Talk:Historicity of Jesus

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Jesus existed as a hallucinogenic mushroom

There should be a serious topic added to this page about Dead Sea scholar John M. Allegro’s theory that Jesus, as a human being, was a misinterpretation of early gnostic Christian cults. He proposed that Jesus was actually the hallucinogenic mushroom, Aminita muscaria. Many unexplainable facts about early Christianity flow naturally from this possibility; including the ingestion of flesh as a sacrament, visionary prophets, miracles, etc. This theory should also be considered in light of more recent discoveries that psilocybin containing mushrooms are ubiquitous worldwide and may be another candidate for Allegro’s proposal of a sacred mushroom, rather than A. muscaria.

Article reflects author's agenda

This article needs to be more balanced; the author makes numerous claims concerning the historicity of Jesus, but does not list any documents that support his view. He does refer to Josephus and his mention of Jesus, but most historians regard the Josephus cite as a 4th century forgery (earlier editions of Josephus do not contain any mention of Jesus).

EF — Preceding unsigned comment added by 76.168.197.87 (talk) 22:46, 8 February 2014 (UTC)

This article has no single author but is a collaboration that anyone, who follows Wikipedia rules, can take part in. Even you can sign up and provide your reliable sources for Josephus forgery for discussion. Alatari (talk) 05:26, 9 February 2014 (UTC)

Late comer here, was researching some stuff and came across this article. The part where I literally laughed out loud at the clear NPOV of this bollocks started primarily at:

Virtually all modern scholars of antiquity agree that Jesus existed, and most biblical scholars and classical historians see the theories of his non-existence as effectively refuted.[1][2][3][8][9][10] In antiquity, the existence of Jesus was never denied by those who opposed Christianity.[27][28]

That's bullshit. Ten citations or not, it's patently absurd and false. I can find a hundred thousand modern scholars of antiquity who feel there is not substantive evidence of the Christian religions Jesus existing in one google search; I am sure that the 10 authors cited made this claim, but when a claim is patently absurd and verifiably false all the citations in the world mean absolutely nothing.

In antiquity the existence of Jesus could NEVER be denied as it would lead to your immediate persecution, the rounding up of yourself and your family, the extremes of torture for heresy and the eventual murder of yourself, your associates, and your loved ones. This is a historically verifiable fact. Fuck, even saying the world wasn't the centre of the universe almost got Galileo offed.

I'm not even going to touch this article or try and make it read more neutral. There's just too much fucking crazy present, but I truly hope that those who participated in this propaganda hang their heads and weep for the defacement of the neutrality that makes this project, Wikipedia, a grand resource and I strongly, strongly support a re-write of this by people who aren't batshit mental! BaSH PR0MPT (talk) 09:35, 9 February 2014 (UTC)

BP, you weren't very clear about how you feel. Can you please elaborate? Bill the Cat 7 (talk) 13:21, 10 February 2014 (UTC)

BaSH PR0MPT - the statement that you found so laughable has been craft by literally dozens of editors as viewpoints of new editors come and go. You may find it false due to your obvious non-NPOV on the entire subject, but much of your argument is just vulgur WP:OR which you do not even attempt to backup. In addition parts of it aren't even germaine to the subject (as the Earth being the center of the universe is actually a creation of the Greeks - Plato to be specific). See Heliocentrism, Geocentric model, and History of the Center of the Universe. I'm also not sure where you found your idea that espousing claims that denied Jesus led to your punishment/death as it was largely the opposite - claiming to be a Christian usually caused persecution up until the Roman empire adopted Christianity as its main religeon. And even after that, the Romans held on to their dozens of pagan gods and thus "at the least" turned a blind eye on the continued practices of these religeons as a continued source of income via taxes.

Please provide sourcing of your claims because at this point your your post is just a angry rant with no substance. Ckruschke (talk) 16:42, 10 February 2014 (UTC)Ckruschke

Another falsification by Ckruschke (talk). The statement that we all find laughable except you has obviously been crafted by a single author, and spread across every page related to Jebus. Absolutely REDICULOUS that you would accuse other editors of NPOV. Absolutely absurd of you to do that, in fact a mockery of Wikipedia policies. What a hypocritical statement, all too common amongst your ilk.Lyingforjebus (talk) 22:42, 11 February 2014 (UTC)

So many personal attacks, so few reliable sources... Huon (talk) 22:58, 11 February 2014 (UTC)

Agree Huon. Guess that's what "my ilk" gets for trying to be nice for once... Ckruschke (talk) 15:43, 12 February 2014 (UTC)Ckruschke

Snivelling will get you no where. And please do review the burden of proof principle. Obviously, the authors of this Wiki found a list of Christians who think Jesus is real, and one Atheist (Ehrman). Now it's been compiled into a ridiculous paragraph, as BaSH PR0MPT mentioned, and spread to every Jesus article. Statements from historians like Richard Carrier, or as Ckruschke (talk) your ilk prefer to call him, "blogger" are routinely removed from this article as are statements from Ehrman which are critical of historical Jesus claims regarding what is and isn't accepted as historical. So, just because you've compiled a short paragraph, Huon (talk) with a few pastors and priests who think Jesus was real, doesn't mean I have to find a paragraph that states otherwise. The point is, this article is full of that type of BS, and we don't need to disprove your claims any more than we need to disprove claims of a magic spaghetti monster, so quit with your snivelling rhetoric about personal attacks and us finding reliable sources to disprove your positive claims. The fact is, those sources, as Bash Prompt and 3 or 4 others have already indicated DO NOT BELONG. Capice? Not sure if English is your first language, Wong, but I hope you catch my drift, and if you're all butt hurt about personal attacks take it up with the board instead of whining and bitching like a snivelling child who's just been told that the tooth fairy isn't real.Lyingforjebus (talk) 02:07, 15 February 2014 (UTC)

*sigh* there are hundreds of historical documents supporting the existence of Jesus, which is why Christ mythicism is a fringe theory, supported by a handful of scholars, and why virtually all scholars say Jesus existed. The OP is a moron who probably just watched Zeitgeist for the first time.Ordessa (talk) 03:38, 15 February 2014 (UTC)

No, there are hundreds of historical documents supporting the existence of _Christians_ who believed in Jesus, but no records of the actual existence of Jesus himself. ~ Röbin Liönheart (talk) 03:54, 16 February 2014 (UTC)

Wrong. You need to a little research before you throw out comments like this. The information on this page is correct - as you would see if you read any one of the referenced links. Ckruschke (talk) 16:16, 18 February 2014 (UTC)Ckruschke

Actually, he is right. There is no historical evidence for the existence of Jesus. And the people listed are known religious people with degrees in theology or whatnot, but not history , and therefore should not be regarded as aspects of knowledge outside their jurisdiction, including historical evidence for anything. All the referenced links regard information from people who not non-history degrees from known religious schools, and are themselves religious, meaning there is an obvious bias when it comes to the information. There is also a ton of talk of a non-existent consensus, or at least one in which no person on earth has yet been able to show via a poll of the beliefs of historians. Even if a consensus did exist, there should be more hard evidence here than simply an appeal to authority, the fact that this evidence is not addressed is very telling. Where are the articles showing the existence of Jesus? Where are the artifacts that Jesus would have held? How is the account of Josephus Flavius accurate when even a non-scholar can know it is false  ? How is Josephus' work accountable anyways, written over 55 years after the supposed death of Jesus  ? Why did so many historians exist at that time yet refuse to mention Jesus at all?

For an article that strives on neutral points of view, this whole post seems vividly one-sided towards one belief, and also a huge bias using the Argument from Authority and very little actual historical evidence outside of hearsay. Please edit this to eliminate the bias and please add real evidence and unbiased sources to the article. Sparkveela (talk) 01:59, 20 February 2014 (UTC)

1.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Dunn_(theologian)

2.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amy-Jill_Levine

3.http://www.josephus.org/testhist.htm

4.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antiquities_of_the_Jews

5.http://www.holysmoke.org/sdhok/jesus5.htm — Preceding unsigned comment added by Sparkveela (talk • contribs) 02:04, 20 February 2014 (UTC)

I agree with this. We have historical and scientific data for the Big Bang via the Cosmic Background Radiation. We have fossils and other evidence of a transition between species. We have evidence that life arose 3 billion years ago. We have physical evidence for the formation of the earth 4.5 billion years ago. We even have data showing not only the existence of Neanderthals, but also what they ate tens of thousands of years ago, yet we cannot find a single shred of physical evidence, especially nothing outside of hearsay the Fallacy from Authority and the Bible, to show the existence of the most popular man to even supposedly walk the earth? Which he did a mere 2000 years ago? Seems fishy to me. Lucyraccoon (talk) 08:11, 20 February 2014 (UTC)

Lyingforjebus, where do you shop for fedoras? I want one.Ordessa (talk) 03:49, 15 February 2014 (UTC)

I think we can close the thread now. He's gone well beyond personal decorum and professionalism. Ckruschke (talk) 04:03, 15 February 2014 (UTC)Ckruschke

I had a read of this article because some gullible christian sent me here and, just like BaSH PR0MPT, almost threw up when I read that incredibly vacuous statement. If the pope says that Jesus exists (as we could expect) it goes no way to prove his existence. Likewise, if the pope said that the tooth-fairy existed. We should not be obliged to believe that there is academic consensus that someone existed merely because so many of his (Jesus') supporters assert it.

If a dude called Jesus ever did exist AND he was the son of god (or god himself!) then evidence in contemporary writings should abound.

This article is an embarrassment to Wikipedia and is very clearly authored and defended by people who think they are going to burn in hellfire for eternity. If that threat hung above my head I might have acted the same. But my parents taught me not to be a gullible shill. Themoother (talk) 16:23, 1 March 2014 (UTC)

I agree this article is a joke. It's pathetic how Christians have taken it over. When the hear that people don't think pretend Jesus is real, they seem to get upset, as if you have just told a small child that Santa Claus is not real, and they are scared they won't get any presents in the afterlife. Then Christians like Ordessa start snivelling, ATHEISTS WEAR FEDORAS! Pretend Jesus IS real. I don't care if Carrier, Price and others say otherwise. They are fedora wearing ATHEISTS, their views can be discarded as fringe. Kind of like Galileo's idea that we aren't the center of the universe was discarded by Christians as fringe and even heresy. I wonder what they'd do to us, people who don't think pretend Jesus is real. That is, if they still had the power. Alas, they seem to have the power on Wikipedia, as this small gang of Christian bullies has shown. If anyone is "Fringe" when it comes to historicity, it's THEOLOGIANS who will go to hell if they find anything other than pretend Jesus is a real person. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Rogerbreal (talk • contribs) 01:37, 9 March 2014 (UTC)

Alexander Jacob== Proposed Edit on Majority versus Minority of Scholars ==

Skipping that partisan nonsense upstream in the Talk page, I propose an edit. The lines specifying a vast scholarly consensus for the existence of Christ should be revised on two grounds. One, the sources cited appear at first glance to consist entirely of scholars who accept the historicity of Christ. Scholars who dispute the existence of Christ but who agree they are a tiny minority are citations I would accept to preserve the claim. Second, whether a consensus vastly outnumbers the opposition is a subject that doesn't seem to be necessary for this article. It might even come across as needlessly partisan. I think it is enough to simply present the topic of the HJ without creating opportunities in the text for visitors to get side-tracked. If, for example, the opening paragraph would be revised to eliminate the line "Biblical scholars and classical historians regard theories of his non-existence as effectively refuted..." which to me is doubtful, but even if true, is not particularly helpful in teaching people about the subject.Woerkilt (talk) 02:19, 7 March 2014 (UTC)

Here's an example revision of an offending paragraph that I propose. Take the following:

Most modern scholars of antiquity agree that Jesus existed,[1][2][3] but scholars differ on the historicity of specific episodes described in the Biblical accounts of Jesus,[4] and the only two events subject to "almost universal assent" are that Jesus was baptized by John the Baptist and was crucified by the order of the Roman Prefect Pontius Pilate.[5][6][7] Biblical scholars and classical historians regard theories of his non-existence as effectively refuted,[8][9][10] although there is a significant debate about his nature, his actions and his sayings. Most scholars agree that Jesus was a Galilean Jew who was born between 7 and 4 BC, in the closing stages of the reign of King Herod and died 30–36 AD,[11][12][13] that he lived in Galilee and Judea, did not preach or study elsewhere,[14][15][16] and that he spoke Aramaic and perhaps also Hebrew and Greek.[17][18][19]

and change to:

Most modern scholars of antiquity differ on the historicity of specific episodes described in the Biblical accounts of Jesus,[4] and the only two events subject to consensus are that Jesus was baptized by John the Baptist and was crucified by the order of the Roman Prefect Pontius Pilate.[5][6][7] Biblical scholars and classical historians debate his nature, his actions and his sayings. Most scholars agree that Jesus was a Galilean Jew who was born between 7 and 4 BC, in the closing stages of the reign of King Herod and died 30–36 AD,[11][12][13] that he lived in Galilee and Judea, did not preach or study elsewhere,[14][15][16] and that he spoke Aramaic and perhaps also Hebrew and Greek.[17][18][19]

Obviously revising the sources as necessary. So far, this example is only a guideline to what I am talking about, and is not necessarily presented as a literal revision to the article.Woerkilt (talk) 02:50, 7 March 2014 (UTC)

Firstly, the sources for the scholarly consensus on Jesus' existence included, until at least October 2013, Robert M. Price who is (or was, when he wrote the source) less than convinced of Jesus' existence himself. See this version for the Price source. Secondly, given the near-unanimous consensus that Jesus existed, it can be expected to be hard to find many reliable sources who don't agree and still comment. Let me guess: All sources cited for the scholarly consensus that the Earth is round are people who accept the Earth's roundness. Should I demand a reliable flat-Earther source? Whether or not these people personally agree with the existence of Jesus, I have yet to see a reliable source that disagrees with their assertion on the consensus. I also strongly disagree with the assertion that the strength - again, near-unanimity - of the consensus is irrelevant. Multiple sources have explicitly and in no uncertain terms commented on the strength of that consensus. We also give the dwindling amounts of agreement on specific facts about the historical Jesus - you had no issues with highlighting the amount of disagreement, so why not treat the amount of agreement similarly? Huon (talk) 20:33, 7 March 2014 (UTC)

When I read this, I wasn't sure if you were joking or not, but unfortunately, I don't think you were. On one hand you're saying that Price, who argues that the Biblical Jesus is a myth can be used to give evidence for "near-unanimous consensus" of the existence of the Biblical Jesus. Then in the very next sentence, you say that it would be hard to find a reliable source who argues that the Biblical Jesus is a mythical figure. You can't have it both ways, Won. Which one is it? Is Price a reliable source or not? — Preceding unsigned comment added by Rogerbreal (talk • contribs) 01:49, 8 March 2014 (UTC)

Price is a reliable source, however Jesus Myth Theory is WP:Frince. So while Price himself is not excluded in all things, the Myth theory is only to have minimal coverage since it has little or no actual recognition among WP:RS. ReformedArsenal (talk) 02:07, 8 March 2014 (UTC)

Exactly. He's a reliable source until he says something that Christians disagree with. And who says that the idea that magic Jesus is entirely myth is WP:FRINCE as you put it? You? And the other small group of Christians who make a mockery of this page and Wikipedia? — Preceding unsigned comment added by Rogerbreal (talk • contribs) 01:30, 9 March 2014 (UTC)

Are you actually aware of what WP:Fringe is? If you can find a sizable representation of the Christ Myth theory, then come back. Until then, it is by definition what Wikipedia considers fringe. ReformedArsenal (talk) 18:43, 9 March 2014 (UTC)

You keep telling yourself that, bud. We have a "sizable" as you put it representation. Price, Carrier, Christopher Hitchens Tom Harpur, Thomas Brodie, Earl Doherty, René Salm, Thomas L. Thompson, Alexander Jacob Richard Dawkins to name a few. Unfortunately, as confirmed atheists, the Christian community of Wikipedia has deemed these scholars to be fringe, and instead have substituted seminary or "Christian university" educated priests and pastors who have no authority on history. Quite pathetic, and quite sad, really. That's why Wikipedia will always be just a wiki and not an encyclopedia. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Rogerbreal (talk • contribs) 04:30, 10 March 2014 (UTC)

Carrier, Hitchens, Brodie, Jacob, and Hawkins have ZERO training in Biblical studies. Hitchens, Brodie, Jacob, and Hawkins have no training in history at all. They are absolutely not WP:RS on this topic. Price is the closest thing you have to an actual WP:RS on the subject as he has training in both Biblical Studies and history, and even he says that this is a fringe theory. ReformedArsenal (talk) 13:31, 10 March 2014 (UTC)

And with hardly any exceptions (Akenson, Grant) HJ researchers have ZERO training in history. The article should simply describe the views of the various camps and say a little about the background of the people in those camps, the size of those camps, various criticisms back and forth etc, without taking sides. Martijn Meijering (talk) 14:03, 10 March 2014 (UTC)

Um... Akenson has a PhD from Harvard in History, is currently a professor of History at Queens University... and has a CV with 17+ pages of published peer reviewed articles in the subject of history. Grant was a Classicist (which directly involves historical studies as part of the training) and also has an extensive list of published works in the area of History. You don't have a clue what you're talking about. ReformedArsenal (talk) 14:21, 10 March 2014 (UTC)

Rudeness objection. I'm well aware that they are historians, which is precisely why I added these two as the only exceptions I knew about. The rest are not historians AFAIK. Martijn Meijering (talk) 14:43, 10 March 2014 (UTC)

ReformedArse, what in the world do biblical studies have to do with the history of Jesus? And what makes you think Carrier, Hitchens, Brodie, Jacob, and Hawkins have ZERO training in Biblical studies? Particularly Carrier, has a PhD in ancient history. That's right when pretend Jesus was around. So, I'd imagine his work is relevant. At least more relevant than some theologian with ZERO training in HISTORY. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Rogerbreal (talk • contribs) 04:50, 12 March 2014 (UTC)

Comment from above - "We have a "sizable" as you put it representation. Price, Carrier, Christopher Hitchens Tom Harpur, Thomas Brodie, Earl Doherty, René Salm, Thomas L. Thompson, Alexander Jacob Richard Dawkins to name a few." Price says Jesus may have existed [1], Thomas L Thompson specifically denies believing or stating that there was never such a person as Jesus - "This does not mean that I say that Jesus never existed" [2], Dawkins says that Jesus probably existed [3],so those names do not belong on a list of scholars or authorities who say "Jesus never lived". Earl Doherty is just a blogger and self published author of no significance. Although Biblical studies professors and theologians will often be dismissed as necessarily biased by pro-mythicists, Price,Brodie, Thomson and Harpur are all theologians, Biblical scholars or professors of New Testament studies, there are not any historians on that list. Carrier has a PhD in ancient history but does not really work as a historian, he is a blogger and author pushing the "Jesus never lived" idea. An article on history should focus mostly on historians, you will find very very few who doubt the bare fact of Jesus' existence, actually zero as far as I know although I have asked many times for the names of historians who dispute eminent classical historian Michael Grant's assessment that there is "very abundant evidence" for Jesus' existence.Smeat75 (talk) 12:40, 16 March 2014 (UTC)

I think Price should be counted firmly in the mythicist camp. It is true that the doesn't completely rule the existence of a historical Jesus, but he believes the evidence does favour nonexistence and that it is arbitrary to believe in a historical Jesus. I agree we should give more weight to the beliefs of historians if this article needs to exist at all, but unfortunately very few historians (Akenson, Grant, Carrier) have studied the matter. I don't think there's a professional consensus opinion among historians that is based on actual research. Individual historians will no doubt have personal opinions, but that doesn't count. I think the idea of historians or "scholars of antiquity" supporting historicity is a piece of propaganda being pushed by HJ researchers. For whatever reason historians are not particularly interested in this question. If this article is to exist at all, it should not give the impression that historians have studied the matter and concluded in favour of historicity. For me, this is another reason not to have the present article at all. It merely takes sides while pretending to be the objective judgement of historians. Better to have to separate pages on the HJ and CMT, clearly indicating both are just points of view, not known facts or scientific consensus, with one point of view having some academic support, though mostly among theologians and biblical scholars, while the other has hardly any academic support at all, with a few prominent exceptions. Martijn Meijering (talk) 13:34, 16 March 2014 (UTC)

Richard Carrier trained as a historian, but he doesn't really work as a historian, he doesn't hold an academic position as a historian or really publish on history, he is more of a polemicist and online blogger than a historian. I find your statement

"unfortunately very few historians .... have studied the matter" rather odd Martijn, you don't think historians study Jesus? I would have thought quite a few historians study Jesus, isn't he quite an important historical figure? You and I are aware of the "did Jesus exist" debate, don't you think professional historians are too? If they do not address that question, what reason can there be, except that they do not think it is worth addressing because the fact that Jesus existed is established and they have let the matter rest with Michael Grant's 1977 authoritative conclusions on the subject?Smeat75 (talk) 03:35, 17 March 2014 (UTC)

That's speculation and not for us to decide. A single book written for a popular audience is not enough to establish an authoritative conclusion. It's possible that there are scholarly articles on the subject by historians, indeed it's hard to imagine there aren't any at all, but they do appear to be extremely rare. Even the historians I mentioned have as far as I'm aware only published popular books on the subject, not scholarly publications. And I haven't seen anyone offer a citation from a scholarly historical publication on this subject in all the debates we've been having here and on related pages. Martijn Meijering (talk) 09:47, 17 March 2014 (UTC)

Yes, that is quite like what McGrath says: "The figure of Jesus has probably been subjected to more skeptical analysis than any other figure in history. Even after such scrutiny, most historians agree on the authenticity of at least some pieces of evidence for him having said and done particular things and having died in a particular way. To suggest that all of the sifting through evidence that has taken place reflects an avoidance of the question of Jesus’ historicity is baffling. There is no evidence for the existence of any human being from the past apart from the evidence that she or he said, built, conquered, or otherwise did this or that." (Review of Biblical Literature 08/2013 Review of 'Is This Not the Carpenter?': The Question of the Historicity of the Figure of Jesus, Thompson & Verenna (eds.). A speculation from me: It seems that a lot of people think that because someone is in religious studies, that therefore that person cannot possibly be an historian. What seems to underlie this is the belief that only people in history departments do history. This is of course, quite wrong. E.g., the majority of history of classical Rome is done in classics departments, not history departments; the majority of history of opera is done in music departments, not history departments; etc. Similarly, the majority of history of early Christianity is done in religious studies departments. It should be obvious that the work of bona fide historians in such departments should not be squelched. --Atethnekos (Discussion, Contributions) 04:37, 17 March 2014 (UTC)

Evidence please. So far, I've only seen bald assertion of this alleged fact by theologians, apologists and biblical scholars, with zero evidence to back it up. All we have so far is two books written for a popular audience and precisely zero scholarly publications by bona fide historians to back this up. It's not credible that there's a scholarly consensus among historians without such publications, which makes this look suspiciously like a piece of propaganda. Martijn Meijering (talk) 09:46, 17 March 2014 (UTC)

Wouldn't that be an issue to take up with these authors? You're saying that McGrath's (and, I presume, Ehrman's etc.) statement is not credible because you've surveyed the literature and determined that McGrath cannot rightly make that judgement. Yeah, maybe that's right. But until some significant number of reliable sources come around and disagrees with the significant number of reliable sources that say this, then we are left with their majority point of view that most historians agree that some minimalist figure of Jesus existed. Anyway, if you are looking for the scholarly literature, maybe start with the four-volume overview of the field by Brill Publishers: Holmén and Porter (eds.), Handbook for the Study of the Historical Jesus (Brill, 2011). --Atethnekos (Discussion, Contributions) 21:30, 17 March 2014 (UTC)

Comment from above " It seems that a lot of people think that because someone is in religious studies, that therefore that person cannot possibly be an historian" - indeed,that is what WP editors on these pages say all the time. Looking at the table of contents of Handbook for the Study of the Historical Jesus I see familiar names of van Voorst (a pastor!, obviously biased, that's what they'll say if you try to use him as a source on one of these pages),James Dunn (a Church of Scotland minister!), so on and so on, as you can see above, even Biblical scholars are not considered bona fide historians. I had one editor on another page (not Mmeijeri) insist I tell him whether Michael Grant was a Christian or not. How do I know? They won't accept that someone can impartially examine historical evidence, but seem to believe that everyone is driven by blind prejudice at all times.Smeat75 (talk) 22:41, 17 March 2014 (UTC)

I've said repeatedly, and on several pages, that I don't think biblical scholars are automatically disqualified as historians, just that they do not automatically qualify as historians. For a consensus about the opinion of historians I'd like to see an explicit statement by a historian. The closest we've come to that is a newspaper interview with a historian who makes a much weaker statement, namely that he doesn't know any historian who thinks Jesus was not a historical figure. For the record, I think that most historians, like most people in society in general, believe there was a historical Jesus. I'm not saying they're wrong either, and I'm undecided myself. All I want to do is to avoid the impression that many historians have studied the matter and have concluded in favour of historicity, as per Ehrman's statement. Because in actual fact, very few of them have studied the matter. I think we should be able to find a form of words that accurately reflects this situation. Martijn Meijering (talk) 23:38, 17 March 2014 (UTC)

Comment from above: "Carrier has a PhD in ancient history but does not really work as a historian, he is a blogger and author pushing the "Jesus never lived" idea."... I'm sorry how does that make him not a historian? And yet your guys who's only qualification is a degree in Theology (qualified to comment on virgin births and other magic, that's about it) are considered historians?

Simplification of the lead section

The wording of the third lead paragraph is a bit cluttered. I propose that we simplify it as follows:

Most modern scholars of antiquity agree that Jesus existed, but scholars differ on the historicity of specific episodes described in the Biblical accounts, and the only two events subject to "almost universal assent" are that Jesus was baptized by John the Baptist and was crucified by the order of the Roman Prefect Pontius Pilate. There is a significant debate about his nature, his actions and his sayings, but most scholars agree that Jesus was a Galilean Jew who was born between 7-4 BC and died 30–36 AD, that he lived in Galilee and Judea, did not preach or study elsewhere, and that he spoke Aramaic and perhaps also Hebrew and Greek.

Any objections? Wdford (talk) 10:06, 8 March 2014 (UTC)

I think that this is a faithful representation of the current text and also agree that it reads/flows better. Ckruschke (talk) 02:27, 11 March 2014 (UTC)Ckruschke

Yes, that is much better, because it removes "Biblical scholars and classical historians regard theories of his non-existence as effectively refuted" This ridiculous statement is cited to James Dunn, Bachelor of Divinity and Doctor of Theology degrees from Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary. In other words, it is cited to someone who is not qualified to talk about the historicity of anything. I'm glad krucke has finally come around. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Rogerbreal (talk • contribs) 05:00, 12 March 2014 (UTC)

Are you purposefully ignoring the PhD and Doctorate of Divinity from Cambridge or do you not know about them? ReformedArsenal (talk) 21:30, 12 March 2014 (UTC)

PhDs in magic and enlightenment need not apply. This is a Wiki about history. If you'd like to use a PdD in enlightenment to make a case, head on over to the virgin birth wiki — Preceding unsigned comment added by Rogerbreal (talk • contribs) 03:03, 13 March 2014 (UTC)

I wasn't aware that Cambridge offered a PhD in "enlightenment"... Where did you get your PhD from again? ReformedArsenal (talk) 14:05, 13 March 2014 (UTC)

Actual content rather than repeating the same sentences over again in different ways

Is it possible to get at least the main pieces of evidence for the historicity of Jesus into this page? The Historicity of Mohammed article would be a good example to follow. As the article currently stands, there is no wonder it is so controversial - it's currently could be replaced with a single sentence containing the same amount of content. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 203.29.131.142 (talk) 04:53, 11 March 2014 (UTC)

If you mean evidence for existence of Jesus, that is on the page - " Bart D. Ehrman states that the existence of Jesus and his crucifixion by the Romans is attested to by a wide range of sources, including Josephus and Tacitus." The execution of Jesus by the Roman authorities is attested to by the gospels, Josephus and Tacitus, therefore it is an historical fact. People who have never studied any figure from ancient history other than Jesus may not realise how precious and rare it is to have multiple attestation like this of an event from antiquity. Disputing that Jesus was executed on the orders of Pontius Pilate, a fact attested by Christian, Jewish, and Roman sources, really is on the level of "space aliens built the pyramids".Smeat75 (talk) 04:04, 17 March 2014 (UTC)

Tacitus is simply recounting the Christian origin story, its no more historically accurate than Herodotus claiming that Croesus of Lydia was rescued by magical dolphins. The Josephus passage has been subject to interpolation, earlier manuscripts make no mention of Christ. The bible as a historical source on the life of Jesus is not reliable, because unlike Herodotus' account of the Persian Wars, for instance, there is not ONE single external reference to Jesus anywhere. All the Josephus and Tacitus passage do is establish the presence of Christians, not Christ. There is not one official Roman document, Pharisee document, contemporary statue or dedicatory plaque etc. There is exactly the same amount of historical evidence for Jesus as there is for Herodotus' gold mining ants. 123.243.215.92 (talk) 06:37, 17 March 2014 (UTC)

Tacitus is simply recounting the Christian origin story - that is just your opinion, the speculation of 'mythicists' and it is not the opinion of people who study ancient history,who will know that ancient historians did not provide sources for their information. Please give me the names of historians who respond to that passage in Tacitus with "I don't believe there was ever any such person as the "Christos" he says was executed under the orders of Pontius Pilate in the province of Judea during the reign of Tiberius." Historians do not necessarily believe every single word in Tacitus is the absolute truth, but if you are not going to believe that the people he says did such and such a thing even existed, you have just thrown the whole of ancient history out the window as the surviving history books from antiquity are extremely few and all we have to go on for many crucial events from antiquity. It is not the same as Herodotus' collection of myths and stories from various peoples, Herodotus says several times in his book "the so and so people say this and that, but I don't believe them", he makes it clear he is recording myths and legends because they are interesting, not because he expects them to be believed. Anyway on WP it is not our opinion that matters, once again, please give me the names of historians who say Tacitus "Annals" is no more historically accurate than Herodotus' collection of myths.The Josephus passage has been subject to interpolation, earlier manuscripts make no mention of Christ - that's an outdated idea, historians don't think that anymore, give me the names of the contemporary historians who reject both Josephus passages that mention Christ as worthless.there is not ONE single external reference to Jesus anywhere yes there is, Bart Ehrman gives them, Josephus and Tacitus. All the Josephus and Tacitus passage do is establish the presence of Christians, not Christ - wrong. Please list the contemporary historians who say that. There is not one official Roman document no indeed there is not, not only not about Jesus but not about one single person, any event whatsoever, absolutely nothing, from Judea at that time, every single Roman document is lost, official Roman documents don't even survive from Rome at that time, never mind from Jerusalem. Pharisee document - please tell me about the Pharisee documents that survive from Jesus' time, this is something I do not know as much about as I do Roman documents, can you give me links to where I can read and perhaps see pictures of the Pharisee documents from Jesus' time? " not one ... contemporary statue or dedicatory plaque" this sort of comment is where we see clearly that people interested in the Christ myth theory do not study any other ancient history, the idea that there would be statues or dedicatory plaques put up in a province of the Roman empire to a criminal who had been executed as a trouble maker by the Roman authorities, is simply ludicrous.Smeat75 (talk) 13:23, 17 March 2014 (UTC)

I don't have any issues with the existence of jesus as a person (I think). My problem is simply that the article blathers on at length and doesn't really say anything. To turn this into a useful article, sentences such as "Robert E. Van Voorst states that the idea of the non-historicity of the existence of Jesus has always been controversial, and has consistently failed to convince virtually all scholars of many disciplines." could be removed - it doesn't add any extra information. Instead, more weight should be given to talk on the actual reasoning of the names. It currently feels like a constant appeal to authority. I'll see if I can work out a better set of contents for the existence section. 203.29.131.142 (talk) 01:58, 26 March 2014 (UTC)

"Appeals to authority" are what WP is based on, reliable scholarly sources. Those names are of generally recognised authorities, yes, on the subject. Is this the same user as 123 above?Smeat75 (talk) 03:08, 26 March 2014 (UTC)

Note I've removed the links and references to make it easier to see what I am getting at. They should be readded later. A lot of the things could be added into a section called "Scholarly views", which would also include most of the content of the accepted historical facts section.

Existence

The question of the existence of Jesus as a historical figure is distinct from the study of the historical Jesus, which goes beyond the analysis of his historicity and attempts to reconstruct portraits of his life and teachings, based on methods such as biblical criticism of gospel texts and the history of first century Judea. Nor does it concern supernatural or miraculous claims about Jesus, which historians tend to look on as questions of faith, rather than historical fact.

Virtually all modern scholars of antiquity agree that Jesus existed, and most biblical scholars and classical historians see the theories of his non-existence as effectively refuted. There is, however, widespread disagreement among scholars on the details of the life of Jesus mentioned in the gospel narratives, and on the meaning of his teachings. Geoffrey Blainey writes that Jesus' life was "astonishingly documented" by the standards of the time – more so than any of his contemporaries – with numerous books, stories and memoirs written about him. The problem for the historian, wrote Blainey, is not therefore, determining whether Jesus actually existed, but rather in considering the "sheer multitude of detail and its inconsistencies and contradictions".

Although the sources for the historicity of Jesus are mainly Christian sources, there are also mentions in a few non-Christian Jewish and Greco-Roman sources, which have been used in historical analyses of the existence of Jesus.

Roman sources include the works of 1st-century Roman historians Josephus and Tacitus. There is some dispute over whether the mention by Josephus is a Christian forgery of the text. The general scholarly view is that while the Testimonium Flavianum is most likely not authentic in its entirety, it is broadly agreed upon that it originally consisted of an authentic nucleus, which was then subject to Christian interpolation or forgery. The two previous sentances need a citation. Josephus scholar Louis H. Feldman has stated that "few have doubted the genuineness" of Josephus' reference to Jesus in Antiquities 20, 9, 1 and it is only disputed by a small number of scholars.

The Mishnah (circa 200) may refer to Jesus and reflect the early Jewish traditions of portraying Jesus as a sorcerer or magician. Other possible references to Jesus and his execution may exist in the Talmud. The Talmud mentions support the existence of Jesus as they aim to discredit his actions, not deny his existence. 203.29.131.142 (talk) 02:18, 26 March 2014 (UTC)

I don't really understand what this is meant to be, could you explain?Smeat75 (talk) 03:08, 26 March 2014 (UTC)

It's meant to be an example of a simplified and actually useful Existence section of the historicity of Jesus article. I don't know enough to fill out the Roman paragraph, the Jewish paragraph etc. It's only an example, but I hope it demonstrates that a lot of the existing text is redundant. I am not the same as 123, and I don't think I agree with what they are saying. Trying once again: What I'd like to do is to modify the existence section to talk about evidence for the existence of Jesus. I think that a new section should be made to put the most of the quotes and thoughts of individual scholars in. The current evidence section is very hard to parse. 203.29.131.142 (talk) 06:06, 26 March 2014 (UTC)

Further to this, I don't have an issue with appeals to authority in Wikipedia, as long as the reasoning they use to come to their conclusions is stated. 203.29.131.142 (talk) 06:10, 26 March 2014 (UTC)

An "appeal to authority" is a form of fallacy. For example, "Aristotle says that the retina must be colourless. Therefore, the retina is colourless." Wikipedia follows WP:V, WP:OR and WP:NPOV, which are neutral as to the occurrence of any fallacies in articles. Appeals to authority are therefore neither condoned nor prohibited. I don't think an appeal to authority would ever pass WP:NPOV, however. But that's not because it is a fallacy, but just because reliable sources generally would not affirm such a fallacy. So even if one reliable source did affirm an appeal to authority, there would likely be many others which would contradict it; so then at best the appeal to authority could be ascribed, but not stated in the voice of the encyclopedia. --Atethnekos (Discussion, Contributions) 06:21, 26 March 2014 (UTC)

In that case, I stand by my original statement. The Existence section (and in fact the whole article) is almost entirely an appeal to authority. It's possible that the sources have actual reasoning in them, but the article mainly follows the form "Scholars say that Jesus was a real person, therefore Jesus was a real person". If the sources have logical reasoning in them, then that is what should be quoted in the article - simply talking about the conclusions doesn't add any additional information beyond the "Virtually all modern scholars....." sentence. 203.29.131.142 (talk) 22:31, 26 March 2014 (UTC)

You have invented a Christ

The quoted phrase does not say that Christians have invented Jesus, it says that they have invented a Messiah. Not the same thing. Does Van Voorst actually say that it amounts to a denial of the historicity of Jesus? Tgeorgescu (talk) 22:59, 19 March 2014 (UTC)

I found it at [4]. Indeed Van Voorst says it is a possible (i.e. not certainly found to be so) argument for the nonexistence of Jesus, but the dialogue does not develop the idea. Even in Van Voorst, it is a footnote, so its relevance is minimal to the question of the real existence of Jesus. Tgeorgescu (talk) 15:59, 20 March 2014 (UTC)

Price also says it's only a possibility, though obviously one he finds intriguing. Martijn Meijering (talk) 16:02, 20 March 2014 (UTC)

Neutrality tag on this article

A tag which says "The neutrality of this article is disputed. Relevant discussion may be found on the talk page" has been sitting on this article since October 2013. According to Template:POV "This template should not be used as a badge of shame. Do not use this template to "warn" readers about the article" but that appears to me to be how it is being used here. I don't like these tags, they seem to more or less say "this article is crap". Template:POV also says "The editor who adds the tag should discuss concerns on the talk page, pointing to specific issues that are actionable within the content policies. In the absence of such a discussion, or where it remains unclear what the NPOV violation is, the tag may be removed by any editor." It shouldn't just sit there without any discussion of what action can be taken to remove it.Template:POV says : "An unbalanced or non-neutral article is one that does not fairly represent the balance of perspectives of high-quality, reliable secondary sources. A balanced article presents mainstream views as being mainstream, and minority views as being minority views. The personal views of Wikipedia editors or the public are irrelevant." There is absolutely no question that the mainstream view is that the bare existence of Jesus as someone who was crucified by the orders of Pontius Pilate, as stated in the Gospels, the Jewish historian Josephus and the Roman historian Tacitus, is a fact of history. The contrary position, there was never such a person, is an extreme minority view. The personal views of Wikipedia editors or the public are irrelevant. So what is the problem here, and how can we resolve it and take that tag off this article?Smeat75 (talk) 04:06, 5 April 2014 (UTC)

Some searching through the page history suggests the tag was last inserted by user Wickorama on October 21 2013. He quite properly added a Talk section with this diff, but that has since disappeared. I have some concerns of my own, but let's deal with this issue first. I'll leave a message on Wickorama's talk page too. Martijn Meijering (talk) 10:03, 5 April 2014 (UTC)

Historicity versus opinions about historicity

The article lede is quite clear and understandable:

The historicity of Jesus concerns the analysis of historical evidence to determine whether Jesus existed as a historical figure, and whether any of the major milestones in his life as portrayed in the gospels can be confirmed as historical events.

Yet, instead of focusing on the analysis of historical evidence, this article focuses on opinions of about Jesus' historicity.

Do you get that distinction? The difference between analysis and conclusory statements?

Can someone can provide a justification for focusing on conclusions while skipping analysis? Fearofreprisal (talk) 09:10, 9 April 2014 (UTC)

See WP:VER and WP:NOR. Tgeorgescu (talk) 14:17, 9 April 2014 (UTC)

I'm not talking about WP:or or WP:syn. I'm talking about analyses of historical evidence from reliable sources, including majority and minority viewpoints. Probably using many of the same sources that are cited for their opinions now. (I'm assuming most of them actually have done some sort of analysis of historical evidence.) Fearofreprisal (talk) 21:04, 9 April 2014 (UTC)

Fearofreprisal put a lot of WP:or and personal opinion into the article and I removed it all. You need to get consensus for changes like that first, you cannot just insert your personal POV all over the place. I only noticed because I was trying to answer your question about analysis. There are only two things that are "universally agreed" - one, that Jesus was crucified, the article explains why there is agreement about this over and over, it is attested to by multiple sources including the gospels, Josephus and Tacitus, in terms of an event from antiquity that is confirmation coming out of our ears. I put in a passage explaining why there is agreement about the baptism - "why would they make that up?" basically.Smeat75 (talk) 00:38, 10 April 2014 (UTC)

Also, Fearofreprisal, you cannot just delete sourced content because you don't like it.Smeat75 (talk) 00:48, 10 April 2014 (UTC)

Smeat75: You are completely incorrect in your claim that I "need to get consensus for changes..." See WP:BOLD. Further, I didn't "just delete sourced content because [I] didn't like it." See WP:GOODFAITH.

Regards the WP:OR you said I put in the article, and which you removed: Please identify it with specificity, so it can be discussed here.

Regards the "universally agreed" episodes: The article merely states the opinions of the cited sources that there is agreement. It doesn't provide any of their analyses of historical evidence.

Your inclusion of the criterion of embarrassment paragraph, copied from Baptism_of_Jesus#Historicity could be a start to a section detailing the analysis of historical evidence regarding the baptism, but it has problems:

• The text says "One of the arguments in favour." So, it has a WP:NPOV problem right from the start.
• Looking at the way the text is written, It appears to be WP:SYN
• The criterion of embarrassent is rarely used by itself (see Criterion of embarrassment), so its inclusion in a standalone fashion hints of WP:Cherrypicking.)

If you want to fix your addition, that'd be fine with me. But I don't think it should be left as it is.

The "Accepted Historic Facts" section is tragically mis-named... I'm open to other names for it, but this name is hardly accurate.

There is a lot of historical Jesus content that has no place in this article. For example:

The reconstruction of portraits of the historical Jesus along with his life story has been the subject of wide ranging debate among scholars, with no scholarly consensus.[21] In a review of the state of research Amy-Jill Levine stated that "no single picture of Jesus has convinced all, or even most scholars" and that all portraits of Jesus are subject to criticism by some group of scholars.[21]

I'm going to remove this, as it is inapposite in this article.

I'm going to revert your reversion of the christ myth theory mention in the lede. This article is about the historicity of Jesus -- not about the christ myth theory. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Fearofreprisal (talk • contribs) 19:42, 10 April 2014 (UTC)

"The article merely states the opinions of the cited sources that there is agreement. It doesn't provide any of their analyses of historical evidence." - that's what you said already, and I already told you that it is quite simple, the Gospels, Tacitus and Josephus all agree that the crucifixion happened. That's the analysis. The article says that over and over and it seems that I have to repeat it over and over on the talk page. With the baptism, it is "why would they make that up?" which I also already said, and there are a lot of sources where you can see that. The rest of it is educated guess work. I put in that paragraph from Baptism of Jesus - is that against some rule I don't know about? - to try to answer your question about analysis of the other "universally accepted" event but it really doesn't need a lot of fancy concepts to explain it, it is accepted as historic because there is no reason for the early Christians to make that up.Smeat75 (talk) 23:12, 10 April 2014 (UTC)

Feel free to repeat your analysis over and over here on the talk page... but you're not a reliable source, so inclusion of your analysis on the article page is WP:OR or WP:SYN. The article needs to include the analysis (and not just the conclusions) of reliable sources, including both majority and minority viewpoints.

FWIW, a person who is a reliable source on biblical history may be WP:BIASED when it comes to claming that their particular viewpoint is "universally accepted."

So far as I know, there is no problem with using text from other WP articles. But, if you pull the text out of context, it may be WP:POV, WP:SYN, and/or WP:Cherrypicking (as I mentioned before.) Fearofreprisal (talk) 04:54, 11 April 2014 (UTC)

I actually don't know what you are talking about any more. You keep saying you want "analysis". I keep telling you what the "analysis" is of the two "universally accepted" events, the crucifixion and the baptism, and put that analysis in the article with sources. Crucifixion- attested by the Gospels, Josephus and Tacitus. Baptism- they would not have made that up as it implies Jesus was lesser than John and needed to have his sins forgiven. That's all there is to it, that is the analysis, and it isn't my analysis, but that of everybody who is an authority on the subject as the sources say. Then you just repeat that you want analysis. I don't understand you, sorry.Smeat75 (talk) 12:51, 11 April 2014 (UTC)

Also since it is a frequent objection that the sources used are theologians, or professors of Biblical studies, or Christians, as if that disqualifies them as being trustworthy somehow, I have put in quotes from the two eminent classical historians, Robin Lane Fox and Michael Grant, secular historians. If by "minority view" Fearofreprisal means "mythicists" that is referred to in a brief section on the Christ myth theory, I updated the definition to the one recently achieved by long and painful process of consensus at that article. WP:FRINGE states "To maintain a neutral point of view, an idea that is not broadly supported by scholarship in its field must not be given undue weight in an article about a mainstream idea. More extensive treatment should be reserved for an article about the idea" and "mythicism" is fully discussed there, anything more in this article would be WP:UNDUE "If a viewpoint is held by an extremely small (or vastly limited) minority, it does not belong in Wikipedia regardless of whether it is true or not and regardless of whether you can prove it or not, except perhaps in some ancillary article." "There was never such a person as Jesus" is not a minority view, it is an extreme fringe idea, see [5] blog of Emeritus Professor at Edinburgh University Larry Hurtado "I was emailed last week by someone asking why scholars don’t engage the “mythicists”...I’m not alone in feeling that to show the ill-informed and illogical nature of the current wave of “mythicist” proponents is a bit like having to demonstrate that the earth isn’t flat, or that the sun doesn’t revolve around the earth, or that the moon-landings weren’t done on a movie lot."Smeat75 (talk) 18:55, 11 April 2014 (UTC)

I make no objection to the use of Christians et. al. as sources. I just believe it's important to be transparent, as it's hard to dismiss the likelihood of WP:BIAS with sources whose belief system is built on the premise that Jesus was a historical figure. As Upton Sinclair said, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” Fearofreprisal (talk) 19:48, 11 April 2014 (UTC)

The Inquisition would have burnt as heretics today's Christian scholars who do historical criticism. You would be amazed about what theology books preach nowadays, many of today's fundamentalist Christians would readily burn them as blasphemy. You could learn this by reading just a few liberal theology books. Tgeorgescu (talk) 23:49, 14 April 2014 (UTC)

Sources for the fringe nature of the CMT

To see the list of quotations and citations, click on the [show] link to the right.

Citations:

• [T]he view that there was no historical Jesus, that his earthly existence is a fiction of earliest Christianity—a fiction only later made concrete by setting his life in the first century—is today almost totally rejected.

G. A. Wells, The Historical Evidence for Jesus (Amherst, NY: Prometheus, 1988) p. 218

• It is customary today to dismiss with amused contempt the suggestion that Jesus never existed.

G. A. Wells, "The Historicity of Jesus," in Jesus and History and Myth, ed. R. Joseph Hoffman (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 1986) p. 27

• "New Testament criticism treated the Christ Myth Theory with universal disdain"

Robert M. Price, The Pre-Nicene New Testament: Fifty-Four Formative Texts (Salt Lake City: Signature Books, 2006) p. 1179

• "Van Voorst is quite right in saying that 'mainstream scholarship today finds it unimportant' [to engage the Christ myth theory seriously]. Most of their comment (such as those quoted by Michael Grant) are limited to expressions of contempt."

Earl Doherty, "Responses to Critiques of the Mythicist Case: Alleged Scholarly Refutations of Jesus Mythicism, Part Three", The Jesus Puzzle: Was There No Historical Jesus?

• 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.

Graham Stanton, The Gospels and Jesus (2nd ed.), (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002) p. xxiii

• In the last analysis, the whole Christ-myth theorizing is a glaring example of obscurantism, if the sin of obscurantism consists in the acceptance of bare possibilities in place of actual probabilities, and of pure surmise in defiance of existing evidence. Those who have not entered far into the laborious inquiry may pretend that the historicity of Jesus is an open question. For me to adopt such a pretence would be sheer intellectual dishonesty. I know I must, as an honest man, reckon with Jesus as a factor in history... This dialectic process whereby the Christ-myth theory discredits itself rests on the simple fact that you cannot attempt to prove the theory without mishandling the evidence.

Herbert George Wood, Christianity and the Nature of History (London: Cambridge University Press, 1934) pp. xxxiii & 54

• The defectiveness of [the Christ myth theory's] treatment of the traditional evidence is perhaps not so patent in the case of the gospels as it is in the case of the Pauline epistles. Yet fundamentally it is the same. There is the same easy dismissal of all external testimony, the same disdain for the saner conclusions of modern criticism, the same inclination to attach most value to extremes of criticism, the same neglect of all the personal and natural features of the narrative, the same disposition to put skepticism forward in the garb of valid demonstration, and the same ever present predisposition against recognizing any evidence for Jesus' actual existence... The New Testament data are perfectly clear in their testimony to the reality of Jesus' earthly career and they come from a time when the possibility that the early framers of tradition should have been deceived upon this point is out of the question.

Shirley Jackson Case, The Historicity Of Jesus (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1912) pp. 76-77 & 269

• If one were able to survey the members of the major learned societies dealing with antiquity, it would be difficult to find more than a handful who believe that Jesus of Nazareth did not walk the dusty roads of Palestine in the first three decades of the Common Era. Evidence for Jesus as a historical personage is incontrovertible.

W. Ward Gasque, "The Leading Religion Writer in Canada... Does He Know What He's Talking About?", George Mason University's History News Network, 2004

• [The non-Christian references to Jesus from the first two centuries] render highly implausible any farfetched theories that even Jesus' very existence was a Christian invention. The fact that Jesus existed, that he was crucified under Pontius Pilate (for whatever reason) and that he had a band of followers who continued to support his cause, seems to be the part of the bedrock of historical tradition. If nothing else, the non-Christian evidence can provide us with certainty on that score.

Christopher M. Tuckett, "Sources and Methods" in The Cambridge Companion to Jesus (London: Cambridge University Press, 2001) p. 124

• [A]n attempt to show that Jesus never existed has been made in recent years by G. A. Wells, a Professor of German who has ventured into New Testament study and presents a case that the origins of Christianity can be explained without assuming that Jesus really lived. Earlier presentations of similar views at the turn of the century failed to make any impression on scholarly opinion, and it is certain that this latest presentation of the case will not fare any better. For of course the evidence is not confined to Tacitus; there are the New Testament documents themselves, nearly all of which must be dated in the first century, and behind which there lies a period of transmission of the story of Jesus which can be traced backwards to a date not far from that when Jesus is supposed to have lived. To explain the rise of this tradition without the hypothesis of Jesus is impossible.

I. Howard Marshall, I Believe in the Historical Jesus (rev. ed.) (Vancouver: Regent College Publishing, 2004) pp. 15–16

• A phone call from the BBC’s flagship Today programme: would I go on air on Good Friday morning to debate with the aurthors of a new book, The Jesus Mysteries? The book claims (or so they told me) that everything in the Gospels reflects, because it was in fact borrowed from, much older pagan myths; that Jesus never existed; that the early church knew it was propagating a new version of an old myth, and that the developed church covered this up in the interests of its own power and control. The producer was friendly, and took my point when I said that this was like asking a professional astronomer to debate with the authors of a book claiming the moon was made of green cheese.

N. T. Wright, "Jesus' Self Understanding", in Stephen T. Davis, Daniel Kendall, Gerald O’Collins, The Incarnation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004) p. 48

• A school of thought popular with cranks on the Internet holds that Jesus didn’t actually exist.

Tom Breen, The Messiah Formerly Known as Jesus: Dispatches from the Intersection of Christianity and Pop Culture (Waco, TX: Baylor University Press, 2008) p. 138

• I feel that I ought almost to apologize to my readers for investigating at such length the hypothesis of a pre-Christian Jesus, son of a mythical Mary, and for exhibiting over so many pages its fantastic, baseless, and absurd character... We must [, according to Christ myth advocates,] perforce suppose that the Gospels were a covert tribute to the worth and value of Pagan mythology and religious dramas, to pagan art and statuary. If we adopt the mythico-symbolical method, they can have been nothing else. Its sponsors might surely condescend to explain the alchemy by which the ascertained rites and beliefs of early Christians were distilled from these antecedents. The effect and the cause are so entirely disparate, so devoid of any organic connection, that we would fain see the evolution worked out a little more clearly. At one end of it we have a hurly-burly of pagan myths, at the other an army of Christian apologists inveighing against everything pagan and martyred for doing so, all within a space of sixty or seventy years. I only hope the orthodox will be gratified to learn that their Scriptures are a thousandfold more wonderful and unique than they appeared to be when they were merely inspired by the Holy Spirit. For verbal inspiration is not, as regards its miraculous quality, in the same field with mythico-symbolism. Verily we have discovered a new literary genus, unexampled in the history of mankind, you rake together a thousand irrelevant thrums of mythology, picked up at random from every age, race, and clime; you get a "Christist" to throw them into a sack and shake them up; you open it, and out come the Gospels. In all the annals of the Bacon-Shakespeareans we have seen nothing like it.

Frederick Cornwallis Conybeare,The Historical Christ, or an Investigation of the Views of J. M. Robertson, A. Drews and W. B. Smith (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Library, 2009/1914) pp. 42 & 95

• Today only an eccentric would claim that Jesus never existed.

Leander Keck, Who Is Jesus?: History in Perfect Tense (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 2000) p. 13

• While The Christ Myth alarmed many who were innocent of learning, it evoked only Olympian scorn from the historical establishment, who were confident that Jesus had existed... The Christ-myth theory, then, won little support from the historical specialists. In their judgement, it sought to demonstrate a perverse thesis, and it preceded by drawing the most far-fetched, even bizarre connection between mythologies of very diverse origin. The importance of the theory lay, not in its persuasiveness to the historians (since it had none), but in the fact that it invited theologians to renewed reflection on the questions of faith and history.

Brian A. Gerrish, The Old Protestantism and the New: Essays on the Reformation Heritage (London: T. & T. Clark, 2004) pp. 231 & 233

• It is certain, however, that Jesus was arrested while in Jerusalem for the Passover, probably in the year 30, and that he was executed...it cannot be doubted that Peter was a personal disciple of Jesus...

Helmut Koester, Introduction to the New Testament, 2 (2nd ed.) (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2000) pp. 80 & 166

• We do not need to take seriously those writers who occasionally claim that Jesus never existed at all, for we have clear evidence to the contrary from a number of Jewish, Latin, and Islamic sources.

John Drane, "Introduction", in John Drane, The Great Sayings of Jesus: Proverbs, Parables and Prayers (New York: Palgrave Macmillian, 1999) p. 23

• By no means are we at the mercy of those who doubt or deny that Jesus ever lived.

Rudolf Bultmann, "The Study of the Synoptic Gospels", Form Criticism: Two Essays on New Testament Research, Rudolf Bultmann & Karl Kundsin; translated by Frederick C. Grant (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1962) p. 62

• Of course the doubt as to whether Jesus really existed is unfounded and not worth refutation. No sane person can doubt that Jesus stands as founder behind the historical movement whose first distinct stage is represented by the oldest Palestinian community.

Rudolf Bultmann, Jesus and the Word (New York: Scribner, 1958) p. introduction

• It is the nature of historical work that we are always involved in probability judgments. Granted, some judgments are so probable as to be certain; for example, Jesus really existed and really was crucified, just as Julius Caeser really existed and was assassinated.

Marcus Borg, "A Vision of the Christian Life", The Meaning of Jesus: Two Visions, Marcus Borg & N. T. Wright (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 2007) p. 236

• To sum up, modern critical methods fail to support the Christ-myth theory. It has 'again and again been answered and annihilated by first-rank scholars'. In recent years 'no serious scholar has ventured to postulate the non-historicity of Jesus'—or at any rate very few, and they have not succeeded in disposing of the much stronger, indeed very abundant, evidence to the contrary.

Michael Grant, Jesus: An Historian's Review of the Gospels (New York: Scribner, 1995) p. 200

• I think that there are hardly any historians today, in fact I don't know of any historians today, who doubt the existence of Jesus... So I think that question can be put to rest.

N. T. Wright, "The Self-Revelation of God in Human History: A Dialogue on Jesus with N. T. Wright", in Antony Flew & Roy Abraham Vargese, There is a God (New York: HarperOne, 2007) p. 188

• Even the most critical historian can confidently assert that a Jew named Jesus worked as a teacher and wonder-worker in Palestine during the reign of Tiberius, was executed by crucifixion under the prefect Pontius Pilate, and continued to have followers after his death.

Luke Timothy Johnson, The Real Jesus (San Francisco: Harper, 1996) p. 121

• The historical reality both of Buddha and of Christ has sometimes been doubted or denied. It would be just as reasonable to question the historical existence of Alexander the Great and Charlemagne on account of the legends which have gathered round them... The attempt to explain history without the influence of great men may flatter the vanity of the vulgar, but it will find no favour with the philosophic historian.

James Frazer, The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion, 7 (3rd ed.) (London: Macmillan, 1919) p. 311

• We can be certain that Jesus really existed (despite a few highly motivated skeptics who refuse to be convinced), that he was a Jewish teacher in Galilee, and that he was crucified by the Roman government around 30 CE.

Robert J. Miller, The Jesus Seminar and Its Critics (Santa Rosa: Polebridge, 1999) p. 38

• [T]here is substantial evidence that a person by the name of Jesus once existed.

Robert Funk, Honest to Jesus: Jesus for a New Millenium (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1997) p. 33

• Despite the prejudices and theological preconceptions of the evangelists, they record many incidents that mere inventors would have concealed—the competition of the apostles for high places in the Kingdom, their flight after Jesus' arrest, Peter's denial, the failure of Christ to work miracles in Galilee, the references of some auditors to his possible insanity, his early uncertainty as to his mission, his confessions of ignorance as to the future, his moments of bitterness, his despairing cry on the cross; 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 lofty an ethic and so inspiring a vision of human brotherhood, would be a miracle far more incredible than any recorded in the Gospel.

Will Durant, Christ and Caesar, The Story of Civilization, 3 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1972) p. 557

• There are no substantial doubts about the general course of Jesus’ life: when and where he lived, approximately when and where he died, and the sort of thing that he did during his public activity.

E. P. Sanders, The Historical Figure of Jesus (London: Allen Lane, 1993) p. 10

• There are those who argue that Jesus is a figment of the Church’s imagination, that there never was a Jesus at all. I have to say that I do not know any respectable critical scholar who says that any more.

Richard A. Burridge, Jesus Now and Then (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2004) p. 34

• Although Wells has been probably the most able advocate of the nonhistoricity theory, he has not been persuasive and is now almost a lone voice for it. The theory of Jesus' nonexistence is now effectively dead as a scholarly question... The nonhistoricity thesis has always been controversial, and it has consistently failed to convince scholars of many disciplines and religious creeds... Biblical scholars and classical historians now regard it as effectively refuted.

Robert E. Van Voorst, Jesus Outside the New Testament: An Introduction to the Ancient Evidence (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2000) pp. 14 & 16

• No reputable scholar today questions that a Jew named Jesus son of Joseph lived; most readily admit that we now know a considerable amount about his actions and his basic teachings.

James H. Charlesworth, "Preface", in James H. Charlesworth, Jesus and Archaeology (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2006) pp. xxi–xxv

• [Robert] Price thinks the evidence is so weak for the historical Jesus that we cannot know anything certain or meaningful about him. He is even willing to entertain the possibility that there never was a historical Jesus. Is the evidence of Jesus really that thin? Virtually no scholar trained in history will agree with Price's negative conclusions... In my view Price's work in the gospels is overpowered by a philosophical mindset that is at odds with historical research—of any kind... What we see in Price is what we have seen before: a flight from fundamentalism.

Craig A. Evans, Fabricating Jesus: How Modern Scholars Distort the Gospels (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 2008) p. 25

• The scholarly mainstream, in contrast to Bauer and company, never doubted the existence of Jesus or his relevance for the founding of the Church.

Craig A. Evans, "Life-of-Jesus Research and the Eclipse of Mythology", Theological Studies 54, 1993, p. 8

• There's no serious question for historians that Jesus actually lived. There’s real issues about whether he is really the way the Bible described him. There’s real issues about particular incidents in his life. But no serious ancient historian doubts that Jesus was a real person, really living in Galilee in the first century.

Chris Forbes, interview with John Dickson, "Zeitgeist: Time to Discard the Christian Story?", Center for Public Christianity, 2009

• I don't think there's any serious historian who doubts the existence of Jesus. There are a lot of people who want to write sensational books and make a lot of money who say Jesus didn't exist. But I don't know any serious scholar who doubts the existence of Jesus.

Bart Ehrman, interview with Reginald V. Finley Sr., "Who Changed The New Testament and Why", The Infidel Guy Show, 2008

• What about those writers like Acharya S (The Christ Conspiracy) and Timothy Freke & Peter Gandy (The Jesus Mysteries), who say that Jesus never existed, and that Christianity was an invented religion, the Jewish equivalent of the Greek mystery religions? This is an old argument, even though it shows up every 10 years or so. This current craze that Christianity was a mystery religion like these other mystery religions-the people who are saying this are almost always people who know nothing about the mystery religions; they've read a few popular books, but they're not scholars of mystery religions. The reality is, we know very little about mystery religions-the whole point of mystery religions is that they're secret! So I think it's crazy to build on ignorance in order to make a claim like this. I think the evidence is just so overwhelming that Jesus existed, that it's silly to talk about him not existing. I don't know anyone who is a responsible historian, who is actually trained in the historical method, or anybody who is a biblical scholar who does this for a living, who gives any credence at all to any of this.

Bart Ehrman, interview with David V. Barrett, "The Gospel According to Bart", Fortean Times (221), 2007

• Richard [Carrier] takes the extremist position that Jesus of Nazareth never even existed, that there was no such person in history. This is a position that is so extreme that to call it marginal would be an understatement; it doesn’t even appear on the map of contemporary New Testament scholarship.

William Lane Craig, "Did Jesus Rise from the Dead?", debate with Richard Carrier, 2009

• The alternative thesis... that within thirty years there had evolved such a coherent and consistent complex of traditions about a non-existent figure such as we have in the sources of the Gospels is just too implausible. It involves too many complex and speculative hypotheses, in contrast to the much simpler explanation that there was a Jesus who said and did more or less what the first three Gospels attribute to him.

James D. G. Dunn, The Evidence for Jesus (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1985) p. 29

• This is always the fatal flaw of the 'Jesus myth' thesis: the improbability of the total invention of a figure who had purportedly lived within the generation of the inventors, or the imposition of such an elaborate myth on some minor figure from Galilee. [Robert] Price is content with the explanation that it all began 'with a more or less vague savior myth.' Sad, really.

James D. G. Dunn, "Response to Robert M. Price", in James K. Beilby & Paul Rhodes Eddy, The Historical Jesus: Five Views (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 2009) p. 98

• Since the Enlightenment, the Gospel stories about the life of Jesus have been in doubt. Intellectuals then as now asked: 'What makes the stories of the New Testament any more historically probable than Aesop's fables or Grimm's fairy tales?' The critics can be answered satisfactorily...For all the rigor of the standard it sets, the criterion [of embarrassment] demonstrates that Jesus existed.

Alan F. Segal, "Believe Only the Embarrassing", Slate, 2005

• Some writers may toy with the fancy of a 'Christ-myth,' but they do not do so on the ground of historical evidence. The historicity of Christ is as axiomatic for an unbiased historian as the historicity of Julius Caesar. It is not historians who propagate the 'Christ-myth' theories.

F. F. Bruce, The New Testament Documents: Are They Reliable? (6th ed.) (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003) p. 123

• Jesus is in no danger of suffering Catherine [of Alexandria]'s fate as an unhistorical myth...

Dale Allison, The Historical Christ and the Theological Jesus (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2009) p. 37

• An examination of the claims for and against the historicity of Jesus thus reveals that the difficulties faced by those undertaking to prove that he is not historical, in the fields both of the history of religion and the history of doctrine, and not least in the interpretation of the earliest tradition are far more numerous and profound than those which face their opponents. Seen in their totality, they must be considered as having no possible solution. Added to this, all hypotheses which have so far been put forward to the effect that Jesus never lived are in the strangest opposition to each other, both in their method of working and their interpretation of the Gospel reports, and thus merely cancel each other out. Hence we must conclude that the supposition that Jesus did exist is exceedingly likely, whereas its converse is exceedingly unlikely. This does not mean that the latter will not be proposed again from time to time, just as the romantic view of the life of Jesus is also destined for immortality. It is even able to dress itself up with certain scholarly technique, and with a little skillful manipulation can have much influence on the mass of people. But as soon as it does more than engage in noisy polemics with 'theology' and hazards an attempt to produce real evidence, it immediately reveals itself to be an implausible hypothesis.

Albert Schweitzer, The Quest of the Historical Jesus, translated by John Bowden et al. (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2001) pp. 435–436

• In fact, there is more evidence that Jesus of Nazareth certainly lived than for most famous figures of the ancient past. This evidence is of two kinds: internal and external, or, if you will, sacred and secular. In both cases, the total evidence is so overpowering, so absolute that only the shallowest of intellects would dare to deny Jesus' existence. And yet this pathetic denial is still parroted by 'the village atheist,' bloggers on the internet, or such organizations as the Freedom from Religion Foundation.

Paul L. Maier, "Did Jesus Really Exist?", 4Truth.net, 2007

• The very logic that tells us there was no Jesus is the same logic that pleads that there was no Holocaust. On such logic, history is no longer possible. It is no surprise then that there is no New Testament scholar drawing pay from a post who doubts the existence of Jesus. I know not one. His birth, life, and death in first-century Palestine have never been subject to serious question and, in all likelihood, never will be among those who are experts in the field. The existence of Jesus is a given.

Nicholas Perrin, Lost in Transmission?: What We Can Know About the Words of Jesus (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2007) p. 32

• While we do not have the fullness of biographical detail and the wealth of firsthand accounts that are available for recent public figures, such as Winston Churchill or Mother Teresa, we nonetheless have much more data on Jesus than we do for such ancient figures as Alexander the Great... Along with the scholarly and popular works, there is a good deal of pseudoscholarship on Jesus that finds its way into print. During the last two centuries more than a hundred books and articles have denied the historical existence of Jesus. Today innumerable websites carry the same message... Most scholars regard the arguments for Jesus' non-existence as unworthy of any response—on a par with claims that the Jewish Holocaust never occurred or that the Apollo moon landing took place in a Hollywood studio.

Michael James McClymond, Familiar Stranger: An Introduction to Jesus of Nazareth (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2004) pp. 8 & 23–24

• You know that you can try to minimize your biases, but you can't eliminate them. That's why you have to put certain checks and balances in place… Under this approach, we only consider facts that meet two criteria. First, there must be very strong historical evidence supporting them. And secondly, the evidence must be so strong that the vast majority of today's scholars on the subject—including skeptical ones—accept these as historical facts. You're never going to get everyone to agree. There are always people who deny the Holocaust or question whether Jesus ever existed, but they're on the fringe.

Michael R. Licona, in Lee Strobel, The Case for the Real Jesus (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2007) p. 112

• If I understand what Earl Doherty is arguing, Neil, it is that Jesus of Nazareth never existed as an historical person, or, at least that historians, like myself, presume that he did and act on that fatally flawed presumption. I am not sure, as I said earlier, that one can persuade people that Jesus did exist as long as they are ready to explain the entire phenomenon of historical Jesus and earliest Christianity either as an evil trick or a holy parable. I had a friend in Ireland who did not believe that Americans had landed on the moon but that they had created the entire thing to bolster their cold-war image against the communists. I got nowhere with him. So I am not at all certain that I can prove that the historical Jesus existed against such an hypothesis and probably, to be honest, I am not even interested in trying.

John Dominic Crossan, "Historical Jesus: Materials and Methodology", XTalk, 2000

• A hundred and fifty years ago a fairly well respected scholar named Bruno Bauer maintained that the historical person Jesus never existed. Anyone who says that today—in the academic world at least—gets grouped with the skinheads who say there was no Holocaust and the scientific holdouts who want to believe the world is flat.

Mark Allan Powell, Jesus as a Figure in History: How Modern Historians View the Man from Galilee (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1998) p. 168

• When they say that Christian beliefs about Jesus are derived from pagan mythology, I think you should laugh. Then look at them wide-eyed and with a big grin, and exclaim, 'Do you really believe that?' Act as though you've just met a flat earther or Roswell conspirator.

William Lane Craig, "Question 90: Jesus and Pagan Mythology", Reasonable Faith, 2009

• Finley: There are some people in the chat room disagreeing, of course, but they’re saying that there really isn’t any hardcore evidence, though, that… I mean… but there isn’t any… any evidence, really, that Jesus did exist except what people were saying about him. But… Ehrman: I think… I disagree with that. Finley: Really? Ehrman: I mean, what hardcore evidence is there that Julius Caesar existed? Finley: Well, this is… this is the same kind of argument that apologists use, by the way, for the existence of Jesus, by the way. They like to say the same thing you said just then about, well, what kind of evidence do you have for Jul… Ehrman: Well, I mean, it’s… but it’s just a typical… it’s just… It’s a historical point; I mean, how do you establish the historical existence of an individual from the past? Finley: I guess… I guess it depends on the claims… Right, it depends on the claims that people have made during that particular time about a particular person and their influence on society... Ehrman: It’s not just the claims. There are… One has to look at historical evidence. And if you… If you say that historical evidence doesn’t count, then I think you get into huge trouble. Because then, how do… I mean… then why not just deny the Holocaust?

Bart Ehrman, interview with Reginald V. Finley Sr., "Who Changed The New Testament and Why", The Infidel Guy Show, 2008

• The denial that Christ was crucified is like the denial of the Holocaust. For some it's simply too horrific to affirm. For others it's an elaborate conspiracy to coerce religious sympathy. But the deniers live in a historical dreamworld.

John Piper, Fifty Reasons Why Jesus Came to Die (Wheaton: Crossway, 2006) pp. 14-15

• I just finished reading, The Historical Jesus: Five Views. The first view was given by Robert Price, a leading Jesus myth proponent… The title of Price’s chapter is 'Jesus at the Vanishing Point.' I am convinced that if Price's total skepticism were applied fairly and consistently to other figures in ancient history (Alexander the Great, Ptolemy, Cleopatra, Nero, etc.), they would all be reduced to 'the vanishing point.' Price's chapter is a perfect example of how someone can always, always find excuses to not believe something they don't want to believe, whether that be the existence of Jesus or the existence of the holocaust.

Dennis Ingolfsland, "Five views of the historical Jesus", The Recliner Commentaries, 2009

• The Jesus mythers will continue to advance their thesis and complain of being kept outside of the arena of serious academic discussion. They carry their signs, 'Jesus Never Existed!' 'They won’t listen to me!' and label those inside the arena as 'Anti-Intellectuals,' 'Fundamentalists,' 'Misguided Liberals,' and 'Flat-Earthers.' Doherty & Associates are baffled that all but a few naïve onlookers pass them by quickly, wagging their heads and rolling their eyes. They never see that they have a fellow picketer less than a hundred yards away, a distinguished looking man from Iran. He too is frustrated and carries a sign that says 'The Holocaust Never Happened!'

Michael R. Licona, "Licona Replies to Doherty's Rebuttal", Answering Infidels, 2005

• Frankly, I know of no ancient historian or biblical historian who would have a twinge of doubt about the existence of a Jesus Christ - the documentary evidence is simply overwhelming.

Graeme Clarke, quoted by John Dickson in "Facts and friction of Easter", The Sydney Morning Herald, March 21, 2008

• An extreme instance of pseudo-history of this kind is the “explanation” of the whole story of Jesus as a myth.

Emil Brunner, The Mediator: A Study of the Central Doctrine of the Christian Faith (Cambridge: Lutterworth Press, 2002) p. 164

• An extreme view along these lines is one which denies even the historical existence of Jesus Christ—a view which, one must admit, has not managed to establish itself among the educated, outside a little circle of amateurs and cranks, or to rise above the dignity of the Baconian theory of Shakespeare.

Edwyn Robert Bevan, Hellenism And Christianity (2nd ed.) (London: G. Allen and Unwin, 1930) p. 256

• When all the evidence brought against Jesus' historicity is surveyed it is not found to contain any elements of strength.

Shirley Jackson Case, "The Historicity of Jesus: An Estimate of the Negative Argument", The American Journal of Theology, 1911, 15 (1)

• It would be easy to show how much there enters of the conjectural, of superficial resemblances, of debatable interpretation into the systems of the Drews, the Robertsons, the W. B. Smiths, the Couchouds, or the Stahls... The historical reality of the personality of Jesus alone enables us to understand the birth and development of Christianity, which otherwise would remain an enigma, and in the proper sense of the word, a miracle.

Maurice Goguel, Jesus the Nazarene: Myth or History? (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1926) pp. 30 & 244

• Anyone who talks about "reasonable faith" must say what he thinks about Jesus. And that would still be so even if, with one or two cranks, he believed that He never existed.

John W. C. Wand, The Old Faith and the New Age‎ (London: Skeffington & Son, 1933) p. 31

• That both in the case of the Christians, and in the case of those who worshipped Zagreus or Osiris or Attis, the Divine Being was believed to have died and returned to life, would be a depreciation of Christianity only if it could be shown that the Christian belief was derived from the pagan one. But that can be supposed only by cranks for whom historical evidence is nothing.

Edwyn R. Bevan, in Thomas Samuel Kepler, Contemporary Thinking about Paul: An Anthology (New York: Abingdon-Cokesbury, 1950) p. 44

• The pseudoscholarship of the early twentieth century calling in question the historical reality of Jesus was an ingenuous attempt to argue a preconceived position.

Gerard Stephen Sloyan, The Crucifixion of Jesus: History, Myth, Faith (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1995) p. 9

• Whatever else Jesus may or may not have done, he unquestionably* started the process that became Christianity…

UNQUESTIONABLY: The proposition has been questioned, but the alternative explanations proposed—the theories of the “Christ myth school,” etc.—have been thoroughly discredited.

Morton Smith, Jesus the Magician (New York: Harper & Row, 1978) pp. 5 & 166

• One category of mythicists, like young-earth creationists, have no hesitation about offering their own explanation of who made up Christianity... Other mythicists, perhaps because they are aware that such a scenario makes little historical sense and yet have nothing better to offer in its place, resemble proponents of Intelligent Design who will say "the evidence points to this organism having been designed by an intelligence" and then insist that it would be inappropriate to discuss further who the designer might be or anything else other than the mere "fact" of design itself. They claim that the story of Jesus was invented, but do not ask the obvious historical questions of "when, where, and by whom" even though the stories are set in the authors' recent past and not in time immemorial, in which cases such questions obviously become meaningless... Thus far, I've only encountered two sorts of mythicism."

James F. McGrath, "Intelligently-Designed Narratives: Mythicism as History-Stopper", Exploring Our Matrix, 2010

• In the academic mind, there can be no more doubt whatsoever that Jesus existed than did Augustus and Tiberius, the emperors of his lifetime. Even if we assume for a moment that the accounts of non-biblical authors who mention him - Flavius Josephus, Tacitus, Suetonius, Pliny the Younger and others - had not survived, the outstanding quality of the Gospels, Paul's letters and other New Testament writings is more than good enough for the historian.

Carsten Peter Thiede, Jesus, Man or Myth? (Oxford: Lion, 2005) p. 23

• To describe Jesus' non-existence as "not widely supported" is an understatement. It would be akin to me saying, "It is possible to mount a serious, though not widely supported, scientific case that the 1969 lunar landing never happened." There are fringe conspiracy theorists who believe such things - but no expert does. Likewise with the Jesus question: his non-existence is not regarded even as a possibility in historical scholarship. Dismissing him from the ancient record would amount to a wholesale abandonment of the historical method.

John Dickson, Jesus: A Short Life (Oxford: Lion, 2008) 22-23.

• When Professor Wells advances such an explanation of the gospel stories [i.e. the Christ myth theory] he presents us with a piece of private mythology that I find incredible beyond anything in the gospels.

Morton Smith, in R. Joseph Hoffman, Jesus in History and Myth (Amherst, NY: Prometheus, 1986) p. 48

• Of course, there can be no toleration whatever of the idea that Jesus never existed and is only a concoction from these pagan stories about a god who was slain and rose again.

Joseph Klausner, From Jesus to Paul (New York: Menorah, 1943) p. 107

• Virtually all biblical scholars acknowledge that there is enough information from ancient non-Christian sources to give the lie to the myth (still, however, widely believed in popular circles and by some scholars in other fields--see esp. G. A. Wells) which claims that Jesus never existed.

Craig L. Blomberg, "Gospels (Historical Reliability)", in Joel B. Green, Scot McKnight & I. Howard Marshall, Dictionary of Jesus and the Gospels (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 1992) p. 292

• In the 1910's a few scholars did argue that Jesus never existed and was simply the figment of speculative imagination. This denial of the historicity of Jesus does not commend itself to scholars, moderates or extremists, any more. ... The "Christ-myth" theories are not accepted or even discussed by scholars today.

Samuel Sandmel, A Jewish Understanding of the New Testament‎ (New York: Ktav, 1974) p. 196

• Dr. Wells was there [I.e. a symposium at the University of Michigan] and he presened his radical thesis that maybe Jesus never existed. Virtually nobody holds this position today. It was reported that Dr. Morton Smith of Columbia University, even though he is a skeptic himself, responded that Dr. Wells's view was "absurd".

Gary Habermas, in Did Jesus Rise from the Dead?: The Resurrection Debate (San Francisco: HarperCollins, 1989) p. 45

• I.e. if we leave out of account the Christ-myth theories, which are hardly to be reckoned as within the range of serious criticism.

Alexander Roper Vidler, The Modernist Movement in the Roman Church (London: Cambridge University Press, 1934) p. 253

• Such Christ-myth theories are not now advanced by serious opponents of Christianity—they have long been exploded ..."

Gilbert Cope, Symbolism in the Bible and the Church (London: SCM, 1959) p. 14

• In the early years of this century, various theses were propounded which all assert that Jesus never lived, and that the story of Jesus is a myth or legend. These claims have long since been exposed as historical nonsense. There can be no reasonable doubt that Jesus of Nazareth lived in Palestine in the first three decades of our era, probably from 6-7 BC to 30 AD. That is a fact.

Walter Kasper, Jesus the Christ (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 1976) p. 65

• There is, lastly, a group of writers who endeavor to prove that Jesus never lived--that the story of his life is made up by mingling myths of heathen gods, Babylonian, Egyptian, Persian, Greek, etc. No real scholar regards the work of these men seriously. They lack the most elementary knowledge of historical research. Some of them are eminent scholars in other subjects, such as Assyriology and mathematics, but their writings about the life of Jesus have no more claim to be regarded as historical than Alice in Wonderland or the Adventures of Baron Munchausen.

George Aaron Barton, Jesus of Nazareth: A Biography (New York: Macmillan, 1922) p. x

• The data we have are certainly adequate to confute the view that Jesus never lived, a view that no one holds in any case

Charles E. Carlston, in Bruce Chilton & Craig A. Evans (eds.) Studying the Historical Jesus: Evaluations of the State of Current Research (Leiden: Brill, 1998) p. 3

• Although it is held by Marxist propaganda writers that Jesus never lived and that the Gospels are pure creations of the imagination, this is not the view of even the most radical Gospel critics.

Bernard L. Ramm, An Evangelical Christology: Ecumenic and Historic (Vancouver: Regent College Publishing, 1999) p. 159

Interesting list of quotations. I think the WP:cherrypicking is pretty obvious, though. For example, the second Wells quote:

It is customary today to dismiss with amused contempt the suggestion that Jesus never existed… Because a defective case was argued seventy years ago, most scholars today think it is certain that Jesus did exist.

User:Bill the Cat copied this list from his user page at CMT FAQ & Miscellaneous Quotes. While he can pretty much put whatever he wants there, this list seem inappropriate here, as this talk page is WP:notaforum for personal beliefs, apologetics, or polemics.

If there's something in this list that could actually be used to improve the article (e.g., some evidence regarding the historicity of jesus, or an analysis thereof), please point it out. All I see are a whole bunch of conclusory statements. Fearofreprisal (talk) 23:21, 14 April 2014 (UTC)

The way you cite policies makes me think of Wikipedia:Wikilawyering. Inside Wikipedia, sources prove something, the more reliable sources the better. And, another thought: the way you argue for presenting the evidence reminds me of how anti-evolution folks argue about Wikipedia articles about evolution. They ask to see proof, not scientific consensus. Tgeorgescu (talk) 00:17, 15 April 2014 (UTC)

• WP:HERE WP:AGF WP:BITE WP:NOTADVOCATE WP:RNPOV WP:RELMOS Fearofreprisal (talk) 02:00, 15 April 2014 (UTC)

Simply giving those wikilinks won't do. You have cited established Wikipedia policies and guidelines in order to fight against the scholarly consensus. That is in itself wikilawyering. I have no objection to present e.g. Ehrman's statements about what constitutes historical proof of the real existence of Jesus, however anything smacking of WP:OR or WP:SYNTH should be avoided. We are the scribes of mainstream scholars, we do not do original research here. We simply take for granted what they say and put it in the articles. When there is a scholarly consensus, that's the viewpoint of Wikipedia, if there is no consensus all notable views should be rendered. Notable fringe views should be clearly branded as fringe ideas. If you have a problem with that, you should not try to edit this article. By the way, I am not a Christian and I have no problem with challenging its theological views, but my utmost commitment is to verifiable information based upon mainstream scholarly sources. I am prepared to follow reliable sources even when they conflict with my theological views. Tgeorgescu (talk) 12:33, 15 April 2014 (UTC)

Assume claim.

Re [6]. A sincere challenge to an uncited claim has always been considered sufficient grounds for removing a claim. I do not see where this claim is cited in the Historical Jesus article. I've removed the claim again following WP:BRD and WP:V.--Atethnekos (Discussion, Contributions) 04:06, 15 April 2014 (UTC)

• See the first paragraph in Historical Jesus: "These reconstructions accept that Jesus existed,[7][8][9][10]..."
• I know that there is a difference between "assume" and "accept." Possibly it's more accurate to say "do not question."
• These exact same citations are included in the Historicity of Jesus article as well, in the third paragraph. We can move them up, if you like.
• Note that neither of the first two paragraphs of Historicity of Jesus include any citations at all.
• You wrote in your first reversion "Mcgrath says the opposite," but provided no citation of who McGrath is, or where he/she says this. Care to clue me in?
• If you'd like to make the case that the historicity of Jesus should be classified as an element in the study of the historical Jesus (rather than being distinct), I'm all ears. My sense is that most historical Jesus scholars never even reach the point of questioning his historical existence, but limit their concerns of historicity to the major events in his life. ("Seldom have recent scholars questioned or denied the historical existence of Jesus." Gary R. Habermas, Christian Research Journal / vol. 22, no. 3, 2000.) Fearofreprisal (talk) 08:15, 15 April 2014 (UTC)

I would also doubt that "do not question" would be more accurate than "accept". "McGrath" is the only McGrath cited above. McGrath also contradicts the view that there is no questioning; and a fortiori he's reviewing a book which is accurately sub-titled The Question of the Historicity of the Figure of Jesus. Ehrman also contradicts this view in Did Jesus Exist?: "Possibly many readers will wonder why a book is even necessary explaining that Jesus must have existed. To them I would say that every historical person, event, or phenomenon needs to be established. The historian can take nothing for granted." (p. 8, Harper ebook) If you want to include that Habermas claim, I would not object to that (maybe someone else would, I don't know). I don't think Habermas is a very good source for it, especially not when he is writing in an Evangelical apologetics magazine like that, but I wouldn't challenge the claim itself. --Atethnekos (Discussion, Contributions) 09:47, 15 April 2014 (UTC)