I've long believed atheists are basically punting on this one because it's not worth the argument.
If you mention that there are no contemporaneous writings or records of Jesus from when he was alive, even atheists of the "I believe Yeshua was a good man" bent throw up Josephus, who was born after Jesus died and wrote only that other people believed in him.
Arguments for the historicity of a figure who left no historical record include tortuous logic like "if he didn't exist then his enemies would have been quick to point out the fraud"... if he didn't exist, he didn't have enemies?
"The historicity of Jesus is almost universally agreed upon by scholars!"
Do we believe that there exists an open academic environment in which any other conclusion could be safely entertained?
Do we believe that there exists an open academic environment in which any other conclusion could be safely entertained?
If you're not Christian, then absolutely nothing hinged upon whether or not a certain religious teacher was born to the family of a carpenter in a certain place at about a certain time. It's not a scientific equation or a calculation on which rests the remainder of your work.
A plane isn't going to crash because somebody answered The Jesus Question wrong. New cancer treatments aren't going to fail because a historian bowed to popular will on the historicity of Jesus.
On the other hand, anybody who claims he was likely not even a real person risks backlash, witch hunts, funding cuts, having the entire body of their work overshadowed by claims of Satanism and politically-driven bias. Is it worth it?
A small number of scholars can make their living out of being the contrarian gadfly on this issue, but for anyone else, the choice of quibbling over the existence of a person who may or may not have lived and died 2,000 years ago... well, it's more headache than it's worth.
We're told that his existence is supported by "the criterion of embarrassment" because why would early Christians have invented a story where Jesus is baptized by John the Baptist (thus assuming an inferior position and tacitly admitting to sin) or where he is crucified?
But Christians don't see Jesus's baptism as submission. They see it as prophecy fulfilled, proof of Jesus's authenticity, and effectively his inheritance of John's position and following. And they see the crucifixion as his triumph over death. Not death nor empire can stop him.
If we assume that Jesus lived and died as a historical and mortal man, that he was simply arrested, tortured before a crowd, paraded through the streets, and crucified and died and that was it... sure, criterion of embarrassment suports that it happened.
But the only versions of the story we have in the historical record say he was the Son of God and God incarnate who wanted this, who willingly sacrificed himself and rose from the dead.
The "embarrassing" story is the one in which the totality of his power is laid bare before the world and death itself is defeated.
There's not a bunch of stories going "Haha, Jesus said he was so great but his Father couldn't stop the Romans from killing him." There's not one.
There's not a bunch of stories going "Haha, Jesus said he was so great but his Father couldn't stop the Romans from killing him." There's not one.
I'm Christian. I believe in Jesus as a figure of faith. I'm not convinced he existed as a historical person. I don't think that we can know that for certain, nor even get a fair assessment of the evidence under Christian cultural hegemony.
Historical evidence of a person is not important to my faith, but think how much more we might know of early Christian history if the investigations into it were driven by science and scholarly principles rather than articles of faith?
