MovieChat Forums > The God Who Wasn't There (2005) Discussion > Washington Post: Yes, Jesus existed.

Washington Post: Yes, Jesus existed.

posted 9 years ago by clyons
7 replies | jump to latest

Here's Reza Aslan saying he existed, but we have a lot of bogus ideas about him.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/five-myths-about-jesus/2013/09/ 26/b08e8272-1c98-11e3-82ef-a059e54c49d0_story.html

This article reports on the existence of Mytherism, but gives the last word (a whole lot of last words) to Bart Ehrman, who is more qualified than all the Mythers combined, and once people hear his arguments, they realize the Mythers don't have any.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/religion/forget-santa-claus-vir ginia-was-there-a-jesus-christ/2014/12/19/c4528a3a-87c0-11e4-abcf-5a3d 7b3b20b8_story.html

But to Ehrman, the most convincing argument that Jesus was a real person is that it would have made no sense to invent a crucified messiah because that is the opposite of what everyone was expecting at the time. In other words, it wasn’t a good sales pitch.

Besides, if Jesus was the product of a conspiracy, one would think that the conspirators would have gotten their stories straight and not have left lots of conflicting details.

Moreover, Ehrman said — contrary to the claims of the mythicists — there is no analogy in the pagan world of the time to a human being who was killed and rose from the dead and then exalted as a divine being.

So why do arguments that Jesus was a hoax persist?

For one thing, Ehrman said, “there are a lot of people who love conspiracy theories, and this is a brilliant one.”

The broader context, however, is the emergence of the assertive “New Atheists” who are both vocal and visible in seeking to criticize and undermine religion and to fight back against the culture warriors of the religious right.

A subset of those neo-atheists, as they are sometimes called, seems to want to take a shortcut in the fight against Christianity by arguing that Christ did not exist, thereby kicking the legs out from under the whole enterprise.

“I think the people who are taking that view are really shooting themselves in the foot,” Ehrman said. “If what they want to do is to counter Christianity, then they really ought to do it on some intellectually solid basis rather than arguing something that’s downright silly.”

And finally, though it doesn't prove Jesus' existence--it is in the Washington Post, so it must be true!

http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/middle_east/archaeologists-find-po ssible-site-of-jesuss-trial-in-jerusalem/2015/01/04/6d0ce098-7f9a-45de -9639-b7922855bfdb_story.html

Herod is not a fictional character--even though he' s mentioned in 'The Bible'. The Bible mentions many people who unquestionably existed. One of them happens to be Jesus of Nazareth.

Three WaPo articles to one. Read 'em and weep, Megaloser. 

[–] bastasch8647 9 years ago

Clyons, thanks for this great post and links. As always, you're a voice of reason on here.

[–] clyons 9 years ago

I have to say, I don't agree with a lot of what Reza Aslan says about Jesus--for example, that he wanted to lead a violent uprising against Rome. I don't believe that could have been covered up, for one thing. The Romans wouldn't have been fooled. The Roman writers who mention Jesus would have heard about it, as would Josephus.

Jesus simply isn't that easy to explain away. He was a mortal man, but his way of thinking was not of this world. And that's too bad for the world.

[–] clyons 9 years ago

Sometimes I wonder if I'm being a bit too hard on him--so he bought into a stupid theory--and has a bizarre fixation on Jay Leno. So what?

Well turns out he's also a racist.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0284767/board/thread/238330137?d=239183384 #239183384

Sometimes I wonder if he has some kind of online version of Tourette's, but mainly I think he's just stupid and emotionally immature, and has no means of distinguishing fact from fiction. He's lonely, and this is his only way of connecting to the world.

No excuse for being a hatemonger.

[–] bastasch8647 9 years ago

It would be sad if your diagnosis about his loneliness is accurate. Even sadder would be his inability to distinguish fact from fiction..his posts - before I put him on Ignore - were obsessively one-note, with no possiblity of acknowledging contradicting points and data...

[–] bastasch8647 9 years ago

I think you're correct - certainly his "rebellion" would not have been an obscure event, especially in view of all the details we know of rebels from that time period. Also his parables of the Kingdom and the Sermon on the Mount cannot be ascribed to someone who thought he was a warrior-king-messiah-rebel.

[–] clyons 9 years ago

Paul was writing his epistles well before the uprising the Romans put down so brutally. There's nothing in there to even hint at a military aspect to Jesus' teaching.

I suppose Aslan, coming from an Islamic background, feels like Jesus was going along a parallel track to Muhammad--starting out peacefully, but finally taking up the sword. But though there are parallels there, that Muhammad recognized, they were very different men, in very different circumstances.

The early Christians were the most peaceable people the world has ever seen. There is no way that's simply a reaction to seeing the Jewish uprising put down. They weren't cowards. They just believed differently.

[–] bastasch8647 9 years ago

They did believe differently. Most of them, it seems, practiced vegetarianism, and a pacifism that dictated that they would not serve in the imperial military service...