(July 9, 2013 at 1:38 am)MindForgedManacle Wrote: I enjoyed Erhman's Misquoting Jesus and Lost Christianities. They're good introductions on the topic of New Testament historicity.
You might want to watch out for endorsements on the 'Jesus-Myth' hypothesis though. They tend to make faulty and extensive comparisons between Jesus and other mythological figures. That's not to say that Jesus has NO common legendary/mythic elements, but the extensive comparisons are very difficult to argue for, even for the best.
I would agree. Most of the comparisons of jesus to other mythical figures are speculative at best and solely dependent on shaky insinuations of translation (mithraism, stemming from zoroastrianism may be the exception being that the two religions are contemporary and stem from the same region), which is why the bible itself is often criticized. This holds true for the comparison of the jesus narrative to the Homeric epics.
It's compelling, but not scholarly steadfast.
But now I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret is as though it had an underlying truth.
Umberto Eco
Umberto Eco
