable observations of reality cover only a fraction of a percent of the populated land surfaces of a single planet (plus a little but infinitely less of the oceans, underground, uninhabited or astronomical domains), in the tiny visible fraction of the light spectrum (plus infinitely less at other wavelengths), for really only the last couple of centuries (plus infinitely less over a few millennia before that); on that basis one could argue that we should have close to zero confidence in any of our conclusions about reality. However an alternative approach is to ask ourselves, whatever field of evidence we have available to us, what are the odds that all we've got would point to a particular conclusion if it were incorrect? Or equivalently, for each point of evidence available to us, what are the odds that it specifically is incorrect or misleading and hence the odds that they all collectively are wrong? For example, hypothetically, if there were a 50% chance of Paul's reference to James being misleading (eg. it's an interpolation, or Paul was lying, he meant a 'metaphorical' James etc.) and a 50% chance of Josephus' reference being misleading (eg. interpolation, other interpretations, false information from Christians etc.) and those were the only two sources available to us, we'd be left with a 75% confidence in James' existence. Obviously I'd argue that both Paul and Josephus are considerably better sources than that!

Plus there's the various other sources on James like the gospels and Hegesippus, weaker sources of course but obviously still noteworthy evidence added to the pile.

There are different ways to synthesize what we have. Here's mine in a nutshell:

• The genuine Paulines and perhaps some of the catholic epistles are the only information we have on Jerusalem Christianity prior to A.D. 70
• There is virtually no continuity between the traditions of the early Jerusalem Church and Christianity as it existed after A.D. 70.
• The canonical Gospels and Acts are fictionalized accounts based almost entirely on information found in the various epistles.
• The Jesus of the Gospels is a myth. Whether or not the James, John, and Cephas that Paul met knew a real Jesus, he was not a fisherman from Nazareth.

When it gets right down to it, I find it impossible to reconcile the way Paul describes the core personalities of Christianity with their Gospel characters. Cephas is an unaffiliated independent rather than a member of an original clique that followed Jesus around. When Paul convinced Cephas to give up eating Kosher, "men from James," whether men literally sent by James or of the "circumcision" faction broadly, convinced him back. That sounds to me like someone trying to navigate the same mystic space as Paul rather than someone that spent three years with the living, breathing founder of the religion.

It's curious that in one breath you emphasize the unknowns of ancient historiography generally, and in the very next are keen to emphasize the conceptual 'impossibility' of things contrary to the conclusions you've drawn from the far more limited data available in Paul's circumstantial epistles.

Where on earth does Paul say that Cephas is an "unaffiliated independent"? Why would you presume that Paul's story of the incident at Antioch is an unbiased and unvarnished account by which to evaluate Cephas? Paul himself declared that "to the Jews I become a Jew"; even if it were a fact that Cephas and the others showed a similar cultural sensitivity for the men from James and a fact that Paul on that occasion considered it hypocrisy and openly rebuked them for it, it would still be unjustified to infer from Paul's account that Cephas' actions were a result of any kind of theological uncertainties. Or for that matter that a chap who'd spent years with a religious founder would be immune from such uncertainties anyway... particularly if he were a solid as rock sort of bloke who'd previously been accustomed to dealing with all the social nuances of the piscine world!

Furthermore, as far as we can tell, James and John never played the obvious "we knew Jesus" trump card. The argument is that Paul didn't mention it because he was embarrassed by it, but Paul didn't seem to have that sort of self-awareness when rebutting other things. This is obvious in 2 Corinthians when Paul is rebutting the apparent charge that he wasn't enough of an apostle. The assertions that he rebuts are that he's not a very good speaker and didn't perform miracles, or at least enough of them. If the other apostles knew Jesus before he died, that doesn't seem to factor into the criticisms that contemporary Christians were levying against Paul.

If that criticism had been raised, you would expect Paul to have conscientiously listed it along with the others and rebutted it... how? I'm not sure that you've thought this argument through particularly well - and that's even granting the, shall we say, questionable assumption that these 'super apostles' were from an original circle of Jesus' followers "disguising themselves as apostles of Christ."

The other side of the coin is apparent in the Epistle of James. Whether it's pseudonymous or not, even the tradition of James didn't rely on his closeness to the real Jesus when rebutting Pauline doctrine.

I'm sorry but this is pretty much nonsensical (again even granting the assumption that Paul and James were deeply at loggerheads with one another): Even by your own stated position/s the tradition of James being Jesus' sibling would have been well-established by the time the epistle of James is believed to have been written, contemporary with Josephus and the gospels of Matthew, Luke or John. So assuming that "James a servant of God and of the Lord Jesus Christ" was necessarily meant to be James the Just, first among the 'pillars' and leader of the Jerusalem church to begin with, we already have good reason to believe that his prominence was downplayed. Furthermore the earliest extant source which (in your view) developed the family relationships of Jesus also downplays them quite noticeably, not least in describing Mary as the mother of James and Joseph rather than as mother of Jesus (Mark 6:3, 15:40, 47, 16:1). It's worth noting that the emphasis on his brothers' doubts about him elsewhere in Mark make sense given the presumed (low-key?) disagreements between Pauline and Jacobean Christians if and only if James had been known as Jesus' biological sibling; otherwise you're stuck believing that Mark invented the relationship in one or two off-hand references only to more or less dismiss it entirely!

We are supposed to simply guess that maybe he didn't write "who was called Christ," on the basis of absolutely zero textual or contextual evidence.

The alternative is accepting that Josephus considered "the brother of Jesus who was called Christ" to be suitably identifying for his (Jewish? Roman?) audience. Perhaps Jesus (or at least Christianity) was already that well-known by the end of the first century, but the other reasonably contemporary sources (Suetonius, Tacitus) that mention Christianity (or Chrestianity, as it were) have to describe to their readers what Christianity is.

No, the alternative - the obvious fact, I would say - is that Josephus was writing about the change in priesthood, and it was a pretty trivial matter whether or not his readers were able to pinpoint James "and some others" in a lineup, whereas authors writing specifically about Christ/Christianity unsurprisingly were more thorough. Three decades after Christians were reportedly already known and reviled enough to become Nero's scapegoats, "James the brother of Jesus who was called Christ" would surely be sufficient identification for many of Josphesus' readers, reason enough to spare a few words on; and if there'd been some original version of the Testimonium, then all his readers would understand.

The alternatives to the obvious fact are either that A) James was the son of Damneus, but despite this deadly high-level feud within the priesthood being intensely relevant to his subject matter Josephus never bothered to explain it, or B) James was some other random fellow who Josephus wasted some utterly pointless words on by 'identifying' him as "the brother of Jesus."

Another datum is that the only reason that we have Josephus in the first place is because Christians preserved his writings because of their import specifically to Christianity. While Josephus did mention other biblical figures (Herod, Pilate, John the Baptist), Jesus is only mentioned here and the Testimonium. If the Testimonium is absent in the earliest manuscripts, then the James reference becomes the most important reason for the earliest copies to have been preserved. Looked at from the other direction, if the James reference is either interpolated or corrupted, then we wouldn't expect early Christians to have preserved competing copies that lack the interpolation.

I really need to head off to bed, but I wanted to soldier on to this point at least, because you have repeatedly and heavily leaned on it in the rest of your reply despite being such a seemingly bizarre claim. How on earth do you imagine that all the pre-Christian and post-Christian documents which don't mention Jesus at all were preserved, if that were "the only reason" Christians preserved writings? I don't have specific numbers but I'm pretty sure documents with apologetic significance to Christianity (or even historical significance, which Josephus obviously did for Jews and Christians regardless of the Jesus passages) constitute a tiny minority of ancient Greek and Latin works which have come down to us. We might have markedly fewer copies of rabidly anti-Christian or 'heretical' works than we otherwise would have, and a few extra copies of mildly relevant works like Josephus; beyond that your claim seems to be unmitigated nonsense as far as I can tell, but maybe I'm missing something?

[Goat]

Pretty much anything besides the conclusion which is most obvious, most parsimonious and supported by some actual evidence, right?

Supported by forgeries you mean.

Wait, now you're claiming that Origen's citation of Josephus on James and/or Hegesippus' account of James' death are forgeries? Maybe it's forgeries all the way down

The standard skepticism on antiquities account is that the phrase 'the brother of the one called Christ' is a copiers gloss, where a translator added the phrase so people knew WHICH James was being referred to.

https://vridar.org/2010/02/13/that-brot ... ss-teacup/

[TRANSPONDER]

This 'historical Jesus' is an interesting one, though in fact (like the 'who made everything, then?' argument), actually academic. Just as if there was a Creator, which one? just raises the case for any one religion rather than another, a Real Jesus just raises the question of just who was he and what did he do? Because the Gospel account cannot be trusted, and that's the only real point of discussion; specifically the resurrection - if that's false and didn't happen, then that's Christianity sunk, even if Jesus did feed a crowd with loaves and fishes).

The case for a Christian Christ where there is a question, often comes down to extra - biblical historians. Josephus being a principal one, with Tacitus following and Suetonius coming in third. With Phleghon, Thallia, Bar -Serapeon and Pliny making up the field. It is bothersome that Philo, who mentions Pilate in some detail, never mentions Jesus at all.

In fact only Josephus and Tacitus are relevant at all and Suetonius is doubtful. That 'Chreshtus' of his might be nothing to do with Christians or Jesus at all. I think Tacitus has credibility (despite a lot of arguments) but the mistake of calling Pilate a procurator rather than Prefect (which he was) suggests that Tacitus was NOT working from official records but simply reciting (with distain) the claims of the Christians.

So we get to Josephus and, while I credit his account of the Baptist, the account of Jesus (the Flavian testament) has every sign of being a Christian forgery.

Now I did for a long while accept the reference to 'Jesus called the Christ' (in 'Antiquities of the Jews') as validating an actual Jesus, but after a long discussion on my Previous forum, I think this is a Christian gloss and the Jesus is actually the son of Damnaeus and nothing to do with James the apostle at all.

Hegesippus on the other hand may be telling the fate of a different James and that may indeed be 'The Lord's brother', even if the story is a made -up one.

That said, I do credit that Paul did meet and know Peter and James, and if they existed, I would suppose that Jesus existed, too. There's also the 'principle of embarrassment' (which I think is a valid historical tool). If Jesus had been made up by Christians, he would have been a Judean, born in Bethlehem, not a Galilean and a Nazarene. He would have been stones by the Sanhedrin, not crucified by the Romans, and the resurrection would have been a consistent story told by all the gospels, not three contradictory tales and Mark with only an empty tomb.

So I am inclined to credit a real Jesus, but not a Jesus that suited Christianity; they had to invent one they liked better.

[TRANSPONDER]

[Replying to TRANSPONDER in post #216]


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