Secondo me il libro ha questi meriti:
- Smonta l'effettiva utilità delle prove storiche extra-cristiane (se dovessimo basarci solo su quelle, su Gesù non potremmo dire niente perchè sono troppo tardive e potrebbero essere solo un sentito dire). Hanno un peso davvero minimo nella dimostrazione. Quando nel dibattito si citano solo queste prove per l'esistenza di Gesù (mentre invece indicano con certezza l'esistenza del movimento cristiano in un dato periodo), è il primo segnale che "l'apologeta" non è particolarmente preparato.
- Dimostra come i Vangeli, nonostante vadano presi con le pinze e contengano molto materiale non-storico, esagerazioni e narrazioni inventate, non siano semplicemente da buttare per la ricostruzione storica e che in realtà siano una collezione di tante fonti indipendenti. Paradossalmente uno dei problemi principale della ricostruzione delle parole e opere del Gesù storico, cioè le fonti discordanti, fornisce una delle prove migliori della sua esistenza.
La conclusione così recita:
The evidence is abundant and varied. Among the Gospels we have numerous independent accounts that attest to Jesus’s life, at least seven of them from within a hundred years of the traditional date of his death. These accounts did not appear out of thin air, however. They are based on written sources—a good number of them—that date much earlier, plausibly in some cases at least to the 50s of the Common Era. Even these sources were not fabricated purely from the minds of their authors, however. They were based on oral traditions that had been in circulation year after year among the followers of Jesus. These oral traditions were transmitted in various areas—mainly urban areas, we might surmise—throughout the Roman Empire; some of them, however, can be located in Jesus’s homeland, Palestine, where they originally circulated in Aramaic. It appears that some, probably many, of them go back to the 30s CE. We are not, then, dealing merely with Gospels that were produced fifty or sixty years after Jesus’s alleged death as the principal witnesses to his existence. We are talking about a large number of sources, dispersed over a remarkably broad geographical expanse, many of them dating to the years immediately after Jesus’s alleged life, some of them from Palestine itself. On the basis of this evidence alone, it is hard to understand how Jesus could have been “invented.” Invented by whom? Where? When? How then could there be so many independent strands of evidence?- Evidenzia bene il
"killer argument" contro i miticisti, ovvero i racconti di Paolo nelle sue lettere (dove è chiaro che si riferisca a un uomo vissuto) e la conoscenza di Giacomo e Pietro.
There is no doubt that Paul knew that Jesus existed. He mentions Jesus’s birth, his Jewish heritage, his descent from David, his brothers, his ministry to Jews, his twelve disciples, several of his teachings, his Last Supper, and most important for Paul, his crucifixion. Paul indicates that he received some of these traditions from those who came before him, and it is relatively easy to determine when.
Even more impressive than what Paul says about Jesus is whom he knew. Paul was personally acquainted, as I’ve pointed out, with Peter and JamesE secondo me questo dovrebbe bastare per dire che l'esistenza di Gesù è estremamente probabile (a conti fatti io la considero certa).
Ehrman da un altro "Killer argument", cioè che nessuno si aspettava un messia morente. Secondo me l'argomento è valido, tuttavia è decisamente meno "Killer" dell'altro per la natura stessa dell'argomento:
Paul also knew that Jesus was crucified. Before the Christian movement, there were no Jews who thought the messiah was going to suffer. Quite the contrary. The crucified Jesus was not invented, therefore, to provide some kind of mythical fulfillment of Jewish expectation. The single greatest obstacle Christians had when trying to convert Jews was precisely their claim that Jesus had been executed. They would not have made that part up. They had to deal with it and devise a special, previously unheard of theology to account for it. And so what they invented was not a person named Jesus but rather the idea of a suffering messiah. That invention has become so much a part of the standard lingo that Christians today assume it was all part of the original plan of God as mapped out in the Old Testament. But in fact the idea of a suffering messiah cannot be found there. It had to be created. And the reason it had to be created is that Jesus—the one Christians considered to be the messiah—was known by everyone everywhere to have been crucified. He couldn’t be killed if he didn’t live.Per contro a Febbraio 2014 uscirà il nuovo libro di Richard Carrier (l'unico miticista che mi pare serio, anche se nei modi di fare è insopportabile),
On the historicity of Jesus. A quanto pare sarà un lavoro peer-reviewed:
www.strangenotions.com/questioning-the-historicity-of-jesus/Questo è un video che racchiude il Carrier-pensiero sull'argomento, mi piacerebbe sapere cosa ne pensate:
VideoEDIT: Inoltre questa è una trattazione sul suffering messiah sempre di Carrier che non ho avuto il coraggio di leggere. Se qualcuno però si vuole cimentare...
www.freethoughtblogs.com/carrier/archives/1440Ciao,
Edited by Nirodh27 - 15/10/2013, 08:48
