Did Jesus Exist? by Bart Ehrman

They've been answered dozens of times. If you want to discuss the origins of the universe (again) I suggest you start another thread on it or re-start many of the existing ones.Meanwhile, why are you trying to change the subject? This thread is about the existence or otherwise of Jesus.
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Hi Charley, We don't know yet is not an answer, it is a cop out.Why would we need another thread as this is as good as any thread as we are talking about His existence. I am not trying to change the subject.If He did not exist He could not create the universe.If He did create the universe I should have the opportunity to show His existence by giving the universe as proof of His existence. That is what I am doing.You don't like it then show me He did not create the universe by answering my questions. It is just that easy.The way you can make assertions it should not take even 10 minutes to prove Jesus did not exist.God Bless,

Go take a flying leap you self righteous holier than thou POS.

Hi Taq, You do if you want to prove that Jesus did not create the universe and everything that is in it. If you did that, you would prove He did not exist. You do if you want to prove that Jesus did not create the universe and everything that is in it. If you did that, you would prove He did not exist. Clouds are created evaporation and since the air can only hold so much vapor when it reaches the saturation point and the temperature and atmospheric pressure gets just right condensation takes place and the water returns to where it came from.There is 6 types of clouds and they are:
Cumulus: Fluffy and cotton-like, often seen on sunny days.
Cirrus: Thin, wispy clouds at high altitudes.
Stratus: Layered and gray, often associated with overcast skies.
Nimbus: Rain-bearing clouds.
Cumulonimbus: Towering, thunderstorm clouds.
Nimbostratus: Thick, gray clouds that bring steady rain.That covers the clouds Now to the second part of that question of infections.I suppose you would like to blame Jesus For that as all evil on earth.He is not the cause of bad things. The man formed from the dust of the ground in Genesis 2:7 is the guilty party. Because he chose to eat the fruit from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil and sin entered into the universe causing Jesus to put a curse on the entire universe.So don't blame God/Jesus/Holy Spirit for problems you have, if you have to blame somebody to make you feel better about it just put the blame where it is supposed to be on the first man. According to Bang theory. When the universe was just 10^^-34 of a second old—yes, that’s a hundredth of a billionth of a trillionth of a trillionth of a second in age—it experienced an incredible burst of expansion known as inflation. During this cosmic sprint, space itself expanded faster than the speed of light. Imagine the universe doubling in size at least 90 times, going from subatomic-sized to golf-ball-sized almost instantaneously!Expanding at the speed of light of 186,000 miles per second in every direction: In 1 second the universe was 372,000 miles in diameter.
In 1 minute the universe was 22,320,000 miles in diameter.
In 1 hour the universe was 1,339,200,000 miles in diameter.
In 1 day the universe was 32,140,800,000 miles in diameter.
In 1 year the universe was 11,731,392,000,000 miles in diameter.
In 1000 years the universe was 1.1731392e+16 miles in diameter.
In 3800000 years the universe was 4.45792896e+21miles in diameter.That tells me there is an empty volume of space at the center of the universe where nothing exists as everything inside that space is 4.45792896e+21 miles apart at that point in time. that is a pretty good size hole in the center of the universe. The reason that hole is that big is that everything that existed in the pea sized universe had expanded away from that point leaving nothing behind.God Bless,

Uh? “We don't know” is one of the best, if not THE BEST answers to any question in science. It's where the work starts, where the excitement of discovery is, it's the coal face.A cop out is not knowing and inventing something magical as a convenient but useless 'explanation.' “We don't know, must have been the fairies.”
​ Because we're talking about whether Jesus physically existed here on earth 2,000 years ago. Not whether some god made the universe billions of years ago. Quit trying to change the subject just because you got into difficulty - it's juvenile and we notice.

You can stick to the topic or I can put you on a post count limit.

So if we don’t know what the very first lifeform was therefore all of evolution falls and we can know nothing.What color are your god’s eyes, ICANT? You don’t know is not an answer, it is a cop out.If you do not know your god to this level of detail then it does not exist. Your entire church collapses.

That sounds dangerously close to creationist conspiracy theories about scientists being unable to speak candidly about evolution. The idea that there non-Christian scholars are trapped in some sort of cognitive bias is far fetched. They are arguably the ones who we might reasonably expect to be more biased toward mythicism and yet they're not. I think that a fair characterisation. I don't know what you expect from such a culturally loaded field of study. Inevitably the existence of Christian faith and any resulting bias are going to affect the scholarship. That's just how it is. It's also worth mentioning that not all Christian scholars are insistent upon every supernatural aspect of the mythic Christ. Moderate Christians do exist and it's my understanding that a number of ostensibly Christian scholars hold beliefs about the accuracy of the Gospels that would make someone like Ken Ham denounce them as fake Christians.Also I will point out again that insofar as there are two extremes at play, the extreme anti-Christian position - mythicsim - falls outside of academia. The extreme within academia is a mundane historical Jesus. That's what I would call "lampshading".I don't think the scenario you outline is innately implausible. The thing that's truly implausible is the idea of Jesus the Messiah needing to be baptised by a lesser figure like John. This oddity falls away however if we picture the scenario where a mundane Jesus gets baptised. Of course he would want to be baptised by John the Baptist. John was already a well known figure and, as you say, having John's imprimatur would have helped Jesus' evangelism. They were operating in the same area. We have independent evidence of John's historicity. It hangs together. I don't think that argument is following the same logic. It's not a criterion of embarrassment. I think you are underplaying the extent to which crucifixion was an embarrassment. Take a look at this Roman Graffito; The caption reads "Alexamenos worships his god". It's from Rome, dating form the 1st to 3rd Centuries, probably the early 3rd. This is the kind of mockery that early proto-Christians were inviting. It would have been viewed no more charitably by most Jews. I don't see why they would invite such scorn without reason.A model built around a historical Jesus actually being crucified however explains this rather well. In the face of the catastrophic failure of their beliefs, Jesus' followers had to come up with a workaround and the resurrection was their solution. I'm not suggesting they concocted it cynically; I think that someone had an experience which they took for a vision or revelation of a risen Christ. This caught on, allowing the veneration of Jesus to continue beyond his death and become the veneration of Christ.This is a higly parsimonious explanation for the crucifixion, the resurrection, the presence of many of the objectionable elements and perhaps most importantly, the reason why Christianity exists at all. There was no pre-existing tradition of a resurrected Messiah, let alone a suffering martyr. The crucifixion of a real Jesus explains the origin of both of these novel ideas. I don't think that putting it the other way around as you do leaves any explanatory power. Certainly it is especially glaring that a full mythicist hypothesis leaves us with absolutely no idea where Christianity came from in the first place. This is a major failing, a failure to address the null hypothesis. Mythicists typically make little attempt to address this question. If not a real Jesus, where does any of this come form? We are left to wonder. No, absolutely not. In the real world most people are right about some things and wrong about others, that's almost universal. It is certainly the case with historical sources from antiquity. I don't think there's any substantial source from that far back that doesn't contain some mixture of truth, honest error, bias, outright lies, plausible and implausible.The same might be said of scholars themselves, but you are being extremely uncharitable in equating the deeply held and oft inflexible faith positions of fundamentalists at one end of the spectrum with the vastly more tentative academic positions held by scholars operating as professional historians or textual critics. I think you're being a little uncharitable toward the more moderate Christian scholars too. There are Christian scholars who are candid about not being able to make an evidence based case for the resurrection. If you insist; it's not hard to believe. In fact it is completely normal for people to be right about some things and wrong about others. The same is true of historical documents, to the point where we might even start to become suspicious if a source were too perfect. We were talking about the resurrection, or at least I was. Paul claims to be a witness to the resurrected Jesus, but only in a vision. That leaves him a poor quality witness to that event, as his account is wholly supernatural in nature. It seems to have convinced him (a superstitious man from the 1st Century) but I obviously don't find it convincing.His accounts of mundane natters are obviously more plausible. Well yes. I think that's both obvious and inescapable.Once the supernatural elements have been cast aside we are left with a mixture of less-plausible and more-plausible material. There are ways of sifting through that. Ahistorical elements for instance cast doubt. A higher degree of concordance between independent sources is more convincing. There are arguments from embarrassment. There are linguistic arguments - some passages from the NT seem to make more sense in Aramaic. Honestly, I'm not really qualified to lay out every tool historians and critics have at their disposal, but they are all aware of the problem you raise and they have their ways of addressing it. Just the same as every other historian in every other area of study. That is the job. That's what they do. they call this "Tuesday".Mutate and Survive

Name them.Mutate and Survive

Name them.Mutate and Survive

There aren't manyRobert M. Price, an American theologian and former Baptist minister who has written several books and articles challenging the historicity of Jesus, such as The Incredible Shrinking Son of Man and Deconstructing JesusRichard Carrier, an American historian and atheist activist who has defended the mythicist position in his books On the Historicity of Jesus and Proving History, using Bayesian probability and textual analysisEarl Doherty, a Canadian writer and former journalist who has argued that Jesus was a mythical figure in his books The Jesus Puzzle and Jesus: Neither God Nor Man, based on his interpretation of the Pauline epistles and other early Christian writingsThomas L. Thompson, a Danish biblical scholar and professor emeritus at the University of Copenhagen who has questioned the historical reliability of the gospels and the existence of Jesus in his books The Messiah Myth and The Mythic Past.Gerd Lüdemann, a German New Testament scholar and former Lutheran pastor who has rejected the supernatural claims of Christianity and the historicity of Jesus in his books The Resurrection of Christ and The Great Deception.One possible reason is that it's tough to get funding for research into proving Jesus didn't exist. Almost all the work is done by believers at theological colleges.Richard Carrier had to be funded by a few secular organisation and is forever begging for people to buy his books. There's not much of a career in it.

By my understanding Lüdemann is the only one who unreservedly deserves to be called a “respected scholar”. Thompson is known as an extreme minimalist (and was before he got into the New Testament) and Price is, I think, even more of a fringe figure.Neither Carrier nor Doherty qualify.

Carrier is definitely a scholar, respected or otherwise.I was impressed, though thoroughly bored, by his book, 'On the historicity of Jesus' it's peer reviewed and heavily referenced. I thought his attempt to at least try to work out what was probable and what wasn't was worth an attempt - though I didn't buy his Bayesian bollox.

Maybe so, but I would show as much caution towards an "atheist activist" scholar (or more so, in my personal case) as I would to any believer.You refuse to listen to a Pastor or believer and yet listen to a scholar with their own biases.Like me, you already have your mind made up beforehand.To your (and Theodoric's) credit, you value "evidence" more than you do belief, but fail to see your bias, as you prejudge any believer as being "brainwashed" and/or uncritical in their examination of Jesus.Since you have written off the possibility of any sort of a supernatural or *unexplained* narrative to the Jesus character, you are in my opinion biased.From a strictly critical thinking paradigm, all you are doing is attempting to falsify in order to critically examine the narrative from an unbiased perspective, so I see both sides of this.

I read all manner of people Phat, from atheist mythicists like Carrier, through 'agnostics' like Ehrman to full on Christian theologians like Wright (an Anglican Archbishop and prominent scholar).I don't read random internet idiots and self-taught Pastors. Phat, you haven't the first clue about how critical thinking have you? Couldn't even start that damn course you promised to. If you had you wouldn't keep making the same mistakes.I'm interested only in evidence - the supernatural events in the bible are dismissed not from bias but from total lack of evidence. Got any evidence? You've been asked that thousands of times and you reply only with belief statements.