Only a quick comment here in passing:

- Gospels as historical documents: Both sides of scholastic debate recognize the Gospels as “sui generis” (it’s own genre) with theological bias towards a particular end, but bias isn’t bad in and of itself. It could very well be that the pericopes presented in the gospels exist no differently than light through a prism; all the colors are there in the first place and there is nothing wrong with emphasizing “red” as being pertinent in a particular scenario.

- James and Paul: Lutheran scholarship has had a terrible time reconciling James and Paul, but this is because of some other underlying “problems” and not because the men are diametrically opposed. I’d encourage reading Bishop N.T. Wright on Paul – (“What Saint Paul Really Said” and “Paul – In Fresh Perspective)

- Pauline take on Jesus’ exaltation – the Phillipian hymn doesn’t necessarily demand that we see Jesus honored ONLY after his death. This is simply in line with the rest of what we see in the NT canon – an emphasis on the resurrection and exaltation of Christ as proof of his kingdom language being true. It is a gratuitous logical stretch to say that even the name “Jesus” wasn’t given prior to the account of his resurrection and ascension.

I’m going to reference a good bit of Tom Wright if I am able to keep up with any of this discussion, primarily his material in “The Resurrection of the Son of God (Christian Origins and the Question of God, Vol. 3)”. It is a beefy read, but this is beefy content. I’m also fond of a much shorter book, directly related, on the scholastic history surrounding the quest for the historical Jesus – “The Modern Search for the Real Jesus, Robert B. Strimple”

Both the Jews and the Muslims are happy to acknowledge that Christ lived. In Islam he is viewed as a prophet.

We have to remember that, generally speaking, evidence of any certain person existing two thousand years ago is scant. The vast majority of people then alive were not mentioned in historical accounts or written documents of any kind. Of the documents that did exist, only a small percentage survived.
Therefore the historical standard for proof that someone existed in that period is low.

Actually, I don’t accept that the guy described by any one of the gospels existed. There is far too much negative evidence within the Bible itself, not to mention negative historical evidence, countng against it.
Note that I say negative evidence. To illustrate: If you tell me it’s raining outside and I don’t hear the rain, that’s a lack of evidence — I could be in a well insulated house, or have poor hearing, or it could be a very light rain. However, if I walked outside and found the environment bone dry and the sky cloudless, that would be negative evidence.
However, if you frame the argument in terms that “there was likely a guy, or a few guys, that inspired the later mythmaking/religious movement,” I think that’s a defensible position. However, I don’t think you can get from there to a description of who that guy was, as any reconstruction ultimately comes to resemble the values of the reconstructor (see Schweitzer’s “The Search for the Historical Jesus” and Price’s “Deconstructing Jesus”).
So, that’s what I mean By “depending upon how one frames the argument” – in my opinion a tenable, solid case can be built that there was a guy of some sort, but whoever that guy was is lost to historical studies – even his name is lost
Anyway, that’s just to clarify what I meant in my email — it really is a discussion that requires several books, a lot of greek, and a pile of ancient sources to conduct properly. And, as I said, it’s a subject I became interested in after I’d already lost my faith for reasons 2-10 on the list, so I don’t think it’s particularly important to Christian faith unless the other items on the list are ALSO true. After all, a lot of people have lived, started religions, and died over the years – their mere existence doesn’t contribute much to the truth case of their religions.
-Dan

The question of whether a historical person that inspired the character of Jesus actually existed isn’t one that interests me very much. The claim isn’t an extraordinary one. Thus, as Scott points out, it doesn’t require extraordinary evidence.

I’m willing to take this point as true. Note that this doesn’t imply that any written accounts of this person’s life are accurate.

Anyone who tries to intellectually understand God is going to fail. It is impossible as that understanding is beyond human capability. It is a mystery and we have to approach it with faith and not the mind.

To clarify, I don’t mean to completely reject inquiry or biblical criticism. It has value, but the primary focus should be on faith and the acceptance that we are not going to understand it fully.

@ Dan – I’m not sure what the “negative evidence” is or even it is. Given your explanation it just sounds like evidence to the contrary. If you’ve got evidence that Jesus didn’t exist I would love to hear it.

If there is as you say a guy of some sort that we don’t even know the name of that the gospels may have (but in all likelihood didn’t) described to some extent then there might as well not be a guy at all.

As Rock said, it’s difficult to say the least to prove that a specific person existed 2000 years ago. For you to say that for all intents and purposes he didn’t exist and then for you to say that a proper discussion requires many books and a knowledge of greek seems a bit thin.

We’ll get to points 2-10, but I would like to hear some “negative evidence” from the Bible or wherever and discuss that.

“Anyone who tries to intellectually understand God is going to fail… It is a mystery and we have to approach it with faith and not the mind.”
We’re not trying to understand God by discussing these points, but whether Christianity is true. Take the particular point of this post, for instance. If Jesus never existed as a real person then Christianity is false – even if you approach Christianity on faith. You faith doesn’t make it true.
It is entirely possible to have faith in something completely false (see, well, any religion you disagree with). This means that we need to establish the truth of a religion independent of faith. That is the point of this exercise.

Sid, I didn’t mean to say that this kind of criticism and fact-finding is worthless. Not at all. I enjoy reading it as much as the next person. I’m just saying that there it only goes so far. Christianity does depend on Jesus being a real historical figure, but it goes beyond the mere physical. What document or artifact can anyone reasonably envision that will prove Jesus was the son of God? The answer is none so we can’t base our faith on the presence or absence of historical evidence.
As far as Jesus actually being a real person, we have to think about what standards we will accept. What historical proof do we have that Jesus actually existed outside of the gospels and other early church writings, some which were written decades after He supposedly lived? The answer is not much. Do we believe that Nero’s mistress Acte existed because Tacitus said so? He and Suetonius and Cassius Dio wrote years (decades and centuries) after the fact and each had their own agenda when writing. Yet, her existence is widely accepted as fact.
Jesus was not an emperor with coinage and statuary and widely copied royal decrees to prove He lived. However, even given that He lived, that in itself does not prove anything. Lots of people have lived. It is the spiritual side that really matters. I suggest we hold no unreasonably high standard of proof of Jesus actually being alive.

IMO there is more evidence that Jesus existed than Nero or a lot of other non-religious people.

Hey Scott -
Sorry for taking so long to reply — I’ve had a succession of extremely busy days recently.
To the issue at hand – Yes, negative evidence = evidence to the contrary. Most of it falls into three categories:
1) evidence that Mark was not intended as history, even by the standards of the genre of history at the time (the two gospels based on Mark, as well as Acts, however, seem to have mistaken Mark for history). This evidence includes the midrashic and mimetic (from “mimesis,” a Greek literary convention not to be confused with memetic, which has to do with memes) literary and narrative structure of Mark, the attempts within Mark to solve doctrinal disputes by giving ground to both sides (a long conversation, but the only way to make sense out of Jesus’s incoherency and self-contradictions without resorting either to hermeneutic eisegesis or writing the guy off as a loon), as well as the blatant ahistorical nature of the few events in the book where the narrative touches other identifiable points of history (the trial of Jesus before the Sanhedrin, the trial before Pilate, and the cleansing of the temple). This particularly is a LONG trek conversation involving a study of the way the ancient genres of history, mythology, liturgy, midrash, and novel all functioned and were constructed, a lot of deep reading of the Old Testament (particularly Psalms and Isaiah), a familiarity with early Christian doctrinal controversies as established in patristic literature, and on and on. Places to start reading up on this are “The Encyclopedia of Midrash” by Jacob Neusner et. al., “The Homeric Epics and the Gospel of Mark” by Dennis MacDonald, “Deconstructing Jesus” by Robert M. Price (particularly valuable for its bibliography). A familiar with the methods and controversies of higher criticism are also important for helping one vet the evidence and arguments.
2) internal evidence from Paul’s letters that the early Jerusalem church lead by James propounded a different soteriology and Christology than did Paul’s Christianity (Particularly, Paul’s description of his fight with the Judaizers and his description of the Council of Jerusalem, the latter of which is in Galatians. I think the former is in either 1 Cor. or Romans, but it’s been a while). Particularly, Paul’s soteriology and Christology are very gnostic and platonic in flavor, while James’ are very much in line with Judaic The fact that Paul’s letters and the book of James are in direct doctrinal opposition in terms of the questions of soteriology provides additional evidence on this point. Teasing apart the subtleties of these arguments from both Paul and from the author of James is one of the reasons that I said initially that Greek is essential to the long version of this conversation.
Now, the question may arise why this is positive evidence that there may not have been a guy rather than it having simply been a power struggle. The answer is this: Neither James nor Paul reference a single teaching of Jesus (in the case of Paul, there are handful possible references, but all are of disputed authenticity – either as interpolations or because they appear in the pseudepigraphia – and none attribute the quote to Jesus, making it equally likely that Paul and the gospel authors were both drawing upon the same oral tradition in the church – for example, in the case of 1 Cor. 11:23-26), and neither of their soteriologies depend upon Jesus having been an actual human being walking on Earth. In other power struggles for control over religions that arise after the founder’s death, the dispute is almost always over what the founder said/meant/intended. This kind of controversy is absent from the doctrinal disputes within the pre-gospel documents of the New Testament. If a recently deceased founder whose teachings were at issue had actually existed, these disputes would have had a very different character, with arguments resting upon the words and deeds of Jesus. They don’t — they rest upon a conflict between personal spiritual visions about the abolition of the Law and the institution of grace in anticipation of the apocalypse (Paul) and a devotion to practical righteousness according to the law of Moses (James), with arguments made in absence of any appeal to the authority of a fleshly pre-deceased Jesus.
3) This doesn’t fit comfortably in another category, so I stand it here on its own: The hymn in Phil 2:6-11, which indicates that the name “Jesus” is an adoptive honorific bestowed by God AFTER the man’s death. It further removes the gospel stories from history for two reasons: a) it is widely agreed to be the oldest piece of Christian doctrine extant in the New Testament, and b) its one reference to the gospel story particulars (the cross) is a later interpolation (this is where it helps to know at least enough Greek to check for poetic meter). So, according to the earliest extant piece of Christian writing, whatever name a guy behind the stories may have had, it was not Jesus.
There’s also another class of evidence, that of secular historical and sociological evidence of the time, particularly as regards other mystery religions from the region (some of which does show up in the old testament) which shows that Christianity, in the words of Christian evangelist Justin Martyr, “propounds nothing different” than did other contemporary mystery religions. I consider this second-order negative evidence, as it does more to answer the question “where did these ideas come from if not from history” rather than prove there was no historical core at all.
Tertiary evidence is where we get into arguments from silence (i.e. that no contemporary historian mentions Jesus and no records of his trial survive even when, if the story told in the gospels is true, we would expect such evidence to survive) and arguments from the development of early Christian canon and doctrine, but that stuff gets both really esoteric and is not, in my opinion, sufficient to do more than establish agnosticism about who Jesus was, rather than agnosticism about *whether* Jesus was.
—
As far as Rock’s assertion that it’s difficult to prove a specific person existed 2,000 years ago, he’s essentially wrong. It’s exceedingly easy to establish the direct personal existence of thousands of ancient people. It’s just very difficult to establish the direct, personal identity of plebs who did nothing of note, which is not the picture painted of Jesus in the gospels. This leaves us with two possibilities: either the Jesus of the gospels has a biography that is vastly embellished (in which case you can’t depend on it for doctrinal authority without extensive historical criticism — exactly the motivation for the majority of Historical Jesus scholarship), or the guy didn’t exist in the first place (which could mean that no historical man existed at all, or that the embellishments are so thorough that it is now impossible to tease apart the man from the mythmaking).
—
By the way, it’s worth pointing out that while “because the gospels said so” may not be a good argument for the authority of the claim that Jesus was God, it IS a decent a priori argument that such a dude probably existed. However, upon delving into these texts for the reliability of their depiction of Jesus, the historical context they are written in appears more and more to be a narrative veneer — they just don’t hold up to what is known from other sources about the ways, laws, procedures, dates, and characters of the other historical figures and cultures portrayed. This raises doubts which spur the inquiry, and takes the gospels out of the category of “history which must be critically examined according to the historical critical method” and into the category of “ancient writings whose purpose and value are unclear and may be ruled upon only after a very deep literary, historical-critical, and sociological analysis.”
BTW, I can (and have in other venues) made the same point about the Koran/Hadith and the life story of Mohammed. I’m not picking on Christianity in particular here.
-Dan Sawyer

So what are your thoughts on the question at hand? Leaving aside the question of embellishment, was Jesus a real person or was Jesus invented by the early Christians?

Nice thoughtful post except for your statement on the extent of our knowledge of individuals in the ancient world. Yes we have evidence to thousands of ancient people, in a time frame that spans thousands of years and many millions of lives. The majority of the people we know about were either connected to the various ruling families in some way or names on a list. The ancient writers were far from comprehensive (see today’s writers for examples) and only a tiny percentage of the ancient writings have survived.

History is too often taught today in a dry straightforward manner that leads people to think that we know everything that happened and all of the important people that lived thousands of years ago. In reality, our view of the ancient world is based on incomplete and fragmentary evidence studied and pieced together by centuries of dedicated scholars with hard work, educated guesses, debate, and varying interpretations. Even with all of that effort, there is a mind-boggling number of unanswered questions.

I can’t wait for Scott to move on to point #2. Let’s keep discussing this!

@ Dan – I don’t think any of the gospels were intended as historical documents in the strictest sense. I don’t think they were biographies either.
I don’t see how James and Paul’s “disagreements” are negative evidence of anything. Of course I don’t see them as a power struggle between the two men. They aren’t fighting for converts to their own personal religions and the differences between the two have been reconciled to my satisfaction (if you’re talking about faith vs works).
Where in the Phil passage do you read that the name Jesus was given him after his death? I don’t see that in the passage.

Only a quick comment here in passing:
- Gospels as historical documents: Both sides of scholastic debate recognize the Gospels as “sui generis” (it’s own genre) with theological bias towards a particular end, but bias isn’t bad in and of itself. It could very well be that the pericopes presented in the gospels exist no differently than light through a prism; all the colors are there in the first place and there is nothing wrong with emphasizing “red” as being pertinent in a particular scenario.
- James and Paul: Lutheran scholarship has had a terrible time reconciling James and Paul, but this is because of some other underlying “problems” and not because the men are diametrically opposed. I’d encourage reading Bishop N.T. Wright on Paul – (“What Saint Paul Really Said” and “Paul – In Fresh Perspective)
- Pauline take on Jesus’ exaltation – the Phillipian hymn doesn’t necessarily demand that we see Jesus honored ONLY after his death. This is simply in line with the rest of what we see in the NT canon – an emphasis on the resurrection and exaltation of Christ as proof of his kingdom language being true. It is a gratuitous logical stretch to say that even the name “Jesus” wasn’t given prior to the account of his resurrection and ascension.
I’m going to reference a good bit of Tom Wright if I am able to keep up with any of this discussion, primarily his material in “The Resurrection of the Son of God (Christian Origins and the Question of God, Vol. 3)”. It is a beefy read, but this is beefy content. I’m also fond of a much shorter book, directly related, on the scholastic history surrounding the quest for the historical Jesus – “The Modern Search for the Real Jesus, Robert B. Strimple”