Heh. A debate between atheists. We'll show 'em how it's done, eh, SnakeLord?
SnakeLord said:
Well, seems I'm going to be the only one here to disagree with you Silas.
If I could go through a few of your statements, it would help show why I disagree..
Silas said:
When I see atheists departing from all reason in order to proclaim the non-existence of the most well-attested historical figure from that particular era
A) I fail to see where any "departure from reason" comes into play with concerns to debating the alleged existence of a specific person. I must confess that if someone was to come on here and tell me that Gilgamesh did indeed exist, I would debate the issue. As with all things of this nature, I would ask for some evidence to support the claims made.
Gilgamesh, Abraham, Moses, Job, Daniel, King Arthur, Robin Hood. There is of course a debate about whether each or any of these characters who can be rightly classified as "mythological" ever had their basis in a single, real, human being, whether they are composites, or whether they were completely made up out of whole cloth. The crucial difference between these (forgive the oxymoron) authentically mythological characters and Jesus is that the stories of these people predate their having been written down by many centuries. The stories themselves invariably contain statements that the tale dates from "hundreds of years ago" at the time of writing. The "historical minimalist" and head of the Copenhagen school of biblical scholarship, Thomas L. Thompson, prefers to see fiction in all writings until its backed up by some kind of archaeological evidence. As such he has I believe cast doubt on Jesus's existence by pointing to parallels between Jesus and other mythological characters from the past. But finding parallels between one person and another is never going to be difficult, be they real or the protagonists of narrative tales. It seems to me that Jesus's being considered mythological is completely precluded by the short period that intervenes between his ministry, trial and death, and the first writings about it - in the case of letters of Paul, probably less than thirty years.
SnakeLord said:
B) One of those claims I would ask for evidence for would be your claim that jesus is "the most well-attested historical figure from that particular era". Please, back it up.
If this discussion were about anybody other than Jesus, it would scarcely be necessary for me to do so! Here we have a person of whom there are not one, but four full histories all of which were definitely written within a century of his death. There are more manuscript copies of these books probably than any other individual historical document that dates back as far as nineteen hundred years. Those books have been pored over by generations of scholars, so that in the later decades of the 20th Century one could probably count no fewer than ten new translations being prepared from them, in English alone. For the New Testament documents, those translations are based on scholarly editions of the original Greek documents, mainly the Nestlé Aland Greek New Testament, currently in its 27th edition - each edition making use and cross-reference to more and more original manuscripts as they come to light. This is attestation up the wazoo. It's not strictly speaking "proof" of a man's existence, but it's strong evidence against any claims that the entire story was dreamt up as a fiction, something that would have had to have happened within scant decades of the events they describe. You don't create complete hoax characters when people around you are more than capable of saying "I was around in Jerusalem then, and I've never even heard of him". In other words, if they were creating a fictional character somewhere between 50 and 70CE, they would have fictionalised him to further back in time.
Jesus is not the only character in the New Testament to which this kind of scrutiny can be given back-up. Documentarily, we have known of Caiaphas the high priest and of Pilate the procurator only through the accounts of them in the Gospels. But archaeological discoveries of recent years have confirmed their existence.
Finally, to assert the high level of attestation for the books themselves, I quote this from the Catholic Encyclopaedia:
Manuscripts of the Texts
More than 4000 have been already catalogued and partly studied, only the minority of which contain the whole New Testament. Twenty of these texts are prior to the eighth century, a dozen are of the sixth century, five of the fifth century, and two of the fourth. On account of the number and antiquity of these documents the text of the New Testament is better established than that of our Greek and Latin classics, except Virgil, which, from a critical point of view, is almost in the same conditions. The most celebrated of these manuscripts are:
B Vaticanus, d 1, Rome, fourth cent.;
Sinaiticus, d 2, Saint Petersburg, fourth cent.;
C Ephræmus rescriptus, d 3, Paris, fifth cent.;
A Alexandrinus, d 4, London, fifth cent.;
D Cantabrigiensis (or Codex Bezæ) d 5, Cambridge, sixth cent.;
D 2 Claromontanus, a 1026, Paris, sixth cent.;
Laurensis, d 6, Mount Athos, eighth-ninth cent.;
E Basilcensis, e 55, Bâle, eighth cent.
SnakeLord said:
Silas said:
There are no reasonable grounds for doubting Jesus's existence
You mean aside from the absolute lack of any evidence supporting his supposed existence?
This is where the "departure from reason" comes in. You can't just dismiss the Gospels and the Epistles of Paul because they're devotional texts. Neither can you reasonably exclude them as evidence merely because they are not precisely contemporary. Very little of our knowledge of the reigns of Augustus and Tiberius derives from contemporaneous documentation. Nevertheless the histories of Tacitus, Suetonius and others are considered valid historical backing for a great deal of detail from that period that is not available from the few sources (outside the Bible) that we have directly from the 1st Century (not one original manuscript among them, by the way!) The evidence we have for those periods are frequently less well founded than the evidence for Jesus's existence attested by the Gospels - at least one of which was by common consent written only 40 years after the events, or well within the living memories of many people around at the time - and of the Pauline letters (the authorship of which by Paul himself is uncontested) which describe meetings between Paul and Peter and James, whose personal acquaintance with Jesus is not in doubt.
There is other evidence too which is not part of the Bible but which has well-attested antiquity. Irenaeus (St. Irenaeus in the Catholic Church) wrote in 170-180 CE of his discipleship of Polycarp, Bishop of Smyrna in Asia Minor, martyred in 155CE at the age of 86, and how he would tell of his personal acquaintanceship with St. John, the "beloved disciple" when he, John, was in his 80s in the late 1st Century, and of Polycarp's having spoken in his youth with others who knew Jesus personally. Here is testimony which garners considerable benefit from never having been considered any kind of "Holy Writ", but is simply a personal testimony in a letter.
It is simply not reasonable, in my view, to regard historical documents of acknowledged antiquity as not possessing the status of evidence.
SnakeLord said:
Silas said:
and saying that he did exist does not affect my atheism one iota
I didn't realise debating history or historical validity had anything to do with atheism. You can say he did exist, didn't exist, used to ride a hairy banana to work... It's utterly irrelevant to 'atheism', but not the reason that these discussions take place.
I have noticed posters who are declared atheists arguing quite vehemently against the existence of Jesus, which leads me to suppose that their atheism is somehow bolstered if they believe there never
was a Jesus. It seems to be more important to shout the non-existence of Jesus from the rooftops than to take a sober consideration of all the available facts. Atheism is nothing if it isn't based on rationality, and I am trying to steer people away from illogical positions simply because those positions are congruent with there being no God.
SnakeLord said:
Silas said:
I will argue with them about what their beliefs imply about their God, and I will fight tooth and nail to stop them denying the title of Christian to those who are but don't share their own narrow set of beliefs.
That's all fine and peachy. Similar to that, some people will debate the historical validity of characters portrayed within certain texts, and believed to have existed by certain people. What's the problem exactly?
I admit, I was getting off topic a little there. Our debates here descend too frequently to name calling, and it's the anti-God side which often starts off the insulting rhetoric, which I find unnecessary and annoying. But lets not get into an argument about that right here.
