Did Jesus Exist?

Mark Shea responds with a snort, a yawn, and, as always, some lovely prose.  Excerpts follow:

...Nobody talks this way about any other historical figure, much less a historical figure with the massive impact of Jesus.  For instance, nobody says of Hannibal that he never existed, or that the campaign he waged against Rome was a myth.  When people do attempt such massive conspiracy theories, they inevitably turn out to be either kooks or satirists.

For a good treatment of this silly fad among New Atheists and their socially inept acolytes (who do not understand normal social and affective cues and who therefore can’t conceive of how normal people function in their normal social and emotional interactions: thus blocking them from realizing how absurd this theory is on its face), I suggest this fine series by James Hannam here, here, here, and here.

When you have people making massive efforts to concoct a conspiracy theory that nobody would risk ten cents on any other historical figure, the burden of proof is overwhelmingly on the “Jesus never existed” dude, not on you, to show that his tissue of highly dubious suppositions and theories is valid.  The problem with the ridiculous theorizing behind the Jesus Myth is that you can use it to “prove” that JFK never existed.  (“Would an Ivy League graduate really say “I am a jelly donut” before a crowd of Germans as the JFK chroniclers describe?  Obviously this is a Eucharistic text interpolated into the record in order to invest the JFK myth with cultic significance and transfer the affections of American Catholics from the Church to the so-called “Kennedy family”.  We can see that shortly after these alleged “events” many American Catholics do, in fact, begin to place their faith more in the Kennedy cultus than in their previous allegiance to the Church.  Clearly then, the JFK myth was concocted by the leaders of the Democratic party in order to draw gullible Catholics away from the Church and into their cult.  In addition, the so-called “assassination” of JFK is rife with difficulties.  How many shots were there?  Where did they come from?  Who was behind the so-called “murder” of “JFK”?  Obviously, the whole story is a much later addition to a myth of the seasonal cycles and there originally was no “JFK” and no “assassination”.  The story was added to provide a veneer of tragic martyrdom and solidify support for the Kennedy legend among the new band of followers that emerged in the late 60s and 70s.)

Anybody can play this silly game...

And of course, there's always my favorite response. The saints make absolutely no sense if the faith is false.