This is not to say that we do not have serious uncertainties about what precisely Jesus said and did, or that we are not sure beyond reasonable doubt that he did not<\/em> say and do certain things attributed to him in the Gospels, or that the possibility is not a real one that his earliest followers either miunderstood or deliberately miscontrued him in places. But it is to say that, in historical study, where certainty is all but impossible, this is a delightful instance where something is as certain as one could ever hope for. To deny Jesus\u2019 existence would be to deny certainty about everything in the past.<\/p>\n Fundamentalist Christians are ready to assume that Jesus said and did everything the Gospels said he did (even, as Ned Flanders famously said on an episode of The Simpsons<\/em>, \u201cthe stuff that contradicts the other stuff\u201d). Atheist fundamentalists are happy to dismiss his existence altogether. The mainstream of serious historical investigation, as well as of faith, recognizes that our knowledge of the past cannot be obtained in such leaps. Each piece of evidence must be examined on its own merits, and whereas \u2018picking and choosing\u2019 what to believe from the Gospels on the basis of personal preference is questionable from most standpoints, recognizing that historians<\/em> will inevitably be persuaded by the evidence for some things and against others is crucial to any attempt to treat the Gospels and other early Christian sources seriously from a historical standpoint.<\/p>\n Anyone who has ever visited an atheist discussion forum will know that there are plenty of atheists and \u201cfreethinkers\u201d who take it as a given that Jesus didn\u2019t really exist, that he is a composite figure created from a patchwork of earlier mythology, and so on. If you ask a professional historian whether Jesus existed, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":136,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4327","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/blogger.googleusercontent.com\/tracker\/7622297540113836091-4887792689862673655?l=exploringourmatrix.blogspot.com\")