Did Jesus Exist?

[Music] hi I'm Dan Barker and welcome to another FFRF ask an atheist and I'm Annie Laurie Gaylor and we are co-presidents of the Freedom From Religion Foundation working to keep religion and government separate and we've done a lot of shows about state your separation lately but we also want to educate the public about the views of non theists atheists agnostics and so on and so on today's show we're going to examine the question did Jesus exist and you'll be able to join in our discussion you can ask us a question by typing a comment right here on Facebook or by sending an email to ask an atheist at FFRF dot org but first we want to remind you that our national convention will be in San Francisco in less than six months the weekend of November 2nd and 4th and it's not too early to make your plans hotel space is limited and we have an astonishing line-up of good speakers you'll see Salman Rushdie Cecile Richards who is the recent president of Planned Parenthood Adam Savage and actor 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outreach slash Convention so Dan did Jesus exist well okay so that's our topic get Jesus exists well it depends on what Jesus you're talking about Jesus of the New Testament which is a character and his story or the actual Jesus of history so most scholars would say that it's most probable that the Jesus of the New Testament did not exist that character is an exaggeration many scholars say that it is probable that there was a historical Jesus after whom that New Testament myth was based although many scholars say no there was that this very probable that there was not an actual historical Jesus and they give good reasons the ones who say no they're usually called myth assists because they think the whole thing's a myth there was no Jesus at all right now they are in a minority of scholarship but they have very strong arguments and we want to talk about those arguments why there is doubt keeping in mind that no historical claim can ever be 100% yes or 0% no it's always a matter of probabilities I think we're on pretty safe ground critical scholars not new not evangelical people who read the New Testament but critical scholars say that Jesus of the New Testament did not exist and could not have existed although there could have been this first century self-proclaimed Messiah there were a bunch of others there was a there was a guy named Judas the Christ in the first century BC there was a self-proclaimed Messiah named Theotis the Christ there was an Egyptian Jew Messiah so there might have been this guy named Yeshua the Christ who you know you can't prove that he didn't exist he might have been there who was the kernel of the story that later grew into the this you know exaggerated New Testament ledge so you're saying there could have been a man who thought he was Christ and then this legend grew around him yeah there might have been this self-proclaimed Messiah who might have might have been crucified and that's historians give some high provocation that could have happened and it's the kind of thing that the Jewish early Christians would not have reported so the crucifixion of this character does seem to ring true for history although it doesn't mean that he was a miracle worker who walked on water and who rose from the dead it just means that there might have been one of these Yeshua wouldn't have a Jesus but it could have been Yeshua which was Joshua however the myth assists have a lot of good arguments why we should lower the probability we can't say no for sure but one of the reasons is that in the first century when these New Testament stories were written there is no external confirmation for the story outside of the New Testament itself there were a whole bunch of people writing in fact the early Roman Empire that first century was pretty well documented there was Philo of Alexandria there was later Josephus came on there was a lot of people writing things nobody noticed this Jesus character during his lifetime or even in decades afterwards there was no snow stories about it no contemporary secular writers about it it's only much later so that's one of the reasons one of the reasons why we would lower the probability of Jesus existing as a historical person so um our videographer wants to know who was Josephus well Josephus okay Josephus was a Roman Jew who wrote some books about the Jewish history the antiquities of the Jews and the Wars of the Jews and Josephus wrote his writings around the year ninety-two a hundred which would have been at least 60 years after the events so in Josephus in this long big long thing the antiquities of the Jews there's this one tiny little paragraph where he does mention Jesus there was a man named Jesus but first of all that's pretty late it hardly qualifies this contemporary came much much later and secondly that little paragraph was most likely interpolated it was inserted later it doesn't even show up in his writings until the 4th century so it looks like Christians doctored the writings of josephus to put this little paragraph about Jesus in there because it's totally out of character with the rest of the chapter it's inserted in a really weird place it's in a kind of a later language and it talks it and it says he was the Christ but Josephus was a messianic Orthodox Jew and if he really thought Jesus was the Christ he would have devoted more than a couple sentences in his think to it that would have been like earth-shattering so most scholars are pretty sure Josephus didn't write that at all the Christ is actually a title yeah when you hear the word Jesus Christ that's not a name that's a title yes'm Christ that Christ the Anointed One the Messiah although Josephus that little paragraph does say the word Jesus although there are a lot of good reasons why scholars doubt the authenticity of that what so to sum it up there is no accepted historical account that's contemporaneous when Jesus was supposed to have lived that he lived any time in the it's a little bit odd yeah in the whole fourth century even 60 years after there's nothing except what the Bible writers themselves say so the New Testament stories they are evidence I mean something happened they didn't just you know totally invent it something must have happened so there's no confirmation in history but also can't you argue you're talking about a person who was deluded who thought he was the son of a God might have been wandering around the desert making claims there were a bunch of those yes there were any of those could have perhaps seeded this New Testament mythology yeah they could have been the template after after whom this later myth was based and what one could parallel for that is the story of Paul Bunyan Paul Bunyan you know was this Northwoods Canadian lumberjack his big lumberjack and we all know the story about Paul Bunyan with his big ox and he dug the Great Lakes as a watering hole for his ox so I think pretty much everybody agrees that they're the Paul Bunyan story is legendary that he didn't exist but you can't prove that there was not an actual Paul Bunyan there might have been the stories were written forty to fifty years after the events when the French were fighting the British so there might have been a guy named Paul Bunyan who was a big lumberjack who did some amazing things but later this story based on him comes along and it's obviously based on him yeah it's a legend it's a story you can read is it true or not I mean is it a fun story or is it our era there's some truth so there in in the legends of Paul Bunyan there might be a little tiny bit of truth there might have been an actual man but nobody has a record of such a thing no no there's no record it's a very parallel with Jesus yeah so there's a you can make the same parallel the New Testament stories are like the stories of Paul Bunyan they're interesting stories and they have these kind of weird weird stuff in them but everybody you can laugh and say that really didn't happen but that doesn't disprove that there was an actual historical person on whom that myth was based there's also a lot of Christians apologists will point to other non biblical extra-extra New Testament sources that mention the Christ in the second century and you know like Pliny and Suetonius and Tacitus they wrote like in the years 7 117 118 and later and you can find a bunch of second century writings about Jesus even by people who didn't like him you can find Jewish writings debunking the story and what the apologists say is that well if they're debunking the story he must have existed or they wouldn't have been writing about him but these are really late these are a century or more later and not one of them uses the word Jesus they all mention a Christ figure and in fact Tacitus writes about this Cresta person not a Christos so they're really grasping at straws by saying and you can read up you can read a long list of like 20 different names of people who mentioned Jesus outside in the New Testament but remember those are all really late after the Christian religion had already come into prominence so obviously there's going to be writings about the religion later well so let's get more to the heart of the Jesus that's portrayed in the New Testament internally aren't there many reasons why someone would doubt the existence of such a person yeah so there's a lot of contradictions you know the the lack of historical confirmation lowers the probability and the presence of internal contradictions in the story lowers it even more it doesn't bring it to zero but it's like wait a minute these people don't have their story straight and a couple of weeks ago we did a whole show on viable contradictions and we focused on the birth of Jesus and who was Joseph's father and the genealogies of Jesus if you just look at the New Testament itself pretend like it's a true story you find all these contradictions that that mean that at least one or maybe all of the storytellers didn't get their facts right they contradict each other so that that greatly drops the probability including the resurrection of Jesus well you have your Easter challenge which we talked about on asking atheists where you challenge people to take all of the chronologies the different chapters about the death of Jesus and to make one cohesive story and you can't do it yeah and even Christian scholars admit and I quote them in my book losing faith in faith and in God and godless even Christian scholars who believe in Jesus admit we can't make sense of this story there's something wrong with this story the way it was patched together it can't all be true something's wrong with it so there's a lot of contradictions in the Jesus story itself especially the genealogies which we talked about and it's and it's lack of historical reliability as well Matthew and Luke didn't get the historical thing straight so that we can give an example well Matthew said Jesus was born during the reign of King Herod and we know from history that Herod was died in the year four BC Matthew said he Jesus was born before that but Luke said Jesus was born when Kyrie Gnaeus became governor of Syria we know that happened in 6 ad so there's a there both are looking back in their own kind of distant history remembering stuff kind of sloppily and Matthew remembers it this way and Luke remembers it this way well they're not really remembering anything you know they're just they're just trying to give a historical setting for the story of Jesus birth and they got it wrong one of them is wrong Matthew both of them are wrong oh yeah but but at least we know there's a contradiction if we had to pick one Luke tends to be a little more reliable than Matthew Matthew tends to be just no Dan when you talk about reliability and scholars what are you basing that on are you basing that on the Bible or the scholars project people like Robert price whatever for mean the myth assists yeah there are people like scholars like Robert price and others but you know there was that whole project where people hated the Bible and they used colors to show what was yeah the Jesus Seminar Jesus Seminar yeah there's a group called the Westar Institute w es ta are who are biblical scholars with PhDs or equivalent who are actual you know university scholars who do the research and they concluded that at least two-thirds of the words attributed to Jesus in the New Testament were not Jesus words they did think that about one-third of them was authentic so the Westar Institute there believed most of them were believers all the Jesus Seminar thinks there was a quote-unquote historic Jesus most of them yeah most of the New Testament is fraudulent yeah although Robert price was part of that for a while so the Jesus Seminar in the West our Institute includes a few scholars who are myth assists although the rest of them would have gone more to legend rather than myth meaning there probably was a historical Jesus but the stories are legendary like the Paul Bunyan story there might have been but the stories themselves well so then speaking of things that are internal in the New Testament that would tend to make some be doubted what about all the miracles well there you go you know there's that famous quote by Carl Sagan that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence and isn't that a paraphrase of David Hughes well yeah David Hume said something like that the the the evidence has to match the claim I mean others have said that but I like the way Carl Sagan said it and these are extraordinary claims people you know magically multiplying the food in just a few minutes and walking on water and and healing people and Raymond and I yeah blindness yeah Jesus there was a blind man and Jesus said you're blind so Jesus knelt down and he got some mud he's been in the mud and he stuck it on the guy's eye and he's started with his sight was returned well there's mud in your eye there's my guy yeah I think I would care to go to Jesus the ophthalmologist to myself so so what honest historian say even honest skeptics say we're pretty sure that's not true well and then let's talk about some of the irrational things there's miracles but also why did Jesus miraculously supposedly drive a demon into a whole bunch of innocent pigs right and drive them in and drive them off into a cliff and so they died yeah because the demons came out of these people out of this demoniac how many pigs I did I don't know how many pigs yeah and why would you do that I mean if you're like Lord or God and you can have miracles and there were demons why wouldn't you get rid of the demons yeah why put them in hell the pigs well and why would Jesus get so mad at a fig tree remember this story about a fig tree and he's hungry apparently and it's not fig fig season yeah and he gets mad that there's no figs for him to eat so he withers the fig tree yeah this guy walking around is quite scary actually but he does a lot of apologists and theologians say well that was just a story because the nation of Israel was withered and the nation of Israel wasn't bearing fruit and so there was going to be a prophecy of the end you know I mean it was like a story too make a point rather than a real real story but back to the demons a lot of scholars have noted that like the book of Mark they were all written in Greek right there are many stories in the book of Mark and in Matthew and Luke as well that parallel almost episode per episode and word-for-word stories that appear in homer in the Odyssey as' there's a place where homer goes out in the ocean and he calms the storm and then he sees the Cyclops and then he casts that the demon out of the Cyclops or you know there's and then when you see in Jesus he gets on a boat with his disciples and he calms a storm and then there's this possessed person and he cast out the demons and they go in you know so you can see that everybody knows that if you were an educated Greek writer in the first century you were schooled on Homer Homer was the textbook the Odyssey and the Iliad everybody read it everybody knew it all those stories were the common currency and so you can see in the book of Mark many story of defeating of the 5,000 that story happened in the Odyssey as well you see some of those stories so when you wonder why are these stories in the New Testament part of the reason is that while these were common motifs that were floating around from the writings of Homer before that so and speaking of the character of Jesus though you know things like renouncing his mother refusing to do things that some little thing for her I mean I guess that doesn't lend itself to the whole legend and myth but it it does make you wonder why is there so much energy on making sure that there was such a person when there were so many things that Jesus said and did that are harmful you know that you that you should become a eunuch for for God for example castrate yourself well that would show not that Jesus didn't exist but that a good Jesus didn't exist he might have existed he might have been a jerk you know well because you tend to only hear the more palatable things no God is love that thing about Jesus but when you really read the New Testament there are a lot of troubling things in it and we know that from history and from modern days that some of these cult leaders were not always that attractive in their teachings and in their personal lives so there might have been this weird Yeshua character the who's who was sexist in the patriarchal which was the currency of Avery and who believed in demons and you know the mental illness was demon possession and holidays stuff and also who called nan non-hebrews dogs yeah Gentiles were dogs yeah so there's sort of a bigotry there yeah so a Celt doesn't disprove that he existed historically but it's still that maybe not worthy of worship yeah and so we're talking about did he exist or not so when you do these debates another thing that I know comes up when you're trying to explain the New Testament is so-called natural explanations for people's myths yeah and so historically in the scholarship historically there have been a whole bunch of attempts to try to explain the New Testament stories as just misinterpreting actually really natural things that happened like demon possession would be a way to misinterpret mental illness right you would think well and so the death and resurrection of Jesus some people have supposed and I don't put a lot of weight on a lot of these but they proposed for example Jesus didn't really die he just passed out and they put him in the grave and ooh that would be terrible well yeah and then later they came back hey he rose from the day and that's why they used to have wakes remember because people would die but you wanted to wait two or three days to make sure they thought they were dead but they weren't as good at confirming it and so they wanted to wait for a few days and see if they would wake up they would have these wakes so one of the natural hypotheses is called the swoon theory and there's others that he was put in the wrong tomb or that somebody else was crucified in his place that he had a twin brother named didymus which means twin who was actually killed in Jesus I mean there's all these other ways to try to explain the stories with natural hypotheses which I think the problem with those is that they give too much credit to the text they give too much credit to what the New Testament says as if it was actually true what they said and believed but we need a national explanation for it right Jesus walked on water well the lake was frozen you know I mean you think you can think of a natural well it was one of these freaking cold spells who knows nobody's proposing that I'm just saying that you can always think of if any miracle story you can think of some natural way to explain it but one hypothesis is that I do like and it's just a hypothesis it's not you know when you go into history you can't prove it they didn't write this here's what we were actually thinking but Robert price brings this up dis confirmation he calls it so here was this cult leader named Jesus he was crucified he did die the disciples were really upset about it his followers like he died he was supposed to bring in this new kingdom and he died the day after Good Friday is called Black Sabbath because the disciples were all black you know and then Easter Sunday follows they were all of Lamy black they were all just like in total dark mist imagine if your whole world fell apart everything you believed in didn't happen and it's just he's dead now right so Peter who was the lead disciple who on whom the whole Pope and Catholic churches based Peter had lied the night before he had denied Jesus when they asked him you know do you know Jesus and he denied and Robert Prizes hypothesis is this kind of like suppose you and your spouse had a big argument and you said some things that you really regretted and you say oh I'm sorry I'm gonna go apologize but the person dies before you can say anything before you can apologize the person is dead let's not do that okay this let's not argue on this show and so Peter must have been feeling like on Black Sabbath oh my goodness he's dead he's gone I didn't get to apologize he was my lord I loved him in he's gone now he's hour later and so Peter prays dear Jesus I'm sorry I apologize please forgive me and then he feels forgiveness and he feels like wow yes Jesus so Jesus is up in heaven somewhere and he's praying to him right and it's just like modern Christians think that grandma died and grandmas in heaven you could say grandma I'm sorry I didn't say this you know I'm sorry but you know I'm getting a sense of the absurdity in this because aren't we I mean I know I recognize it's important to debate this but aren't we giving an awful lot of credence to fairy tales would we sit there and analyze Hansel and Gretel but they might have existed maybe there really were bread crumbs left do you know what I mean okay but get the story I mean all it has to be as plausible it doesn't have to be true has to be just plot because other myths have arisen look at Jehovah's Witnesses look at the look at the myth of the Elian Gonzalez thing I mean their human nature creates these things out of something what's the myth of alien goes there for this little Cuban kid who was rescued and they I remember him but what was the myth well that there were these Angels dolphins that were flirting with him and the Virgin Mary was walking the streets of Miami people were getting healed I mean just within a couple of days this whole myth thing arose out of basically nothing so it is human nature for very quickly for these kind of ideas and excitement and myths arise so if you have no ballast for or anchor and in your intellect for deciding and discerning whether something seems plausible anything is possible yeah and as my mother like to say one can speculate endlessly about the non-existent isn't that what's going on and in a sense okay well let me finish the the hypothesis it this isn't truth this is just a plausible hypothesis that price and others have put forward so Peter prays and he feels better and he tells his friends I talked to Jesus and I'm forgiven and they said you talked to Jesus he's dead but I talked to him you mean he's not dead he's alive he's lived somewhere he's alive and he rose to heaven so you can seem so far-fetched yeah but that's far-fetched things happen in court I mean the whole thing is far-fetched yeah it is you don't really believe there was a historical Jesus is that I think the probability is so low that there was and there's other good reasons for that but I'm just saying there are plausible natural hypotheses to explain how maybe the story could have come out of something right and one of them that could have happened those things do happen we know in history that people brains right but we don't even know that there were there was a Peter for example so this whole thing is just complete speculation yeah exactly all we have is those New Testament documents if you take him at face value you can find natural explanations but I think that's like you say I think that's stretching it a bit too much well I think that leads us to another point which is Jesus is legend well first back to myth let there's myth and there's legend there's also their difference yeah myth means he never existed at all legend means like the Paul Bunyan story he might have existed but then the story is a legend right like you talk about a historical person can have a legend on his life based right but the the pagan parallels there's many many things in the story of Jesus that parallel many other pagan stories of God men coming to earth or being persecuted by the leading powers they're then put to death and then their followers Revere the the grave and born of a virgin anybody who was anybody in those days if you're going to have this new religion with this person that you believe is a God then they had to be born of a virgin or born of summer at like hercules was born is very sexist well yeah or not necessarily born of a virgin but with Hercules it was a divine birth it was like a snake so anybody who's anybody has to be born well anybody anybody who's a God has to have these God characters to them so you'll know it's a God and also we haven't talked about the Sun gods I mean you've talked about parallels but what are there at least 25 Sun gods that Osiris yeah they all have this parallel kind of miraculous virgin birth and then the 12 disciples in the 12 houses of the zodiac sacrifice that seems to be the main and there's a big theory about how Christianity came basically from the Egyptian eighth y'all you know Astro theology and the stars and all that and you can kind of see that there's 12 disciples and there's the you know they have their different houses and and they were in the Age of Pisces at the time so the fish symbol was the symbol of Christianity at the time coming into the Age of Pisces so yeah you can see a lot of that stuff and I don't think any of that totally disproves the historical Jesus I think what all that does is it just drops the probability way way way way way down but you mentioned legend and I attend to think myth is very likely but legend is much more likely because if you look at the entire first century when these documents were written we have the first thing written was Paul first thing there about the resurrection was Paul in first Corinthians around the Year 25 then you have mark around the year I mean not 25 Paul was Ron near 55 about 25 years later after the events then then you have mark around 80 Matthew around 80 Luke around 80 85 somewhere in there after the temple was destroyed and then John like around the years 90 or so so here you have this big stretch of time when these documents are being written if you look at each one of them and count up the number of extraordinary events like Carl Sagan said there's a lot well but what you will see is that in the early ones there's very little in fact in Paul you don't have a bodily resurrection when you come to mark then you get a little bit more and then as you move later in the first century Oh Matthew and Luke more miracles and more stories and then when you get to John you see he said even if all the books were written could not contain what Jesus did and so in the book of John you have all this huge so you can actually see a growth through the first century of legendary embellishment as time passes over those decades which is what happens in any human legend that's growing it starts out simple very simple unadorned hardly any miracles there's no angels at the tomb there was no bodily resurrection there was none of that but then you have an angel at the tomb now you've got two angels at the tomb and now you've got rich now you have earthquakes and you have the the eclipse of the Moon over here zombies patek and that stuff's not in the early ones in the early documents you don't have that stuff and then here and then there's even more stuff that's it not in the New Testament the gospel of Peter has a huge giant cross and Jesus's head is up in the clouds and the cross is coming out of the tomb speaking which is pretty fantastic stuff I mean it's like later stuff gets more and more fantastic so this is the apocryphal yeah so but what you can see is that in the telling of the story across that first century there's an obvious growth of the story as it gets more and more so that's legendary growth that's the footprints of a legendary growth from maybe an actual kernel that's true or maybe not if you're a myth assist you say the kernel is not even true if you follow legend you say well the kernel might have been true there might have been a Jesus but this are later stuff and the mistake a lot of Christians make today is they take the New Testament and they look back through history through the lens of John and Luke and Matthew as if the whole thing which just happened flat you know and they don't see the growth they don't see the distortion that happened in later years so where does Bart Ehrman fall on this Jesus myths or with myth man or legend is it yeah so Bart Ehrman Falls he thinks it's Bart Ehrman thinks the New Testament Jesus probability is really too low to be taken seriously but he does think the probability of the historical Jesus is over was 0.5 he thinks it's high enough for us to say yeah there was a man named Jesus I wonder if people who aren't used to this terminology when I hear you say historical Jesus they don't mean there was a Jesus who performed miracles I mean there was this charlatan or deluded person who went around and and had a father maybe not even that maybe just a teacher or you know like there what would the original Paul Bunyan have been he would have been kind of interesting I suppose a big guy with an axe but he wouldn't have been doing these fantastic stuff so the historical Jesus is this man as a human being who may have existed or not right so then I have another question I didn't realize that crucifixions were really very common were they well yes public executions were not necessarily not on the t-shaped so and even the Bible doesn't talk about a TC t-shaped across it cause it talks about a Stavros is it which is more like a stick yeah the word crucify in the Greek New Testament Stavro which is where we get the word staff you know like a stick what would they would do is they wouldn't impale people just stick him and stick him up above so they're suffering they're bleeding and that's plays into one of the New Testament stories where the his side was pierced with a sword right when he was supposedly hanging on the cross his side was pierced with the store sword but blood didn't come out water came out apparently which is weird so there were public executions but the whole idea that was crucifixion common or was it uncommon public executions were common but I'm asking about the crucifixion well we don't have any evidence that the Romans used that t-shaped cross there is one in in the catacombs there is one little picture of a goat look like it's on this shape thing ago because about here so the earliest evidence we have of a t-shaped crucifixion and the word crucifixion and let comes through the word cross it's a cruise right the Greek word isn't cruise it's just steak but the early seventies like in the sixth century before that the Christians used the fish symbol and the shepherd as their symbol they didn't use the cross they didn't have cross necklaces they didn't have crosses on their bill didn't even have builder I also feel like Ruth green that I mean why would we go around wearing a implement implement of torture you know what even if you followed somebody and you felt there was great suffering why would you do that yeah it's desensitizing but if there were public executions like this and they were common many many people suffered not just to Jesus yeah and and so Christians today should be wearing a stake not a not a tee or maybe they should just drop that grave torture yeah jewelry be like wearing an electric chair around your neck to show that somebody was executed it's green who wrote our ffs book the born-again skeptics guide to the Bible always said that Easter was a time a terrible time for her as a child because there would be that image of this tortured agonized person and why would you revel in it you know there's it's just something very desensitizing about it and especially in Catholic churches where you have blood dripping off the side of the yeah so that was that was also part of the later later evolution of this yeah but but centuries later the the idea that he was publicly executed or crucified has some credence and that's why Bart Ehrman and other historians who doubt the legend I mean who doubt the New Testament they think that that self-proclaimed Messiah probably was publicly killed that he probably did exist and he was publicly killed on a stake right it put up to die and that in their minds and in Bart Ehrman's mind that lends credence to the whole idea that that person could have existed although the throw out the New Testament but there might have been just kind of like what Thomas Jefferson did yeah he he threw out everything that he thought was supernatural in the Jefferson Bible well I think we've covered this topic do we have any questions well let me see if we have questions from so how do I find the questions on here on Doc's pedis oh here they come okay okay here's a question from Cori Melton I have heard Bart Ehrman say many times that his reason for believing Jesus was a real person was because Paul met Jesus brother James to me that seems like such a fragile leg to stand on I can think of a handful of reasons immediately that could explain reasons for them to fabricate that or for someone to have pretended to be Jesus brother sure that could have been a historical Jesus why not if we one day find evidence for that but for there to be so little evidence for historical Jesus why do you think a scholar such as Bart would accept such seemingly brittle evidence to make such bold assertions okay so in all fairness to Bart I think what Bart is saying is that the probability is high I don't think Bart is saying we know 100% that Jesus did exist I think when historians are honest they take they have to take all sorts of things into in our bible scholar is it the same thing well he's both yeah he's a bike he's the Bible school he's a highly respected Bible scholar and he spoke at one of our meetings right so and we've had him on a radio show not our emperor has no clothes and his books are wonderful and especially what you know that he shows that there's a lot of fraud and there's a lot of forgery in the New Testament but even with all of that even though Bart Ehrman does discount the the crazy miracle working New Testament Jesus he thinks there was a real person and it's not just James it's also the crucifixion story and he's also alluding to the fact that Josephus in addition to that little probably interpolated passage about Jesus that shows up that wasn't real there's a later passage that does mention a James the brother of Jesus so Josephus does mention Jesus had a brother named James which means that there would have been a Jesus if he if gee if James was the brother of Jesus although in Josephus a story about James it contradicts what the New Testament says about James so but what you're saying is Bart Ehrman did this doesn't pin all of it on the brother he doesn't pin it all on the brother of James so so yeah I you know and I think we have to be honest none of us should be looking for a hundred percent or zero percent we should all be looking for what's what is a sensible probability here question yeah we do okay Connor Allen is asking why are there no stories about Jesus when he was growing up you hear about him as a baby and then BAM he's a fully grown man why is that well of course there's apocryphal all kinds of apocryphal stuff right but it didn't make the grade when they put together the current Bible well there is that one little story about Jesus with his parents as a life probably as a teenager he was a little bit of a terror I think yeah so yeah that's a good question in and that happens a lot in other pagan mythology you don't hear much about the childhood of this person it's just this person just comes right you hear about their birth so that's a good question although a lot of Christian apologists would say well that wasn't the point of it of the document you know if you're writing a history of Simone Bolivar who you know liberated South America you care about his liberation you may not care so much about his childhood we should have shown a little bit of Julia Sweeney talking about that recent movie that came out remember about you I think he was a little blond boy with a British accent do you remember yeah there was a dead bird yeah they get one of these highly produced films they're making a lot of money unfortunately promoting fundamentalist Christianity so I guess they're filling in the gaps these and that is one of the apocryphal stories is that it's not in the New Testament but Jesus saw a dead bird and he's just a little boy he went up and he and he picked it all the poor little bird is dead and then when he touched it it came to life oh that proves that he was even America worker when he was a little boy that's not in the New Testament at least not in the canonical that we accept but that's some some Catholics take that as one of the apocryphal stories of their childhood well at least that was a peaceful thing to do okay a question from Matthew Rock or comment it is interesting that the Bible is the only written albeit contradictory account what would have been the most important event in human history and not written about until at least fifty years after the event yeah it is yeah why couldn't it have happened when there were video cameras you know why couldn't that why can't God have waited until we could - why did you have to I mean if there's a God why weren't there video cameras then I mean what was God waiting for yeah so all we have are these second and third-hand in fact a lot of scholars think that the earliest gospel mark was written by somebody who could not have actually known Jesus it would have been a second generation of Christians something happened back there we can't deny that something happened there were Christians early and whoever wrote mark and we don't know that it was even mark who wrote mark was obviously writing from the 2nd or 3rd generation of people within that cult movement who was remembering what the parents remembered kind of thing but mark was written about 50 years after you're right although Paul did write a little bit about Jesus about 25 years after the first thing we have written about Jesus in first Corinthians 15 around the Year 55 which would have been about 25 years after Jesus supposedly died depending on when he was born which of the two you know and Paul wrote this little thing which he didn't actually write he said he got it from somebody else he wrote it to these people in Corinth which was about 1500 miles away as you travel and to people who most of them wouldn't have they'd even been alive so he writes this thing about what happened to these people who weren't even there who wouldn't have remembered or knowing anybody and yet he treats it like it was a historical story so it was much later is there some yeah the question one last question are we out of time here oh okay final question Jenna resh why do so many people portray Jesus as a white man was he always portrayed as that or did it happen when Christianity came to Europe if he existed was he lighter skinned well I don't know you do see how you know that sallman painting of Jesus is that kind of brown tone he's kind of like a white European if Jesus did exist in the early years of the Roman Empire he would have looked more like one of these people that you see out in the street or in you know Semitic people he would have looked more like some people say they want to look like mayor Koch of New York City who he would have been that kind of a person like he would have been likely Semitic is what you're doing exactly but he couldn't he have also been brown skinned yeah well I mean I've been brown skinned yeah northern northern African yeah or Egyptian or that kind of thing so you know who knows that and obviously our artists in medieval times and later are portraying the Jesus in the artwork of their day a lot of them a lot of Jesus is look pretty Italian to me Italian yeah well the Italian artists are right making a Jesus based on the models that they had available to them or Spanish yeah that that's a very good question yeah so we see the sunday-school paintings of a blonde or red red curly haired juices it's totally ridiculous well it's like the Jesus of the Europeans who came over to America there was the Jesus of those people you know the white people and you know the same question has it has to do with the Virgin Mary you know there's these verse places of the Virgin Mary in Europe in the whole supposed to hold a man but in Mexico they needed to have their own Virgin Mary so they had la Vida can they like what a Lupe they have her and she's like a native Aztec woman looking Virgin Mary so they made their Virgin Mary look like themselves and it was probably deliberate so that the people would have more easily identify with that Virgin Mary so who knows the motivation between behind the way Jesus is portrayed in artwork last one okay so well I think there's a lot more to say by the way about the Jesus of history we just touched on it and to summarize I think the probability of the historical Jesus is low maybe below 50% Bart Ehrman thinks it's higher than 50% we can't say yes or no either way but there are good reasons for doubting whether Jesus really existed and certainly there's excellent reasons for doubting the portrayal of Jesus in the New Testament because miracles as Carl Sagan said basically do not happen yeah so you know that's pretty much for me so let's let's end by reminding people about the convention we won't be talking about whether Jesus existed at the Cardinal convention but we will be hearing from Cecile Richards on her new book make trouble we have so many fascinating speakers John de Lancie is going to be getting our new Clarence Darrow Award Adam Savage Salman Rushdie will be getting our emperor has no clothes award as well and we have some fascinating other topics we have a 12 year old girl who's written a book about evolution it's darling I think there will show the whole book is a power but she was 8 years old when she started writing it and in self-defense living there in Utah we have the wonderful Julia Sweeney and Dan you and I just saw Julia Sweeney older and wider the debut at second city in Chicago should be doing that for us at the convention very very funny Leeanne Lourdes very funny sara hater excellent activists shall be getting their freethought heroin award and many other people will be there and it's not too early to make your reservations at the hotel because every year people get disappointed when the block is filled very early so you can find out more at FFF dot org slash convention 2018 and if you're not a member of F or F would be glad to send you a sample of our newspaper and it's got the red registration form you can do it online and we hope to see lots of you there we have room for I think nine hundred or thousand people we'll see well that's our show for today thanks for watching tune in next week at twelve o'clock noon central time to FFRF ask an atheist [Music] [Music]

Channel: FFRF

Views: 13,715

Rating: 4.7911229 out of 5

Keywords: Freedom From Religion Foundation, FFRF, Atheism, Atheist, Dan Barker, Annie Laurie Gaylor, Christianity, Bible, Jesus, Jesus Christ, Did Jesus Exist, Is Jesus real?, Jesus isn't real

Id: 3jvfTfCBznc

Length: 48min 16sec (2896 seconds)

Published: Thu May 10 2018