An Example Of Rational Thought

“If one wants to insist that God inspired the very words of scripture, what would be the point if we don't have the very words of scripture? ... It's a bit hard to know what the words of the Bible mean if we don't even know what the words are! This became a problem for my view of inspiration; for I came to realize that it would have been no more difficult for God to preserve the words of scripture than it would have been for him to inspire them in the first place. If he wanted his people to have his words, surely he would have given them to them... The fact that we don't have the words surely must show, I reasoned, that he did not preserve them for us. And if he didn't perform that miracle, there seemed to be no reason to think that he performed the earlier miracle of inspiring those words."

--Bart Ehrman, "Misquoting Jesus: The story behind who changed the Bible and why"

Josephus's Jesuses

From the II Errancy discussion list, January 9, 2002:

HELEN
I once took the time to count up all the Jesuses listed in

Josephus from I think it was 100 BC to 50 AD. It was a

relatively large number, like 40-50 of them. Most of them

were minor political or religious leaders. I think there
were several Jesuses listed in the Talmud for the same

period. There are even at least two possible passing references

to other Jesuses in the NT for heaven's sake. In some very

old manuscripts of the gospels' Barabbas (Aramaic name

means "son of the father"), a supposed revolutionary political

leader, has the first name of Jesus, and there is a Jewish

magician with the Greek name Elymas and a Hebrew name

of Bar-Jesus (son of Jesus) who Paul out magics in Acts

chapter 13. It is not hard to imagine that stories from
either of these two men's lives or any of the other Jesuses

could have added to the gospels' myths. When it is considered

that the gospels were written at least 30-40 years after the

events they describe and there were all these Jesuses

running around doing things that were being remembered

in folk tales, I would think that it is reasonable to suspect

there was far more than one human Jesus that inspired

the stories of the gospels. If you add to this possibility

that any good story about a Jewish religious teacher who was
addressed in the story by his followers as simply "Rabbi" might

also have mistakenly become part of the Christian mythology,

I think the idea that no one "Jesus" of the gospels ever existed

is very reasonable.

TILL
It's rather odd that Josephus, who was born shortly after the

time Jesus was allegedly crucified, would have mentioned

so many obscure Jesuses but mentioned Jesus the

miracle-worker and resurrected one only in two short
statements whose authenticity has been challenged by

many scholars.

Farrell Till