Reply to If Jesus wasn’t a real historical figure, where did Christian theology come from?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]No need to hash this out again. There is no evidence he existed. Maybe he did, maybe he didn’t. No one in 2022 knows for sure. Many choose to believe he existed, but not because of any actual evidence.

People talking about a person doesn’t mean the person exists. Ho ho ho. 
[/quote]

Skeptics might dismiss personal witness, but some of the hearsay evidence Christian scholars rely on today was written by trusted sources. “The ancient Romans helped lay the groundwork for many aspects of the modern world,” according to National Geographic.

The same unbelieving record keepers of Imperial Roman culture who lay that groundwork also confirmed that Jesus Christ lived and preached during the first century AD. “Within a few decades of his lifetime, Jesus was mentioned by Jewish and Roman historians in passages that corroborate portions of the New Testament that describe the life and death of Jesus,” writes Christopher Klein.

If historians doubt the legitimacy of Christian texts because of the gaps between events and extant manuscripts, one must compare the Bible with other famous texts from which we derive much of our history and the foundations for modern western culture.

We might as well “throw away the works of Homer, [...] of whose writings we have no [...] fragments even older than the sixth century — fifteen centuries after the blind poet died. Of the history by Herodotus there is no manuscript extant earlier than the ninth century, but this historian lived in the fifth century before the Christian era. There is no copy of Plato previous to the ninth century, and he wrote considerably more than a thousand years before that.”

One historian, responsible for much of what we know about Rome in the first century AD, is Flavius Josephus. He composed “one of the earliest non-biblical accounts of Jesus.” Josephus was born shortly after the crucifixion of Jesus and, according to Ehrman, “is far and away our best source of information about first-century Palestine.”

Lawrence Mykytiuk assures readers that Josephus was able to write freely because of his unusual position of safety and privilege in Rome, while other Jews would have been cautious. Josephus mentions Jesus twice in his great work entitled “Jewish Antiquities,” dated around 93 AD.

As a “well-connected aristocrat and military leader in Palestine [...] during the first Jewish Revolt against Rome between 66 and 70 AD,” he did not follow Christ. Josephus “knew people who had seen and heard Jesus,” according to Mykytiuk.

The text talks about James, the brother of Jesus. Josephus further specified which Jesus he was referring to by adding the phrase “who is called Messiah,” or, since he was writing in Greek, Christos.

Although Bible scholars concede that Christians have made additions or changes to some historical texts, “this phrase — ‘who is called Christ’ — is very unlikely to have been added by a Christian” because Christian texts always referred to James as “the brother of Jesus,” and because “Josephus’s description in Jewish Antiquities of how and when James was executed disagrees with Christian tradition, likewise implying a non-Christian author.’ These small points identify a non-biased writer.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.christianity.com/wiki/jesus-christ/does-proof-of-jesus-other-than-in-the-bible-exist.html%3famp=1[/quote]

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