Lol. Did Aristotle live?
The earliest copy of one of Aristotles manuscripts is from 1100 A.D. (1,400 year time span).
40 years is considered amazing attestation by any legitimate historian's standards.
Yeah, and about 19 years (which is the actual closest gap - not 40 years) is even more amazing. And the way you can get even closer than that by studying what the letters said by what they were referring to, is even more amazing.
There are three things that bug me in discussions concerning the existence of Jesus.
Some strawman arguments here, I admit, but here it goes anyway:
1. People hold amazingly high standards to what should be considered as evidence for Jesus compared to other historical figures.
Sometimes it goes so far that once they have to reconsider their position they'll start considering that well maybe those others figures weren't real either. And quite probably they wouldn't have had any reason to do that the other figures if it wasn't for some sort of deep need to try to erase Jesus from history.
People gladly throw the other historical figures under the bus if it helps keeping Jesus out of history, and pretty much never the other way around. People don't generally think "hey, this Jesus didn't exist because the evidence for Socrates or Aristotle is not that good." No, it's Jesus that makes people for some reason worried enough to be willing to jump those hoops.
2. It starts with completely denying the existence of Jesus. It's flat out "there is no evidence - he didn't exist", but when the evidence is explained the argument turns into "well maybe SOME Jesus was living somewhere minding his own business."
And when it's explained that it wasn't just SOME Jesus but he was really important to a group of people in his day to the point that the public and authorities felt he had to be executed AND he was important enough for many people to lay down their lives for him - letting people execute them without even trying to escape or hit them back - then it goes to "well maybe he was important but he surely wasn't any magic guy or the son of God."
Then the real question is, why did you deny his existence in the first place? And people still say "well the historical Jesus is different than the magic Jesus."
No. No you weren't trying to deny the existence of magic Jesus, you were trying to deny the existence of historical Jesus. You were trying to erase Jesus from existence quite probably because it would help you to be even more certain that Christianity is 100% impossible and false. So then the goalposts are moved and it's as if their point still stands when in reality their point had been fallen down before the argument was even given.
You can try and point out he wasn't who he claimed to be, but trying to do that by trying to completely erase him from existence is just reaching way too far. And claiming it to be you holding on to the scientific facts just makes your sense of scientific facts one step lower than where you think it is.
3. People keep on thinking that writing about something even 10 or 20 years after the fact can not be trusted. I feel like people are way too used to the modern world of having a pen and paper everywhere to be used by anyone, and people can write about them taking a dump right now and potentially the whole world can know that instantly via tweets and other social media. But things weren't always like that. It took time to write about things back then. People had to really think when to write and when to not write. It wasn't like they could use 20 pieces of papyrus to write drafts and thrown them to the trash bin if it's not good enough.
Also, for young (10-20 years old) people the last 5 years might feel like quite a long time. But for, say, 40 years old people 10 or even 20 years isn't
that long of a time. They could easily write about things that happened that long ago. Some philosophers think about some stuff for decades and only then write it all down. Some write biographies or autobiographies 60 years after the fact. Should we not believe them just because it has taken so long to write them down?
Sure, today we read newspapers that tell us what happened yesterday and we feel anything longer than that is already old news. Hell, I'd say even half a day is nowadays too long for something to be relevant. We need to have all the news and information the minute they happen.
People think that if something wasn't immediately written 2000 years ago, then it didn't happen. But they don't realize two things:
1) Maybe they did write about it - maybe those writings were destroyed - maybe they were lost at some point. People still find old writings where it's a completel miracle if they are able to bring them to safety without them falling apart in their hands. Yeah, I know this is not a proof of any sort, but still...
2) Even if they didn't write about it, they still probably talked about it a lot. Like Paul's letters suggest, they had established their groups way before Paul's earliest known writings were written. They were actively talking about it and telling about it to other people very close after Jesus died.
I mean, if a group gets together today and after actively participating on their events and meetings only write something about it 20 years after, should the future historians 2000 years from now deduce the group or what it was all about didn't exist because they wrote about it so long after the fact?
Now, the deniers, imagine if Jesus actually wrote something down by himself (as of now the only thing he was claimed to write was something on the sand when people were trying to stone a woman - so that's something that's sadly not for us to examine) would it matter in your worldview in any way?
If there were texts from contemporary people writing "whoah, I just saw this dude feed tons of people with only small amounts of fish and bread" or "whoah, that dude they nailed on the cross totally walked past me a minute ago", would it help you believe it any more than you believe now?
If there were texts that can be 100% proven to be written when Jesus was alive and perhaps even written by Jesus himself, would it matter to you in any way?
No, you probably are just trying to prove the "miracle stuff" wasn't real by trying to erase the whole guy from existence. It's as if people in future would try to say Uri Geller never existed because he was claimed to bend spoons with magic. And it's just completely unnecessary hoop-jumping that only aims to direct people's attention from the subject away by trying to prove there isn't a subject to talk about in the first place. It's foolish, but more importantly it's also very lazy.
And in theological discussions people sometimes say that if Jesus was who he claimed to be and if God really exists, they certainly wouldn't use this kind of stupid and slow methods to reveal themselves. Or that it's oddly convenient for them to claim Jesus to have done miracles and magic tricks in time when people were gullible and no evidence of the tricks could be recorded.
Well, imagine if today's technology was there to film him saying stuff and doing tricks. Would it help them believe any more than they do now? I mean, the technology is so advanced that most certainly people would immediately try to figure out which software and what CGI techniques were used to do that. Miraculous looking things on video are evidence of digital technology being used rather than evidence of something miraculous really happening. That's the thing people usually figure today when they are watching ghost videos or things like that. So perhaps in the end the way Jesus was presented actually was the most efficient way considering how well it ended up to spread.
