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Originally Posted by photon
I'm not so sure anymore, not that I've gone over to a mythic Jesus position, but does a historical Jesus fit more than, say, a collection of "historical Jesuses" and the authentic portions of the writings are themselves from collections of oral traditions that merged over time (or something like that)?
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I would say two things about this: First, the Jesus tradition is at its earliest stage undeniably Jewish, much more so even than we assumed it to be little more than a decade ago. Second, because it is firmly couched within a Jewish milieu, I would further argue that it absolutely fits better into a real historical context that featured a real Jesus. At the time in which the Jesus movement emerged, its proponents would have had little time and no patience for a myth as imagined by Carrier. It works much better in a Greco-Roman tradition, but is practically implausible for first century Jews.
Quote:
Originally Posted by photon
...I meant it more that the confidence in what is written and its internal consistency isn't sufficient (IMO) to warrant it being the absolute standard by which all other claims about divine revelation should be judged.
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I totally agree.