Of interest may be my Two Centuries Worth of Citations to the historical Jesus.
One issue that is discussed in the debate is Ken Humphreys’ claim that Christianity is fraught with fraud from beginning to end. He proposes his beginning point to be the claimed letter to have been fraudulently written in the Apostle Paul’s name. Yet, this does not necessarily follow as he claims that 1) there was a forged letter to which Paul himself alludes and so 2) Christians were perpetrating a fraud. Yet, he missed a step; he did not prove or evidence that it was Christians who forged it. Well, who else would have done it? Let us slow down now because what is happening is that an idea is asserted by Ken Humphreys and then when it is pointed out that he did not prove his case, an argument from silence is asserted in order to prop up the previous assertion. Who else? I do not know but this does not resolve the fact that he did not prove of evidence that Christians did it. Perhaps antagonists of Christianity did it in order to misguide the Christians who thought that they were getting directions from Paul.
But the deeper issue is that fraud has been perpetrated in every human endeavor; there have been a myriad of frauds in science but do we discount science? There are frauds within the field of anti-Jesus polemics but does that mean that we ought to dismiss Ken Humphreys out of hand?
When it is mentioned to Ken Humphreys that celebrity antagonist of Christianity Bart Ehrman at least affirms the historical existence of Jesus he offers an, well, shall we say interesting response: perhaps in the future Ehrman will no longer affirm the existence of Jesus (this is from the for what it’s worth files).
Learn more about a historical Jesus side issue via my book “The Apocryphal Jesus.”
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