Christianity

"Christian mythology incorporated the cosmological theories current eighteen centuries ago. Dante found it a slight strain to combine this mythology with the facts known in his own day. Milton found it harder. Mr. Lewis finds it impossible."

"Eternal rest grant to him, O Lord; and let light perpetual shine upon him. May his soul, and the souls of all the faithful departed, through the mercy of God, rest in peace."

"Rest, weary heart, From all Thy silent griefs and secret pain, Thy profitless regrets, and longings vain; Wisdom and love have ordered all the past, All shall be blessedness and joy af last; Cast off the cares that have so long oppressed; Rest, sweetly rest!"

"Lord Jesus, I am weary in Thy work, but not of it. If I have not yet finished my course, let me go and speak for Thee once more in the field, seal Thy truth, and come home to die."

"After the burden and heat of the day, The starry calm of night; After the rough and toilsome way, A sleep in the robe of white. Oh, sweet is the slumber wherewith the King Hath caused the weary to rest! For, sleeping, they hear the angels sing, They lean on the Master's breast. Tarry with me, O my Saviour; Lay my head upon Thy breast Till the morning; then awake me — Morning of eternal rest."

"Sit thou at the feet of Christ, and within the influence of His all-composing calmness thine all-disturbing activity shall be gently soothed into quietness and peace; there thy weary soul shall find rest and bliss."

"Go where ye will, your soul shall not sleep sound but in Christ's bosom."

"For me, my heart, that erst did go Most like a tired child at a show, That sees through tears the mummers leap, Would now its wearied vision close, Would childlike on His love repose, Who giveth His Beloved, sleep."

"The Princess Elizabeth, of England, was found dead with her head resting on her Bible, open at these words, "Come unto me, all ye that labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest." So may we all fall asleep at last when the day's work for Jesus is over, and wake up in heaven to find ourselves in the delicious rest that remaineth for the people of God."

"You are made to find your rest only in God. As the eye craves light, and the ear sound, your higher nature sighs for God. Your desires, vainly seeking rest apart from Him, are trailing flowers climbing up the reeds and stalks only to bend them down to the earth, instead of grasping a high and strong support that would lift them up and let them hang out their bells in the sun. God alone can satisfy the soul. It needs His infinite love and unclouded light to meet its lon'ging."

"It is not in understanding a set of doctrines; not in outward comprehension of the " scheme of salvation," that rest and peace are to be found, but in taking up, in all lowliness and meekness, the yoke of the Lord Jesus Christ."

"Rest in the Lord. Let your intellect, your judgment, your reason, rest in God; in God personal, and possessed of every perfection—almighty and all-knowing, kind, righteous, and holy; that is, on a God truly Divine. Rest in the Lord as He reveals Himself in the gospel, merciful and gracious. Faith in God is good, but faith in Him as our own God is better."

"Oh, give Thine own sweet rest to me, That I may speak with soothing power A word in season, as from Thee, To weary ones in needful hour."

"Thou hast made us for Thyself, and the heart never resteth till it findeth rest in Thee."

"It is not the placidity of stupid ease that we should covet, but the repose that is requisite for the renewal of exhausted strength, the serenity that succeeds the storm, and the salubrity that repays its ravages."

"Rest is not quitting This busy career; Rest is the fitting Of self to its sphere."

"If thou seek rest in this life, how wilt them then attain to the everlasting rest? Dispose not thyself for much rest, but for great patience. Seek true peace — not in earth, but in heaven; not in men, nor in any other creature, but in God alone."

"[G. A.] Wells argues that the Gospels contain much that is demonstrably legendary, and they are directed by theological (not historical) purposes."

"Christianity and its Christ, [Bruno] Bauer argued, were born in Rome and Alexandria when adherents of Roman Stoicism, Greek Neo-Platonism and Judaism combined to form a new religion that needed a founder."

"[Bruno Bauer] promoted the view that Christianity was syncretistic and mythical at its beginnings."

"Although Wells has been probably the most able advocate of the nonhistoricity theory, he has not been persuasive and is now almost a lone voice for it. The theory of Jesus' nonexistence is now effectively dead as a scholarly question." and "The nonhistoricity thesis has always been controversial, and it has consistently failed to convince scholars of many disciplines and religious creeds... Biblical scholars and classical historians now regard it as effectively refuted."

"I.e. if we leave out of account the Christ-myth theories, which are hardly to be reckoned as within the range of serious criticism."

"The essentials of the message Paul preaches are not coming from those who were with Jesus, whom Paul sarcastically calls the “so-called pillars of the church,” adding “what they are means nothing to me” (Galatians 2:6), but from voices, visions, and revelations that Paul is “hearing” and “seeing.” For some that is a strong foundation. For many, including most historians, such “traditions” cannot be taken as reliable historical testimony. (James Tabor, “Paul as Clairvoyant,” accessed 21/09/2012, http://jamestabor.com/2012/05/23/paul-as-clairvoyant-2)."

"Whether the gospels in fact are biographies—narratives about the life of a historical person—is doubtful. Their pedagogical and legendary character reduces their value for historical reconstruction. New Testament scholars commonly hold the opinion that a historical person would be something very different from the Christ (or messiah), with whom, for example, the author of the Gospel of Mark identifies his Jesus (Hebrew: Joshua = savior), opening his book with the statement: “The beginning of the good news about Jesus Christ, God’s son.”"

"In an article ('The Historiography of the Pentateuch: 25 Years after Historicity' Scandinavian Journal of the Old Testament 13, 1999, 258-283) I have discussed why I think it is very difficult to establish the historicity of figures in biblical narrative, as the issue rather relates to the quality of texts one is dealing with. I work further on this issue in my Messiah Myth of 2005. Here I argue that the synoptic gospels can hardly be used to establish the historicity of the figure of Jesus; for both the episodes and sayings with which the figure of Jesus is presented are stereotypical and have a history that reaches centuries earlier. I have hardly shown that Jesus did not exist and did not claim to. Rather, I compared our knowledge about Jesus to our knowledge of figures like Homer. As soon as we try to identify such an historical figure, we find ourselves talking about the thematic elements of stories."

"The assumptions that (1) the gospels are about a Jesus of history and (2) expectations that have a role within a story’s plot were also expectations of a historical Jesus and early Judaism ...are not justified."

"In the academic mind, there can be no more doubt whatsoever that Jesus existed than did Augustus and Tiberius, the emperors of his lifetime. Even if we assume for a moment that the accounts of non-biblical authors who mention him - Flavius Josephus, Tacitus, Suetonius, Pliny the Younger and others - had not survived, the outstanding quality of the Gospels, Paul's letters and other New Testament writings is more than good enough for the historian."

"[The non-Christian references to Jesus from the first two centuries] render highly implausible any farfetched theories that even Jesus' very existence was a Christian invention. The fact that Jesus existed, that he was crucified under Pontius Pilate (for whatever reason) and that he had a band of followers who continued to support his cause, seems to be the part of the bedrock of historical tradition. If nothing else, the non-Christian evidence can provide us with certainty on that score."

"Zindler depends on secondary works and writes with the aim of proving the Christ-Myth theory, namely, the theory that the Jesus of history never existed."

"Not all mythicists agree with each other about what they view as the correct explanation of the origin of Christianity and of the Jesus myth. [...] [Some mythicists] claim that whether a mere man named Jesus ever existed at the time when the Christian era began is an impossible thing to either prove of disprove today."

"The writing of biographies of Jesus is of doubtful critical value. Legend has coloured the historic data too much, and outside corroborative testimony is too slender..."

"[Per a review of The Historicity of Jesus (1912)] “The New Testament data are perfectly clear in their testimony to the reality of Jesus’s earthly career” ...ignores the whole symbolic interpretation set forth in Ecce Deus. If this interpretation be in large measure correct, then the New Testament data would seem to be perfectly clear in their testimony against the historicity in question. Unless the error of that interpretation be shown, this leading argument in Professor [S. J.] Case’s summary falls to the ground."

"His published work on the Synoptic Problem had already contributed towards exploding the theory of the “Christ-myth”—that Jesus as a historical person never existed—by providing the two oldest records of His life to be genuine historical documents.""

"As Morton Smith remarks, [G. A.] Wells’s argument is mainly based on the argument from silence ...arguing for “unknown proto-Christians who build up an unattested myth . . . about an unspecified supernatural entity that at an indefinite time was sent by God into the world as a man to save mankind and was crucified”."

"Historically, it is quite doubtful whether [Jesus] Christ ever existed at all, and if He [Jesus] did [exist] we do not know anything about Him."

"I knew from LDS [Latter Day Saints] statistics that the early growth of Christianity was in no way astonishing. All that was required for Christians to number 6 million within the time that history allows was a growth rate of 40 percent per decade, which is significantly lower than the recent LDS rate (Stark 1996a:7, 14)."

"Paul shows us with what complete indifference the earthly life of Jesus was regarded by primitive Christianity."

"Today, nearly all historians, whether Christians or not, accept that Jesus existed and that the gospels contain plenty of valuable evidence which has to be weighed and assessed critically. There is general agreement that, with the possible exception of Paul, we know far more about Jesus of Nazareth than about any first or second century Jewish or pagan religious teacher."

"In the 1910's a few scholars did argue that Jesus never existed and was simply the figment of speculative imagination. This denial of the historicity of Jesus does not commend itself to scholars, moderates or extremists, any more. … The "Christ-myth" theories are not accepted or even discussed by scholars today."

"Some nineteenth-century rationaists maintained that he never existed, that the gospels portrayed an ideal Jew who never was. A clutch of German and British writers was capable of that historical nonsense, some of which has resurfaced. It would be easier to establish that there never was an emperor Nerva, a name invented to fill the gap of ignorance of the years between Domitian and Trajan."

"Since the Enlightenment, the Gospel stories about the life of Jesus have been in doubt. Intellectuals then as now asked: 'What makes the stories of the New Testament any more historically probable than Aesop's fables or Grimm's fairy tales?' The critics can be answered satisfactorily...For all the rigor of the standard it sets, the criterion [of embarrassment] demonstrates that Jesus existed."

"An examination of the claims for and against the historicity of Jesus thus reveals that the difficulties faced by those undertaking to prove that he is not historical, in the fields both of the history of religion and the history of doctrine, and not least in the interpretation of the earliest tradition are far more numerous and profound than those which face their opponents. Seen in their totality, they must be considered as having no possible solution. Added to this, all hypotheses which have so far been put forward to the effect that Jesus never lived are in the strangest opposition to each other, both in their method of working and their interpretation of the Gospel reports, and thus merely cancel each other out. Hence we must conclude that the supposition that Jesus did exist is exceedingly likely, whereas its converse is exceedingly unlikely. This does not mean that the latter will not be proposed again from time to time, just as the romantic view of the life of Jesus is also destined for immortality. It is even able to dress itself up with certain scholarly technique, and with a little skillful manipulation can have much influence on the mass of people. But as soon as it does more than engage in noisy polemics with 'theology' and hazards an attempt to produce real evidence, it immediately reveals itself to be an implausible hypothesis."

"The pseudoscholarship of the early twentieth century calling in question the historical reality of Jesus was an ingenuous attempt to argue a preconceived position."

"When Professor Wells advances such an explanation of the gospel stories [i.e. the Christ myth theory] he presents us with a piece of private mythology that I find incredible beyond anything in the gospels."

"Whatever else Jesus may or may not have done, he unquestionably* started the process that became Christianity…"

"The myth theory as stated by J. M. Robertson does not exclude the possibility of an historical Jesus. “A teacher or teachers named Jesus” may have uttered some of the Gospel sayings “at various periods.” The Jesus ben-Pandera of the Talmud may have led a movement round which the survivals of an ancient solar or other cult gradually clustered. It is even “not very unlikely that there were several Jesuses who claimed to be Messiahs.” The founder of the movement may have met his death by preaching a subversive political doctrine, and the facts may have been suppressed by later writers. A Galilean faith-healer named Jesus may have been offered as a human sacrifice by fanatical peasants at some time of social tumult."

"[J. M.] Robertson is prepared to concede the possibility of an historical Jesus perhaps more than one having contributed something to the Gospel story. "A teacher or teachers named Jesus, or several differently named teachers called Messiahs" (of whom many are on record) may have uttered some of the sayings in the Gospels. (J. M. Robertson, Christianity and Mythology, revised edition, p. 125) [...] What the myth theory denies is that Christianity can be traced to a personal founder who taught as reported in the Gospels and was put to death in the circumstances there recorded."

"We know next to nothing about this Jesus. He is not the founder of anything that we can recognize as Christianity. He is a mere postulate of historical criticism—a dead leader of a lost cause, to whom sayings could be credited and round whom a legend could be written."

"[Per Paul-Louis Couchoud] The salient fact about Jesus ...is that he is a God. Paul, the earliest extant Christian author (eight of whose reputed epistles Couchoud regards as basically genuine, though much edited and interpolated), treats Jesus as God."

"[J. M.] Robertson is prepared to concede the possibility of an historical Jesus perhaps more than one having contributed something to the Gospel story. "A teacher or teachers named Jesus, or several differently named teachers called Messiahs " (of whom many are on record) may have uttered some of the sayings in the Gospels."