New article questioning the existence of Jesus(link)

This is from one of the top magazines in Canada. And NO! There isn't a SHRED of evidence Jesus was real! The bible simply tells a STORY but does NOT give evidence the story and characters in that story are REAL!!

Did Jesus exist?

“Do this in memory of me,” said Jesus at the Last Supper, according to the Gospel of Luke. But memories of Jesus the man have proved stubbornly elusive for historians who are convinced the truth of the son of God lies beneath the surface of Gospel accounts written decades after his death. Now, for the first time, one of America’s most prominent New Testament scholars has gone outside of his narrow field, driven as much by frustration as curiosity, to examine what the science of memory might offer to separate the historical wheat from the theological chaff in the Gospels. In so doing, University of North Carolina religious studies professor Bart Ehrman may have opened a new front in the currently quiescent Jesus wars, a quarter-century of devout and secular scholars battling over what, exactly, is the gospel truth.

Ehrman’s aim was to illuminate the role of memory in crafting the stories of Jesus that would appear in the Bible, and to see how well the assumed role of eyewitnesses in supporting miraculous events stood up. There’s a twist in the tale, though, and frailty of human memory turned out to be more profound than Ehrman suspected or, perhaps, welcomed. His eye-opening Jesus Before the Gospels: How the Earliest Christians Remembered, Changed, and Invented Their Stories of the Savior may prove most useful for those who hold to a position Ehrman finds more wrong-headed than insistence on the Bible’s literal truth. The reason Biblical historians cannot find even the outline of a historical Jesus, argues an increasingly persuasive chorus of challengers, is that there is nothing to find: Jesus Christ never lived at all.

“For the past two years I’ve been reading what I can about memory,” says Ehrman in an interview, “and learning that what we were taught in grad school—what’s still taught in grad school—is untrue.” Changes in oral memory, psychologists, sociologists and anthropologists have found, are actually more radical than in literary transmission, because the literary tends to fix, unchanged, the received text. But every act of oral transmission, Ehrman cites one memory expert as declaring, “is also an act of creation.” That means one of the few pieces of common ground between believers and skeptics—that the oral transmission of stories about Jesus in the time between his death and the composition of the Gospels could be (more or less) trusted—is turning to quicksand.

The crucial gap in written records, lasting four decades or more, between the death of Jesus (which is established today at no later than 36 CE) and the earliest gospel, that of Mark (in scholars’ near-universal view, some time after the fall of Jerusalem in 70 CE), was never a serious issue in New Testament studies. The faithful have always coped with it by assuming that however long it lasted—and they do tend to shorten it—the inerrant Word of God was still passed on in oral form subject to correction by Apostles or other eyewitnesses. Secular historians, without much questioning their own assumptions, accepted the entrenched academic idea that oral cultures were significantly better than literary cultures in preserving accurate memory.

The passage of years explained, in a way acceptable to historians, why there were different accounts of the same event. Ehrman recalls how, as a young professor, he asked an older expert—a proponent of sturdy oral transmission—how he dealt with the fact the gospels give two accounts of Jesus’s visit to the 12-year-old daughter of Jairus: one in which the girl is dying, another in which she is already dead. The answer, that there must have been two visits to the (unlucky) child, was essentially impossible for anyone not committed to gospel truth. Yet at the same time, and of greater importance, historians’ trust in overall oral truth meant small detail changes did not trouble their assumptions about accurate “gist” memories lying at the heart of stories in Mark and the other Gospels.

No more. Memory studies and experiments cited by Ehrman show it would have been impossible to control the contents of stories about Jesus. One experiment a decade ago took 33 university students to a morgue, the sort of experience they would be bound to talk about. Follow-up by the researchers showed that within three days news of the visit had spread in garbled form, via intermediaries, to 881 people. The more often a story is repeated—and a growing new religious community will repeat its stories very often—the more it changes. Repeat one 10 times, as in a game of telephone, and the most salient details—who exactly said what or did what to whom—will change the most. What are the chances, 50 years after the fact, that the author of the Gospel of Matthew remembered hearing the Sermon on the Mount—a polished and nuanced discourse—exactly as it was said?

As for eyewitness corroboration, far from controlling accuracy, eyewitnesses tend to offer the least trustworthy accounts, particularly when recalling something spectacular or fast-moving, like Jesus walking on water. Or thinking that they recall it: 10 months after a cargo plane crashed into an Amsterdam apartment building in 1992, killing 43 people, researchers asked Dutch university students and faculty if they recalled the TV footage of the moment of impact. More than three-quarters said they did, even though there was no such footage. (Not unlike Donald Trump’s crowds of Muslims dancing for joy on New Jersey rooftops on 9/11.) And there’s no reason to believe memories of the more mundane details of Jesus’s life would be any more reliable.

False memories are easily implanted. Just imagining being at an unusual event—seeing Lazarus rise from the dead, say—can cause a hearer to “remember” being personally present. A group of students in one test Ehrman cites were led, one by one, to a Pepsi machine; half were asked to get down on one knee and propose to it, the other half to imagine doing so. Two weeks later, half of the second cohort remembered actually making the marital offer. Early Christians seemed well aware of the treachery of memory. St. Paul offered assurances to his readers in the Epistle to the Galatians that the teachings he offered had not come to him by an untrustworthy path: “I want you to know, brothers and sisters, that the gospel I preached is not of human origin. I did not receive it from any man, nor was I taught it; rather, I received it by revelation from Jesus Christ.”

Group memory was often the worst, according to anthropologists who watched it distort before their eyes when they recorded several witnesses at once. If a dominant member of the group interjected his version or a new (and potentially suspect) detail, the others would often let it slide unchallenged, incorporating it into the new collective memory. The most important fact about memory, adds Ehrman, is that it’s social as well as individual, “and social memory is all about what matters now.”

That’s why the image of celebrating Muslims on 9/11 comes to the fore in the heat of a xenophobic election campaign, and why the Gospels are full of “recalled” stories that offered guidance on urgent matters at the time they were written down, “arguments with orthodox Jews about keeping Sabbath laws, claims that Jesus had given his disciples powers of healing.” Tales grow in the telling too, while the sort of detail that convinces hearers that “this really happened”—Christ wrote in the dust with his finger before he answered the question about the woman caught in adultery—is precisely what is added to stories, because nothing recommends a tale better than a claim of actuality.

http://www.macleans.ca/society/life/did-jesus-really-exist-2/

Jesus NEVER existed! He is Judeo Christian MYTH!