Reply to How do you "know" that Jesus/Christianity is not just a crazy story?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote][quote=Anonymous]As regards taking on Jesus "directly", what would that look like exactly?  I'm honestly curious to know.[/quote]

It's not hard.  Take Jesus, and decide if he was just a man, or if he really was God, and why.  There's no need to bring up other topics.  That's the essence of Christianity right there.  Take it, examine it, then accept it or reject it.[/quote]

Sure, let's unpack this a bit.  There's little direct evidence that the story of Jesus is literally true.  By that I mean, born in a manger, became a carpenter, assembled a following of 12 disciples, preached as a rabbi, threw money-changers out of the Temple, and was crucified.  Were there itenerant holy-men wandering in the area of modern day Israel at that time?  Lots.  The story of Jesus is likely an agglomeration of such stories into a single mythological person.

[quote]
I think a grand total of one PP dismissed Jesus directly, and the reason given?  Biblical accounts are unreliable.  Are they really?  And is that all you've got?[/quote]

Since it's the Biblical account that is pretty much the sole evidence that Jesus lived, and further, had a set of supernatural powers ascirbed to him, I'm curious why you think their innate unreliability of those accounts is trivial.  It's as though you claimed to discover a new planet with a telescope, then when I pointed out that your telescope is not, in fact, a telescope at all but a paper-towel tube wrapped in duct-tape, and you responded:  "Really?  Is that all you've got?"  What more is needed?

[quote]The most "authoritative" accounts of a historical Jesus come from the four canonical Gospels of the Bible. Note that these Gospels did not come into the Bible as original and authoritative from the authors themselves, but rather from the influence of early church fathers, especially the most influential of them all: Irenaeus of Lyon who lived in the middle of the second century. Many heretical gospels existed by that time, but Irenaeus considered only some of them for mystical reasons. He claimed only four in number; according to Romer, "like the four zones of the world, the four winds, the four divisions of man's estate, and the four forms of the first living creatures-- the lion of Mark, the calf of Luke, the man of Matthew, the eagle of John (see Against the Heresies). The four gospels then became Church cannon for the orthodox faith. Most of the other claimed gospel writings were burned, destroyed, or lost." [Romer]

Elaine Pagels writes: "Although the gospels of the New Testament-- like those discovered at Nag Hammadi-- are attributed to Jesus' followers, no one knows who actually wrote any of them." [Pagels, 1995]

Not only do we not know who wrote them, consider that none of the Gospels existed during the alleged life of Jesus, nor do the unknown authors make the claim to have met an earthly Jesus. Add to this that none of the original gospel manuscripts exist; we only have copies of copies.

The consensus of many biblical historians put the dating of the earliest Gospel, that of Mark, at sometime after 70 C.E., and the last Gospel, John after 90 C.E. [Pagels, 1995; Helms]. This would make it some 40 years after the alleged crucifixion of Jesus that we have any Gospel writings that mention him! Elaine Pagels writes that "the first Christian gospel was probably written during the last year of the war, or the year it ended. Where it was written and by whom we do not know; the work is anonymous, although tradition attributes it to Mark..." [Pagels, 1995]

The traditional Church has portrayed the authors as the apostles Mark, Luke, Matthew, & John, but scholars know from critical textural research that there simply occurs no evidence that the gospel authors could have served as the apostles described in the Gospel stories. Yet even today, we hear priests and ministers describing these authors as the actual disciples of Christ. Many Bibles still continue to label the stories as "The Gospel according to St. Matthew," "St. Mark," "St. Luke," St. John." No apostle would have announced his own sainthood before the Church's establishment of sainthood. But one need not refer to scholars to determine the lack of evidence for authorship. As an experiment, imagine the Gospels without their titles. See if you can find out from the texts who wrote them; try to find their names.

...

Please understand that the stories themselves cannot serve as examples of eyewitness accounts since they came as products of the minds of the unknown authors, and not from the characters themselves. The Gospels describe narrative stories, written almost virtually in the third person. People who wish to portray themselves as eyewitnesses will write in the first person, not in the third person. Moreover, many of the passages attributed to Jesus could only have come from the invention of its authors. For example, many of the statements of Jesus claim to have come from him while allegedly alone. If so, who heard him? It becomes even more marked when the evangelists report about what Jesus thought. To whom did Jesus confide his thoughts? Clearly, the Gospels employ techniques that fictional writers use. In any case the Gospels can only serve, at best, as hearsay, and at worst, as fictional, mythological, or falsified stories.
[/quote]

As far as non-Christian sources that are claimed to support the existence of Jesus (Josephus Flavius, Pliny the Younger, Tacitus, etc...) all lived after the alleged life of Jesus.

[quote]I'm not insulted when people change the subject, but I am a bit frustrated.  But it's understandable.  When I was intensely working my way through these questions, my friends would patiently work through each and every objection I had, and when I had nothing left, I would just shrug and say, "It's still theoretically possible you're wrong.". Because I didn't want to share their conclusion.

On the flip side, I'm honestly curious to know what your #1 direct objection to Jesus might be?  [/quote]

My main objection is this:  there's no hard evidence he existed, less that he had supernatural powers, and it's actually *less* likely that he was some sort of divinely inspired prophet than, say, Joseph Smith.  At least we know from many first-hand, non-biased sources that he existed.  And there's every bit as much eyewitness evidence that Smith was the conduit through which miracles were performed.

You get into a problem of infinite recursion when you try to use the Bible as an eyewitness account of the life of Jesus, since the books of the Bible were written by multiple people at different times, they were also rewritten, modified, some elevated to the canon, others relegated to the apochrypha (or worse discarded).  It makes total sense that they form something of a coherent and internally consistent narrative.  Why wouldn't they?[/quote]

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