PH“Atheists claim that Jesus never existed.”
Nope.
Some atheists claim there’s very little evidence outside the Bible to support the idea that the character in the Bible existed in exactly the way he’s depicted in the Bible.
A small number of atheists claim it’s likely that the Biblical character of Jesus didn’t exist at all, chief among them Dr. Richard Carrier, author of The God Who Wasn’t There, but this is distinctly a minority view among Biblical scholars.
Most Biblical scholars, both theists and atheists, believe that it’s most likely that the stories in the Bible are based on a real itinerant end-times preacher who lived in or around Judea around 2,000 years ago. A significant minority of Biblical scholars think the stories in the Bible may have been based on an aggregate of several such itinerant preachers—it was hard to shake a stick in the Middle East back then without hitting a dozen Messianic preachers said to be able to work miracles—which would explain why the Jesus of the Bible seems a bit all over the place, preaching peace but also saying “Think not that I am come to send peace on earth: I came not to send peace, but a sword;” talking about turning the other cheek and then cursing a tree for not producing out of season.
Nope.
Some atheists claim there’s very little evidence outside the Bible to support the idea that the character in the Bible existed in exactly the way he’s depicted in the Bible.
A small number of atheists claim it’s likely that the Biblical character of Jesus didn’t exist at all, chief among them Dr. Richard Carrier, author of The God Who Wasn’t There, but this is distinctly a minority view among Biblical scholars.
Most Biblical scholars, both theists and atheists, believe that it’s most likely that the stories in the Bible are based on a real itinerant end-times preacher who lived in or around Judea around 2,000 years ago. A significant minority of Biblical scholars think the stories in the Bible may have been based on an aggregate of several such itinerant preachers—it was hard to shake a stick in the Middle East back then without hitting a dozen Messianic preachers said to be able to work miracles—which would explain why the Jesus of the Bible seems a bit all over the place, preaching peace but also saying “Think not that I am come to send peace on earth: I came not to send peace, but a sword;” talking about turning the other cheek and then cursing a tree for not producing out of season.