Not sure if this has been asked before but have you found that studying theology has influenced your own views and morals? If so, in what way?
Not on morality, but I'm sure that studying philosophy has, since it helps to consider the rational justifications for what we believe. Certainly studying theology has been useful in shaping my views on religion, particularly on its truth value, but again I think philosophy has been useful with that. I'd say it's harder to believe in the truth of Christianity once you understand how Christianity developed and how its doctrines developed, as it seems that one can explain the fact that people believe these things quite adequately without having to suppose that they are true.
To me: In (MYTH No. 3: Ancient historian Flavius Josephus wrote about Jesus.); I had never heard that there were 3 Jesus' during that time frame. Some of what he said has already been mentioned by you and others in this forum.
There were lots of Jesuses at the time - it was a very common name. (It's the same as Joshua.) Even the Gospels mention other Jesuses (Jesus Barabbas). Josephus tells us about various Jesuses.
It still is a catch 22 though. No one takes the word of eyewitness, so destroying the credibility of eye witnesses, seems a mute point to me. They are there to take or leave. If someone felt desperate enough to make fun of a person to take the Bible as literal, and God cannot keep error out, and later say eyewitness are rubbish any way, seems to say that God should not have used eyewitnesses to begin with.
I don't really see the point here: most secular scholars do not believe that there are any eyewitness accounts of Jesus, but they still believe Jesus existed. They also don't think that the Bible is errant. So an argument that the Bible is inerrant or does not contain eyewitness accounts, while laudable in combating fundamentalism, isn't going to have much success in undermining the belief that Jesus existed.
Is this a quote from the book? Because it doesn't seem very coherent to me. Is the argument anything other than "If Jesus were really the Messiah he would have acted differently"? Because that doesn't prove anything, except possibly that he wasn't the Messiah.
A thorough review.
tl;dr: the book is bunk
That's a very good article. I think the summary of the "Jesus didn't exist" movement is interesting and insightful. The reference to Acharya S is interesting - she is someone who writes in an impressively scholarly style, but once you engage with her and probe the arguments - as I have myself on a couple of occasions - she quickly reveals herself to be just a conspiracy theorist, without any real rigour.
The brief history of the view that Jesus didn't exist, and its relation to mainstream scholarship, is quite correct too.
Without having read the Fitzgerald book (and now I see it's self-published, so it's hardly surprising I hadn't heard of it), it sounds to me from this review that it's really not worth bothering with. And I think I can say that purely on the basis of the passages of the book that the review reproduces, without taking into account the reviewer's comments on them - which are exactly correct.
Is there any theological/philosophical concept that scares the crap out of you?
I can't think of any.
Could you link please? I tried searching the forums, but drowned in countless text references.
Actually I can't find the links either. I will try to track them down, since I remember writing a fairly long piece about this, the details of which I can't recall.
I think those days are over. The ESV has had a big impact on the more conservative end of the market. The 1978 NIV is being replaced this year by a less conservative revision. So it seems very likely there will be divergence over the next few years.
So both conservative evangelicals and liberals will be using revisions of the old RSV.
That's interesting, and a positive development.
What are the viewpoints of Authoritative Modern Scholarship on Jesus' primary message - was he mainly an eschatological prophet or a morality teacher?
I don't think there is a commonly accepted viewpoint on that. Each view would have its proponents, as would the view that he was mainly a miracle worker. I suspect that it may be something of a mistake to distinguish between these categories and try to work out which one Jesus was mainly. It's based on the assumption that Jesus
did fit neatly into categories. Whereas it might seem reasonable to suppose that he was highly unusual, given that he spawned an enormous religion after his death and none of the other Galilean preachers, prophets, or miracle workers did. Indeed Jesus seems to have been very unusual in being widely known for doing all three of these things, whereas others seem to have been almost exclusively one or the other.