Will Jesus return on a white horse?

[Brian37]

I was hoping minimalist as you have read more of ehrmans material than me you may have had more information about what was the state of play with his religious belief or non belief.

Sorry, I cannot help you there.

Ehrman has spent his entire career pointing out the errors, omissions, edits and politicizing of the NT writings over time. Put another way, he has trashed the only documents which tell the alleged story of the alleged godboy and he has done so very effectively.

Now he has always felt that there was some recognizable personage as jesus but, much like Thomas Jefferson, discounted all the miracles and magic tricks and concentrated on the teachings. My point is this, without the magic tricks what is jesus? Xtianity without the resurrection is not very compelling. Basically it is "we had a teacher and he got himself killed." Big deal. Could be talking about David Koresh.

Was there a jesus son of joseph? In first century Judah there had to be a 100 of them as the names were very common. Was there a jesus of nazareth? Probably not. Nazareth cannot be shown to exist in the first century. That is probably a later misunderstanding or mistranslation by Greco-Roman writers. But a jesus bar joseph who does not do miracles and come back from the dead is missing from history. No one knows that better than Ehrman. So why he insists on dumbing down his own stories is beyond me.

If I had been alive during Jefferson's time and could have debated him, I still would have blasted even his watered down version. He was a deist of some sort, looking at Jesus as, like you said, a teacher of God. But there is no way logically or even scientifically now, to even postulate a non material thinking being, by any name.

Of course there was a movement that started Christianity. The more likely situation, is that the name "Jesus" was used like "Smith or Jones" to start a legend(the upstart challenging authority). There is no contemporary evidence during the alleged time of the Jesus character. And any upstart challenging the powers that be, they would have taken great notice and great notes. Every non biblical reference is after the fact, and the earliest gospels are still after the fact, which would make them suspect and hearsay.

Jesus is a myth invented after the fact to reflect the struggles of a minority. But the magic baby and zombie god stories are bologna which would negate any claim to divinity. Like you said, it sounds like a cult leader got himself killed trying to martyr himself for the cult he wanted to start.

But even before you get to one word of any holy book, they are still stuck with the naked assertion that a magic man with no body or brain or neurons pulls our strings from somewhere, nowhere and everywhere all at the same time.