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(Hy is ’n agnostiese ateïs.)
The alleged parallels between Jesus and the “pagan” savior-gods in most instances reside in the modern imagination: We do not have accounts of others who were born to virgin mothers and who died as an atonement for sin and then were raised from the dead (despite what the sensationalists claim ad nauseum in their propagandized versions).
[Uit Did Jesus Exist?]
There is no scholar in any college or university in the western world who teaches Classics, Ancient History, New Testament, Early Christianity…any related field who doubts that Jesus existed.
[Uit The Historical Jesus DID Exist – Bart Ehrman (Youtube)]
JZ Smith
The category of dying and rising gods, once a major topic of scholarly investigation, must now be understood to have been largely a misnomer based on imaginative reconstructions and exceedingly late or highly ambiguous texts … There is no unambiguous instance in the history of religions of a dying and rising deity.
[Uit Dying and Rising Gods]
Graeme Clark
I know of no ancient historian or biblical historian who would have a twinge of doubt about the existence of a Jesus Christ—the documentary evidence is simply overwhelming.
Philip Jenkins (Distinguished Professor of History at Baylor University)
What you can’t do, though, without venturing into the far swamps of extreme crankery, is to argue that Jesus never existed. The “Christ-Myth Hypothesis” is not scholarship, and is not taken seriously in respectable academic debate. The grounds advanced for the “hypothesis” are worthless. The authors proposing such opinions might be competent, decent, honest individuals, but the views they present are demonstrably wrong….Jesus is better documented and recorded than pretty much any non-elite figure of antiquity.
Prof Sherwin-White (1911–1993)
For Acts the confirmation of historicity is overwhelming … any attempt to reject its basic historicity, even in matters of detail, must now appear absurd. Roman historians have long taken it for granted.
Encyclopædia Britannica
Daar is heelwat nie-Christen historici en skrywers wat die lewe en teregstelling van Jesus bevestig: Cornelius Tacitus, Lucian of Samosata, Flavius Josephus, Suetonius, Pliny the Younger, Thallus, Phlegon, Mara Bar-Serapion, en verwysings in die Talmud en ander Joodse skrywes. Encyclopædia Britannica som soos volg op:
These independent accounts prove that in ancient times even the opponents of Christianity never doubted the historicity of Jesus, which was disputed for the first time and on inadequate grounds by several authors at the end of the 18th, during the 19th, and at the beginning of the 20th centuries.
[Uit Should we trust the Bible?]
Sir William Mitchell Ramsay (1851–1939)
Luke is a historian of the first rank; not merely are his statements of fact trustworthy … this author should be placed along with the very greatest of historians.
Barnett, P., Jensen, P. and Peterson, D., Resurrection: Truth and Reality, Aquila Press, Sydney, Australia, p. 14, 1994
The notion that Jesus was resurrected in a totally spiritual sense, while his old body lay in the grave, is a purely modern conception. First-century Jewish thinking would never have accepted such a view and that is not how Jesus’ Resurrection was proclaimed in the earliest accounts. It would have been impossible for Resurrection claims to survive in the face of a tomb containing the corpse of Jesus.
Dan Wallace
The wealth of material that is available for determining the wording of the original New Testament is staggering: more than fifty-seven hundred Greek New Testament manuscripts, as many as twenty thousand versions, and more than one million quotations by patristic writers. In comparison with the average ancient Greek author, the New Testament copies are well over a thousand times more plentiful. If the average-sized manuscript were two and one-half inches thick, all the copies of the works of an average Greek author would stack up four feet high, while the copies of the New Testament would stack up to over a mile high! This is indeed an embarrassment of riches.
Lee Strobel (The Case for Christ)
if the gospels had been identical to each other, word for word, this would have raised charges that the authors had conspired among themselves to coordinate their stories in advance, and that would have cast doubt on them.
as die evangelies, woord vir woord, identies was, sou dit die aanklagte laat ontstaan het dat die outeurs onderling saamgesweer het om hul verhale vooraf te koördineer, en wat dit sou betwyfel.
Modern news stories covering the same event have much the same sort of ‘contradictions’ skeptics point to in the Gospel accounts
Moderne nuusberigte oor dieselfde gebeurtenis het baie dieselfde soort ‘teenstrydighede’ wat skeptici in die Evangelieverslae aandui.