Christians - What would you do if it were discovered Jesus never existed?

[Drich]

I see a lot of empty and unsupported assertions concerning Christ and the historical paper trail surrounding him. Do you have anything to go on besides your word? You by not providing any citations or any other proof of any kinda means, that because you have access to anti Christian commentary we are supposed to simply take you at your 'expert' word. Maybe this is how it works where you are from, but for those who genuinely think for themselves you need to be able to provide some primary or secondary source material to support those otherwise empty words.

Are you so seriously ignorant of Christian scholarship that you need me to tell you when the books of the Bible were supposed to be written?  Just do a search for the words "New Testament dates written" (without the quotation marks) and you will get plenty of links to sites, many of which are run by Christians, giving you dates of composition.  You will there see that the entire New Testament was written many years after Jesus was supposed to have lived.  But since you are either an idiot or dishonest in your approach to this, here are some links for you, some of which are to sites run by religious people:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Testam...omposition

http://www.biblestudytools.com/resources...ament.html

http://www.beginningcatholic.com/when-wa...itten.html

https://carm.org/wasnt-new-testament-wri...ter-christ

Basically, all reputable scholars say that all of the books of the New Testament were written years after Jesus supposedly lived.  Even the religious ones, as you can see from a couple of the links above.  The exact dates of composition are generally not known, so there is some range commonly given, but no respectable scholar tells us that any of it was written during Jesus' lifetime.  Some, of course, try to push the dates closer to Jesus' lifetime to try to make them seem more authoritative, but most of them are not so dishonest as to try to pretend that they were actually written during Jesus' lifetime.

If you need me to tell you this, you obviously do not take Christianity very seriously.

Sorry i jumped the gun with you. I assumed you knew more. let's start over. First You do understand that Christ's ministry lasted only 3 years, in an age with out news and internet. In an age like that word tended to get around little slower (will come back to that point...) And you do also understand that in an Oral society (one's who's literacy rate was less than 2%) your modern value to the written word does not hold the same value. things like intergrity, honor, and reputation of the person relaying the story would be of the most importance (which holds true today as well in a round about way.)

So outside of the apstoles (who carried the words of Christ himself and eye witnessed everything that happened) their was no direct need to write anything down till the came to the understanding that Jesus may not return with in their life times. That left those like Theophilus, who was Theophilus? he was the man/master of St. Luke who charged him to find out and document what was going on in Jeruslem. Theophilus did not accompany Luke, many suspect he was older/well to do high ranking person of rome or maybe a priest. Either way he was well established. The book of luke if you read 1:1 forward Luke is writing to his master Theophilus about the life and ministry of Christ. He was an understudy of Paul. There are estimates that put them together as early as 40AD to and late as 60AD. I tend toward the earlier date simply because the stories would have been better known to Theophilus, and he wouldn't have sent someone to check things out.

So again, your comparing apples and oranges. You hold writtings of supreme importance, but the culture you are judgeing did not, so your 'standard' is meaningless in that time frame.