Jesus Existed

I kindly thank Wylted for not forcing me to drop a roundPrefaceAs noted, the BoP is shared in this debate. So I will be using this round to present my positive case for Jesus’ absence.State of the literatureOverviewThe timeline below indicates the periods in which all the known canonical writings of the New Testament, I don’t believe Pro and I will be in any/much disagreement with this timeline, nor the trends indicated: [1]The main focus on my case is going to be on the Apostle Paul to which I intend to determine either of the following: The Apostle Paul’s account of Jesus is entirely/partly of revelation The Apostle Paul’s account of Jesus is entirely/partly of oral tradition It is important to address Paul since Paul’s writings predates Mark’s by 10-20 years, and as such Paul’s writings would have been uninfluenced by any of the material written by Mark and later authors (as were Matthew & Luke with Mark). If I can demonstrate that the Apostle Paul’s writings most likely doesn’t describe a real person, then the remaining evidence is rather easy to dismiss. Moreover Paul played a major role in the early Church, and already by the time Paul authored his letters a significant number of Christian converts existed at this time (1 Cor 1:4)It will be my contention from here that virtually all of the content within the Gospels of Mark, Matthew and Luke are ‘generated’ entirely as a product of oral traditions and from the intentions/motives of the authors that commissioned them. I don’t anticipate Pro will disagree with me that significant portions of the synoptic gospels are quite simply, false, and that the motives of the authors give us significant reason to doubt even the mundane claims of the Old Testament.ManuscriptsIrrespective of scholarly consensus on *which* writings are original are there questions of the quality of transmission of the New Testament. We possess 6,000 fragmented/complete manuscripts from the New Testaments which all differ from each other. The types of mistakes varies, most insignificant, but given that there are more mistakes in these manuscripts than there are words in the New Testament, the number of significant mistakes becomes very large.This becomes worse when the process of manuscript transmission is considered, printing did not exist during this period, and copying of manuscripts was performed manually by scribes, letter by letter, and as such many, many mistakes were made. While most mistakes were minor and don’t translate, others are very significant.Each manuscript is copied, and the copy is copied, and that manuscript is copied, and so on and so forth. Each generation of manuscripts will contain all the errors of the predecessor, plus the errors the scribe makes and other changes. What we end up with is a family tree of manuscripts as shown below: [2]This wouldn’t necessarily be a problem if we had early copies of the manuscripts as these will avoid the majority of transmission errors, but we simply do not have that. Our earliest manuscripts (70-100AD) are fragments, and our earliest complete manuscripts don’t appear until and our earliest complete manuscripts don’t appear until nearly 300 years later (!).[4,5]That’s 300 unaccounted for years where scribal errors can accumulate, and at a period of time when the errors are most significant!Oral TraditionIt is significantly worse for oral traditions. Whereas we have the capacity to prune the younger branches of manuscript generations, the same is not possible with oral traditions. Stories are passed by word of mouth in the years of the early Church, and the primary intention is to create conversions. Hence the oral traditions were significantly motivated. Myths and fables, and random memes that crop up quickly spread throughout a community and like the game of Chinese whispers, ends up making part of the tradition from which the Gospels are composed.This is extremely problematic, as the Gospels by far contain most of what is claimed about Jesus, and it becomes difficult, if not impossible to separate fact from fable.[3]Bart Erhman affirms (emphasis mine):“…they saw it as their mission to convert people to the belief that the death and resurrection of Jesus were the death and resurrection of God’s messiah and that by believing in his death and resurrection a person could have eternal life. The early Christian “witnesses” to Jesus had to persuade people that Jesus really was the messiah from God, and to do that they had to tell stories about him. So they did. They told stories about what happened at the end of his life—the crucifixion…”[8]Critically, essentially all the information that was written in the Gospels was either constructed by generations of authors, or derived from these oral traditions.[9]Apostle PaulApostle Paul makes very few claims about a physical Jesus in his epistles, if any. This is unexpected if we are to believe there really was a man named Jesus. IF we accept there was a man named Jesus, who was resurrected, then we can reasonably expect him to be of significance within his lifetime. Paul alludes to Jesus’ apostles, therefore Jesus must have done significant works in the way of preaching, etc. However all references to these are absent from Paul’s epistles.Paul only spoke of a Jesus who was crucified and resurrected, of which he only came to know via. Revelation during his conversion (1 Cor 15 1-10, Acts 9:3) . Unless Pro wants to claim that Jesus appeared as a literal zombie to 500 claimed in 1 Cor 15:6, then the next best explanation is Paul came to ‘know’ this by vision(s). In Acts 9 Luke attests that Paul did not physically meet Jesus during his conversion either:“ “Who are you, Lord?” Saul asked. “I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting,” he replied. 6 “Now get up and go into the city, and you will be told what you must do.” The men traveling with Saul stood there speechless; they heard the sound but did not see anyone. 8 Saul got up from the ground, but when he opened his eyes he could see nothing. So they led him by the hand into Damascus.”Paul repeatedly expressed that the spirit supersedes the flesh (Phil 3:4, Phil 1:21-25), it would be bizarre that he would expect to see Jesus after resurrection in any other way than by spirit (hence revelation), which was his expectations of those in salvation.Paul explicitly affirms this, and in fact does so emphatically (Gal 1:11-12)“11 I want you to know, brothers and sisters, that the gospel I preached is not of human origin. 12 I did not receive it from any man, nor was I taught it; rather, I received it by revelation from Jesus Christ.”As such, essentially everything we know about Jesus (including his existence) is on seriously dubious ground. This is especially important of Paul because he has significant possible influence on all subsequent oral traditions and writings pertaining to Jesus.ContaminationStephen Law attacks that the notion of the mundane claims, especially in the Gospels (and also to a large extent, to the Pauline Epistles) are made dubious by the presence of supernatural claims within the same narrative. Law Provides the following argument (rephrased by myself): [6]1. We can be sceptical of extraordinary claims if they lack extraordinary evidence where the claim’s justification derives solely from evidence.2. The extraordinary claims concerning supernatural miracles made in the New Testament documents have no extraordinary evidence.3. We can be sceptical of those extraordinary claims (1&2)4. (P2) If a testimony weave together a narrative that combines mundane claims with a significant proportion of extraordinary claims, then we have good reason to be sceptical of those mundane claims sans independent evidence5. The New Testament documents weave together a narrative about Jesus that combines mundane claims with a significant proportion of extraordinary claims. 6. There is no good independent evidence for even the mundane claims about Jesus7. Therefore (from 3, 4, 5, and 6), there's good reason to be sceptical about whether Jesus existed.I expect premise 1 & 2 will be uncontested by Pro, so I only need to affirm 4,5 and 6Premise 4 follows from the contamination principle established by Law, which he provided a prima facie case with the example:“Let’s return to Ted and Sarah. If they tell me a man called Bert paid them an unexpected visit in their home last night, I have every reason to believe them. But if they tell me that Bert flew around the room by flapping his arms before dying, coming back to life and turning their sofa into a donkey, well then not only I am not justified, solely on the basis of their testimony, that these amazing things happened, I can no longer be at all confident that any such person as Bert exists.”This is essentially what we have in the Gospel accounts, including Mark. With no fewer than 18 miracles affirmed, including resurrection, healing palsy, exorcism, feeding the four thousand, etc. [7] This affirms P5.I expect Pro to contest P6, and I will expand on this some more in later rounds. The conclusion follows deductively, which given the state of the New Testament, is rather easy to affirm.ConclusionI have painted the framework of a case which gives us good grounds for rejecting the existence of Jesus as even an inspiring entity. The most significant case from Paul is on obviously dubious ground, and the case from the Gospels are as unlikely.References http://triangulations.files.wordpress.com... http://kjvonly2.blogspot.co.uk... http://en.wikipedia.org... http://en.wikipedia.org... http://en.wikipedia.org... http://philpapers.org... http://www.gospelgazette.com... How Jesus Became God 2014, p47 http://kjvonly2.blogspot.co.uk...