Quote:
Originally Posted by Actor
Your question should be "who was Justin?" Obviously it was Justin Martyr, a person I assume we can both agree actually existed. I agree that the dialog is possibly "a fictional literary device" but then I must ask you "why did Justin put those words in his fictional character's mouth?" The dialog is hard evidence that the question of Jesus historicity was extant circa 160 C.E.
|
"No pagans and Jews who opposed Christianity denied Jesus’ historicity or even questioned it...at the end of chapter 8, Trypho, Justin’s Jewish interlocutor, states, 'But [the] Christ—if indeed he has been born and exists anywhere—is unknown, and does not even know himself, and has no power until Elijah comes to anoint him and make him known to all. Accepting a groundless report, you have invented a Christ for yourselves, and for his sake you are unknowingly perishing.' This may be a faint statement of a nonexistence hypothesis, but it is not developed or even mentioned again in the rest of the Dialogue, in which Trypho assumes the existence of Jesus...if anyone in the ancient world had a reason to dislike the Christian faith, it was the rabbis. To argue successfully that Jesus never existed but was a creation of early Christians would have been the most effective polemic against Christianity … Yet all Jewish sources treated Jesus as a fully historical person … The rabbis … used the real events of Jesus’ life against him" --Robert Van Voorst,
Jesus Outside
At the risk of doing your homework for you, I'm aware that Richard Carrier criticizes Van Voorst. For a criticism of Carrier, I've got atheist historian Tim O'Neill warming up in the bullpen.
"The non-Christian testimonies to Jesus … show that contemporaries in the first and second century saw no reason to doubt Jesus’ existence...as far as we know, no ancient person ever seriously argued that Jesus did not exist."--Theissen and Merz,
Historical Jesus
