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Plasma Bloggin''s avatar

Aside from all the textual references to Jesus confirming that he existed (especially from Paul, who met people that knew Jesus in real life), there's also just the sheer implausibility of Christianity coming to exist at all if there was no Jesus. If Jesus did exist, it's pretty easy to see how the religion got started, but mythicists have to believe an ad-hoc explanation, and any such explanation will fit with the historical data quite poorly. Either a massive cult just suddenly sprung up out of nowhere, worshipping a guy who never existed but who they claimed was from the recent past, at a time when many of them were still alive, or the Christians originally didn't believe Jesus was a real person, despite all of the textual evidence that very early Christians did, and they somehow switched over to 100% uniform belief in historicity in just a few generations, with no one ever commenting on this change (not even to try to argue that it never happened) and even secular sources being fooled into thinking that they had always believed in a flesh-and-blood Jesus, and that this Jesus was a real person.

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Osty's avatar

Great post! I agree with the facts presented, but I also want to raise a philosophical point about personal identity.

Suppose I write a biography of you. It’s a thorough description of your life, and it gets everything correct, including all the minute details. Then suppose I make some edits to it – I change your middle name, or your favorite TV show – such that now there are a few details that are incorrect. Ok, you might say, it’s still a biography of you, just with some minor errors. But then suppose I keep doing this – not only altering facts about you that are more and more fundamental to your identity – but also embellishing things and inserting new stories about your life that are entirely made up. So there is a gradual transition of this book from “accurate biography” to “mostly accurate but with some errors” to “loosely based on your life” to “fictional story about someone else that is entirely unrecognizable to you”. At what point in this transition does the character in the book cease to be *you*? It depends on how many facts are changed and how fundamental they are to your identity, but ultimately it’s an arbitrary distinction.

I think many historical figures lie somewhere on this spectrum. There’s often some delta between historical figures as they actually existed and the conception of them in the public consciousness. For example, there’s a lot of folklore surrounding the Founding Fathers that isn’t true. George Washington didn’t have wooden teeth, and he didn’t chop down a cherry tree as a child. But nobody thinks these stories are fundamental to his identity, so we say that Washington was a real person who existed.

But on the other end of the spectrum, consider Santa Claus. Although we recognize that he isn’t real, there is an actual historical figure who he is based on – Saint Nicholas of Myra. Now clearly, Nicholas didn’t live at the North Pole with elves or fly on a sleigh with reindeer. If Nicholas were to hear a description of Santa Claus, he would of course reject the notion that it’s him. Perhaps the only thing they have in common is their penchant for gift-giving. In this case, the folklore has evolved so extensively that it is more accurate to say that Santa Claus isn’t real, even if there technically is a real person who we can tie him to.

I view Jesus as being somewhere between Washington and Santa Claus on this spectrum, though closer to Washington. You make a compelling case that *someone* named Jesus really existed as a historical figure. But is he the same Jesus as the character from the Bible? No doubt the two can be linked - there are historical facts about the real person that the Bible gets right – his name, where he was born, that he got crucified, etc. But on the other hand, if the individual who really existed wasn’t born of a virgin, didn’t perform miracles, didn’t rise from the dead, etc…then I don’t know, that seems like a lot of (pretty important and fundamental) aspects of someone’s identity/biography to get wrong! I don’t think there’s an objective fact of the matter, but personally I would just phrase it as “Jesus was based on a real person”.

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