Jesus Christ Existed as a Historical Person and was Not a Myth

Mitras I wasn"t able to access Con"s source for these claims that Mithra was born of a virgin, orr was a savior. I would like to see a quote from any ancient text he has access to, along with the name of the professional who translated it, the book title and page number, so I can check it for myself. For I am saying that no such work exists! I dare my opponent to provide it. I bet he hasn"t seen it. All we hear are claims about what ancient people believed, but no actual quotes from the ancients text. I once debated a guy who told me that Jesus" crucifixion was borrowed from the crucifixion of Osiris and Horus, but he could only quote self-proclaimed historians who believe this. Not once did he go back to the ancient source text and give me the actual words to show a parallel. I quoted from the Egyptian Book of the Dead, and read directly to him where it says Horus died from a scorpion bite, and Osiris was chopped to pieces by his evil brother Set. None of the two were crucified. And this is the same problem we have right now with my opponent"s argument, and is the reason I made this debate challenge. We hear people claiming that Jesus" life story was plagiarized from previous myths, but when asked to give us the quotations from the pre-Christian, pagan texts, so we can see the parallels for ourselves, they don"t ever do it. They want us to accept their theory based on modern writers who CLAIM these parallels exist. But they don"t. Show them to me! You can"t! Yes, Mithrism existed before Christianity, but the only parallels that actually do exist between the two only appear after Christianity came on the scene. So how is it that we have no parallels before the Christian era, but we have them afterwards? Also, Con"s argument that modern Christianity began 400 AD fails because this debate isn"t about modern Christianity with all their new interpretations, but its about whether Jesus existed or not. And the New Testament documents as well as the quotations of the church fathers from those documents predate Constantine by hundreds of years. So before there was a Constantine, the virgin birth, crucifixion, resurrection and so forth were already in the Bible. Furthermore, if we have proof that the 12 apostles were real men who actually existed, then Jesus choosing 12 apostles simply cannot be a myth borrowed from Mithra or anywhere else. The fact is, there were people alive in the second century C.E. who had personally met the apostles. "Papias describes his way of gathering information in his preface:[7] I shall not hesitate also to put into ordered form for you, along with the interpretations, everything I learned carefully in the past from the elders and noted down carefully, for the truth of which I vouch. For unlike most people I took no pleasure in those who told many different stories, but only in those who taught the truth. Nor did I take pleasure in those who reported their memory of someone else"s commandments, but only in those who reported their memory of the commandments given by the Lord to the faith and proceeding from the Truth itself. And if by chance anyone who had been in attendance on the elders arrived, I made enquiries about the words of the elders"what Andrew or Peter had said, or Philip or Thomas or James or John or Matthew or any other of the Lord"s disciples, and whatever Aristion and John the Elder, the Lord"s disciples, were saying. For I did not think that information from the books would profit me as much as information from a living and surviving voice. Papias, then, inquired of travelers passing through Hierapolis what the surviving disciples of Jesus and the elders"those who had personally known the Twelve Apostles"were saying. One of these disciples was Aristion, probably bishop of nearby Smyrna,[8] and another was John the Elder, usually identified (despite Eusebius' protest) with John the Evangelist,[9] residing in nearby Ephesus, of whom Papias was a hearer;[2] Papias frequently cited both.[10] From the daughters of Philip, who settled in Hierapolis, Papias learned still other traditions.[11] All this supplemented what Papias could learn from the written Gospels also available to him, and some years after collecting his information, Papias seems to have finally composed his work." http://www.google.com... Such folks who knew the apostles couldn"t have existed if Jesus choosing the 12 didn"t literally happen. It doesn"t occur to Pro that Zoroastrianism along with many other world religions teach about heaven and hell because people around the globe have grasped the fact that its true? That such places do exist? No need for borrowing. But the NT didn"t need to borrow from pagan sources because the Jewish OT writings on which the NT writers grew up already taught a heaven and a hell, so there was no need to borrow from pagans. The issue in this debate is Jesus" existence though, not heaven and hell. My Point About Mashiah's Con claims that many of these messiahs very almost identical to how Yeshua was recorded, yet he doesn"t give us a single quote from a single ancient text and compare it to a passage in the NT so we can see the parallels for ourselves. He wants us to take his word for it. Or the word of other people! Majority of Scholars Con is being biased here. He doesn"t accept the majority of scholars who say Jesus existed, which is the topic of the debate, but accepts the majority of scholars view that the gospels were anonymous, which isn"t the topic of the debate. In fact, he didn"t even respond to my arguments showing how we know who wrote them, and until he does that evidence still stands. How Long Did Jews Live "When John was aged, he trained Polycarp who later became Bishop of Smyrna. This was important because Polycarp was able to carry John's message to future generations. Polycarp taught Irenaeus, passing on to him stories about John. In Against Heresies, Irenaeus relates how Polycarp told a story of " John, the disciple of the Lord, going to bathe at Ephesus, and perceiving Cerinthus within, rushed out of the bath-house without bathing, exclaiming, "Let us fly, lest even the bath-house fall down, because Cerinthus, the enemy of the truth, is within."[41] " It is traditionally believed that John was the youngest of the apostles and survived them. He is said to have lived to an old age, dying at Ephesus sometime after AD 98." http://www.google.com... Tertullian, an early Church Father who wrote just before AD 200 reports the martyrdoms of Peter and Paul. (Tertullian, Scorpiace, 15, in Roberts, Donaldson, and Coxe, eds. and trans., The Ante-Nicene Fathers: Translations of the Writings of the Fathers down to AD 325 (Oak Harbor, OR: Logos Research Systems, 1997). Atheist NT scholar Gerd L"demann concludes, "It may be taken as historically certain that Peter and the disciples had experiences after Jesus" death in which Jesus appeared to them as the risen Christ." (Gerd L"demann, What Really Happened to Jesus? A Historical Approach to the Resurrection, John Bowden, trans. (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1995), 39, 42) The contemporary biblical critic and skeptic, Bart Ehrman concedes: "We can say with some confidence that some of his disciples claimed to have seen [postmortem] Jesus alive." (Bart Ehrman, Jesus: Apocalyptic Prophet of the New Millennium (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 200) Yes, these men who knew Jesus also existed, and the unanimous testimony through the centuries that they wrote the Gospels is irrefutable. Con simply cannot explain how anyone could attempt to put a name to an anonymous work and convince the entire church without multiple other names even arising as suggested authors, as is the usually the case with anonymous material in ancient times. So Con's argument that most Jews didn't live beyond 42 years old still doesn't show that no one could have. "A remarkable statement mentioned by Diogenes Laertius (c. 250 AD) is the earliest (or at least one of the earliest) references about plausible centenarian longevity given by a scientist, the astronomer Hipparchus of Nicea (c. 185 " c. 120 BC), who, according to the doxographer, was assured that the philosopher Democritus of Abdera (c. 470/460 " c. 370/360 BC) lived 109 years. All other accounts given by the ancients about the age of Democritus appear, without giving any specific age, to agree that the philosopher lived over 100 years. This possibility is likely, given that many ancient Greek philosophers are thought to have lived over the age of 90 (e.g., Xenophanes of Colophon, c. 570/565 " c. 475/470 BC, Pyrrho of Ellis, c. 360 " c. 270 BC, Eratosthenes of Cirene, c. 285 " c. 190 BC, etc.)" http://www.google.com... So people did live long in those times, and Con can't just assume the Gospel writers didn't. He doesn't reply to the fact that the Gospels are closer to the events they record than most documents we have from classical historians, nor does he deal with Josephus and Tacitus on the existence of Jesus. Clearly, Jesus Christ did walk the earth. His life was no myth.