Any Evidence For A Historical Jesus?

[Minimalist]

This ought to piss them off.

Philip R. Davies, one of the more respected Minimalist Old Testament scholars has a new essay at Bible and Interpretation in which he can't resist weighing in on the historical jesus routine.

http://www.bibleinterp.com/opeds/dav368029.shtml

The new collection of essays Is This Not the Carpenter represents something of the agenda I have had in mind: surely the rather fragile historical evidence for Jesus of Nazareth should be tested to see what weight it can bear, or even to work out what kind of historical research might be appropriate. Such a normal exercise should hardly generate controversy in most fields of ancient history, but of course New Testament studies is not a normal case and the highly emotive and dismissive language of, say, Bart Ehrman’s response to Thompson’s The Mythic Past shows (if it needed to be shown), not that the matter is beyond dispute, but that the whole idea of raising this question needs to be attacked, ad hominem, as something outrageous. This is precisely the tactic anti-minimalists tried twenty years ago: their targets were ‘amateurs’, ‘incompetent’, and could be ignored. The ‘amateurs’ are now all retired professors, while virtually everyone else in the field has become minimalist (if in most cases grudgingly and tacitly). So, as the saying goes, déjà vu all over again.

If I have any complaint it is that WE are not the ones insisting that fucking "jesus" was real. I think the evidence for jesus is even less compelling that Davies, does...and he doesn't think much of it. But we do retain the right to blast the living shit out of those fundie morons who show up here insisting that he was.... in all his miracle-working glory.