Massacre of the Innocents

[Fake Messiah]

Huggy, like most xhristards, thinks "real historians" are those that tell him what he wants to hear.

Theists should keep in mind that mythicists win in biblical studies. Take the Old Testament: It's no longer taboo for historians to declare that Adam, Eve, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Job, Jonah, Joseph, Joshua, Moses, Noah, Sampson, Ruth and Boaz, and a sizable portion of the Old Testament's other most prominent major characters never existed. They are purely literary creations.

Like Richard Carrier says:

"Moses is now regarded as fictional, yet like Jesus he performed miracles, had huge numbers of followers, gave speeches and had travels, and dictated laws. No mainstream historian today believes the book of Deuteronomy was even written in the same century as Moses, much less by Moses, or that it preserves anything Moses actually said or did – yet it purports to do so, at extraordinary length and in remarkable detail. No real historian today would accept as valid an argument like ‘Moses had to have existed, because so many sayings and teachings were attributed to him!’And yet if this argument is invalid for Moses, it’s invalid for Jesus."

And also he points out the problems of historical Jesus:

The quest for the historical Jesus has failed spectacularly. More importantly, the many contradictory versions of Jesus now confidently touted by different Jesus scholars are all so very plausible – yet not all can be true. In fact, as only one can be (and that at most), almost all must be false. So the establishment of this kind of “strong plausibility” has been decisively proved not to be a reliable indicator of the truth. Yet Jesus scholars keep treating it as if it were.

This has left us with a confused mass of disparate opinions, vast libraries of theories and interpretations essentially impossible to keep up with, and no real attempts at improving or criticizing the worst and gathering the best into any sort of coherent consensus view of what actually happened at the dawn of Christianity, or even during its first two hundred years.