The Evidence for a Man

Five lessons on what the documents will and will not carry.

A course on the thought of The God Question.

Theology · Religion

Course outline

1. Miracles and Testimony — The rule that decides in advance what testimony can establish, and the objection that the rule assumes the very thing in dispute. Still philosophy — and by its last beat the question has become…
2. The Myth and the Life — Two ways to write a life of Jesus once the miracles are off the table — dissolve the narratives into the ideas that produced them, or rewrite them as a human story — and why the same four documents…
3. Every Man Found His Own Face — The man who read every life of Jesus the nineteenth century produced, found that each one was a self-portrait, and then wrote one of his own.
4. The Witness Outside — The only first-century non-Christian who mentions Jesus, the passage in him that has been worked over, and how much the outside record actually establishes.
5. What the Criteria Can and Cannot Do — The strongest case that nothing can be known at all, the answer historians actually give, and the discovery that the discipline's own best tool was manufacturing the very distortion Schweitzer had…

Built from

This course was built from 11 books.

• David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding
• David Friedrich Strauss, The Life of Jesus Critically Examined
• David Friedrich Strauss, A New Life of Jesus
• Ernest Renan, The Life of Jesus
• Albert Schweitzer, The Quest of the Historical Jesus
• Flavius Josephus, Antiquities of the Jews
• Tacitus, The Annals
• Gerd Theissen and Annette Merz, The Historical Jesus
• Origen, The Writings of Origen, Vol II (Contra Celsum)
• William Paley, A View of the Evidences of Christianity
• Louis H. Feldman, Josephus and Modern Scholarship 1937-1980

Part of the Simposeum course library.