doctorzb

This bugs me--Obviously, it's the argument that matters. With peer review, people who actually know what they are talking about are looking at the arguments and determining whether it's totally dumb, been done elsewhere, etc. I don't have to rely on the opinions of people on a message board, let alone my own, poorly informed, judgement.

The disdain for the peer review process is one of the ways I think this whole area reminds me of creationism.

Zeichman

Beyond just not contributing to journals, the books that are published are consistently written for popular audiences. Generally, scholars wait until the end of their career (there are, of course, exceptions) before publishing stuff for the populace. Crossan may have written a lot before The Historical Jesus, but I doubt you're going to find "The Cross that Spoke" in any Barnes and Noble you go to (it's out of print, I know, I'm just making a point).

gnosis92

Same sort of thing with respect to global warming, Shakespearean authorship, 9-11 conspiracy theories, etc.

spamandham

Have you actually read the New Testament? People are not born of virgins, they don't cause coins to come out of fishes mouths, nor wander in the desert talking to mythical beings. Nor are their lives scripted by Jewish scriptures, as almost every single passage in the Gospels is. They don't walk on water, they don't rise from the dead, they don't cause zombies to wander around Jerusalem.

On what grounds to you discount the historicity of Hercules (assuming you do)?

Why would they believe that? Christianity did NOT die out, and has plenty of texts to draw on, and yet historians still can not come to any concensus about him, including the one you proposed. There is NO concensus among modern historians regarding any aspect of Jesus, other than 'he existed'. There is not agreement among reputed scholars that he lived in the first century, nor that he was a Jewish reformer, nor that he was killed by authorities. This is an unprecedented inconsistency among scholars applied to no other figure presumed to have actually lived as far as I can tell.

andrewcriddle

Our first mention of Hercules comes in Homer sometime after 800 BCE.
Any historical Hercules lived long before the Trojan war.
Prima facie Homer and the post-Homeric sources are not historical evidence for Hercules. (Particularly given the loss of literacy associated with the fall of the Mycenaean civilization so that these traditions have had hundreds of years of purely oral transmission. )

The NT writings are much closer to the alleged events and prima-facie are historical evidence. The fact that stories have weird elements is not in general a ground for denying a historical core although it may make extracting that core difficult.

Consensus is a problematic term.

I would say that over two-thirds of scholars would hold all of the following
a/ Jesus was a Jew of the early 1st century CE.
b/ he had some form of controversial religious message.
c/ He was executed. (As distinct from dying a natural death or being stabbed in the back in a dark alley.)

Andrew Criddle

spamandham

We don't know that. The Gospels might have been first penned as late as the mid 2nd century. Regardless, it's clear that none of the Gospel stories are original writings, but are instead follow on writings of some earlier writing(s), meaning that whoever wrote them had no more insight into a historical Jesus than Homer had of Hercules.

I have no idea if this is true or not, but my case is not terribly strong either. I have only the interview remarks of a single historian of the time period interviewed on 'point of inquiry' to base my comment on. She (the name escapes me at the moment) made the claim that there was no concensus regarding any details of Jesus among her peers, which confirms my own anecdotal observations.

Steven Avery

And what are the peer review journals that publish papers on 911 conspiracy issues ? Popular Mechanics ? Skeptical Inquirer ? (Two debunkers.)

In what peer-reviewed Journals were the papers with the conspiracy theories of 19 highjackers with box-cutters published ?

And what is your view of the controversy around the question of peer review of the Stephen E. Jones paper ? Overall, what peer-reviewed Journals do you specifically think are appropriate and open to publishing papers on such issues ?

Shalom,
Steven