Talk:Tacitus

Completing the page

 * in a recent debate with a christian:


 * "How do we know Jesus existed? Because Christianity exists, if He didn´t exist it seems ridiculous that people like Peter and the other apostles :would talk about and die for someone who didn´t exist. The writings of Tacitus also seem to confirm the existence of a man called Jesus."


 * can someone build this page up with apologetics and counter apologetics?
 * -Conor147


 * This is going to sound rude, but it's not meant to be. Is there a reason you couldn't do it? If you're worried about formatting, you can look at other pages and see how they do it. I hadn't done any real wiki editing before I got here. If you don't know the topic, then you can research it, and work at the page, little by little if needed. It's a great opportunity to learn. I don't always know the topics of the pages I work on before I came across them. I understand that time can be a limiting factor, but you don't have to do it all at once.
 * --jt 11:47, 7 March 2011 (CST)


 * i live in britain, scotland specifically. religion here isnt a big deal to anyone apart from muslims who make up 2% of the population. christians are laughed at for being "funny in the head". atheists that are atheists because they care, and not because they dont give a shit, are laughed at for taking it seriously at all. as a result, my first exposure to religion was on the internet. ive never read the bible (but ive read the qur'an), of the hundreds/thousands of people i know, none are christians (but i know some muslims), and i have a very poor understanding of christian theology on the whole. i really dont care about who tacitus or josephus or matthew, mark, luke or john were, and probably wont ever come across them again in my life apart from in the context of christian apologetics from christian fundie fucktards on the internet. any time i have at my disposal is spent on my degree, pretty much. apart from wanting to be able to have a response to christians that say "tacitus proves jesus existed", i dont give a flying fuck about who he was and dont want to waste any of my limited number of neurons on learning about him. in order to make this article to a reasonable standard i would have to spend tens of hours learning about bullshit, time which i dont have and wont for years, in all likelihood. normally id be willing to invest some time in learning. but this guy is boring, uninteresting and largely irrelevant, just like christianity nowadays. id rather spend my time learning something worthwhile. just an honest, rushed "rant". anyone have a grounding in christian theology, specifically this tacitus guy?
 * --Conor147 13:07, 7 March 2011 (CST)


 * looks really good. looking back at my rant, it seems a bit excessive. sorry if i came across as a douche. seriously though, i dont know a single christian :/
 * --Conor147 17:19, 10 March 2011 (CST)


 * No problem. I'm still going to add the criticism. But, honestly, it's hard to criticize anything but what people read into it (i.e. even if Tacitus' statement were accepted as evidence that Jesus existed, and it can be to a limited degree, that does not lend any weight to the Biblical story about Jesus being magic).
 * --jaban 03:24, 13 March 2011 (CDT)


 * There we go. I might add more later, or reword some stuff. But that'll do for now.


 * As an aside, I want to mention that while Tacitus doesn't prove Jesus existed, he does reflect the popular belief of Christians at the time... the fact that a lot of people believed there had been a martyr is generally acceptable evidence that there was. It's not concrete proof, but it's good enough in most cases, considering how little we have to go on. From what I read, about half of the scholars do accept this account as non-canonical evidence for his existence (mind you, about half of the scholars are Christian, too, and there's a fairly strong correlation between the the two).


 * If you're arguing against a Christian who's trying to show there's non-canonical evidence that Jesus was real, I'd recommend the argument be against the extraordinary claims this is used to support. As in, "Yeah, perhaps he did. So what?" The fact there's a guy in New York named Peter Parker does not prove Spiderman is real.


 * --jaban 16:55, 23 March 2011 (CDT)