“The evidence for Jesus is early and powerful”

I confess that I just don’t see much point to the notion — increasingly popular, it seems, on the web — that there was no historical person corresponding to Jesus of Nazareth.

Although I obviously don’t, it’s quite easy enough to reject claims of his deity without feeling any obligation whatever to flatly deny his existence altogether.

Moreover — and I freely grant that this is a subjective matter — the historicity of Jesus seems to me to make perfectly good sense when I travel here in Palestine.  The geography, archaeology, and topography fit the story.  I feel no more urge to deny his historical reality than I’ve had, when visiting Gettysburg or Hastings, to deny that legendary battles actually occurred there or to claim, while walking the streets of Wittenberg, that there wasn’t any genuine historical figure named Martin Luther.  I’m confident, when I visit Athens, that Socrates once lived there.  In Florence, I feel no inner compulsion to reject the reality of “the Michelangelo of history.”

Anyway, here’s a column that I wrote some time ago on the topic:

http://www.deseretnews.com/article/865619115/The-evidence-for-Jesus-is-early-and-powerful.html

Posted from Tel Aviv, Israel