What has been under discussion is whether there’s strong evidence for the resurrection. There have been a few comments about his supposed existence, but your own quote that I was replying to was:There aren’t many people who have ever denied that there was a man named Yeshua living in Nazareth two thousand years ago, or that he said enough inspirational things to enough people that the Roman authorities thought their power was threatened.
So the meat of what I was disagreeing with is partially around whether it’s almost universally accepted that he said a lot of inspirational things. We really don’t know, because those things weren’t written down for decades, in a world where most people were illiterate, and stories survived by word-of-mouth. I will grant that the indirect evidence for a set of writings called “Q” would most likely be a bunch of sayings attributed to Jesus, at a time predating the gospels, but still it’s pretty weak evidence that a man named Yeshua said any of these things.
You can keep adding to a handful of snow and eventually you might get a snowman(maybe even an avalanche). Now tell me about how special that handful of snow originally was.
Because they are what happened, so yes, they would be similar. However, John is quite a bit different than the Synoptic Gospels. I have already posted cite that explain what John is based upon, and also how the Synoptic Gospels came about so you are simply arguing from ignorance, since you refuse to read those cites and educate yourself.
Most people werent illiterate, perhaps they would be considered today “functionally illiterate” but it is clear most people read and enjoyed graffiti. The Q source might have be written during Jesus’s life or perhaps immediately after. It is indeed, “almost universally accepted that he said a lot of inspirational things”.
I think you’re a little delusional here. Claiming someone could walk on water or rise from the dead is the extraordinary claim, along with claiming that he existed. Perhaps the burden of proof is on you to prove that Zeus and Vishnu didn’t exist in that case.
But Kenneth Humphreys has witten exactly two books I can find, bit the same topic. He doesnt have a degree or a position at a University. So while you can call him a author, I dont know you could call him a “scholar and historian”. His home page gives no bio, just a farrago of hate filled hard core atheist articles, he clearly hates and despises religion in every form, especially the Christian one, so he is clearly biased.
But even so here’s the blog for his book:
“Even among modern atheists, a fragile consensus holds that Jesus was at least a real person, whose historical presence, though embellished, has been reliably established in the order of disinterested scholarship. Whether he is envisioned as peace-loving rabbinical sage or as a militant prophet of doom, this man called Jesus is widely assumed to have had an important, even a profound, impact on the course of world history.
In the space of this hard-hitting monograph and supplemental interview, **dissident **scholar Kenneth Humphreys interrogates the biblical and historical evidence to offer this concise and pithy exposition of a fringe idea whose time has come…”
Fringe idea. Dissident. So, like I said “nearly every.” And Humphries credentials are at best modest and clearly biased.
Which is exactly what I said. The Miracles are indeed extraordinary claims. The mere existence of a mundane man named Yeshua ben Yosef, aka Jesus, who founded a religion, is not a extraordinary claim in any way.
You DO realize that “Did Jesus exist?” and “Is there proof for the physical resurrection of Jesus?” are two entirely different questions and you cannot answer the first in place of the second, right?
Now, it may be kind of a dick move on my part to bring it up all this time later, but I truly think it’s relevant and worth mentioning: a poster in that thread, who explains that he’s engaged in decades of Bible study, flatly relates a miraculous appearance by Jesus after the Crucifixion — and, when asked about it by yours truly, he triumphantly produces the passage he recalled.
Except, well, he doesn’t; he gets it wrong when the writing isn’t actually in front of him, and he still gets it wrong when it is right in front of him. But he asks us to remember that miraculous feat anyay; and, if that’s the best he could do, what hope would an illiterate person minus those decades of Bible study have?
Where do you get this? I’m a die-hard atheist (hell, I’m kind of an anti-theist) and I have no problem admitting that there was probably a man named Yeshua ben-Yosef who lived in the Roman province of Palestine around the first century BC(E). The question at hand is whether he was actually an aspect of the Abrahamic God and that has only religious doctrine to speak for it, which isn’t proof.
As an atheist, I find myself doubtful about how accurate it is to say a given dude was Jesus if you’ve stripped all the mythology away from him. It’s a little like saying that Joseph Bell’s existence proves that Sherlock Holmes isn’t fictional.
From everything I’ve heard there was quite likely a dude named Jeshua who was an itinerant preacher who got himself killed for disturbing the peace during passover, when the Romans were testy about potential troublemakers and reacted to them in a “bug, meet windshield” manner. To say he founded a religion would be overstating it - from the sound of it he had maybe a few dozen followers at most at the time of his death. Many of the stories about him are clearly false - starting with the ones where the gentiles executing him are presented as being wise and peaceful and out-of-character for the sake of the gentiles in the audience, shifting the blame to the evil jewish religious leaders.
So, regardless of how real Jeshua was, the people telling stories about him were clearly and demonstrably willing to tell giant obvious lies in order to appeal to their audiences.
I’m not thinking inventing miracles was even slightly out of the question.
So if I were to be impressed by an account of this Jeshua dude breaking the laws of physics, it would have to come from somebody who was not trying to sell him. And while there are impartial accounts of the “Jesus” dude’s existince, impartial accounts of his miraculous powers and divinity number in the low zeroes.
Without the miracles or resurrection, there would not be much to make Yeshua ben Yosef memorable some 2000 years later. What if he was really a fiction created by Paul? Ever see the scene between Paul and Jesus in The Last Temptation of Christ? Now there’s something to consider: Paul as the creator of Jesus.
In part because if the best you can do is say a historical Jesus was likely, but cannot be proven (which is what most of the people in this thread are saying) then you certainly can’t prove that the guy who may or may not have existed rose from the dead.
That would be hard since also Peter, John and especially James, the Brother of Jesus, who was historically stoned to death because he preached the Word.
