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Is there any historical evidence of the existence of Jesus other the Bible?

forester 4 Apr 22
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Posted this before, you may have missed it

Coldo Level 8 Apr 23, 2018

Yes I missed that

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Practically none. Those existing records acredited to being Jesus coudl have been anyone, as the name was common, and more than one person with the name was put to death via crusifiction.

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No, except for a spurious reference in the writings of Flaviius Josephus, which was probably added hundreds of years later. (You can find it by Googling "Testimonium Flavianum".)

A friend of mine has created a good 8-minute video on the "historical" evidence for Jesus, or lack thereof:

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Books were copied word by word by hand. Thus it was easy for a later copyist to add the comment in Josephus that's generally considered fake.

I think that the cloth in the "Shroud of Turin" was dated to the middle ages. Someone above claims that the DNA links him to Mary - where would they get Mary's DNA? (quick google) The link below discusses DNA on dust vacuumed from the shroud. Because of degradation in old DNA, they looked mostly at mitochondrial DNA - possibly leading to the misunderstanding.

They found many people's DNA, including some features that are unique to Druze. [livescience.com]

GossG Level 2 Apr 23, 2018
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Plain and simple, no.

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No. There is no airtight case either way. People who believe Jesus is not an historic discrete individual are called mythicists. The opposite are called traditionalists. I lean strongly mythicist myself, although it presents zero problem for me if the Jesus mythos is based on a real person because the mythos is still fabulist nonsense with virtually no secular testimony to it.

As to extra-Biblical evidence for Jesus, it is essentialy non-existent. There's a passage in Jewish Wars by the historian Josephus that mentions him, but it's widely agreed by scholars that it's a "pious fraud" that was added much later. Early church fathers for example mention that book, but not that passage, and you can bet they would have if they had known it to be there.

Many other secular references people cite don't talk about Jesus, but about Christians or Christianity. No one disputes that Christianity exists. That people were running around worshipping Christ is beside the point. Indeed, one of these early references is to "followers of Christus" and it's unclear that Christus = Christ = the Christ = Jesus.

All such references is grasping at straws. If the events of the gospels actually happened (resurrected people walking around, earthquakes, darkness at noon) it would have been widely reported and remarked upon. But there's really nothing but crickets in the ancient record.

My own reaons for being a mythicist focus more on internal Biblical inconsistencies coupled with my understanding of early church history. The early church was not the monolith of uniform belief people imagine it to be; there were competing orthodoxies and if you understand those and the order in which the NT was written you can trace the evolution of Jesus from a celestial apparition to a flesh and blood human quite clearly. The gospels were written very late in the game to push something more like the orthodoxy we know today -- the orthodoxy that eventually won out and got to write history.

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There are a couple of texts within Roman and Jewish history that make mention of him.

Are we sure? It was a common name and if no miracles were mentioned it's just another Yeshua.

@DenoPenno I guess one could argue the unsurety of anything. Some say those writings were added later, and maybe they were. I personally think there's enough evidence that he was a man and walked the Middle East sometime around 2000 years ago. Remember that the NT itself is made up of lots of different texts from different sources, too. (FWIW, do I personally buy the supernatural stuff? No. I've studied enough of Roman paganism (not an expert, but decently-read) to understand how the melding of Christianity and paganism created the virgin-born/rising from the dead mythos.)

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There has been scientific evidence of his existence as far as I know. I believe they have the cloth that he was wrapped in. I also believe they have done some DNA analysis to link him to his mother Mary. This does nothing to further my belief. It simply proves the existence of some man who may or may not have been named Jesus. Does anyone know when the Bible began to be read? Where the first one was read? Who decided to distribute it?

The Shroud of Turin is a flat out fake. It's a latter day forgery and has nothing to do with Jesus. Where do they have the DNA of Jesus and how did anyone get that DNA? The science of DNA is rather modern.
As for bible reading I suppose it started right after the council put the 66 books together as one and believers were encouraged to accept it. That would be well over 300 years after Jesus and there were many books that did not make it into the bible.

The documentary claimed that DNA pulled from the shroud, I do not remember how they had come to believe they had "Mary's" genetic code

Citations needed.

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None whatsoever. but there are tons of proof that he never existed at all passed a mormon yesterday jees the smell was unbearable

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There is much that Christians claim that refer to Jesus. The problem is they are all references to Writers that refer to what believers claimed. There is no historical references to Jesus from any outside source that claims to know any first hand information about Jesus. There is a claim that 500 people saw Jesus after he died in the bible. These are claimed by Apologist siting the Bible, The problem with this is no first hand accounts are given. It is simply the claim of a beliver that never met Jesus or any of the people that he claims saw him appear. This account was written by an author/belever that lived in another region of the world that had not even second hand accounts of any witnesses many decades later

Their is not outside historical accounts, no archeological evidence which is really trying for any historian.

So No.

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The bible isn't evidence of anything.

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Not really. I'd hardly call the Bible a history book.

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