Is there independent proof that Jesus existed?
For the first part of the question, yes sort of. Jesus (Joshua) was a common enough name at the time, and ‘messiahs’ were ten a penny in Roman occupied Judea. So there are references, for example in Josephus, to local rabble-rousers called Jesus, but to equate such references to the Jesus of the Gospels takes a bit of a leap of faith. For the second part of the question, well, no. ‘Son of God’ may be just a generic title adopted by the Essene and similar mystics at the time, with no special significance. I’d like to tip the question on it’s head and ask if there is proof that he was son of god in the bible! The so-called prophesies are very dodgy – the Emanuel prophesy for example is very generic and Jesus didn’t really fulfil any of the criteria. And the Gospels can not agree with each other! Both Mathew and Luke give long genealogies of Jesus, but both are obsessed with establishing that he is male-line descendant of the house of David, not the son of God! Both trace his ancestry bac
