(October 13, 2017 at 12:54 am)Cyberman Wrote: Interestingly, the number of historians that think Jesus never existed is actually growing.Yes.
I personally am convinced that Jesus of Nazareth (the historical person) is likely either a complete fiction or a composite character. Jesus the miracle-working god-man can of course be rejected out of hand since that which is asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.
That is not to say that some intelligent people don't make a decent case for an historical Jesus (Bart Erhman being one of them last I knew); it's just to say I'm not persuaded.
For me the key is reading the NT in the rough chronological order it was written in. The earliest stuff that's closest in time to the alleged life of Christ (certain of Paul's letters), when read without the re-framing assumptions of the much later gospel mythos, raises certain interesting questions. Why does Paul mostly talk about a celestial being "seated in the heavenlies"? Why no specifics of his earthly ministry? Why no appeal to living eyewitnesses to validate Paul's teachings about Christ, but rather, to a personal subjective experience in the form of a heavenly vision?
Reading the NT this way also makes the gospels look much more like corrective proto-orthodoxy to try to undo Paul's proto-gnosticism.
But ... as others have pointed out, this is not really a very interesting question. Answering it one way or the other doesn't change anything of substance unless maybe you're a fundamentalist Bibliolater of some kind whose whole world flies apart if every jot and tittle of scripture isn't literally true and inerrant.
