Merged Topic - Historical Reliability of the Gospels

Started by Randy Carson, November 27, 2015, 11:31:44 AM

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Randy Carson

Quote from: Baruch on January 17, 2016, 08:31:51 PM
The scholarly evidence today is pretty clear (outside of theology, which by its nature is biased).  And I do respect Paul as a historical personage ... who got a few things wrong, given that he died before the destruction of Jerusalem, the wholesale move of Christianity from Jewish to Gentile form, and the adoption of one version (out of many) as the official doctrine of the Roman Empire.    We don't have many personal documents from ancient times to go by.  Certainly the worldwide destruction didn't come ... shortly ... and still hasn't come.  It may yet come, but given tardiness, I don't think Paul will have predicted it.

Glad to see this post.

If Paul died before the Destruction of Jerusalem in AD 70, then that fits into the idea that the NT was mostly complete before that date.
Some barrels contain fish that need to be shot.

Randy Carson

Quote from: josephpalazzo on January 18, 2016, 08:21:09 AM
The earliest hard copy of the gospel dates at about 125 CE. It's approximately the size of a credit card. It's identified as Mark's gospel due to some sentences and the style of writing that conforms with Mark. There are thousands of these fragments of the gospels, but the earliest hard copy of a manuscript in its fullness dates around the 3rd century CE. The Codex Sinaiticus dates back to the 4th century, but remembered it was written in Greek. Comparing different manuscripts of different eras indicates that copying these manuscripts often involved errors: typo errors, confusing in the translation as a word in a language can have several interpretations, transpositions of words, insertions that didn't belong in earlier manuscripts, conflating that is if they were different descriptions of a single events, the copier would often conflate these different descriptions... to name a few of these errors. The idea that the NT is God's words is as ludicrous as saying that Homer's Iliad and the Odyssey are real descriptions of Zeus and the other Greek gods and their stakes in human affairs.

Sorry, but this is flat wrong. Here's why:

Textual Criticism Explained

Each author of a NT book wrote an original manuscript which I'll call "M". Using M, copies were made and sent to various Churches in the NT era. I'll call these second-generation copies, C1, C2 & C3. The number of copies is not important for this illustration. Now, imagine that copies of the copies were made as the Christian Church expanded since every local congregation wanted to have a copy of these important texts. I'll call the copies of C1, C1a, C1b & C1c. There would also be C2a, C2b, and so forth. With me so far? In the following diagram, each column represents a generation. For example, M is the original, C1 a copy of M, C1a is a copy of C1, and C1a1 is a copy of C1a. Like this:

M > C1 > C1a > C1a1

Over the course of history, some copies are lost or destroyed. The copies which have not been lost are portrayed in red. (Sorry for the alignment issues.)

M----C1----C1a----C1a1
-------------C1b----C1b1
---------------------C1b2
-------------C1c----C1c1
---------------------C1c2
------C2----C2a---C2a1
-------------C2b----C2b1
------C3----C3a---C3a1
----------------------C3a2
-------------C3b---C3b1
-------------C3c----C3c1
----------------------C3c2
----------------------C3c3

Now, imagine further that M, C1, C2 & C3 along with C1a, C2a, C3a & C3b have all been lost, but that C1b, C1c, C2b & C3c are all in museums scattered around the world - Moscow, London, the Vatican, etc. Additionally, all of the copies of those copies still exist (I'm simplifying, of course).

We know that M must have existed, and logic dictates that C1, C2 & C3 must have existed (though we may be unsure of the number of first-generation copies). We can learn that both C1 & C2 must have existed by comparing the extant copies C1b & C2b and discovering subtle variations in the texts - copyists glosses or "typos", if you will. If C1 was slightly different from C2, then those differences will be reflected in C1a and C2a along with all of the subsequent copies of those copies. Variations were passed on from generation to generation. Make sense?

So, how can we know with certainty what the Bible actually said if we don't have the original autograph (M) or if errors (variations) crept into the text? By comparing the existing texts, scholars can work backwards to determine what M actually said with a high degree of confidence.
Some barrels contain fish that need to be shot.

Randy Carson

And then there's this (which I wrote based upon my reading):

The Historical Reliability of the Bible
Drawn from The New Evidence that Demands a Verdict by Josh McDowell

The historical reliability of the Bible should be tested by the same criteria by which all historical documents are tested. C. Sanders, in Introduction to Research in English Literary History, lists the three basic principles of historiography: the bibliographical test, the internal evidence test, and the external reference test. (Sanders, IRE, 143 ff.)

Bibliographical Test

The Bibliographical test is an examination of the textual transmission by which documents reach us. In other words, since we do not have the original documents, how reliable are the copies we have in regard to the number of manuscripts (MSS) and the time interval between the original and extant copies?

For example, there are currently 643 surviving manuscripts of Homer’s Iliad, and the first complete text dates from the 13th century. By comparison, we have nearly 25,000 manuscripts of the New Testament including 5,685 in Greek, more than 10,000 Latin Vulgate and more than 9,000 additional manuscripts in Ethiopic, Slavic, Armenian and many other languages.

F.E. Peters states that “on the basis of manuscript evidence alone, the works that made up the Christians’ New Testament were the most frequently copied and widely circulated books in antiquity.” (Peters, HH, 50)

The importance of the sheer number of manuscript copies cannot be overstated. As with other documents of ancient literature, there are no known extant original manuscripts of the Bible. Fortunately, however, the abundance of manuscript copies makes it possible to reconstruct the original with virtually complete accuracy.

Dockery, Matthews and Sloan have written:

Quote“For most of the biblical text, a single reading has been transmitted. Elimination of scribal errors and intentional changes leaves only a small percentage of the text about which any questions occur…It must be said that the amount of time between the original composition and the next surviving manuscript is far less for the New Testament that for any other work in Greek literature…although there are certainly differences in many of the New Testament manuscripts, not one fundamental doctrine of the Christian faith rests on a disputed reading. (Dockery, FBI, 176, 182)

In addition to the manuscripts themselves, quotations of the New Testament may be found in the writings of the Early Church Fathers. Sir David Dalrymple undertook a challenge to determine whether the New Testament could be reconstructed solely from these Fathers. He was able to find all but eleven verses of the New Testament quoted in these patristic writings. Geisler and Nix reported that more than 32,000 quotations of the New Testament may be found in the writings of the Fathers produced before the Council of Nicea in AD 325.

According to Dr. Daniel B. Wallace, “we have as many as eighteen New Testament manuscripts from the second century and one from the first. Altogether, more than 43% of all New Testament verses are found in these manuscripts.”

Commenting on the discovery of several previously unknown New Testament papyri, Dr. Wallace noted:

QuoteAs with all the previously published New Testament papyri (127 of them, published in the last 116 years), not a single new reading has commended itself as authentic. Instead, the papyri function to confirm what New Testament scholars have already thought was the original wording or, in some cases, to confirm an alternate readingâ€"but one that is already found in the manuscripts. As an illustration: Suppose a papyrus had the word “the Lord” in one verse while all other manuscripts had the word “Jesus.” New Testament scholars would not adopt, and have not adopted, such a reading as authentic, precisely because we have such abundant evidence for the original wording in other manuscripts. But if an early papyrus had in another place “Simon” instead of “Peter,” and “Simon” was also found in other early and reliable manuscripts, it might persuade scholars that “Simon” is the authentic reading. In other words, the papyri have confirmed various readings as authentic in the past 116 years, but have not introduced new authentic readings. The original New Testament text is found somewhere in the manuscripts that have been known for quite some time.

+++

So, we know - yes, we really know - what the authors of the NT wrote with a high degree of certainty. Understanding what they meant is our challenge.
Some barrels contain fish that need to be shot.

josephpalazzo

Quote from: Randy Carson on January 19, 2016, 09:00:32 AM


So, how can we know with certainty what the Bible actually said if we don't have the original autograph (M) or if errors (variations) crept into the text? By comparing the existing texts, scholars can work backwards to determine what M actually said with a high degree of confidence.


No, that's wishful thinking. If you don't have M, even though you can  postulate its existence, you can't know what was written in M. The errors are not just typo types. There are mistakes in translations, insertions, interpretations, conflations for instances, and so you won't know if that happened in in C1, C2 or C3, in your illustration Secondly, you don't know how many missing copies there are between C1 and C1a1. It could be just 2 like it could be 55. Thirdly, even though you can reasonably identify the dates of those existing copies (C1a1...C3c3), you still don't know the dates of M, C1, C2,C3. It becomes a guessing game.

Lastly, you didn't bother to read my posts, as it pertains to hard copies that were found and are in existing museums, not textual criticism. But you totally dismissed as being wrong. WTF. What are you? A five year old kid??

Randy Carson

Quote from: josephpalazzo on January 19, 2016, 09:29:00 AM
No, that's wishful thinking. If you don't have M, even though you can  postulate its existence, you can't know what was written in M. The errors are not just typo types. There are mistakes in translations, insertions, interpretations, conflations for instances, and so you won't know if that happened in in C1, C2 or C3, in your illustration Secondly, you don't know how many missing copies there are between C1 and C1a1. It could be just 2 like it could be 55. Thirdly, even though you can reasonably identify the dates of those existing copies (C1a1...C3c3), you still don't know the dates of M, C1, C2,C3. It becomes a guessing game.

Lastly, you didn't bother to read my posts, as it pertains to hard copies that were found and are in existing museums, not textual criticism. But you totally dismissed as being wrong. WTF. What are you? A five year old kid??

You can add five decades to that number, friend.

Now, let me continue to try to explain your error, since you have not thought this through.

First, the extant copies - despite the variants you point out - are largely in agreement with one another. This agreement gives us a pretty good indication of what was contained in M.

Second, NONE of the variations actually affects Christian doctrine. So, even if we had some questions about a specific word or phrase in a given verse, so what? IOW - it's not like one manuscript says "Jesus did rise on the third day" while another reads "Jesus did not rise on the third day". Consequently, attempting to dismiss the reliability of the NT in order to bolster one's atheism is pretty thin ice.

Third, if a copy of one manuscript is in Cairo, another in Rome and still a third in Moscow, it is possible to compare them side by side to determine what these variations are. If all of the copies in the "Cairo" line contain a specific variation, but none of the copies descended from "Rome" or "Moscow" have that variation, then it can be determined that "C" was altered at some point in time. Further, by studying these variants, scholars can determine which extant manuscripts are related...as I diagrammed previously. However, once the copies were made and distributed to the churches around the Roman Empire, it was not possible for a scribe to intentionally modify ALL of them...the horses were already out of the barn, so to speak.

So, I say again: scholars are extremely confident that the texts of the NT are reproduced today with a high degree of certainty and that the doctrines of the Christian faith are unaffected by the existence of the well-documented variants.
Some barrels contain fish that need to be shot.

josephpalazzo

Quote from: Randy Carson on January 19, 2016, 09:59:51 AM

So, I say again: scholars are extremely confident that the texts of the NT are reproduced today with a high degree of certainty and that the doctrines of the Christian faith are unaffected by the existence of the well-documented variants.

You're very naive. Does 325 CE ring a bell? Don't you know what happened at the council of Nicaea? Only those manuscripts that conformed to the church doctrine survived, the others that didn't were deliberately destroyed. So what you have today is a made up story that was filtered and refined over a thousand of years. And even with that, one can see in that made up story, elements from other culture/religion: born from a virgin, resurrection after 3 days, choosing 12 disciples, started ministry at 30 - all of these can be found in Egyptian, Greek, Roman mythologies, to name a few.

Randy Carson

Quote from: josephpalazzo on January 19, 2016, 10:15:14 AM
You're very naive. Does 325 CE ring a bell? Don't you know what happened at the council of Nicaea? Only those manuscripts that conformed to the church doctrine survived, the others that didn't were deliberately destroyed. So what you have today is a made up story that was filtered and refined over a thousand of years. And even with that, one can see in that made up story, elements from other culture/religion: born from a virgin, resurrection after 3 days, choosing 12 disciples, started ministry at 30 - all of these can be found in Egyptian, Greek, Roman mythologies, to name a few.

Gee, according to this Wikipedia article, [lmgtfy]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Council_of_Nicaea[/lmgtfy], "There is no record of any discussion of the biblical canon at the council." The development of the canon went something like this:


Council of Rome (382 A.D.)

Convoked by Pope Damasus, this council produced the Roman Code.  The Roman Code identified a list of scriptural books identical to the Council of Trent's formally defined canon. Pope Damasus I approved the work of the first Council of Constantinople, accepting St. Athanasius’ list as divinely inspired, and indicated that if any bishop used a list of books inconsistent with the Roman canon he would need a convincing explanation.

Council of Hippo (393 A.D.)

This council reiterated the list of books established by the Council of Rome.

First Council of Carthage (397 A.D.)

This council reiterated the list of books established by the Council of Rome and also affirmed the Decree of Damasus issued in 382 A.D.. Carthage, unlike Hippo, sent its decisions to Rome for ratification.

Pope Innocent I (405 A.D.)

In a letter to Exsuperius, the Bishop of Toulouse, Pope Innocent listed the same books established by the Council of Rome.

Pope Boniface (ca. 420 A.D.)

Pope St. Boniface I (418-422) ratified the decision of the first Council of Carthage and declared the canon settled for the Western Patriarchate. Boniface also sent the decision to the Eastern patriarchs in Alexandria, Antioch and Jerusalem. At that point, the Catholic Canon of Sacred Scripture was informally accepted worldwide.

Second Council of Carthage (419 A.D.)

This council reiterated the list of books established by the Council of Rome.

Second Council of Nicaea (787 A.D.)

This council formally ratified the African Code which contained the same list of books that Trent would name “canonical”.

Council of Florence (1441 A.D.)

This council defined a list of inspired books identical to those defined by the African Code and the Second Council of Nicaea.

Council of Trent (1546 A.D.)

On April 8, 1546, this council produced a decree, Sacrosancta, which was the first, formal canonical definition of Old and New Testament scripture. This was the third formal affirmation of the list by an ecumenical council and at least the eighth overall.

+++

As for the Church destroying those books that it did not approve, which do you mean? None of the following were destroyed:

First Letter of Clement to the Corinthians (once thought to be inspired in some places)
Second Letter of Clement
The Didache
The Shepherd of Hermas
The Gospel of Thomas

and many others. So, no...the Church did not destroy everything that did not conform to Church doctrine...these works still survive.
Some barrels contain fish that need to be shot.

josephpalazzo

Quote from: Randy Carson on January 19, 2016, 10:29:42 AM
Gee, according to this Wikipedia article, [lmgtfy]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Council_of_Nicaea[/lmgtfy], "There is no record of any discussion of the biblical canon at the council."



In a remarkable aside, the Church has admitted that, "the earliest of the extant manuscripts [of the New Testament], it is true, do not date back beyond the middle of the fourth century AD"

(Catholic Encyclopedia, op. cit., pp. 656-7).

The Church admits that the Epistles of Paul are forgeries, saying,

"Even the genuine Epistles were greatly interpolated to lend weight to the personal views of their authors"
(Catholic Encyclopedia, Farley ed., vol. vii, p. 645).

aitm

A humans desire to live is exceeded only by their willingness to die for another. Even god cannot equal this magnificent sacrifice. No god has the right to judge them.-first tenant of the Panotheust

widdershins

Quote from: Randy Carson on January 17, 2016, 10:08:54 AM
I'll pause to respond here.

Do I have these credentials? Of course not. But I've done a wee bit more than Google a few websites. And I can read Bart Ehrman who does have credentials. He wrote: A bunch of things not relating to dates of Biblical writings
I never said Jesus didn't exist, although I'm reluctant to believe a historian of times with few written records to say with such certainty "it is" rather than "the evidence strongly suggests" as that is not scientific.  It is, to say the least, highly unusual for a purveyor of any real science to simply make an absolute claim like that, especially on such a controversial topic, without backing it with the evidence he has to support his claim.  And such evidence would have to be ironclad for someone to make that claim as an absolute, surely good enough to convince any objective historian.

I'm not sure how this allows you to rewrite the timelines you would like to rewrite, though.  I do hope you realize that cherry-picking a single qualified person with the credentials to examine your alternative timeline in no way overrides scientific consensus.  The way that would go would be for you to throw a cherry-picked scholar at me, me to throw ten more at you, you to throw two more at me, me to throw a hundred more at you and so on until we neither one had any more to throw back and forth.  I would then tally the results, which would show that I have more than 95% of the scholars on my side, which is the point of "scientific consensus", and we're back to square one where you want to choose different dates and I'm telling you scientific consensus has already chosen other dates.

Quote from: Randy Carson on January 17, 2016, 10:08:54 AM
So, who do you trust? I think the answer is obvious.
I trust science, the scientific process and scientific consensus.  It has proven itself time and time again and I have no reason to doubt it.  Was that the "obvious" answer you arrived at?

Quote from: Randy Carson on January 17, 2016, 10:08:54 AMAnd Jesus did exist.
Perhaps.  Maybe someday we'll find his corpse and the debate will be settled once and for all.  I really don't have an issue with the man having existed.  What I have an issue with is the claim that he went to school at Hogwarts.
This sentence is a lie...

widdershins

Quote from: Randy Carson on January 17, 2016, 10:18:38 AM
Sorry to disappoint you, but the timeline in the OP is not original with me. I read books, and I learn. Then I share what I have learned with others who haven't read.
"Reading books" is no substitute for "knowing the subject".

Quote from: Randy Carson on January 17, 2016, 10:18:38 AMYou say that "conservative" scholarship points to dates in the AD 70 range for the gospels (gJohn later, the epistles probably much earlier). Great. That's what "conservatives" think. However, conservatives are, you know, conservative, and they go with dates that NO ONE could seriously disagree with - at least not the majority of their fellow scholars.
I am, as I have been all along, talking about "scientific consensus".  You make it out as if I cherry-picked the scholars who agreed with the numbers I wanted.  Nothing could be further from the truth.  I simply looked up the numbers which the majority of historians agreed with, the universally accepted method for determining scientific consensus.  I'm not changing the rules or cherry-picking here.  There is no slight of hand on my part.  If they agreed with your numbers we would be in agreement because I trust scientific consensus.  Does that mean it's impossible for your numbers to be correct?  Certainly not, but improbable.

And a "conservative estimate" is not the same thing as "the consensus among conservative historians".  That's just some grade A bullshit right there.

Quote from: Randy Carson on January 17, 2016, 10:18:38 AMBut others are just as reasonable in saying, "Well, hang on...my academic reputation may take a hit, but isn't it reasonable to ask a few questions such as why the destruction of the temple or the martydoms of James, Peter and Paul are NOT mentioned anywhere in the NT?"
Yeah, that's called "conjecture" and that's why they are the scientific fringe, not the consensus.  Frankly, this is the same tired argument used by UFO and Bigfoot nuts when they claim something along the lines of, "My husband is a pilot and he said it could not have been a helicopter" when they want to turn "lights in the sky" into some supernatural phenomena of great mystery and importance.  That some event wasn't mentioned is not "evidence" of anything.  It's a lack of evidence.  No scientific theory ever was built on a lack of evidence.  That's just not how it works.

What you're doing is finding the fringe historians who agree with what you want to believe and simply using them instead of the scientific majority.  If you want to do that, I'm actually fine with it.  No problem here.  But what you're asking me to do is to agree with this fringe, to accept as reality the dates they have put forth, so that you can make your future arguments stronger.  I'm sorry, that's not going to happen.  If you want me to accept your dates, change the scientific consensus and I will.  Plain and simple, that's what it will take.  I'm not qualified to consider the dates you want to use and neither are you.  You're also not qualified to determine which historians are correct and which are not and, in fact, that's absolutely not what you're doing.  You're just choosing the ones who are saying what you want to hear and asserting that we should all disregard the scientific consensus in support of these few who agree with you.  It's simply not going to happen.

Quote from: Randy Carson on January 17, 2016, 10:18:38 AM
And those questions need to be answered.

Either way, I don't see how this does the average atheist who denies that Jesus even existed and wants to place the authorship of the NT deep into the second century much good.

Do you?
First of all, I never denied Jesus ever existed.  I wasn't there.  I don't know.  I've never made any claim to know.  If there is ever a scientific consensus one way or another, then I may feel that I know.  In fact, I'm pretty sure history strongly suggests that Jesus was a real man.  Certainly not the Jesus of the Bible, going all Dumbledor on some leprosy and shit, but a man, now dead and buried.  But to my knowledge there's no consensus on this, so I don't know.

Second, I don't place the NT in the second century, a consensus of historians do.  People like you blame us for everything.  I suppose Hitler was an atheist, too, and if he weren't he wouldn't have been such a dick?  Because REASONS!  News flash, I actually do not control the majority of historians.  True story.  I have nothing to do with them whatsoever.  The closest I ever got was having a few history teachers.  I know, right?  Big, mean atheist like me, NOT mind controlling historians into saying the Bible was written in the second century?  What the hell?  But, no, that was actually all them.  Nothing to do with me.
This sentence is a lie...

Hakurei Reimu

To me, the whole question of whether Jesus existed at all is only academic: interesting to contemplate, but otherwise of no importance at all. So what if there were a real Jesus? It's not as if he was the only preacher at the time who fathered a rogue religion like Christianity. The region was a fermenting vat of various sects of not only Christianity, but of other religions altogether. The cult of Mithras (with a suspiciously similar protagonist) was being practiced right up through the first century. The man who would become known as St. Augustine came from Manicheanism. Christianity, especially Catholic Christianity, strikes me not as some sort of truth that shone through because of its merits, but rather the last survivor that the faithful gravitated towards when their own sects fell into obscurity.

In fact, dying and rising gods were in vogue at the time of Jesus (Cult of Mithras, Cult of Osiris, Baccus, etc), so it's not very surprising that had Jesus existed, he would have been mythicized by including elements from other, popular notions floating out there. So we either have a real person who has been mythicized or a mythical figure that has been historicized, and as such has both realistic and mythical attributes. Which one this is doesn't matter much to the end product: The mythical stuff is still myth, and the realistic stuff may have been attributed to anyone. It really would matter little to me if I found out that Jesus was a real person, because all the miracles attributed to him are certainly later additions in any case, and without that the rest of it is just meh.
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widdershins

That was a fine bit of writing right there.  Not to mention that this thread isn't even about whether Jesus exists or not, but about the timeline for the books of the New Testament which we must all agree to accept in opposition to the scientific consensus before any real conversation can begin.  I'm not sure why, exactly, we can't discuss religion until we've established that the majority of historians are wrong and the minority which agrees with the OP should be taken as absolute fact.  I'm assuming, as I'm sure we all are, that he has some argument which, without this concession, is utterly meritless.
This sentence is a lie...

Baruch

Quote from: Randy Carson on January 17, 2016, 09:49:57 AM
Just as it is common among atheists to try to push the dates as late as possible, eh? Both sides have their reasons for this.

However, I laid out a reasonable timeline in the OP. Please let me know where it is in error.

Perhaps the fact that Paul was martyred in Rome around AD 65-66 hindered his ability to know that happened "post 66 CE"?

As pointed out in a later post I made in this string ... quite a few different chronologies can be argued ... and so I find it unfruitful to try to narrow things to less than a 300 year timespan in general.  Certainly Paul's writings can't be later than 70 CE because the referred to Temple didn't exist after that ... we can't count the Book of Acts since it wasn't written by Paul.  How much earlier Paul's writings could be it isn't clear, because the Temple (in some state of construction) existed for some decades before that, it being started by Herod the Great.  There were edits and false ascriptions after 70 CE .. and I won't count those a Pauline either.  It isn't clear that Paul was martyred in Rome, but it is at least likely he died there.  I consider the "epistle" to the Romans to be crucial Pauline theology.  It is crucial to Roman hagiography, that both Paul and Peter were martyred there .  Not impossible, but loaded dice.

In general I won't give any more credence to a hagiography of Jesus or Paul, than I would of Apollonius ... a contemporary miracle worker.  These were popular novellas of the time, in both pagan, Jewish and proto-Christian literature.  The first full bio of the Buddha, for that matter, was 300 years after he perhaps lived as well, again not trustworthy except as literature.  The epistles and homilies are different ... Romans and Hebrews are really homilies not epistles.  The John who wrote the epistles, and James ... seem to be historical as well, just not was important as Paul.  Though it is possible that before 70 CE, the Three Pillars which included James, Cephas and John, were more important than Paul or Barnabas.
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Azee’ Å,a’ish nanídį́į́h?
Táadoo ánít’iní.
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Are you taking any medications?
Don't do that.

Randy Carson

Quote from: Hakurei Reimu on January 19, 2016, 05:30:22 PM
To me, the whole question of whether Jesus existed at all is only academic: interesting to contemplate, but otherwise of no importance at all. So what if there were a real Jesus? It's not as if he was the only preacher at the time who fathered a rogue religion like Christianity. The region was a fermenting vat of various sects of not only Christianity, but of other religions altogether. The cult of Mithras (with a suspiciously similar protagonist) was being practiced right up through the first century. The man who would become known as St. Augustine came from Manicheanism. Christianity, especially Catholic Christianity, strikes me not as some sort of truth that shone through because of its merits, but rather the last survivor that the faithful gravitated towards when their own sects fell into obscurity.

In fact, dying and rising gods were in vogue at the time of Jesus (Cult of Mithras, Cult of Osiris, Baccus, etc), so it's not very surprising that had Jesus existed, he would have been mythicized by including elements from other, popular notions floating out there. So we either have a real person who has been mythicized or a mythical figure that has been historicized, and as such has both realistic and mythical attributes. Which one this is doesn't matter much to the end product: The mythical stuff is still myth, and the realistic stuff may have been attributed to anyone. It really would matter little to me if I found out that Jesus was a real person, because all the miracles attributed to him are certainly later additions in any case, and without that the rest of it is just meh.

That's just a bunch of Horus Manure. You can read more here: http://www.jonsorensen.net/2012/10/25/horus-manure-debunking-the-jesushorus-connection/

However, the REASON that it's more than academic is because Jesus also claimed to be God. And He left behind some very specific instructions and teachings.

So, IF He is God, then what He had to say is anything but "academic".
Some barrels contain fish that need to be shot.