Any Evidence For A Historical Jesus?

[Confused Ape]

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

Interesting article because I think he's taking a sensible approach.

But one should not argue from these, as do Thompson and Verenna, that Jesus was invented. The use in this particular case of such mythic types ought to have been provoked by something,and the existence of a guru of some kind is more plausible and economical than any other explanation—which, by the way, does not necessarily make it the right one, but historian’s rules apply: plausibility and economy are the trump cards. How quickly stories about a guru can be manufactured, and how the outline of a possibly historically figure can be obliterated by all kinds of creative ‘memory’ is clear from the Qumran allusions to the ‘Teacher of Righteousness’. Awareness of such types and tropes should inform the historian how easily traces of historical reality can be painted over in the colours of myth and the conventions of storytelling.

So, there might have been a real man who was mythicized. We'll never know anything about him if he did exist, though.

I found one of the reader comments rather interesting.

The whole "Jesus is a myth" vogue is simply the ultimate extension of the anti-Jewish tendencies in Bible scholarship. Our scholastic pseudo-elite would rather have no historical Christ at all than a merely human, ie. purely Jewish, Christ.

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.

I wonder why so many Christians think atheists are dreadful people.