Sam and Jamie both think there’s good evidence that Jesus was a real historical figure. The Rev. Sam says:<\/p>\n
\u201cTo deny that [Jesus] was a solid historical figure is to my mind a certain indication that standards of rationality have been left behind.”<\/span><\/p>\n Jamie suggests there’s as much evidence for Jesus as there is for Socrates, whom we all accept was a real person.<\/p>\n Let’s compare the evidence for Jesus and Socrates. In both cases we have a few documents thousands of years old saying this person existed.<\/p>\n First some minor points:<\/p>\n One difference is, those writing about Socrates actually knew him and heard him speak. Not so in the case of the four Gospels written decades after Jesus supposedly lived. Nor, in the case of Socrates, do we have a lot of other documents (other Gospels) that contradict these four. Nor do the Socrates documents contain many internal contradictions. Nor do the Socrates documents report many amazing events that, if they really happened, would almost have been reported elsewhere (such as the earthquake after Jesus’ death resulting in the splitting of the Temple and the dead coming out of their tombs and roaming the streets of the City where they were, as Matthew reports, “seen by many”) – there being no other records of these events at all.<\/p>\n I could go on, but this is all small beer compared to the real<\/span> evidential deficit, which is this.<\/p>\n If two friends tell me that a man called Bert visited them at home last night, I have every reason to believe them. That’s evidence enough.<\/p>\n But if they then tell me that Bert flew around the room, then dropped dead, and them came back to life again, before turning the sofa into a donkey, well then that’s no longer nearly<\/span> good enough evidence that they are telling the truth, is it?<\/p>\n In fact, not only am I justified in rejecting their testimony about the miracles, I would now also be wise to suspend judgement on whether any such person as Bert even exists, let alone did the things they claim.<\/span><\/p>\n The moral is pretty obvious, I think. No one claims Socrates performed extraordinary miracles in front of audiences of thousands. The gospels claim Jesus did. That is why we need rather better evidence for his existence than just the say so of four rather inconsistent documents written by the faithful decades after the event.<\/p>\n My view is – I just don’t know whether the historical figure Jesus existed. There’s not enough evidence. The parallel drawn with the historical evidence for Socrates is misleading.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Sam and Jamie both think there’s good evidence that Jesus was a real historical figure. The Rev. Sam says: \u201cTo deny that [Jesus] was a solid historical figure is to my mind a certain indication that standards of rationality have been left behind.” Jamie suggests there’s as much evidence for Jesus as there is for […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":13,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-776","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-jesus-historical-evidence"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/believingbullshit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/776","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/believingbullshit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/believingbullshit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/believingbullshit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/13"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/believingbullshit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=776"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/believingbullshit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/776\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/believingbullshit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=776"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/believingbullshit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=776"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/skepticink.com\/believingbullshit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=776"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}