Did the man "Jesus" exist?

[youkrst]

The Baloney Detection Kit

i think the baloney detection kit is never more required than when someone is telling you that a guy really did literally walk on water and rise from the dead literally to save the world from it's "sins"

when someone tries to present symbolic allegory as literal history then the baloney detction kit will definitely come in handy.

muslims jews and christians and literalism what a combination, what a mess, what a world of suffering.

[tat tvam asi]

Becoming a martyr does not mean you are right.

Isn't that the truth. I've heard too many Christian apologists ramble on about "why would people give up their lives for a myth?"

Simplest explanation is because they wanted to believe that a mythological afterlife is greater than actual life. So much so that they were willing to give their lives for it. That doesn't do anything to prove them right of course...

[Robert Tulip]

ant, Shermer's argument is good, and provides a useful baseline for skepticism about the Christ Myth Theory.

It is why I argue that the prima facie assumption in the debate should be that Jesus Christ really did exist. The weight of authority is simply so massive that contradicting it requires very strong argument.

But, my perception of the Christ debate, and how it differs in kind from normal intellectual debates, is that people who believe that Jesus was real have a strong emotional investment, even a sense of personal relationship with Jesus, that makes them resistant to simple logic and evidence.

If you compare it to other paradigm shifts, no one really cares about plate tectonics or Newtonian mechanics in the same way they care about religion. The Galileo and Darwin upheavals were so massive because they sapped the foundations of conventional faith. Calling Jesus Christ as a myth is an intellectual upheaval on a similar scale.

What we find now is that advocates of the Christ Myth Theory, which Earl Doherty has described as a persistent coherent scholarly strand on the margin of academic life for several centuries, are utterly shunned. They are not invited to speak in any public forum, they are not sought out by academics eager to co-write articles, they are not cited in media and mainstream journals except as figures of ridicule and abuse. It is very strange.

The explanation is not that scholars such as Earl Doherty, DM Murdock and Robert M. Price are cranks and crackpots. It is that too many Christians find their work viscerally repugnant, investigating a hypothesis that Christians have decided in advance is necessarily false. This advance decision is known politely as prejudice. It infects the whole climate of debate, with even undecided scholars affected by the severe intellectual reaction of the true believers into deciding this is a field of research where angels fear to tread.

I would take your citing of Shermer more seriously if you could point to any evidence of universities engaging in sustained critical dialogue about the Christ Myth Theory. Such dialogue is the prerequisite of peer review. It is not enough to say it has already been refuted, as that is either ignorance or a lie.

Universities love to present this heroic image of academics as courageous intellectual pioneers seeking to extend the frontiers of knowledge in pursuit of Nobel Prizes etc through innovative research. That is a myth. Academics, at least in fields related to this topic, are timid herd animals, followers not leaders. They are mostly very skittish and cowardly when it comes to conversation with anyone outside the blessed anointed magic circle of tenure. You cannot get tenure if you have different ideas, so the magic circle becomes an echo chamber for self-perpetuating dogma and prejudice.

[tat tvam asi]

As far as science is concerned:

A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it. (Max Planck, 1920)

That seems to be the key. We debate Christian apologists and evemerist's online about the historicity of the gospel Jesus and a new generation is growing up that is familiar with the debate itself. I didn't grow up familiar with the debate, did anyone here grow up familiar with it?

There was no internet while I was growing up, no youtube, no forums. I had no exposure to any of it. Therefore I knew nothing about any of it due to lack of exposure.

This seems very new to most of us regardless of which position we prefer. That's precisely why there's so much shock and awe involved with the assertion that the gospel Jesus may have been completely mythological through and through. Previously most generations only considered that Jesus seems partially mythological but certainly partially historical too. That isn't nearly as certain nowadays, at least not to the up and coming generation and probably generations to follow. Newer scholars will be rising through the ranks of academia who will most definately be familiar with the debate and all of the uncertainty that goes along with the gospel myths.

In the days of Gerald Massey and such there was no wide spread exposure about mythicism. It was just something that a few people were getting into which had no way of reaching the masses. But it lasted long enough in small circles to eventually merge into the information age...

http://www.stellarhousepublishing.com/mythicism.html

[Robert Tulip]

Proving History!
February 8, 2012 at 8:31 pm Richard Carrier
My new book is finally done and available for pre-order at Amazon: titled Proving History: Bayes’s Theorem and the Quest for the Historical Jesus. Yes, that’s the one (or one of the two) that everyone has been asking me about. It’s been years in the making, and in the waiting, but we completed its academic peer review, I made all requested revisions, proofed the galleys, finished the index, and it’s all ready to go, at the printer’s being typeset now. It’s being published by Prometheus Books, my first sole-author title with them.

more from Carrier's blog...