Quote Originally Posted by Greenbeanz View Post
Quote Originally Posted by VictorCharlie View Post
Something that hasn't been addressed if all of what Green and Mars say is true why academics as a whole do not share their beliefs? One would also think that after all of these years it wouldn't be hard to find secular evidence of a conscience decision to fabricate the life of Jesus. I mean if true we are talking about possibly the biggest ruse in history. Seems like it would be a hard thing to cover up over the ages.
The fact is there is very little secular evidence FOR the existence of Jesus. The point is most academics do not consider the Bible a reliable source of historical evidence for anything. Even Christians insist that it cannot all be taken literally. It is not a conspiracy theory, it does not require a cover-up to doubt the existence "of the Jesus described in the Gospels". If even one supernatural thing attributed to this Jesus is questionable, which it clearly is from a secular point of view, then the life of Jesus has already begun to be fabricated. Factor into this, the proliferation of messianic figures documented as existing during the same time period and this along with Judeo-Hellenic tradition of employing allegory and it is not difficult for someone without faith to assume that the Jesus figure talked about in the Gospels is a composite, a figurative head of a movement that wished he was the liberator of Isreal, something he did not turn out to be.
Green once again if your position is so well founded then why isn't it taken as fact by most of academia? If you want to dismiss Dawkins as just one guy then fine but the bulk of historians and intellectuals also don't seem to agree with you. I'm not sure what Christian denominations you have interacted with on a daily basis but there is a fair amount that do take the Bible as the literal word of god. Lastly while it may not be difficult for a person w/o faith (whatever that means) to deny a man named Jesus walked the Earth sometime between 6 BC and 31 AD, to get to the point that Christianity is today one of two things had to have happened.

1. Some guy with a funny looking hat turned to a bunch of other guys with funny looking hats and said " Ok so let me get this straight, not only are we going to found our religion on miracles that didn't happen but the guy we said did these things is actually just a fictional character we made up for PR purposes? Ok sounds good to me."

2. Or a group of people took stories and myths they had heard about miracles regarding various messianic prophets and unintentionally created a persona that ultimately led to one of the 3 dominate religions of the world.

One would think that option 1 would have unraveled by now and number 2 seems about as possible as turning water into wine. You seem to dedicate a lot of time to discrediting the sources that state Jesus's existence (Bible, Tacitus etc) yet haven't provided a hypothesis and/or evidence for how the majority of the world past and present accept that he at the very least existed.