Have you seen the little three-part drama on Jesus and Mo?
It started with Mo doing some web surfing on the evidence for Jesus.
Oh no! It’s too poignant.
The next one is even more poignant.
How does it end? See for yourself.
Butterflies and Wheels
Gnu atheism, women's rights, internationalism, universalism, and gossip
Well if Clint Eastwood is a fan of WLC, that’s another place he might have gotten it from.
I thought it was here:
My theory is that he thought he was in his weekly Gestalt Therapy session.
I thought he got the idea from the Craig-Dawkins non-debate.
Mo does not need to despair He might disappear in the same puff of smoke in meet his buddy again. His historicity is equally questionable.
(Well maybe not exactly equally, but what’s left behind is small enough to easily escape the unaided eye.)
I agree with Mo. I have read about a dozen Bart Ehrman books so, not surprisingly, I shared his ideas about Jesus, until I read Did Jesus Exist? Ehrman lined up all the evidence and it looked very thin. His argumentation was weak. For example, he took Earl Doherty to task for saying that 1 Thessalonians 2:15-16 was an interpolation, dismissing the argument by ad hominem saying Jesus-mythers employ the interpolation excuse for inconvenient verses and dodged Doherty’s argument. Doherty only cites two passages as interpolations in The Jesus Myth by my count and his argument in this case is strong.
The extra-biblical evidence only shows that there were people who believed there was an actual Jesus by the late first century. What began to convince me that there was no Jesus is the realization that the intra-biblical evidence supports this, too. The Epistles never mention anything Jesus said, did, or taught. This is astonishing because some of them are supposed to have been written by his companions. The Epistles, from Romans through Revelation, only talk about the death and resurrection. This rules out the idea that Jesus may have been based on an itinerant rabbi that was known to the writers of the Epistles.
Robert M. Price, in The Christ Myth Theory and Its Problems, shows how various scholars have traced nearly all the Gospels stories to Old Testament verses, The Odyssey, and Euripides. He doesn’t mention that Luke seems to have used Josephus as a source. This shows that the stories about Jesus come from pre-first century literature, rather than memories of an actual person.
While it is true that we really can’t expect evidence for the existence of any particular person in ancient history, the evidence we have for Jesus shows that nothing we think we know about Jesus goes back to a real person. At least we can trace Santa Claus back to Saint Nicholas.
I don’t like the Christ Myth meme. The thing is, it’s trivial to assert that there was a historical Jesus about whom some, but not all, of the details we have are at least in the right ballpark. I mean, the similarities of the virgin birth, miracle stories, etc to other messianic types are pretty well-documented, but the most you can say about that is that they were attached to someone who actually existed and had a small following during his lifetime.
In other words, people trying to prove the Jesus Myth are fighting the wrong battle — they’re trying to treat the gospel accounts as authoritative, then saying that no such person existed. Well, yeah, such a person can’t exist, but someone to whom those properties were wrongly attributed can, so the logical leap from “these stories are exaggerated” to “there is no such person” isn’t warranted.
If we’d discard the gospel accounts entirely as fiction and assume there was a historical Jesus who we know nothing about and who entirely escaped any entry in any sort of historical source, and who’s existence was thence historically entirely trivial from our perspective, then I wouldn’t know any objection to the hypothesis. I wouldn’t know anyone who’d care enough to entertain it either.