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[quote=Anonymous]Some of you continue to ignore the posts here confirming there's linguistic AND external evidence. You stop up your ears and continue to insist there's only internal evidence from the gospels (which, as pointed above you use incorrectly anyway, asserting the evidence is rooted in faith instead of being based on historical analyses and simple logic). PP above did a good job with the external evidence. The linguistic evidence is interesting to me.

So here you go, Saint Bart on the linguistic evidence. https://ehrmanblog.org/gospel-evidence-that-jesus-existed/ . What follows is a cut and paste, shortened with the hope you'll read it (although that seems unlikely) and with my bolding.

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[u]Linguistic evidence[/u]

Good evidence shows that some of the Gospel accounts clearly go back to traditions about Jesus in circulation, originally, in Aramaic, the language of Roman Palestine, where Jesus himself lived.  One piece of evidence is that Aramaic words occasionally appear in stories about Jesus, often at the climactic moment.   This happens in a variety of stories from a variety of sources.  For example, In Mark 5 Jesus raises the daughter of a man named Jairus from the dead.  When he comes into her room and raises her, he says to her “Talitha cumi.”  The author of Mark translates for us: “Little girl, arise.”

... [a story about Bart's German professor giving German anecdotes] ...

This story about Jairus’s daughter, then, was originally told in Aramaic and was later translated into Greek, with the key line left in the original.  So too with several stories in a completely different Gospel, the Gospel of John.  It happens three times in just 1:35-42.   This is a story that circulated in Aramaic-speaking Palestine, the homeland of Jesus and his disciples.

[u]Traditions Stemming from Aramaic[/u]

The other reason for knowing that a tradition was originally in Aramaic is because it makes better sense when translated *back* into Aramaic than it does in Greek.

My favorite illustration of this is Jesus’ famous saying: “Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath; therefore the Son of Man is the Lord of the Sabbath” (Mark 2:27-28).  The context: Jesus’ disciples have been eating grain from a field on the Sabbath day; the Pharisees object, and Jesus explains that it is permissible to meet human needs on the Sabbath.  Then his clever one-liner.

But the one-liner doesn’t make sense.  Why would the Son of Man (Jesus) be Lord of the Sabbath BECAUSE Sabbath was made for humans, not the other way around?   In other words, when he says “therefore” the Son of Man is the Lord of the Sabbath, what is the “therefore” there for?

The logic doesn’t work in Greek (or English).  But it would work in Aramaic.  That’s because in Aramaic the word for “man” and the word for “son of man” are the same word:  “Bar enash” (could be translated either way).  And so what Jesus said was: “Sabbath was made for bar enash, not bar enash for the Sabbath; therefore bar enash is lord of the Sabbath.”  Now it makes sense.  The saying was originally transmitted in Aramaic, and when translated into Greek, the translator decided to make the final statement about Jesus, not about humans.

[u]Reality Check: Jesus Existed[/u]

Christianity did not make a big impact on Aramaic-speaking Palestine.  The vast majority of Jews in the homeland did not accept Christianity or want anything to do with it.  There were not thousands of storytellers there passing on Christian traditions.  There were some, of course, especially in Jerusalem.

[b]But the fact that these stories based on Aramaic are scattered throughout our sources suggests that they were in circulation relatively early in the tradition.  Most of these are thought to go back to the early decade or two (probably the earliest decade) of transmission.[/b] [bolding added] You cannot argue that Jesus was made up by some Greek-speaking Christian after Paul’s letters, for example.[/quote]

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