This House believes that Jesus Christ was a historical figure

A note on sourcing I’ve had this problem before when people source something yet do not quote the relevant bit, and I drudge through 20-page sources to debate. As such, I’m going to only refer to the arguments given. In other words, if it is not quoted, it’s not evidence; otherwise we could just be posting random quotes linked to random books. I'll of course quote citations when possible. The historical Method Should we presume an individual existed before any analysis? Let us consider the very basics of analysis. The way we analyse things is through hypothesis testing, in which we always assume the null hypothesis until an alternative hypothesis shows otherwise, “arguably the most widely used method of analysis of data” [1]. When true, the null hypothesis means “any difference found [between the expectation and reality] is due to sampling fluctuation” [2]. The logic of hypothesis testing is: “Given the null hypothesis is true, how likely it is for the occurrence shown by the data to surface? When the p-value is 0.001, it means that 1 / 1000 times the data will surface as it did under the assumption of the null.”[3] To see whether it is fluctuation, we compare the likelihood of the alternative hypothesis. The inexistence of pattern is the null hypothesis, as we instead should assume things come down to natural deviation instead of a design. For example, if I flip a coin twice and gets two heads, the probability is only a quarter, but we do not assume the coin is fixed. A fair p-value is 5%, meaning if there is evidence making it 0.95 likely that Jesus existed historically, we should believe it, and if not, we should reject it. Though this seems excessive, consider: if we flip a coin five times and get 5 heads, the probability of this is less than 5% (0.03125 to be precise), which seems massively generous already. We should assume the null hypothesis is, furthermore, against the existence of Christ for a number of reasons. For one, we’d assume that natural fluctuations will produce a small amount of proof in favour of Christ. For another, existing evidence can only support an alternative hypothesis by the nature of evidence: evidence cannot exist to disprove a null hypothesis except by positing an alternative hypothesis. In other words, we cannot disprove “I don’t know what happened” except by saying “This happened”, and the latter is making a claim. And finally, my claim is this; that the evidence does not justify the existence of a historical Christ. Explanatory power What explains the origin of Christianity best? A guy made it, it snowballed, and became popular. Christianity is not unique in being a religion: my opponent has to explain why it is distinct from Islam, Sikhism or even postmodernism in that why its success is proof its truth, while these others’ success isn’t relevant. Note explicitly I deny the events leading up to Jesus’ crucifixion in its entirety, due to its inexistence outside of the Bible, which my opponent agrees is a mess of cross-plagiarism and based on oral hymn, which is so bias that it goes without saying it is as strong evidence for historicity of Christ as Life of Brian.The success of Christianity is also surprisingly simple: it was appealing. Though some argue that the fact that they died for their beliefs made their sacrifice irrational if they didn't believe, their sacrifice was in fact a crude blessing for them. Their martyrdrom bought a place in heaven and eternal paradise, something Roman Paganism couldn't grant. Authority I have many problems with this case. Firstly and swiftly it is an appeal to consensus and authority, which most who are against the historicity will agree is fallacious and most for the historicity will deny. Of course, no matter what we believe, scholars will disagree with us, so we should take argument, not their credentials, as relevant. However, there are two other problems. Secondly, the claim that there is consensus is just flat-out wrong. Consider evolution: the scientific support is 99.9%[4]. This is of a field which is near-requires evolution, and scientists arguably go into it already believing evolution. This is certainly similar to bible scholars. But of bible scholars, Habermas finds “approximately 75% favor one or more of these arguments for [the historicity]”[5]. In other words, a group we’d expect to be more bias has vastly less support than another paradigm group. And finally history as a whole is a theory in crisis: “historians have suffered a major theoretical challenge to the validity of their subject”, “poststructuralism threatens to throw historians out of work”, and as Spiegel wrote, postmodernism “entails the dissolution of history” and “necessarily jeopardizes historical study as normally understood”[6]. Yet this is an extreme minority opinion, with only a few postmodernist interpretations per hundred produced [6]. This moves onto my third problem: history itself has suffered “an air of complacency [6] in which shoddy history is done, and none moreso than the biblical historians, who seem oblivious to how a quarter of scholars disagreeing with them within their own community is in reality a massive amount. History has become about confirming their metanarrative, not analysing properly the original evidence but instead simply referencing other scholars to create a circle of confirmation bias. The Bible When it comes to the evidence of the crucifixion and similar events, my opponent essentially just cites the Bible, without external documentation. Though this looks impressive, in reality this means that the evidence of the events documented in the gospels is the gospels. Now, I want to attempt to discredit the source quickly: The Bible is, as mentioned, a jumble of cross-plagiarism to create the story of Christ. This implies that instead of being four independent accounts, these are accounts using one another to create the story. This means that if one rested on a false judgement, the rest generally followed suit. In other words, the Bible is not many independent sources, but a large source which self-references to prove itself. For example, ‘Old Testament prophecy is fulfilled in the New Testament through Christ’ can be explained by the New Testament being made to do such a role. The Bible’s later books builds on itself to exaggerate. For example, the gospel story of resurrection, the gospels slowly gain in brilliance of what happens: going from “a man in white” to “two angels”[7] over the course of the gospels. Unless we assume that when the story was retold someone thought “it probably wasn’t an angel that was around when Jesus came back to life, it was a bloke instead”. A more clear example is when in the Old testament the Judaeans "slew in Judah a hundred and twenty thousand in one day" (2 Chn 28:6). The Bible contains many events around the resurrection that are just ahistorical. For example, there was a supposed earthquake when Jesus resurrected, yet this, which should be able to be found with modern detection, cannot be documented. Moreover, no other contemporary documents such an event. In general, in fact, it is true that the events of the Bible which should be documented, such as Jesus’ astonishingly great orating skill, the earthquake, the souls being let on the streets, or even things about Jesus like the census of Quirinius simply doesn’t have any documentation. These events not being documented seriously brings into question whether the event happened at all. 1 – Raymond Nickerson, Null Hypothesis Significance Testing: A Review of an Old and Continuing Controversy 2 – R. P. Carver, The case against statistical significance testing 3 – http://www.creative-wisdom.com... 4 - http://www.jodkowski.pl... 5 - http://www.garyhabermas.com... 6 – In Defence of History, Richard J Evans. 7 - http://carm.org...