The Evidence for Jesus http://www.bringyou.to/apologetics/JesusEvidence2.

htm

The Evidence for Jesus (Part 2)

Evidence for Jesus (Part 2)

Response to Brian Flemming's DVD "The God Who Wasn't There" (below)
Response to Earl Doherty's book The Jesus Puzzle (below)

see also Part 1 Pagan Parallel "Saviors" Examined

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text text summarize Raymond Brown, John P. Meier, N. T. Wright, Craig Blomberg, Luke Timothy
Johnson, Robert van Voorst, Gregory Boyd, etc

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Jeffery Jay Lowder of Internet Infidels: “There is simply nothing intrinsically improbable about
a historical Jesus; the New Testament alone (or at least portions of it) are reliable enough to
provide evidence of a historical Jesus. On this point, it is important to note that even G.A.
Wells, who until recently was the champion of the christ-myth hypothesis, now accepts the
historicity of Jesus on the basis of 'Q'.” ("Josh McDowell's 'Evidence' for Jesus," also Wells
The Jesus Myth [Open Court, 1999])

Secular historian Will Durant: “The Christian evidence for Christ begins with the letters
ascribed to Saint Paul....No one has questioned the existence of Paul, or his repeated meetings
with Peter, James, and John; and Paul enviously admits that these men had known Christ in his
flesh. The accepted epistles frequently refer to the Last Supper and the Crucifixion....in
essentials the synoptic gospels agree remarkably well, and form a consistent portrait of
Christ....no one reading these scenes can doubt the reality of the figure behind them. That a
few simple men should in one generation have invented so powerful and appealing a
personality, so loft an ethic and so inspiring a vision of human brotherhood, would be a miracle
far more incredible than any recorded in the Gospel.” (Ceasar and Christ, volume 3 of Story
of Civilization)

Graham Stanton of Cambridge: “Today, nearly all historians, whether Christians or not, accept
that Jesus existed and that the gospels contain plenty of valuable evidence which has to be
weighed and assessed critically. There is general agreement that, with the possible exception of
Paul, we know far more about Jesus of Nazareth than about any first or second century Jewish
or pagan religious teacher.” (The Gospels and Jesus)

Bishop N.T. Wright: “It is quite difficult to know where to start, because actually the evidence
for Jesus is so massive that, as a historian, I want to say we have got almost as much good
evidence for Jesus as for anyone in the ancient world....the evidence fits so well with what we
know of the Judaism of the period....that I think there are hardly any historians today, in fact I
don't know of any historians today [aside from G.A. Wells, etc], who doubt the existence of
Jesus....No Jewish, Christian, atheist, or agnostic scholars have ever taken that [proposition]
seriously since. It is quite clear that in fact Jesus is a very, very well documented character of
real history. So I think that question can be put to rest.” ("The Self-Revelation of God in
Human History" from There Is A God by Antony Flew and Roy Abraham Varghese

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[HarperOne, 2007])

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Response to Brian Flemming's DVD "The God Who Wasn't There"

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BF = Brian Flemming, Q = Question by interviewer, RC = Richard Carrier

BF: "Christianity was wrong about the solar system, what if it's wrong about something
else too?"

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BF: "Of course those aren't the only faces of Christianity." (pics of Charles Manson,
Pat Robertson, Dena Schlosser, LaHaye and Jenkins, David Koresh)

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Q: "After Jesus died and was resurrected, in your own words, what happened then?
How did Christianity begin to spread?"

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BF: "Why is it that Christians can be so specific about the life of Christ, but they're
vague about what happened after he left?" "Aren't Christian leaders telling them the
story?"

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BF: "Mark was the first one written, and the other three are clearly derived from
Mark. Mark mentions the destruction of the Jewish temple which happened in the year
70, so the Gospels all came later than that, probably much later." (graphic appears to
have Mark 70+, Matt 80+, Luke 95+, John 110+)

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BF: "There's a gap of four decades or more. Most of what we know about this period
comes from a man who says he saw Jesus Christ come to him in a vision. He was the
apostle Paul, formerly known as Saul of Tarsus."

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BF: "Paul says the Lord told him to start spreading the word of Jesus Christ, and he
did it with a vengeance." "Paul was a bit of a scold, but the salvation he offered
through the God he called Christ Jesus was very popular. He traveled widely and in his
wake left behind groups of new Christians who formed the early Christian church.
Paul wrote lots of letters about Christianity, in fact, he wrote 80,000 words about the
Christian religion. These documents represent almost all we have of the history of
Christianity during this decades long gap."

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BF: "And here's the interesting thing. If Jesus was a human who had recently lived,
nobody told Paul. Paul never heard of Mary, Joseph, Bethlehem, Herod, John the
Baptist. He never heard about any of these miracles. He never quotes anything that
Jesus is supposed to have said. He never mentions Jesus having a ministry of any kind
at all. He doesn't know about any entrance into Jerusalem, he never mentions Pontius
Pilate, or a Jewish mob, or any trials at all. Paul doesn't know any of what we would
call 'the story of Jesus' except for these last three events [graphic has Christ put on the
cross, The Resurrection, and The Ascension]. And even these, Paul never places on
earth."

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BF: "Just like the other savior gods of the time, Paul's Christ Jesus died, rose, and
ascended all in a mythical realm."

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BF: (shows on screen Hebrews 8:4, translated as) "If Jesus had been on earth, he would
not even have been a priest." Hebrews 8:4

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BF: "Paul doesn't believe that Jesus was ever a human being. He's not even aware of
the idea. And he's the link between the time frame given for the life of Jesus, and the
appearance of the first gospel account of that life. This is why you don't hear many
Christian leaders talking about the early days of Christianity. Because once you
assemble the facts, the story is that, Jesus lived, everyone forgot [referring to decades
from 30 AD to 70 AD], and then they remembered [referring to the Gospels beginning
in 70 AD]."

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BF: "But it gets even shakier than that. Allegorical literature was extremely common
back then [again graphic shows the Gospels]."

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RC: "Mark himself probably did not believe he was writing history. He was writing a
symbolic message, he was writing a Gospel, the good news, and symbolizing it using
biblical parallels, using parallels to pagan religions, and so forth."

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From this point, I'll let Mike Licona's review and critique answer the rest.

See also St. Justin Martyr's "Sons of Jupiter" (Zeus) and the meaning of "the devil imitated the
prophecy"

Response to Earl Doherty's book The Jesus Puzzle

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Doherty's primary "thesis" and initial premises in The Jesus Puzzle taken from chapter 1 of his book:

In Paul's letters, Jesus Christ is not identified with a recent human man or placed in an earthly
setting, much less given a ministry of teaching and miracle-working in Galilee. Instead, he was
a heavenly deity who had done his redeeming work in the supernatural dimension. (page 5)
None of the NT epistles identify the divine Son of God and Christ with his recent incarnation,
whether this be the man "Jesus of Nazareth" of the Gospels, born of Mary and died under
Pilate. There is a "silence" that "Jesus of Nazareth was the Son of God and Messiah." The
Jesus of the epistles is not spoken of as a man who had recently lived. (page 14)
The entire corpus of early Christian correspondence gives us no indication that the divine
Christ these writers look to for salvation is to be identified with the man Jesus of Nazareth
whom the Gospels place in the early first century. (page 15)
The references in the epistles to the "death" and "rising" of Christ are not references to
physical events on earth or in history. They are part of the "myth" of the Son, they relate to the
activities of this divinity in the supernatural realm. (page 16)
What we find in the letters of Paul and other early writers is a divine Christ, the figure of the
Son in heaven. There is no equation with a historical man, a human teacher who had recently
lived. Paul believes "in" the Son of God, not that anyone "was" the Son of God. (page 16)
All we find in Paul's presentation of Christ is this transcendent divine being whose activities
are never linked to history or an earthly location, so there is no justification for assuming Paul's
Christ arose out of Jesus of Nazareth, out of the human figure who appears in the Gospels that
were written some time after Paul. (page 19)
There is no denying that the earliest Christian record shows us a Jesus who is presented
exclusively in mythological, transcendent terms, with no reference to any human career or
earthly teachings and deeds. (page 22)

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“Contemporary New Testament scholars have typically viewed their [i.e. Jesus-mythers]
arguments as so weak or bizarre that they relegate them to footnotes, or often ignore
them completely....The theory of Jesus' nonexistence is now effectively dead as a
scholarly question....Biblical scholars and classical historians now regard it as effectively
refuted.” (Robert Van Voorst, Jesus Outside the New Testament, 6, 14, 16)

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see also Part 1 Pagan Parallel "Saviors" Examined

Additional Books and Links

on the reliability of the New Testament

The New Testament Documents: Are They Reliable? by F. F. Bruce (Intervarsity/Eerdmans, 1981 sixth
edition)
"The Historicity of the New Testament" chapter from Scaling the Secular City (1987) by J. P. Moreland
The Historical Reliability of the Gospels by Craig Blomberg (Intervarsity, 1987, revised/updated 2nd
edition, 2007)
An Introduction to the New Testament (and appendix on the "Jesus Seminar") by Raymond Brown
(Doubleday, 1997)
Can We Trust the New Testament? Thoughts on the Reliability of Early Christian Testimony by G.A.
Wells (Open Court, 2003)
Can We Trust the Gospels? by Mark D. Roberts (Crossway Books, 2007)

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on the genre of the Gospels

What are the Gospels? A Comparison with Graeco-Roman Biography by Richard Burridge (Cambridge
/ Eerdmans, 1992, 2004)
Jesus and the Eyewitnesses: The Gospels as Eyewitness Testimony by Richard Bauckham
(Eerdmans, 2006)

on the historical Jesus (Christian scholars, historians, skeptics, and answers to skeptics)

Jesus: An Historian's Review of the Gospels by Michael Grant (Charles Scribner's Sons, 1977)
The Evidence for Jesus by R.T. France (Intervarsity Press, 1986)
A Marginal Jew: Rethinking the Historical Jesus (volume 1) by John P. Meier (Anchor / Doubleday,
1991)
The Historical Jesus: The Life of a Mediterranean Jewish Peasant by John Dominic Crossan
(HarperSanFrancisco, 1991)
The Historical Figure of Jesus by E.P. Sanders (The Penguin Press, 1993)
Jesus Under Fire: Modern Scholarship Reinvents the Historical Jesus edited by Wilkins / Moreland
(Zondervan, 1995)
The Real Jesus: The Misguided Quest for the Historical Jesus and the Truth of the Traditional Gospels
by L.T. Johnson (HarperSanFrancisco, 1996)
Jesus and the Victory of God by N. T. Wright (Fortress, 1996)
The Historical Jesus: Ancient Evidence for the Life of Christ by Gary Habermas (College Press, 1996)
Will the Real Jesus Please Stand Up? : A Debate between William Lane Craig and John Dominic
Crossan (Baker Academic, 1998)
The Jesus Puzzle by Earl Doherty (Age of Reason, 1999, 2005)
Jesus Outside the New Testament: An Introduction to the Ancient Evidence by Robert van Voorst
(Eerdmans, 2000)
The Incredible Shrinking Son of Man: How Reliable is the Gospel Tradition? by Robert M. Price
(Prometheus, 2003)
What Have They Done With Jesus? by Ben Witherington III (HarperSanFrancisco, 2006)
Fabricating Jesus: How Modern Scholars Distort the Gospels by Craig Evans (Intervarsity, 2006)
The Jesus Legend: A Case for the Historical Reliability of the Synoptic Jesus Tradition by Eddy / Boyd
(Baker Academic, 2007)
Jesus of Nazareth by Pope Benedict XVI (Doubleday, 2007)
Shattering the Christ Myth: Did Jesus Not Exist? edited by James Patrick Holding (Xulon Press, 2008)

on the resurrection of Jesus

The Son Rises by William Lane Craig (Moody, 1981, Wipf and Stock Publishers, 2000)
Resurrection of Jesus: History, Experience, Theology by Gerd Ludemann (Fortress, 1995)
Jesus' Resurrection: Fact or Figment? A Debate Between William Lane Craig and Gerd Ludemann
(Intervarsity Press, 2000)
The Resurrection of the Son of God by N. T. Wright (Fortress, 2003)
The Case for the Resurrection of Jesus by Habermas / Licona (Kregel Publications, 2004)
The Empty Tomb: Jesus Beyond the Grave edited by Robert M. Price and Jeffery Jay Lowder
(Prometheus, 2005)
The Resurrection of Jesus : John Dominic Crossan and N. T. Wright in Dialogue (Fortress, 2006)

Articles on the "Jesus Myth" from Bede's Library

Shattering the Christ-Myth by J. P. Holding of Tektonics.org
Extrabiblical, Non-Christian Witnesses to Jesus by Glenn Miller of Christian Think-Tank
Analysis of "The God Who Wasn't There" by GDon
Review and Critique of "The God Who Wasn't There" by Mike Licona
Josh McDowell's 'Evidence for Jesus' : Is it Reliable? by Jeffery Jay Lowder

Evidence for the Resurrection of Christ from Kreeft/Tacelli (chapter 8 of Handbook of Christian Apologetics)

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Is There Historical Evidence for the Resurrection of Jesus? The Craig-Ehrman Debate (2006)

by PhilVaz -- postponed until 2009

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