aa5874

However, every single thing non-existent left no evidence and Jesus of the NT did not leave any. It is therefore reasonable to claim Jesus did not exist.

The authors of the NT and the church writers did not portray Jesus as most persons, Jesus was claimed to have thousands of followers and his disciples and "Paul" offered the Jews and Gentiles an alternative mode of salvation never known to Jewish tradtion where belief in Jesus, a man crucified for blasphemy, had the power to save people from their sins.

This alternative mode of salvation was unprecedented.

No Jewish writer wrote a single word of the phenomenal Lord and Saviour, Messiah, Christ, son of the God of the Jews, the son of Man who was likened unto the prophets as Elijah, Jeremiah and others as an alternative source of Salvation to the Jews and Gentiles.

Jesus was just a fabricated character unheard of in every respect.

It is reasonanable to claim Jesus of the NT was fiction.

If people think Jesus of the NT existed, then they can provide the evidence for their belief. Belief has no truth value, no veracity, without evidence.


The evidence that supports fiction is fiction itself. The Jesus stories are riddled with fiction and implausibilties.

The prophecies about Jesus are false, his conception is fiction, the birth narrative is a fairy tale where a special star stood over the place were he was born, his temptation, where he was on the pinnacle of the temple is bogus, his baptism when the Holy Ghost entered Jesus like doves is incredible, it is false that spit can make people see, or that Jesus raised a man from dead and walked on water. His tranfiguration, his resurrection and ascension through the clouds are all known fictitious events yet the authors claimed these bogus events were witnessed by Mary, his mother, thousands of followers including his disciples.

The claim that Jesus did not exist is supported by the implausible and fictious elements in the Jesus stories.

The belief that Jesus may have existed does NOT contradict, diminish or overturn the claim that Jesus did not exist since the written statements, the evidence of the NT and church writers, about Jesus is fundamentally fiction and/or implausible.

The belief that a man found guilty was innocent cannot overturn the evidence used to produce the guilty verdict. Evidence, not belief, must first be produced to counter the original verdict.

show_no_mercy

The basic claim that Jesus was an "unknown peasant" from Galilee contradicts the accounts given in the gospels. If the accounts given in the gospels are true, then the silence from his contemporaries is strange. If the accounts given in the gospels are false, then the silence from his contemporaries makes sense.

There's a silence from his contemporiaries, so this should mean that the account of Jesus' life, ministry, execution, and resurrection depicted in the gospels is false. I would conclude that the Jesus depicted in the NT is a blatant falsehood, but it's impossible to discount the existence of an unknown peasant from Galilee. Kinda like Russel's Teapot. It's contradictory to claim that both the gospel account of Jesus' life is true AND that he was an unknown homeless preacher from Galilee.

Amaleq13

That "silence" doesn't actually argue against anything except the described extent of Jesus' fame.

Agreed but, to my knowledge, no one is making such a claim. Not here and not anywhere else. :huh:

Toto

But this is what people try to argue - that the gospels (however they are deconstructed or
interpreted) provide some sort of evidence for jesus existence, but that he was still too obscure to leave a footprint in history.

show_no_mercy

Yes. The path of argumentation usually goes:

Skeptic: What's the evidence for the existence of Jesus?
Christian: He had thousands of followers! Thousands of witnesses!
Skeptic: How come none of his contemporaries know about or wrote about him?
Christian: Uhh... he was unknown!

Jesus' popularity is one of the main themes throughout the gospels; it's what's directly responsible for his crucifixion. If he *wasn't* popular, then why would the Pharisees have him executed?

Amaleq13

And right there is where the notion that the gospels are "true" is no longer part of the argument.

Toto

But then we get back to the question of how you extract any historical value from the gospels, and we've gone around that too often.

eheffa

So if the Gospels are not "true" or so full of fabrication, the historical kernel of information about the "real" Historical Jesus is effectively lost to us. We have nothing else to go on. Unless we discover some new source of information, the Historical Jesus is unknowable or undefinable.

This anonymous "Peasant Christ" notion Elijah has been promoting amounts to the same thing: an unremarkable nobody with delusions of grandeur & no audience in sight. The Christian Jesus Christ is incompatible with this pathetic substitute Messiah.

-evan

aa5874

So, the historical Jesus is just simply a case of futility.

Elijah

The self sacrifice meme he started is what makes him remarkable and explains the explosion of faith around him; an otherwise common man.

To crank up the wacky Christian meter a little… It’s like the sign of Jonah he spoke of, where one man’s conviction is contagious and spreads though a nation or the world.