Any Evidence For A Historical Jesus?

[DeistPaladin]

I see here a clear contradiction in your thinking, FTR. First you tacitly admit these are the earliest manuscripts, (which is why they were chosen for the Bible BTW)

Bart Ehrman is better trained than I am to comment on which were the earliest manuscripts and why they were chosen. There was a hoard of different gospels, epistles and apocalypses, and while I can comment on the order in which the books of the NT were written, I can't on the others that were rejected. And he doesn't seem to think, based on Lost Christianities, that the books are as unchanged as fundies today like to think. The Ebionites, according to Ehrman, had their version of Matthew which dropped the part about his virgin birth. The Marcionites had a their version of Luke.

I can only assume with Paul, the poster-boy for the Marcionite faith, that his epistles read much differently than the ones we have today. Or else Marion would have been promoting him as his primary prophet hoping no one would actually read what he wrote!

Then you say there are all these variant interpretations of Jesus' life and purposes. Granted, some things in the NT are not easy to understand, but if these manuscripts are the earliest, and they do not disagree with each other, you have contradicted your point.

OK, first of all, are you under the delusion that there was a published NT for the early Christians to reference to know that the Marionites were wrong, that Jesus was born of a woman or that the Ebionites were wrong, that Jesus did claim to be god? If this had been the case, the wouldn't have been such a big problem.

Second of all, the books of the NT are not as unchanged as you might like to believe. Ehrman has commented on how the story of Jesus and "cast the first stone" wasn't added to the story until hundreds of years later. The change to Mark 16, with the inclusion of the resurrection, was a later addition (a point not in dispute by Christian scholars).

You have a case only if there are disagreements and contradictions within these manuscripts. Can we fairly assume you can't really find any, so you have to talk about disagreements among sects?

There are vast disagreements with the modern books of the NT. Search the synoptic gospels in vain for any reference to Jesus calling himself God. The closest you can come is Matthews mangled misquote of Isaiah 7:14. These books clearly depict a Jesus separate from and completely subordinate to Yahweh. Echoes of the Ebionite belief of salvation through keeping the Law is found in Matthew, a stark contrast to the Pauline epistles. Echoes of the struggle with the Docetic Christians is found in the epistles of John, which argue for Christians to have faith that Jesus came in the flesh (the Docetics believed that Jesus was a purely spiritual being).

Instead you make rather gratuitous assertions, like "The distinctions between these early Christianities would make the difference between Islam and Trinitarian Christianity look like petty hairsplitting."

Even if that were true, which it is not, ...

Actually, it is. Modern Christians and Muslims would agree that:

1. Jesus was a physical being (Docetics would disagree)
2. Jesus was born and had a childhood (Marcionites would disagree)
3. Jesus' mother was a virgin (Ebionites would disagree)
4. Jesus preached about the faith of the Abrahamic god (Marionites would disagree)
5. Jesus preached that there was one god (Marcionites would disagree).

Was there one god, two, several, hundreds? Was Jesus a physical being? If he was, was he a god, an angel, or a mortal man? How do we gain salvation? Did Jesus preach to keep the Law or discard it? These are serious theological differences and yet they are all part of "Christianity" in the first few centuries.