the disciples wrote those eyewitness accounts themselves.
in a time when few read or wrote, why would you expect to find some one to write about a carpenter executed like a criminal?
thats like saying some roman slave didn’t exist because no one wrote about him.
It’s generally agreed by scholars that the disciples themselves did not write the gospels – the gospels are attributed to them, but their contents probably derived from oral tradition.
There’s nothing that indicates that the gospels were written by the disciples.
And indeed if someone were making the claim that a roman slave did miraculous things, I would certainly not believe that such a slave existed unless there was some good, strong evidence supporting it – not a handful of stories written anonymously by followers of the slave decades and decades later.
you mean someone wrote about events afterr they occured? how original, i usually write about things before they occur.
No, the point is that the accounts are not contemporary. When we verify whether historical individuals existed, we rely upon contemporary sources to verify their existence
so Christians existed, according to written and arccheological evidence.
the mere fact that they existed, the first Catholics, proves the efficacy of the Messiah.
No one is disputing that Christians existed.
I’m sure you’ll agree that followers of Krishna existed, but that doesn’t “prove” that Krishna was an historical individual or a god.
you mean except for the eyewitness accounts that men seperated from the event by decades and many, many miles allowed themselves to be tortured to death rather than recant?
The supposed grisly fates of some of the disciples are also largely unverifiable; and in any event, the willingness of a person to die for a belief doesn’t prove that the belief is true – just that the person was willing to die for it.
your arguments here are simply restatements of empiricism.
by that logic, you cant prove that anything you havent personally witnessed ever existed
No, that is wrong. History is a very well-developed human science based on
evidence. While we may not be able to be absolutely certain of the past, we can definitely evaluate claims about history to determine which ones are more likely and which ones are less likely to be true.
maybe ther was never a george washington, or a davinci, or a buddha, mohammed, ghandi, king james, plato, socrates, alexander the great, or any historical figure.
I could go through each figure on your list, but I’ll just pick a few – it is incontestable that Washington existed. We have letters that he wrote, things that were written about him by contemporaries (and not all flattering), items he owned, records of land he owned (and people he owned!), Oh, and also, he was
president of the United States. He made huge policy decisions and we have testimony of other world leaders meeting him. It would be crazy to assert that George Washington might not have lived.
However, some aspects of his life are less verifiable. Most people concede that the “cherry tree” story is a myth – there’s nothing to confirm it, and it sounds like too much of a self-serving, image-bolstering tall tale.
Indeed, if you read descriptions of great men from history, you will often find tall tales springing up around them – the Roman generals, for example, were written about by Roman historians in ways that made it seem like they had supernatural powers or that they were the recipients of supernatural omens. Tall tales do spring up around figures that inspire people.
So we can say that the “cherry tree” episode of Washington’s life is less likely to be true and probably a myth.
Now, Buddha, on the other hand – the only real information we have about his life comes from the Pali Cannon, written at least a hundred years after he lived by his followers. Furthmore, accounts of his life are mixed with things that are unverifiable and that defy our understanding of the universe, like the assertion that he was aided by the god Brahma Sahapati.
As such, I don’t think there’s enough evidence to say that the legendary Buddha, as depicted in the Pali Cannon, existed. Now I do think it is likely that a real person (or maybe people) existed as the basis for the Buddha legend, but I can’t really claim this as a fact.
Similarly, I think it is likely that a person named Jesus existed (or perhaps several rabbis who taught similar things), but I don’t think that there is enough evidence to believe the tall tales that sprung up around him.
So as you can see, learning about history is a process of deciding what is most likely to be true and what is least likely to be true depending upon
evidence. A bunch of stories don’t cut it.
