Opening and concluding addresses and responses by Dr William Loader (professor of New Testament at Murdoch) and ancient history teacher David Lewis address a forum held to debate the historicity of Jesus.
Lewis: “Escaping the gravitational pull of the gospels”
Loader: “The fraught project of finding the historical Jesus”
Links to these and the debate they introduced and concluded
Blurb from the ABC religion site:
From December 2005-May 2006, the ABC’s Religion and Ethics web site ran an open forum debating these perennial and important questions.
Two Australian protagonists opened the discussion. David H. Lewis first submitted his article to us – drawing on the work of one of the leading proponents of “Jesus as myth”, G.A. Wells – with a request that we open up such a discussion. We were pleased to oblige, and sought a response to his article from an eminent New Testament scholar, Professor William Loader. We then invited David Lewis to read William Loader’s article and reply, and finally we sought a rejoinder to that from William Loader.
Further from the ABC page:
Did Jesus of Nazareth really exist? Are the gospel accounts of his life, teachings and miracles historically reliable? Why are the writings of St Paul – which are earlier than the gospels – almost silent about the historical person of Jesus?
The search for the historical Jesus is not a new quest. But it is one which provokes passionate debate, and advances in scholarship raise as many questions as they seem to answer.