Jesus did not die on cross, says scholar

[snopes]

Jesus may not have died nailed to the cross because there is no evidence that the Romans crucified prisoners two thousand years ago, a scholar has claimed.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/news...s-scholar.html

[Steve Eisenberg]

I just found this:

http://www.joezias.com/CrucifixionAntiquity.html

CRUCIFIXION IN ANTIQUITY: THE ANTHROPOLOGICAL EVIDENCE

[crocoduck_hunter]

Mr Samuelsson said: "That a man named Jesus existed in that part of the world and in that time is well-documented. He left a rather good foot-print in the literature of the time.

No he didn't, the first references to him from non biblical sources are a good half-century after when the excecution supposedly occurred. That's like if the oldest reference to Albert Einstein was from the 80s.

[diddy]

Originally Posted by crocoduck_hunter

No he didn't, the first references to him from non biblical sources are a good half-century after when the excecution supposedly occurred.

And even the presence of a man named what we call Jesus (since that name was unlikely to have been used in the region Jesus lived in), there is no evidence that this person was indeed the son of God. In other words, there was so many messiah like figures of the time (like in Life of Brian) its pointless that a man names Jesus walked the earth.

[Chloe]

The "loads of historical evidence for Jesus" argument seems odd. If there weren't, would its adherents say, "Oh. Well, I guess none of it happened, then"?

[diddy]

If by “adherents” you are talking about people who believe in the divinity of Christ, I would say “no”.

[KingDavid8]

Originally Posted by crocoduck_hunter

No he didn't, the first references to him from non biblical sources are a good half-century after when the excecution supposedly occurred. That's like if the oldest reference to Albert Einstein was from the 80s.

For those times, a half-century is pretty quick, especially considering how little of what was written back then survives to this day. The earliest reference we have to Julius Caesar crossing the Rubicon is from over a century after the event, and most of what we know about Alexander the Great comes from sources writing four centuries after his time.

From within 150 years of Jesus' time, we have about fifty different authors, including several non-Christians, who wrote about Him (and, obviously, that doesn't count stuff that didn't survive to the 21st century). Yes, that would be considered a pretty sizable footprint in ancient literature. Other than politicians and generals, I'm not sure anyone from that era matches it.

David

[Richard W]

This isn't the argument I was expecting; I thought it was generally accepted by historians independently of religious affiliation that crucifixion was a common method of execution back then.

It isn't terribly clear from the article, but is the new argument just that "crucifixion" doesn't mean what people think it does, or is it that there's no evidence that crucifixion was widely used? Or both?

Either way, this is one reason that I've never been as interested in some aspects of history as I might. The influence of religion is clearly a very strong distorting force against getting to any kind of "truth", at least if you define truth as being the most accurate picture of reality that we can develop. When history gets towards religious history, it suddenly interferes with dogma, and people become "controversial" for no reason, or stop looking at what's really there, or whatever.

(eta) There must be a problem with purely textual analysis in general, though. We could write the most complete and accurate description of a modern practice that we could devise - including analogies to help people understand and so on - and would still be using all sorts of unconscious assumptions about what people nowadays just know and therefore don't need explaining. In a couple of hundred years, perhaps some of our assumptions will stop being such common knowledge, and a new commentator might need to update an explanation for his new audience. At this time, most or some people still understand the original description, but it's no longer the sort of knowledge that you can just assume, and so a person who does understand it then writes a clearer version for modern audiences. But that commentator then becomes the "first" person to explicitly describe whatever aspect is being forgotten, and at that point, they're already a couple of hundred years from the original source. A historian looking purely at text might well dismiss it as a later fabrication - or if they don't, to be completely objective they'd still have to say "The first written reference comes two hundred years later", and others will read that as being unreliable.

That could have happened to the term "crucifixion" or its equivalent in the relevant languages.

[crocoduck_hunter]

Originally Posted by KingDavid8

For those times, a half-century is pretty quick, especially considering how little of what was written back then survives to this day.

And that still tosses everything "known" about Jesus into third to fourth hand levels of information. That's not terribly reliable.

[BringTheNoise]

So Alexander The Great is also a potential myth then?

[Skeptic]

Some years ago on this forum I challenged readers to provide contempory historical evidence about Jesus.
I'm still waiting.

There is absolutly no evidence that he existed.

[KingDavid8]

Originally Posted by Skeptic

There is absolutly no evidence that he existed.

Being mentioned by multiple non-Christian historians from within a century of His time doesn't constitute evidence of His existence?

Contemporary evidence isn't the only kind of evidence, you know.

David

[crescent]

Originally Posted by Skeptic

There is absolutly no evidence that he existed.

I love it when people say that there is "absolutely no evidence" of this or that.

By your standard, there is absolutely no evidence of Alexander the Great and quite a few others. There is evidence, including some from non-christians who only noted his existence and offered no opinion regarding his religious views. Granted, the vast majority of the evidence was not written down until sometime after his death, but still, it is evidence.

Disagree with the evidence if you will, but it exists.

[crocoduck_hunter]

Precisely my point, which is why I reject out of hand anything like the original article.

[Silas Sparkhammer]

Originally Posted by KingDavid8

. . . The earliest reference we have to Julius Caesar crossing the Rubicon is from over a century after the event . . .

On the other hand, we do have Caesar's own commentaries on the wars in Gaul, and absolutely nothing comparable with regard to Jesus.

Silas

[Steve Eisenberg]

Originally Posted by Skeptic

Some years ago on this forum I challenged readers to provide contempory historical evidence about Jesus.
I'm still waiting.

There is absolutly no evidence that he existed.

He died in year 33. The earliest parts of the New Testament are generally dated by secular scholars to around year 48. So if they made him up, they were in danger of being ridiculed by people who would have known.

Also, we know from later Jewish history that messianic figures do arise from time to time. What we don't know from well-recorded periods of history is that people invent messianic figures who never existed.

One thing that impresses me about the gospels: There is a fair amount that Jesus says which is hard to reconcile with the beliefs of Christians at the time the earliest surviving New Testament manuscripts were physically produced. For example, look up Matthew 24:34, where Jesus says that the end of days will come in the lifetimes of his listeners. If the church fathers were content to make stuff up, I think they would have changed that.

Although it is a little too rough on Christianity for my tastes, you might want to read When Prophecy Fails, a book mostly about a UFO cult, whose author tries to use the cult to explain how Christianity spread not in spite of, but because of, Jesus making some mistaken prophecies.

Also, check out Wikipedia's good article on the Historicity of Jesus.

If you want something a little more concrete, University of North Carolina Professor James Tabor presents, in his book The Jesus Dynasty, some evidence that this is an image of Jesus's natural father, Abdes Pantera:



You might not think the proof absolute, but there certainly is evidence.

[KingDavid8]

Originally Posted by Silas Sparkhammer

On the other hand, we do have Caesar's own commentaries on the wars in Gaul, and absolutely nothing comparable with regard to Jesus.

Yes, for some ancient events that we know happened, we have more evidence. For others, we have less evidence. But if we were to hold the "standard of evidence" so high that Jesus' existence doesn't pass, then the evidence for most other ancient people and events wouldn't pass, either. The wars in Gaul would. The crossing of the Rubicon would not.

I just say that when it comes to ancient history, we should simply go where the evidence points. And with about fifty people, including several non-Christians, writing about Jesus within 150 years of His time, I think we can safely say that the evidence favors Jesus' existence.

David

[Eddylizard]

There was a ducumentary made by a reputable crew that aired here some years ago (sadly I cannot remember the name) that presented evidence that there was a man called Jesus living in the same place around the same time, acquired a popular following and for that was persecuted by the Romans. It didn't claim this man was the Son of God, but it did have some convincing facts that the man existed.

[Steve Eisenberg]

Originally Posted by Silas Sparkhammer

On the other hand, we do have Caesar's own commentaries on the wars in Gaul, and absolutely nothing comparable with regard to Jesus.

Those commentaries could easily have been ghost-written.

The evidence of Caeser's existence is pretty similar to the evidence for Jesus's existence. We know they existed because their existence fits well into the known narrative of subsequent history, such as the New Testament Epistles that appear by secular scholars to have been written before any gospel and quite close to the year 50.

If Jesus did not exist, then I would expect we could find comparable examples, from later, better-documented, times, of founders of religions whose existence is a demonstrably false UL. Did Mary Baker Eddy exist? What about L. Ron Hubbard? And do you doubt that "Manifestation of God" Bahá'u'lláh (1817-1892), founder of the Bah'ai faith, existed?

Maybe you will cite Moroni, who appeared to Joseph Smith in a vision, as an example of a made-up founder of a religion. But it seems to me that Joseph Smith was the founding prophet, and he certainly existed.

A really good modern example is Wallace Fard Muhammad, in terms of being a prophet whose parentage is uncertain, who didn't write a book, whose real burial place is unknown/unclear, and whose existence might thus be doubted. As shown in my last link, careful study shows that Fard did indeed exist. (Fard was however, radically different from Jesus in his teachings.)

ETA: While Jesus did not write a book, his brother James wrote a very short one.

[Logoboros]

Originally Posted by Silas Sparkhammer

On the other hand, we do have Caesar's own commentaries on the wars in Gaul, and absolutely nothing comparable with regard to Jesus.

Silas

Yes, I would say a better classical comparison would be Socrates. How do we really know that Socrates wasn't just a fiction invented by Plato? Or that even if there was a person named Socrates, that Plato didn't invent most of the ideas and concepts credited to him? (To my knowledge, the latter is indeed debated quite seriously -- at least to a certain degree -- but the former is not.)