I have no disagreement with anything you've stated.
Great. I notice a lot of typing after that, so---
I was just a bit surprised that your decided opinion was that the question regarding a historical Jesus was a closed cased.
It's as closed as it can be in this field. There is no REASONABLE doubt he existed. You could, if you wanted, argue that Alexander the Great was a myth trumped up by the Macedonians to terrify their enemies, and legitimize their empire. Read the story of Alexander sometime--does that sound like something that really happened, or the fever dream of some Hollywood screenwriter? In fact, we have virtually nothing about him from his own lifetime--a few inscriptions--fragments of lost works--the story we have was written down well after he died. So there is, in fact, a lot of disagreement about the details of his life--we can't be sure exactly what he did and said. But no, there's no reason to question his existence.
Hell, there's controversy about historical figures WHILE THEY ARE ALIVE. Where was Obama born? Hawaii, dammit! But a lot of people will never believe it. Can you and I be sure he was born in Hawaii? Were we there? Do we know anybody who was present at his birth? How much of an invincible skeptic do you want to be?
From what I've gleaned over the years every purported piece of evidence has it's detractors and both sides make an interesting case.
THAT much, huh?
As someone who is not a scholar in the field, I find both sides of the aisle have interesting points and am left open minded to the whole affair.
Great! So I assume you're equally open-minded about whether we evolved from lower life forms or were created by God/Aliens/Whatever? No, right? So open-mindedness is a virtue as long as it's not about something you really want to believe in.
Okay, sorry, but this is getting tiresome--if you looked closer, you'd realize that in fact the people questioning Jesus' existence have no valid points to make. The gospels themselves are sufficient evidence, because they make no sense as purely mythic narratives. The analogies made between the Mithras Cult or Egyptian Mythology are based on highly distorted versions of those myths--see, to make Jesus not exist, you have to start falsifying other areas of study as well.
So my glibly remarked "hunch" was a nod to that effect -- I can't entirely dismiss those who insist Jesus never existed but I'm not compelled to accept their conclusions.
But again, would you say the same thing about the people calling evolution by natural selection into question? Why not? Were you there? Do you KNOW for an absolute fact that we evolved from earlier life forms? Do you think science has answered every single question about how it happened? Because it hasn't, and probably never will. But evolution happened, and Jesus existed. The people questioning both may have degrees in some cases, they may have done some serious study, but they entered into their inquiries with their minds made up, and created a controversy where none existed. To give equal weight to both sides when one side is clearly not equal to the other is 'teaching the controversy'. Like it or not.
My impression of those who are adamant that Jesus never existed are akin to those who try too hard to make the comparisons of Jesus to Krishna, Horus and Mithra, in the hopes (I suspect) of being able to claim overt plagiarism and then proceed to flush Jesus down the drain in one fell swoop. I find influences on the Jesus story from earlier sources all but certain
I don't. Because they aren't. Yes, there are parallels, and there are parallels between stories told by cutlers that never had any interaction with each other at all. Because there are only so many BASIC stories to tell. Was the genuine narrative of Jesus' life reshaped? Sure, and every historian who writes about some modern historical figure is reshaping that life to form a narrative, no matter how hard he or she tries to stick to the facts. The people who gradually transformed him into God were not trying to be objective, but they were sincere in their beliefs, and they preserved facts that hardly served their cause--like "My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?" Like Jesus being baptized by John. These stories don't serve the narrative that Jesus is divine, but they are in there anyway--why? Because they happened, and the people writing down these stories knew they had happened, and they wanted to tell the truth, as best as they could know and understand it, working out of the highly religious mindset they had. It was never their intention to deceive. That doesn't mean everything they wrote down happened. It does mean that it's impossible to rationally posit that they'd just make Jesus up out of whole cloth. If they had known he didn't exist, they would not have been reshaping their beliefs to accommodate their reaction to his life, and what he did in that life. And even harder to believe they'd lay down their lives as martyrs to the memory of a man they had made up.
How can any rational person look at the epistles of Paul, written perhaps 20 years after Jesus died, where Paul clearly refers to Jesus as a man who walked around on the earth, whose brother he actually met (same brother referenced by Josephus years later), and come to any conclusion other than that Jesus really did live, really was crucified, and really did have some very interesting things to say? It's great we have Josephus, Tacitus, and a few other outside sources, and contrary to what you've read, there's overwhelming consensus that they are legitimate (if perhaps slightly rewritten in one or two cases), but the New Testament texts are evidence Jesus existed, just as much as the writings of Plato and Xenophon are evidence Socrates existed. In neither case, is there any believable case to make that they would create a mentor out of thin air, knowing that contemporaries who never saw this man would call them liars.
but I think there is an over zealous attempt by skeptics to try too hard in this area. Much the same as you've pointed out with those who insist Jesus never existed.
It's really the same people.
No serious scholars think the gospel narrative was seriously impacted by earlier pagan myths. No serious scholars think the gospels are a straightforward factual narrative of exactly what Jesus said and did, either. But to argue that the Jews didn't know how to tell their own stories without copying off somebody else's paper is pretty damn bizarre. If anything, they've been more copied FROM. Far more influencing others than being influenced by others. Billions of people belong to faiths that are derived from Jewish scripture.
It's not impossible that the later gospels had some influence from sources other than Judaism, but as of this moment, scholars just can't find much of anything. Christianity as an institution obviously borrowed a lot from paganism in terms of ritual, but that's a different subject entirely.
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