Quote:The thing is, though, there's no point in promoting Ehrman's books as proof that Jesus didn't exist. Minimalist will have to find a different source of information.
I'm starting to wonder about you, Ape. If you expect to find a definitive book out there which is going to answer all your questions you have two choices. Hang yourself now, because it will never happen or become a theist and grasp onto their fucking bible and tell yourself the whole story is true.
As D-P said, Ehrman in his field on analyzing ancient texts is one of the best. But his "evidence" for his jesus being historical is the same shit as all of the others and it is not convincing. You had best ask yourself what he means by a "historical jesus." That's a little shaky, too. Ehrman sees jesus as a apocalyptic preacher but without the miracles and all the other holy horseshit that got tacked on. The problem with that is that there is no evidence at all for that view. The only stories of "jesus" are the god stories with all of the magic tricks. Ehrman's speculation on other stories is no more valid than your own because we do not have any such stories.
Like I said, you are not going to find any sort of coherent narrative because the early church did a great job of making sure that any such writings were suppressed. The trick is to evaluate disparate pieces of information and try to fit them together and when you do that you can not make mistakes such as you did when you said that 3 Roman historians mentioned jesus. They did not. They mentioned xtians. None of them used the word "jesus" and as you should know by now I doubt that Tacitus even said "christianos." If you examine the correspondence between Pliny and Trajan you'll note that Pliny mentions nothing about any of the main points of xtianity as we now know it. Further, Trajan's reply is exceedingly mild. So mild that I would prefer him on the US Supreme Court than some of the republicunt fuckwits we have now. But neither Trajan nor Pliny gives a hint that xtians were a bunch of raving arsonists who burned down the capital when both were boys. Were Tacitus' account true one would imagine that their attitude towards xtians would have been a bit harsher. But it isn't.
You have to THINK about these anomalies, Ape.
