Just a quick note. Over the past many years in reading the work of “Biblical Historians” I have been struck by what, perhaps, should have been self-evident to me from the beginning.
These “scholars” are not trying to understand why, for example, Jesus’ disciples all chose (with the exception of John who was exiled to an island to live out his life) to be martyred rather than renounce their faith — at least according to the accepted tradition.
They have no interest in taking the empty tomb on face value. Why? As historians, they only deal in facts, and no one can assert that anything supernatural is a fact. This is particularly strange because the only reason they have jobs is because the story they’re “researching” is only known to them because it contains supernatural events! So, to them Jesus’s body had to have been moved (by someone unknown to the Disciples) to a permanent tomb, after being placed in the hastily arranged borrowed one at Golgotha.
This problem pervades much of the Christian narrative: No resurrection; Mary wasn’t a sexual virgin; Lazarus was only resuscitated, not revived from a state of death; Jesus didn’t restore sight to the man born blind, nor heal the life-long cripple at Bethesda; nobody actually saw or interacted with a form of Jesus after His death — these were only later “interpolations” of the original texts (and fraudulent at that).
They have no professional obligation to decipher the over-arching “why” of the texts they study. For example, they may try to rigorously lay out the dates and routes the Apostle Paul took in his missionary journeys. They have little to no interest in why he did so. To them, his Damascus Road experience is fantasy.
And, in case you object that these professionals are simply being “academically objective”, it may be that you have not had enough experience with academia to understand that the vast majority of these critics have a very pronounced and very obvious worldview that informs their interpretations. You’re just not going to get objectivity from these folks. And, of course, their message is designed to make them money online. If they’re not going to get their papers accepted by scholarly journals, what’s left?
So, here’s the problem. Sticking to the rules of their vocation, these people will never understand (nor help you understand) the story many of them have spent their lives trying to explicate, if it is true. Only if the story is untrue would they add any peripheral value via its detailed historical events, like documenting a conspiracy plot.
The vocation of analyzing Jesus of Nazareth as just another prophet, another historical figure with a small following in late 2nd Temple Judaism, is, in so many words, a “fool’s errand”. Trying to figure out how this human demonstrably and profoundly changed the world forever, is just not rational if you cannot acknowledge any part of His story as told by His followers as real. It is essentially a waste of their time in writing about it, and ours in reading what they say.
So, if this handful of these scholars are correct (“none of that supernatural stuff happened”), then 2.64 billion people in the world are wrong. The thing that is so absurd about this situation is that these people have pursued a vocation that cannot possibly add any value to that story, one way or the other. To believers, they could care less what these people say or write. To atheists, they too could care less.
Only those on the fringe of religious belief, who, perhaps as a self-defense mechanism, feel the need to justify themselves by reading any and everything that disclaims the Christian story (and approving of it in their social media commentary), comprise the historian’s “market”/audience.
Sadly, that audience of self-righteous cynics is big enough to support many of them through their speculative, certainly heretical, and just plain derogatory books and videos.
Don’t take their bate. They will lead you exactly nowhere.
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