"Only a minute portion of scholars ".
Since when? The majority of scholars examining the =same= set of evidence even in the early 20th century have made a questioned the historicity of Jesus:
"Some excitement has been caused in the religious world recently by the fact that the late Georg Brandes adopted the opinion that Jesus never existed..."
"Whatever we think of the question of the historicity of Jesus, it is one of the most difficult things in the world to extract any reliable information about him from the only biographical documents we have; and even if we take the teaching ascribed to Jesus in the gospels as authentic, although, as I have shown, this would be a drastic violation of all ordinary rules of history, that teaching is not unique in any single particular or in its entirety. As I have said... I know of only one occasion on which any historical committee sat down to examine the gospel on ordinary historical principles, and all its members were Christians. Yet they candidly admitted that no single saying of Jesus in the Gospels can be proved to have existed in the first century."
(Joseph McCabe 1867-1955)
From the British paper the "Observer" (May 30, 1926)(Dr. Burch, theologian)"...the ablest book on the whole subject, " (Klausner's "Jesus of Nazareth) "twenty-four lines" from Jewish and pagan writers, and four of those are spurious. Of the twenty genuine lines twelve (universally regarded as spurious) are in the Jewish historian Josephus. In the immense Latin literature of the century after the death of Jesus there are only eight lines; and each of these is disputed."
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Sir J.G. Frazer writing, in his introduction to Dr. P.L. Couchoud's recent "Enigma of Jesus," that "whether Dr. Couchoud be right or wrong" in denying the historicity of Jesus, "he appears to have laid his finger on a weak point in the chain of evidence on which hangs the religious faith of a great part of civilized mankind."
Your "position to know" is weakness, just as scholars who "knew" about flight and flying in the 19th century, by a huge majority, thought man would never fly. They =were= in a "position to know", unquestionably. They were wrong. |
