spamandham

The case against a historical Jesus does not rest on the fact that some came to view him as a god, or even that miracles were attributed to him. It was ordinary in those days to deify people (or imaginary people like Asclepius) and attribute miracles to them. Damn near everything, real or imagined, was a god back then.

Surely the author of Matthew was familiar with such coins. I hope you're not trying to say that only a historical Jesus could have noticed such coins and thus a passage such as this proves he existed.

aa5874

But, this was not the case for Jews. The Jews did not deify any man and have no history of deifying men, not even Emperors, Kings or their Messiah.

Jesus, the disciples and even a Pauline writer were claimed to be Jews. It is extremely unlikely that Jews would have worshiped Jesus as a God knowing that he was a man while at the same time preaching against the deification of men.

Neither King David nor Simon BarCocheba were deified. It is just total fiction that a blasphemer could have been deified by Jews after the very Jews had him crucified.

In the NT, Saul and Barnabas refused to be worshiped as Gods but they worshiped Jesus as a God.

It is critically important to understand that Jesus believers did not worship the created but the Creator Jesus Christ. The authors of Jesus placed him in Judea as a Jew with Jewish followers which would have almost certainly mean that he would not have been deified if known to be a man living in Galleee for about 30 years with human parents and registered in the public records as only human.

It therefore must mean or is likely to mean that Jesus of the Gospels was thought of as a God/man at all times and that the entire Canonised NT was written very late and probably well away from Judea.

Doug Shaver

Yep. Now, just as soon as you find someone who argues, "Some people consider Jesus to be a god; therefore, Jesus did not exist," then you've got a killer counterargument to use against them.

mountainman

Obviously we a great deal of independent corroborative evidence such as literature, coins, inscriptions, statues and other archaeological relics. Outside of the assertions contained in Eusebius literary collages (and this includes the new testament which was specially and carefully gift-wrapped by Eusbius in his literary collages, Jesus has no independent corroborative evidence.