Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: September 19, 2025
To discuss the literal historicity of the story of the Garden of Eden is as absurd as to seek to discover who was the sower who went forth to sow or the Samaritan who went down to Jericho. Even, if no member of the despised Samaritan race ever followed in the footsteps of an hypocritical Levite along the rocky road to Jericho and succored a needy human being, the vital truth abides.
The reports of His mighty works have to be carefully scrutinized by historical scholars, and no doubt the historicity of some of them is much more fully attested than that of others; but when every allowance is made for the ideas of a prescientific age in which miracles were relatively frequent, and for the possible growth of the marvellous elements in the tradition, enough remains to show that here was a Personality whose power cannot be limited by our usual standards of human ability.
He said that while rationalists and supernaturalists alike, by their methods, sacrificed the divine content of the story and clung only to its form, his hypothesis sacrificed the historicity of the narrative form, but kept the eternal and spiritual truth.
We can bear witness to the truthfulness of the record of the consciousness of shame and separation from God in the story of the fall of Adam and Eve; we must leave the question of the historicity of the narrative and the scientific view of the origin of the race in a single pair to the investigations of scholars.
There is enough historicity in the narratives to convince sober historians, whatever their faith or unfaith, that Jesus existed as a man among men, and that He was conscious of a relationship to God and a significance for men which transcend anything in ordinary human experience.
The position, then, that there is not a single saying of Jesus in the gospels which is quoted by Paul in his many epistles is unassailable, and certainly fatal to the historicity of the gospel Jesus. Again, from Paul himself we learn that he was a zealous Hebrew, a Pharisee of Pharisees, studying with Gamaliel in Jerusalem, presumably to become a rabbi.
As early as John's time, if he is the writer of the epistle, Jesus' historicity was questioned. The gospel of John also hints at the existence in the primitive church of Christians who did not accept the reality of Jesus.
If the historicity of Jesus, in any degree, could be proved, it would give us reason for supposing what I have personally always been inclined to believe that there was also a historical nucleus for such personages as Osiris, Mithra, Krishna, Hercules, Apollo and the rest.
"A loftier race than e'er the world Hath known shall rise With flame of liberty in their souls, And light of science in their eyes." The documents containing the story of Jesus are so unlike those about Lincoln or any other historical character, that we must be doubly vigilant in our investigation. The Christians rely mainly on the four Gospels for the historicity of Jesus.
It was this sense of the insufficiency of the evidence which drove the missionaries of Christianity to commit forgeries. If there was ample evidence for the historicity of Jesus, why did his biographers resort to forgery? The following admissions by Christian writers themselves show the helplessness of the early preachers in the presence of inquirers who asked for proofs.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking