“One of the most certain facts of history is that Jesus was crucified on orders of the Roman prefect of Judea, Pontius Pilate.” - Bart Ehrman, The Historical Jesus: Lecture Transcript and Course Guidebook 2000. p. 162) Ehrman has a Ph.D. from Princeton.
Marcus Borg – Ph.D. Former Distinguished Professor of Religion and Culture at Oregon State University. He is a Bible scholar and an agnostic who believes Jesus was a Jewish prophet and teacher.
In an interview, Borg is asked “So we have the proposition: “Jesus once walked this earth.” True or false?”. Borg responds: “True. The reasons for thinking that Jesus was invented by the early Christians are so weak. We have no reason to think that they did.”
In another interview Borg stated: “Though a few books have recently argued that Jesus never existed, the evidence that he did is persuasive to the vast majority of scholars, whether Christian or non-Christian”.
Numerous scholars of antiquity & almost universally in the modern age agree that Jesus existed. How has this been deduced? By drawing from these.
9 Ancient Secular testaments: Josephus (Roman-Jewish historian), Tacitus (Roman historian), Pliny the Younger (Roman politician), Phlegon (freed slave who wrote histories), Lucian (Greek satirist), Celsus (Roman philosopher), Mara Bar Serapion (prisoner awaiting execution), Suetonius (journaled the first 11 emperors of the roman empire), and Thallus (wrote a three-volume history of the Mediterranean World.)
And this doesn’t even include the hundreds of ancient textual references in the Old Testament that predicted Jesus manner of death, time of birth, place of birth, and burial.
If this is true, then Jesus (or Joshua as he would’ve been called in Hebrew) was a real man that walked this earth. He is the only person I know who claimed to be God and demonstrated unlimited power by miracles, including making several thousand pounds of fish and bread loaves out of 5 loafs of bread and 2 fish. What? I don’t think even a historian can get that wrong, or unintentionally exaggerate the account that much. Jesus also stopped a storm so strenuous it had experienced sailors quaking for their very lives - by saying “Be Still.” All the wind and rain stopped instantly. And if his existence is so there remains an unimaginably small number of things that Jesus could have been.
C.S. Lewis
"A man who was merely a man and said [and did] the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic - on a level with the man who says he is a poached egg ‑ or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was, and is, the son of God: or else a madman or an outrageous liar."
Liar, Lunatic, or Lord? At least you might give him a chance, considering what Joshua did.
But if you are a skeptic when it comes to ancient certification of documentation (which then you couldn’t trust the vast majority of what’s written in History Books period), then there’s also the flood evidence left behind in the rock layers; and fossils of sea creatures who dwell at the bottom of the ocean - strewn haphazardly about high on mountain peaks across the world.
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