Notable Quotable

Hector Avalos in The End of Biblical Studies writes of Hermann Samuel Reimarus [1694-1768] who is often credited with producing the first modern critical enquiry into the “historical Jesus.”  Avalos quotes Reimarus on the subject of Jesus’ resurrection:

    Now, if all the apostles who, of course, had seen and heard Jesus’ earlier miracles…were still skeptical and doubtful about such an important event, how much less should we be reproached today for being doubtful and skeptical since we cannot experience all the things with our own senses but must accept it seventeen hundred years later from the reports of a few witnesses?

Albert Schweitzer is quoted:

    There is nothing more negative than the result of the critical study of the Life of Jesus…”

Avalos summarizes thus:

The quest for the historical Jesus is an abject failure.  After hundreds of years and probably millions of person-hours, reconstructions of Jesus are no better than the one of Reimarus in the eighteenth century.  Reimarus had nearly exhausted the critical search for any historicity, and he found mostly a myth.  … Further progress is futile because we simply don’t have any preserved accounts of Jesus from his time or from any proven eyewitnesses.”

Can God blame us if we search for any historical evidence of Jesus and come up empty handed?  Is there any fairness to state that we will all be tortured in a burning hell forever and ever and ever when God has not even given the proper tools for belief?  There is no eyewitness account to be found of Jesus. The gospels are in not eyewitness accounts.

 Even Christian Biblical scholars admit that the vast majority of what Jesus is alleged to have said in the New Testament, those letters in red that you see in your Bible, could not, or would not, have been spoken by their Jesus.  The vast number of additions and omissions in the New Testament are astounding.  It all strikes me as so not inspired by all-knowing, all-seeing, all-powerful God