show_no_mercy

Well the Christian apocrypha should be used because they're just as valid as the canonical gospels. In other words, there are no writings about Jesus by anyone who knew him - they're all second hand. The gospel later assigned to a "Mark" is just as valid as the gospel of Peter.

Our canonical gospels were only canonical because they were the most popular. Though the "heretical" Christians used variants of our canonical four.

No Robots

Apocalyptic rhetoric is a standard component of Jewish literature. As the Jewish Encyclopedia makes clear, it does not necessarily entail anything about the end of the world. While Christ's followers, after his death, expected the end of the world, I don't think it likely that he did. He uses his phrase "Kingdom of Heaven" in many non-eschatological passages:

Neither shall they say: Behold here, or behold there. For lo, the kingdom of God is within you.--Lk 17:21

aa5874

This information is blatantly false. There is no external corroborative source that can confirm that Jesus of the NT was just human and that he was crucified.

Again, this is more bogus information and may be deliberate. There is no source external of the NT and Church writings that can confirm that Jesus was human and did do any thing.

The abundance of information from the NT and Church writings show that Jesus was TRULY the offspring of the Holy Ghost of God, that walked on water, transfigured, resurrected and ascended to heaven.

Virtually all that is known about Jesus is from the NT and the Church writings and they agree that Jesus was fully DIVINE or Supernatural.



This is another bogus source. There is virtually no good evidence for a human only Jesus. It is the complete opposite.

The information or evidence from antiquity found in the NT and Church writings is extra-ordinarily good that Jesus was considered a God and the offspring of the Holy Ghost.

This may indeed be a deliberate half-truth. Please say what is reliable about the Gospel with respect to Jesus and the disciples? Please say what in the DSS denies that Jesus was the offspring of the Holy Ghost of God, who walked on water, transfigured, resurrected and ascended to heaven.



How can you present all bogus and questionable statements and then claim the existence of an historical Jesus is certain? What absurdity?

Look at the abundance of evidence. The evidence has been recorded for perhaps eternity.

See Matthew 1.18, Luke 2.35, MARK 16.6, John 1, Acts 1.9, Galatians 1.1 and others.

This is Tertullian claiming that it is agreed that Jesus was DIVINE or Supernatural.

On the Flesh of Christ It is completely false that there is an abundance of information that Jesus did actually exist and was on earth during the time of Tiberius and Pilate.

ApostateAbe

I figure that the sources composed earliest should have precedence concerning the historical character of Jesus. Do you have a way of dating the various sources? The consensus seems to be that the synoptic gospels are considerably early (70 AD) and the various apocryphal sources seem to be late. I ask because, if you put 100 years or more between the original Jesus and the composition of the source on Jesus, then you are much more likely to get irrelevant ideas about him.

show_no_mercy

Yes, I realize that a majority of scholars date Mark around 70 CE. But the "smoking gun" section that they use to date Mark (Mark 13) that's used to describe the events of 70 CE could also be used to describe the events of 132-135 CE. There was no "abomination causing desolation" that caused the events of 70 CE. However, there was a very Daniellic "abomination" that caused the Bar-Kokhba revolt. With Daniel and his desolating abomination being written as a contemporaneous account of the Maccabean rebellion yet retrojected into a different historical context (the exile) to seem like a "prophecy", the same modus operandi might have been used by Mark.

Since there's also no evidence of any Christians knowing of any narrative gospels prior to the Bar-Kokhba revolt of 132, I think a range of 70 - 135 would be more appropriate for the creation of the canonical narrative gospels. In either case (70 or 135) anyone who could have been an eyewitness to any sort of historical Jesus was significantly dead by the time the narrative gospels were written.

Even worse, this all assumes that Mark was intended to be historical, even if written in 70. What if Mark is primarily theology/allegory about how the Jews and the historical witnesses (disciples) were clueless and their obtuseness is what caused the events of 70/135 CE? The gospel of Mark is decidedly hostile towards the posited "historical witnesses" while the subsequent gospels try to reconcile this, meaning that the gospels that rehabilitate the disciples were using the non-historical Mark as their "witness".

Lastly, there could have been Christians around for decades before any narrative gospels were written. They just might have all been gnostics.

Toto

"Mainstream" only because Christianity is mainstream. None of these are professional historians, and most are theologians.

Have you actually read these quote mined sources, or did you just copy and paste from some internet page? Would you like to expand these quotes with the date, the name of the book or article or other source?

This is just silly. There are coins, portraits and contemporary accounts of Julius Caesar, confirmed by archaeology. There is nothing comparable for Jesus.

But he doesn't name any historians. This is just a claim that is passed around - that historians think Jesus existed.

Another very silly statement. Josephus was a Palestinian Jew, and we have his autobiography, and we have his accounts of other Palestinian Jews.

That's NT Wright, the Bishop of Durham, who calls himself "Tom" when he tries to relate to the common folk. By "significant amount" does he mean the 18% of the gospels that the Jesus Seminar thought to be reliable?

Craig Evens is a conservative Christian scholar and a theologian. I would say that he is lying when he says that there is any "persistent trend to see the gospels as essentially reliable," unless he is talking about the trend of conservative evangelicals to talk to each other and boost each others' confidence in the face of skepticism.

But we don't have a date on this quote, so we don't know what recent means.

Archaeology has added nothing to the search for Jesus. The Dead Sea Scrolls do not mention Jesus or Christianity, and have been radiocarbon dated to the first century BCE. Literary analysis of the gospels has shown them to be based on readings of the Jewish scriptures, in particular the Septuagint, leaving little or no room for any history.

No Robots

While this may be true of non-Jewish scholarship, many Jewish scholars, versed in Jewish literature, do find considerable room for history in the Gospels.

ApostateAbe

Cool. Whatever methods they use to date the synoptic gospels, it seems to fit my own theory very well. In 70 AD, when the synoptic gospels containing the apocalyptic deadline were supposedly written, it was unlikely but conceivable that some of the listeners of Jesus may have been alive, if very old. But it could not have been conceivable when the gospel of John was supposedly written, in 90 AD, where we see no apocalyptic deadlines and instead the first defense against the seemingly failed prophecy (John 21:20-23) by denying it. And, in 2 Peter, supposedly written sometime in the second century, we see partial acceptance of the apocalyptic deadline but a reinterpretation of it (2 Peter 3:3-8). Your arguments about dates could be correct, for all I know. Without sufficient knowledge of the dating methods, I lean toward the established date of the 70 AD ballpark, in part because I trust the intellectual authorities and in part because it fits the time line of expected Christian reactions for and against the apocalyptic deadline. That may come off as circular reasoning and/or argument from authority, I guess, but to me it is one set of evidence mutually reinforcing another set of evidence.

spamandham

...Jewish sources (including the Jewish scriptures of course), gnostic sources, so called "pagan" sources, archaeological finds, the writings of heretics and critics, all other noncanonical early Christian texts, and everything we know about the Hellenistic culture at large from all sources...

All of these give us information about how Christianity formed. If our only choices were to focus on the NT, or exclude the NT but look at everything else, I think we'd get a much better picture with the second option.

...so are all the Christian sources. Nothing in the NT was written by anyone who knew Jesus, nor anyone who knew someone who knew Jesus, nor are they records of oral histories of the man.

If Christianity had died off 1000 years ago, I don't think anyone would be trying to reconstruct a historical Jesus from such obviously mythical theological sources. Few people engage in the fool's errand of trying to reconstruct the historical Moses.

spamandham

I think it's fair to say that we know Christianity *did not* have it's origin in a real historical magic god man walking around in 30 CE. Since the only sources we have indicate that as the origin, it's fair to conclude that the real origin is lost to the ravages of time.

That being the case, not only do we not know *how* it started, but we also don't know *when* it started. It could easily have existed for hundreds of years before the events of the 1st and 2nd century brought it to the forefront, or it might not have existed at all until the penning of the first gospel effectively created it. But a newly empowered cult needs an origins story...and that's what the gospels provide, a novel and theologically relevant origin that replays the same 2nd born theme seen over and over in the Jewish scriptures and explains why Christianity replaces Judaism.