Jesus was a historical person. This doesn’t mean Christianity is correct, but there is sufficient historical evidence and most mainstream scholars of the era agree on this.

andros_rex@lemmy.world · 10 days ago

Jesus was a historical person. This doesn’t mean Christianity is correct, but there is sufficient historical evidence and most mainstream scholars of the era agree on this.

andros_rex@lemmy.world · 10 days ago

Yeah - it is an unpopular opinion on Lemmy though. I’ve been accused of being Christian for making this argument, as if accepting the historicity of the figure inherently means accepting the claim that he was a divine being.

zz31da@piefed.social · 10 days ago

historicity

I think you’re looking for the word “history”

edit: sorry… I try not to be that guy, but I couldn’t help myself

andros_rex@lemmy.world · 10 days ago

I was not.

Historicity: the quality of being a real and important part of history and not a myth or legend (= ancient story)

zz31da@piefed.social · 10 days ago

I stand corrected, TIL!

Cosmoooooooo@lemmy.world · 10 days ago

That’s because nobody goes around claiming jebus was real except christians. Way to troll, asshole.

shalafi@lemmy.world · 10 days ago

Adults are discussing history. Whatever they did to you in Sunday school class is not relevant here.

andros_rex@lemmy.world · 10 days ago

Ehrman has said he progressed from evangelical belief to agnosticism, identifying the problem of suffering as decisive. He has written, “the problem of suffering became for me the problem of faith” and has said, “I no longer go to church, no longer believe, no longer consider myself a Christian”. In a 2008 interview he said, “I simply didn’t believe that there was a God of any sort”.

Ehrman has said that he is both agnostic and atheist but that “I usually confuse people when I tell them I’m both”. “Atheism is a statement about faith and agnosticism is a statement about epistemology”, he said.

Ehrman argues that Jesus of Nazareth existed historically, and has summarized the claim in popular form “he did exist, whether we like it or not”. His position on Christology is historical rather than confessional. In summarizing How Jesus Became God, NPR recorded his judgment that “Jesus himself didn’t call himself God and didn’t consider himself God”. He has also written that Jesus did not teach postmortem reward and punishment as popularly conceived. In a 2020 essay he argued that Jesus proclaimed resurrection and the coming kingdom rather than eternal torment.