Carthage

It is largely indisputable fact that a man lived who started a ruckus at the temple and was crucified for religious preachings. It is accepted by most historians - objectively - that this man was named Jesus, and he was from Nazareth. The only evidence, though, are letters from Senators in Rome describing it and the millions of modern Christians.
Is he the son of God? That depends on your religion. But to the thread question - he does not seem to be a myth.

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All Else Failed

Keep in mind, the name Jesus was very common in that era.

Carthage

Which makes it all the more likely that the man who made the ruckus and was crucified was named Jesus.

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groundpounder

yeah, I've been kinda waiting on that..

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pladecalvo

Where can the evidence for this "fact" be found?

How does that work when Nazareth didn't exist in the 1st century?

Nazareth is not mentioned in any historical records or biblical texts of the time and receives no mention by any contemporary historian. Nazareth is not mentioned in the Old Testament, the Talmud, nor in the Apocrypha and it does not appear in any early rabbinic literature. Nazareth was not included in the list of settlements of the tribes of Zebulon which mentions twelve towns and six villages. Nazareth is not included among the 45 cities of Galilee that were mentioned by Josephus. Nazareth is also missing from the 63 towns of Galilee mentioned in the Talmud.

Nazareth did not exist as a town until the third century CE. Exhaustive archaeological studies have been done by Franciscans to prove that such a town existed but actually they have shown the site to have been a cemetery during the first century CE.


Are you referring to the 'faked' letters of Pilate?

pladecalvo

What are you waiting on....evidence for the existence of Alexander the Great?

Carthage

There really isn't much.

Probably just mis-written by the Gospel wirters and later translators and interpreters to the point where we think it was Nazareth but wasn't really. But does it matter which town he was born in? There are tons of historical figures we don't even know the birth year of.

I did not know those were faked.

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pladecalvo

This 'myth' regarding Pilate's letters to Seneca in which he is alleged to have mentioned Jesus comes from a work by a guy called W.P.Crozier. Pilate's letters are mentioned in this work and Christians have jumped on it like starving vultures as evidence for their man-god. They haven't yet realised that the work by Crozier called "Letters of Pontius Pilate - Written during his Governorship of Judea to His Friend Seneca in Rome" is in fact his first NOVEL and depicts what Crozier thinks Pilate would have said to his friend regarding Jesus.

Now if we look at real letters of the times, such as those written by Philo of Alexandria to Gaius Caligula c. 40 CE we find a whole paragraph in which Philo is complaining what a miserable tosser Pontius Pilate had been. In the course of that denunciation he never mentions that Pilate may have killed someone who "multitudes" hailed as the Messiah. Even more amazingly, he never mentions that the man that Pilate killed supposedly "came back to life" which would seem to be a pretty clear indication that "god or the gods" were not happy with Pilate's action.

The facts are that Jesus is absent from all non Christian literature, including the works of contemporaneous historians such as Josephus, Philo-Judaeus, Seneca the Younger, Pliny the Elder, Marcus Fabius Quintilian and Plutarch.

Justus of Tiberias, a Jew and a contemporary of Jesus, lived near Capernaum (where Jesus was said to live) and wrote a history of the Jews beginning with Moses and extending into his own times, but never mentioned Jesus.

pladecalvo

Carthage,

If you look at this site regarding "Pilates Letters"...

Prophetic understanding - Letters From Pontius Pilate To Seneca

...you will see how low some Christian sites will stoop to con the faithful. Note how it's headed:

"LETTERS OF PONTIUS PILATE
written during his Governorship of Judaea to his friend Seneca in Rome."

...but there is not one mention that the source that is being quoted comes from a novel written in 1928. So along comes the credulous Christian and immediately thinks that what is being quoted are the actual letters of Pilate mentioning Jesus.

COOL_BREEZE2

I suppose the Egyptian pharaohs didn't exist either because you didn't see them.

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Yeah, there always after my lucky charms. What? Why does every one always laugh when I say that. They are after me lucky charms. What?

COOL_BREEZE2

Exactly my point.

So true.

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Yeah, there always after my lucky charms. What? Why does every one always laugh when I say that. They are after me lucky charms. What?

COOL_BREEZE2

Straight to hell the lot of you will be going. One way ticket.

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Yeah, there always after my lucky charms. What? Why does every one always laugh when I say that. They are after me lucky charms. What?

Pudding Time

pladecalvo

There is a mountain of evidence to show that the Egyptians existed. There is no non-religious evidence for your Christ.

You said you were "waiting on evidence." I'm asking you what evidence you are waiting for.

I'll ask again. Which two followers wrote accounts of Jesus Christ?

pladecalvo

You are missing the point by a mile. We don't have to have seen the Pharaohs to know that they existed and we don't have to have lived in ancient Greece or Rome to know that the Greeks and Romans existed. The civilisations and the lives of people who lived there are recorded in history which can still be seen today. The sources for our knowledge of the Pharaohs can be verified in history.

Neither you or I were alive during WW1 or WW2 but do we say they can't be verified to have happened... because we were not there? Of course not! We rely on the people who were there and who recorded it at the very time it was happening. There are a myriad of sources that tell us that the Egyptians, Greeks and Romans existed. There is also a myriad of sources all over the world that confirm the world wars......but when we come to Jesus, what do we have....the Bible! A self serving, contradictory document compiled and written by people who thought the world was flat and the Sun revolved around the Earth. If any other event in history had only one single dubious, unverifiable source, would you believe it?

Our knowledge of ancient history comes from the records of people who were there at the time, those who saw it, those that lived it. In the case of Jesus, that didn't happen. Not one contemporaneous historian mentions him. The only source of information we have for Jesus is the Gospel. The Gospels were not written by Jesus' followers but by unknown authors decades after the events are alleged to have happened.