Job601

What do you think will happen to the PA voter id laws going forward? How do you think about getting out the vote for midterm elections?

I'm a (atheist/agnostic) doctoral student in a slightly different area of religious studies, but I passed a PhD exam in New Testament. Bible_Student's answers in general have been really excellent. You are making our field look good!

The commenters who suggest that there's a scholarly debate about the historical existence of Jesus have been misled. There is a strong consensus that Jesus existed, for the reason Bible_Student gives here. There is simply no other good explanation for why the texts of the New Testament exist in the form that they do. The question is not whether or not the existence of Jesus can be proven, but whether or not any alternative explanation for the nature of the received New Testament is plausible.

The gospels are theological polemics, not histories, and they have been narrativized and fictionalized, but they are far easier to understand as a reflection of some underlying historical reality than they are as a complete fiction.

The inconsistencies and difficulties that the atheist community on reddit love to point out are, in a way, evidence of the historical underpinnings of Jesus. The many difficult parables and apothegms, the sayings which seem to reflect a different context than the one in which the gospel authors have placed them, the stories which appear to be attempts to valorize or attack particular figures in the early Church -- all are signs that the audience for the gospels was aware through oral tradition of the activity of a historical Jesus, activity which needed to be synthesized into a coherent message and cleaned up to fit into contemporary theology. Simply put, if Jesus was entirely fictional, his words in the church's founding documents would make more sense.