Jesus, the Gospels and History

Jesus, the Gospels and History August 9, 2013

Amanda Witmer has written an article for The Bible and Interpretation about mythicism. Here’s how it begins:

In some quarters it is now fashionable to argue that Jesus did not exist! At the opposite end of the spectrum we find the position that every word of the Bible is literally true and that the gospels provide us with an unfiltered historical account of Jesus’ life. This is a false dichotomy rooted in our human tendency to insist on absolutes and true or false claims. Neither position takes the evidence seriously. As it turns out, historical information about Jesus can be found, but sifting through the data requires some work.

Click through to read the rest. For those who may not be familiar with mythicism, there’s the Jesus Birther Movement on Facebook. The comparison between Jesus and birthers (i.e. those who claim that Barack Obama was not born in the United States) is apt, and I am surprised that it was adopted willingly. But as Poe’s Law says, when you get to the kooky fringes of pseudoknowledge, any attempt at parody will probably closely resemble something that someone actually admits to thinking.

See also the excellent post at Unreasonable Faith about storytelling and how stories which may not be factual can still tell us something about how a real, historical figure was perceived, the impression that they made.


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