RE: Historicity of Jesus
December 23, 2014 at 8:41 pm
(This post was last modified: December 23, 2014 at 8:48 pm by Tonus.)
(December 21, 2014 at 5:04 pm)polar bear Wrote: As a christian I always accepted the historicity, but when you look deeply at it...it looks suspect at best.One thing you might notice over time is that many theist arguments come down to "this or that could have happened." Which is to say that their holy book says that something happened, and although there is no evidence that it did, the lack of sufficient disqualifying evidence allows them to hang on to the possibility that it happened. The most obvious version of this is the old "you can't prove god doesn't exist" ploy.
Where Jesus is concerned, I suspect that their hope is that if they can establish that there was a guy named Jesus around whom the new testament was built, then the accounts in the books could have happened. And that is sufficient evidence for them. Which makes sense for a belief system built on presuppositions, after all. Doesn't work too well if you're short on Kool-Aid, though.
(December 23, 2014 at 7:30 pm)Minimalist Wrote: There are over 20 jesuses named in Josephus alone....not counting the one that xtian forgers invented.I wonder why it doesn't strike the christers as weird that Josephus seems pretty nonchalant about what he wrote in the TF, if it was indeed what he had written. He interrupts himself to tell his readers that hey, there was this amazing guy who WAS THE CHRIST AND CAME BACK FROM THE DEAD and, um... what was I going on about? Oh yeah, this other sundry shit. Let's get back to that and forget all about the god figure.
Well, no wonder there seems to be so little reporting on Jesus during his time-- no one was impressed by stuff like walking on water, healing the sick, feeding thousands out of a basket, and dying them coming back to life. Just another day in the ancient middle east!
"Well, evolution is a theory. It is also a fact. And facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world's data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts. Facts don't go away when scientists debate rival theories to explain them. Einstein's theory of gravitation replaced Newton's in this century, but apples didn't suspend themselves in midair, pending the outcome. And humans evolved from ape- like ancestors whether they did so by Darwin's proposed mechanism or by some other yet to be discovered."
-Stephen Jay Gould
-Stephen Jay Gould