Here’s my problem with the premises of the writer:
* She drew distinctions between scientific evidence and belief as if evidence requires no belief or assumption or interpretation. The belief of Christians in Jesus’ life comes from “textual evidence in the Bible” – betraying a bias that textual evidence is less credible than scientific evidence.
* Her headline also implies that evidence must be physical. This rules out logical and textual evidence and eyewitness testimony.
* It also begs questions about whether other beliefs accepted by scientists are based on physical evidence alone.
* But dubious archaeological claims, frauds and forgeries have little to do with the question of whether Jesus really lived. But she gives weight to these.
* She seemed to indicate that non-canonical gospels have equal bearing with Matthew, Mark, Luke and John on the history of Jesus: “There are still other Gospels,” she said, without naming them.
* She did not mention that the Gospel of Judas was written much later by Gnostics, and that the Gospel of Thomas and others have long been considered spurious by early church fathers who lived closest in time to the writing of those documents. Nor did she explore the church fathers’ criteria for authenticity, the social dynamics of heretics and cults who might have reasons to write spurious accounts, nor the science of textual analysis, concerned with the authenticity of texts.
* She drew a middle ground on the historicity of Jesus, quoting Marcus Borg, a secular scholar at Oregon State: “We do know some things about the historical Jesus – less than some Christians think, but more than some skeptics think.” That judgment, though, rests on what documents one takes as credible. Borg did not question the fact that Jesus lived, but from the textual evidence, presented a synopsis of Jesus’ life SANITIZED of the miraculous.
Articles like the above often appear when Good Friday looms.
During this time, Secularists will pick and choose the kinds of evidence they like, draw their conclusions based on that selected evidence, filter it through their materialistic biases, and proclaim to the world that science has shown the resurrection to be a myth, congratulating themselves that they have been neutral “scientists” and not biased dogmatists like the believers.
IIRC, to this date, no remnants of the second temple which could be called a part of a wall or even a walkway have been proved.
Yes, and whether she realized it or not, she was ignoring this (or ignorant of it) precisely because the textual evidence is ironclad. Tens of thousands of contemporary manuscripts, agreeing in amazing harmony, and first circulated at a time when, if their claims were false, there would be hundreds of eyewitnesses ready to debunk them.
Saying He didn't exist, or een that we don't have clear evidence He rose from the dead, is like saying that I'm not sure a battle was ever fought at Lexington, Massachusetts.