Q: I already am an atheist/anti-theist but I wonder if Jesus actually was real. Obviously, the whole “son of god” thing didn’t happen. But was there a guy named “Jesus” that went around claiming to have special abilities? I wondered if there is any actual historical evidence of “Jesus” or is he completely made up and taken from ancient religions? A: There are a lot of competing theories on the topic of a historical Jesus, but the general consensus is that there was a man (or perhaps multiple men) on which some of the stories are loosely based. His name, however, was definitely not Jesus… perhaps Yeshua. There were many traveling rabbis and “prophets” in that age, so it’s not extraordinary, and many aspects of the narrative were obviously added later, as is usually the case. He certainly wasn’t born of a virgin, for example, and likely grew up in obscurity – he would have probably been married with a family, too. This would explain why so many years of his life are missing from the texts. For great scholarship on the historicity of Jesus, I recommend the writings of Bart D. Ehrman, an American New Testament scholar and currently the James A. Gray Distinguished Professor of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Posted on: Fri, 20 Sep 2013 20:36:21 +0000
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