Challenge to atheists: I find your lack of faith disturbing!

[Aractus]

Doesn't look like anybody ever provided this link:

http://www.jesusneverexisted.com/

It goes over in extenstive detail the evidence.

All I know about Kenneth Humphreys is that he isn't a New Testament scholar for one thing, so he has no expertise or authority in the matter, and that he was the clear loser of this debate against Prof. Gary Habermas (I haven't watched this debate, perhaps you can watch it and decide who you think the winner is):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=93UyXGfYDG4

Why you would get your facts from someone not qualified to give them in the first place is beyond me.

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Re: the Holocaust, that has historical evidence to support it. The Biblical 'story' is just that, a story. Historians are guessing at 'what might have actually taken place,' based on using the Bible as their main reference. Without the Bible, there is no story.

Once again, I see you've jumped to a conclusion without regard to the facts. Yes, historians often make "guesses", that's what they do - but historians that specialize in the life or the time of Jesus we call New Testament scholars. It doesn't mean they have to be a Christian - in fact some are Jewish, atheist, etc, but what it means they study the ancient Greek language, documents (like the books of the Bible, the Gnostic texts, the writings of Josephus, other ancient Roman documents, ancient Jewish documents, early church documents), artefacts and other materials from the time period. So your claim that "without the Bible there is no story" is false, in fact nearly the entire NT Bible could be recreated from the quotations found in ancient literature by the church fathers, even if you erased each and every ancient manuscript of the Bible. It's a moot point because we have the 27 NT books in their entirety, but the fact is that even if we didn't have the Bible we'd still have it and it'd still be studied by NT scholars.

And if you lined up 100 historians in a room, and asked them to decipher the Bible and give their best guess as to what might have happened, if Jesus actually existed, etc...you'd get 100 different answers. Taking the Bible and making wild assumptions and historical guesses out of it doesn't build a credible historical case for it.

Incorrect. As I've stated many times there is consensus among critical scholars (those'd be the non-religious or religious but non-Christian ones) that Jesus: 1. lived, 2. was baptized by john, 3. called disciples, 4. gave sermons/talks (eg sermon on the mount) 5. was crucified on a roman cross. There's a few other points they also agree on (eg that Paul wrote at least 7 of the epistles attributed to him, that he knew the family of Jesus, that Luke-Acts is written by the one author, etc). If you had 100 NT critical scholars in a room you'd be lucky to find one that doesn't think that Jesus actually existed, and if you did you'd have found someone with theories well outside general scholarly thought, he'd be the Halton Arp of NT scholarship.

It is still 'just a story,' and it is only relevant in a religious sense. The Holocaust has bona fide evidence to support it. I wouldn't use that as your argument to support your assertion that the Bible has historical merit as well.

Jesus has bona fide evidence too. Hell you'd easily find more Holocaust Deniers than fair dinkum NT scholars willing to say that Jesus didn't exist!

A man named Jesus 'might' have existed. A man named Adolf Hitler really did exist.

So you're more qualified to tell me that than the critical scholars that say Jesus certainly existed?

During that timeframe, it was not uncommon for people to believe that ''gods'' were impregnating mere mortals. Hmmm...then, the fantastic story emerges about Jesus being born of a ''virgin.'' Coincidence?

And what's your evidence for this assertion? (FYI I require evidence relevant to the beliefs of Palestinian Jews, not say Egyptians that lived 4,000 years before them).

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I didn't see this video, but Paul almost certainly did not write half the letters attributed to him in the New Testament. And this is not an opinion intended to piss off Christians, although it certainly would have that effect on some of them.

I'm interested as to why you personally believe this? I'm going to assume you accept these ones: Romans, 1-2 Corinthians, Galatians, Philippians, 1 Thessalonians, Philemon and reject these: Ephesians, Colossians, 2 Thessalonians, 1-2 Timothy, and Titus.

Scholarly thought is divided on this issue, seemingly pretty evenly, so why do you come down on the side against Pauline authorship of those 6 epistles? I don't even hear Ehrman saying that he "certainly didn't write those six" as you do...