Pharoh

Um, yeah?

The larger points are though, that some really do simply care about the history. And while you, and many others, often bring up the belief that no other ancient historical figure is subjected to the same level of scrutiny, the reality to me, and many others, is historians have been far more forgiving regarding the historical jesus, and have not applied the same rigorous standards and methodology, at least across the board. Further, there is absolutely no need to scrutinize socrates or Siddhārtha Gautama; they are completely irrelevant and it is disingenuous to point to them and other similar characters as examples of unfair treatment of the historical jesus (HJ).

More importantly, this whole type of of argument is nothing but deflection. The HJ stands on his own or it doesn't. The existence of Caesar has no bearing, despite there supposedly being less evidence for him being a favorite of Christians. (I strongly disagree, but again, it is irrelevant.).


I don't believe I ever said that, have I? I accept that the majority of the NT was originally written between 60 and 150 CE, with the occasional exception, such as Hebrews.

My question to you is, given your response, do you seriously doubt the age of the extant copies of the books of the NT? Do you likewise doubt that redactions, edits, and additions were made, and made by "church" authorities?

None of which addresses the central point that there need not be a conspiracy for there not to have been a HJ.



What blows me away is that it was the lack of a conversation by Jews regarding YEC that finally made you accept its silliness. For me, it was geology, chemistry, and physics. I know you now have reconciled these with your religious beliefs, but it is still baffling. Likewise, I want to apply some of those same principles to the discussion of a HJ, at least as the best we can.

I don't really understand why you place so much emphasis on there being a lack of Jewish conversation on the HJ. It appears to me that you are ascribing a greater prevalence and prominence to early Christianity than what actually existed in the first century and beginning of the second, particularly prior to the of Jerusalem. If, as evidence suggests, it was a minor fringe sect and one of many, why would they? It really wouldn't have been an issue until at least the third century, and by then why would they?


That is quite a bit of circular logic there. We are questioning the veracity of the bible, especially the gospels, as it pertains the the HJ, and you reference what is in the bible as evidence.

Now for an honest question, weren't most of Paul's epistles and the first two gospels written for an "international" audience, at least according to conventional wisdom?

Related, we know that there was a fairly large number of peoples/groups who were sympathetic to second temple Judaism and were gentile practitioners, though not adhering to Mosaic law. We also know that the idea of an imminent messiah was gaining steam, both among these groups and elsewhere throughout the Hellenistic world. How is that audience not receptive to Paul's message?


Touched on a bit already up above.



You can be dismissive out of hand if you like. I will try not to, but if Carrier's work is filled with faulty scholarship, bad science, and factual errors, I will indeed feel the same as I do about Ehrman's work. I don't dismiss Ehrman's book because I disagree, but because of the shoddy mistake filled nature.

Also forgive me if the application of Bayesian Reasoning to the HJ question has been discussed here before and I missed it. Perhaps it too will be a "flavor of the month", but we shouldn't fall victim to appeals to popularity; those 99 just might have all been wrong.

dvdjunkie32

That doesn't explain why the stories share common elements with the Biblical account like God destroying the earth and a righteous family building a boat, a dove being sent out etc.....

Draven

How about the writers of the Bible heard the same story that everyone else did and wrote it into their book? That's a much easier explanation than the existence of an Ark that could absolutely not be built.

RoyalTea

dvdjunkie32 - how many hours after the creation of earth did humans appear?

Supermallet

The thing I never got about the Noah story is that God is dismayed by how wicked people are, but this is before he makes a pact with Abraham, and before he gives the laws to Moses, so how the hell are people supposed to know that God exists and how he wants them to act?

Also, to answer moviefan's question, "Is God capable of murder?", I assume the real question is that if God creates life, is it wrong for him to take that life back. And the answer is obviously yes. If I were capable of creating life independent of natural processes, let's go the Victor Frankenstein route and say I can create a creature by re-animating dead tissues, once I create that being, it's alive and I can't just arbitrarily kill it because it's not acting the way I want or it's inconvenient.

Shady12

Even if Jesus existed, from what I've read, the original text didn't say he was born of a virgin but that Mary was a 'young woman' and it was mistranslated into Greek..from what I recall. So, if he existed, he was just some dude, not the Messiah. Guess we're still waiting.

Bandoman

Supermallet

Life of Brian is probably the most accurate depiction of life in Israel under Roman rule.

moviefan2k4

God's not cruel; He interacted with people to let them know what He was like. Noah became the main mouthpiece for the area where he was building the Ark, but no one listened...and they paid for it with their lives.

Your analogy has one problem: you didn't create the original lives later used to build your reconstructed being. If God is the Creator of all life, spiritual and natural, then He's perfectly within His rights to take it back at any point, for whatever reason. That's wrong for us because we didn't create life.

We don't know a lot about the pre-Flood world, but there's evidence to suggest some cultures had things similar to our own inventions today.

Not necessarily. Gd told them to coat the whole Ark with a tar-like substance called pitch, which would make it waterproof and also protect against rot.

I think many legends have their roots in historical truth. The level of disparity from history varies, according to numerous factors.

Not as much as I'd like. One of my friends recently put a hold on our communication, after I said I think he should stand up to his taskmaster of a father. My comments were harsh, but he seems so miserable, and I just wanted to help. I apologized, but he still wants some distance for now.

With all the politics constantly changing, I'm worried about being stranded somewhere like Tom Hanks in "The Terminal"...or worse, ending up in jail.

I don't think I could ever claim a total lack of belief in God, but I walked away from Him for a long time in my teens. It took tons of personal pain to make me realize how much I need Him, even though trusting Him isn't always easy.

I think Frank Turek says it best, in this short clip...

<iframe width="640" height="360" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/mWwEI-ky6uI?feature=player_detailpage" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>

You're welcome.

moviefan2k4

We still have Mary's admission to Gabriel, saying she'd never been intimate with a man (the word "know" was synonymous with that in Biblical times).

Navinabob

Seriously? You can't think of an easy answer for that question? That'd be like me saying that our Sun is really God because so many different cultures had a sun god. Or how about we each are born with an animal spirit?

What about all the ancient cultures that didn't have a flood myth? Did you count those and did some math and figured out that the flood myth must be real because it was a bigger number?

I'll give you a hint if you are still stumped. Native American cultures that lived along the coast of near major water sources have flood stories while the tribes that lived far inland do not.

Let me now ask a question and see if their is a creationist answer for it. Explain how records from Egypt and China carry right through the Biblical Flood period without A) Being killed off, B) Even noticing it.

How about how geologists around the world having no trouble determining when major flooding occurred historically, yet they all seem to miss the greatest flood of all time.

I also love how creationists love to toss out scientific words like tectonic plate shifting, and yet ignore the fact that the experts in tectonic shifting do not agree with the claims creationists make at all. Or use the knowledge that geologists have discovered and studied deep wells of water, but ignore the fact that those same experts say the flood water receding at that level is impossible. So, "Catastrophic plate tectonics theory" has virtually zero evidence for it, and a mountain (haha) of evidence against it. Conventional plate tectonics theory instead fits with what we understand of the known universe in science and happens to cross over and fit through multiple disciplines of study.

It's a lot like knowing enough about anatomy to parrot the names of our internal organs, but then assign them ridiculous uses (Our heart carries our soul and feeling emotions, our brain is is good for math and logic, our spleen filters our negative energy and influences karma) and call it science.

kvrdave

If it was mistranslated into Greek from the Hebrew, why wasn't it corrected in the Greek Old Testament (the Septuagint) when it was made around 200 years before the birth of Jesus? The Hebrew word has several possible meanings including virgin. If it was an inaccurate translation, it would have been fixed long before Jesus came around.

Does that make sense?

Lt Ripley

She certainly wouldn't have been the first woman to lie.

Navinabob

We know a lot of the pre-flood world, you do not. And if you go on about lost ancient technology (that was like ours, but was lost), evidence it will cement the idea that you do not fully understand what the word "evidence" means.

And they did not use pitch like that. What they did back then was dip bits of cloth in pitch and stuffed it between boards. This of it like sealing cracks in a bathtub.

RoyalTea

It was the sixth day, right? So between 144 hours and 168 hours before Adam, there was no Earth, right?

moviefan2k4

True, but the angel would've known, just as God did. The Greeks described Mary with the word "parthenos", a reference to Athena, whom they regarded as a virgin.

cungar

Yeah well she wasn't the first or last to lie about that.

DaveyJoe

Maybe she was born-again.

dvdjunkie32

You are ignoring the fact that a vast number of these cultures around the world have NUMEROUS elements in common with the Bible story.


http://www.apologeticspress.org/apco...y=9&article=64


That's a bit too coincidental for me.

Supermallet

So, if I said to you today: "Moviefan! I come to warn you of a great tragedy. The dread Cthulhu is going to rise from his watery tomb on R'yleh to consume all that walks upon the earth! You must build a great space ship to send Earth life into the stars to escape this vile fate!" and you didn't listen to me, it would be your fault if I happened to be right?

I don't understand that. If I make a work of art, and it gets put in a museum, am I within my rights to have it destroyed later? Creating something does not give you control over the creation for all of existence. The basic logic fails for me on that one.

The only factor I can see here is how badly you want to believe in it.

Mrs. Danger

Well, why didn't he tell them directly, instead of through the neighborhood drunk?

You would think he would understand his own creations. Sheesh!

Mrs. Danger

BTW, that's not the Voice of God. It's just a temporal lobe seizure.

kvrdave

I simply disagree with you on this. Let's be honest, if there is a HJ, you won't suddenly become a believer. You will just believe he was some dude, like many other dudes. The research that is being done is being done by people in exactly the same point. If the HJ is real, they don't become believers. To all of them, this is just like Caesar or anyone else. Just another dude. But they do not treat it as such.

And I think all of that discussion is important to have because it shows motivation and bias. That can obviously be peer reviewed, so it isn't the end of the world. But ultimately with something like this, proving the HJ existed or not will ultimately be like proving whether God is real. There simply won't be a way to definitively prove HJ didn't exist. Just as, I suppose, one can't definitely prove he did. But I think the bulk of the evidence will be obvious to most unbiased people.

And keep in mind, I have (hopefully) made it clear that I don't care. If HJ never existed, I will be shocked, surprised, etc., but my faith will remain.

Actually, that is a great reasons to read Misquoting Jesus. There are lots of changes. 99.9% of the variants are not some malicious thing, though. And I believe (based on the research) that the actual number of the beast is 616. But it isn't like we don't have a dearth of manuscripts, books outside the Bible, etc. to make pretty short work of what it actually says. you could rebuild the NT just using church father's writings on the subject. Those are not so incredibly far removed from the originals. Tertullian lived from 160-220. Lots of guys around during that time wrote about it. Those are good sources used to reconstruct the entire thing.


I'm not saying there IS a conspiracy. I'm saying that the thinking is very much like conspiratorial thinking. The "evidence from silence" thing strikes me that way, most definitely.

"Helped bring home the idea" is a lot different from "finally made me accept." I obviously had some doubts. But it is a weird thing that I would not expect many to understand. Very "cult" like, but that doesn't quite describe it. It is the same allure as the "no HJ" has for some people, or many conspiracies have for others. It is the idea that you are one of the very few who see this and what morons everyone else is (that is too strong, but hopefully gets the point across). It is a bit intoxicating, to be honest. And it isn't like I believed it for long. The fact that Jews did not have that conversation made me sit back and say, "how important could this issue really be? They don't seem to care. Yet the YEC seem to thing this is the lynchpin to everything."

Many Jewish people see Christianity (rightly so, from their perspective) as blasphemy, stealing their religion, hijacking it, etc. I think because they have had a pretty tough heritage most have learned to say things like, "I think he was a great teacher, a good man, etc." instead of saying those things, but it is there. And they are great scholars. Don't kid yourself on that. They really are when it comes to their writings, etc. It was as big a deal 100 years AD as in 400 AD, as in the 1800s. Nobody had greater motivation to show that HJ never existed than they did at every point in history, did they?

Always a tough subject. If a book was deemed to be verifiable, etc. and about Jesus, and from the right time, it was made part of the Bible. But you can't use those texts to prove anything because they are part of a religious text called the Bible. That is circular logic as well.

I suppose it depends on which ones you are talking about. Most of Paul's either written to churches or individuals. Corinthians was not written to all Corinthians, but to the church in Corinth. Timothy, obviously, was written to Timothy. I don't there was concern about them being seen by an international audience, but they were clearly written to specific people, churches, etc. Unless I misunderstand what you are saying. Otherwise, I'd say the synoptic gospel most written to an international audience was Luke, followed by John, and Matthew and Mark being behind those.

I suppose they can be as receptive as any, but how receptive are people today about changing religions? And it isn't just "incorporate this into your Hellenistic view" because Paul admonishes them in huge ways when some try to do that. He makes it clear that it is all or nothing. This isn't a part way deal. You don't get to follow Jesus as part of an incorporation into what you already believe.

But beyond that, if Jesus was fictional, if the disciples didn't really ever see/meet/hang with Jesus, Paul must not have known that he was in on the gag. He is pretty clear about also saying, "hey, you don't have to take my word for it. Many of these disciple dudes are still alive, so go ask them. Others that saw Jesus are also still alive, so go ask them. Many saw the great works and are still alive, so go ask them. Hey, this is his brother James, ask him." It seems pretty obvious that of the "brothers of Jesus" that James was the only one that actually believed Jesus to be the Messiah, but you don't see things like reference to James being the only brother who actually believed he even had a brother named Jesus.

I don't think Carrier's work will be shoddy. But I also don't think Ehrman's work is either. And aside from those on the "Jesus didn't exist" crowd, I don't see any peers that think Ehrman did shoddy work either. Rather, I think Carrier will spin a little tale that doesn't have a whole lot of real evidence in it, he will stretch what he has, and he will work in the "evidence from silence" angle to such a degree than any other researcher would be laughed at in any other subject. But the faithful will certainly enjoy and praise it.

Super busy today, so I don't know if I'll get back into this conversation. Getting ready to head to Vegas for a few days, and life is hectic.

Shady12

This reminds me that pretty much everything in the bible appears in myths previously throughout the region. Makes it seem more likely that it's not true than it's coincidental that it's almost a copy from many, many other stories.

Shady12

So what IS his non-bible based evidence for the truth of Christianity?