[QUOTE="wis3boi"]No contemporary non-bible evidence the man existed and i find most of his teachings rather unimpressive and/or bad advice
LJS9502_basic
LOL at the insecurity......and teaching others to live in peace and be non violent is bad advice? You must have some personality dude....glad I only encounter you on the internet.If this isn't biggest case of reflection your own self onto me, I don't know what is. I've never fought anyone or hurt anyone, I hate war, and regularly donate and volunteer at local food shelfs and soup kitchens when time permits. How amazing of you to paint my entire character because I actually researched the history of your supposed prophet.
Do you have anything else to add besides avoiding the issue and targeting personality by guessing out of your ass? Probably not. Jesus is a red herring, his existence to me is irrelevant to my views on christianity and I don't really care what he said.
So Tacitus and Josephus doesn't exist? Most of what we know about ancient history doesn't exist?hiphops_savior
It's common to see Christians jump at these to defend jesus, but they are ultimately worthless.
Josehpus's passage is widely considered to be a forgery, or at least heavily embellished by early christians, because:
- Although the church fathers were quite fond of quoting passages which supported Christianity, since this passage would seem to be the proverbial "nail in the coffin" for doubters, and since early church fathers were very familiar with the works of Josephus, it's very strange indeed that not a single one mentions this quote until Eusebius does in the fourth century. Eusebius is considered the most likely candidate for the creator of this passage and, indeed, he is well-known as believing that a little white lie was justified if it furthered the cause of Christianity. Furthermore, Origen, the famous early Christian apologist quotes extensively from Josephus' works, yet he never mentions this passage.
- The passage comes in the middle of a collection of stories about calamities that happened to the Jews. The crucifixion of Jesus would not have been considered a Jewish calamity.
- The passage interrupts the normal flow of the text. When the passage is removed, the end of the paragraph before it and the beginning of the paragraph after it merge perfectly.
- Josephus was an Orthodox Jew and remained one his entire life. He would have never said such glowing things about Jesus. Indeed, he never would have called him "Christ" and yet remained a Jew his whole life.
- The last line of the passage, "...subsists to this time", implies that the passage was written a long time after the events in question. Josephus himself, who lived so close to the time of Jesus, would never have written such a thing.
Tacitus:
This is quite worhtless to anyone unless you are actually reading it (the work of Annals) to find confirmation of your already held belief. For anyone else simplyl reading it, it's nothing more than a citing of what early christians believed, not how much of it was factualy true. And again this isn't a contemporary account of Jesus...it was written in AD 117
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