aa5874

How can it be an oversimplification for a person to adopt the position that both passages are not authentic after examining the passages and taking into account commentaries about the passages from different sources?

I consider AJ 18.3.3 to be inauthentic and 20.9.1 to be either ambiguous, irrelevant, or not from the hands of Josephus.

neilgodfrey

Respected scholars -- e.g. Bruno Bauer, Arthur Drews, George A Wells, Alvar Ellegard, Robert Price -- have written such books, or books that at the very least seriously question the existence of Jesus. The "problem" is that some of them are dismissed purportedly because their primary scholarly specialty was a nonbiblical area; or if they are biblical scholars their hypotheses are dismissed as "long since refuted". Others are dismissed because they are not from the scholarly guild (e.g. Earl Doherty) -- but that does not lessen the respect with which he is held by many, scholars included.

If you can ever find where their arguments actually have been "long since refuted" then do let me know. I'm still looking.

Neil

mountainman

Particularly
Witnesses to the Historicity of Jesus: Arthur Drews (1912)

Best wishes,


Pete

dog-on

IMO, the best books for refuting Jesus' existence are:

Mark, Matthew, Luke and, of course, John

Paul actually believes he met spirit Jesus, so being defacto insane, I wouldn't put too much weight in what Paul has to say, in particular, about that.

Huon

Paul actually says he met spirit Jesus, so there are two hypothesis :

1 - Paul was mentally fragile, or he was
2 - a sort of religious cuckoo, laying his eggs in the nest of a small jewish sect, and enlarging it to hellenized Jews and pagans.

lycanthrope

hi

what about the book "The Jesus Mysteries (or via: amazon.co.uk)"? i hope i didnt waste 20 bucks...

dog-on

I just take it at face value. He was nuts, or simply a liar. No need to speculate about motivation.

dog-on

You reall have a thing for Acharya, don't you?

You remind me of the boy, on the play ground, that pulls the little girl's hair. :love: :love: :love:

:rolling:

Malachi151

I haven't read that one. I've read 2 of her books, and her website, and unless this book is 180 degree different from everything else she's ever said on the subject then I subject that its bunk as well.

I consider her basically a cult leader with a cult following who spouts a bunch of mystical nonsense.

I was going to do a large review of "Suns of God", but I ended up having better things to do. When I posted a small part of the rough draft on line I got two death threats from followers of hers.

Here is a thread on the subject: http://iidb.infidels.org/vbb/showthread.php?t=233037

Here is the rough draft of the review I I was working on:
http://www.rationalrevolution.net/temp/SunsofGod.pdf

See also: http://iidb.infidels.org/vbb/showthread.php?t=234405

robto

If you're talking about the book by Freke and Gandy, I'd say it's largely but not entirely a waste of time. They are by no means cautious scholars: they have an agenda and will grab at anything, no matter how dubious, that supports it. They basically ignore the last 100 years of New Testament scholarship, and take a position held by the "history of religions school" of NT criticism of the early 20th century - that parallels between pagan and Christian beliefs and rituals prove that the latter derive from the former. In fact, in some cases it may be that pagan beliefs derive from Christian, or that they were independent parallel developments - neither of which is even considered as a possibility by F&G.

On the other hand, some of the evidence they cite is genuinely interesting. But, given the polemical approach of the authors, it's hard to know how much to believe them.

For a good "state of the question" book, I'd recommend The Historical Jesus by Theissen and Merz. Their section on "Did Jesus exist?" is way too short, but it's more than you will find in most serious NT scholarship. At least it will give you a flavor of how strong the arguments are on each side. They also have a good, balanced discussion of the Josephus passages about Jesus.