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23 of 30 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Shattering the Internet Mythicists, July 23, 2008
Having been aware of this so-called "debate" on the Internet (please note: it is entirely an "online debate" not one advanced by serious NT or historical Jesus scholars) since the mid 1990s, I am glad that J.P. Holding has finally transcribed and edited some of his impressive "Tektonics" online articles for an entire book on "Shattering the Christ Myth." He and his amateur scholar contributors have pulled together an excellent set of articles and chapters debunking both the "myth" hypothesis and the "copycat" or "pagan parallel" thesis presented by many an anti-Christian conspiracy buff and uninformed skeptic of historical Christianity.
Chapters include an introduction on the history and origin of the "Christ myth" claims dating from the early 1800s; detailed defenses of the standard non-biblical references to Jesus from the Jewish historian Josephus (his two passages), the Roman historian Tacitus, Lucian, Pliny the Younger, and Papias; responses to the various "silences" argued by "mythicists" from Remsburg to G.A. Wells to Earl Doherty; analysis of the supposed "pagan Christs" from Mithra to Krishna to Horus to Dionysos; reviews and refutations exposing the abysmal scholarship and poor arguments of recent "Christ myth" movies "The God Who Wasn't There" and "Zeitgeist"; and additional material on the city of Nazareth, the academic and Internet mythicists, and more.
This book shows there is really nothing at all to the "mythicist" claims: they are groundless historically, poorly argued based on "silence" and refuted by numerous reliable witnesses to Jesus, and that includes the canonical Gospels and the earliest writings of St. Paul. The real debate among scholars is not whether there was a historical Jesus who was crucified under Pontius Pilate around 30 AD, but on Christ's claims to divinity and being the unique Son of God, the miracles of the Gospels as signs of that divinity, and especially the bodily resurrection of Jesus Christ -- i.e. the whole "Jesus of history" vs. "Christ of faith" debate among conservative evangelical and more "liberal" scholarship.
Jeffery Jay Lowder of Internet Infidels: "There is simply nothing intrinsically improbable about a historical Jesus; the New Testament alone (or at least portions of it) are reliable enough to provide evidence of a historical Jesus. On this point, it is important to note that even G.A. Wells, who until recently was the champion of the christ-myth hypothesis, now accepts the historicity of Jesus on the basis of 'Q'." ("Josh McDowell's 'Evidence' for Jesus")
British historian Michael Grant: "...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 recent years 'no serious scholar has ventured to postulate the non-historicity of Jesus' -- or at any rate very few, and they have not succeeded in disposing of the much stronger, indeed very abundant, evidence to the contrary." (Jesus: An Historian's Review of the Gospels [1977], pages 199, 200)
Anglican Bishop N.T. Wright: "It is quite difficult to know where to start, because actually the evidence for Jesus is so massive that, as a historian, I want to say we have got almost as much good evidence for Jesus as for anyone in the ancient world....the evidence fits so well with what we know of the Judaism of the period....that I think there are hardly any historians today, in fact I don't know of any historians today, who doubt the existence of Jesus [aside from one or two]....It is quite clear that in fact Jesus is a very, very well documented character of real history. So I think that question can be put to rest." ("The Self-Revelation of God in Human History" from There Is A God by Antony Flew and Roy Abraham Varghese [2007])
Robert Van Voorst: "Contemporary New Testament scholars have typically viewed their [i.e. Jesus-mythers] arguments as so weak or bizarre that they relegate them to footnotes, or often ignore them completely....The theory of Jesus' nonexistence is now effectively dead as a scholarly question....Biblical scholars and classical historians now regard it as effectively refuted." (Jesus Outside the New Testament [2000], pages 6, 14, 16)
Shattering the Christ Myth is a welcome addition to the many evangelical defenses of Jesus Christ by well-known scholars such as R.T. France (The Evidence for Jesus), Moreland/Wilkins (Jesus Under Fire), and recently Boyd/Eddy (The Jesus Legend: A Case for the Historical Reliability of the Synoptic Jesus Tradition). As a Catholic apologist, I also appreciated the brief chapter on "Leo's Line" explaining the "fable quote" sometimes attributed to Pope Leo X by mythicist skeptics.
My only complaint is the book is slightly "oversized" so it is not the size of your normal paperback and may not fit easily on your bookshelf. Nevertheless a definite 5-star effort from apologist J.P. Holding and company.
Phil Porvaznik
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16 of 24 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Confirming the Historical Jesus, August 25, 2008
Around the year 56AD, St. Paul wrote to remind his converts in Corinth that: "We preach Christ crucified: to the Jews a stumbling-block and to the Greeks foolishness; but to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God." The event to which he refers had happened little more than two decades before; and it was the core of the message that had been preached by the earliest disciples of Jesus since the Day of Pentecost, and by their successors.
There had - as Paul reminds us - always been those who disbelieved that Jesus was the Christ, and who rejected what his earliest followers taught about him as mere 'foolishness'. But those who maintain that he never even existed are a rather more recent phenomenon. Probably the first was Bruno Bauer in the Nineteenth century. One of the ultra-Hegelians, Bauer convinced few others in a field where denial of orthodox beliefs was nevertheless fairly common. Over the next hundred years, proponents of the view that Jesus never existed can be counted on the fingers of one or at most two hands: they include Arthur Drews, JM Robertson, and GA Wells. None of these men were historians, all were dependent on arguments from silence. Furthermore, none of them could make sense of the New Testament documents on the basis of their theories, all of which required ignoring or rejecting most of the evidence. It is one thing to claim that there are mythical elements in the gospels - most likely around the nativity stories in Matthew and Luke: it is quite another to claim that there was no historical Jesus at all.
It is quite understandable that no historian worth his salt has tried to defend such a view: those who do so must therefore be motivated by unhistorical - indeed anti-historical - considerations. But while serious scholarship rightly rejects the notion that Jesus never existed, there has been a recent resurgence among anti-Christian elements in the sensationalist press, and the twilight zone of internet chatrooms, of this preposterous notion. The `arguments' put forward to support their case have been eagerly seized upon by some of those who have ulterior motives for rejecting not just the historicity of Jesus, but the whole fabric of the Christian faith. The ensuing mischief has unsettled some who are not well-enough informed to withstand it. This book - by internet apologist JP Holding and a group of well-informed fellow-workers - goes a long way towards answering their `case'. It is a thorough and painstaking achievement, and the only sad thing is that it was necessary.
There is no need here to rehearse the contents, as a full description of its various chapters and contributors can be found on the Tektonics website of JP Holding - where earlier versions of many of the chapters have previously appeared. The book is a tremendous resource for all those engaged in countering the mischief and misinformation promulgated by deniers of the historical Jesus, and is a worthy complement to the excellent `Re-inventing Jesus' by Ed Komoszewski, James Sawyer and Daniel Wallace published in 2006. I found a few misprints, but nothing serious enough to compromise the value of this outstanding book. The editor and his contributors are to be congratulated. It is worth five stars.
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10 of 15 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Excellent resource, September 5, 2008
Wherever you stand in the debate over the historical existence of Jesus, this book is an excellent resource. There has been a huge resurgence of interest in "Christ myth" and "pagan copycat" theories, mostly owing to 'Zeitgeist' and 'The God Who Wasn't There'. This book deals directly with both movies, and goes into incredible detail in picking apart the underlying theories. Unlike either movie, this book contains genuine scholarship on these subjects. If you have ever read Acharya S, Jordan Maxwell, Gerald Massey, Blavatsky, etc, you will immediately be struck by how rigorous genuine scholarship is. One of the central claims of the mythicist and pagan-copycat theories is that there is NO modern scholarly support for the historical existence of Jesus. This book completely obliterates that outrageous claim, as modern scholarship strongly supports the view that Jesus actually did exist as a historical person.
"Shattering the Christ Myth" is a large 350+ page book, packed with information and analysis. This is not a light inspirational read, but rather a very serious scholarly look at the arguments and evidence concerning the historical existence of Jesus.
Unfortunately, there does not exist a convenient video on the internet extolling the historical Jesus with quite the same force as 'Zeitgeist' and others. For some reason, going through the Testimonium Flavianum line by line and concluding that most of it is authentic is just not as exciting to most people as the blanket unsubstantiated claim that "There is no evidence for Jesus whatsoever!!" However, if you are truly interested in these questions, you would do well to at least read a serious presentation of the arguments on both sides. This book is an excellent place to go for the evidence that Jesus really did exist as a person in history.
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