Posted by Illuminati on 5/4/2005, 8:40 am, in reply to "Re: Validity of the Bible" Because their subject is religious society doesn't hold them to the same hight intellectual standards as we do scientists. Since most people believe religion is just a myth anyway all equally wrong so who cares what things people do and say in the name of God? This is wrong. As we learned on 9-11 even for those who don't believe in God, religion is often a matter of life and death. Religious people should be forced to defend their beliefs intellectually and factually whether they are believers or skeptics. This final reason is probably behind most of the search for the "historical" Jesus now days. I suspect the legitimate skeptical attempt to go behind the Gospels and find the real Jesus died long ago. Jesus wasn't a bourguise German as Schweitzer's contemporaries tried to claim and He wasn't an ancient version of Che Guevara as more recent researchers may lead us to think. The only way to know the historical Jesus is to give up modern theories about what Jesus should have said and done and accept Him for who He was, a practicing Jew in the Second Temple era. Only by accepting the validity of the Gospels and studying the Jewish culture and religious beliefs extant in Jesus' day can we begin to understand who Jesus really was and how He actually interacted with his contemporaries. This is the direction many responsible scholars are moving.
206.206.120.230
If those preparing skeptical versions of the historical Jesus are methodologically wrong, why did they not detect their errors early on and why have they received so much support as scholars? Here is my take on things.
1. In the beginning they apparently thought the gospels were produced very late when all those who personally knew Jesus or who had heard the stories related by those who personally knew Jesus were all dead. Therefore they thought that the 1600 years or so which separated them from Jesus made no difference since the gospels were produced by people who had already forgotten the real stories. This is much more difficult to accept as the original autographs have been pushed back into the first century. Modern "historians" have therefore had to invent the theory that the early Christians really didn't care about the truth or the stories and just made them up as they went along. That there is no evidence to support this position seems to matter little at all.
2. Although many modern scholars supposedly looking for the "historical" Jesus may present their ideas as scientific to the public since this is where their money comes from, many probably know they are playing a cynical game against believers. When I read in the scientific literature that physicists and chemists are also voting at their meetings regarding propositions about the physical world and the ideas which receive the most votes are accepted and published as truth, then I'll be willing to consider the possibility that the Jesus Seminar contains legitimate scholarship. Until then their "scholarship" deserves no respect.
3. Those searching for the "historical" Jesus could be considered defense attorneys for the agnostics and atheists. In a trial the defense attorneys for a guilty client will make up stories and scenarios, often wildly implausible, to distract and confuse the jury from the facts of the case in the hopes their client will be declared innocent. In the same way skeptical researchers make up stories and positions about Jesus which they know are not truth in order to confuse the public and to promote skepticism.
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