Student Who Dressed Up as Jesus During School’s ‘Fictional Character Day’ Featured on SourceFed

It makes me nervous when kids are more intelligent than their teachers.  I am impressed with the young man for whom this took courage and critical thinking. I gotta say not a good idea. Too antagonistic. I wonder if the devil would have been less controversial.

I loved the enthusiastic broadcasters!  

Well, the student succeeded in making atheists look ignorant, since Jesus of Nazareth isn’t a fictional character.

@ Ignatz: Would your evidence that Jesus is not a fictional character be forthcoming?

 Well, just to be clear, I for one will not be jumping to conclusions about the ignorance of Christians in general based on your post.

Proof that Jesus is not a fictional character cannot only be drawn from the Muslim and Jewish religions where he is traditionally believed to have been simply a prophet, but also in the writings of Cornelius Tacitus, Pliny the younger, and Suetonius. I am a firm believer in questioning one’s faith and finding the truth, and this is the truth I have found. Something like this happened at the college where I attend; an over-zealous man was yelling about how everyone was going to hell and the resident atheist group on campus decided to mock him and one young man dressed up as Jesus. I was horrified that the group accusing “Brother Jed” of being intolerant were offending me, and other Christians like me by the stunt. Not that I at all agreed with Brother Jed, but the atheist group was certainly not recommending themselves to me.

I’m willing to accept that there was a character wandering around Galilee 2000 years ago by the name of Jesus, and that he may have ‘claimed’ to be a bit more than just a simple human being. But I cannot accept that the character of Jesus as portrayed in the Bibble and the Christian religion is anything other than fictional. Extraordinary claims etc etc.

Oh, and those two kids in the video need to slow down a touch before they blow a gasket. Even 10% would make it so much easier to follow their point. That video might also be good for a round of ‘Spot the logical fallacy’.

Well, seeing as the Jewish and Christian peoples were the effectively the same people at the time of Jesus’ claimed existence, you would expect them to share a similar opinion on his hiostoricity. The Muslim faith didn’t appear until several centuries after and then only as an off-shoot of Abrahamic religions so we would expect them to share some myths with their parent religions.

Also: Tacitus, born: AD 56, Gaius Plinius Caecilius Secundus (Pliny the younger) born: AD 61, Suetonius, born: ca AD 70. None of these men were contemporaries of Jesus so their evidence is second-hand at best. Suetonius in particular talks about the existence of Christians at least as much as the existence of Christ himself. Tacitus talks about Jesus’ execution at the hands of Pontius Pilate but at least 50 or 60 years after it happened. Certainly plenty of time for rumours of his death to to be greatly exaggerated.

I would question the validity of any of the evidence you put forward for the existence of an historical Jesus. Of course, this says nothing about whether or not an itinerant preacher named “Jesus of Nazareth” did actually live in Galilee some 2000-odd years ago but does suggest that a belief in this fact is more a matter of faith for a questioning individual like yourself than you suggested.

 There are more sources for Robin Hood (38+) than for Jesus (16). But no one has any problem in seeing Robin Hood as fictional. Is Thor a fictional character, do you think?

JM you’re arguing with someone who’s level of discourse is; FFR is stupid.

 You’re right, a degree of faith is necessary in order to “fully accept” that Christ existed, but the evidence given is evidence enough for me to make an educated decision. Although they are hearsay accounts, the fact that they exist is definitely enough to make one consider the possibility that it is true.

The consensus amongst historians of the Ancient Near East, both those who identify as religious and those who are not, is that almost certainly Jesus existed. The simple reason is that a) it fits all of the available evidence, and b) nobody has yet come up with an alternative theory which fits all of the available evidence. Nor is any such theory likely to, because of the extremely high burden of proof.

To see why, we’ll consider a simplified scenario where we only have the gospels. This isn’t even close to being all of the evidence, but we’ll just think about them for simplicity. The gospels exist. We know they existed at a certain point in history. They therefore constitute evidence which must be evaluated.

One theory, the theory of the fundamentalist Christian, is that the gospels are 100% journalistically accurate and inerrant. This is a claim about ALL of the evidence. Every single detail in the depictions of Jesus must be correct, otherwise the theory is false. This, therefore, carries a high burden of proof.

Another theory, the theory of the Richard Carriers of the world, is that the
gospels (or at least the bits that depict Jesus) are 100% fiction and inerrant. This is also a claim
about ALL of the evidence. Every single detail in the depictions of
Jesus must be made up, otherwise the theory is false. This also carries a high burden of proof.

Yet another theory, the academic consensus theory held by every mainstream historian of the period, is that Jesus was a real person, and that the stories about him vary in accuracy from “pretty accurate” at one end to “completely historically inaccurate” at the other end. This is a claim about SOME of the evidence. Non-existent people do not say things or do things, so even a few pieces of evidence which are better explained by Jesus having existed than Jesus not having existed indicates that he probably existed. This carries a far lower burden of proof.

The Bible, and especially the New Testament, is the most analysed book in all of history. We know an awful lot about it, and all of the evidence points to Jesus having existed, and the stories about him being more or less accurate in parts, highly exaggerated in parts and flat out false in parts.

There isn’t evidence that would stand up in court, but the fact is, when you go back 2000+ years, there’s very little which does. If it helps, consider that the evidence for the existence of Jesus is better than or roughly the same as that of people whose existence nobody seriously doubts, such as Pythagoras and Aesop.

But we can actually speak to the guy who made up the FSM. We can verify his fictional nature. RAmen.

Had belief in the resurrection not developed, it is entirely possible that Jesus of Nazareth would have come and gone without leaving any discernible trace in the historical record.  I think that creates unique problems that historical Jesus scholars never seem to deal with. 

Supernatural stories arose concerning many figures in the ancient world about whose existence historians are reasonably confident such as a Alexander the Great.  However, it was the accomplishments of the person’s life that led to the supernatural stories being perpetuated and preserved.  If you scrape away the supernatural stories about Alexander the Great, you are still left with a substantial historical footprint.

In the case of Jesus of Nazareth, stories about the man’s earthly life were only perpetuated and preserved because of a belief in his postmortem supernatural accomplishments.   If you scrape away the supernatural stories about Jesus, you scrape away the reason that any stories about the natural man were preserved in the first place.

I don’t think that the evidence for Jesus’ existence is at all the same as that for other ancient figures.

Part of the methodology of history is that you need to work out how much, and what kind of, evidence you should expect to find.

That’s exactly the problem.  Had belief in the resurrection not arisen, we probably wouldn’t expect to find much of anything.  So how does the historian go about establishing the existence of a man who wouldn’t be expected to leave a mark in the historical record?