DO JESUS DENIERS MAKE HIS EXISTENCE UNCERTAIN?

The skeptic intends to shake us loose from our faith by claiming that Jesus never existed. However, even atheistic historians have taken issue with such wild allegations.

Atheist historian Michael Grant is adamant that such claims represent the height of irresponsibility:

·       This sceptical way of thinking reached its culmination in the argument that Jesus as a human being never existed at all and is a myth… But above all, if we apply to the New Testament, as we should, the same sort of criteria as we should apply to other ancient writings containing historical material, we can no more reject Jesus’ existence than we can reject the existence of a mass of pagan personages whose reality as historical figures is never questioned…To sum up, modern critical methods fail to support the Christ myth theory. It has ‘again and again been answered and annihilated by first rank scholars.

In “An Atheist’s Defense of the Historicity of Jesus,” Neil Carter expresses embarrassment regarding the wild assertions of some of his fellow atheists:

·       “It doesn’t seem to bother the deniers that they themselves have no specialization in the academic field they disparage because in any field of study there will always be at least some small contingent who go against the consensus.

·       “I don’t think it makes us look very objective when we too eagerly embrace a position which contradicts an almost universal consensus among those who have devoted their lives to the academic discipline which concerns itself with these matters. We of all people should know better” (83).

In “The Dark Age Myth: An Atheist Reviews ‘God’s Philosophers,’” Tim O’Neill is highly critical of many social media atheists:

·       “One of the occupational hazards of being an atheist and secular humanist who hangs around on discussion boards is to encounter a staggering level of historical illiteracy. I like to console myself that many of the people on such boards have come to their atheism via the study of science and so, even if they are quite learned in things like geology and biology, usually have a grasp of history stunted at about high school level.

In fact, even the evidence for Jesus’ resurrection is so weighty – let alone His existence – that several skeptical scholars have concluded:

·       “It may be taken as historically certain that Peter and the disciples had experiences after Jesus’ death in which Jesus appeared to them as the risen Christ.’” (Gerd Lüdemann, What Really Happened to Jesus?, trans. John Bowden (Louisville, Kent.: Westminster John Knox Press, 1995), p. 80.)

The liberal Jewish historian, Paula Fredriksen, claims

·       “The Disciples’ conviction that they had seen the risen Christ…is historical bedrock, facts known past doubting.” (Lee Strobel, 119)

·       “I know in their own terms what they saw was the raised Jesus. That’s what they say and then all the historic evidence was have afterwards attests to their conviction that that’s what they saw. I’m not saying that they really did see the raised Jesus. I wasn’t there. I don’t know what they saw. But I do know that as a historian that they must have seen something.” (119)

NT scholar, James Dunn, is emphatic that Jesus’ disciple had been convinced that Jesus had risen:

• “It is an undoubted fact that the conviction that God had raised Jesus from the dead and had exalted Jesus to his right hand, transformed Jesus’ first disciples and their beliefs about Jesus.” (Christian Research Journal, Vol.39, No.2, 14)

In light of the above, the testimony of the 27 books of New Testament, the Church Fathers, the Jewish Talmud, and even of the Gnostic Gospels, the claim that Jesus never existed is laughable.