Amaleq13

According to your Bible, the disciples didn't publicly claim that Jesus had risen from the dead until over a month after his execution so what you suggest was never a realistic possibility.

C. The tomb story is a late addition to the story. There was no tomb and the body of Jesus was lost in an anonymous pit along with all the other victims of crucifixion.

Solitary Man

1. Appeal to Authority
2. Did you even read this article...from 1944?

jeffevnz

I see what you mean.

Let me clarify what I'm saying. In the Gospels, Jesus is protrayed as more-or-less human. He looks, sounds, smells, talks, and acts like any other guy, with the exception of unusual charisma, and numerous claims of miracles, which are conveniently unverifiable (and were unverifiable even at the time). He has parents, a first name that was common at the time, a hometown, and a tomb. And much of the meat of the story is about earthly human activities: walking around, preaching, getting drunk and coming up with the bar stool theory that the bread is really his body, etc.

Maybe I'm not putting it well, but I think there's an important distinction to be made. On the one hand, you have religious figures like this, who the followers view as special, but still more or less human; Mohammed and Joseph Smith are other examples. And OTOH, you have characters such as the ones you mentioned (cults of Baal, Marduk, Isis, Horus, Zeus, Apollo), whom they see as distinctly non-human, and whom they perceive as living in a whole other plane. AFAIK, those characters are not portrayed as actually founding the religion, nor as preaching and arguing over doctrine.

I guess what I should have said (if you agree that there's a meaningful distinction to be made), is that I don't know of any cults whose legendary founders (as opposed to mythic creators) are known or believed with a high degree of certainty not to exist.

Toto

This links to

Gospels in a Developing Church
William Scott
Journal of Bible and Religion, Vol. 12, No. 1 (Feb., 1944), pp. 19-25

What's with digging up old articles from the mid-20th century, as if there has been no progress in Biblical studies since then?

This is part of CS Lewis's flawed reason for thinking that the gospels must be true - that the authors were too simple minded to have actually invented anything. But a closer analysis shows that Mark is a sophisticated literary composition which draws on the Hebrew Scriptures at every point.

Toto

There are many other possibilities.

The Christian story in Acts says that the disciples waited some time after the crucifixion before they started preaching. Conveniently, at this point the body would not be identifiable even if it had been produced.

Or, some Christian scholars think that Jesus' body was thrown into a common grave, and his disciples experienced a spiritual appearance from him. The story of the empty tomb was invented sometime after 70 CE, by which time the Romans had flattened Jerusalem, and no one could check for evidence.

There are many other possibilities.

schilling.klaus

this is a hillarious delusion of positivists
with zero understanding of the gospels.
The Gospels show Jesus as the anthropomorphised Logos
of hellenic philosophy. People who refused to see that
are beyond any capacity of understandiung the origins of Christianity.

many ancient deities reportedly had such puny stuff,
this has no bearing for questions of historicity


no, that's a vicious delusions of people who fail to understand the gospels


Klaus Schilling

dmallett

I voted NO because there is no way to find a historical Jesus from the evidence. So if he existed, he's not the person we'd be looking for anyways.

The problem is circular. How can you ask if someone existed that we know nothing about except legends and fabrications?

Solitary Man

Perhaps like how scientists discover extinct species by examining their fossil remains?

arnoldo

I have already submitted archaelogical proof that Pilate existed. Here is archaeological proof the King Herod existed. The fact that no tomb of Yeshua has been found also gives testimony of the historicity of Yeshua. That is unless your argument is that no such person ever existed.

http://www.britishmuseum.org/explore..._herodnbs.aspx

makerowner

This is all irrelevant. Do you see anyone above saying that either Pilate or Herod didn't exist? Does the existence of either of these people prove Jesus's existence? Do you purposely try to derail every thread you post in, or do you just do it by accident?