Evidence for Jesus

[_Jersey Girl]

Thank you, marg, for your contribution here. I will try to respond but quite frankly, I don't know how I can keep up with this thread and responses given the format which causes me a great deal of frustration and makes it time consuming for me to find responses, reply to them and remain on topic. I will make an honest effort to do so.

[_marg]

Thank you, marg, for your contribution here. I will try to respond but quite frankly, I don't know how I can keep up with this thread and responses given the format which causes me a great deal of frustration and makes it time consuming for me to find responses, reply to them and remain on topic. I will make an honest effort to do so.

No need to respond, nor am I expecting one from you. The post is there for informational purposes.

[_GoodK]

I don't believe this is a correct statement.

Well, it is.

Certainly some historians accept Jesus, but there are others who do not, precisely because there is no historical evidence.

This is not true. It is silly to say only "some" historians accept this. Historians have overwhelmingly accepted Jesus' existence for many, many centuries. Only recently have atheists tried to argue the untenable by saying he never really existed. If you find historians who reject the historicity of Jesus, then they are the ones on the fringe, not vice versa.

And by reasserting a falsehood (I.e. "no historical evidence") it doesn't become more plausible.

Alexander the Great, and what we know about him, is more likely to have happened than what we are told about Jesus.

Well, historians who know their business, disagree.

This is why Alexander is universally accepted by historians as a real person, while Jesus is not.

Jesus is accepted as historical. The only reason atheists don't reject the historicity of Alexander is because it doesn't serve their agenda. It certainly isn't because consisitency is important to them. JAK was trying to use coinage as his new standard of evidence. How does he react to the fact that Zeus appears on coins? As he always does. He ignores the point and then throws up dozens of meaningless web links, none of which prove whatever point he thinks he is making.

How many standards need to be shot down before you guys give it up? JAK is all over the place now, trying to come up with new standards. So Alexander had sculptures? That's the new argument? So did the Greek Gods.


Of all the links to past discussions provided by JAK, he doesn't draw your attention to this one:
http://mormondiscussions.com/discuss/vi ... 3&start=21

This is why you are being silly Kevin:

1. It would be easy to provide a list of historians who argue against the historicity of Jesus
2. You still have yet to provide an example of historical evidence for Jesus - yet you have made an interesting case against Alexander the Great
3. JAK does not speak for all atheists nor does he speak for all those who doubt the historicity of Jesus. I could give a **** about Alexander the Great coins.

[_Nevo]

2) The authors inherited their stories from the oral tradition, in which tales of Jesus' words and deeds had been in circulation for years and were altered in the process.

This has been the conventional view but it has recently been challenged by Samuel Byrskog's Story as History, History as Story: The Gospel Tradition in the Context of Ancient Oral History (Leiden: Brill, 2002) and Richard Bauckham's groundbreaking study, Jesus and the Eyewitnesses (2006). It turns out that the Gospels may, in fact, contain eyewitness accounts of Jesus.

[_Nevo]

1. It would be easy to provide a list of historians who argue against the historicity of Jesus

I'd like to see this list.

[_Jersey Girl]

2) The authors inherited their stories from the oral tradition, in which tales of Jesus' words and deeds had been in circulation for years and were altered in the process.

This has been the conventional view but it has recently been challenged by Samuel Byrskog's Story as History, History as Story: The Gospel Tradition in the Context of Ancient Oral History (Leiden: Brill, 2002) and Richard Bauckham's groundbreaking study, Jesus and the Eyewitnesses (2006). It turns out that the Gospels may, in fact, contain eyewitness accounts of Jesus.

Nevo,

Now you have my undivided attention. Might you share with us the gist of what Byrskog and Bauckham are forwarding?

[_marg]

Nevo,

Now you have my undivided attention. Might you share with us the gist of what Byrskog and Bauckham are forwarding?

And Nevo please give the evidence they are using to draw out their conclusions.

[_Jersey Girl]

Thank you, marg, for your contribution here. I will try to respond but quite frankly, I don't know how I can keep up with this thread and responses given the format which causes me a great deal of frustration and makes it time consuming for me to find responses, reply to them and remain on topic. I will make an honest effort to do so.

No need to respond, nor am I expecting one from you. The post is there for informational purposes.

marg,

The Jewish sources are something that I'm interested in. Could you post just a list of those? I don't expect you to post lengthy commentary unless you choose to. I've been collecting references for this thread that I've not posted yet. I'd like to know Ehrman;s list of Jewish sources for I have 2 collected that I'd like to learn more about.

[_GoodK]

1. It would be easy to provide a list of historians who argue against the historicity of Jesus

I'd like to see this list.

Why would you like to see this list?

Hardly a comprehensive list:

Bruno Bauer
Will Durant
Michael Grant
Earl Doherty
Robert M Price
Timothy Freke (not so much a historian as the others)
Peter Gandy (same as above)
Bart Ehrman

[_dartagnan]

Hardly a comprehensive list

Hardly surprising, since one probably doesn't exist.

Earl Doherty, Timothy Freke and Peter Gandy are not historians. They are pop authors who sing a tune to a crowd that isn't particularly concerned with real scholarship. The fact that they needed to be mentioned in this short list only goes to reinforce the point that scholarly support for an ahistorical Jesus is scant.

Bruno Bauer and Will Durant have been dead a long time, but I would like to see a citation from Durant that suggests he rejects the historicity of Jesus. Interestingly enough, you named Michael Grant, who is a historian, but unfortunately for you he doesn't fall into this camp. He once wrote:

"To sum up, modern critical methods fail to support the Christ myth theory. It has 'again and again been answered and annihilated by first rank scholars.' In recent years, 'no serious scholar has ventured to postulate the non historicity of Jesus' or at any rate very few, and they have not succeeded in disposing of the much stronger, indeed very abundant, evidence to the contrary." - Michael Grant, Jesus: An Historian's Review of the Gospels.

Does that sound like someone who rejects the historicity of Jesus?

Bart Ehrman is a good guy. He and I had several email exchanges about five years ago, but he said nothing that would indicate to me that he rejected the historicity of Jesus. I would be surprised if he did. After all, he wrote a book called Misquoting Jesus, and his work is based on trying to figure out what Jesus' real teachings were. Kinda hard to misquote someone who doesn't exist. But he isn't a historian anyway; he's a textual critic.

You said my claim was silly because you could provide a list of historians that agreed with JAK.

Well, where is it? Is the theology trained Robert M. Price all you've got?

Here are a couple of citations worth noting:

"Biblical scholars and classical historians now regard [Christ myth] as effectively refuted." - Robert E. Van Voorst, Jesus Outside the New Testament: An Introduction to the Ancient Evidence (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2000), p. 16.

"There are those who argue that Jesus is a figment of the Church’s imagination, that there never was a Jesus at all. I have to say that I do not know any respectable critical scholar who says that any more.” Burridge, R & Gould, G, Jesus Now and Then, Eerdmans, 2004, p.34.