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Evidence for the Historical Jesus
see also Part 1 Pagan
Parallel "Saviors" Examined
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For some reason I have lost a later unfinished copy of this article,
this is an earlier draft.....hope to finish this sometime this year
(2011).
text text summarize Raymond Brown, John P. Meier, N. T. Wright, Craig Blomberg, Luke Timothy
Johnson, Robert van Voorst, Gregory Boyd, etc
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- Jeffery Jay Lowder of Internet Infidels: “There is simply nothing intrinsically improbable about a historical Jesus; the New Testament alone (or at least portions of it) are reliable enough to provide evidence of a historical Jesus. On this point, it is important to note that even
G.A. Wells, who until recently was the champion of the christ-myth hypothesis, now accepts the historicity of Jesus on the basis of 'Q'.” ("Josh McDowell's 'Evidence' for Jesus," also Wells
The Jesus Myth [Open Court, 1999])
- Secular historian Will Durant: “The Christian evidence for Christ begins with the letters ascribed to Saint Paul....No one has questioned the existence of Paul, or his repeated meetings with Peter, James, and John; and Paul enviously admits that these men had known Christ in his flesh. The accepted epistles frequently refer to the Last Supper and the Crucifixion....in essentials the synoptic gospels agree remarkably well, and form a consistent portrait of Christ....no one reading these scenes can doubt the reality of the figure behind them. That a few simple men should in one generation have invented so powerful and appealing a personality, so loft an ethic and so inspiring a vision of human brotherhood, would be a miracle far more incredible than any recorded in the Gospel.” (Ceasar and Christ, volume 3 of Story of Civilization)
- Graham Stanton of Cambridge: “Today, nearly all historians, whether Christians or not, accept that Jesus existed and that the gospels contain plenty of valuable evidence which has to be weighed and assessed critically. There is general agreement that, with the possible exception of Paul, we know far more about Jesus of Nazareth than about any first or second century Jewish or pagan religious teacher.”
(The Gospels and Jesus)
- Bishop N.T. Wright: “It is quite difficult to know where to
start, because actually the evidence for Jesus is so massive that,
as a historian, I want to say we have got almost as much good
evidence for Jesus as for anyone in the ancient world....the
evidence fits so well with what we know of the Judaism of the
period....that I think there are hardly any historians today, in
fact I don't know of any historians today [aside from G.A. Wells,
etc], who doubt the existence of Jesus....No Jewish, Christian,
atheist, or agnostic scholars have ever taken that [proposition]
seriously since. It is quite clear that in fact Jesus is a very,
very well documented character of real history. So I think that
question can be put to rest.” ("The Self-Revelation of God in Human History" from There Is A God by Antony Flew and Roy Abraham Varghese [HarperOne, 2007])
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Response to Brian Flemming's DVD "The God Who Wasn't There"
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BF = Brian Flemming, Q = Question by interviewer, RC = Richard Carrier
BF: "Christianity was wrong about the solar system, what if it's wrong about something else
too?"
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BF: "Of course those aren't the only faces of Christianity." (pics of Charles Manson, Pat Robertson, Dena Schlosser,
LaHaye and Jenkins, David
Koresh)
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Q: "After Jesus died and was resurrected, in your own words, what happened then? How did Christianity begin to
spread?"
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BF: "Why is it that Christians can be so specific about the life of Christ, but they're vague about what happened after he
left?" "Aren't Christian leaders telling them the
story?"
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BF: "Mark was the first one written, and the other three are clearly derived from
Mark. Mark mentions the destruction of the Jewish temple which happened in the year 70, so the Gospels all came later than that, probably much
later." (graphic appears to have Mark 70+, Matt 80+, Luke 95+, John 110+)
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BF: "There's a gap of four decades or more. Most of what we know about this period comes from a man who says he saw Jesus Christ come to him in a vision. He was the apostle Paul, formerly known as Saul of
Tarsus."
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BF: "Paul says the Lord told him to start spreading the word of Jesus Christ, and he did it with a
vengeance." "Paul was a bit of a scold, but the salvation he offered through the God he called Christ Jesus was very popular. He traveled widely and in his wake left behind groups of new Christians who formed the early Christian church. Paul wrote lots of letters about Christianity, in fact, he wrote 80,000 words about the Christian religion. These documents represent almost all we have of the history of Christianity during this decades long
gap."
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BF: "And here's the interesting thing. If Jesus was a human who had recently lived, nobody told Paul. Paul never heard of Mary, Joseph, Bethlehem, Herod, John the Baptist. He never heard about any of these miracles. He never quotes anything that Jesus is supposed to have said. He never mentions Jesus having a ministry of any kind at all. He doesn't know about any entrance into Jerusalem, he never mentions Pontius Pilate, or a Jewish mob, or any trials at all. Paul doesn't know any of what we would call 'the story of Jesus' except for these last three events [graphic has Christ put on the cross, The Resurrection, and The Ascension].
And even these, Paul never places on earth."
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BF: "Just like the other savior gods of the time, Paul's Christ Jesus died, rose, and ascended all in a mythical
realm."
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BF: (shows on screen Hebrews 8:4, translated as) "If Jesus had been on earth, he would not even have been a
priest." Hebrews 8:4
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BF: "Paul doesn't believe that Jesus was ever a human being. He's not even aware of the idea. And he's the link between the time frame given for the life of Jesus, and the appearance of the first gospel account of that life. This is why you don't hear many Christian leaders talking about the early days of Christianity. Because once you assemble the facts, the story is that, Jesus lived, everyone forgot [referring to decades from 30 AD to 70 AD],
and then they remembered [referring to the Gospels beginning in 70 AD]."
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BF: "But it gets even shakier than that. Allegorical literature was extremely common back then [again graphic shows the Gospels]."
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RC: "Mark himself probably did not believe he was writing history. He was writing a symbolic message, he was writing a Gospel, the good news, and symbolizing it using biblical parallels, using parallels to pagan religions, and so
forth."
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From this point, I'll let Mike Licona's review
and critique answer the rest.
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“Contemporary New Testament scholars have typically viewed their
[i.e. Jesus-mythers] arguments as so weak or bizarre that they relegate
them to footnotes, or often ignore them completely....The theory of Jesus'
nonexistence is now effectively dead as a scholarly question....Biblical
scholars and classical historians now regard it as effectively refuted.”
(Robert Van Voorst, Jesus Outside the New Testament, 6, 14, 16)
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see also Part 1 Pagan
Parallel "Saviors" Examined
Additional Books, Links, and Audio (MP3)
on the reliability of the New Testament
- The
New Testament Documents: Are They Reliable? by F. F. Bruce
(Intervarsity/Eerdmans, 1981 sixth edition)
-
The Historical Reliability of the Gospels by Craig Blomberg
(Intervarsity, 1987, revised/updated 2nd edition, 2007)
-
An Introduction to the New Testament (and appendix
on the "Jesus Seminar") by Raymond Brown (Doubleday,
1997)
- Can We Trust the New Testament?
Thoughts on the Reliability of Early Christian Testimony by G.A.
Wells (Open Court, 2003)
-
Can We Trust the Gospels? by Mark D. Roberts (Crossway Books, 2007)
- The Reliability of the New Testament
: Bart D. Ehrman & Daniel B. Wallace in Dialogue, edited by Robert
B. Stewart (Fortress, 2011)
on the genre of the Gospels
-
What are the Gospels? A Comparison with Graeco-Roman Biography by Richard Burridge (Cambridge / Eerdmans, 1992, 2004)
-
Jesus and the Eyewitnesses: The Gospels as Eyewitness Testimony by
Richard Bauckham (Eerdmans, 2006)
on the historical Jesus (Christian scholars, historians, skeptics, and answers
to skeptics)
- Jesus: An Historian's Review of the
Gospels by Michael Grant (Charles Scribner's Sons, 1977)
- The Evidence for Jesus by R.T.
France (Intervarsity Press, 1986)
- A Marginal Jew: Rethinking the
Historical Jesus (volume 1) by John P. Meier (Anchor / Doubleday,
1991)
- The Historical Jesus: The Life of a
Mediterranean Jewish Peasant by John Dominic Crossan (HarperSanFrancisco,
1991)
- The Historical Figure of Jesus by
E.P. Sanders (The Penguin Press, 1993)
- Jesus Under Fire: Modern Scholarship Reinvents the Historical Jesus edited by Wilkins / Moreland
(Zondervan, 1995)
- The Real Jesus: The Misguided Quest for the Historical Jesus and the Truth of the Traditional Gospels by
L.T. Johnson (HarperSanFrancisco, 1996)
- Jesus and the Victory of God by N. T. Wright (Fortress, 1996)
-
The Historical Jesus: Ancient Evidence for the Life of Christ by
Gary Habermas (College Press, 1996)
- Will the Real Jesus Please Stand Up? : A Debate between William Lane Craig and John Dominic Crossan
(Baker Academic, 1998)
- Jesus: Apocalyptic Prophet of the New
Millennium by Bart Ehrman (Oxford Univ Press, 1999)
- The Jesus Puzzle by Earl Doherty (Age of Reason, 1999, 2005)
-
Jesus Outside the New Testament: An Introduction to the Ancient Evidence by Robert van Voorst
(Eerdmans, 2000)
- The Incredible Shrinking Son of Man:
How Reliable is the Gospel Tradition? by Robert M. Price (Prometheus, 2003)
- What Have They Done With Jesus?
by Ben Witherington III (HarperSanFrancisco, 2006)
-
Fabricating Jesus: How Modern Scholars Distort the Gospels by Craig
Evans (Intervarsity, 2006)
-
The Jesus Legend: A Case for the Historical Reliability of the Synoptic
Jesus Tradition by Eddy / Boyd (Baker Academic, 2007)
- Jesus of Nazareth by Pope
Benedict XVI (Doubleday, 2007)
- Shattering the Christ Myth: Did Jesus
Not Exist? edited by James Patrick Holding (Xulon Press, 2008)
- The Historical Jesus: Five Views by
R.M. Price, J.D. Crossan, L.T. Johnson, J.D.G. Dunn, D.L. Bock
(Intervarsity, 2009)
on the resurrection of Jesus
- The Son Rises by William Lane
Craig (Moody, 1981, Wipf and Stock Publishers, 2000)
- Resurrection of Jesus: History,
Experience, Theology by Gerd Ludemann (Fortress, 1995)
- Jesus' Resurrection: Fact or Figment?
A Debate Between William Lane Craig and Gerd Ludemann
(Intervarsity Press, 2000)
-
The Resurrection of the Son of God by N. T. Wright (Fortress, 2003)
-
The Case for the Resurrection of Jesus by Habermas / Licona (Kregel
Publications, 2004)
-
The Empty Tomb: Jesus Beyond the Grave edited by Robert M. Price and
Jeffery Jay Lowder (Prometheus, 2005)
- The Resurrection of Jesus : John Dominic Crossan and N. T. Wright
in Dialogue (Fortress, 2006)
Articles on the "Jesus Myth" from Bede's Library
Shattering
the Christ-Myth by J. P. Holding of Tektonics.org
Extrabiblical,
Non-Christian Witnesses to Jesus by Glenn Miller of Christian
Think-Tank
Analysis
of "The God Who Wasn't There" by GDon
Review
and Critique of "The God Who Wasn't There" by Mike Licona
Josh
McDowell's 'Evidence for Jesus' : Is it Reliable? by Jeffery Jay Lowder
Evidence for the
Resurrection of Christ from Kreeft/Tacelli (chapter 8 of Handbook
of Christian Apologetics)
Is There Historical
Evidence for the Resurrection of Jesus? The Craig-Ehrman Debate (2006)
by PhilVaz -- completed ???
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