Ideological Atheism and Historical Jesus

A recent anti-theist commented to me, in part, "You recycle vacuous opinion devoid of supporting evidence of any kind. You reference the fictional "Jesus" without recognition that there is no historical evidence of the existence of such a man and no historical evidence of the centuries later written confused and contradictory legends of "Jesus" ever happening. The Church agrees, saying: "Our documentary sources of knowledge about the origins of Christianity and its earliest development are chiefly the New Testament Scriptures, the authenticity of which we must, to a great extent, take for granted." (Catholic Encyclopedia, Farley ed., vol. iii, p. 712)

The Church makes extraordinary admissions about its New Testament. For example, when discussing the origin of those writings, "the most distinguished body of academic opinion ever assembled" (Catholic Encyclopedias, Preface) admits that the Gospels "do not go back to the first century of the Christian era" (Catholic Encyclopedia, Farley ed., vol. vi, p. 137, pp. 655-6).

Well, congratulations, at least you´re not devoid of substantive argumentation altogether. Your presumptuousness still does you in, however, because you are ideologically motivated and careless and unsystematic in the way you try to find things that fit your preconceived notions. You confuse your categories and classes of terms, so you have to leap to conclusions to get your way instead of honestly acknowledging the parameters of your agreement and disagreement, and your stage in examining your own assumptions. In your boiling blood stereotyped antipathy, however, you will always find yourself like Wile E. Coyote and running off a cliff into the air. That´s why Therapeutic Psychology is a basic activity to pursue for personal development, along with a spiritual path. Philosophy alone does have some potential orientations that I know of in DesCartes and Spinoza, and perhaps John Locke. Perhaps the critical thinking perspective of Horkheimer and the Frankfurt School, too. But, whether or not that´s "pearls before swine" is up to you.

Getting back to your attempted argument. If you leap to your ideologically-based presumption that MY arguments are "recycled and vacuous," it won´t be long before your own cognitive dissonance begins. Watch out for your prickly boxed-in mental jailcell bars. From the get-go, you trip on your own presumptions of Jesus´ being "fictional" and unhistorical and your garbled statement about "later legends." You then treat YOUR ideological interpretation as presumptive, and actually presume that the language of the Catholic source you cite itself "AGREES" with you. You don´t seem to perceive the process of YOUR INTERPRETATION of the NON-CONcRETE LANGUAGE used in what source? A CATHOLIC one, and a generalized statement of a secondary nature in an ENCYCLOPEDIA. You take the term "take for granted" which was used without careful consideration of a variety of more rigorous perspectives, and fall into what became a trap of your own making. You´re like the anti-theist version of a very submissive Catholic congregant. Now, self-awareness and intellectual clarity grows with self-disclosure, acknowledgment, and examination of one´s own assumptions. Personally, I majored in Bio Anthropology, worked in Social Services and Financial Services, and got my masters in International Relations drawing on interdisciplinary perspectives with my recognizing the superior explanatory power of the psychosocial and microsociological in many significant categories of events. And I have long followed an interfaith spiritual path linked to Unitarian Universalism after being loosely raised an atheist/secular humanist into High School.

It is on that kind of basis that I can evaluate various issues in regarding Jesus´ historicity in ways that address various modern assumptions. So, as an ideologue, you´re in for it. However, even taking your chosen starting point, or modus operandi more likely, of a Catholic Encyclopedia and your projection fallacies of imposing your interpretive leaps, I´ll just throw a few more darts in a more empirical and more philosophically comprehensive and adequate direction.

Now, as your Encyclopedic references go, your failure to cite, say, "Enlightenment skepticism had given way to a more 'trustful attitude toward the historical reliability of the sources [...] [Currently] the conviction of (scholar EP) Sanders, (we know quite a lot about Jesus) characterizes the majority of contemporary studies.'" Holmén, Tom (2008). Evans, Craig A. (ed.). The Routledge Encyclopedia of the Historical Jesus. Now, a slightly more pointed perspective that begins to dovetail into my own is given by scholar Chris Keith, "(The historical Jesus) can be hypothesized on the basis of the interpretations of the early Christians, and as part of a larger process of accounting for how and why early Christians came to view Jesus in the ways that they did."Chris Keith (2016), The Narratives of the Gospels and the Historical Jesus: Current Debates, Prior Debates and the Goal of Historical Jesus Research, Journal for the Study of the New Testament. All your other allegations are based on faulty premises like the ones I´ve indicated,