{"id":26061,"date":"2014-09-05T10:02:15","date_gmt":"2014-09-05T14:02:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/admin.patheos.com\/blogs\/exploringourmatrix\/?p=26061"},"modified":"2014-09-05T10:02:15","modified_gmt":"2014-09-05T14:02:15","slug":"neil-carter-on-the-historicity-of-jesus","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/religionprof\/2014\/09\/neil-carter-on-the-historicity-of-jesus.html","title":{"rendered":"Neil Carter on the Historicity of Jesus"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

Neil Carter<\/a> is concerned about the widespread rejection of a mainstream academic field by\u00a0fellow atheists. Here is an excerpt from his post on the subject<\/a>:<\/p>\n

It feels like here lately a growing number of fellow freethinkers are jumping on the bandwagon of an intellectual position that hasn\u2019t yet earned credibility. Rather than concluding that the New Testament simply exaggerated the size and scope of the Christian church during its earliest years, people are jumping all the way to the opposite ditch and concluding that every single thing contained therein must have been made up entirely.\u00a0 But the many contradictions and variations we encounter within the gospels (and noncanonical books) point to the\u00a0unreliability<\/em>\u00a0of the sources, but not necessarily to the complete\u00a0nonexistence<\/em>\u00a0of their central figure.\u00a0\u00a0 And while the oldest extant copies of Paul\u2019s letters date back to nearly a century after the time that he wrote them, we posess no variants of those letters which leave out the credal statements referenced above, leaving us with the reality of an early attestation (mid-first-century)\u00a0of the existence of Jesus.\u00a0 There\u2019s a method to determining these things, and a pretty thoroughly developed academic discipline underneath it all.\u00a0 It doesn\u2019t speak well of us to dismiss whole disciplines with the wave of a hand on account of two or three of its members finally suggesting something we wanted to believe all along.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Click through<\/a> to read the rest.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Neil Carter is concerned about the widespread rejection of a mainstream academic field by\u00a0fellow atheists. Here is an excerpt from his post on the subject: It feels like here lately a growing number of fellow freethinkers are jumping on the bandwagon of an intellectual position that hasn\u2019t yet earned credibility. Rather than concluding that the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":136,"featured_media":17366,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[127,64],"tags":[870,871,2592,4652,7853,7856],"class_list":["post-26061","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-atheism-religion","category-mythicism","tag-atheism-religion","tag-atheist","tag-denialism","tag-historical-jesus","tag-mythicism","tag-mythicists"],"yoast_head":"\nNeil Carter on the Historicity of Jesus<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Neil Carter is concerned about the widespread rejection of a mainstream academic field by\u00a0fellow atheists. 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