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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]If only you understood how what you posted totally supports the other position.

Every single point you make drives home the similarities.  It's like that SNL sketch, "No it's fine, we call ourselves Jon Bovi! It's totally different!" :-)

Also, you responded to a post that admitted a man Jesus may have existed, and even prominent scholars and atheists like Bart Ehrmann believe  that is true;  however that gives no documentation to the historicity of the supernatural Jesus, and none of the supernatural aspects have any contemporaneous accounts.

Wouldn't they have been big news? [/quote]

Well. It created the world’s largest religion with approximately 2.4 billion members 2 thousand years later, so you could say big news is an understatement.

The Bible documents Jesus well....the most read book in the world is the Bible. Writer James Chapman created a list of the most read books in the world based on the number of copies each book sold over the last 50 years. He found that the Bible far outsold any other book, with a whopping 3.9 billion copies sold over the last 50 years.

Pretty good for a troublesome Jewish boy who never existed.

[/quote]

The Bible is a wonderful book but it's not documentation in the historical or archaeological sense. It's not independent evidence. Which isn't to say that events or personages mentioned didn't exist, but if someone wants proof, there has to be independent proof. There's never been any historical proof found of Israelites in Egypt, for example. That doesn't stop Jews from celebrating a major religious holiday associated with liberation, but if one is interested in archaeology, it must be acknowledged.

There's enough evidence of Jesus that it's pretty clear he existed. Of course there can never be evidence that he performed miracles or was the son of G-d because those are matters of faith and not archaeology. [/quote]

It's a great story. Period.

Maybe there was some guy named Jesus. Maybe not. There is no proof (and, no, it's not "pretty clear he existed"). Doesn't really matter though. The STORY of Jesus is what changed the world. Not an actual person. People want to believe it. And people are happy to tell the story to control others. Everyone is happy. Pretty convenient story.

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Virtually all scholars of antiquity agree that Jesus existed.[5][6][7][note 1] Reconstructions of the historical Jesus are based on the Pauline epistles and the Gospels, while several non-Biblical sources also bear witness to the historical existence of Jesus. Since the 18th century, three separate scholarly quests for the historical Jesus have taken place, each with distinct characteristics and developing new and different research criteria.[9][10]

Scholars differ about the beliefs and teachings of Jesus as well as the accuracy of the biblical accounts, and the only two events subject to "almost universal assent" are that Jesus was baptized by John the Baptist and was crucified by the order of the Roman Prefect Pontius Pilate.[11][12][13][14] Historical Jesus scholars typically contend that he was a Galilean Jew living in a time of messianic and apocalyptic expectations.[15][16] Some scholars credit the apocalyptic declarations of the gospels to him, while others portray his "Kingdom of God" as a moral one, and not apocalyptic in nature.[17]
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_Jesus

5] In a 2011 review of the state of modern scholarship, Bart Ehrman (a secular agnostic) wrote: "He certainly existed, as virtually every competent scholar of antiquity, Christian or non-Christian, agrees" B. Ehrman, 2011 Forged : writing in the name of God ISBN 978-0-06-207863-6. p. 285

6] Robert M. Price (an atheist who denies the existence of Jesus) agrees that this perspective runs against the views of the majority of scholars: Robert M. Price "Jesus at the Vanishing Point" in The Historical Jesus: Five Views edited by James K. Beilby & Paul Rhodes Eddy, 2009 InterVarsity, ISBN 028106329X p. 61

7] Michael Grant (a classicist) states that "In recent years, 'no serious scholar has ventured to postulate the non historicity of Jesus' or at any rate very few, and they have not succeeded in disposing of the much stronger, indeed very abundant, evidence to the contrary." in Jesus: An Historian's Review of the Gospels by Michael Grant 2004 ISBN 1898799881 p. 200

1] Jesus Remembered by James D. G. Dunn 2003 ISBN 0-8028-3931-2 p, 339 states of baptism and crucifixion that these "two facts in the life of Jesus command almost universal assent".

13]  Crossan, John Dominic (1995). Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography. HarperOne. p. 145. ISBN 978-0-06-061662-5. That he was crucified is as sure as anything historical can ever be, since both Josephus and Tacitus ... agree with the Christian accounts on at least that basic fact.

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