Reddit mentions of The Historical Jesus (Essential Guides)

Here are some sources to disprove Zeitgeist.

9/11 Popular Mechanics Conspiracies debunked

[Noam Chomsky's rebuttal of 9/11 attacks]
(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-_fFkLcRrBE)

I don't tend to lend weight to most of Noam Chomsky's beliefs, but since he is one to read deeply into a lot of American historical events, he uses general logic to dismiss most conspiratorial claims. One quote that I think highlights this case is:

>Most of the evidence is circumstantial. Odd coincidences, why didn't this happen, and so on and so forth. The problem with that is, that's the kind of evidence that you can accumulate about any complex event. By that kind of evidence, you can probably prove the white house was bombed yesterday. In fact, that's why scientists do experiments instead of taking video tapes of the world. Video tapes of the world are too complicated and too many things happening, you can't learn much from them.


And as for Jesus:

My educational background is in biblical history, so if more sources are needed I can provide them. Zeitgeist tries to disprove the existence of Jesus by linking him to other religious deities (Egyptian, Sumarian, Zoroastrian, Buddhist, etc). These arguments are linked to late 19th Century scholars. Most of these scholars have been disproven for being incredibly off in their studies of antiquities. Many weren't actually trying to disprove the existence of Jesus, but were actually universalists, who desperately wanted to draw parallels between religions and find a common origin. However due to their poor understanding/translation of religious texts, they made some very outlandish claims.

Current academic debates over the existence of Jesus exist around historical sources. Most people that don't believe in the existence of Jesus claim the sources are fraudulent, way past Jesus' lifetime, too biased, or too few in number. Furthermore, most sources are biblical (gospels) in nature and tend not to carry much weight for skeptics.

Two books do a great job of highlighting the historical persona of Jesus through an academic lens (sorry since they aren't ebooks):

Excavating Jesus

The Historical Jesus

Now, my aim isn't too prove that Jesus existed, that's not my intention. My aim is to prove that Zeitgeist is full of shit in ramping up old dead arguments from the 19th century and trying to pass them off as fact. I believe there was a historical jesus given the sources on the matter, but I don't want to make this post too long.


As for the Fed, I don't know enough about it to disprove what Zeitgeist said, but generally the rhetoric from the movie seemed a bit too twisted for me to buy all three arguments given that 2 of them were pretty much pulled out of some guy's ass.

>Jesus of Nazareth likely had a darker complexion than we imagine, not unlike the olive skin common among Middle Easterners today. Princeton biblical scholar James Charlesworth goes so far as to say Jesus was “most likely dark brown and sun-tanned.” The earliest depictions of an adult Jesus showed him with an “Oriental cast” and a brown complexion. But by the sixth century, some Byzantine artists started picturing Jesus with white skin, a beard, and hair parted down the middle. This image became the standard. 1

Also feel free to peruse The historical Jesus: an essential guide by James Charlesworth (mentioned above).

The idea of a white Jesus doesn't bother me outside of it simply being incorrect. As I said before, the colour of his skin was inconsequential, it was what he said and who he was that mattered.

Still no reason to lie about it.

Have a wonderful day.

You know I can't really link you to scholarly texts, right? If you want me to show you the primary source evidence itself, it's all documents you already know that have been linked elsewhere in this debate, or that aren't digitized. Biblical texts and apocrypha, pretty much.

One of the leading scholars of Biblical texts, apocrypha, Second Temple Judaism and Early Christianity is James Charlesworth, who has written a short historiographic introduction that I highly recommend. Here's an Amazon link, but to my knowledge the book itself hasn't been digitized:

http://www.amazon.com/Historical-Jesus-Essential-Guide-Abingdon/dp/0687021677/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1267149900&sr=8-3

The reality is that the internet rarely reflects current scholarship in this field. I can grab some books from my shelf and my friends and quote them at you, but it might take some time and links aren't gonna happen.