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Originally Posted by Thor
Dan sums that up nicely, not only is it a bad strategy to argue Jesus was not a real person, but ultimately is not really something we could ever be certain of in any real sense...
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I agree. That was very good. I have but one quibble:
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Originally Posted by Daniel Fincke
"Jesus is just too controversial, self-contradictory, mediated through the words of others, distanced from us culturally and historically, and important to people theologically and philosophically to take anyone’s reading as totally unbiased and straightforward. The stakes involved in interpreting him are too high and there are too many divides between us and the ancient world for me to have much confidence that any one can pull out an authoritative account of what he did or thought."
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He premises this observation with George Tyrell's famous 19th cent. criticism of the historical Jesus "quest," but I do believe that we can have more confidence in modern methods for uncovering an historical Jesus than he believes is possible. There have been many important historical developments since the time of Harnack and Schweitzer that have in turn made a dramatic impact on what we know and those things that we can confidently claim about the "cultural and historical" distance. There has been an explosion of information in Syro Phoenician and Palestinian archaeology in the last century that provide scholar's with much more sure footing for positing both the existence of Jesus, and for developing a consensus about who he was and what he did.
My problem with Carrier and other mythicists claims regarding the origins of Christianity are grounded in their extremely cultural and religious implausibility. I would still go as far as to argue that it is exceedingly improbable that Jesus did not exist, because virtually all efforts to construct a Christianity apart from a founding historical Jewish messianic martyr utterly fail. Carrier has mounted a passionate defense, and I would agree with him that his is the most scholarly robust argument for the mythicist position, but even then, he must still depend on an unsustainable string of logical, cultural, historical and religious leaps to continue to promote the idea that Jesus was an historicised cosmic figure.