Robert M. Price; Fellow, Jesus Seminar: Well, in the case of someone like Caesar Augustus, around whom many of the same myths clustered, we know there nonetheless was a Caesar Augustus, because he's intricately tied in to the history of the time and many secular historians talk about him. You can't rewrite history without Caesar Augustus.
But at the very two points Jesus appears to be locked into history, these stories are either still mythical, like the Slaughter of the Innocents derived right out of the book of Exodus,
Or they contain outrageous improbabilities such as the Jewish Supreme Council meeting on Passover Eve to get rid of this guy. That's just out of the question.
Or Pontius Pilate letting go a known killer of Romans and insurrectionist Barabbas and letting Jesus be thrown to the mob after, however, trying to get him off the hook as if he has to have a vote on it. It just defies any kind of historical verisimilitude and then when you realise:
Well, you know there were other Ancient Jews and Jewish Christians that believed Jesus had been killed a century before under King Alexander Jenius (sp?). Or in the Gospel of Peter, it says that Eric (sp?) had Jesus killed. How could this be a matter of such diversity if it was a recent event that people remembered? It just begins to make you wonder: is this man really part of the historical timestream? Or does it begin to look like someone is trying to put a figure originally mythical into a historical framework and made various stabs at it?
Interviewer: Can you give me an example of a story that started as fiction, that's known to have been fiction and then it became considered real with the addition of details?
Barbara and David P. Mikkelson; Urban Legends Reference Pages, snopes.com: Oh, well we've seen this any number of times in, say, glurge stories where stories have stories have started out as actual works of fiction. Where they were written by identifiable authors. They were written and provided as works of fiction. And they have since gained a life and a spread of their own.
Where they are now told and relayed as true stories. As 'this really happened' tales. And are believed as such...
Jesus' life does conform to the hero pattern. It's a hero pattern with so many incidents.
Alan Dundues; Author, 'Holy Writ as Oral Lit': Regmund gave a score. He took... the Oedipus of all things as the model. And then gave other heroes scores as to how many of the 22 points they had in their lives...
His mother is a royal virgin, his father is a king, often a relative of his mother. The circumstances of his conception are unusual, five, he's also reputedly the son of a god. Six, at birth an attempt is made, often by his father, to kill him. But seven, he's spirited away and eight reared by foster parents in a foreign country.
Nine, we're told nothing of his childhood but ten, on reaching manhood he returns and goes to his future kingdom. And eleven, after a victory over a King or a Giant or a Dragon. He marries a princess, twelve. Thirteen, becomes king.
Fourteen reigns uneventfully but fifteen prescribes laws. Sixteen: later he loses favor with his subjects. Seventeen he is driven and thrown from the city. Eighteen he meets with a mysterious death. Nineteen often at the top of a hill. Twenty, his children if any do not succeed him. Twenty-one his body is not buried but nevertheless, twenty-two he has one or more holy sepulchres.
So Oedipus gets 22 points out of the 22. Theseus gets 20. Romulus 17, Hercules 17, Perseus 16 etc. I don't remember off the top how many Jesus got but it was high
Robert M. Price: There are other similar savior figures in the same neighborhood, at the same time and history. Mithrias, Attis, Adonis, Osiris, Tamuz (sp?), and so forth. And nobody thinks that these characters are anything but mythical and their stories are so similar. Most of them, in fact, having some kind of resurrection or another, sometimes with celebrations after three days and so forth that it just seems like special pleading to say: "In this one case it really happened".
"When we say that Jesus Christ was produced without sexual union, was crucified and died, and rose again, and ascended to heaven, we propound nothing new or different from what you believe regarding those whom you call the sons of Jupiter." - Justin Martyr, church father...
Sam Harris: "Our religions are the area in which we tolerate dogma completely uncritically. To deny that the Holocaust ever happened or to assert that you're in dialogue with extraterrestrials is pretty much synonymous with craziness in our culture. And it is so because we challenge people when they believe things strongly without evidence, or in contradiction to a mountain of evidence. Except on matters of faith."
A flawed critique of this flawed documentary (which of course has a response, to which there is a reply, neither of which I didn't even bother to scan)