Reply To: Lecture 22 – The New Testament Era – The Historicity of the life of Jesus

#16419
gutzmank
Participant

Dinesh D? Really?

These questions are nothing new. The eminent Christian theologian Origen wrote about them as early as the third century, and the pagans raised them almost from the start. For the latter, see Robert Wilken’s THE CHRISTIANS AS THE ROMANS SAW THEM. Wilken, who was then an ordained Lutheran minister, but who later became a Catholic (despite publicly stating that he agreed with the Orthodox about the filioque, Vatican I, etc.), is one of the most prominent historians of Christianity in the last half-century, and that book is outstanding.

The questions posed in this thread all assume that one becomes a Christian as a result of receiving acceptable answers to a series of questions. The first Christians, on the other hand, became Christian because they saw Christ risen, and then they re-read the Old Testament in light of that fact. See, for example, Eusebius’s THE HISTORY OF THE CHURCH, or Kallistos Ware’s THE ORTHODOX CHURCH.