If Jesus wasn’t a real historical figure, where did Christian theology come from?
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Anonymous
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Basically dcum posters are putting themselves on par with scholars and historians of antiquity. And blanket stating how their opinions are equal to and supersede every scholar snd historian.
That’s where the skinhead Nazi holocaust denier and flat earth proponent and vaxxx denier comes in. That’s not an attack. That’s an accurate description of your behavior. |
Anonymous
Wow. That is a whole lot of nasty just to say you don’t have any hard evidence. |
Anonymous
Jesus did more than just exist. He said and did a great many things that most historians are reasonably certain we can know about today. .... A hundred and fifty years ago a fairly well respected scholar named Bruno Bauer maintained that the historical Jesus never existed. Anyone who says that today - in the academic world at least - gets grouped with the skinheads who say there was no Holocaust and the scientific holdouts who want to believe the world is flat. M A Powell, Trinity Lutheran Seminary |
Anonymous
You seem quite eager to blindly follow people who you deem an “authority”. Regardless of their own biases and motivations. Don’t question. Just believe. Don’t look up. |
Anonymous
Using the words of an evangelical pastor doesn’t make it any less ad hominem. |
Anonymous
There are those who argue that Jesus is a figment of the Church’s imagination, that there never was a Jesus at all. I have to say that I do not know any respectable critical scholar who says that any more. Richard A. Burridge, Professor of Biblical Interpretation, Kings College, London |
Anonymous
Powell was Professor of New Testament at Trinity Lutheran Seminary in Columbus, Ohio until his retirement in 2018. He is editor of the HarperCollins Bible Dictionary and author of more than 100 articles and 35 books on the Bible and religion, including a widely used textbook, Introducing the New Testament (Baker Academic, 2009). Powell has held a number of positions in the academic guild of theological studies. From 1992–1996, he served as co-chair of The Matthew Group, a section of the Society of Biblical Literature devoted to the study of Matthew's Gospel, and from 2000–2006, he served as Chair of The Historical Jesus Section for that same organization. He has also served for many years as editor of the Society of Biblical Literature's dissertation series (Academia Biblica), and he has been on the editorial boards of numerous professional journals, including Catholic Biblical Quarterly, Journal of Biblical Literature, and Word and World. He is one of the founding editors of the Journal for the Study of the Historical Jesus. Powell's primary contributions in the field of biblical/theological studies have been in three areas: the application of modern literary criticism to the Bible, the interpretation of the Gospel of Matthew as a product of early Christian formation developing out of Judaism, and the scholarly appraisal of what can be reliably known about Jesus through the application of traditional historical methodology. Powell is best known to many students of religion as the author of a few widely used textbooks. His Introducing the New Testament (Baker Academic 2009; 2nd. ed., 2018), is designed to serve as a college textbook for survey courses on the New Testament. It is descriptive in tone, avoiding stands on contentious issues; well illustrated with color reproductions of artwork from various cultures depicting New Testament themes; and "another noteworthy feature, perhaps the most important one, is that the book is filled with hyperlinks to a website (www.IntroducingNT.com)" offering extensive printable material, including hundreds of supplemental essays and bibliographies.[1] Powell's What Is Narrative Criticism? (Fortress Press, 1990) is a standard work for introducing students to modern literary criticism and its application to the Gospels. His Jesus as a Figure in History(Westminster/John Knox, 1998; 2nd ed., 2012) is the standard text for many institutions that feature history courses on Jesus or Christian origins. Another book, Fortress Introduction to the Gospels (Fortress Press, 1998; 2nd ed. 2020) is often used at a graduate level for courses focusing on the distinctive characteristics and theological messages of the four New Testament Gospels. |
Anonymous
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Are you capable of a discussion? Or can you only copy & paste the same crap over and over again?
Here you go: “Historical reconstruction is never absolutely certain, and in the case of Jesus it is sometimes highly uncertain.” |
Anonymous
Still ad hominem… |
Anonymous
Today, nearly all historians, whether Christians or not, accept that Jesus existed and that the gospels contain plenty of valuable evidence which has to be weighed and assessed critically. The late Graham Stanton, Cambridge University |
Anonymous
So zero original thought. Noted. Is that how “believing” works? Less critical thinking skills = stronger “beliefs”? |
Anonymous
That’s where the holocaust and flat earther comparison comes in and is accurate. Anti-vaxx comparison too. You have access to what that these phd level scholars and historians don’t have that disproves them all? All of them, you can disprove? And what about the non-Christian historians and scholars that believe Jesus existed? What’s your issue with them? They are not critical thinkers? They don’t have access to atheist blogs that mean absolutely nothing in the historical academic world? You have found what on the internet to disprove the atheist scholars and historians that say historical Jesus is a certainty? There are no Christian or Atheist or Agnostic historians or scholars that are respected in their field that say Jesus did not exist. What critical thinking skills or evidence do you have to refute them? |
Anonymous
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I have read quite a few books by Bart Ehrman and (quite obviously) disagree with much of what he says. And yet recently I decided to read his book Did Jesus Exist? If you are looking for a book that provides a fair analysis of the evidence for the existence of the historical Jesus, and offers an informed and insightful critique of mythicism, then this book should be at the top of your list.
What is the scholarly consensus about the historical Jesus? “Despite the enormous range of opinion, there are several points on which virtually all scholars of antiquity agree. Jesus was a Jewish man, known to be a preacher and teacher, who was crucified (a Roman form of execution) in Jerusalem during the reign of the Roman emperor Tiberius, when Pontius Pilate was the governor of Judea” (p. 12). How seriously is mythicism taken in the academy? “It is fair to say that mythicists as a group, and as individuals, are not taken seriously by the vast majority of scholars in the field of New Testament, early Christianity, ancient history, and theology” (20). "The idea that Jesus did not exist is a modern notion. It has no ancient precedents. It was made up in the eighteenth century. One might as well call it a modern myth, the myth of the mythical Jesus" (96). Why don’t Greek and Roman authors mention Jesus in the first century? “It is also true…that no Greek or Roman author from the first century mentions Jesus. It would be very convenient for us if they did, but alas, they do not. At the same time, the fact is again a bit irrelevant since these same sources do not mention many millions of people who actually did live. Jesus stands here with the vast majority of living, breathing, human beings of earlier ages” (43). “If an important Roman aristocratic ruler of a major province [Pontius Pilate] is not mentioned any more than that in the Greek and Roman writings, what are the chances that a lower-class Jewish teacher (which Jesus must have been, as everyone who thinks he lived agrees) would be mentioned in them? Almost none” (45). “[F]rom Roman Palestine of the entire first century we have precisely one, and only one, author of literary texts whose works have survived… That one author is Josephus” [And according to Ehrman, Josephus testifies to important facts surrounding the life and death of Jesus, 49, 57-66]. How important is the historical Jesus? “One could argue as well that Jesus is the most important person in the history of the West, looked at from a historical, social, or cultural perspective, quite apart from his religious significance” (95). https://seanmcdowell.org/blog/bart-ehrman-on-the-existence-of-jesus-great-quotes |
Anonymous
“Despite this, we have a good idea of the main lines of his ministry and his message. We know who he was, what he did, what he taught, and why he died. ..... the dominant view [among scholars] today seems to be that we can know pretty well what Jesus was out to accomplish, that we can know a lot about what he said, and that those two things make sense within the world of first-century Judaism.” EP Sanders, Oxford & Duke Universities You took a single sentence from the entire quote. Why did you do that? |
Anonymous
You think the words and works of every respected scholar and historian quoted here is crap? Why? |