SCIENCE? If Caesar existed or not has nothing to do with the Scientific method. It has to do with History.
***And it is the science behind all that history which is being denied when the history is denied.
All we have is the words that people wrote about him and the objects they made with his image and his own writings and commentaries.
***That’s all we have for any historical figure. Note that there are ~20,000 manuscripts that talk about Jesus and his ministry, whereas for Julius Caesar there were 11 manuscripts. That’s a strong preponderance of evidence — the science behind it is sturdy.
OK, so we do not ONLY have the words of Jesus, we also have a few comments by a single Jewish writer sometime after his death.
***Wrong. There are lots of other writers. This is demonstrable from historical texts — and, outside of the purview of this thread.
Other than that we have no physical or historic evidence for Jesus.
***I have lots. Feel free to open a thread to discuss that matter and be overwhelmed with evidence, certainly a “preponderance of evidence”.
There are absolutely no Roman records saying why Jesus was put to death, or even that Jesus was put to death. Of course absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
***Wrong. Feel free to open that thread. When it is demonstrated that your assertion here is incorrect, will you be coming back here to correct it? I certainly commit to the opposite action if I’m wrong. There have been other threads about the historicity of Jesus here on FR. It’s all good reading. Best wishes.
If you base your faith in Jesus Christ our Lord on physical evidence you are putting a lot of weight on some rather scant shards of evidence. I base my faith in Jesus the Christ on the Bible and my faith that it is the word of God.
***My faith journey demanded that what Jesus said about faith being as small as a mustard seed be true. Once one looks at all the evidence for the historicity of Jesus, it really is a matter of small faith to accept it.
When I start out talking about Jesus, I ask people, “Do you think he was a good man or a bad man?” They invariably say he’s a good man, if misunderstood or somesuch nonsense. And I say, “that’s all the faith you need to accept Him.” Once one realizes that it is historically provable that Jesus claimed to be equal with God, it’s just a matter of deciding whether he was a good man or a bad man — and they’ve already addressed that one.
Counting the number of manuscripts is “science” that is “sturdy”? You really have absolutely no idea what Science is. Science is based upon theory and experimentation. Science can be performed upon objects like the Shroud of Turin or a statue of Caesar to see if either object is actually old enough to be contemporaneous, but that is not the same thing at all.
So you not only think Science is Religion, you also think it is History? Anything else you want to throw in there?