Atheist Memes

Know that if you choose to argue against facts attested by the overwhelming majority consensus of scholars, academics and historians then you are the one making extraordinary claims.

If you want to hear him talking on this I suggest skipping to 14:35 since you're impatient:

https://youtu.be/hnybQxIgfPw

Read through page 55-101 of below:

https://archive.org/details/jesus-apocalyptic-prophet-bart-d.-ehrman/page/55/mode/1up

Most people in our society probably think that Jesus must have had an enormous effect on the people of his day — not just on his immediate followers. He was, after all, the founder of the most significant religion in the history of Western Civilization.

Unfortunately, the commonsensical view is not even close to being right—biblical epics on the wide screen (the source of many people's knowledge about the Bible!) notwithstanding. If we look at the historical record itself—and, I should emphasize, for historians there is nothing else to look at—it appears that whatever his influence on subsequent generations, Jesus' impact on society in the first century was practically nil, less like a comet striking the planet than a stone tossed into the ocean. This becomes especially clear when we consider what his own contemporaries had to say about him.

Pagan sources

Pliny the Younger

The first reference to Jesus in any surviving pagan account does not come until the year 112 CE. It appears in a letter written by a governor of the Roman province of Bithynia-Pontus (northwestern part of modern-day Turkey), a Roman official named Pliny. The letter tells us some interesting things about these followers of Jesus. We learn, for example, that they comprised a range of ages and socioeconomic classes, that they met in the early morning before it was light, that they partook of food together, and—the chief point for our present investigation—that they worshiped "Christ as a god." The name "Jesus" itself is not given here, but it's pretty clear whom Pliny had in mind. Unfortunately, he doesn't give us any information about Jesus—for example, who he was, where he lived, what he said or did, or how he died—only that he was worshiped as divine by his followers.

Suetonius

A few years later, the Roman historian Suetonius made a casual comment that some scholars have taken to be a reference to Jesus. Suetonius wrote a set of biographies on the twelve Roman Caesars who had ruled up to his own time, starting with Julius Caesar. There is a lot of valuable historical information in these books, along with a lot of juicy gossip—a gold mine for historians interested in major events of the early Roman Empire. In his Life of Claudius, emperor from 41 to 54 CE, Suetonius mentions riots that had occurred among the Jews in the city of Rome and says that the riots had been instigated by a person named "Chrestus." Some historians have maintained that this is a misspelling of the name "Christ." If so, then Suetonius is indicating that some of Jesus' followers had created havoc in the capital, a view possibly confirmed in the New Testament (see Acts 18:2).

Tacetus

Tacitus is probably best known for the Annals, a sixteen-volume history of the Roman Empire covering 14-68 CE. Probably the most famous passage in the Annals (book 15) reports the megalomania of the emperor Nero, who had Rome torched in order to implement some of his own architectural designs for the city. When he was suspected for the fire, Nero sought to place the blame elsewhere and found in the Christians a ready scapegoat. He rounded up members of this despised sect (Tacitus himself says that the Christians were widely held in contempt for their "hatred of the human race") and made a public display of them, having some rolled in pitch and set aflame to light his public gardens, and others wrapped in animal skins to be torn to shreds by savage dogs. Nero was not known for his timid tactics. In any event, in the context of his discussion of Nero's excesses against the Christians, Tacitus does manage to say something about where they had acquired their (to him) strange beliefs and so provides us with the first bit of historical information to be found about Jesus in a pagan author: "Christus, from whom their [i.e., the Christians'] name is derived, was executed at the hands of the procurator Pontius Pilate in the reign of Tiberius" (Annals 15.44). Tacitus goes on to indicate that the "superstition" that emerged in Jesus' wake first appeared in Judea before spreading to Rome itself.

Early Jewish Sources

Josephus

I'll take the references in reverse order, since the second is of less historical interest. It occurs in a story about the Jewish high priest Ananus, who abused his power in the year 62 CE by unlawfully putting to death a man named James, whom Josephus identifies as "the brother of Jesus who is called the messiah" (Ant. 20.9,1). From this reference we can learn that there was indeed a man named Jesus (Josephus actually discusses lots of different people with that name—many of them at far greater length than the Jesus we are concerned about), that he had a brother named James (which we already knew from the New Testament; see Mark 6:3 and Gal. 1:19), and that he was thought by some people to be the Jewish messiah. The information is not much, but at least it's something. I should point out that Josephus himself does not happen to agree with those who called Jesus the messiah. We don't know how much he knew about the Christians, but it is clear that he remained a non-Christian Jew until his dying day.

Early Christian sources

Documents and oral tradition now lost but existent at time the Gospels were written

All of these written sources I have mentioned are earlier than the surviving Gospels; they all corroborate many of the key things said of Jesus in the Gospels; and most important they are all independent of one another. Let me stress the latter point. We cannot think of the early Christian Gospels as going back to a solitary source that "invented" the idea that there was a man Jesus. The view that Jesus existed is found in multiple independent sources that must have been circulating throughout various regions of the Roman Empire in the decades before the Gospels that survive were produced. Where would the solitary source that "invented" Jesus be? Within a couple of decades of the traditional date of his death, we have numerous accounts of his life found in a broad geographical span. In addition to Mark, we have Q, M (which is possibly made of multiple sources), L (also possibly multiple sources), two or more passion narratives, a signs source, two discourse sources, the kernel (or original) Gospel behind the Gospel of Thomas, and possibly others. And these are just the ones we know about, that we can reasonably infer from the scant literary remains that survive from the early years of the Christian church. No one knows how many there actually were. Luke says there were "many" of them, and he may well have been right. And once again, this is not the end of the story." (page 83)

Q

One of the most controversial and talked-about sources that scholars have used for studying the life of the historical Jesus is, oddly enough, a document that does not exist. Most scholars are reasonably sure, though, that at one time it did exist, and that it can, at least theoretically, be reconstructed. The document is called "Q." What else did it contain? It certainly had some of the most familiar sayings of Jesus. It contained, for example, the Beatitudes (Luke 6:20-23) and the Lord's Prayer (Luke 11:2-4); it included the commands to love your enemies, not to judge others, and not to worry about what to eat and wear (Luke 6:27—42; 12:22—32); and it provided a number of familiar parables (e.g., Luke 12:39-48; 14:15-24). The reality, though, is that we don't have a full picture of what Q contained, since our only access to it is through the agreements of Matthew and Luke in passages not found in Mark. So, while we can say what probably was in it, we're hard-pressed to say what was not.

Letters of Paul

Matthew, Mark, Luke

Clement of Rome

Ignatius of Antioch

Polycarp of Smyrna

Dead Sea Scrolls

Many more...