Yoel
<< When missionaries argue they usually appeal to
emotions rather than to reason and they will attempt to
make you feel embarrassed about denying the
historicity of Jesus. The usual response is something
like _"Isn't denying the existence of Jesus just as silly
as denying the existence of Julius Caesar or Queen
Elizabeth?"_. >>
DAR
Yes, I have heard this one a lot. There is also what I
call the "argument from encyclopedia Britannica".
This is where they say, "look how many pages he gets
in the encyclopedia! He must be real!". This is when
you tell them to look up Mythra, Zeus and all the rest
of the spooks they DON'T believe in. LOL
I am going to enjoy your Jesus Myth series, I had
put off reading it since it is quite long.
Dan Barker has an excellent summary of the
reasons for how and why the evidence for JC existence
is so pitifully weak in the last chapter of his book
"Losing Faith In Faith: From Preacher To Atheist."
There is no "real Jesus" in any meaningful sense
of the word.
cheers,
Darrel
------------------------- An excellent post from a friend on AOL. Check
this out:
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Kornform on the gospels
Subj: Jesus? Here's the "Evidence" 1
Date: 96-04-09 13:21:54 EDT
From: Kornform
I've posted this several times since 1991 and I thought new
readers would like it for the Day After Little Easter.
We constantly hear from the most pious and loudmouthed
Christians that the Jews recorded all of the bible "religiously."
For thousands of years, literate scribes faithfully penned the
very words of "God," and kept them guarded in an ark for
posterity. Indeed, the very word "religiously" has taken a
vernacular meaning a faithful, scrupulous and conscientiously
performed activity. It is claimed by many here on this forum
that we have, or once had for sure, an absolutely perfect Old
Testament, the "Word of God," impeccably recorded by the
Israelites.
"Let's do a little reconstruction of the alleged New Testament
history. Jesus arrives on the scene. Jesus, a Jew, not a
Christian, is a member of the Tribe, right in the midst of them
all. He is allegedly the most wondrous of all the Jewish
prophets, a magnificent Savior and Messiah, a miracle worker
beating out any previous miracle worker by miles. He raises
the dead, heals the sick, and walks on water. He is able to zap a
little fig tree with one glance, and magically inserts devils into
pigs which then run off to commit suicide by drowning. He is
a superlative advisor and teacher, a seer's seer, a moralist
beyond compare. He is going to save the entire world. In fact,
he's "God" himself. You name it, he's got it.
But wait! Here we also have these hundreds, if not
thousands, of faithful Israelite scribes, finished with the perfect
Old Testament, hanging around, ready and willing to
meticulously and accurately and instantly record anything of
"Godly" import. Not only that, we have an entire populace,
living under a theocracy--lighting candles, praying, fretting
about eating the right foods, thinking about "God" all day and
all night. Plenty of potential eyewitnesses to any possible
appearance of "God" HimSelfMost.
The scene is set. Jesus, "King of the Jews," appears, circa 4
B.C. - 29 A.D., struts his stuff for more than thirty years in
front of all these hungry reporters and wide-eyed "God"
watchers, performing absolutely astounding miracles,
promising to save all of humanity from deadly sins and or evil,
and even coming back from the dead following the most
public of trials and executions, not only involving the populace
at large, but the Roman authorities, and their observers and
officials.
Well, after all this folderol, what do we poor saps get??
All we get is Paul, once Saul, a neurotic and effete fanatic,
possibly a repressed homosexual, who admitted never to have
even seen Jesus except in a hallucination, writing a few
pompous and threatening letters and pretending to be
humanity's sex counselor. This "reportage" (if written today, it
would be summarily trashed in even the editorial offices of the
National Enquirer) is followed, after a remarkably and
suspiciously long 10,20,30...90 or more years, by four sorry
anonymous gospellers, writing, no! assembling bits and
snatches of rumors and gossip into a silly pastiche of tall tales
and supernatural gobbledygook, complete with contradictions,
errors, omissions, duplications, even plagiarism between the
books. We have no original documents of any of the alleged
eyewitnesses, who are not even identified. No original gospel
writings remain. No preciously preserved news reports by all
these Jewish scribes ready to carefully guard them until now in
secure archives. The earliest document for the period anybody
has ever been able to produce is a tiny little thumb-nail sized
fragment, dated from about 125 CE, a forlorn little tatter, not
even an original, but just a translation in Greek, containing
only a handful of words from the gospel "attributed" to the
senile John.
This is an astonishing discrepancy. A huge disparity
between what reasonably could be expected from the
"religiously" alert Jewish culture and what we actually got
from the miserable handful of rag-tag Gospellers and Paul. It's
ridiculous pseudo history. The Jesus story is absurd and
simply laughable.
I sincerely wish some of the happy Jesus warriors on this
forum would think long and hard about this puzzling and
gigantic anomaly, and either offer up some realistic scholarly
explanations or to get real and admit the New Testament is
nothing more than a fabrication." --kornform@aol.com
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