Neither Josephus or Eusebius were even ALIVE when they allege Jesus was! All they did was repeat stories people told them! They had no idea if it was true or a myth since they NEVER saw him!
Josephus Flavius, the Jewish historian, lived as the earliest non-Christian who mentions a Jesus. Although many scholars think that Josephus' short accounts of Jesus (in
Antiquities) came from interpolations perpetrated by a later Church father (most likely, Eusebius), Josephus' birth in 37 C.E. (well after the alleged crucifixion of Jesus), puts him out of range of an eyewitness account. Moreover, he wrote
Antiquities in 93 C.E.,
after the first gospels got written! Therefore, even if his accounts about Jesus came from his hand, his information could only serve as hearsay.
Some GREAT info below on to the utter lack of evidence for Jesus & how other gods like Hercules have very similar stories to Jesus!
Did Jesus exist?
Neither Josephus or Eusebius were even ALIVE when they allege Jesus was! All they did was repeat stories people told them! They had no idea if it was true or a myth since they NEVER saw him!
That line of reasoning, or if you prefer, requirement for establishing veracity, is one of the most absurd things I've seen in a while, even for USMB.
- Do you also think scads of other Biblical characters simply didn't exist because the people who wrote of them didn't personally know them?
- Do you think biographers have to meet the person about whom they write to know that person walked the earth?
- Moses is credited with writing the Pentateuch. Do you think he knew Adam and Eve? Or Cain and Abel? Or Abraham? Or all those other people mentioned in the first five books of the Bible?
I don't know what experience you have with archaeological validation, but clearly it's not enough for you to credibly assert that a Jewish dude named Jesus walked the earth and catalyzed a religious movement based on his very existence and sayings. Josephus and Tacitus tell the same story about the guy. Josephus, a Jew, and Tacitus, a Roman, had nothing to gain by even mentioning Jesus.
As a movement, Christianity wasn't much to speak of when Tacitus and Josephus mentioned Jesus, so there'd have been no point in their inventing him. Heck, Jesus and his earliest followers weren't even Christians; they were Jews who were trying to effect reform within Judaism.
One can, in an effort to establish the starting point of Christianity, quibble over when the split occurred in a complete and final form, but there's no mistaking that Jesus and his Apostles saw themselves as Jews. Moreover, such disputation doesn't address whether Jesus existed. One can even consider that maybe people mispronounced or misspelled Jesus' name; however, that still doesn't establish that a person who had a ton of followers didn't exist.
I mean really. It's one thing to worship and follow a deity or whatever that nobody's ever seen. That just wasn't the case for Jesus' disciples/Apostles. They believed him because they knew him. Jesus invented the notion of "god before us as man" and, apparently, he was at least a decent magician or physician, so people bought into his "schtick." Jesus could have been the first guy to figure out CPR and how to use it. Maybe he had smelling salts? Who knows? That part of the story doesn't come down to us; it just looked like a miracle to the people of the day.
(Odds are then as now, a magician never reveals his secret. I'll wager dollars to donuts that a magician who's purporting to be a god isn't about to reveal his secrets.)
Refuting the Jesus Myth
I don't think one need necessarily buy into the holiness, godliness, miracle working, rising from the dead, ascending bodily into Heaven, saying "this" or meaning "that" and all the rest about Jesus, but refuting the notion that the man lived and walked on Earth is just preposterous. I'm sure there's plenty about Jesus that's been embellished and fabricated, but not his mere existence.
I think you are trying to say that because we don't from ancient times have the same sorts of evidence of the existence of certain individuals, they didn't exist. That's just not a credible basis for asserting existence or denying it. If you went to China and asked a 50 people about Mother Theresa and each person said they'd never heard of her, would you then deny she existed? That's essentially the nature of the argument you and Jesus Mythologists put forth.
Josephus Flavius, the Jewish historian, lived as the earliest non-Christian who mentions a Jesus.
What? You surely have a reason why you wrote that. Presumably you think it helps prove your point somehow. It doesn't.
Tacitus, the other early writer of Jesus' name, was not a Christian. He was a Roman senator. He lived from around mid first century to early-ish second century AD. Josephus was a bit older and the two men lived contemporaneously. Yes, Flavius Josephus wrote his Jewish Antiquities around 90 AD and Tacitus' mentions Jesus in a text written some 15 or so years later.
I've remarked on your comment because it carries a tone that implies there were hundreds of years or more separation between them. There wasn't. Yes, one of them must necessarily have written Jesus' name before the other, but to talk about some 15-20 years as being material to who came first in the act of writing the name of a minor pain in the Roman's ass -- Jesus -- seems like making a point that has no point, at least in this discussion's context.
