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

Con"s argument strikes me as very bizarre. He says "in the hundred or so years before Yeshua is claimed to have been born there were" many people messiahs, and somehow this implies Jesus the Messiah didn"t exist but was a mixture of these. That"s like saying "in the hundred or so years before Obama is claimed to have been born there were" many Presidents, and this somehow shows they invented Barrack Obama as a mixture of these. Amazingly, the folks listed in his Wikipedia link, most of them came after Jesus, and the few who predate Jesus such as Alexander the Great, Cyrus, David and Simon were all real historical people, not myths. So if these messiahs existed, surely Jesus too, existed. http://www.google.com... I also contend that if you search his sources you won"t find a single savior-god predating Jesus that bares any resemblance to Jesus, so that we could say his story was copied from that previous one. In fact, I challenge Con to provide a single quote from ANY ancient text predating Jesus, and show me the parallel from the New Testament. This he CANNOT and WILL NOT do, because the parallels claims by some who want to discredit the existence of Jesus, do not exit! Mithras The cuneiform engravings of Mithra shows that Mithra was never an infant, nor was this god born of a virgin, but first appears as a full adult emerging out of a rock. (Manfred Claus, The Roman Cult of Mithras, p. 81) While it is true that like Jesus, Mithra is here attended by shepherds, this account comes in the 4th century, over 300 years after Christianity; so in this case, if there was any borrowing, it was Mithra"s shepherds being borrowed from the Gospels, not the other way around! Since my opponent trusted Wikipedia as a source, maybe he will accept this Wikipedia article that debunks a number of parallel falsely claimed to exist between Jesus and Mithra. http://www.google.com... Con is defending a view that has been abandoned by most scholars because it is so weak and the evidence is against it. http://www.google.com... Con is simply ignoring recent scholarship on the issue. Gary Lease, "Mithraism and Christianity", in: ANRW II, p.1328: "To be specific, it is clear that the few scattered remarks in Christian polemical literature against Mithraism, together with the scanty archaeological remains of the Mithraic religion, do not bear out a direct influence of one religion upon the other." "1.2. Salvation A painted text on the wall of the St. Prisca Mithraeum (c A.D. 200)14 in Rome contains the words: et nos servasti (?) . . . sanguine fuso (and you have saved us ... in the shed blood). The meaning of this is unclear, although presumably refers to the bull killed by Mithras, as no other source refers to a Mithraic salvation. However the servasti is only a conjecture.15 According to Robert Turcan,16 Mithraic salvation had little to do with the other-worldly destiny of individual souls, but was on the Zoroastrian pattern of man's participation in the cosmic struggle of the good creation against the forces of evil 17 1.4. Marked with the sign of the Cross Some scholars have stated that initiates of Mithras were marked with the sign of the cross on their forehead. The idea has been described as a scholarly myth.20 The basis for the idea is found in Tertullian, who states that followers of Mithras were marked on their forehead in an unspecified manner.21 There is no indication that this is a cross, or a branding, or a tattoo, or a permanent mark of any kind.22" http://www.google.com... We don"t even know what Mithrism was about before the Christian era. The earliest references to Mithra come from the ancient Hindu literature. However, just what people believed about him at that time is unknown. J.P. Arendzen writes, "The origin of the cult of Mithra dates from the time that the Hindus and Persians still formed one people, for the god Mithra occurs in the religion and the sacred books of both races, i.e. in the Vedas and in the Avesta. In Vedic hymns he is frequently mentioned and is nearly always coupled with Varuna, but beyond the bare occurrence of his name, little is known of him (Rigveda, III, 59)." (Arendzen, J.P. . "Mithraism." http://www.newadvent.org...) Because of the lack of textual evidence for early Mithraism, there is no way to positively assert that the ideas that seem to correspond to Christianity were ever taught prior to the second century A.D. after all of the Christian texts that make up the New Testament had been in wide-spread circulation. In fact, most scholars take a dim view of that idea. Dr. Edwin Yamauchi dismisses this hypothesis in stating "Those who seek to adduce Mithra as a prototype of the risen Christ ignore the late date for the expansion of Mithraism to the west (cf. M. J. Vermaseren, Mithras, The Secret God, 1963, p. 76)." (Yamauchi, Edwin M. . "Easter: Myth, Hallucination, or History?." March 29, 1974. http://www.leaderu.com...) In fact, Mithraism seems to change drastically from its Persian roots when it becomes a Roman cult. Romans adapted the military cult into something much more comfortable and understandable for their form of worship. Scholars Beard, North and Price agree stating, "The form of the cult most familiar to us, the initiatory cult, does not seem to derive from Persia at all. It is found first in the west, has no significant resemblance to its supposed Persian 'origins', and seems largely to be a western construct." (Beard, Mary, John North and Simon Price. Religions of Rome Volume I, Cambridge university Press. New York NY. 1998 p.279) So if any of these religions influenced the other, Christianity influence Mithrism, not the other way around. Because of the above evidence, we must dismiss the claims that Christianity borrowed from Mithraism in order to codify its own set of beliefs. The ancient form of Mithraism would not have looked anything like Christianity. It in fact was a very pagan form of worship. Ronald Nash writes: "Allegations of an early Christian dependence on Mithraism have been rejected on many grounds. Mithraism had no concept of the death and resurrection of its god and no place for any concept of rebirth - at least during its early stages.... During the early stages of the cult, the notion of rebirth would have been foreign to its basic outlook.... Moreover, Mithraism was basically a military cult. Therefore, one must be skeptical about suggestions that it appealed to nonmilitary people like the early Christians." (Yamauchi, loc cit) Nash goes on to assert that instead of Christianity borrowing form Mithraism, it was the other way around. Mithraism tried to make its pagan rituals look and feel more Christian. "The taurobolium was a bloody rite associated with the worship of Mithra and of Attis in which a bull was slaughtered on 'a grating over an initiate in a pit below, drenching him with blood. This has been suggested (e.g., by R. Reitzenstein) as the basis of the Christian's redemption by blood and Paul's imagery in Romans 6 of the believer's death and resurrection. Gunter Wagner in his exhaustive study Pauline Baptism and the Pagan Mysteries ( 1963) points out how anachronistic such comparisons are: The taurobolium in the Attis cult is first attested in the time of Antoninus Pius for A.D. 160. As far as we can see at present it only became a personal consecration at the beginning of the third century A.D. The idea of a rebirth through the instrumentality of the taurobolium only emerges in isolated instances towards the end of the fourth century A.D.; it is not originally associated with this blood-bath [p. 266].Indeed, there is inscriptional evidence from the fourth century A.D. that, far from influencing Christianity, those who used the taurobolium were influenced by Christianity." (Nash, Ronald. Mystery Religions of the Near East as quoted in "Mithraism." Baker Encyclopedia of Christian Apologetics. 1999) So we have evidence from the scholars who have studied the religion of Mithra that the so-called parallels came after the rise of first century Christianity, and hence, it was Mithraism that borrowed from the Bible, not the other way around. Con puts more trust in modern men trying to reconstruct history hundreds of year later by speculating about the age of ancient bones, over the testimony of an eyewitness who was there. Go figure. He says the majority of scholars say they don't know who wrote the gospels, but when the majority of historians accept that Jesus existed, he doesn't take their word. Bias? Majorities don't decide truth. I defended based on the rules historians use the reliability of the Gospels as contemporary and eyewitness accounts, to which I have seen no rebuttal. The evidence for Jesus therefore still stands.