What evidence is there of a "historical" Jesus?

[ParisFrance]

Through the view point of history

[poliguru]

1. See this link

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/religion/

It's the best one I've seen - and it's PBS, not a religious site.

[WoodrowFan]

25. a nice collection of links.

thanks.

[SmileyBoy]

2. Jesus of Nazareth existed in real life, that's a fact.

There was a man in Judea at that time named Yeshua(Jesus) of Nazareth, son of Mary, who was a Jewish preist. That is historical knowledge.

It's the interpretation of his existence that varies like a spectrum.

[Dookus]

6. Why is it historical knowledge?

I don't know of any undisputed contemporary historical references to him.

[truthspeaker]

16. not undisputed, but in my opinion quite likely

[Droopy]

3. It's one of the great questions for historians and archeologists

And Christians have a great interest in it, also. From what I've seen they haven't turned up any compelling evidence for the existence of the historical Jesus.

[Spider Jerusalem]

4. The answer to that question is...

none that can be accepted as hard evidence that such a person as "Jesus of Nazareth" ever existed. The earliest extant Christian writings are the epistles of Paul (c. 60-70 AD), who speaks of Jesus as a spiritual entity and not once makes reference to Jesus as a living person. The earliest extant Gospel dates to the early 2nd century AD, some seventy to ninety years after the events it purports to describe. No contemporary historians make any mention of Jesus; there is a reference in Josephus (dating to about 70 or 80 AD) which is, from careful textual analysis, adjudged spurious (the relevant passage is a rather obvious textual interpolation, and only exists in one known copy of Josephus' "Antiquities of the Jews").

In short, there's approximately as much in the historical record to suggest that Jesus existed as there is to suggest that King Arthur existed...which is to say, not very much.

[Dookus]

5. there are no contemporary

historical records that he existed.

[Beware the Beast Man]

12. I heard different.

Now pardon me for not having a source, but my Roman history prof in college told us there was precious little documentation on the historicity of Jesus, though there were some criminal records stating that there was a man named Jesus who was crucified around the time he was supposed to be. But like I said, no source, so take it with a grain of salt.

[Snow]

35. Yeshua was a pretty common name,

in fact Yeshua/Joshua/Jesus is common in a lot of places today. Jesus Gomez is a pretty sharp statistical programmer in my department.

[lapfog_1]

7. I've always thought it strange

that the bible and other Christian teachings are fairly silent
on the entire period of Jesus's life from early childhood to
life as young man. Surely his followers must have asked questions
about his life as a teenager, why didn't they write about it
in the scriptures? His family (and John the Baptist) knew that
he was the messiah from his birth...

[KG]

8. Jesus.... the missing years - by John Prine

Jesus.... the missing years

It was raining. It was cold
West Bethlehem was no place for a twelve year old
So he packed his bags and he headed out
To find out what the world's about
He went to France. He went to Spain
He found love. He found pain.
He found stores so he started to shop
But he had no money so he got in trouble with a cop
Kids in trouble with the cops
From Israel didn't have no home
So he cut his hair and moved to Rome
It was there he met his Irish bride
And they rented a flat on the lower east side of Rome...
Italy that is
Music publishers, book binders, Bible belters, Money Changers,
Spoon Benders and lots of pretty Italian chicks.

Chorus:
Charley bought some popcorn
Billy bought a car
Someone almost bought the farm
But they didn't go that far
Things shut down at midnight
At least around here they do
Cause we all reside down the block
Inside at ....23 Skidoo.

Wine was flowing so were beers
So Jesus found his missing years
So He went to a dance and said ";This don't move me";
He hiked up his pants and he went to a movie
On his thirteenth birthday he saw ";Rebel without a Cause";
He went straight on home and invented Santa Claus
Who gave him a gift and he responded in kind
He gave the gift of love and went out of his mind
You see him and the wife wasn't getting along
So he took out his guitar and he wrote a song
Called ";The Dove of Love Fell Off the Perch";
But he couldn't get divorced in the Catholic Church
At least not back then anyhow
Jesus was a good guy he didn't need this shit
So he took a pill with a bag of peanuts and
A Coca-Cola and he swallowed it.
He discovered the Beatles
And he recorded with the Stones
Once He even opened up a three-way package
In Southern California for old George Jones

Repeat Chorus:

The years went by like sweet little days
With babies crying pork chops and beaujolais
When he woke up he was seventeen
The world was angry. The world was mean.
Why the man down the street and the kid on the stoop
All agreed that life stank. All the world smelled like poop
Baby poop that is ..the worst kind
So he grew his hair long and thew away his comb
And headed back to Jerusalem to find Mom, Dad and home
But when he got there the cupboard was bare
Except for an old black man with a fishing rod
He said ";Whatcha gonna be when you grow up?";
Jesus said ";God";
Oh my God, what have I gotten myself into?
I'm a human corkscrew and all my wine is blood
They're gonna kill me Mama. They don't like me Bud.
So Jesus went to Heaven and he went there awful quick
All them people killed him and he wasn't even sick
So come and gather around me my contemporary peers
And I'll tell you all the story of
Jesus...The Missing Years

Repeat Chorus:

We all reside down the block
Inside at ....23 Skidoo.

[lapfog_1]

9. That's pretty funny.

Haven't seen that one before!

My girlfriend thinks that Jesus went on a spiritual quest to
India, and that's why the new testament is much more "turn the
other cheek" rather than "eye for an eye". But I've never seen
any biblical study or historical study that suggests that this
is even possible much less likely.

[realisticphish]

21. there is a supposed "Q"

a manuscript written by a teacher of Jesus' during his teenage years; supposedly, it still exists somewhere in a roman catholic vault or chapel...all with a grain of salt, of course


:hippie: The Incorrigible Democrat

[WoodrowFan]

24. actaully "Q"

Actually the "Q" document (or "source") is supposedly a collection of Jesus' saying that Matthew, Luke and either Mark or John (I forget which) supposedly used as sources when they wrote their gospels. The accounts of Jesus' childhood are in the apocrypha.

BTW, for a funny take on Jesus from 13 to 30 see "Lamb: the Gospel according to Biff, Jesus' Childhood Pal."

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0380813815/qid=1093635756/sr=ka-1/ref=pd_ka_1/102-1093758-8798542

[realisticphish]

26. well

i guess i had heard that what i said was in it MIGHT be in it (i misspoke, sorry). im christian, but i love reading about the old manuscripts, the gnostic books, etc, to try and find out what christianity was really like before various translators and church elders fucked it up


:hippie: The Incorrigible Democrat

[WoodrowFan]

42. they are fun to read

:-)

[St. Jarvitude]

37. I'd hate to be Kid Jesus

"So, children, what do you want to be when you're all grown up?"

"I'm gonna be an astronaut!"
"I'm gonna e a cowboy!"
"I'm going to die at age 33 having failed life as a carpenter and then later cause the deaths of millions of innocent people in my name." (crickets)

[Captain Absolut]

10. One main one

Pliny the Elder wrote about Jesus. He said there was some rabble rouser in Judea. He was one of the best Roman historians.

[lil-petunia]

11. but even pliny was citing people in whose interest

it was to have the story believed.

You know, like Atlantis. Or ethics in today's White House.

[clidaw]

14. Where is this source?

I can't even find a quote from Pliny the Elder mentioning Jesus on a Christian apologetics site.

http://www.tektonics.org/tekton_01_01_01_THL.html.

The quote they use is a silly one about comparing his description of three suns and three moons to the darkness described after the crucifiction in Matthew's gospel.
I know apologists use Pliney the younger, who talks about Christians in a letter he wrote around the turn of the first century, but doesn't mention Jesus specifically.
The history of this era is fascinating, especially if you look outside the bible at other evidence. Quite a jigsaw puzzle of different sects.

[Dookus]

22. Sorry

that isn't true. Pliny the Younger wrote about the existence of CHRISTIANS 70 years after Jesus purportedly died.

Pliny the Elder, never mentioned him. Interestingly, as the greatest natural historian of his time, failed to mention the sudden darkness the New Testament claims covered the world at the time of Jesus's death on the cross. In fact, NO historial ever mentioned such an event.

[slappypan]

13. about as much as there is of King Arthur or Robin Hood

which is unfortunately not much.

[truthspeaker]

20. slightly more than that

but not definitive

[jdonaldball]

15. Historical knowledge can include oral history

All history, obviously, is based on individual experiences and memories of some kind. Even written records begin with some kind of memory by witnesses.
That said, it seems true that there are no contemporary written records of Jesus (I might be wrong about that.)
However, on the other hand, written "records" are not necessarily any more true than oral stories. Just take a look at what's written on the Fox News website. :-) A more extreme example might be the Soviet newspapers of Stalin's time.
So, in this sense, there ARE "historical records" of the life of Jesus, based on oral traditions which were later rendered in writing.
However, there is no such thing as an indisputable historical record.
So, the Gospels are open to question, but so are all other written histories, INCLUDING contemporary eyewitness accounts.
What I am saying, is that "historical" is not the same as "absolutely accurate" or "absolutely truthful." (And truth and accuracy are not exactly the same thing, because accurate details can sometimes be misleading.) All history involves storytelling, either written or oral or both, and the truthfulness of those stories is ALWAYS open to question and revision.
And so you can use your own judgement of how credible the stories are of Jesus existing (seems highly credible to me), as well as whether any of his reported miracles happened (seems possibly credible in some ways), and then the question of his divinity is outside of historical judgement.
One more thing about oral history: Many peoples, like many of the Native Americans, had no written history. But does that mean that their oral traditions were not historical? No. It just means that their history was mostly oral, and just as open to question OR to belief as any written history.
On edit: In the ancient Roman Empire, there were no "newspapers of record", no journalists detailing the events of each day (as they do today, whether truthfully or not.) There were no "historians" in our modern sense, in ancient Rome. They did not keep the same kind of detailed records of legal proceedings as we do today - and so, if the Romans executed what they considered a common criminal (of a despised conquered nation), they would not bother to register the trial and death of Jesus in official records. My point? My point here is that if someone like Jesus were executed TODAY, then yes you would expect official or journalistic written records. But not in ancient Rome, and therefore, the lack of written records about Jesus does not make his existence less credible, given the way records were written in those times.

[barb162]

23. and it is historical

to say that people of that time and up to perhaps around `1800 AD often wildly exaggerated in the oral and written tradition.

[politicat]

29. The problem with oral trad. in the period is there's so much good

written documentation that survived the medieval purges that it seems suspect that things that would shore up the medieval church's position would be "lost".

Unless a) they didn't exist, or b) they didn't shore up the position.

Documentation - written words - are far more reliable to historians than any oral tradition and the oral tradition is usually suspect.

CF: Catherine the Great and her horse. There are so many bad tales on that...

Pcat

[NashVegas]

17. None, And That's Why We Have People Seeing Apparitions

Christians have no external proof of Jesus' existence. It then becomes necessary to project their internal symbols upon outside objects to provide verifiable existence of proof. That's my theory anyway, and I'm sticking to it.

[jdonaldball]

18. You have a good point but see my post number 15

The concept of "external proof" is vague and disputable. But if you mean written records or other tangible material contemporary records of Jesus' existence, then yes, you are correct so far.
But: The lack of "external proof" as you call it, does not categorically discredit the truth of oral traditions. My grandmother's grandparents were Irish immigrants from the Great Famine, with no written records about them, no tangible evidence is left of their identities. But I know their names from oral tradition.
(Not just that those "genetic" ancestors existed - that much is obvious from my existence - the history comes in when I remember their actual names and some life details from oral tradition.)
This is how MOST history is remembered and passed on.

[NashVegas]

19. More Here

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=111&topic_id=22803

read the 4th and 5th paragraphs of the initial post, to see what I was trying to get at.

[Lydia Leftcoast]

30. Yes, as they sing in Jesus Christ: Superstar

"Israel in 4BC had no mass communication."

Most people in pre-modern times were completely undocumented. That's true for the ancient world and also for Japan up to about the 17th century.

If you're asking for absolute journalistic proof, you won't find it, not about most people in the ancient world.

You can't even prove that Socrates existed, since he is mentioned only in Plato's writings, not in the judicial records of Athens, which, as far as I know, haven't survived anyway.

The oral tradition can be surprisingly trustworthy at times. The Indians in southern Oregon told a largely accurate account of the formation of Crater Lake--7,000 years before. (For those who don't know, it filled up after a massive volcanic eruption.)

The Delaware tribal history tells of the tribe's journey through mountains where the snow never melts--a type of mountain that doesn't exist anywhere near where they lived (uh, Delaware) when the Europeans first arrived. It has to be an oral tradition memory of the journey from Siberia.

But neither tribe took pictures, so I guess they were wrong, huh?

[politicat]

32. And surprisingly untrustworthy -

using similar landmark, the Navajo had an oral tradition about Meteor Crater in NE AZ that it was a volcano, also haunted and not to be gone near.... (which has been good for those who study such things) They also had a creation myth about it and some claimed to be descended of someone who had seen the creation.

WOW!! considering it was created 50,000 years ago, some 30,000 before anyone set foot on the Bering Land bridge....

We historians are really, really careful with oral tradition. We'll take it if there's even a single artifact to back it up, but.... There are too many things we're just waiting on the Time Machine to be free to witness before we can say anything definitive.

Pcat

[patcox2]

27. Given his origins, there's more than you'd expect.

Contemporary historical documents? Diaries of people who've met him, birth certificate? there's precious little of that for any person dating back 2,000 years.

Jesus was a peasant who rose from the illiterate underclass of his society. Not a milieu in which you'd expect a lot of documentation.

For the record, there is next to no contemporary historical evidence for the existence of Pontius Pilate. Yet he was governor of a substantial province, would have presided over hundreds of trials, engaged in numerous state acts of significance, would have generated tons of correspondence. yet there is, as I have said, almost nothing.

Compare this dirt poor peasant who led a splinter religious sect for maybe 18 months before he was summarily tried and executed by the roman authorities. What do you expect would be out there? But there are many many records of his followers dating back to their lifetimes, appropriately, because the movement he founded got bigger and generated more notice.

I think it far more implausible that anyone would invent a god of such humble origins, who suffers such an ignominious fate. If you were free to invent, you would make him something glorious, wouldn't you? Detailed study of the gospels and the non-cannonical texts reveals numerous instances where the embarrasment principle comes into play (ie, places where its amazingly obvious that noone who was making up the story would have included that detail).

Most any cult of personality has a real personality at its center. there was probably a buddha, a zoroaster, there was certainly a Joseph Smith. There was certainly a saint paul, and if you read his letters, he is so insecure about the fact that he never met the living jesus, and he is so obviously jealous of those living disciples who had known the living jesus, that it makes his letters very real and tangible proof, to me. Again, why would he ever admit he never met jesus, if he could just lie, and as for his resentment and jealousy, thats not even intentional, its just in there. These are certainly genuine letters from a person who had met Peter and James, at the minimum, and he beleived what peter and james told him, that much is for sure. (and most of what he said of Peter and James was pretty snide, again, why would a church even preserve documents which document this little fued between Paul and Peter and James in the first place, if they could just make stuff up?

And finally, something else to remember. 40 years after jesus died, the romans sacked jerusalem as punishment for the last jewish uprising. The followers of jesus, his family members and apostles, were headquartered in jerusalem. nothing more is heard from them after this point. Paul founded a different church in asia minor, apart from the direct lineal followers of jesus in jerusalem. If anyone had any more concrete evidence, writings, etc., it would have been the jerusalem followers, who were most likely destroyed or scattered by the war. We have fragments.

[politicat]

31. well, no... actually, you've got several misconceptions in the above.

Jesus was a peasant who rose from the illiterate underclass of his society.

Even just working from the gospels, Jesus was not a peasant. Nor, considering the emphasis on the legalistic judaism of his time, likely illiterate. Not if he's a rabbi. He would have had to have been able to read at least Hebrew.

historical evidence for the existence of Pontius Pilate.

Judea was NOT that important as it happens. Thanks to the several hundred years of environmental devastation visited on the region (remember, once upon a time, it was green and relatively lush.... until the Hebrews got a hold of it....) Judea was barely hanging on. PP was not a governor and Judea was not a substantial province - it was a backwater and he was - if he existed, a position I am agnostic on - a promagistrate or procurator, both lesser positions. He and his like were lieutenants. Just as we rarely know the names of the Lieutenant Governors of states that have them, PP would have been... less than important. Britain was more important to Rome than Judea was; Britain at least had tin and metals. Judea? Goats. Everyone has goats. (that's the period attitude, not necessarily mine.) Rome considered the Jews barbarians, not in the least because of infant circumcision (You mean, they mutilate their children before the child has any right of consent!! Oh, the horror!!!)

romans sacked jerusalem as punishment for the last jewish uprising.

Actually, the sacking happened after the FIRST rebellion in 66-70. The Second Rebellion happened in 115-117. The third rebellion was in 132-135, after which the diaspora happened.

(Sources: Timetables of history, Asimov's chronology, several texts from classes as a history major I have since sold, wikipedia, livius.org, lectures from same history major. )

Those aren't good arguments for stating that lack of evidence means probable existence. I think the best that can be said is there's no evidence either way and on historical authenticity, this is a good place to be agnostic.

Politicat

[mondo joe]

33. Not only none - but what about the Slaughter of the Innocents?

Not only is there no real evidence of Jesus but there's no evidence of many elements of the bible stories.

Slaughter of the Innocents? No record - not from any historian, Jewish or Roman.

How about the census that requires everyone to go back to their place of birth?

Certainly nothing about anyone rising from the dead or the resurrection of masses of people.

How about the idea that Rome let the Jews choose one convict to be freed on Passover? Does this sound like the Roman Empire?

[patcox2]

36. Thats because most of those things were made up and never happened

And serious biblical scholars don't even pretend they did. But that has nothing to do with whether jesus existed. Textual analysis makes it very clear what is made up and what is genuine oral tradition in the gospels.

[rockymountaindem]

41. The choosing of who to execute does not fit

into Jewish concepts of justice. To begin with, the death penality in Jewish law is so constricted with red tape it is impossible to apply. Furthermore, it applies only to crimes such as murder and adultery (again only in the conceptual sense because it would hardly ever be applied), and Jesus only thought differently, he was not a criminal.

Secondly, Deuteronmy says "justice, justice shall you pursue", therefore if mercy were to be shown to one it would have to be given to all. Saving one man and executing another is inequitable.

[patcox2]

34. Umm, youre points are arguable at best.

Judea was not insignificant. Jerusalem was a very important city then, for religious reasons far outweighing its actual economic importance, as it remains today. The connections between herod, his family, and the roman emporers were close. It was a small province, but even the governor of a small province is a big man in his backyard and would, as I suggested, generate reams of records and other documentation, the point of which is simply that none survived, merely evidence of the fact that one should not expect very much to survive and thus establish that absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.

Procurator is not akin to a lieutenant governor, he would have been the one in charge.

On the peasant origins of jesus, you seem to be buying into the obviously made up lineage posited for him in the bible. If he was in fact a rabbi, he was probably the only literate memebr of his family. His lteracy is doubted by many historical jesus researchers. There is no doubt of his peasant status, in any of the standard hsitorical jesus works, from schweitzer on down. In fact, its more likely he was less than a peasant. At that time, a peasant at least had some form of property rights and could become somewhat prosperous. Lower on the scale were artisans, such as carpenters. It was then as it is now, to be a farmer is higher than to be a tradesman. In some agrarian societys, in fact, peasants had it quite good. Complicating things at the time of jesus was the fact that judean society was in a transition from agrarian to mercantile influenced by the roman occupation, displacing many peasants and artisans, who were forced into an underclass of the hopeless. And all of the more reliable gospel accounts describe his followers as peasants and lower, the meek the humble, down to prostitutes. Thats the whole milieu of his sect, he attracted the poorest in a country in economic upheaval.

[Lydia Leftcoast]

28. About as much proof of him as of any figure from that period

Whether you believe in Christianity or not, there is no reason to believe that there was NOT an itinerant teacher who collected disciples, wandered the countryside, preached things that were uncomfortable to the establishment of his day, and was crucified by the Romans.

However, some of the militant atheists seem to think that unless we can produce Jesus' high school yearbook picture or something like that, then he's just an elaborate hoax dreamed up by some guys who got drunk one evening.

A hoax is conceivable. A hoax that people--including some of the alleged hoaxers--would die horrible deaths for rather than admit that it's a hoax--is hard to imagine.

People have died for all kinds of causes throughout history. But dying for a hoax would be like letting yourself be tortured to death rather than admitting that Star Trek is ficitonal.

If you've ever read ancient history, you'll realize that an awful lot of people from back then are mentioned in only one source, and Jesus was from a peasant background, living in a region under colonial occupation, that no one knew he was going to be famous when he was actively preaching, and that Judaea was thoroughly trashed by the Romans after the Jewish uprising of 70AD. It's hard to prove the existence of any individual from those times. We know about Herod and Pontius Pilate from Roman records, but following the hardliners' standards of proof, first-century Judea was uninhabited, since most non-nobility went completely undocumented.

[Dookus]

38. But we DO have historical records about a lot of people from that time

and the gospels recount that:

Mat.4:23 And Jesus went about all Galilee, teaching in their synagogues, and preaching the gospel of the kingdom, and healing all manner of sickness and all manner of disease among the people.

Mat.4:24 And his fame went throughout all Syria: and they brought unto him all sick people that were taken with divers diseases and torments, and those which were possessed with devils, and those which were lunatick, and those that had the palsy; and he healed them.

Mat.9:35 And Jesus went about all the cities and villages, teaching in their synagogues, and preaching the gospel of the kingdom, and healing every sickness and every disease among the people.

Mat 12:15b and great multitudes followed him, and he healed them all;


So he was famed throughout Syria, and multitudes followed him. He performed healings and other miracles throughout the area, his death caused 3 hours of unexplained darkness, and earthquake, and the rising of many dead:

Matthew 27:45 Now from the sixth hour<5> there was darkness over all the land<6> until the ninth hour.<7> 46And about the ninth hour Jesus cried out with a loud voice, saying, "Eli, Eli, lema sabachthani?" that is, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" 47And some of the bystanders, hearing it, said, "This man is calling Elijah." 48And one of them at once ran and took a sponge, filled it with sour wine, and put it on a reed and gave it to him to drink. 49But the others said, "Wait, let us see whether Elijah will come to save him." 50And Jesus cried out again with a loud voice and yielded up his spirit.
51And behold, the curtain of the temple was torn in two, from top to bottom. And the earth shook, and the rocks were split. 52The tombs also were opened. And many bodies of the saints who had fallen asleep were raised, 53and coming out of the tombs after his resurrection they went into the holy city and appeared to many. 54When the centurion and those who were with him, keeping watch over Jesus, saw the earthquake and what took place, they were filled with awe and said, "Truly this was the Son<8> of God!"

Yet no contemporary historians bothered to take note of any of this.

[Lydia Leftcoast]

39. Fame wouldn't have counted unless he was famous among the "right"

people.

Granted, today such a figure would merit at least a one-page article in People magazine, but what you're not getting is that it was a whole different society.

Most people were illiterate, and if they did write anything down, the chances of it surviving in a region that was trashed completely by the Romans are almost nil. Almost no written material of any kind survives from that era, except for the writings of Josephus, who was buddy-buddy with the Romans, and the Dead Sea Scrolls, which were hidden away in a cave in the desert, and even they are pretty threadbare, if you've seen photos of them.

You might want to investigate and see how many personal letters and diaries of any kind survive from the ancient world. Egypt and Babylon/Assyria/Sumer are exceptions, Egypt because being in a tomb in an exceptionally dry climate preserved papyrus extremely well, and Babylon/Assyria/Sumer because they wrote on clay tablets and baked them. We have more "everyday" (non-literary) writing from the Middle East than we do from ancient Greece or ancient Rome, and even then, we know that an incalculable amount was lost. Some of the poems of Sappho are known only because they were found in Egypt, wrapped around mummified crocodiles.

I've worked through the frustration of trying to find out something specific from medieval Japan, an unusually literate society for its time, only six or seven hundred years removed from our times, and there is so much stuff that we will never know. There are collections of poetry with entire volumes missing, references to entire works that have never been found, and stories that end in mid-sentence. Most literary works exist in only one original copy. We know of the existence of most of the authors only from their own works, and who knows, they may have been writing under pseudonyms. This is in a nation that has a tradition of literary scholarship dating back to about 1200.

As far as the stuff about the dead people coming out of tombs is concerned, no reputable Biblical scholar takes this as literally true, anymore than students of American history believe the story of George Washington and the cherry tree.

It's always amusing to see atheists criticize Biblical accounts on the basis of passages that most mainstream Christians don't take as literally true.

[HEyHEY]

40. A dirty old rag and some used nails?

[ParisFrance]

43. fascinating subject