My Inquiry

[25point81]

Erm, you jumped pretty fast from "creator" to "Jesus" there. Why on earth would you think a story book character just happens to be God?

Why do you say story book character? Jesus raised people from the dead, walked on water, etc. There's even recorded proof of his existence. I would say look at some of the books of the Bible, but I can't use that here, so check out this. To take a few excerpts from it: 

The Christ myth theory is the proposition that Jesus of Nazareth never existed, or if he did, he had virtually nothing to do with the founding of Christianity and the accounts in the gospels. This theory has very little support among scholars. The theory enjoyed brief popularity in the Soviet Union, where it was supported by Sergey Kovalev, Alexander Kazhdan, Abram Ranovich, Nikolai Rumyantsev, Robert Wipper and . Later, however, several scholars, including Kazhdan, had retracted their views about mythical Jesus and by the end of the 1980s the support for the theory became almost non-existent in Soviet academia.

There is no evidence today that the existence of Jesus was ever denied in antiquity by those who opposed Christianity.

Non-Christian sources used to study and establish the historicity of Jesus include Jewish sources such as Josephus, and Roman sources such as Tacitus. The sources are compared to Christian sources such as the Pauline Letters and the , and are usually independent of each other (e.g. Jewish sources do not draw upon Roman sources), and similarities and differences between them are used in the authentication process.

There's two references to 'jesus' by Josphus (93/94 AD) - that's 61 & 62 years after jesus supposedly died.  At best then, Josephus was a secondary source because he was not contemporary with jesus.  What Josephus didn't tell us what his primary source was.  Also, Josephus didn't write swathes of pros about jesus.  It was the odd line.  In addition, one of the Josephus texts relating to jesus has been shown to be an early christian insert.  The second is also under some dispute.  What's also interesting is that Josephus lived < 30 minutes walk from where jesus was supposed to have lived.  Yet, he never mentions this.  Why not?

Tacitus referred to the crucifixion of jesus in AD 116.  That's 83 years after jesus supposedly died.  Again, at best, Tacitus was a secondary source because he was not contemporary with jesus.  What Tacitus didn't tell us what his primary source was.  Also, Tacitus didn't write swathes of pros about jesus. 

In total then, outside of the bible, these are the only 3 non-christian sources of proof of the historicity of jesus.

Once, most historians were assured of jesus' existence.  The work performed by Carrier, especially, puts jesus' existence in major doubt.  If jesus disappears from history, then it's game over, or as near as.

Just me view, is all.