More reason to suppose The Daily Mail is written and edited by imbeciles. On the 1st October 2014, the following article was published: Jesus NEVER existed’: Writer finds no mention of Christ in 126 historical texts and says he was a ‘mythical character It reports the following claims:
- Writer Michael Paulkovich has claimed that there is a little evidence for a person known as Jesus existing in history
- Jesus is thought to have lived from about 7BC to 33AD in the Roman Empire
- However Paulkovich says he found little to no mention of the supposed messiah in 126 texts written in the first to third centuries
- Only one mention of Jesus was present, in a book by Roman historian Josephus Flavius, but he says this was added by later editors
- He says this is surprising despite the โalleged worldwide fameโ of Jesus
- And this has led him to believe that Jesus was a ‘mythical character’
This is piffling. Though Mr Paulkovich denies it, there are mentions of Christ in Suetonius and Tacitus and Pliny the Younger – all writing about 70 years after the Crucifixion. The Gospels themselves have a ring of truth in their historical particulars. As for the alleged mistranslation of ฯฮญฮบฯฯฮฝ, the Greek Fathers seem to have had no doubt regarding Joseph’s occupation.
This is not to say that Jesus was the Son of God. But it does strike me that the evidence for his existence as a real person is established beyond reasonable doubt.
Oh, and here are a couple of the relevant passages this crank says are not there.
Tacitus, Annals 14:44:
“Consequently, to get rid of the report, 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 superstition, thus checked for the moment, again broke out not only in Judรฆa, the first source of the evil, but even in Rome, where all things hideous and shameful from every part of the world find their centre and become popular. Accordingly, an arrest was first made of all who pleaded guilty; then, upon their information, an immense multitude was convicted, not so much of the crime of firing the city, as of hatred against mankind”.
Suetonius, Claudius 25:
“Since the Jews constantly made disturbances at the instigation of Chrestus, he expelled them from Rome.”
These also have a ring of authenticity. If there had been a Stalinesque programme of interpolation into the Latin classics, there would have been protests right through to the end of Antiquity. There should have been more interpolations. They should have been less casual but more devout.
Yes the man is a crank. How did he get into a mainstream newspaper? Or have I already answered this?
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That’s quite interesting. What is the metatext of this Paulkovich bloke and what does he do? Is he an “academic” in a British “uni” by any chance? I will have to go and see what sort of “expert” the Daily Dread says he is.
Of course, Sean, you and I know precisely why we read the Daily Mail. It shows us daily to what depths of intellectual triviality the Britishpolitical-EnemyClass has brought this nation on purpose, which is to say: deliberately.
They don’t even check their typos and grammar. I also believe that this is deliberately neglected, on purpose, which is to say: by design and by intention. it is disgusting and repellent, but nevertheless we must go down into the cesspit and dig, all the time, in the hope of finding help one day.
However, as you know, I do think that the War – for now – is truly lost. The most I think we can hope for is for more or less not-too-sinister-conditions to last out our time and that of our children. We can but hope that, in the end, sense and therefore actual individual liberty as a goal to be worthily striven for by people, and not actually hindered by statists, might prevail. I think matters will get much worse before that, though.
Christian scepticism is a bit last century. It’s much more fun these days to say that Mohammad never existed.
I was wondering whether to write something like that myself, but these days I’m not brave enough.
Anyway, we only have the testimony of others, to the effect that Mohammad existed. I thought the Archangel Michael or some other similar fella got pressured to write it all down, and Mo pretended to have dictated it in his sleep? Or was that someone else about some other stuff?
This “writer” is entitled to his opinion. However, there is objective right and objective wrong, and all the actual evidence points to the fact that Paulkovich is wrong.
Indeed, there is a lot of written evidence, including a fairly large number of contemporary Roman and Greek records that feature stuff about Jesus Christ as an actual person who the local Roman Procurator Pontius Pilatus sentenced to death under pressure.
This was so as to pacify the local Pharisaical High Priests who felt threatened and might have caused irritating troubles for Rome.
Dr Gabb is quite correct – good post.
It might as well be pointed out though that neither of the quotes (and other than the Josephus interpolations, these are all that history has got) actually attest to Jesus as an historical personage. It is doubtful who “Chrestus” even refers to, while the first merely attests to what Christians believe; it puts Jesus at best somewhere in the same level of historicity as Ned Ludd.
For a rabble rouser attracting crowds of thousands, Jesus had a remarkable talent for evading historical mention.
Not really. Most sources from the first century haven’t survived. And why should elite writers in Rome bother much with a nuisance in Palestine that had been pretty well stopped before it could get out of hand?
The strange thing is that nobody in Judea seems to have heard of him either, including St Paul who, as Saul, entirely missed the excitement, including the whole hullabaloo at Passover; most strange for a zealous disciple of Gamaliel.
We don’t know where he was at the time of the Crucifixion. Our first view of him shows him fully aware of the Christian heresy within Judaism.
Look, I am closely familiar with the entire published output of T.B. Macaulay, Wilkie Collins, Charles Dickens, and George Eliot. I am also reasonably familiar with the works to Disraeli and Lord Salisbury and Samuel Smiles. I’m not aware of a single reference in these writers to Karl Marx. Are we on that basis to say he never existed, and his works were all put together by the Soviet Politburo, c.1930, to legitimise their 1917 coup?
The answer is no, because we have other sources for his existence. Where the first century is concerned, most written sources have vanished. But there is no particular reason why the Roman elite should have paid attention to yet another trouble in Palestine, when it had been knocked on the head before it could get out of hand, and when the main concern was with the Rhine and Euphrates frontiers. As soon as Christianity became a serious nuisance, we have adequate written sources – eg, Pliny the Younger.
A further point is that that the Pagan controversialists of the third and fourth centuries were very able men. They had access to all the relevant sources. Had there been any reason to believe Christ had never existed, they would have used that ruthlessly.
We have more reason to believe that Christ existed than that Socrates existed, or Epicurus, or Carneades and Pyrrho. You might as easily insist that Catullus never existed, but that the surviving poems were written by one of Cicero’s slaves.
You’re using a fallacy, Sean, which is that if you’ve no good data, insufficient data should be seen as sufficient.
I don’t actually know whether any of these people existed. For all I know, Cicero was a pen name. The point about Jesus though is that outside the Gospels there is nobody that directly attests to him at all. There are references only to the Christian movement; like I said, this puts him on a par with Ned Ludd. Maybe there was a real Ned Ludd, I don’t know. But I certianly wouldn’t say he definitely existed because of an historian writing some years later about the Luddites.
The silence regarding Jesus is most striking considering the wonders that accompanied his ministry and crucifixion. You would think somebody even in Rome would be impressed enough to write about Jerusalem’s Zombie Apocalypse, but nobody else even mentions it in Judea.
We really do need better information than we have before we can trust any of this stuff, Sean. It might be true. It might be complete fiction. We simply cannot say.
And a fallacy on your part, Ian. We have no reason in itself to accept historical claims that violate the laws of nature. But that there was a Jesus of Nazareth who made a nuisance of himself to the Jewish Establishment strikes me as sufficiently evidenced.
Well now, what we now find ourselves in is a Titanic war between video-head-hacking-barbarians who hate and despise everything we stand for while using our internet and phones and tech gear to hurt us with, and between some other sorts of people that merely want to alter our moral-behaviour for our own good, and whose white middle-class-women-supporters are mumsy and have bad hairdos. Which would you choose to live under, then? And which “prophet” would you prefer?
Can I vote none of the above? Particularly as we aren’t going to be able to respond properly to the first mob until we get rid of the second mob?
“The Daily Mail is written and edited by imbeciles.”, writes Sean Gabb, the evidence being an article claiming that Jesus never existed. The writer of the article “is a crank. How did he get into a mainstream newspaper?”
I wonder what The Daily Mail can do to rehabilitate itself. Would it help if it ran an article claiming the existence of ghosts ?
“We have no reason in itself to accept claims that violate the laws of nature”.
Observation is observation.
If trustworthy people tell me they have seen seen (heard and felt) X – or I have experienced myself, I have no reason NOT to believe it – just because the laws-of-nature say that X can not happen. Of course the big thing is who are “trustworthy people”.
Part of the very definition of God is that He can do things that “violate the laws of nature”. “X can not happen” is just disguised atheism (and not very honest atheism – because it is hiding behind something else).
Much more honest to say “God does not exist” than “X can not happen because it violates the laws of nature” – when X really stands for the return to life of Jesus.
The Christian position is that the Laws of Nature do exist – but that God created them and can (if He chooses) do things that they “do not allow”.
I think I’ll do a piece on whether Karl Marx existed. Trouble is, the records alone of the Great Northern Railway and the LNER will show that Marx did exist, by the noting of one of his progeny by his wife’s maid, who had an honest and unblemished career working for them. (Look it up.) It’s rather a shame really, for it would have been good if he didn’t.
Richard Whatley’s attack on the existence of Napoleon.
Having read through all the appointed readings for Holy Week many times, I am more and more convinced of their authenticity. The things which convince me most are the differences between them. Some clever equivalent of Ron Hubbard would have made sure that they were identical.
As any policeman will tell you, witnesses of the same incident (including disinterested ones) often give different accounts of the same incident.
I’m quite willing to believe that the singular Jesus of Nazareth never existed. For one thing,”Christ” is a title, not a name, which could have referred to any number of people. Note that a “ring of truth” or “ring of authenticity” in an account is not evidence. Also, someone going around doing the sorts of things Jesus is purported to have done would have elicited more than a measly few notes.
The fallacy here is that we must choose one way or another on the question. Instead, we can estimate a probability that Jesus existed, perhaps greater than 50%, perhaps less than the conventional (but arbitrary) standards scientists use, such as 90% or 95%. We are less certain that Jesus existed than we are that Napoleon existed, probably roughly as sure as we are that Mohammad existed, but we might have more confidence in a historical Jesus than we do in a historical Robin Hood.
The truth might be messy – perhaps there were multiple people named Jesus or a Jesus very different from the Biblical accounts. We might estimate a 40% probability that his father was a carpenter, given his existence, a 1% chance that he found a way to feed 5,000 followers, etc.
Of course, this is an un-Christian view: “he that wavereth is like a wave of the sea driven with the wind and tossed. For let not that man think that he shall receive any thing of the Lord.” (James 1:6-8)
I am personally agnostic on the question of whether there was a historic Jesus. But I do think a compelling though not fully conclusive case can be made that Jesus Christ was indeed a mythical figure. The argument for the “Christ mythicist” perspective is too complicated and involves too many technical byways of history, theology, biblical scholarship, anthropology, hermeneutics, etc. to explain in a single blog post, so I won’t make the effort. I will instead refer anyone who is interested in hearing more about the Christ mythicist perspective to the works of Robert M. Price, who is the most competent scholar I know of to defend this position.
Will have a look