Jesus Has Left the Building, Part 3 (Tacitus, Suetonius, and Pliny)

The third installment in a series examining the historicity of Jesus Christ.

Category:

Education

Tags:

• Jesus
• Christ
• historicity
• historical
• person
• man
• figure
• character
• myth
• imaginary
• existed
• existence
• real
• fake
• skepticism
• criticism
• bible
• extra-biblical
• non-biblical
• Josephus
• Tacitus
• Suetonius
• accounts
• evidence

[TheDreadedlife]

XD hes arguing Cesear is a lie? We have writings from him, his exboyfriend, wives, enemies, Pompey, Augustus,Mark Antony, records of his role as pontifix maximus, the temples he built, tax records, his military career, and a family genealogy record. The only part that he was right on was that Ceaser indeed had a cult, because he was made a god after death. After his death the name Ceaser also was used to refer to the leader of Rome. How can someone claim to be a historian and ignore all of that?

[TaylorX04]

@TheDreadedlife No one is arguing Caesar is a lie. That comment is from someone who was making a bad analogy to my arguments in this video. You need to read more carefully before you post. ;-)

[pablo16825]

If reading Eisenman is causing you to seek to understand all of the social and cultural trends of the 1st century then that is a good thing. If you are "staggered" at the "fanaticism" of the "jesus" movement then you do not yet really appreciate and understand the culture of the era. You and I would very likely be just like them, no different. Once you get a handle on the cultural (taxes, religious and civil corruption etc. etc.) constraints you can better understand what is happening.

[TaylorX04]

@pablo16825 I wasn't at all implying that I would be any different. What's staggering is that these things are very rarely taught to believers and generally not known unless you brush up a bit on your history from the right sources.

[TaylorX04]

@pablo16825 Yes, and the evidence for Caesar is overwhelming compared to the sparse evidence for Jesus, as I previously demonstrated. If you were to bring up Socrates or Confucius, you would be in trouble, however, because there ARE historians who doubt their existence, and yet we have sparse evidence for them that is even more informative than the evidence for Jesus! Talk about pedantic methods. Are you done making terrible arguments now?

[TaylorX04]

@alvaboyfilms Are you kidding me? You're gonna post this same shit on every video in the series? To anyone interested, see my evisceration of this nonsense in the comments on the first video.

[TheDreadedlife]

@TaylorX04 :3 Thank you for the correction, its just for me some that have made similar comparisons before had literally got to the point where they doubted the existence of the particular person. If you don't mind me asking how long do you believe you will continue making videos and at some point will you make a video going into more detail on your view of Islam?

[TaylorX04]

@pablo16825 It was Robert Eisenman's book "James the Brother of Jesus" that changed my mind. He does a great job of contextualizing the first century in the wake of the Maccabees, Hasmoneans, and Essenes. It's staggering to realize the fanaticism that was going on at the time, between numerous factions, and to think that people find it so easy to believe Jesus and his followers were somehow exempt from it all.

[pablo16825]

@TaylorX04 We are not far from each other. I found John Painter's book on James good. Studying the period of Seleucid domination that precedes the Maccabee and the critical Hasmonean period essential background. Why is Judaism spreading through out the Mediterranean? Why so much discontent with the established Jerusalem Temple authorities? Understanding even roughly who the Essenes were, who John the Baptist helps to understand the world that Jesus enters.

[TaylorX04]

@pablo16825 Historians make inferences and inferences are always questionable. Any good historian knows he does not serve as an expert on what truly happened, but only what probably happened. I believe Jesus is best attested to by the historical evidence for his brother James, which is interestingly more abundant and more contemporary.

[pablo16825]

@splicedenergy sounds like you are looking in the national archives or your local tax assessors office for the "records" . Probably wont find them there. You wont find the historical records for the existence of over 2billion people born before 1800 there either. Sorry about that. The good news is that we can still reconstruct the rough parameters of the historical record of the ancient world from the evidence that is there and doing that is both enlightening and fun!

[pablo16825]

sorry about that, I hope I didn't get any spittle on your shirt. I feel like an old historian walking into a frat house full of teenagers. The historian must seek to understand every facet of the ancient's life, the economic and social conditions as well their beliefs and aspirations. Great historians understand the epoch and people and from that interpolate what happened and why it happened. Projecting back in time one's own biases and grievances with a religion today leads one astray.