Josephus and other contemporaries on Jesus

[Amarok]

Correct.  What is really amusing about all that is that Israeli archaeologists like Ronnie Reich and Eli Shukron are digging around 30 feet below street level at the actual first century level of the city while above their heads xtians delude themselves like this!






No, no.  You're just making the tourist industry profitable which is at least the one thing that jews and arabs can agree on!

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BTW, here's Ronnie Reich with a significant discovery made by digging under the Western Wall.  I bet the Waqf was pissed about that but it does back up Josephus' claim that the Temple Mount complex was completed by Herod's grandson Herod Agrippa II.

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Here's one: Bart Ehrman.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Did_Jesus_...F_(Ehrman)

He's a New Testament scholar, but also an open agnostic, and even he points out that the Jesus myth hypothesis is not seriously considered by historians or experts in the field at all. And once again, he's extremely well-versed in this area (and has written 25 books on the New Testament, including three college textbooks) and, as someone who doesn't believe (he admits that the more he looked into the Bible, the less he believed; admittedly, it's the problem of evil that pushed him into nonbelief), has enough distance that he can actually examine the evidence without trying to force the ideas he already holds into it.

So, if someone with these credentials says he probably did exist (even if the Gospels ended up embellished to the point where the real person becomes a myth, which he does point out throughout his books), I'm inclined to believe him.

I lost a lot of respect for Ehrman the first time I read that he supported the watered down variant of the TF.  He makes no attempt to figure out what happened he simply blindly follows the herd.  Someone has to answer the question of "what the fuck was Origen reading when he quoted Book XVIII of Antiquities.  And none of them do it.

maybe Origen was high on hemp oil a lot of people were back then