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

The translation of the Hebrew name Yeshua to the Greek Iesous into the English (Jesus) is simply a non-issue, nobody disputes that, so let"s deal with the sources. Sources Con"s argument about Jews having short life-spans in the first century C.E., even if true, ignores the fact that many Jews did live long lives, and we have examples such as that recorded by the well respected first century historian Flavius Josephus, that many Jews lived above 100 years. He says: "10. Now after the time of their preparatory trial is over, they are parted into four classes; and so far are the juniors inferior to the seniors, that if the seniors should be touched by the juniors, they must wash themselves, as if they had intermixed themselves with the company of a foreigner. They are long-lived also, insomuch that many of them live above a hundred years, by means of the simplicity of their diet; no, as I think, by means of the regular course of life they observe also." (The Jewish War, Book 2. Chapter 8, "Archelaus"s Ethnarchy is Reduced into a [Roman] Province. The Sedition of Judas of Galilee. The Three Sects." Section 10) The irony in this is that Con is trying to use the short-life span argument to show that the eyewitness to Jesus would have been dead by the time anyone wrote about him if he even did exist, and yet here Josephus is speaking about stuff he was an eyewitness to, the old, long-live Jewish Essenes were still around in his day, which shows its not all that improbable for John to have been an eyewitness of Jesus and lived to write about him in 98 C.E. Now if Con accepts the eyewitness testimony of Josephus about the longevity of Jews in his day, he can"t assume no Jews could have lived long enough to write about Jesus 30 or even 40 years after he died. In fact, we also have testimony from 55 C.E. that Tryphon, and Egyptian contemporary of Jesus, who also lived a long time. "Tryphon, son of Dionysius, about"years old, of middle height, fair with a long face and a slight squint, and having a scar on his right wrist, has bought from his mother Thamounis" cousin, Pnepheros, son of Papontos, also an inhabitant of Oxyrhynchus, about 65 years old, of middle height, fair, having a long face and a scar above his"eyebrow and another on his right knee"" (Grenfell, Bernard Pyne, and Arthur Surridge Hunt. 1898-99. The Oxyrhynchus Papyri. Parts 1-2, Nos. 1-207, 208-400. London: Oxford University Press. Cited in The Historical Jesus: The Life of a Mediterranean Jewish Peasant. New York: HarperSanFrancisco, 1992, by John Dominic Crossan, p. 27) So it"s simply not true that the oldest witness to the latest part of the life of Yeshua would be expected to die around 60AD (at the age of 42). There are those who would have lived beyond that point. The Gospels in fact are eyewitness testimony, and testimony of contemporaries of Jesus. John - "The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. WE HAVE SEEN his glory." (John 1:14) "That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which WE HAVE SEEN WITH OUR EYES, which we have looked at and our hands have touched"this we proclaim concerning the Word of life..." (1 John 1:1-3) Peter -"For we did not follow cleverly devised stories when we told you about the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ in power, but we were eyewitnesses of his majesty." (2 Peter 1:16) Even Luke says he interviewed the eyewitnesses (Luke 1:1-4) Luke was also a travelling companion of Paul in the book of Acts who had contact with the apostles, and Matthew was one of the 12, plus Mark was a contemporary, so most NT authors personally knew Jesus and all of them lived in his day. We know NT authors we believe in today were the original authors, evidence: (1)Second-century testimony is unanimous on assigning to the Gospels the same authors whose names they bare today. If they were written anonymously, a plethora of names would have been speculated, and we"d have some record of competing authorship for the same books, but we don"t. If the Gospel were anonymous for the first 60 years, how could anyone assign names to them and get the church across the entire Roman Empire to agree? (2)All the manuscripts of the Gospels we have today that contain the first chapter, all contain authors names such as According to Matthew, According to Mark, etc. There are no earlier manuscripts which lack title authors to show that the authorship was added later. (3)The fact that such unlikely authors were chosen. After all, if someone was going to invent authors, why chose an obscure person like Luke who is barely mentioned in the NT? Matthew was a tax collector, and Jews hated them. Would you pick the IRS man to write your gospel? (4)The Gospels must have received their titles immediately - not in the second century. For an anonymous author to have penned a Gospel, and have it accepted as being from any authoritative person, would required them to first produce the Gospel, present it as the work of another; concoct some story as to how it came peculiarly to be in their possession; get around the problem of why a work by such a person disappeared and was previously unknown; then get the church throughout the entire Roman Empire to accept this work as genuine. Yet, we have no historical record of the discovery of previously unknown gospels, which certainly would have caused a stir and controversy! Most scholars date most of the Gospels before 70 C.E., and John around 98 C.E. Its not unlikely that such authors would have been alive in the time of Jesus. So what if Tacitus and Josephus are not eyewitnesses of Jesus? They are certainly close enough to his time to know the historical facts. For example, most historians accept that Julius Caesar crossed the Rubicon River on 11 Jan, 49 B.C. But nothing written by eyewitnesses exists today. "There are no firsthand testimonies to Caesar"s having crossed the Rubicon (wherever it was). Caesar himself makes no mention in his memoirs of crossing any river. Four historians belonging to the next two or three generations do mention a Rubicon River, and claim that Caesar crossed it. They are: Velleius Paterculus (c.19 B.C."c.A.D. 30); Plutarch (c.A.D. 46"120); Suetonius (75"160); and Appian (second century). All of these evidently depended on the one published eyewitness account, that of Asinius Pollio (76 B.C."c. A.D. 4)"which account has disappeared without a trace. No manuscript copies for any of these secondary sources is to be found earlier than several hundred years after their composition." (The Evangelical Quarterly 58, 319-336) The NT manuscripts extant today are even closer in time to the life of Jesus which they describe, than the copies of Herodotus, Tacitus and most other classical writers surviving copies are to the events they describe. http://www.google.com... http://www.google.com... So the NT is so much better attested than any other ancient document that to reject the NT as reliable is to reject most of ancient historical writing as reliable. In that case, our libraries' history section would be very small. What a price to pay just to deny Jesus existed! As for being tampered with, scholars have found the NT text to be 99.5% accurate. (Metzger, Bruce M. 2005. The Text of the New Testament: Its Transmission, Corruption, and Restoration, Oxford, Oxford University Press) How? We have over 5000 Greek manuscripts to compare, plus thousands of other in different languages, plus enough quotations from the church fathers within the first 300 years of Christian history to make up the entire NT. All this comes from so many diverse lines of transmission, so wide, its not possible anyone could have changed all of them. Any change, in any manuscript, is always detected when compared with the thousands of others that read the same in that particular verse. http://www.google.com... This is how we know the "three-in-one" Comma Johannaeum was added to 1 John 5 because it isn"t in the oldest manuscripts, nor is it in the majority of manuscripts, nor was it quoted by most of the early Christian writers even in controversy over the Trinity. If Con"s claim is that these documents were changed from not having a Jesus, to having a Jesus, he needs to show us proof there was ever a copy of Matthew, Mark, Luke or John that said nothing about Jesus. The earliest historical witness, such as Papias, testify that Matthew was written first http://www.google.com... http://www.google.com..., but if Con goes by the majority of scholar, let's remember that most scholars admit Jesus existed. Even skeptics like Bart Erhman who doesn't believe in the Gospels reliability. All of Con's arguments have failed to show Jesus didn't exist. My evidence still stands.