Yea, but are the majority of scholars really free from bias with 3 major religions notorious for killing people over disagreements (and funding those that agree with them) all having a vested interest in perpetuation of the myth?
Every wikipedia source to the contrary is essentially an agrument to authority and didn’t even discuss the underlying “evidence” or points to sources long after the fact and calls on:
Multiple attestation across independent Gospel traditions (Yea, right, that can all be made up)
Criterion of embarrassment: (Once again, not evidence. Religions are not aways rational, or correct)
Tacitus (Annals 15.44, c. 116 CE): “Christus… suffered the extreme penalty during the reign of Tiberius at the hands of one of our procurators, Pontius Pilatus.” This is the key non-Christian corroboration. (And a hundred years later, press X to doubt)
To your first point, no one is free of bias, but it’s not the Middle Ages dude. People are free to not be Christian or to criticize or contradict Christianity, and they do all the time. Even non-Christian historians agree that Jesus likely existed.
Between the canonical and apocryphal gospels there are a good amount of people who wrote about Jesus for decades after his death. In my personal opinion as an armchair historian it just seems more likely that early Christian writers, intentionally or not, mythologized a real person that people already knew existed rather than invented one whole cloth.
Yea, but are the majority of scholars really free from bias with 3 major religions notorious for killing people over disagreements (and funding those that agree with them) all having a vested interest in perpetuation of the myth?
Every wikipedia source to the contrary is essentially an agrument to authority and didn’t even discuss the underlying “evidence” or points to sources long after the fact and calls on:
Multiple attestation across independent Gospel traditions (Yea, right, that can all be made up)
Criterion of embarrassment: (Once again, not evidence. Religions are not aways rational, or correct)
Tacitus (Annals 15.44, c. 116 CE): “Christus… suffered the extreme penalty during the reign of Tiberius at the hands of one of our procurators, Pontius Pilatus.” This is the key non-Christian corroboration. (And a hundred years later, press X to doubt)
So, I’m not impressed.
To your first point, no one is free of bias, but it’s not the Middle Ages dude. People are free to not be Christian or to criticize or contradict Christianity, and they do all the time. Even non-Christian historians agree that Jesus likely existed.
Between the canonical and apocryphal gospels there are a good amount of people who wrote about Jesus for decades after his death. In my personal opinion as an armchair historian it just seems more likely that early Christian writers, intentionally or not, mythologized a real person that people already knew existed rather than invented one whole cloth.