Trace for the 'historical' Jesus Christ.

[Filuwaúrdjan]

The issue here would seem to be that people who are not trained historians are often not aware quite how rare surviving documentation of anything is before the Middle Ages,* or how increasingly parlous and incomplete primary sources become the further back into Antiquity we travel. We do not, for instance, know how Cyrus the Great, one of the most important figures in the Ancient Near East, died: there are multiple conflicting accounts and none of them are particularly credible. There are significant gaps in the biographies of most leading politicians of the Roman Republic and of many Roman Emperors and even the military history of the Empire is patchier than often assumed. This being true, why would we expect to find endless surviving contemporary documentation on the life of an itinerant Galilean Rabbi who was of only strictly local importance during his brief career?

Of course we actually have a lot more than we would expect, because of the existence of the New Testament which is as useful and reliable an historical source as anything else written during the period - and if you think otherwise then you clearly have no knowledge of or experience with Classical texts! Exactly how contemporary, for instance, the Gospels are is uncertain (thus the interesting discursive digression in this thread), but by the standards of Classical texts they would all count as being roughly contemporary. No, they are not objective accounts and were not written to be: they all (not just John) aim towards a truth beyond that of the day-to-day. But objective accounts, as we would understand the concept, did not exist at the time and a primary source does not have to be 'objective', or to aim for objectivity, in order to be of use. Our principle source for the Battle of Cannae almost certainly tells a series of outrageous lies in order to protect the reputation of the family of the author's patron. It is nevertheless an essential document, the essential document, in understanding what happened and why.

Sometimes the most important facts can be so obvious that they are easy to overlook. This is the case with regards to Jesus as depicted in the Gospels. We are all doubtless familiar with the rhetorical style of Jesus as shown in Matthew, Mark and Luke, a rhetorical style that has been immensely influential on the development of Christian polemic and also on that of later European literary traditions. Because it is foundational to our cultural world we miss that at the time it was distinctive, that it represents a clear attempt to depict a style of speaking that Jesus was remembered as deploying one that, as some historians of Christianity and scholars of the texts have noted, the well-educated Greek-speaker Luke was clearly embarrassed about but felt the need to show anyway. Isn't that just fascinating? That faint outline of something so tangible... whatever your religious views, this is the sort of thing that ought to give anyone with a serious interest in the idea of the past a little thrill.

In any event that Jesus existed does not 'prove' Christianity and no serious Christian would argue else! As such it is really very silly to base any rejection of Christianity on the 'refutation' of the existence of Jesus, and would be even were that task not patently futile. I am not an atheist, but if I were I would find arguments of this sort very dispiriting.

_{*In fact there are no surviving copies of Classical texts made before the Carolingian Renaissance of the 8th and 9th centuries! All of the famous Histories and Geographies and works of literature that we rely on today to understand that world are only accessible to us now because, oh dear, religious institutions in the Middle Ages saw themselves as the rightful inheritors of that civilisation and the guardian of its legacy and thus regarded those texts as worthy of preservation.}