RE: The Historical Christ
August 3, 2009 at 1:49 am
(This post was last modified: August 3, 2009 at 1:50 am by Minimalist.)
Put me squarely in the mythical jesus camp. Xtianity is based on little more than special pleading and, as Professor Bart Ehrman has shown in "Misquoting Jesus" the so-called gospels were heavily edited to conform to later doctrines of the power mongers of the early church. We cannot even be certain that they existed in their present form until some time in the middle ages.......(for example, the well known story of "the woman taken in adultery" does not appear in early version of xtian bibles and the original "gospel" of mark ends when the women run away. Both were "improved" by later scribes.
There is not a single contemporary first century reference to any xtian claims. The earliest contemporary reference to xtians (but not "jesus") is Pliny the Younger and his report to Trajan (early 2d century) is not something that xtians are proud to point to (although they do it because of their desperation to find some record of their boy in the record. The fact that later xtian writers inserted fraudulent claims into Josephus suggests that when they came to power in the 4th century they were highly embarrassed by the lack of historical detail and set out to correct the problem.
There are few historical markers in the gospels themselves and those there are are frequently contradictory.
I have yet to meet the xtian who can answer these questions:
When was your boy born?
When did he die?
It is up to the proponents of a theory to answer questions about it. It is not up to us to disprove them. We merely point out the fallacies.
There is not a single contemporary first century reference to any xtian claims. The earliest contemporary reference to xtians (but not "jesus") is Pliny the Younger and his report to Trajan (early 2d century) is not something that xtians are proud to point to (although they do it because of their desperation to find some record of their boy in the record. The fact that later xtian writers inserted fraudulent claims into Josephus suggests that when they came to power in the 4th century they were highly embarrassed by the lack of historical detail and set out to correct the problem.
There are few historical markers in the gospels themselves and those there are are frequently contradictory.
I have yet to meet the xtian who can answer these questions:
When was your boy born?
When did he die?
It is up to the proponents of a theory to answer questions about it. It is not up to us to disprove them. We merely point out the fallacies.
