Clivedurdle

Sounds like an emotional comment that!

Why are these arguments not worthwhile, how does hand waving help yuor case?

Why?

Where exactly are the claims in the NT that Jesus was historical? I thought catholics had said the idea of a historic jesus is a heresy!

jgibson000

Then you have no acquaintance with, or anything approaching sound knowledge of, Catholicism or Catholic Biblical scholarship.

JG

Toto

I'm sorry if I gave you that impression. Catholics clearly think that the idea of a merely human historical Jesus is heresy, along with other Christians.

One particular Catholic, Charlotte Allen, has written a book (The Human Christ (or via: amazon.co.uk)) which implies that the search for a historical Jesus is part of the heresy of Protestantism (or worse - Deism!) and represents a refusal to accept the validity of church tradition and mysteries. At various times in the past, the Catholic Church has treated the search for a historical Jesus as bordering on heretical, but current Catholic doctrine is more favorable, and more than a few Catholics have done church sanctioned scholarship on the historical Jesus.

Clivedurdle

Excuse me, any Jesus with any hint of anything supernatural about him, is by definition mythical! All the creeds talk of fully god fully man. Catholics used to be open about it - yes that is how it is - this universe is created by god, who sent his son etc. If modern catholics are bending with modernist naturalist thinking they are clearly heretical by their own standards!

Anyone seeking a historical jesus has lost the plot - of the fully God, fully Christ, Fully Holy Spirit!

Please xians, at least keep to your own standards - if he ain't the only begotten son who died and resurrected and thereby washed away all our sins, what are you arguing for?

Charlotte Allen's arguments are correct!

gurugeorge

Exactly my point in another thread - another way of putting it is that to defend a "historical Jesus" is either to defend the fully-blown man-God who died to redeem us from our sins, or to defend some obscure roughneck preacher or revolutionary who somehow got deified real quick after his death - the rationalist has no problem being clear that it's the second Jesus he's defending the existence of, and sees no problem with. But for a Christian to defend that pale imitation of the Risen Christ - wtf is going on there???!!!

Is it actually an admission of defeat disguised as a defence of a religion? The battle is already lost (actually lost long ago with the absence of attestations in the archaeological, historical records, of any external evidence of some of the more improbable miracles) - is all this cunning rearguard action just an attempted diversion from facing the fact of defeat?

(Alternatively, go follow (with my blessings) some larded-over mythification of an obscure preacher from ancient times, whose original teachings, if there even were any, are lost in a fog of textual obscurity - no problem with that, so long as it's clear that's what you're doing! )

lpetrich

That's if he had imagined a purely earthly Jesus Christ instead of a heavenly one.

That's the "you know the story" argument, which is very odd when one considers the later history of Xianity, or of religion in general. Which Xian pastor has ever announced that he won't talk about the Gospels anymore or even mention them, because you all know the story/

What evidence?

(Richard Carrier using Lord Raglan's Mythic-Hero profile...)
Except that Lord Raglan did not use Jesus Christ as a source for his profile.

That's being excessively literal-minded. And even if one insists on being literal-minded in that way, I note that Jesus Christ is presented as being a sort of royalty, a successor of King David.

The Bishop, you're grasping at straws. It looks like you're recognizing how closely Jesus Christ fits and feeling embarrassed by it.

That's a very reasonable inference.

Or else the myth could have been generated from stories passed down orally before they got written down.

gurugeorge

I think you've got the wrong end of the stick on this Bishop, the profile was collated from a bunch of ancient mythic heroes other than Christ, and yet Christ scores quite highly.

For the Christian, the whole point would be to show that Christ was NOT like all the mythic archetypes out there at the time (for this was, indeeed, part of the pagan criticism of Christianity - that it was really not all that different from extant pagan stuff); and a high score should actually be disappointing and annoying to a true Christian.

aa5874

Can you show me this prima facie evidence that there was one man /men that lived and died and attracted a following and that Saul/Paul ,or whoever used those names, came along and created a Theology to go around him/ them or whoever these names refer to.