Jelamkorj
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- Sorry it has taken so long for you to be welcomed - you have probably learned some of this already but I hope some of the links are useful. Sophia 08:15, 10 February 2008 (UTC)
Faith
editI'm sorry to hear of your loss of faith. But if your movement away from Christ was primarily something attributable to the Christ myth theory, perhaps there's hope. I won't bother to throw quote after quote at you regarding the scholarly consensus; having looked at the CMT article here you are already familiar with those. Nor will I go on and on about the anti-Semetic biases which colored the thinking of some of its more academic proponents like Bauer, Drews, and Oliver. Instead, as you seem to be hungry for substantive arguments in favor of a historical Jesus, allow me to recommend a few such treatments. Bruce Metzger once referred to three books as "careful and scientific examination[s] of the evidence for the historicity of Jesus": The Historical Christ by F. C. Conybeare, The Historicity Of Jesus by Shirely J. Case, and Christianity and the Nature of History by Herbert G. Wood. Of course, none of these book address Doherty directly, but The Jesus Legend by Paul Eddy & Greg Boyd does. Eddy & Boyd's book is the most recent on the topic and is quite respectful in tone and substantive in argument. Even Robert M. Price recommends it. I realize that not everyone wants another book on his reading list, but if it's a matter of embracing Christianity or not, maybe a few dollars spent and a few hours reading wouldn't be such a bad idea.
Also, you mentioned that your Christianity was similar to C. S. Lewis'. I love Lewis' writing. And I think that he emphasized something that might be helpful: if God were to communicate with humanity through a singular human being, becoming the human being and revealing himself as the maker of the world, what would that look like? Is it likely that he would seem like just some guy, whose followers would take a couple generations to mythologize into someone special? Or is it perhaps more reasonable that he would be so striking that someone like Paul, writing within a generation of the events, would already be describing him in "mythic/epic" categories? If God were to become a man, wouldn't he be the sort of person that poorly educated revisionists like Doherty, writing 2000 years after the fact, could confuse with a larger-than-life myth? Eugene (talk) 23:29, 22 April 2010 (UTC)
- Thanks for your concern, Eugene, but it is clear that we would even not agree what the word "faith" means for us. I expect that if I use an (unprecise) quote from Price "it was my concern to venerate the truth, learned from Christianity, which finally lead me to ..." then it would irritate you because you surely know better what the truth is, don't you? It was not reading Doherty which caused me to "revise my personal faith", it was by reading the early Christian literature that I realized that I can see no evidence anymore that anything extraordinary, anything miraculous, happened. Of course, I can be mistaken, maybe that God sent his Son, but (intentionally?) left such ambiguous evidence (so that people like me could be easily mislead ?) ... I just cannot force myself to believe this anymore. Bye, Eugene, and good luck with your efforts to make a balanced, neutral, fair article (that is surely your best intention, isn't it?)Jelamkorj (talk) 22:56, 24 April 2010 (UTC)