Like what?
Sounds like a bunch of clowns.
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Many people, myself included, have being telling you this could be the case for Jesus.
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I not only took but taught undergraduate religion classes, and it’s that background that informs my remarks here.
This is often the case where a student comes from a very narrow fundamentalist background (Bart Ehrman, for example.) It can work the other way, however. I came from a bland liberal religious background, and studying religion actually increased my respect for religion, which previously had been very low. And I was not the only one upon whom my teachers had this effect.
I studied and taught in secular religion departments, in which religion was treated as an academic subject such as anthropology, sociology, political science, history, or philosophy. A large number of my undergraduate and graduate fellow-students were religious unbelievers or at least were not the slightest bit interested in obtaining a Divinity degree or becoming clergymen. Many of the professors were liberals, agnostics or even atheists. There is a difference in atmosphere between a secular department of religion and a seminary or Bible college or Christian-sponsored undergrad college.
Interesting. Many of my graduate and undergraduate professors in religion were Jews, all along the spectrum from Orthodox through Conservative to Reform and purely secular. I can’t think of one of them who denied that Jesus was a historical person. Indeed, one course I took, from a Jew who was frankly anti-Christian, treated Jesus as very much a historical person, though of course not one who was the Messiah, walked on water, or rose from the dead. He did his doctorate not in theology but in ancient history, at an Ivy League school, and was trained in modern historical methods. He presented us with rabbinic literature which referred to Jesus as a real person (though treating him and his teaching in a hostile manner). And the vast majority of Jewish scholars and theologians whom I have studied treat Jesus as a real historical person. You might want to have a look at some of the scholarly work by Jews in this area, before insisting on your conclusion that Jesus did not exist.
It is interesting that you complain about “pushy” Christians when your own point of view is stated here in language that many might describe as “pushy”.
I add that your list of scholars who claim that Jesus never existed is highly suspect. For example, you name Tom Harpur. That certainly wasn’t his original position, and wasn’t the position he took in most of his writings, though it might have been his view later on, as he became increasingly radical. In any case, Harpur was never considered a major Biblical scholar, and mostly was a clergyman and journalist. And Marshall Gauvin was not a Biblical scholar at all, or a historian, but a popular controversialist. (And I’m not even sure he ever denied that Jesus existed, though, as a Rationalist in the line of Paine, he denied Jesus’s miracles and divinity.) And some of the major scholarly figures you cite, you are mischaracterizing. Reimarus did not believe that Jesus was divine, but did not claim that there was no such person. Ditto for David Friedrich Strauss and William Wrede. And as for Gerd Ludemann, whom I once met, while he denied the historicity of the Resurrection, I’m unaware of any claim of his that Jesus did not exist. You seem to be lumping together a whole list of people who are connected only by doubting something about the traditional religious portrait of Jesus, as if they all deny that Jesus ever existed. Very sloppy scholarship on your part.
Finally, I note that your remarks have produced a rare and perhaps unprecedented phenomenon: you have caused me to agree with some statements here by Mercer and by Roy!
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I’ve always admired Packard autos, and was amused when, on meeting a fellow who’d learned to drive in one, he explained to me that in his particular neighborhood, they were almost always driven by Jewish people (he, too, was Jewish) and were known as “Yom Kippur Clippers.” Those days are long gone, however, the last true Packards having rolled off the line in '56 and the unloved “Packardbakers” having died just a couple of years later in '58.
I happen to have a cousin who spent a number of years as a professional clown, and who did the clown-car thing. Never in an Accord, I think, though. He said it truly is amazing how many people you can get into an old car if you take out everything except a small driver’s seat. Heck, I knew a fellow who had a '48 Packard, which would probably have held about twenty even with the seats in.
Irrelevant to Roy’s point, which was that “Yesous” (I use English rather than Greek characters for the non-Greek readers here) is the Greek rendering of Yeshua/Joshua. Josephus was writing in Greek for a Hellenistic audience, so of course he wrote in Greek rather than Hebrew, but the names are equivalent.
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Yes, and you are aware, I trust, that motorcycles are also mentioned in the Bible? (I leave you with the punch line.)
Once again Peaceful Science proves to be an endless fount of practical knowledge. Even while introducing Boris.
(Medieval scholasticism pondered how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. PS contemplates how many clowns can exit a clown car.)
And that same prophet also had a Dodge pickup. The Israelites encamped at Sinai were told not to approach Moses until they heard a long blast from his Ram’s horn.
As with Donald Knuth and all aged professors, I resort to “The proof is left as an exercise.”
Did Moses have a motorcycle, too? Actually, I wasn’t thinking of him, but of David, to whom the Lord gave many Triumphs. (Ps. 18:50) Sorry, but I did try to give you the punch line…
What facts are there that can be known about Jesus? To qualify as a legend we have to have a fact or two. A mythological character is someone who never existed, there are no facts about them that can be verified and the stories about them almost always contain supernatural elements. Jesus fulfills all the qualifications for a mythical character and no qualifications required for a legendary one. People have been telling me a lot of things here but not one of them has stated a single fact about the supposed life of Jesus.
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Religion has been and is the worst human tragedy to ever happen to this planet. But you respect it and your respect has actually increased? I suggest you’ve only been looking at one side of the subject and ignoring the sheer horrors of religion, not to mention the untruths people have been indoctrinated with.
I was a student teacher and taught second grade. The students were receptive and wanted to learn. The people here, not so much.
Yes Jesus Pantera. I wish I had a dollar for every time a believer coughed up that story in the Talmud as evidence that Jesus existed. It isn’t. It’s a bunch of cooked up nonsense invented to discourage belief in the virgin birth story. As if you have to make something up to refute something someone else made up.
In my studies of the New Testament no professor ever discussed whether or not any of the events or episodes in the story of Jesus actually occurred or whether or not Jesus actually existed. That is irrelevant. And no History professor I had ever once mentioned Jesus or anything in the New Testament.
I’ve looked for scholarly work on this subject. It doesn’t exist. Outside of the New Testament there’s nothing. A perfect vacuum ready to be filled with nonsense by the likes of Bart Ehrman and others.
I didn’t say it was a list of scholars, it’s a list of mostly writers. I gathered it from several reliable sources including Tom Harpur. I’ve only read the works of a few of them and nothing really on the subject of Jesus. I posted it to show that the notion that Jesus never existed is a lot more popular than apologists know or care to admit. When it comes to the subject of religion I would trust an investigative reporter or journalist with no previous background on the subject before I would ever trust a so-called Bible scholar. When a journalist gets enough stuff wrong they get fired. When Bible scholars do they’re praised and promoted.
Well now all three of you can be wrong together.
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No, that’s wrong. Greek mythology predates the Hebrew Bible, its people and its language. The name Ισους means “healer” in Greek mythology. The name also appears in inscriptions on pottery, gifts from older males to their younger male friends that also predate the Old Testament. This is one of the many tragedies of religion, the way its salesmen purposely distort history to the point where they themselves believe their religion’s own lies. The oldest OT manuscripts are written in Greek, not Hebrew. Translations break down early, obviously and often. The Greek OT is smooth and does not look at all like a translation whereas the Hebrew is primitive, choppy and looks like a copy. So which came first? Now you know the answer.
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Nope, that’s wrong. Check the post above.
On the contrary; when I was growing up I had a long phase where I liked emphasizing all the bad things religious people had done throughout history, and I went around picking fights with religions and religious acquaintances. I devoured writers like Bertrand Russell and Tom Paine and tried to emulate their debating styles. My learning to recognize the good side of religion was a healthy rebalancing, not a naive lack of awareness of the other side.
I was also a student teacher and taught twelfth grade. I’m not sure what your point is.
The reason that did not happen is that educated scholars, trained in the study of literature, history, and ancient languages, have no more doubt over whether Jesus existed than over whether Napoleon existed. Would you expect a professor of French history to introduce his unit on Napoleon with the statement, “Before we can study Napoleon, we first have to ask whether there is any evidence that Napoleon even existed”? No professor of French history would bother, because it is just taken for granted that Napoleon existed. Similarly, it is just taken for granted that Jesus existed, by the vast majority of people with the relevant historical knowledge – ancient historians, Classicists, philologists, and so on. No one raised the question in your classes because there was no significant doubt in the field. And by the field I’m including all the historians, Classicists, etc. of whatever religious stripe – Christian, Jewish, agnostic, Deist, pantheist, atheist, etc. The number of serious scholars who doubt that Jesus ever existed is only a tiny fraction of the total number of scholars with relevant academic training.
I’m not an apologist, but I’ll comment on your statement anyway. Apologists of course know very well that there are all kinds of people who hate Christianity, and that among those, there are a hundreds who have argued that Jesus never existed. Your list (aside from its inaccuracy, since it contains several people who did not deny the reality of a historical Jesus) doesn’t tell apologists anything they didn’t already know about. I think you are confusing the hypothetical reaction, “What? There are people who don’t believe Jesus ever existed?” with the common actual reaction: “Yes, there are people who don’t believe that Jesus ever existed, but their arguments are weak and in some cases downright silly, and have all been refuted countless times.”
For someone who claims to have studied religion at the college level, I can’t say much for your research skills. The whole “quest for the historical Jesus” of the 19th century was a scholarly quest, and in almost all cases it presumed there really was a man Jesus, though whether or not he was the Messiah, whether or not he was God, whether or not he said exactly the words attributed to him in this or that Gospel, whether he saw himself as merely fulfilling Judaism or intended to start a new religion, etc., was all up for grabs. The idea was to sift out all unreliable elements in stories about Jesus and get back to some historical core, something reliable that could be said about Jesus – and that sort of sifting is something one doesn’t try to do for a figure one thinks is purely mythical. One does it only for a person one believes to have actually existed.
It remains true today that most scholars – people who have taken more than the handful of undergrad courses you say you have taken, and have spent their lives studying the languages, culture, and literature of antiquity – believe that Jesus was a Jew and teacher who really lived in ancient Palestine roughly between 6 BC and 30 AD. The vast majority of atheist and agnostic scholars would support the vast majority of Christian scholars on this. The differences between unbelievers and Christians are not over whether a man named Jesus lived during that period but over exactly what he did and said and how he conceived his mission and of course who or what he ultimately was.
No, they get hired by the New York Times and The New Republic to keep on doing what they are so good at. 
When Bible scholars get things wrong they are savaged by other Bible scholars. Bible scholars are the most anally retentive nit-pickers in all of academia. They are merciless to what they consider errors, bad research, improper methodology, etc. I don’t know what world you have lived in, but it isn’t the academic world of religious studies. Your conception seems to be of some narrow little Christian community in the Midwestern US in which there is a conspiracy of like-minded theologians and Bible scholars to preserve some narrow understanding. But the academic world of Biblical studies is now global, and the fundamentalist contingent within Biblical studies is actually quite small compared with the liberal and secular contingents.
Maybe you are thinking of places like the Dallas Theological Seminary (at least, as it used to be; I don’t know what it’s like these days) or Bob Jones University or the like. But what you are describing is nothing like religious studies and Biblical studies as they are found at Princeton, Yale, Harvard, Columbia, Johns Hopkins, McGill, Toronto, Heidelberg, Oxford, Tel Aviv, Paris, Melbourne, at the annual academic conferences of the AAR-SBL, etc.
No doubt we are all wrong, individually or collectively, on a number of things. But on the points we are discussing here, that is not the case. Neither Roy nor Mercer is a Biblical scholar or theologian, but I have been both, and I can attest that they are essentially correct in the arguments they are making against you. In your case, it seems, a little knowledge has proved a dangerous thing. From a smattering of undergraduate courses related to religion, you have drawn vast and grand conclusions which scholars who have gone much farther than you academically have not drawn. There is no reason to suppose that you know the world of Biblical scholarship, history of religion, etc. as well as those scholars, especially given that you have already displayed gross errors in your list of names of people who deny a historical Jesus. You do not demonstrate careful historical scholarship in your comments here. Given this fact, it is not surprising that the majority of readers here, given a choice between your interpretation and that of the the majority of the world’s top scholars, will choose the latter.
I have nothing against your being an atheist, or anti-Christian, or anything else. I’m objecting not to your conclusions about religion but to the inadequate methods by which you have arrived at those conclusions.
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This might be the most uninformed comments in this whole thread (and that’s saying something).
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The fact the New Testament is all written originally in Greek is odd enough. I didn’t know there was a question on the Old Testament. Please elaborate.
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You’re comparing apples and oranges. You have to either compare the ideas expressed in the literature, or the literature itself, not one of each. The oldest parts of the Hebrew Bible are believed by most scholars to predate the oldest writings of Greek mythology that we possess. Whether the ideas of Greek mythology, which go back before our earliest written texts, predate the theological ideas found in the Hebrew Bible is a different question, and one which it is probably impossible to answer. Once again, your methodology is sloppy.
Your smattering of undergraduate Greek is nowhere near enough for you to make such philological judgments. The world’s greatest Septuagint and Hebrew scholars disagree with you – including the majority of Jewish scholars working in the area, which one would think would have some weight with you given your previous remark on your upbringing.
Your continued resistance on the point about Yesous/Joshua is pointless. It is very obvious that some of the New Testament writers were aware of the Septuagint and knew what Greek words it used for Hebrew names. You appear to have learned fragments of Greek and Hebrew, and isolated bits and pieces of Biblical Studies, very incompletely.
See my longer reply above regarding some more important general considerations.
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What’s odd about it? The NT writers knew nothing of First Century Judaism, its people, its customs, its actual history, Herod, or the geography of Judea. Had they bothered to visit Jerusalem they would have seen that not all of the temple was destroyed. The gospels were written and Christianity was born right where it still sits today: Rome.
As far as the OT the oldest manuscripts we have were written in Greek not Hebrew. Maybe some “archaeologists” will “discover” some more “ancient” manuscripts and sell them to the Green family to put in their “museum” of forgeries and fakes. We’ll see.
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Says who?
The key word here is as always “believed.” On what basis do they “believe” that? Faith is not a way of knowing, it’s a wish to not know. The Greek metaphors for fertility and barrenness are clearly present in biblical literature and reflect similar purposes patterns. The ebb and flow of Dionysus’ life is a reflection of antiquity’s struggle between famine and fertility. These themes, metaphors and motifs existed in literature long before the Hebrews even existed.
My upbringing was devoid of religion. Except maybe the whole mishpachah dressing up as the characters from the Book of Esther at my aunt’s house a few times. Of course God is not mentioned in that book.
Your continued resistance to the truth about Jesus and Christianity is pointless and the future will no doubt prove this. The NT writers only knew the Septuagint which is why they have Jesus quote from it instead of the Hebrew. No wonder the Pharisees hated him in the story. Jesus in the gospels is no more Jewish than the pope. What could you possibly know that I don’t know?
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