Not wnating to brag about it but i never gave a thing to my church expect some few cents to to help on cooking for the poor.[
quote=“Klax, post:21, topic:44926”]
less warrant
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So we do have at least some?
Good for you! Never let anyone emotionally blackmail you. And oh aye, we have some warrant. The existence of the Church all the way back to the letters of Paul. And the sheer outrage of the claim of Jesus and His faithfulness.
Is that enough though? How about Josephus and Tacitus and maybe others?
They complement the former. All part of the warrant. It’s the claim that counts above all and the fact that we have it. Either the claim can correspond and cohere with reality or it can’t. It can.
Nicholas, I understand where you are coming from and I sympathize with you. But I have found that the best route to take to become at peace with God is to seek Him with all that is in you. We are not dealing with a make believe god, He is the living God that wants to make Himself known to us. You can go directly to Him and He will make Himself known to you.
I first look at and consider deeply my own sinfulness. I allow Him to convict me of how evil I am without Him. When I was overcome with the knowledge of my wickedness and realized I needed to be saved from my sinfulness, I turned to Him and asked for forgiveness. I was aware of Jesus already but God had people talk to me more about Jesus. When I understood He died in my place and rose from death to free me from sin, I called out to Him and He by His grace and power forgave me. I was born again, made into a new creation at that moment. From that moment on God began delivering me from sins temptations daily. I’m not saying I have not sinned since then but as He continued to show me what sin was He also gave me the desire and power to turn from it. God was personally interacting with me.
So I urge you to first seek God, with the expectation that He will answer you. He desires His people to seek Him; if you do you will find Him. The personal knowledge that He will give you through what He has done through Jesus will overcome these doubts you have. You will know God and His Son. They will live in you and they will give you knowledge, understanding and wisdom that no man is able to give you. God Himself will make himself known to you. No one will be able to take that away. It is God you must trust, not your own understanding or others.
Place all your trust in God, He will reveal Himself to you.
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Good afternoon, Nickolaos,
As for whether Jesus existed the bare answer is yes, even from a very skeptical scholarly standpoint. Cf. the work of NT scholar and agnostic Bart Ehrman, Did Jesus Exist?.
But are there solid intellectual grounds for ascribing more historical credibility and reliability to the NT documents – specifically the Gospels – than Ehrman and others do? Yes. Back in the day the go-to work on this account was Craig Blomberg’s The Historical Reliability of the Gospels. More recently I have read and can heartily recommend NT scholar Brant Pitre’s book The Case for Jesus: the Biblical and Historical Evidence for Christ. Dr. Pitre makes a lot of good points in that book, but two stood out to me. First was his documentation of a growing scholarly consensus that the Gospels are very consciously written in a well-established genre of “Lives” (in Greek bios) or ancient biography, combined with a strong argument for an early dating of the Gospels. This strikes directly against many of the arguments made by scholars such as Ehrman who “creates the impression that the Gospels are the equivalent of ancient folklore, which has little or nothing to do with actual historical events” (p. 70.) The second was his debunking of the “anonymous Gospel” view wherein scholars argue that we just have no idea who wrote the four Gospels. Pitre observes that we do not have any “anonymous” ancient manuscripts of the four Gospels, not one; every ancient manuscript contains an attribution to Matthew, Mark, Luke, or John. And if you ask a textual critic like Bart Ehrman what you call a reading that appears in every single manuscript we possess, he’ll say you call it part of the original text. So the Gospels are not in fact anonymous, they have always circulated with their authors’ names. I have a Master’s degree in New Testament studies and this argument blew me away. How could we have missed this?
So, long and short of it, is that Pitre lays out a very cogent case that the Gospels were written by people who intended to pass on real information about Jesus (they were deliberately writing bios, ancient biography) and who were in a very good position to know that information. It’s relatively short, an easy read, and should encourage anybody who fears that belief in Jesus requires a bare leap of faith rather than a reasonable conclusion from solid evidence.
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Thank you so much for this. !
When you read the words of Jesus and you read the explanation of what Jesus did for us through His death and resurrection, and you place your trust in Him, then you will know God. You will know the truth and the truth will give you freedom. As you live in that freedom no man’s explanations about Jesus or the Father will be able to harm you because you will KNOW GOD. You will know God’s power that is delivering you daily from sin. You will not want to give that freedom away. Go to God directly, He will bring you to His home safely. Trust Him.
Cody did you grew up Christian? Whatever the question here it seems to me that you only speak about the bible and the bible alone . Not even providing answers for it just quoting it directly. I admire your faith actually
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I was brought up where God was taught about but not much about Jesus, He was kind of a side issue. It was about 1978 when I finally submitted to God’s conviction of my sins and placed my trust in Jesus and pledged my allegiance to Him. Since then, the Father has consistently shown me sin and righteousness and works in me both the desire and ability to do His will. It is possible to turn away from God, I did for awhile but even then His Spirit continued to convict me and I couldn’t continue to rebel, so I turned back to trust, love and obedience to the Lord.
It is God who saved me through my union with Jesus on the cross and through His resurrection. It is God who continues to save me daily from sins power and it is God who will bring me into that final salvation at the resurrection. It is His unmerited favor (grace) working in me that is my only hope. My trust is in Him, not in myself or any other man. To whatever level of maturity in Christ that I have attained, it is through the Father’s work that He did in Jesus on the cross and by bringing me into union, one spirit, with Christ. Obviously all the glory goes to the Father and Jesus my Sovereign Lord.
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So what? There is a Jesus in the Quran. There is a Jesus in the Book of Mormon. Other Jesuses as well. Believe what you want; I’ll take the Jesus of the Bible.
Josephus has one mention of John the Baptist and two mentions of Jesus. One was likely added later by a Christian scribe, but Josephus description of the martyrdom of “the brother of Jesus, who was called Christ, whose name was James” is acknowledged by scholars to be authentic. The wikipedia page is informative: Josephus on Jesus - Wikipedia
The Roman historian Tacitus referred to “Christus” and his execution by Pontius Pilate in his Annals (written c. AD 116). Historians agree the reference is authentic. The fact that Jesus lacks more mentions in contemporary histories is easy to explain. He was not a political figure, and Christianity was still a fringe religion.
A few notes on the historical method. Historians much prefer primary sources, such as letters. If you watched Ken Burns’ The Civil War, you probably remember the numerous letters that propelled the narrative. The NT contains a large collection of letters that are considered primary sources, especially the letters of Paul.
Biographies and histories are secondary sources, and historians judge the accuracy of these by various methods. One is the sources that the ancient historian himself used, and another is the amount of time between the written account and the events described. The earliest biography of Alexander the Great was written hundreds of years after his death. That doesn’t make his existence doubtful. It simply adds a layer of doubt to the details of the biographer’s account. In Jesus’ case, we have four biographies and a history (Acts) written within the lifetime of still-living witnesses. This is a rarity in the ancient world and adds a great deal of credibility to the accounts.
Modern historians may doubt Jesus’ miracles or that he rose from the dead, but no creditable scholar doubts Jesus’ existence or his crucifixion.
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I can’t find any evidence for my father’s mother’s mother’s father. Do we really need to evaluate historical data and say that we don’t know if this was a historical person?
That leans on the door @thepalmhq, or braces the legs on the down side of the see-saw. But it preaches to the converted. And I was converted without a doubt. I’d like to see the scholarship on the early dating of the gospels. Despite the onslaught of physicalism becoming utterly sufficient to explain existence, I had the Pericope Adulterae. The overt signature of divine genius. Until I found that it wasn’t early in the slightest. By centuries. And then the critique of a friend struck home. The NT is the work of a late C1st-C4th priestly elite, at the least as editors, only the seven consensus letters of Paul being autographs. I’m now learning the hard way, in my seventh decade, that doubt is integral to faith. At least the orthodoxy of universal salvation in the faithfulness of Christ has emerged for me, otherwise my see-saw would have me all the way down, legs splayed.
[I do accept the gospels as being autographic at the very least in part as it is parsimonious.]
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So how do you know Jesus is not only in the priests mind as you stated since they write them?
Because I want to believe.
Questioning the historicity of Jesus is a bit silly since we have different standards when considering non-royal people in antiquity.
I have always found existence questions to be a bit peculiar. It would seem to be the resort of someone who simply doesn’t want to think about something. The question for the person actually interested is: “What is it?” In this case, “What is true about Jesus?” or “What really happened?” or “What is most likely?” The last question is the one most often asked by scholars and historians. But there is a strong bias in such a question against the unlikely. After all, unlikely things happen all the time. And most of the time they don’t leave the slightest bit of evidence either. But of course… there is a difference between merely unlikely and logically incoherent. So this isn’t quite the warrant to believe everything in the most magical anti-science way possible.
So for example… That Jesus fed 5000? Unlikely but there are many explanations which make it possible. That Jesus out threw all the laws of nature God made for the universe in order to make food appear out of thin air, however? That sounds incoherent to me. Another one is… Jesus predicted the destruction of the temple? Historians go from unlikely to dating those texts after 70AD. But given the social political conditions, I don’t think such a prediction is that unlikely and thus the conclusion is unwarranted, even when you do have an incompatibilist belief in human free will and that the future is not already written.
First of all, why should we depend on others to tell us that Jesus, the Messiah, was a “historical” person. Do we not know the details of His life even though it was a short one?
We have not only one, but four biographies. We have the testimony of Paul, who did not know Jesus, but was a contemporary and knew both His friends and enemies.
I think there is no question that Jesus of Nazareth lived and died, but of course that does not mean there are no questions that can be asked. Nothing in life is simple and easy. That a man of God that fits the general description of Jesus lived and died does not mean that He was the Messiah.
Some time ago someone tried to tell that Jesus lived, but someone else created the Jesus myth and gospel. How and why would anyone take up the cause of a failed Jewish rabbi who was condemned by His Jewish peers, the Roman authorities, and the Greek philosophers and think His message would conquer the world?
Jesus stands on His own two feet. If He is not Who He says He is, then reject Him. He does not need others to vouch for Him although their testimony is always welcome. You have to decide for yourself if you choose to follow Jesus, the Messiah…
I dont think believing what you want means that is right though
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