{"id":19791,"date":"2013-12-11T07:43:02","date_gmt":"2013-12-11T12:43:02","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/religionprof\/?p=19791"},"modified":"2013-12-11T07:43:02","modified_gmt":"2013-12-11T12:43:02","slug":"a-mythicist-sympathizers-case-for-a-historical-jesus","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/religionprof\/2013\/12\/a-mythicist-sympathizers-case-for-a-historical-jesus.html","title":{"rendered":"A Mythicist Sympathizer’s Case for a Historical Jesus"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

A new article in The Bible and Interpretation <\/em><\/a>concludes in the following way:<\/p>\n

Precisely because I am quite aware of the extent to which the Canonical Gospels are the result of a process of doctoring the historical figure of Jesus \u2013 a process which has had wide-ranging distorting effects \u2013, I think I can better understand at least one of the reasons which lead some scholars (and also other readers) to deem these sources as desperately unhelpful and to remove them completely from the available evidence to recover a historical being. I think, however, that this is not only an unwarranted conclusion, but also a tragic mistake, because the critical energy of several intelligent people \u2013as many \u201cmythicists\u201d undoubtedly are\u2013 devoted to \u201cprove\u201d the non-existence of Jesus seems to be both misguided and wasteful. In my opinion those scholars opt to cut the Gordian knot, instead of tackling the \u2013by far harder\u2013 task of disentangling it. In this way, and despite the insights of some of their works, they leave the problem of the Gospels unresolved, the nature of their distortions ultimately untouched, and the embarrassing history these biased sources try to veil unfortunately unrecovered.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Click through<\/a> to see how it gets there.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A new article in The Bible and Interpretation concludes in the following way: Precisely because I am quite aware of the extent to which the Canonical Gospels are the result of a process of doctoring the historical figure of Jesus \u2013 a process which has had wide-ranging distorting effects \u2013, I think I can better […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":136,"featured_media":14357,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[39,64],"tags":[1140,4652,5309,5677,7853,7856],"class_list":["post-19791","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-historical-jesus","category-mythicism","tag-bible","tag-historical-jesus","tag-interpretation","tag-jesus","tag-mythicism","tag-mythicists"],"yoast_head":"\nA Mythicist Sympathizer's Case for a Historical Jesus<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"A new article in The Bible and Interpretation concludes in the following way: Precisely because I am quite aware of the extent to which the Canonical\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/religionprof\/2013\/12\/a-mythicist-sympathizers-case-for-a-historical-jesus.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"A Mythicist Sympathizer's Case for a Historical Jesus\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"A new article in The Bible and Interpretation concludes in the following way: Precisely because I am quite aware of the extent to which the Canonical\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/religionprof\/2013\/12\/a-mythicist-sympathizers-case-for-a-historical-jesus.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"Religion Prof: The Blog of James F. 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