Skeptic Blog

fathershane:

Telling one of Jesus’ parables to someone who has never heard it before.

You see this sense of wonder that Jesus himself must have experienced all the time as people heard his words for the first time.

And for a priest, it tells you that you’re hanging out with the crowd…

I enjoyed the commentary, but I have a bit of an issue with the “But he never existed” part. I believe that at least the existence of Jesus of Nazareth is attested to in the Bible. 

Wait! Give me a chance to explain. Using the Bible as partial biographical evidence of Jesus is not as completely insane or wall-bangingly circular as it may first seem. When we look at the Gospels, we see them gathered in one book called The Holy Bible. What’s easy to forget is that they are separate documents and almost certainly written by separate authors. These authors wrote about the life of Jesus years and years after the events happened.  They were skilled in Greek composition, writing about what they had heard, and doing so in religio-politically motivated ways. What we can infer is that they wrote about the events from dictated stories. 

What most likely happened is that, in the years that nobody bothered to write down the events of Jesus of Nazareth, the story of his life was warped almost completely beyond recognition, making him out to (literally) be a god. It’s likely, however, that major broad themes are based in reality; he likely would have been one of the many teachers or self-proclaimed prophets of the time, and he was probably killed for angering the wrong people. 

I think an important thing to remember is that “A man named Jesus existed” is not an extraordinary claim. It does not require as extraordinary evidence as, say, that he was God/the Son of God.