Jesus did not rise from the dead -- My debate opening statement.

[Crossless2.0]

Drich, as much as I enjoy watching you engage 21stCenturyIconoclast (sort of like watching a man box a crippled kangaroo), your quote from 'Gotquestions' is weak as hell. Most of those sources are either suspect (e.g., later interpolations into the text of Josephus) or relatively late works that do no more than establish that there were Christians with certain beliefs, which isn't in dispute. I really don't have time today to get into the mud and wrestle over each source, and it's not terribly important that I do so, since I'm not a Jesus-myther in the first place. But a compilation of late hearsay sources really doesn't help establish much of anything beyond the existence of a community of believers, few of whom would have had anything like first-hand knowledge of what they believed.

Like it or not, the best sources we have for the historical Jesus are the canonical Gospels, and they aren't terribly good sources.

Here's a good article that discusses the problems with the secular sources as such:
http://rationalrevolution0.tripod.com/ar...istory.htm

It's a fascinating article, well worth a read.

I'll take a look when I crawl out of today's work swamp. At a glance, it does look fascinating.

For Drich (or anyone else who gives a damn), I've been re-reading John Meier's A Marginal Jew: Rethinking the Historical Jesus and can't recommend it highly enough. Meier does an admirable job also dismantling claims that the extra-Biblical "sources" we have on Jesus  are reliable or useful for establishing much of anything about Jesus that can't be gleaned from the Gospels.