From a jesus freak site on Van Voorst:
This is apologetic nonsense.
1 - Paul seems as phony as "jesus." He does not appear even in the xtian record until the 2d century and that is a big fucking problem.
2- The "earliness" of the gospels is part of the story...like Luke Skywalker being born on Tattooine. We have no evidence at all of this claim..which does not prevent jesus freaks from regurgitating it relentlessly. Nonetheless, the earliest fragments of copies are also 2d century.
3- Not evidence. Merely a baseless assertion.
4- Why would there be early opponents if the story itself is not early?
We see xtian dogma fleshed out - more or less - in Justyn Martyr c 160 AD and almost immediately we have Lucian of Samosata making fun of it and 20 years later Celsus is blasting the living shit out of it.
But if there is no "jesus" in the first century how could anyone "oppose" it?
5- Xtian wet dream. The evidence for Tacitus is mainly wishful thinking and Josephus is an obvious forgery. The 11th century manuscript of Tacitus' Annales shows under ultraviolet light that the word was "chrestianos" not "christianos." This puts Tacitus' manuscript more in tune with what his contemporary Suetonius wrote when he said that "Chrestus was causing trouble in Rome" during the reign of Claudius.
The Chrestus/Christos enigma is bizarre but the fact remains that neither Suetonius, Pliny nor apparently Tacitus ever heard of any fucking "jesus." Josephus was called a forgery by Bishop Warburton in the 1760s. It remained such until embarrassed fundie preachers decided to breath life back into the corpse by claiming that there was a watered down version of it....which they cannot produce anywhere except their own imaginations.
6- Most arguments that jesus was a historical person come from people with a decided bias...not to mention financial interest...in asserting that there was one. Add in the fact that for 1800 years these fine xtians would burn anyone at the stake who denied their godboy and point #6 fades into oblivion. Now that the church has lost its power to murder people they are losing control....as evidenced by the empty churches which are worrying them so.
7- Simply untrue. Stories of assorted heavenly horseshit fill the literature of the Hellenistic world...which jesus freaks might learn if they put their fucking bibles down long enough to learn something useful.
You'll have to do better than Van Voorst.
Quote:In Jesus outside the New Testament, Robert Van Voorst gives 7 reasons why historians are confident Jesus lived:
The Apostle Paul did not say a lot about Jesus (an argument sometimes used by sceptics, but this is an argument from silence and therefore invalid without positive evidence). But Paul did know about Jesus, and was unlikely to write a lot of historical detail in letters.
The gospels are too early for invention (too many people would have remembered the real facts), and their accurate references to Palestinian geography would not have been possible if the stories were invented later.
The development of the early christians' understanding of Jesus which can be seen in the gospels (another argument sometimes used) is not sufficient to justify the belief that they were inventions.
No early opponents of Christianity, whether pagan or Jew, ever denied that Jesus truly lived, or even questioned it.
Scholars are generally agreed that references to Jesus in the Roman historian Tacitus (early second century) and the Jewish historian Josephus (late first century) are both genuine, though some parts of Josephus appear to be later additions.
Most arguments that Jesus wasn't a historical figure have come from people opposed to Christianity and thus not unbiased, whereas scholars of all viewpoints from atheists to Christians accept the historicity of Jesus.
Proponents of the mythical Jesus view have not been able to offer any credible hypothesis that explains the stories of Jesus and the birth of Christianity.
This is apologetic nonsense.
1 - Paul seems as phony as "jesus." He does not appear even in the xtian record until the 2d century and that is a big fucking problem.
2- The "earliness" of the gospels is part of the story...like Luke Skywalker being born on Tattooine. We have no evidence at all of this claim..which does not prevent jesus freaks from regurgitating it relentlessly. Nonetheless, the earliest fragments of copies are also 2d century.
3- Not evidence. Merely a baseless assertion.
4- Why would there be early opponents if the story itself is not early?
We see xtian dogma fleshed out - more or less - in Justyn Martyr c 160 AD and almost immediately we have Lucian of Samosata making fun of it and 20 years later Celsus is blasting the living shit out of it.
But if there is no "jesus" in the first century how could anyone "oppose" it?
5- Xtian wet dream. The evidence for Tacitus is mainly wishful thinking and Josephus is an obvious forgery. The 11th century manuscript of Tacitus' Annales shows under ultraviolet light that the word was "chrestianos" not "christianos." This puts Tacitus' manuscript more in tune with what his contemporary Suetonius wrote when he said that "Chrestus was causing trouble in Rome" during the reign of Claudius.
The Chrestus/Christos enigma is bizarre but the fact remains that neither Suetonius, Pliny nor apparently Tacitus ever heard of any fucking "jesus." Josephus was called a forgery by Bishop Warburton in the 1760s. It remained such until embarrassed fundie preachers decided to breath life back into the corpse by claiming that there was a watered down version of it....which they cannot produce anywhere except their own imaginations.
6- Most arguments that jesus was a historical person come from people with a decided bias...not to mention financial interest...in asserting that there was one. Add in the fact that for 1800 years these fine xtians would burn anyone at the stake who denied their godboy and point #6 fades into oblivion. Now that the church has lost its power to murder people they are losing control....as evidenced by the empty churches which are worrying them so.
7- Simply untrue. Stories of assorted heavenly horseshit fill the literature of the Hellenistic world...which jesus freaks might learn if they put their fucking bibles down long enough to learn something useful.
You'll have to do better than Van Voorst.
