Was There a Christ?
Did he really exist? Again the issue is the bible. It is the only real testimony to the existence of a man who might have been a visitation of God. But the bible has reliability issues.
Some claim Josephus mentions the Christ and so is an independent confirmation. A problem here is the writings of Josephus were interpreted by exactly the same people who translated the bible several times. Back in the centuries after Christ, most people could not read. They certainly couldn’t read the Hebrew or Greek of the Old and New Testaments if they didn’t live in either of those places.
The folk who did the record keeping, the writing and copying, and the translating were exactly those who had very good reason to maintain the version of the bible they had inherited after the Council of Nicaea and also an overwhelming purpose in adding a touch here and there to Josephus to ensure an ‘independent’ confirmation of someone mentioned nowhere else.
I’ve also read a pretty solid theory that Josephus was in reality Saul of Tarsus; now there is a character who needs careful examination. The founder of the modern version of Christianity, the tax collector who originally persecuted the Christians suddenly became the champion of them, yet his conversion isn’t witnessed by anyone, his moment on the road to Damascus is evidenced only by his own story.
The Pauline Church was the model on which the Roman Church was built, but in the early days, as we’ve since found out, there were other models and those models seem to follow the original teachings of the Christ far more closely
Leave a Reply