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Anyone got a good reply to this?(r/atheism)
You can’t use the Bible to support itself. Fulfilling the prohecies was really easy, it was done by writing the actions in the NT that were predicted in the OT. That’s like claiming Harry Potter is true because Book 1 predicts that Dumbledore will die, and he dies in Book 5.
The Josephus document is almost universally considered a forgery. The only thing the historians aren’t unanimous about is whether the whole paragraph is a forgery, or only parts of it. Incidentally, the fact that Christians felt the need to introduce this forgery reflects poorly on the state of their evidence.
The Tacitus document is even more disputed. It contains a rather oblique reference and needs a lot of goodwill to believe refers to Jesus.
There is in fact a great dearth of documents referring to Jesus. Embarrassingly few. Can you explain how thousands of risen saints walked through Jerusalem, yet there is no mention of it in any written history? No mention of the cleansing of the temple merchants, darkening the whole city, or the tearing of the curtain on the temple, the feeding of thousands, the resurrection itself?
The Babylonian Talmud makes vague references to the existence of Christians, not Jesus. And it does so starting at a time when there were Christians to talk about, namely around 200 AD, not around the time when Jesus supposedly lived.
To claim that there is overwhelming evidence for Jesus Christ is a bald-faced lie. There is almost no such evidence, and what exists is likely fabricated. Early Christians like Bishop (?) Eusebius have been caught in various lies in their histories so it is very credible that they fiddled the evidence for the Jesus story. Historians like Richard Carrier and Karen Armstrong have come to the conclusion that Jesus never existed at all but was completely fabricated as a myth; they and other historians of that persuasion are called “the mythicists.” David Fitzgerald’s book Nailed explains this in great detail, with complete listings of what documentation there is, the sources that failed to mention Jesus, and various bits of evidence pointing to a fabricated Jesus. A summary of the book is given in Fitzgerald’s talk at Skepticon III. (OP, you really should listen to this talk before you continue the debate).
This story about the thousands of martyrs willing to die for Jesus only proves that there were lots of crazy people in the Middle East back then. Guess what, the Middle East is still full of crazy people; these days they blow themselves up for Allah. Certainly they believed the story to be true, but that doesn’t make it true. Insane asylums are full of people who consider themselves Jesus, and that doesn’t make them so.