I wish to request the creation of the following tags in whichever grammatical case is best: Nestorianism, Chalcedonian, Monophysitism, Miaphysitism.
Apparently Chalcedonianism isn't a word.
Thank you.
I was just looking at my ratios. I'm sure one answer would be, "whatever the circumstances at the time dictated." But would anyone care to share or offer guideline?
Well, the New Testament itself is some. But many other historians have mentioned him. Josephus of course being the most famous non-Biblical historian to document Jesus.
And yes, I am aware of the many criticisims of Josephus and other historians.
But I'm not here to prove that Jesus exists.
Only that your claim that there is "no evidence" is completely bogus in every way.
The New Testament itself is evidence for the events described in the New Testament. Making your statement self-contradictory.
We have had many answers that follow this pattern (using the unicorn theme from the about page):
Q: Some people say that your unicorn's horn should be buffed gently with chamois in order to bring out the opalescent shimmer. Do they recommend this for all unicorns, or only those with rainbow m...
The New Testament itself is evidence of the New Testament. It's not sufficient evidence to consider the New Testament authentic, authoritative, accurate, or anything else interesting. But it IS EVIDENCE. The only way to deny that is to change definitions.
I really do find this sort of thing rather fascinating. Sorry to have just missed it.
It's amazing how quickly people reach to the most extreme position - that there is ZERO reason to believe Jesus existed, that we can NEVER know anything about the past, etc.
At least we did not get to the conspiracy theory that the whole thing is a deliberate fraud by the Roman Empire.
I wonder if there is any linguistic issue here. I read a book called "Experience, evidence, and sense" by Anna Wierzbicka, which posits among other things that the modern English-language concept of "evidence" carries a specific cultural weight that might not be the case for apparent parallels in other languages.
English "evidence" often means raw uninterpreted data, whereas eg Latin "evidentia" means something that is evident, obvious, undeniable.
The smoking gun kind of evidence.
The NT is certainly evidence in the sense of data. Because to say that it is not evidence means that the history and content of the documents have no bearing on the question of whether we should believe that Jesus existed. That would be an odd thing to say.
@fredsbend I don't think I've heard that one. I did hear the one where he was a Buddhist who was quite severely misunderstood.
@fredsbend title seems familiar - I think someone tried to get me to watch it because of some 9/11 conspiracy theory. I didn't know Jesus was involved.
@JamesT There's three parts. The first is the religious part. The second is the financial institution part. I don't remember the third. I saw part two first and thought it was interesting and convincing. Then I saw part 1 and thought that if they are that stupid about the religious part they are likely just as stupid about the financial part.
@fredsbend There should be a word for that double-take sensation you get when you realize the conversation is further down the rabbit hole than you thought. Like when you are having what you think is a normal chat about interest rates, or something, and the other person mentions that we're all controlled by lizards from space.