Most likely there was a historical person whom the attributes of Jesus are attributed. It's just common sense because a made up person would never stand up to scrutiny.
That's the point. Jesus does not stand up to scrutiny. The only reason he has been accepted as a historical figure for so long is that the Christians had veto power over Western culture. Now that that power is mercifully waning, so is the believability of Jesus.
Especially early on. I am referring to when the religion was created people would most likely say "where is this guy, how come he never shows up?"
Unless you have some startling new evidence, nothing was written about Jesus until after the alleged time of his death. We have no reason to believe that anyone spoke about him or believed in him during the time he is alleged to have been alive, so there was nothing to be skeptical about.
Jesus was probably real. . . .
You're begging the question that started this thread. Upon what evidence do you base that assertion? Please present it to us. That's the purpose of this thread, so please cooperate.
It is not generally accepted by non-religious scholars that there was no historical Jesus.
This is no longer true, although it was for the first half of my life. The last shred of evidence for Jesus as a real historical figure was the writings of the Roman historian Josephus. Modern forensic analysis has demolished the credibility of those portions of his writings. They are blatant forgeries.
So again, unless you have some new evidence that will stun the community of non-religious scholars, you are wrong about this.
You are pissed off at the religious and Christians and I can think of many reasons for you to be, but that is beside the point. Medicine Woman' hypothesis has little merit. She could, coincidentally, be correct, but her assertion is weakly supported.
There's no inherent negative correlation between being pissed off at somebody and that person actually being wrong. MW may be pissed off at Christianity (and I'm not sure she is, at least not one-tenth as much as I am), but that doesn't autmatically mean that it can't be pure bullshit.
The idea that some religious scholars confirmed his non-existence is a joke.
You are way behind the information curve on this. Besides, no scholar would use terminology like "confirming his non-existence." This sounds like something a religionist made up to cast aspersions on atheists.
No matter what, there is plenty of evidentiary support of Jesus' existance.
You're going to have to do better than that on a science website, even if this is the religion board and we relax some of the rules. Please cite some of this evidence for us. The assertion on the table is that there is NO such evidence. If you know of some, you're going to have to do more than say so.
Please provide evidence for this assertion.
Snakelord, We have a bitter woman (M*W) trying to convince people that a few modern authors, who know virtually nothing about that time except for what they read, know if someone was alive over 2,000 years ago.
It's rather a lot of modern writers. The consensus on this issue has completely turned around in the past fifteen or twenty years, since the debunking of the Josephus forgeries. Besides, what does anyone know about events 2000 years ago except what they have read? Scholarship under these circumstances becomes an exercise in forensics, and Jesus fails the test.
And we are simply trying to tell you that he could not have been made up. You just cannot create a person out of nowhere.
What is your reasoning for this remarkable statement? Con artists and politicians have been fooling people since the dawn of civilization.
Better still, give an example of one fictional character who has, in the course of history, been believed as real.
As an American I'm somewhat familiar only with the legends of England, the country even those of us without a drop of British blood regard as our spiritual ancestral home. So I'll limit myself to that folklore and I immediately come up with two examples: King Arthur and Robin Hood.
But this is a fallacious question. If someone is believed as real, then how are we to discern that he is false and everyone who believes in him is wrong?
Here we have a perfect laboratory experiment. There is absolutely zero satisfactory scholarly evidence for the existence of Jesus as an actual person. Yet right here on SciForums, a website one would assume to attract scientists and other scholars, people who have nothing to add to that missing pile of evidence are insisting that he was real, and getting really angry and insulting when we ask for at least a modicum of respect for the scientific method in their argument.
We're asking for evidence. The apologists for religion keep tossing around statements to the effect that "there is lots of evidence." Yet no one has actually provided any.
Q.E.D.
