Is Mormonism so bad?

[Meadowchik]

Maybe calling the first volume Proving History wasn't such a great idea.

I think I might forgive the title since it implies an ongoing process.

[Kishkumen]

I think I might forgive the title since it implies an ongoing process.

I don’t see how that helps. Maybe not as egregiously bad, I guess.

[huckelberry]

Kishkumen's observations about the appearance of Pilot in the gospel narratives are interesting and something I have not considered before. Part of their interest to my mind is their subtlety. Perhaps they would convince even without other large considerations in favor of seeing Jesus as a real person.

I am not sure we have considered the largest and most obvious evidence of a human Jesus. It may be obvious enough to sound a bit naïve. I think despite its simplicity it is strong.

There are organizations today which have an unbroken line of connection back to the original Christians in the first half of the first century. Those groups of people have sought to maintain a clear connection to the tradition of what happened. They report Jesus was a Jewish religious leader or preacher who was crucified by the Roman power,(Pilot)

People might complain that the early Christians were not organizationaly unified. So? People complain that there were interpretive variations in theology and praxis. So? These variations do not undermine the basic report of a Jewish preacher who was crucified under Pontius Pilot.

[Kishkumen]

huckleberry,

What you say brings to mind the fact that Paul tried to make his reliance on revelation over personal acquaintance with the living Jesus or education from the apostles who knew Jesus a kind of virtue. That strategy is nonsensical and falls flat if there were no reason to assume that Jesus had been a real person with real disciples/apostles. Mythicism really makes no sense for this reason (among a number of others).

You are right to point to this chain of people connecting Christians back to Jesus through their mortal forebears in the faith. The pattern is pretty clear: John the Baptist—>Jesus—>James/Peter

There is a kind of lineage of humans who were presumed to have lived in this. Master initiates disciple. Disciple becomes master. Rinse, repeat. Jesus did outgrow his peers in the way his story was amplified over time, but he does not start out as the god-man, and there is no valid reason to suppose that he is a myth who was clothed in the garb of a human. Euhemerism usually works in that direction only when you are dealing with gods of a very distant past, and it is only to explain that the god actually had started out as a person, not the other way around as modern Jesus mythicism argues.