I'm fine when that answer, it's honest, and true, but if we had a larger segment of fundamentalist philosophy PhDs claiming his existence as part of dogma we would be having that conversation too.

Or that the message of the Euthyphro is contingent on the characters in the dialog existing. I don't think it is.

Honestly I'm content with Richard Carrier's conclusion. Giving it the best assumptions it's about 33%. If you aren't generous it's more like 1/10000.

There are practically no primary sources for vast amounts of historical people. What standards do you think should be upheld? How would you compare the historicity of Jesus to some other secondary characters?

I think one of the major problems that people have with imagining a historical Jesus is that they've got a hard time conceiving a world in which Jesus isn't as big as a deal as it is now. It doesn't take much to acknowledge that there probably was some apocalyptic preacher of the name who managed to gain some following. He'd not be an anomaly at all in the Judaea of those days.

And if he was just made up couldn't the early Christians just have said that he was from Bethlehem without mentioning Nazareth? It'd fit the narrative a bit better.


What assumptions? Josephus was altered, yes. Doesn't mean it's an outright forgery ("who was the messiah" blahblah).

Are you willing to accept the claim that other would-be-messiahs lived in those times?

This post was edited by Gastly on Feb 1 2016 10:06am

Basically using Bayesian statistics, giving the probability values the highest possible values.

I'm well aware apocalyptic messiahs were a dime a dozen, but that's not what we're getting at. We're interested in the specific actions, and whether Christianity was actually started by a person, or was simply a euhemerized God.

I'm sure there were hundreds of apocalyptic preachers around at that time. That's precisely the issue. To consider a person to be a historical character we would have to have a specific idea of who they were. To say 'oh there probably was a preacher named Jesus' is not enough to consider him a specific character. I'm pretty damn sure that there were smiths named William or shepherds named Peter. That's not enough to say that you know of a historical William Smith or Peter Shepherd. It's meaningless. We're talking about a specific person to whom these biblical stories all pertain. It's not a stretch to say he may have existed. It's a stretch to claim he did.

e/ also this -




This post was edited by Scaly on Feb 1 2016 12:24pm