The actual *existence *of Jesus or a person around whom Christianity was constructed is not actually that interesting to this atheist. It would be unremarkable. What would be remarkable are supernatural occurrences, miracles etc. and I don’t see how the mundane (but still uncertain) existence of a first century rebel preacher lends any greater weight to that.
Consider, we know to a close-certainty that Kim il Sung was a real person, we have writings about him and eye-witness accounts that dwarf anything the biblical texts can muster.
What then are we to make of the miraculous claims about his life? If there is any consistency then surely we should give them the same weight as anything Jesus did?
To DrDeth, what do you think the existence of a historical Jesus would prove? Why is it important to you?
If there were miracles, there must have been a miraculous person behind it, if there was a miraculous person then it follows that they would have been able to perform miracles.
The same circular reasoning is behind the bible, the stories in the books prove that there was a god and if there was a god then of course they could have dictated or inspired the writing of the book within which we find evidence for god…and so on…and so on
If you start from a position of believing in gods and miracles then you can easily accept the stories as backing up that position. If you don’t start with that assumption then the evidence of the literature is weak indeed.
I am not Dr Deth; may I answer? The historicity of Jesus is not “important” to me (another atheist). It is however interesting. Reading about it is fun and stimulating. Many mysteries of human history and prehistory are interesting to me. The huge importance of Christianity to Western Civilization makes the Jesus questions especially interesting.
I also find the question of “King” Arthur’s historicity to be interesting. That does NOT mean I’m embarking on a hunt for the Holy Grail!
I maybe wasn’t quite clear enough in my question, I was asking more why it is important to DrDeth that Jesus definitely *was *a real person.
From your POV Septimus I think you state that it isn’t important for him to be real, but that exploring the pros and cons may be interesting. That’s fair enough. I’ve found it interesting to read up on Dickens’s characters and the possible real-life inspirations for them but I attach no particular importance to the historical existence of Miss Havisham or Pip.
Why the change in scope? China and India are huge. By that standard, you’d have to say that Christianity was founded by a Mediterranean, and became very popular around the Mediterranean.
The point is, Luke, written some time after Christianity failed to take off among Jews (a religion mostly localized to the area where Jesus and his most immediate followers lived), conveniently contains a line given as an admonition that a True Prophet TM will not be accepted where he is from. While perhaps harkening back to past OT prophets who were shunned for a time, it also serves as a convenient retro-prophecy for Jesus and his (lack of) acceptance by all but a relatively small contingent of other Jews. It’s not a prophecy, of course, because “Luke” put it in his mouth after he was already dead, along with any chance of ever being seen as a Jewish Messiah in the traditional sense of a powerful, very human leader of the Jews on Earth.
I guess the answer depends on what question you are asking:
Was there a person named Yshua/Joshua/Jesus who lived in Galilee at the right time? Certainly. It was a common name in the region.
Was there such a person who was a preacher and a healer and had followers and was executed by Rome for treason? Extremely likely. The area was chock-a-block full of itinerant healers/preachers/messiah-wannabes. Do we have really really solid proof? No. But it’s vastly more likely that some person existed and was the basis for the Gospels than not.
Did that person raise the dead, argue with Satan, and return from the dead? There’s no evidence for that outside the gospels, and I, personally, think it’s extremely unlikely.
Did kings attend the baby’s birth and give him royal presents? Are all the other stories in the Gospels literally true? Almost certainly not.
Poe’s Law: Without a clear indicator of the author’s intent, it is impossible to create a parody of extreme views so obviously exaggerated that it cannot be mistaken by some readers for a sincere expression of the views being parodied.
I gave cites that shows that now the new theory is that John was part of writing it. No one yet has shown there is any kind of “consensus” that John was not the author, in fact the opposite.
Like I said, previously the thought was that since the Gospel shows clear Gnostic tendencies, and that did start until later, it couldnt be : but now the Dead sea scrolls have shown otherwise. That was the main argument agains John and his Gospel, and it’s dead.
Note that doesnt mean the Apostle wrote Revelations, he almost certainly didnt.
As Smapti pointed out in Post #77, it’s not a question of a conscious hoax; the mythicists think the Gospels are the records of, well, a mythic figure.
The idea that mythicists think the Jesus story is a deliberate con job is a strawman argument.
Well, to be fair, some do. It’s a spectrum, from the Gospels as inerrant truth written by the Holy Spirit through the hand of man, to a deliberate Hoax thought up by the Romans as late as the fourth century. Both extremes are, of course, absurd. The difference is, we’ve been culturally conditioned to just nod and smile when someone tries to pass on the former as true, but the latter is rightly subjected to skepticism and scrutiny.
Well, a dude named Jeshua existed. Jesus is either a mythic figure based on Jeshua, or a calcified translation error, depending on your level of pedantry.
Have you got any evidence that faith healing has actually worked the way placebos do, because I seem to have the impression that most “faith healing” is just outright fraud.
