apologize.

>>17825134 (OP)
no. :)

>>17825134 (OP)
el barto... i kneel

I love this nigga like you wouldn't believe

He really got me addicted to history of religions. It's funny, the more critical scholarship you read the more Bart is revealed as a conservative scholar who is committed to some of the biggest cannards in Bible scholarship (I think of Q and apostolic authorship of ANY Pauline letters). But he brings so many people to critical scholarship it's right that Christians live in fear of him

>>17825162
The problem si that we lack sources so we lack the Diary of Jesus Christ, court documents, etc. And we know something happened, and it's well attested, but there's always room for debate. We know Paul wrote letters, but how many? You can just as easily say all of them were forgeries.

At a certain point, you just have to say "we can't know for certain, some details are lost to history. Not everyone was meticulously record keeping what was then a very obscure movement". End of story.

Keep in mind, academics make their living publishing, writing, lecturing, and teaching, and that is their main interest. There is thus a tendency for them create fluff and nonsense. If they were to say "we're basically done here" their entire field is over and they go home.

>>17825223
> You can just as easily say all of them were forgeries.
> Keep in mind, academics make their living publishing, writing, lecturing, and teaching, and that is their main interest. There is thus a tendency for them create fluff and nonsense. If they were to say "we're basically done here" their entire field is over and they go home.
Come on, let's be serious

>>17825263
The big questions about the New Testament are mostly "solved" as much as they can be historically. So that story is interesting and relevant to most people. however, at a certain point it just becomes nerd debates among nerds with little or no relevancy to people's day to day lives and should be kept in the halls of academia.

Jesus and the events of the New Testament are better attested than a lot of historical figures we take for granted. We get a pretty good outline of the guy, the local scene, what happened, and the events that transpired afterwards. The only reason we obsess over this is because a religion was formed around him.

Take Diogenes in contrast. Everyone "knows" his story, but we get scant allusions to the guy until a biography pops up called "Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers" written by a guy born in 180 AD. So a third century AD guy is our best source on a 4th century BC guy. See the problem? Remove this book and we only get the haziest

Diogenes of Sinope probably existed, but details get fuzzy and hazy. How much of it is myth and fact? Perhaps he wrote stories which then get passed on as stories about himself? Perhaps the stoics, who admired him, used him as a kind of teaching tool? The details will never be known for sure simply because most of the sources on the guy don't exist and will never exist.

We wish half of our historical figures were as well attested and had as many sources written only a few decades out as Jesus!

But as I said, after a certain point, once you move past the basic story of the historical Jesus, and the New Testament, it becomes pointless nerd debates and most people should jsut move on.

>>17825223
>We know Paul wrote letters
No we don't, unless you mean whoever authored (some subset of) the Pauline epistles is "Paul" ipso facto and not necessarily to be identified with the putative Paul of Acts, 1st ce. minister to the Gentiles.
That's my problem with conservative critical scholars - they "know" Paul wrote Galatians because the same Church Fathers who received the Paul-Seneca correspondence as genuine "knew" it, and the scholars that first began to really impugn settled apostolic authorship of NT scriptures and laid the groundwork just weren't that critical and coincidentally settled on the Hauptbriefe model (though the number of "authentic" letters remains disputed). The Dutch radicals should have opened the academy's eyes w/r/t NT epistles, but it renders so much even recent scholarship worthless I think they're scared.
Christian apostles no more wrote letter-in-form scriptures (and indeed in history Pauline letters first appear in a collection, as scripture) than Seneca wrote the massive correspondence they used for Stoic initiation.

>Jesus Existed

Yeah, what's your proof?

>Uh well, I mean, I guess the fact people spoke about him

You mean in the Bible?

>Well, there's also the extra biblical accounts

You mean the ones that were proven now to be Christian interpolations and forgeries?

>Uh, well, you see, Christ existed, okay? I mean, how else will I keep Christians paying to read my books???