Why do Christians insist there are eyewitness accounts of Jesus life when there simply are not?

Question

Reply to Cris C:
Josephus again, his account can only be regarded as hearsay , his was not an eyewitness account.

Reply to He is alive!:
absolutely not so, if the Christian religion sucked up to gays it would in no way change the facts that there are no eyewitness accounts of Jesus at all, and to anybody that should suggest he was not a real person but a fictional character.

Reply to stinger_449:
You go too far, I am simply asking why people say there are eyewitness accounts because there are none, any scholar of heremeneutics knows the scriptures are not eyewitness accounts and in the Bible they are anonymous and attributed later to saints...all hearsay. Josephus account also hearsay, there is no contemporary account from the time Jesus supposedly lived, this is very odd if he was indeed such a revolutionary as it is claimed.

Answer 1

Speaking as a historian, there are difficulties with regarding any of the 'eyewitness' accounts of Jesus' actions and words as being good primary evidence. In particular, it begins to become troublesome that a) his name wasn't Jesus, but Joshua, and b) there appear to have been a number of likely candidates to be the 'Bibical' Jesus, and some of them are recorded as doing some of the things the Bible mentions, and others are recorded doing others. While historian A N Wilson claims "he was more real than, say, Robin Hood or King Arthur", there is some degree of evidence that he is partially what they are - an amalgum of different people with the same name, and a distillation of all of the most noteworthy points about them.

There is primary evidence of certain moments that help identify the most likely "base character" for "Jesus" - a man called Joshua Bar Joseph, born in a cave on the road to Bethlehem, where his parents were heading for the census in the time of Tiberius. The name turns up some years later in the records of the Essenes, a particularly strict jewish sect, much given to devotional starvation and denial of the flesh. And it easy to make an evidential leap to the idea that his was the man who later caused such trouble that he was hauled up for Roman justice, and crucified. Some of the greatest of the parables were not attributed to his man at all, but to an entirely different Joshua, who did the rounds about 30 years after the execution of the first one.

Either way, the difficulty is that as you say, eyewitness accounts are only of any historical value if they are rendered in writing with a certain degree of immediacy, and these, more often than not, weren't. Josephus is an interesting case, as he's not an eyewitness account, but he is a fairly rigorous historian by the standards of his day, and would have accumulated several accounts before asserting that any particularly noteworthy thing happened - he's like the journalist writing up a story based on a press release, rather than actually viewing the events they describe - in other words, he's not perfect, but he's not worthless either.

Anyway - despite a considerable volume of hearsay evidence that someone existed and did x, y, z, you're technically right that there are no extant eyewitness accounts that can be independently validated. Why this is important to Christians is easy - it's the basis of their faith and their life - it CAN'T be based on an amalgum of people - who then would be the true son of God? Why do they insist on it? Because it's the basis of their religion. Nothing more, nothing less.

Answer 2

The Bible is full of eyewitness accounts. The gospels were written by those who saw Jesus and followed Him. Acts was written by Luke (see above). Most of the letters were written by Paul (who saw Jesus and referred to hundreds of others who did, also; 1 Corithians 15:6).

Why do people like you ignore the facts, and claim (against all evidence) that the Bible was written dozens or even hundreds of years after the fact, despite the fact that fragments of the book of Matthew have been found dating to ~AD 50 (before the destruction of Jerusalem mentioned in that very fragment!)?

Wellhausen was a fraud; no Q document has ever been found, there has never been a reference to a Q document, and if you were consistent, you would deny the existence of it based on the evidence. But as long as it fits what you believe, I suppose you'll hold on to it.

Answer 3

Where did you get this statement: "any scholar of heremeneutics [sic] knows the scriptures are not eyewitness accounts and in the Bible they are anonymous and attributed later to saints...all hearsay"?

Not all scholars agree with you. You are simply making an unsupported and assumption and factually inaccurate statement.

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"We can already say emphatically that there is no longer any solid basis for dating any book of the New Testament after about A.D. 80, two full generations before the date between 130 and 150 given by the more radical New Testament critics of today." -Dr. William Foxwell Albright, the distinguished archaeologist, 1955 (McDowell, pp. 62-63).

Answer 4

Because they want to believe that people are something special, and that their life has meaning.
Jesus is crucial to that because they have placed so much stock in his existence because he is their god in person, or kind of.
People will also say that there is eyewitness accounts, but they have not done their research properly, there are some, just as their are books today that have references to other fictional character in them.
You will never get people to stop believing in Jesus because some peoples brains have shut off a lot of their reasoning skills.
If the son of god had really come to earth then the world would know without a doubt and it would have had more of a lasting effect than to merely create a cult with a huge following.

Answer 5

The best eye witnesses for Christ were his apostles.

These guts not only wrote the new testament (or supervised it) but they also literally gave up their lives for their faith.

I don't know about you, but I wouldn't give up house and home, and eventually my life, to travel around the world spreading lies.

What would be the point?

None of these guys got rich or powerful doing what they did. All they got was abuse.

Perhaps you think the apostles (and the worldwide church they helped establish) aren't real historical figures, either?

If one traces history backwards through time, rather than forward, it's much easier to find and link up all the necessary historical evidence.

Fortunately, a number of great contemporary scholars have done just that.

Try anything from Warren Carroll on the subject.

www.amazon.com/gp/richpub/listmania/fullview/RBH1MRLUPQDA0/002-1857055-5091229?%5Fencoding=UTF8

Answer 6

If you mean to say there were no on the scene news reporters, you are right. The book we call the Bible was written years after the fact. But it is a fact.

The reason why many Christians will argue the point, is to help you. Granted, many Christians are jerks, and don't realize how insulting they can be. It is your type of critical mind, that would make you a fantastic Christian. You are much like the apostle Paul. He was legalistic too.

Answer 7

There are eyewitness accounts that have been passed down over time. Duh, I mean no one has been around for 2000 or so years that can attest to have personally witnessed the events. But just like science it has been recorded and passed along for all to know. Why would you believe other books and not the Bible? I know, you claim to be an atheist.

Answer 8

Because we (Christians) believe that the Bible is Truth and the Word of God and can be trusted because you can find evidence that what happened in there did! But the biggy to answer your question is we have Faith that God's Word is the real deal, thus the writers of the Gospels DID spend time with Jesus and wrote what they saw and heard to give us guidelines on how to lead Godly lives even in this day and age.

Answer 9

Many modern Christian sects claim that all you need for salvation is to accept Jesus as your Savior. No reading the Bible, no study of the works of Christian scholars, not even any knowledge of the particular beliefs of their sect are required, much less belief in those details!

This has led to a common believe that ignorance is somehow a sign of faith! I see amazing examples of this even in my own family: My mother claims to be a true Christian and member of the Southern Baptist Church, but she also believes in reincarnation!

There are also huge numbers of Christians here who believe in the heretical 19th century invention of Sudden Rapture followed by the dead rising from their graves, while ALSO believing that their deceased loved ones are "looking down from Heaven".

Answer 10

Just because something is written in a book (such as the Bible), it does not mean that it actually happened.

People get carried away on fantasy, emotion and superstitions instead of trying to accept the need for PROOF.