bacht

Were there any Christianities that didn't have resurrection/afterlife as a central belief? Were the Sadduccess the only Jews who hadn't accepted this idea by the 1st C?

Toto

OK, rephrase it.

Isn't the intellectual honest thing to do simply to admit that we don't have enough information to say whether a historical Jesus existed with any degree of probability?

GakuseiDon

I don't know. I'm not sure of their relevance to the OP, but they are interesting questions.

GakuseiDon

Yes, much better. I think that is how mg01 should have phrased his question.

ApostateAbe

Ehrman's best seller, Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why (or via: amazon.co.uk), drew the most challenges from conservative Christians. The introduction was a short autobiography of Ehrman's deconversion from Christianity. I was surprised and pleased to see the book being sold in a local supermarket a few years ago. I hope it inspires other authors to challenge ideology on intellectual grounds.

Toto

OK, now that it is rephrased to your liking, how would you answer it?

ApostateAbe

If you place Jesus in the category of Zeus, Osiris, Wodin and Quetzacoatl, then, yes, Muhammad also belongs in that category, and so does Socrates, King Xerxes, Pythagoras, Augustus Caesar, and so on. We place likelihood on their original existence based on second-hand and third-hand sources and historical context. I think there is a clear difference between human characters and god characters. In the earliest surviving biographies of Jesus (the synoptic gospels), Jesus was a human character, not a god character, so I figure the analogies you would need are religions that started with a mythical human being, not a mythical god.

JohnB

Let me try.

I am reasonably certain that the data now available does not support the existence of a HJ and can also describe the origins of most of the MJ. Further and in my view, the MJ (which is the only one that ever came into being) could not have existed as a historical figure.

I also think that most of the external sources used to support the HJ are either misunderstood, or unreliable. That is, there is no reliable evidence to support a HJ.

I find the evidence for the MJ also to be unreliable until at least the late 2nd century, at the very earliest. The problem for the external sources is that they are mostly, if not totally, as unreliable as the HJ they are used to support.

On the politics of the history of the Church, I think that the Church is keen to control the agenda of the debate and is supported in this by organs of state, so that respected figures such as Ehrmann continue to refer to the MJ as historical. In that sense, they continue the mythology.

I view Jesus-based Christianity as a philosophy of pragmatism, with hypocrisy as the necessary prime ingredient. I cannot otherwise explain how the mythology has continued for so long to be presented as history and become the bedrock of Western Civilisation.

ApostateAbe: Just read your post. I agree with one proviso: I do not accept the early dating of the gospels and regard the MJ as just another divine-man, in the same mould as Alexander the Great and numerous others.

Toto

Socrates might or might not have existed - no one gets worked up over it - but there are other contemporaneous sources of his existence. For Augustus Caesar, there are many more reliable sources. It's not clear why you keep repeating this bogus argument. Richard Carrier is going to deal with this in his forthcoming book. The gospels are clearly myth (in the best sense of the word, of course.) They are much later than Jesus would have lived, and cannot be considered biographies in the modern sense. They might fit into the categorie of , ancient biographies, but these ancient biographies were also written about Zeus and Hercules.

And they are not the earliest descriptions of Jesus. There is the Jesus in Paul's letters, who is virtually a spiritual entity.

aa5874

Jesus cannot even be placed alongside Zeus or Osiris. Historians and writers of antiquity mentioned many of the mythical Gods confirming that people of antiquity did worship these Gods.

Only Jesus is not mentioned at all, anywhere by any first century Jewish non-apologetic historian or writer.



It is not really true that the synoptics portrayed Jesus as a human, it is the complete opposite.

Isaiah 7.14 was used as the basis for the synoptic Jesus, where he was born of virgin without sexual union.

Isaiah 7:14 -