Historian explains why Jesus ''mythers'' aren't taken seriously by most Historians

[Pyrrho]

Not all biblical scholars deny it as a remote possibility.  Some even affirm it as likely.  But most say that they believe in an historical Jesus.  (Though as Minimalist likes to point out, they disagree with each other on what, exactly, that means.  Some believe more detailed stories than others, and some believe different details than others.)  

The thing is, pretty much everyone entering the matter starts with the idea that there was an historical Jesus.  Before I read anything on the matter, I pretty much assumed that there was.  But in reading about it, I found the evidence less than compelling.  But I have no particular need to believe one way or the other, as it does not matter to me if there was or was not an historical Jesus.

I specified Christian biblical scholars I know not all biblical scholars are Christian, but many are and their opinion still holds weight. (Not so much with me, but in general ) They literally can't conclude anything that would justify the mythicist position in any form, can they? Or rather they won't, regardless of what the evidence is or isn't.

I suppose you could have some whacky Christian who doesn't believe Jesus was real... err...

Here are the words of a Christian whose name you may recognize; Albert Schweitzer:

Those who are fond of talking about negative theology can find their account here. There is nothing more negative than the result of the critical study of the Life of Jesus.

The Jesus of Nazareth who came forward publicly as the Messiah, who preached the ethic of the Kingdom of God, who founded the Kingdom of Heaven upon earth, and died to give His work its final consecration, never had any existence. He is a figure designed by rationalism, endowed with life by liberalism, and clothed by modern theology in an historical garb.

This image has not been destroyed from without, it has fallen to pieces, cleft and disintegrated by the concrete historical problems which came to the surface one after another, and in spite of all the artifice, art, artificiality, and violence which was applied to them, refused to be planed down to fit the design on which the Jesus of the theology of the last hundred and thirty years had been constructed, and were no sooner covered over than they appeared again in a new form. The thoroughgoing sceptical and the thoroughgoing eschatological school have only completed the work of destruction by linking the problems into a system and so making an end of the Divide et impera of modern theology, which undertook to solve each of them separately, that is, in a less difficult form. Henceforth it is no longer permissible to take one problem out of the series and dispose of it by itself, since the weight of the whole hangs upon each.

Whatever the ultimate solution may be, the historical Jesus of whom the criticism of the future, taking as its starting-point the problems which have been recognised and admitted, will draw the portrait, can never render modern theology the services which it claimed from its own half-historical, half-modern, Jesus. He will be a Jesus, who was Messiah, and lived as such, either on the ground of a literary fiction of the earliest Evangelist, or on the ground of a purely eschatological Messianic conception.

In either case, He will not be a Jesus Christ to whom the religion of the present can ascribe, according to its long-cherished custom, its own thoughts and ideas, as it did with the Jesus of its own making. Nor will He be a figure which can be made by a popular historical treatment so sympathetic and universally intelligible to the multitude. The historical Jesus will be to our time a stranger and an enigma.

...

Jesus means something to our world because a mighty spiritual force streams forth from Him and flows through our time also. This fact can neither be shaken nor confirmed by any historical discovery. It is the solid foundation of Christianity.

The mistake was to suppose that Jesus could come to mean more to our time by entering into it as a man like ourselves. That is not possible. First because such a Jesus never existed. Secondly because, although historical knowledge can no doubt introduce greater clearness into an existing spiritual life, it cannot call spiritual life into existence. History can destroy the present; it can reconcile the present with the past; can even to a certain extent transport the present into the past; but to contribute to the making of the present is not given unto it.

...

But the truth is, it is not Jesus as historically known, but Jesus as spiritually arisen within men, who is significant for our time and can help it. Not the historical Jesus, but the spirit which goes forth from Him and in the spirits of men strives for new influence and rule, is that which overcomes the world.

...

From The Quest of the Historical Jesus, chapter XX "Results," by Albert Schweitzer.

http://www.gutenberg.org/files/45422/454...422-h.html


The historical Jesus seems fairly irrelevant to Schweitzer.