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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]If only you understood how what you posted totally supports the other position.

Every single point you make drives home the similarities.  It's like that SNL sketch, "No it's fine, we call ourselves Jon Bovi! It's totally different!" :-)

Also, you responded to a post that admitted a man Jesus may have existed, and even prominent scholars and atheists like Bart Ehrmann believe  that is true;  however that gives no documentation to the historicity of the supernatural Jesus, and none of the supernatural aspects have any contemporaneous accounts.

Wouldn't they have been big news? [/quote]

Well. It created the world’s largest religion with approximately 2.4 billion members 2 thousand years later, so you could say big news is an understatement.

The Bible documents Jesus well....the most read book in the world is the Bible. Writer James Chapman created a list of the most read books in the world based on the number of copies each book sold over the last 50 years. He found that the Bible far outsold any other book, with a whopping 3.9 billion copies sold over the last 50 years.

Pretty good for a troublesome Jewish boy who never existed.

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The Bible is a wonderful book but it's not documentation in the historical or archaeological sense. It's not independent evidence. Which isn't to say that events or personages mentioned didn't exist, but if someone wants proof, there has to be independent proof. There's never been any historical proof found of Israelites in Egypt, for example. That doesn't stop Jews from celebrating a major religious holiday associated with liberation, but if one is interested in archaeology, it must be acknowledged.

There's enough evidence of Jesus that it's pretty clear he existed. Of course there can never be evidence that he performed miracles or was the son of G-d because those are matters of faith and not archaeology. [/quote]

It's a great story. Period.

Maybe there was some guy named Jesus. Maybe not. There is no proof (and, no, it's not "pretty clear he existed"). Doesn't really matter though. The STORY of Jesus is what changed the world. Not an actual person. People want to believe it. And people are happy to tell the story to control others. Everyone is happy. Pretty convenient story.

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Virtually all scholars of antiquity agree that Jesus existed.[5][6][7][note 1] Reconstructions of the historical Jesus are based on the Pauline epistles and the Gospels, while several non-Biblical sources also bear witness to the historical existence of Jesus. Since the 18th century, three separate scholarly quests for the historical Jesus have taken place, each with distinct characteristics and developing new and different research criteria.[9][10]

Scholars differ about the beliefs and teachings of Jesus as well as the accuracy of the biblical accounts, and the only two events subject to "almost universal assent" are that Jesus was baptized by John the Baptist and was crucified by the order of the Roman Prefect Pontius Pilate.[11][12][13][14] Historical Jesus scholars typically contend that he was a Galilean Jew living in a time of messianic and apocalyptic expectations.[15][16] Some scholars credit the apocalyptic declarations of the gospels to him, while others portray his "Kingdom of God" as a moral one, and not apocalyptic in nature.[17]
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_Jesus

5] In a 2011 review of the state of modern scholarship, Bart Ehrman (a secular agnostic) wrote: "He certainly existed, as virtually every competent scholar of antiquity, Christian or non-Christian, agrees" B. Ehrman, 2011 Forged : writing in the name of God ISBN 978-0-06-207863-6. p. 285

6] Robert M. Price (an atheist who denies the existence of Jesus) agrees that this perspective runs against the views of the majority of scholars: Robert M. Price "Jesus at the Vanishing Point" in The Historical Jesus: Five Views edited by James K. Beilby & Paul Rhodes Eddy, 2009 InterVarsity, ISBN 028106329X p. 61

7] Michael Grant (a classicist) states that "In recent years, 'no serious scholar has ventured to postulate the non historicity of Jesus' or at any rate very few, and they have not succeeded in disposing of the much stronger, indeed very abundant, evidence to the contrary." in Jesus: An Historian's Review of the Gospels by Michael Grant 2004 ISBN 1898799881 p. 200

1] Jesus Remembered by James D. G. Dunn 2003 ISBN 0-8028-3931-2 p, 339 states of baptism and crucifixion that these "two facts in the life of Jesus command almost universal assent".

13]  Crossan, John Dominic (1995). Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography. HarperOne. p. 145. ISBN 978-0-06-061662-5. That he was crucified is as sure as anything historical can ever be, since both Josephus and Tacitus ... agree with the Christian accounts on at least that basic fact.

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Virtually everyone agrees Jesus walked the earth as an man, as His baptism and death on the cross are recorded in the historical writings of Josephus and Tacitus.

Tacitus

For other uses, see Tacitus (disambiguation).
Publius (or Gaius) Cornelius Tacitus (/?tæs?t?s/; Classical Latin: [?tak?t?s]; c.? 56 – c.? 120 AD) was a senator and a historian of the Roman Empire. Tacitus is considered to be one of the greatest Roman historians.[1][2] He lived in what has been called the Silver Age of Latin literature, and is known for the brevity and compactness of his Latin prose, as well as for his penetrating insights into the psychology of power politics.

The surviving portions of his two major works—the Annals and the Histories—examine the reigns of the emperors Tiberius, Claudius, Nero, and those who reigned in the Year of the Four Emperors (69 AD). These two works span the history of the Roman Empire from the death of Augustus, in 14 AD, to the years of the First Jewish–Roman War, in 70 AD. There are substantial lacunae in the surviving texts, including a gap in the Annals that is four books long.

Tacitus' other writings discuss oratory (in dialogue format, see Dialogus de oratoribus), Germania (in De origine et situ Germanorum), and the life of his father-in-law, Agricola, the general responsible for much of the Roman conquest of Britain, mainly focusing on his campaign in Britannia (De vita et moribus Iulii Agricolae).

Five works ascribed to Tacitus have survived (albeit with lacunae), the most substantial of which are the Annals and the Histories. This canon (with approximate dates) consists of:

(98) De vita Iulii Agricolae (The Life of Agricola)
(98) De origine et situ Germanorum (Germania)
(102) Dialogus de oratoribus (Dialogue on Oratory)
(105) Historiae (Histories)
(117) Ab excessu divi Augusti (Annals)

Tacitus makes use of the official sources of the Roman state: the acta senatus (the minutes of the sessions of the Senate) and the acta diurna populi Romani (a collection of the acts of the government and news of the court and capital). He also read collections of emperors' speeches, such as those of Tiberius and Claudius. He is generally seen[by whom?] as a scrupulous historian who paid careful attention to his sources. The minor inaccuracies in the Annals may be due to Tacitus dying before he had finished (and therefore before he had proof-read) his work.

Tacitus cites some of his sources directly, among them Cluvius Rufus, Fabius Rusticus and Pliny the Elder, who had written Bella Germaniae and a historical work which was the continuation of that of Aufidius Bassus. Tacitus also uses collections of letters (epistolarium). He also took information from exitus illustrium virorum. These were a collection of books by those who were antithetical to the emperors. They tell of sacrifices by martyrs to freedom, especially the men who committed suicide. While he places no value on the Stoic theory of suicide and views suicides as ostentatious and politically useless, Tacitus often gives prominence to speeches made by those about to commit suicide, for example Cremutius Cordus' speech in Ann. IV, 34–35.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tacitus

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