Reply #20: Wikipedia entry on JC's historical basis [View All]

[al bupp]

From: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historicity_of_Jesus

Of the non-Christian commentators living within memory of Jesus, very few are said to have written anything at all about Jesus or Christianity. This is not surprising; most writers of the time whose works have survived had little interest in the Middle East in general, and Palestine in particular, and so would have little reason to write about a local religious leader who preached there for a handful of years.

Nonetheless, several major non-Christian historians of the time are attested by various groups to have written material relating to Jesus: Pliny the Younger, Josephus, Suetonius, and Tacitus. Pliny the Younger condemned Christians as easily led fools, as did the rhetorician Lucian some years later. There is an obscure reference to a Jewish leader called "Chrestus" in Suetonius. Surviving manuscripts of Tacitus (in a passage in the Annals written c. 115) summarize popular opinion about Jesus, but do not demonstrate access to any independent source of information. Of the four, Josephus' writings are the most interesting to scholars dealing with the historicity of Jesus.

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Many Christians use a passage from the Jewish historian Josephus as evidence that the Bible is not the only contemporary document proclaiming the truth of their faith and its history. However, John Dominic Crossan and K. H. Rengstorff have noted that the passage has many internal indicators that seem to be inconsistent with the rest of Josephus' writing and with what is known about Josephus, leading them to think that part or all of the passage may have been forged.

Josephus, as a historian, recorded details on many people claiming to be Messiahs in Roman Judea; however, on Jesus, Josephus appears to have written only one passage, quoted by Eusebius as part of a larger text (the only source for this, and many other texts written by Josephus), as well as a shorter passage stating that Jesus was thought to be the brother of James the Just and was referred to as the "Christ." The longer passage declares that Jesus was a wise man (or more than a man) who converted many Jews and non-Jews and was the Christ. The second passage goes on to say that he was crucified by Pontius Pilate at the instigation of the Jewish authorities and rose from the dead on the third day following.

While the passage is often cited as proof of Jesus' existence, most critical scholars hold that it is a forgery, or has at least been heavily edited by a later hand. Several reasons are given for this:

1. First, the text contains several hapax legomena, often evidence of a different author.
   
2. Second, the text as it stands could only have been written by a Christian, not a Jew like Josephus.
   
3. Third, the logical flow between two paragraphs is interrupted by the "Jesus passage," though it must be admitted that Josephus' logical flow is not always exemplary in the rest of his writings.