Proving The Resurrection By the Minimal Facts Approach

[Cato]

You can know if Jesus existed by STUDYING THE EVIDENCE.

Professional scholars do it all the time. It takes some effort. It takes some courage. But the evidence for Jesus' existence is there for your evaluation. If you don't think Jesus existed, then have the guts to say so. If you do think he existed, then show some stones and say so.

Why not just man up and admit that you LIKE being on the fence about whether Jesus existed or not because you don't want to commit one way or the other?

Because you know that once you admit that Jesus DID exist, then you're going to have to make some hard decisions about the minimal facts I'm presenting in this thread. And you don't want to face those facts, do you, rob?

Randy,
I've had about enough of your ignorant baseless proselytizing on behalf of this supposedly superior fucking scholarly community you keep referencing. I suppose it's inconceivable to you that Christians who dominate the field wouldn't at all have any reason to be biased. Here are some quotes from a blog, repleat with links to the source material:

- It (emotional interest in Jesus) is always present as an invisible hand guiding interest, commitment, choice, judgement, and the framing of meaning.
- While each may make the claim that they are simply after the facts and simply trying to figure out what Jesus was really like—and while most don’t quite say this, most do think this is what they are doing— nearly every one of them presents what they would like the church, or others with faith, to think about Jesus.
- As it stands presently, NT scholarship will always get largely Christian results
- The overall result of such bias is to make the description of New Testament Studies as an academic field a dubious one.
- Would the participants of nontheological conferences even believe that other academic conferences do such things?
- the differences were ultimately harmonized under the umbrella of Christian faith . . .
- he lack of a significant number of non-Christians or even scholars deliberately attempting to see beyond their Christian background has prevented serious secular alternatives to Christian origins being properly discussed.
- It should be clear that Christian stories can be treated differently because of Christian dominance,
- In the field of Jesus research, however, one person’s bedrock is another person’s sand. I cannot honestly think of a single supposed bedrock event or interpretive stance that somebody has not denied.
- Dodd’s words, however, constitute not an argument but an opinion
- His method is similar to my own in that he enters the circle from generalizations about Jesus and the Jesus tradition.
- A scholarly assumption may look like a legitimate argument, but contrary to genuine argument, it cannot be falsified . . . It is characteristic of such cases that there is no [i]tertium comparationis, no external evidence that may prove the argument to be correct and not a baseless assumption.
- So the conclusion that certain apocalyptic sayings go back to Jesus is not just a product of the premise: the final conclusion also fortifies the opening supposition.
- But there is another problem: most scholars of the New Testament have religious loyalties: they want the text [Bible] to be orthodox, or historical, or preachable, or relevant. So any new interpretation which does not fulfil these conditions is not likely to be approved.
- There is a hankering after putative lost sources and oral traditions which would take us back to the historical Jesus.
- Therefore, it was theology’s need that reasserted the historical reliability, in part, of the gospels with respect to Jesus, and sought to re-establish the historical continuity between the preaching of the man Jesus and the preaching of the first primitive Christian communities about Jesus
- There is probably no Jesus scholar writing today who is not explicitly and keenly aware that all historical research is colored and influenced by the personality of the historian. But this awareness never seems to penetrate deeply into the overall approach and methods that shape the historical writing of the scholar.
- Instead, most have an overall representation of Jesus in mind and go about looking at evidence and making judgments about what is genuine from what is not genuine and, at times, revising the overall representation.
- The answer is that both the conservative and liberal historical Jesus scholars still share religionist and bibliolatrous bonds. They believe that Jesus’ words matter or should matter.
- Intellectual honesty should compel at least the liberal scholars to announce aggressively to the world that Jesus cannot be found, and that any notion of following actual words or deeds of Jesus is vacuous.
- . . . a recognition that [Jesus’s] existence is not entirely certain would nudge Jesus scholarship towards academic respectability.
- And he measures his words. Besides, it is unusual, in biblical scholarship nowadays, to speak plainly about a negative attitude in another scholar. But there it was: ‘It is hard to argue against such determination not to see what is in fact there in the text’.
- That goal was to rewrite the gospel story as a plausible “life of Jesus.” It was taken for granted that the proper account of Christian origins would be a biography of Jesus.
- Thus it is the case that most reconstructions of the historical Jesus have started with prior assumptions, unexpressed, about the importance of a certain kind of Jesus. With this assumed profile in mind, textual material has then been collected in its support.
- The quest for the historical Jesus . . . seeks, on the model of the Protestant reformation, to leapfrog over the “wrongheaded” myths and rituals of the Christian churches to land at the beginning where the pure, clean impulse of an uncontaminated Jesus can rectify and rejuvenate Christian faith. That is mythic thinking with an apron-string attachment to Christian mentality. It will not produce a scholarly account of Christian origins

http://vridar.org/2015/04/17/unrecognize...n-origins/

Now, quit using this aforementioned nebulous academy of scholars as justification of anything. They clearly aren't what you've made them out to be. It's just a fatuous canard tossed out in a dishonest attempt to shelter your baseless assertions from criticism. These scholars of yours are nothing more than intellectually dishonest vermin circle jerking themselves in a petri dish of delusional shit.