Large meteor in Russia caught on tape – building hit

I once listened to John Dixon, Senior Research Fellow of the Department of Ancient History, Macquarie University, Australia, http://johndickson.org/, say that there is not a single mainstream secular tenured historian who does not acknowledge the historical evidence that Jesus Christ lived. He was not saying they believed he was the Son of God, simply that he was a historical figure.
I had an extended conversation on this very point with Richard Carrier, one of the participants in The Jesus Project (who has written some really excellent stuff on e.g. the contradiction in birth dates between Matthew and Luke). We both are basically Bayesians, and Bayesians don’t “acknowledge evidence”, they weight probabilities given evidence. The fact of the matter is that there is no, none, zero contemporary evidence that Jesus in fact lived. This in and of itself is rather odd, given how supposedly influential he was supposed to be at the time. The Romans and the Jews both were meticulous record keepers, but there is simply no trace.
The only reliable evidence actually dating to the first century that Jesus lived consists of — well, it isn’t clear if the correct answer is “none” or “a single fragment of a single gospel” that might be very late first or early second century. Nearly all of the fragments — note well, fragments — of gospels we have today are from the 3 or 4th centuries — not more than a handful of second century fragments exist. There is a single line in Josephus that for a variety of reasons is suspect. All the second century evidence (and if you are very generous, late first century evidence) really shows is that by the end of the first century, a variety of cults had sprung up concerning a legendary apocalyptic preacher called Redeemer. In three languages. Yeshua -> Jesus -> Christ all mean the same thing, and would have been a standard name among the many apocalyptic preachers of the era.
This evidence has to be contrasted with evidence for the existence of other people that were contemporaries of Jesus (or from even earlier eras), and frankly, suffers enormously from the comparison. If it weren’t for the church itself and documents it was the sole custodian of over most of the last 2000 years, we would never have heard of Jesus at all, or he would be one of many names in e.g. the collection of Gnostic writings of the time (most of which were systematically purged by the church, a tiny handful of which were recently rediscovered and recovered at e.g. Nag Hammadi). Of the three synoptic gospels, it seems rather likely that Matthew and Luke are both derived from Mark as the original gospel, and the earliest fragments of Mark seem to be missing substantial text especially from the end. Bart Ehrman, a UNC Biblical scholar, has a truly excellent series of books he has written discussing the actual documentary New Testament texts as evidence of — well, anything, but the transmission of some mix of myth and legend by a mix of oral and written tradition that has almost completely obscured our ability to resolve truth from falsehood in what we have today.
From a Bayesian point of view, then, it isn’t that we know Jesus did or didn’t exist. It is that we don’t know if a single person (possibly named Yeshua, possibly named something else entirely) existed who actually did, or said, any of the things attributed to him in the NT. Might have happened, sure. Or what we have today could be a syncretic combination of stories derived from several more or less contemporary apocalyptic messianic cults.
Here is what we don’t know about Jesus. We don’t know his actual name. We have no idea when he was born (not within fifteen years). We know absolutely nothing about his early life. We don’t know where he, or his family lived (Nazareth did not exist at all at the time he was supposed to have been born — it was a burial ground and goatherder’s field that was turned into a city by second century entrepreneurs seeking to capitalize on the growing Jesus trade). We don’t know what he preached, where he preached, how old he was when he preached. We don’t know the day of the week upon which he died. There are enormous inconsistencies — ones that can consistently be explained by the growth of a legend in the retelling — in the story of the crucifixion and subsequent resurrection.
How much Bayesian weight you want to attach to documents filled with obvious myth and legend is up to you, but I tend to consider all of this evidence in total weak. Carrier agreed, but said that the evidence that he found more reliable is that in the letters of Paul/Saul. There is relatively little doubt that Paul actually existed, and while in his writings he invariably speaks of Jesus as a sort of spiritual being rather than as a person who necessarily existed, he does refer in an offhand way to real people who supposedly did know Jesus, such as James his brother. I don’t disagree, although I would still argue that there is considerable room for these letters to be written a decade or two after the supposed events by somebody who wasn’t there and to have even his casual assumptions about relationships to be wrong, nor does it contradict the possibility of “our” modern Jesus being a synthesis of a number of figures heavily salted with myth, legend, insertion, redaction, so that the Jesus of John is not the Jesus that Paul was writing about at all.
In the end, existence hardly matters. If Jesus really existed, we still can be certain of almost nothing about him. What we can be fairly certain of is that no actual magic was done, no miracles occurred, there was no real resurrection from being actually dead, and that if there was a claim made by the Jesus of that time that he would rise again from the dead and come back to usher in a kingdom of heaven, it has long since been falsified and would never have been taken seriously in any sane culture with a sane epistemology in the first place.
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1. The pagan historian Thallos in the 3rd volume of his ‘Histories’ around 55AD describes a natural eclipse of the sun coinciding with the crucifixion of Christ.
From Richard Carrier of “The Jesus Project”; “This leaves us with four options: Africanus meant Phlegon, not Thallus; or Eusebius quoted Thallus verbatim, revealing that Thallus did not mention Jesus; or Thallus mentioned Jesus, but wrote in the 2nd century, when we know the gospels were already in circulation; or Thallus mentioned Jesus and wrote in the 1st century, and is the earliest witness to the gospel tradition. Although all of these are possible, it is clear that any of the first three are more likely than the last one, since there are several facts which support each of them, but none which support the last one–in other words, it is a ‘mere’ possibility, whereas the others actually have some arguments in their favor.”
Note well, we do not know what Thallos wrote or when he wrote it, as what we have is a reference in Africanus that might or might not have been to the writings of Thallos, might or might not have been redacted, and in any event was hearsay of hearsay describing an impossible event.
2. The stoic writer Mara bar Serapion shortly after 70AD refers to Jesus as a king and teacher
You do know that you can read all of this stuff yourself online at this point. The letter in question does not refer to Jesus at all — somewhat curiously given that he cites Socrates and Pythagoras by name. It’s like giving as examples “Tommy, and Richy, and that guy that owns a bar on seventh street”. And the bit about “within one hour Samos was covered with sand” is pure cooked legend.
But why speak of it when we can quote it:
What are we to say, when the wise are dragged by force by the hands of tyrants, and their wisdom is deprived of its freedom by slander, and they are plundered for their superior intelligence, without the opportunity of making a defence? They are not wholly to be pitied. For what benefit did the Athenians obtain by putting Socrates to death, seeing that they received as retribution for it famine and pestilence? Or the people of Samos by the burning of Pythagoras, seeing that in one hour the whole of their country was covered with sand? Or the Jews by the murder of their Wise King, seeing that from that very time their kingdom was driven away from them? For with justice did God grant a recompense to the wisdom of all three of them. For the Athenians died by famine; and the people of Samos were covered by the sea without remedy; and the Jews, brought to desolation and expelled from their kingdom, are driven away into every land. Nay, Socrates did “not” die, because of Plato; nor yet Pythagoras, because of the statue of Hera; nor yet the Wise King, because of the new laws which he enacted.
The second issue with the letter when you read it yourself is the “shortly after 70 AD” dating. This is clearly absurd from the tone of this paragraph alone. The author is referring to three “exemplary” events in the fairly remote past, not “yesterday” (the fall of the temple was in 70 AD, and the Jews were hardly “expelled from their kingdom” before this). The only plausible date for his being made captive in the first century would have been 72 AD, a mere two years after the fall of the temple, and there is no possible way that this letter is referencing that event, I’m sorry. This is a man conveying to his son the mythical idea that it is OK for tyrants to wipe out the wise because God then curses said tyrants. The idea that God punished the Jews for “murdering Jesus is itself a late first century idea, and this letter is very probably from the second century event where captives where made of the people of Samosata (in Turkey).
There are other oddities in the letter — the writer is almost certainly a monotheist, but it is by no means clear what flavor — and the letter was found with a 6th/7th century manuscript so it could have even have been the third century captivity event. Of the three possible dates, first century is clearly just plain incorrect, and either of the other two is a crap shoot thousands of years later. It isn’t even hearsay — it is simply echoing the existing lore of that time, including the “Jews murdered Jesus” meme that is most difficult to make consistent with the state of church lore of the first century if one takes the letters of Paul seriously. This is a statement that postdates both the fall of the temple and the schism of Christianity into the Gentile religion it is today at the end of the first century.
3. The Roman historian Cornelius Tacitus (AD 56 – 120) scathingly refers to Jesus’ execution under Pilate and describes the movement surrounding him as a deadly superstition
Granted, an example from the second century. And by 60 AD there may well have been Christians in Rome, or “Chrestians” if one prefers. Where Josephus smacks of being an insertion as out of character for a devout Jew, this refers to Christians the way one would expect a Roman senator to refer to them and seems less likely to be a forgery/insertion. This is hardly a “contemporary record” of Jesus, and the story he tells of the Crucifixion is as likely to be a retelling of the Christian story of the event as it is anything drawn from contemporary records (why would Tacitus otherwise know anything about the execution of a single person out of the long, long line of people that Pilate, a person who was removed eventually from his position because of his brutality, executed). In the end, lacking a reference by Tacitus to his sources, it is nothing more than hearsay, rather more likely to be drawn from what the Christians claimed happened than from Roman records. And there were once again no doubt many “religious” martyrdoms in Judaea in this era — everybody hated the Roman invader, there were many small rebellions, all of those small rebellions claimed divine guidance and justice or made claims of being anointed heroes, many of them were apocalyptic, and Pilate very likely had little “patience” with any of them. And it is rather likely that there were many in those movements named Yeshua, as an assumed name if not a given name. Was one of the “the historical Jesus”, or was the Jesus Tacitus refers to an amalgam of legends nucleated around one of them (or more than one of them) who was crucified?
We have rather direct evidence of the growth of legend and power of cognitive dissonance in our own time. It takes no more than a few years for humans to rewrite the past and turn it into what they wish it had been instead of what it was. And when the humans in question cannot write — are illiterate — and are promoting a religion as a verbal transmission, it becomes an enormous game of telephone where everybody can play. Lacking an objective contemporary record of events there is no second century hearsay that can prove how things fell out in the early first century. Or if.
I’m rather with Carrier on this. The best one can say is that somebody corresponding to Jesus “probably” existed, but not probably like Socrates, not probably like Julius Caesar. Somewhere in between “probably” somebody corresponding to Hercules once existed and “probably” somebody corresponding to Buddha probably existed. More like strongly possible, less like nearly certain. Our knowledge of what this Jesus did, or said, goes way downhill after that. At its most generous, one has Jefferson’s New Testament, the Gospels with all of the myth and magic stripped out, presenting the words of Jesus as having a certain amount of wisdom in them regardless of the actual existence as a discrete entity or magical powers of the author.
4. The Roman administrator Pliny the Younger (AD 61 -113) mentions the early Christian worship of Jesus ‘as a god’
Second century evidence of Christianity, not Jesus himself. Paul refers to Jesus as a being that appears to him and to “hundreds of others” in a burst of light. This is hardly a reference to Jesus himself, it is referring to a religious “vision”, a dream, a fantasy, an experience. Humans are wired so that at least some people can cook this sort of thing up without any help, others are so suggestible that all you need to do is give them the slightest shape of the vision in words and they’ll do the rest. By the second century one had everything from exploitative priests developing the first versions of the massive world-spanning con game that Christianity became, leading it to accumulate more wealth and power than all but the twenty wealthiest countries in the world as of today to genuinely passionate but susceptible crazies. No doubt many did worship Jesus as a god. We have a handful of gnostic “gospels” that survived the purges. There were no doubt hundreds, and hundreds of variations on the hundreds. The game of telephone, spanning countries, cultures, and time.
5.The Roman historian Suetonius, around 120 AD, refers to disturbances among Roman Jews over the claim that Jesus was the Christ
6. The Greek satiris, Lucian of Samosata ( AD 115 – 200) ridicules Jesus as a crucified sophist
7. The Greek intellectual Celsus, around AD 175, insists Jesus’ conception was suspect and his miracles mere Egyptian magic.
8. The first century historian Josephus recounts Jesus’ fame as a teacher, healer and martyr and the report of his resurrection by his followers
9. In another text the same writer recounts the martydom of a man called James described as the ‘brother of Jesus the so-called Messiah’
10.The Talmud, an ancient exposition of Jewish law contains a passage (AD 100-200) justifying Jesus’ execution as he ‘led Israel astray’ and ‘practiced sorcery’
11. In a later text (post AD 200) it also insists Mary was an adulteress
All in the same category, second century hearsay that proves nothing beyond the fact that by then the Christian Mythos existed, not that the object of that myth/legend structure ever actually existed. Josephus is an important exception. Bearing in mind that we have nothing but a twelfth century copy of Josephus to work with, and that his works were in the custody of a Church that would cheerfully burn you alive, torture you, imprison you, or simply burn or edit your works if you ever stated something that was not supportive of Christianity, and that the works themselves were the manuscript copies of copies of copies made by (usually Christian) scribes, analysis of the writing strongly suggests that the first reference and the words “the so-called Messiah” were insertions. This more or less erases the first paragraph and turns the second into a neutral reference of a man called James, brother of Jesus, when both were common enough names and the latter paragraph was referring to a contemporary event, not something from the distant past. Every occurrence of the name Jesus (Romanization of Yeshua) in any text of the era is not evidence of “Jesus” (until a copyist makes it so by the equivalent of a marginal note that is then copied in turn as if it were text fifty years later.
The fundamental problem is that manuscript transmission of information always sucks. We tend to trust it when we have many manuscripts with distinct transmission chains that can be dated back to the right period that strongly corroborate. We should trust it a lot less when we lack any chains that date back to the right period, and where our secondary chains mostly date back to a period almost a hundred years later and reference a religious phenomenon as much as they do any particular individual.
Most historians are going to be inclined to accept the existence of a historical Jesus simply because if there wasn’t one, the whole thing gets handed off to the mythologists and the historians don’t get to have any more fun. Or grants. Or fun. Also, as I said, there is probably enough evidence to say that he “probably” existed, in a very weak form of the term probably. If one presented evidence as if it were to a court of law, however — hearsay isn’t admissible, and none of the evidence we have today would stand up for a single minute in any real court.
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