IanS,
There's a much easier approach than your comments require.
It's rather simple: Was there a Jesus who was the divine savior of humankind, who was part of God?
No. That is incredibly easy to answer.
Firstly, before we even get to Jesus, we can rule out the divinity by simply noting that the Hebrew god was the Canaanite deity El from that pantheon - the Father of the pantheon.
By consequence, we openly know that no such god as the Hebrew god even existed since it was lifted from the Canaanite pantheon and was of polytheistic following for quite some time by the Hebrew peoples until a unification movement (possibly the Maccabees movement) left only El standing.
So right away we can easily claim that the imperative aspect that you are concerned with regarding Jesus' stature in our culture is immediately answered: no such figure existed.
Well just on a point of important principle here - you are saying the above as if that were all known to you as certain 100% fact. You are expressing no caution at all in what you say about where various god ideas came from. But you should realise that actually neither you or any of us is in a position to state things like that as if it was absolute certainty with no caution at all required in your remarks and beliefs.
Personally I would not even say what you have said above in that completely incautious unguarded way. And for example, in the these HJ threads, even where I mentioned a supernatural God Yahweh, I have usually taken the caution to say only that modern science shows that such a God “almost certainly” does not exist (because he would contravene properly established theories in science).
What we are left with is rather benign and unimpressive to our culture and of no interest to anyone alive today in regards to what you are outlining.
It matters none at all whether there was some outspoken revolutionary from Galilee who was killed and from whom some Hebrew unification philosophy was taken up by others for Hebraic following and transfigured through the diaspora into a legend of individualized and self-actualized authority to moral judgement beyond the control of centralized governance or theocratic rule by misconstrued outline of whatever aspects of those philosophies happened to have made it in some fashion from oral tradition of the Hebrew culture into textual literature tradition of the Roman empire..
Well I actually disagree with you if you are claiming that the existence Jesus, or more pertinently the non-existence of Jesus, is of no importance to anyone today. And I have already spelt out why it should be absolutely obvious and unarguable that his claimed existence is of fundamental importance to the religion of Christianity and it’s biblical NT teaching worldwide. But that is actually a separate point, i.e. a point about why any of us might take an interest in the question of whether or not Jesus existed, and that separation is the point that I just made to
Craig when he claimed yet again for the tenth time that my reason for questioning the existence of Jesus was not because I think the evidence is bad but because according to Craig I want to denigrate Christian religion, and where I again had to tell him that -
" 1. The reason I think the Jesus case is very shaky, is because the claimed evidence is poor to non-existent. Full stop.
2. However, the reason I think the subject is important is because I think Jesus is a vitally important figure in the current day Christian church as the basis of it's teaching, it's beliefs, and the beliefs of Christians in general.
And those are two quite separate considerations. “
This no longer is fascinating in any other respect other than to those who find interest in examining why this particular legend was attractive to the territories of the Roman empire, and in which manners this legend was leveraged for which cultural sociopolitical movements of their time.
Well again, I disagree with you. I think it’s patently obvious that the Christian church would be very concerned indeed, as would most Christians, if they found out that Jesus was not ever actually a real person after all.
In short, Jesus as an historical figure, and not a divine figure, is hardly valuable to anyone in this culture we live in today; which would have been about the same for any such figure during their own time.
Again I disagree. First of all a so-called HJ is only an invented proposition to maintain the belief that the biblical Jesus was indeed a real person, even if he did not perform the claimed miracles etc. You are not talking about a completely different person who had absolutely nothing to do with Christianity and who was not the figure described in the bible & around whom Christianity first arose. On the contrary, you are proposing that the biblical figure of Jesus is actually the very same HJ, only without the miracle stories being true.
When proposing a HJ, you are most definitely proposing the Jesus figure of the bible and of Christian religious belief. The only difference is that you are accepting that the miracles must be fiction.
So that HJ actually
is the very same biblical Jesus, minus all the obvious fiction. And the question is - what is the actual evidence that this HJ ever lived at all?
And the reason that has become a question on sceptic non-religious forums like this, and indeed in numerous academically written sceptic books, is because what has been claimed by bible scholars to be unassailable evidence of a Jesus who “certainly” and “definitely” lived, turns out to be virtually no reliable or credible evidence at all beyond the religious biblical writing of peoples 2000 year old superstitious religious beliefs …
… and that is by no means good enough for a Jesus figure who has such central importance as the basis of worldwide Christian teaching today.
You can, if you want, argue that it is a matter of opinion whether or not the existence of Jesus would be of zero importance and zero interest to the leaders of the Christian church and to Christian believers around the world. If you argue that it would be of no importance or interest to them, then I for one would profoundly and completely disagree with you. But that is really a separate issue, and probably a question for a new and different thread. And the only reason I offered to explain that aspect as my reason for taking interest in this subject, was because
Craig yet again tried the same deliberate falsehood of claiming that my supposed hated of Christianity was the real reason that I disputed the evidence for Jesus.
