Don't know if this guy is right with what he posted here, can anyone help me?
His statement
guy wrote:His statement:It is now generally considered a historical fact that Jesus existed (and has been for what? two centuries after a brief 'Jesus Myth' phase in the 18th century?)
His evidence
guy wrote:
"Excuse me, I was mistaken with regard to the 'Jesus Myth' phase in 18th century. It belongs, seriously, to the 19th century, although there were a few French writers who classed Jesus and Christianity as myth in the 18th. According to the late NT scholar R. E. Brown[1] German historian B. Bauer was the first serious scholar to propose the idea that Jesus never existed in Christ and the Caesars (1877). Nevertheless, 60 years ago in the mid-20th century H. E. Fosdick could assert:
Doubt concerning the historicity of Jesus was a passing vogue of the nineteenth century; no serious scholarship now upholds it.
--The Man From Nazareth, Harper & Brothers, 1949, p. 22
Similarly, the Encyclopedia Britannica, after dicussing the various non-Christian sources (Tacitus, Suetonius, Pliny the Younger, Josephus, and the Talmud) for Jesus' existence, states:
These independent accounts prove that in ancient times even the opponents of Christianity never doubted the historicity of Jesus, which was disputed for the first time on inadequate grounds at the end of the 18th, during the 19th, and at the beginning of the 20th centuries.
--Ency. Brit. Volume 22, 1990, p. 360.
NT scholar Bart Ehrman discusses these same sources and suggests that Josephus alone is evidence enough that Jesus existed[2]. There is no real debate about this in contemporary scholarship and hasn't been for a long while. Scholars may debate what Jesus taught or what he did, or over various reconstructions of his life and message[3], but to say he never existed is out of the question. M. A. Powell expresses this quite forcefully:
Anyone who says that today--in the academic world at least--gets grouped with the skinheads who say there was no Holocaust and the scientific holdouts who want to believe the world is flat.
--Jesus As a Figure in History: How Modern Historians View the Man from Galilee, Westminister John Knox Press, 1998, p. 168.
[1] An Introduction to the New Testament, Doubleday, 1997, p. 818
[2] Jesus: Apocalyptic Prophet of the New Millenium, Oxford University Press, 1999, p. 61: 'From this reference we can learn that there was indeed a man named Jesus.'
[3] J. D. Crossan, for example, lists a few of the positions of modern scholarship in The Historical Jesus: The Life of a Mediterranean Jewish Peasant, HarperCollins, 1991, pp. xxvii-xxviii: 'There is Jesus as a political revolutionary by S. G. F. Brandon (1967), as a magician by Morton Smith (1978), as a Galilean charismatic by Geza Vermes (1981, 1984), as a Galilean rabbi by Bruce Chilton (1984), as a Hillelite or proto-Pharisee by Harvey Falk (1985), as an Essene by Harvery Falk (1985), and as an eschatological prophet by E. P. Sanders (1985).'
His own position is that Jesus was something like an itinerant Cynic preacher."