From Christ To Jesus title

It is a peculiarly modern quest, unlike the ancient or medieval worlds, our age wants the facts. Ancient, medieval, early Christians never had such a thing. Who would have question at that time the legitimacy of Christian faith in Jesus Christ?

Anyone can see from above that almost all Historians on Jesus are in reality Theologians. Most of them are also priest/pastor/minister or former priest or had a spouse or father who was.

Christianity is still very present in western culture, despite it went done in the U.S. from 83% in 2003 to 72% in 2017, mainly due to new generations of non-believers.

Most of the universities in the United States have a major workforce of teachers and researchers devoted to something-or-other relating to the bible. Many men and women depend on it for their living while being at the same time members of `faith communities'.

This is even more true for scholars of the New Testament as we can see in the previous tab A Quest of 150 Years. The professionals of the field are not Historians but Theologians and most of them are or have been priest, pastor, minister... The Christian Church is everywhere in their education and life.

Many of these universities teach these kind of doctrines:

Bahrt Ehrman and many other scholars are their products, even if they can change side after.

A conservative environment:

There is a whole economic ecosystem based on the Bible for which so many people depend on, including most of our theologians. It exists almost everywhere in the world and particularly in the United States where study shows that the Faith economy is worth $1.2tn a year – more than the combined revenues of the 10 biggest tech firms in America.

The assumptions implied reflect a serious problem regarding the historical quality of scholarship in biblical studies—not least that which presents itself as self-evidently historical-critical.

And think a little bit outside its "seminary boxes"?

As usual, Catholics lag behind. For a long time, HJ studies were forbidden by the Catholic Church. See Vatican

The first major book of E.P. Sanders, Paul and Palestinian Judaism, was published in 1977, while it was written 2 years earlier but had difficulty to be published due to its controversial nature.

This web site already displays many quotes from scholars resorting on the Argument of Authority, even provocation and insults.

There, it is even more toxic. You can see moderators creating entirely fake messages assigned to you in order to expulse you from their forum... No need to spend much time on it, a couple of examples below on IMDb will be enough.

Jewish, as well as pagan faith literature were based on fake stories passed off as fact.

In 1900, the situation was that archealogy had plenty of evidences for

The minimalist position is a concensus nowadays since most of its opponents like William G. Dever became friends with it:

Over the last 150 years there has been a rise in skepticism with regard to the historical validity of the Gospels. Modern scholarship holds now non-traditional views of Jesus, primarily that he said and did only a small percentage of what the Gospels claim. There are many reasons for that. For example, studies in the ancient art of composition clarified their genre and purpose: they are allegories and metaphors. The stories, characters and decor are setup to serve symbolic meanings.

The New Testament records are rewritings or transformations of older texts and ideas that existed at that time, giving a clear sense of where they come from. Christianity was not special but a product of its time.

Knowing that everything in Christianity can be found elsewhere, there is no reason to believe there is more God behind it than elsewhere. What is the point of coming to earth if it is to repeat what everybody say in your neighbourhood? ;-)

It is impossible to know what the original manuscript of the NT said because these first-generations examples no longer exist, and they have not been transmistted properly afterwards.

In the end, we only have what the winning side left us.

In the absence of any other supporting evidence from the first century that in fact the Jesus of Nazareth portrayed in the Gospels clearly existed, Josephus becomes the slender thread by which such an assumption hangs. And the sound and fury and desperate maneuverings which surround the dissection of those two little passages becomes a din of astonishing proportions.

Verse 16 is an apparent reference to the destruction of Jerusalem that happened several years after Paul's death.

This finality of God's wrath must refer to an event on the scale of the first Jewish War (66-70), when the Temple and much of Jerusalem were destroyed, not, as is sometimes claimed (e.g., by R. E. Brown), to the expulsion of Jews from Rome (apparently for messianic agitation) by Claudius in the 40s. This gleeful, apocalyptic statement is hardly to be applied to a local event which the Thessalonians may or may not have been aware of several years later. Besides, Paul's reference in verse 14 (which many take as the end of the genuine passage) is to a persecution by Jews in Judea, and even the killing of Jesus was the responsibility of Jews in that location. Offering a local event in Rome as a punishment for either crime seems somehow inappropriate. There are also those who question whether any such persecution of Christians took place prior to 70 (see Douglas Hare, The Theme of Jewish Persecution of Christians in the Gospel According to St. Matthew, p.30ff.), indicating that perhaps even verse 14 is part of the interpolation, by someone who had little knowledge of the conditions in Judea at the time of Paul's letter. (Pearson, below, suggests this.)

It does not concur with what Paul elsewhere says about his fellow countrymen, whom he expects will in the end be converted to Christ. Rather, this is characteristic language of 2nd century Christianity. The vicious sentiments in these verses is recognized as an example of "gentile anti-Judaism" and "foreign to Paul's theology that 'all Israel will be saved'." (See Birger Pearson: "1 Thessalonians 2:13-16: A Deutero-Pauline Interpolation," Harvard Theological Review 64 [1971], p.79-94, a thorough consideration of the question.)

a passage in which he speaks of the guilt of the Jews for failing to heed the message about the Christ, Paul refers to Elijah's words in 1 Kings, about the (largely unfounded) accusation that the Jews have habitually killed the prophets sent from God. Here Paul breathes not a whisper about any responsibility on the part of the Jews for the ultimate atrocity of the killing of the Son of God himself. This would be an inconceivable silence if the 2:15-16 passage in 1 Thessalonians were genuine and the basis of the accusation true.

There are no different textual traditions of 1 Thessalonians without the disputed passage. Since this is so, it is claimed, the insertion would have to have been made very early (soon after 70), when there would hardly have been enough time for the evolution from the mythical to the historical Jesus phase. But this is an unfounded assumption. Recently (see The New Testament and Its Modern Interpreters, Epp and MacRae, eds., 1989, p.207f.) some scholars have abandoned the old idea that the first corpus of Pauline letters was assembled no later than the year 90. They now see such a collection as coming around the time of Marcion in the 140s. Even though a few individual letters, like Romans and the two Corinthians, do seem to have been known by the turn of the century to people like Ignatius, the first witness to the epistle 1 Thessalonians in the wider Christian record (beyond the writer who used it to compose 2 Thessalonians, probably in that city) comes no earlier than that first corpus.