dik909 wrote:You must remember that the Bible isn't one book, but a collection of books, each one with it's own unique literary style and genre.
Doh! Really? Where exactly did i say it wasn´t fiction by different authors, or that there can´t be something that did happen working their way into it? That is rather usualy for fiction .... .
The majority is historical narrative,
fictional narratives.
So, please, give thoughtful study before wanton dismissals based on ignorance and prejudices.
I did, it is mostly nonsense.
[quote=Man, if you can find me just ONE tenured, peer-reviewed historian of classics or ancient history at an accredited university who agrees that Jesus didn't exist, I'll eat my words. ^_^[/quote]
aside of tenure, Thomas L. Thompson fits your bill and one ups it by actually be a Theologen, and endorsed by the National Endowment for the Humanities. Then there is Constantin François de Chassebœuf, comte de Volney, Charles-François Dupuis, David Strauss (ok, he is just saying no miracles, everything supernatural in the gospels is nonsense), Bruno Bauer, Abraham Dirk Loman, Edwin Johnson, pretty much the whole Dutch Radical School, George Albert Wells ..... not all fit your bill point for point of course, but there is plenty of peer reviewed historians, archaeologists and so on that don´t think Jesus ever existed as an historical person.
The Mainstream opinion only holds on, it is only eroding slow, because for most scientists in the field, believing that nonsense is required to get the job. There have been plenty on studies on how accepted methods of historical inquiry are consistently set aside when it comes to bible studies, see for example:
Chris Keith and Anthony LeDonne (eds.), Jesus, History and the Demise of Authenticity
Dale Allison, 'The Historians' Jesus and the Church', in Seeking the Identity of Jesus: A Pilgrimage
Hector Avalos, The End of Biblical Studies
Gerd Theissen and Dagmar Winter, The Quest for the Plausible Jesus: The Question of Criteria
Stanley Porter, The Criteria for Authenticity in Historical-Jesus Research: Previous Discussion and New Proposals
No offense, but you strike me as someone who believes things at face value without doing any independent research, because if you did you'd know that there's +45 independent eyewitness testimonies to Jesus' life and works from within one generation of His life. Can you even comprehend how close that is in terms of ancient history !?
There is not a single eyewitness testimonial of Jesus life on earth, you mean hearsay. That is not the same. Keep in mind that we don´t know the authorship of any Gospel, so everything is along the lines of "I am telling you a story, that someone told me, and according to him this and that happened". The only person we know about that conceivably could have met Jesus, Paul, has not met Jesus and insists you can only know about him from revelation and scripture.
There is however plenty of evidence that accounts of Jesus have been faked, not much point doing that if you have plenty of evidence available. Like, most likely, Eusebius adding the Testimonium Flavianum to Josephus´s work.
The earliest manuscripts/sources we have referring to Plato are from the Middle Ages; are you as skeptical of his existence ?
Haven´t considered it, at a quick glance evidence for his historicity seems to be rather vague. But the account of his life also isn´t at odds with other sources of the time, while pretty much everything about Jesus is.
best regards
Thomas