Mind Blowing Facts About Jesus? ![rw-book-cover](https://img.youtube.com/vi/VqBmKGPC1_A/maxresdefault.jpg) ## Metadata - Author: [[YouTube]] - Full Title: Mind Blowing Facts About Jesus? - Category: #articles - Document Tags: [[early]] [[h1]] [[historiography]] [[methodology]] [[xref]] - Summary: Mind blowing facts about Jesus? - URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VqBmKGPC1_A Here's a few mind-blowing historical facts about Jesus. All right, let's see it. Nobody denies that Alexander the Great existed. And yet, the only documents that we have about him from the ancient world are five. And the earliest of those was written over 300 years after he died. So, this is entirely false and just wildly uninformed. There are five biographies about Alexander the Great, the earliest of which was written almost 300 years after his death. But those biographies are overwhelmingly based on writings from people who knew Alexander the Great while he was alive and traveled with him, including an official historian. So we have folks like Kalistanes and Tommy and Naarchus and Aristobulus and Onusiticus who knew Alexander the Great and wrote about his life and his exploits from firthand experience as well as collecting the different accounts from other contemporaries. And some of those works still survive in fragments or in quotations that are found in the five later main biographies. But we also have other texts. We have tablets written in Aadian that are about Alexander the Great and his decrees and his activities. We have Greek monumental inscriptions with decrees from and about Alexander the Great. And we have coins that were minted during his lifetime that show his face and have his name on them. We have many such coins and they continued to be minted for a decade after his death. We have archaeological remains from the battlefields that are discussed by his historian, by others, by his biographers. We can correlate a lot of different types of sources to reconstruct with a high degree of confidence an awful lot of the details of Alexander the Great's life and exploits. The notion that there are just five total documents about Alexander the Great that witness to his life is just laughably misinformed. Yet, we take that to be enough evidence that Alexander the Great was in fact a real person. With Jesus, on the other hand, there are over 35 extra biblical documentations talking about him. A large amount of those were actually talking about Jesus in a negative light. You have writings from ancient historians like Tacitus and Josephus, things that mention this guy who was followed by his disciples who claimed that he rose from the dead. Documentation talking about him being crucified by the Romans. And keeping in mind this is all outside of the Bible. If you wanted to include the 27 letters that composed the New Testament, then that is going to be around 62 different documents that are from the ancient world giving credibility and evidence to the fact that Jesus was in fact a real historical figure. And these give evidence that Jesus was definitely actually crucified and that his disciples, his followers actually believed that he rose from the dead. The notion that the evidence that exists for the life and the exploits of Jesus of Nazareth does anything other than timidly pale in comparison to the evidence that exists for the life and exploits of Alexander the Great is just bafflingly uninformed. There exist no firsthand accounts of the life and exploits of Jesus of Nazareth. There exist no accounts that we can confidently say are based on any firsthand accounts of the life and exploits of Jesus of Nazareth. Even if we accept as genuine all 35 of these extra biblical documents, 33 of which are not named, the very earliest of them comes from 60 plus years after the death of Jesus. and again is not a firsthand account or even based on a firsthand account. The three parts of Jesus's life that are mentioned as being discussed in these documents are the fact that he existed, the fact that he was crucified by the Romans, and the fact that his followers claimed that he came back to life. Again, we don't have any data that can allow us to confidently conclude that any of that is based on actual firthand accounts. So when we compare the kinds of sources that we have to reconstruct the life and the exploits of Alexander the Great and Jesus of Nazareth, the evidence for Alexander the Great absolutely overwhelmingly eclipses the evidence for Jesus of Nazareth. Now aside from John, all of his disciples were martyed, which means that they were killed for their faith. And to be more specific, they were killed specifically because they refused to recant the claim that Jesus came back from the dead. Or at least that's what tradition tells us. Because we have no firsthand accounts of their deaths or the rest of their lives after what we have in the New Testament. We don't have any accounts that we can confidently conclude were based on firsthand accounts either. So while we were taking care to examine and interrogate the quality of the sources and the types of sources that we have for reconstructing the life and exploits of Alexander the Great and to a far lesser degree the life and exploits of Jesus of Nazareth when it comes to what happened to his disciples, we're just blindly accepting tradition without asking at all where that tradition comes from. But guess what? That has to be based on historical sources as well. What historical sources can you name for all of the different disciples that are mentioned in the New Testament? None. All you can name is later church tradition. These people who lived with him for three and a half years every single day watched him die and watched him come back to life 3 days later. So the argument continues to devolve as we continue to assert dogmatic claims without argument that are based on presuppositions of univocality of inspiration of inherency of historicity. Only now we're asserting specific reconstructions of the length of Jesus's ministry. And we have long ago abandoned the notion that we are actually concerned for interrogating the number and the nature and the quality of the sources of these historical reconstructions. That was just a performance for the introduction to the video. Now we're just asserting as evidence dogmas without argument and without evidence because the audience for this video is a group of people who already agree with this content creator. And all this content creator is doing is performing a grasp of the data and the methods and the theories and the scholarship to make that audience that already agrees feel like this is someone who can be trusted. And when they assert with confidence that we can know that these things happened, the people who already agree are made to feel comforted that hey, this person who knows what they're talking about speaks with such conviction and so I can be confident that they're right and therefore the dogmas that we share are right and are defensible and they're not. This content creator doesn't begin to have the first clue what they're talking about when it comes to historioggraphy, when it comes to the type and the quality and the number of the sources that we have and that we use to reconstruct the life and the exploits of folks like Alexander the Great and Jesus of Nazareth and Jesus's disciples and the texts of the New Testament and their change and transmission through time. He doesn't really have a grasp of much of that at all. He's just performing confidence and competence for an audience that already agrees and just needs to be made to feel validated in that agreement. They were so sure about this that they literally were tortured and put to death in the most gruesome possible ways, including being crucified upside down, having their skin filleted off of their body. John, who was not martyed, he was boiled in oil and somehow did not die prior to him being sent off into exile onto the island of Patmos where he wrote Revelation. The author of the Gospel of John was very unlikely to be the beloved disciple and someone named John and they are definitely not the author of the book of Revelation as even the majority of Christians agreed up until Justin Martyr in the middle of the 2 century CE decided to make that connection. But all kinds of analyses including the witness of early Christians make clear that the author of the book of revelation was not the author of the gospel of John. So again we are asserting dogmas that are not only not supported by any data but are pretty flatly precluded by the data. And where does the notion that John got boiled in oil and suffered no harm come from? that comes from Tertullan who just asserts it around 200 CE has absolutely no firsthand account to offer. His claim is not based on any firsthand accounts. It's just something that he asserts. So obviously this content creator is not going to interrogate the nature or the quality or the number of the sources for that particular claim because we've already gotten past the need to perform concern for historical integrity. Now it's off to the races of just asserting a bunch of dogmas that we know the audience will already agree with. And so we don't even have to care about whether or not any of it is historically defensible. And it's not. Throughout all of the torture, the beatings, and even literally having your life taken from you in gruesome, painful ways, none of them ever recanted the claim that Jesus did in fact rise from the dead. That is historical fact. And that is mind-blowing. >> No, those are historical claims. They are not remotely historical fact. And you provided absolutely zero evidence for those historical claims. And the overwhelming majority of them are not supported by any historical data. Again, what we can retreat to as most historically defensible when it comes to the life and exploits of Jesus of Nazareth is that he most likely existed. He was most likely a Jewish itinerant apocalyptic preacher who was most likely crucified by Rome probably for starting a riot in the temple around Passover and then his followers began to claim that he came back to life shortly thereafter. That's about the best we can reconstruct regarding the life and exploits of Jesus of Nazareth. That I would say comes the closest to being historical fact. Everything else mentioned so far in this video is just a tradition, a historical claim. So 100% undeniable facts about Jesus is that Jesus of Nazareth was a real person. He was in fact crucified by the Romans and died. And then his disciples went to their death because they claimed that Jesus came back from the dead. That's not myth. That's not fairy tale. Those are undeniable historical facts. Uh, no, this is the performance of a lot more certainty than is actually merited regarding these events. These are likely historical events, but we don't really know for sure how Jesus's disciples actually died or who they were precisely. Uh, I already described what we can most likely confidently reconstruct regarding the life and exploits of Jesus. Again, anything beyond that and particularly the claims that have been made so far in this video that are being asserted as 100% undeniable historical fact uh are not that. So, if you're of the mindset that the Bible isn't real and that Jesus is not God and you think that all of this is just mythology, I would challenge you to actually genuinely look into it because you will have your mind changed by the history alone. But more than that, you will have your heart changed by the Bible alone. The Bible is the first source evidences of Jesus's life. go read that, learn from it, trust it. So, I think it would be a wonderful idea for people out there to go get better informed about these things, but not because of the performance in this video, because this content creator is not remotely adequately informed about the related history, about the sources that we use, about the methods and the theories, how we interrogate the quality of these sources, how we reconstruct the lives and exploits of historical figures. uh they very quickly abandoned the pretense of concern for the number and the nature and the quality of documentation regarding the lives of ancient figures and very quickly just started rattling off dogmatic claims without any concern for where those claims come from. So this is another example of performing confidence and conviction and competence so that that audience that already agrees with you can be filled with confidence and conviction regarding these dogmas that you share. And the greater you can perform competence, the more effective the performance of confidence and conviction will be in allowing them to siphon off some of that confidence and conviction and feel like these things are so obvious. And anyone who's educated about these things will obviously agree. That's simply not the case. And this content creator doesn't really know much about how actual scholars talk about these things. They're just regurgitating a rather pedestrian brand of online apologetics that managed to dupe them and now they're turning around and trying to use it to dupe others. Do better. Repent and trust in Jesus Christ alone that he was the sufficient sac. >> Now I'm good. But the fit for this video has been Lobo., Mind Blowing Facts About Jesus?, YouTube, 01kc4e11bampqa2mf86bscs7n2.