Thalassamania:
Now that you've resolved that there are no contemporanious cross-references for Jesus, what my historian friends have told me comes into play.
To demonstrate that someone actually existed (in an historical sense) you need two contemporary cross-references.
I'm not a historian but thanks to Andy I've done a lot of reading on this subject. Of course, there's too much to go into here but there a couple of interesting themes that seem to recur among those who argue against the existence of Jesus.
One is the apparent wide spread agreement that James existed and that he was the brother of Jesus. One would have to note that it's is very hard for one who does not exist to have a brother.
It's intereting to note the arguements against the validity of Josephus statement concerning Jesus. Most secular scholars seem to agree that the text was altered, though many agree that there was probably some statement concerning Jesus there originally. Some of the arguements against the text itself are interesting. Recently I read one arguement that included the statement that Josephus was unlikly to have said that about Jesus because Jesus was viewed as a terrorist. It would be difficult to view someone as a terrorist if they didn't exist.
The gospels themselves are apparently sumarily discarded for several reasons, some of which are also very interesting. Some scholars seem to be willing discount them largly on the basis of their account of supernatural events. Would that constitute dogmatic bias?
Some point to the difficulty in harmonizing specific events though they are not writen as we would write a biography today and probably weren't meant as such at the time they were writen. For example, while the different gospels present the finding of the empty tomb differently, the empty tomb itself as well as other esential elements are common to them all.
Edit: If they were fabricated in the back room of a church someplace, why wouldn't they just sit down and get their stories straight during the edit and save every one the trouble of having to argue later on?
The historical overlap of the gospels is often brought into question though, the historical overlap of acts has been discriobed by some scholars as very good. Luke seems a reliable historian.
Edit: This too could have easily been fixed during the editing.
I could go on and on but I'll stop with a couple quick points. I don't find it surprising that there isn't much in the way of secular writting about the leader of a small group that was mostly insignificant to society as a whole at the time he lived. If any one would write about him, who would it be? Yep, those to whom he is significant. A good illustration, is what you find if you try to trace your own lineage. I don't know about you but, working back, my family just about disappears from the written record shortly before comming to this country. What few records exist are...guess where?...in the church, though those aren't very complete either. Yet had my family maintained the history of an individual person orally or in writing, the lack of public or better known documents doesn't prove the inaccuracy of that history.
The last point that I'm going to mention (out of about a thousand that I'd like to address) is the fact that the assertions of secular scholars as to the existance of Jesus and his nature as well as the justifications for those assertions are, themselves, not at all consistant and differ on almost every concievable point. One would expect that such learned scholars all looking at the same evidence would come to similar conclusions but they don't. As far as I'm concerned that has to put the validity of the analysis in question. All having a different stories, they wouldn't make very good witnesses in a court room. The assertions that the history of Jesus was rewriten so soon after his death presumes a desire of the church to do so even before there was much of a church. It's a guilty before inocent approach. The burden of proof is in the wrong place as if I attempted to convict you of a crime that I couldn't prove was ever commited on the basis that you couldn't prove that you didn't do it. Some "scholars", go so far as to take what they believe to be true of the era and invent their own Jesus that they think fits in with the times better than the Biblical Jesus. whether you like that Jesus better or not it's hard to argue that such an approach is anything other than pure fabrication.
The bottom line is that believeing in the Biblical Jesus requires a beliefe that such events are possible and that the documentation of them was faithful. Secular society could never do that regardless of what the specific nature of the documentation was and would always have some other explanation.
My own view is that the Biblical account is rejected primarily on the desire to reject it rather than any viable evidence of it's falsehood. The secular logic is easy enough to follow. ie, the Biblical Jesus can't have existed because he raised the dead and no one can raise the dead therefor the accounts must be fictional, therefor, there must be another Jesus or no Jesus at all. The only thing left to do is explain who falsified the accounts and why. We don't need any phisical proof that the documents were falsified because we started with the assumption that they must have been. In a completely natural world where there is no God, this is perfectly reasonable. They then move to try to argue based on literary style, accusations of political motives without evidence or whatever. In order to accept the secular analysis (any of them) you must accept those assumptions which they basically present as facts without evidence. Unless of course you are starting with the same assumptions youself and in that case, you don't need theirs.
