Posted: May 07, 2012 1:19 pm
angelo wrote:Corky wrote:dogsgod wrote:
The possibility that Jesus is mythical should not be ruled out by the likes of Ehrman and his followers, but they do rule it out. It's no surprise though, after all, we are discussing a religious figure from The Bible, and we know how passionate and superstitious people can be when it comes to The Bible, as if there is a rule that it must contain some truth about history and its characters that play a role in the stories.
Trying to explain how a mythical Jesus could arise while not being able to read the minds of the con-men preachers who invented him is the reason Jesus is historical - it's easier to explain that way.
Then there is the assumption that there are true facts to be found in the Bible, when there isn't. The only truth about it is that over a period of several centuries a bunch of religious con-men made that shit up out of thin air. There was no Genesis flood, there was no tower of Babel, no Exodus from Egypt, no conquest of Canaan and last but not least, there was no "revelations" of a Jewish god-man and the ones who claimed to have witnessed a resurrection were liars.
Knowing that these people were lying about seeing a resurrection - why would anyone in their right mind believe any damn thing else they said? But Ehrman does - Ehrman thinks Paul is an honest man.
Occam's Razor would suggest that the simplest explanation is usually the correct one. MJ seems the simplest explanation when looking at the hard evidence or facts. There are no eyewitnesses, but the HJ supporters will say there are no eyewitnesses for most of the ancient mythical heroes. But this Jesus was no ordinary ancient world hero, he was said to have come back from the dead, walked on water, healed the sick and lame, turned water into wine, in short, the son of God. The most famous non entity ever. The disturbance he created in the Temple which got him arrested should have been noted by Philo of Alexandria who wrote extensively about Pilate, yet nothing about putting to death the king of the Jews.
This is incorrect, Occam's Razor clearly argues against Mythicism, which requires either very unusual readings of several texts or establishing interpolations ad hoc. We have some biographical details about Jesus in Pauline epistles and in non-Christian accounts that are simply dismissed by these methods with insufficient evidence, sometimes no evidence at all. Material in the gospels that is poorly explained by an invented figure is nevertheless explained away. Aside that, it would require that around one hundred years ago either the overwhelming majority of relevantly trained scholars suddenly stopped asking a question that was posed before that time or developed a very strong bias against Mythicism. What we have there is not the simpler hypothesis, but an unsound hypothesis that is laden with extensive and dubious claims.