I wonder if it peoples faith would be as strong if they knew, and believed that he actually looked something like this
I disagree with the idea that scholarship regarding the resurrection of Jesus has not advanced since 1906. I find it interesting that you dismiss the work of Gary Habermas and Bill Craig on the resurrection of Jesus because they are not historians, but you accept Albert Schweitzer as the final authority on the matter, and he also was not a historian. You have staked your eternal destiny on your response to Schweitzer‘s book and it appears you don’t want to consider any other evidence or argument. By the way, the dissertation for Bill Craig’s second doctor degree, this one from the University of Munich, was on the historicity of the resurrection of Jesus.
There is absolutely no evidence of Jesus’s resurrection. Schweitzer saw this and said it was because faith is important to god. Faith is believing stuff without evidence. I am incapable of believing stuff without evidence. Perhaps this is the way god created me. So his plan for me was eternal damnation? Such a loving god.
This is hilarious. You dismiss Craig’s work on the resurrection because his second earned doctorate is a ThD and not a PhD, like the first one was.
He is not a historian is my point. I imagine I have read and studied this issue more than you have. You dismissed Schweitzer’s the Quest for the Historical Jesus. I read it twice. Once in English and once in the original German thinking that the translation may have been lacking.
Well I didn’t accept it. I found it wrong. I have never read anything better and I have read a lot. Not by theologians but by historians and linguists. One I have been reading lately is Bart Ehrman. Most of the nonsense written by apologists are just restating the Kalam cosmological argument. I read with an open mind. I prefer the authors of the books I read to write with an open mind. Starting with the resurrection happened is not starting with an open mind.
Ehrman has written some interesting books -read several and just finished Triumph of Christianity. He never really debunks the Resurrection- he says (iirc) that there were several witnesses who were recorded as saying they saw Jesus in the flesh post crucifixion and that those accounts may have been written in that fashion due to the concomitant controversy over the divinity of Jesus. I have Schweitzer’s book but haven’t started it.
He has many and a few plow the same ground. A couple I liked. Jesus Interrupted- looks at some of the contradictions in the NT and opinions of contemporaries of Jesus as to what he was. Misquoting Jesus covers the what changes to the NT have occurred, who did them, and their possible reasons.
I just admit that I don't know and so am comfortable with the agnostic label. I'd add that the gnostic perspective makes much more sense to me than any of the mainstream denominations. Finally, the idea that non-believers are condemned to eternal damnation is absolute nonsense. This nonsense was, in fact, invented by Dante.