The Historicity of Jesus

By -
I really don't understand anti-Christians who try to argue "Jesus never existed." Certainly, someone came up with the doctrines we call Christianity. So what if his name was Bill and not Jesus? What possible issue could turn on that question?

Comments

  1. John Goes8:47 AM

    There is a theory that Paul invented Christianity. It is not insignificant if one believes that Jesus was not Divine or not flesh, but was Christ by virtue of a human pencil.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Unknown9:23 PM

    Do you have a citation of someone who actually says that Jesus never existed? That seems like an extreme point of view that very few people would actually hold to.

    Regardless, it seems wrong to assume that someone came up with the doctrines that make up Christianity. Jesus's preaching plus Paul's writings plus generations of increasingly hegemonistic bishops and more recently a wide variety of non-Catholic preachers have crafted over 2000 years what we think of as Christianity these days, if there's even a set of doctrines that are consistent across all the various sects (I don't think you could find very many).

    ReplyDelete
  3. gcallah1:05 AM

    http://nobeliefs.com/exist.htm

    Googling "Did Jesus exist" gets 18,500 hits, many sceptical.

    Now, it's quite clear that rather a lot turns on the issue of, "Did the fellow who invented Christianity really die on the cross and rise again?" and similar things like that. But it's quite a differrent question than whether such a bloke existed at all.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Anonymous1:08 AM

    Jesus is mentioned by Josephus the Roman/Jewish historian. The doctrines of the Church were invented mainly by Paul.

    ReplyDelete
  5. Unknown2:10 PM

    Hmm, well during his reported existence, there were a number of other people claiming to be messiahs as well.

    And I think Monty Python's "The Life of Brian" does a pretty good job showing the inanity surrounding sacred cows and superstition of that time.

    This is not to say that old Jesus didn't exist.

    However, seeing as the entire line of his own family, the Jamesian side, was pushed to the wayside by Paulites, it's difficult to precisely know what the intentions of baby jesus were.

    After all, a good percentage of the official corpus in the New Testament were written by a guy who never met him and many denominations/sects spend a lot of their time strictly focused on interpreting Paul and not James -- due to the fact that Constantine promoted and edified Paul's version a the Council of Nicea.

    I wouldn't say he didn't exist, I just don't think that he was a deity nor is represented best by Paul's machinations.

    Playing the devils advocate on this particular topic can be constructive and should be used on other "faiths" such as Zoroastrianism... did he really exist the way we perceive him today?

    For what it is worth, there is a decent summation discussing these and other ideas:

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historicity_of_Jesus
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jesus-myth_hypothesis

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Libertarians, My Libertarians!

By -
Cruel to be kind means that I love you . Because, while I think you are mistaken, your hearts are in the right place -- yes, even you, Silas --  unlike some people . This Breitbart fellow (discussed in the link above), by all appearances, deliberately doctored a video of Shirley Sherrod to make her remarks appear virulently racist, when they had, in fact, the opposite import. I heard that at a recent Austrian conference, some folks were talking about "Callahan's conservative turn." While that description is not entirely inaccurate, I must say that a lot of these people who today call themselves conservative give me the heebie-jeebies.
Read more

"Pre-Galilean" Foolishness

By -
 I am currently reading The Master and His Emissary , which appears to be an excellent book. ("Appears" because I don't know the neuroscience literature well enough to say for sure, yet.) But then on page 186 I find: "Asking cognition, however, to give a perspective on the relationship between cognition and affect is like asking astronomer in the pre-Galilean geocentric world, whether, in his opinion, the sun moves round the earth of the earth around the sun. To ask a question alone would be enough to label one as mad." OK, this is garbage. First of all, it should be pre-Copernican, not pre-Galilean. But much worse is that people have seriously been considering heliocentrism for many centuries before Copernicus. Aristarchus had proposed a heliocentric model in the 4th-century BC. It had generally been considered wrong, but not "mad." (And wrong for scientific reasons: Why, for instance, did we not observe stellar parallax?) And when Copernicus propose
Read more