Goodness, what planet do you live on?
Earth. This question obviously is an attack on my sanity though because you know which planet I live on.
I don't know what you are on about that you cannot get faith through dispassionate observation of the evidence. How do the police investigate crimes, how does the court system sentence people? They do not know 100% what happened in cases because no one was there, anyone in the Jury who is emotionally attached to the case in the end would not be allowed to sit. So too we can observe evidence pertaining to Christianity and come to a result which is not controlled by our emotions.
The Christ of history is a couple of quoted lines in Josephus, some of which may even be forgeries.
You need to restudy what the historical Christ is, I am not going to point out that what you say here is coming from another planet
There is essentially zero corroborative extraBiblical history. Whether or not there should be, provide he existed and the stories are true, is a matter of debate. There is certainly nothing about message or character.
You deny that there is credible evidence of Jesus outside his biographies? I am sorry but your thinking is fantasy, opinion and not something studied.
Let me give some corroborating evidence.
People like to flippantly throw around ancient historian names without even knowing anything about them. Josephus was a very important Jewish historian, he defended his decision in the Jewish-Roman War which took place iin A.D 66-74. He had surrendered to the Roman general Vespasian during the siege of Jotapata, even though many of his colleagues committed suicide rather than give up. He became a defender of the Romans.
As you can imagine from his collaboration with the hated Romans, Josephus was extremely disliked by his fellow Jews. However he became very popular among Christians, because in his writings he refers to James, the brother of Jesus, and to Jesus himself.
In "The Antiquities" he describes how ahigh priest named Ananias took advantage of the death of the Roman govenor Festus, who is also mentioned in the New Testament, in order to have James killed. Josephus writes, "He convened a meeting of the Sanhedrin and brought before them a man named James, the brother of Jesus, who was called the Christ, and certain others. He accused them of having transfressed the law and delivered them up to be stoned."
There is no scholar who has successfully disputed this passage. L.H Feldman noted that if this had been a later Christian addition to the text, it would have likely been more laudatory of James. So here you have a reference to the brother of Jesus, who had apparently been converted by the appearance of the risen Christ if you compare John 7:5 and 1 Corinthians 15:7, and corroboration of the fact that some people considered Jesus to be the Christ, which means "the Anointed ONe" or "Messiah"
Josephus had written an even longer section on Jesus which is called the Testimonium Flavianum. This passage is among the most hotly disputed in ancient literature because on its surface it appears to provide sweeping corroboration of Jesus' life, miracles, death and resurrection. But is it authentic?
Scholars have gone through three trends on this topic. For obvious reasons, the early Christians thought it was a wonderful and thoughtfhly authentic testament fo Jesus and his resurrection. However, the entire passage was questionined by at least some scholars during the Enlightenment.
However today, there is a remarkable consensus among both Jewish and Christian scholars that the passage as a whole is authentic, although there may be some interpolations. Such as: "About this time there lived Jesus, a wise man." That phrase is not normally used of Jesus by Christians, so it seems authentic for Josephus. However the following phrase says "if indeed one ought to call him a man." This implies Jesus was more than a man which appears to be an interpolation.
I can highlight more interpolations but I don't want to make this too long. The bottom line is that this passage Josephus wrote was originally written about Jesus, although without the interpolations. But even with the identified additions removed Josephus corroborates important information about Jesus, that he was the martyred leader of the church in Jerusalem and he was a wise teacher who had established a wide and lasting following, despite the fact that he had been crucified under Pilates at the instigation of some of the Jewish leaders. This is quite a statment from a non-blblical source, as what would have caused Ancient Jews of that time to make such drastic change to their form of worship (the single most important thing in their life)?
What can we say about Tacitus? What does he corroborate? He recorded what was probably the most important reference to Jesus outside the New Testament. In A.D 115 he states that Nero persecuted the Christians as scapegoats to divert suspicion away from himself for the great fire that devasted Rome in A.D 64.
Nero fastened the guilt and inflicted the most exquisite tortures on a class hated for their abominations, called Christians by the populace. Christus, from whom the name had its origin, suffered the extreme penalty during the reign of Tiberius at the hands of one of our procurators, Pontius Pilatus, and a most mischievous superstitution, thus checked for the moment, against broke out not only in Judaea, the first source of the evil, but even in Rome.... Accordingly, an arrest was first made of all who pleaded guilty; then, upon their information, an immense multitude was convicted, not so much of their crimes of firing the city, as of hatred against mankind.A leading scholar J.N.D Anderson speculates that when Tacitus says this "mischievous superstition" was "checked for the moment" but later "again broke out," he was unconsciously bearing testimony to the belief of early Christians that Jesus had been crucified but then rose from the grave. This has been the interpretation of some scholars, they wonder, how can you explain the spread of a religion based on the worship of a man who had suffered the most ignominious death possible? Crucifixion was the most abhorrent fate that anyone could undergo, and the fact that there was a movement based on a crucified man has to be explained.
Of course Christians have the answer as the Resurrection. Others have come up with alternative theory if they do not believe that. But none of the alternative views, in my mind at least, are persuasive.
Tacticus writings on Christ is an important testimony by an unsympathetic witness to the success and spread of Christianity, based on a historial figure Jesus, who was crucified under Pontius Pilate. It is significant that Tacitus reported that an "immense multitude" held so strongly to their beliefs that they where willing to die rather than recant.
There is another Roman called Pliny the Younger (governor of Bithynia in northwest Turkey A.D 79), he also referred to Christianity in his writings. Much of his writings where to his friend Emperor Trajan and a lot of them have been preserved to the present time. In book 10 of his letters he specifically refers to the Chrisitans he has arrested.
I have asked them if they are Christians, and if they admit it, I repeat the question a second and third time, with a warning of punishment awaiting them. If they persist, I order them to be led away for execution; for, whatever the nature of their admission, I am convinced that their stubborness and unshakable obstinacy ought not to go unpunished...
They also declared that the sum total of their guilt or error amounted to no more than this: they had met regularly before dawn on a fixed day to chant verses alternately amongst themselves in honor of Christ as if to a god, and also to bind themselves by oath, not for any criminal purpose, but to abstain from theft, robbery, and adultry..."
This made me decide it was all the more necessary to extract the truth by torture from two slave-women, whome they called deaconesses. I found nothing but a degenerate sort of cult carried to extravagant lengths."
How important is this reference? It was probably written in A.D 111, and it attests to the rapid spread of Christianity, both int he city and in the rural area, among every class of person, slave women as well as Roman citizens, since he also says that he sends Christians who are Roman citizens to Rome for trial. And it talks about the worship of Jesus as God, that Christians maintained high ethical standards, and that they were not easily swayed from their beliefs.
The portrait of Pilate is interesting to note as well. Critics have questioned the accuracy of the gospels because of the way they portray this Roman leader. While the New Testament paints him as being vacillating and willing to yield to the pressures of a Jewish mob by excecuting Jesus, other historical accounts pictureh im as being obstinate and inflexible. Some people believe this represents a contradiction between the Bible and secular historians.
Study of Pilate shows that his protector or patron was Sejanus and that Sejanus fell from power in A.D 31 because he was plotting against the emperor. This loss would have made Pilate's position very weak in A.D 33 which is most likely when Jesus was crucified. So it would be certainly understandable that Pilate would have been reluctant to offend the Jews at that time and to get into further trouble with the emperor. That means the biblical description is most likely correct.
There are not many non-Christian Jews who wrote about Christ. Jews as a whole did not go into great detail on who they considered heretics. There are a few passages in the Talmud that mention Jesus, calling him a false messiah who practiced magic and who was justly condemned to death. They also repeat the rumor that Jesus was born of a Roman soldier and Mary, suggesting there was something unusual about his birth. So in a negative way these Jewish references do corroborate some things about Jesus.
Let me quote Professor M Wilcox:
The Jewish traditional literature, although it mentions Jesus only quite sparingly (and must in any case be used with caution), supports the gospel claim that he was a healer and miracle-worker, even though it ascribes these activities to sorcery. In addition, it preserves the recollection that he was a teacher, and that he had disciples (five of them), and that at least in the earlier Rabbinic period not all of the sages had finally made up their minds that he was a "heretic" or "deceiver"
When people being religious movements, it is often not until many generations later that people record things about them. But the fact is that we have better historical documentation for Jesus than for the founder of ANY other ancient religion. That is a real statement, let me elaborate. For example, although the Gathas of Zoroaster, about 1000BC are believed to be authentic, most of the Zoroastrian scriptures where not put into writing until after the 3rd century AD. The most popular Parsi biography of Zoroaster was written in AD 1278. The scriptures of Buddah, who lived in the 6th century BC, where not put into writing until after the Christian era, and the first biography of Buddah was written in the first century AD. Although we have the sayings of Muhammad, who lived from AD 570-632, in the Koran, his biography was not written until 767, more than a full century after his death.
So the situation with Jesus is unique - and quite impressive in terms of how much we can learn about him aside from the New Testament. If we pretend for a moment that there was no Bible or any other Christian writings, even without them could we be able to conclude something about Jesus from ancient non-Christian soures, such as Josephus, the Talmud, Tacitus, Pliny the Younger and others? We would know several things:
1) Jesus was a Jewish teacher.
2) Many people believed that he performed healings and exorcisms.
3) Some people believed he was the Messiah
4) He was rejected by the Jewish leaders
5) He was crucified under Pontius Pilate in the reign of Tiberius
6) Despite his shameful death his followers who believed that he was still alive, spread beyond Palestine so that there were multitudes of them in Rome by AD 64
7) All kinds of people from the cities and countryside, men and women, slave and free, worshiped him as God.
This is an impressive amount of independent corroboration. Not only can the contours of Jesus' life be reconstructued apart from the Bible, but there's even more that can be leaned about him from material so old that it actually predates the gospel themselves.
The apostle Paul never met Jesus prior to Jesus' death, but he said he did encounter the resurrected Christ and later consulted with some of the eyewitnesses to make sure he was preaching the same message they where.He began writing his New Testament letters years before the gospels where written down, they contain extremely early reports concerning Jesus, so early that nobody can make a credible claim that they have been seriously distorted by legendary development. Luke Timothy Johnson, the scholar from Emory University contends that Paul's letters represent "valuable external verification of the 'antiquity and ubiquity' of the traditions of Jesus.
First Paul refers to the fact that Jesus was a descendant of David, that he was the Messiah, that he was betrayed, that he was tried, crucified for our sins, and buried, and that he rose again on the third day and was seen my many people, including James, the brother of Jesus who hadn't believed in him prior to his crucifixion. It is also interesting that Paul does not mention some of the things that are highly significant in the gospels, for instance, Jesus' parables and miracles, but he focuses on Jesus' atoning death and resurrection. Those, for Paul, where the most important things about Jesus and indeed they transformed Paul from being a persecutor of Christians into becoming history's foremost Christian missionary who was willing to go through all sorts of hardships and deprvation because of his faith.
Paul also corroborates some important aspects of the character of Jesus, his humility, his obedience, his love for sinners etc etc. The fact that Paul came from a monotheistic Jewish background and woshippsed Jesus as God is extremely significant. It undermines a popular theory that the deity of Christ was later imported into Christianity by Gentile beliefs. It's just not so. Even Paul at this very early date was worshiping Jesus as God.
Ignatius, the bishop of Antioch in Syria was martyred during the reign of Trajan before AD 117. What is significant about Ignatius is that he emphasized both the deity of Jesus and the humanity of Jesus, as against the docetic heresy, which denied that Jesus was really human. He also stressed the historical underpinnings of Christianity, he wrote in one letter on his way to being executed, that Jesus was truly persecuted under Pilate, was truly crucified, was truly raised from the dead, and that those who believe in him would be raised too. Putting this all together, Josephus, the Roman historians and officials, the Jewish writings, the letters of Paul and the apostolic fathers, and you have got a persuasive evidence that corroborates all the essentials found int he biographies of Jesus. Even if you were to throw away every last copy of the gospel, you'd still have a picture of Jesus and that is extremely compelling, in fact, it is a portriat of the unique Son of God and thus why the Christ of History is the Christ of Faith and vice versa.
Topic: New christianity post (others are way too long)