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Thaaaaaaaank you, Lucidkitty. Now if you could just convince the good pastor Vizio and jeffbase of this fact.
I'm perfectly open to the likelihood that some sort of departure took place from Egypt to somewhere. The numbers of Israelites are probably from the hundreds to a few thousand. I mean people were settling all sorts of places back then. It's not inconceivable that a few hundred goat herders worshipping a deity they called Yahweh wandered into Egypt and settled somewhere out of sight of the Egyptians or that the Egyptians saw them but they were so small in number that the Egyptians said, "Aww, just let 'em be." Maybe after a few hundred years they decided to seek greener pastures and departed. But all the malarkey found in Exodus about God sending plagues and parting the Red Sea and wandering in Sinai for 40 years is just too much. They probably took a wrong turn somewhere that added a month to their trip and a month, as the famous fish story goes, grew into 40 years.
A true believer is never going to believe the evidence because their faith relies on inerrancyIt the Bible isn't inerrant then they have a hard time believing. So they would rather ignore the discrepancies and assume there is an answer to them all. A lot of these people will try to use Bob Cornuke and Ron Wyatt as sources, which tells you that you will never get them to listen to reason.
Quote:
Originally Posted by thrillobyte
What I am having trouble with is that a man who is crucified is not news in the Roman empire. A man who is crucified, setting off darkness for 24 hours, a great earthquake, and zombies rising from the grave and appearing to thousands of people in Jerusalem, the man rising from the dead and appearing to 500 people and then ascending into the sky in front of hundreds of witnesses---all this would have immediately set off reverberations all over the Roman empire. At the very least all the contemporary historians, certainly a scholar as reputable as Philo of Alexandria would have written something to the effect, "There was a Jesus fellow who was crucified and reports are circulating all around Palestine that he rose from the dead and stayed with his disciples for 40 days before ascending into the skies under the power of his god." Something---anything, no matter how small just to show that such a powerful series of miracles did not go unnoticed.
The irony--rather, the truth is that these events went entirely unnoticed by everyone likely because they just never happened. The stories were invented as the gospels were being written, hence the wide diversities in the descriptions being recorded. The authors likely had to pump up the stories to make Jesus appear divine so that pagans would more readily accept him as a god instead of just a wise man as he initially was portrayed.
Assuming those events actually happened and were not made up for consumption. The concept of miraculous men in the Greco Roman world was not new and even many early 1st century rabbis had mystical "powers". Miracles are the least likely thing to have happened, thus we can draw from that and say they likely don't happen. That doesn't mean they are impossible, just that without any way to test miracles impiraclty we had to conclude that any story involving them are either lies or simply people seeing what they want to see. Example: A woman goes to Jesus saying she is sick and he puts his hands on her and she immediately feels better. People seeing this believe she was healed and tell their friends. They don't notice that this woman dies the next week from the illness she was "cured" from. She might of wanted to believe she was cured and her mind *Which is a powerful motivator* made her believe she really did feel better through a burst of chemicals in the brain. You an I understand that can happen, but a 1st century peasant, not so much.
My point is that if you want to search for the Jesus of history you must always discount the miracles. You have to go by the stories from a historical critical view. Looking at the customs, the people, the time. And from a independent attestation point of view. I.E. the more times a separate source tells a story, the more likely it is to be true. For example the Eucharist is reported in early Christian writings, all 4 Gospels, and Paul's letters. We can conclude from this that this was likely an actual event. On the flip side though, the Birth narratives only appear in 2 Gospels, and are completely different from on another. Early Church Fathers also never mention the event. We can conclude that these stories are made up and written to serve a theological point. I.E. Jesus is the new Moses/David and John is the new Prophet to herald that arrival. Each one having several parallels to make that seem obvious.
October 31 1517 The Otterman Turks begin the take Israel by way of Beersheba.
October 31 1917 General Allenby begins to take Israel back by way of Beersheba.
400 years to the day, and also when Martin Luther did his thing and Da Vinci did his.
430 years later after 1517, Israel became a nation again.
Their nation only repeated what happened when they became a nation when the walked out of Egypt.
The first people they fought was Ai, war was declared the day they became a nation.
The Exodus has begun in our lifetime and we have seen it, what the first Exodus was pointing to, was only the last Exodus that we have seen, and who would be so bold as to say that it is not a miracle?
There was absolutely no chance of Israel claiming Israel again, but through the horrendous acts of Hitler and the world, Israel, became a nation again, a people exiled for thousands of years returning and doing the impossible.
The fact that the Exodus happened in our lifetime, is much more bigger than people crossing a little water, they have crossed vast oceans and returned.
Up until 1947 and 1948, I may have given Exodus doubters a pass, but not now since I have seen it with my own eyes.
The Ottomans took The Levant in 1516 not 1517 and Israel was not declared a nation until 1948. That sort of skews your "math" a little bit .
No, I agree with Dr. Herzog (but being Jewish doesn't mean anything). There may have been some people in Egypt who moved into the Northern hill country and brought with them a charter myth about deliverance, but there may not have been. I'm not saying the exodus is historical, I'm saying you can't unilaterally dismiss is as a fairytale just because that sells books on Amazon.
I know. As I pointed out, no such thing ever happened.
I do not, as I have already stated.
No.
I suggest you check out J. Z. Smith's Drudgery Divine and then take that knowledge back to those mythicist theories with you. That should help with all that parallelomania.
And there is not an apologetic word in any of those books. You're imagining things. These are the leading critical scholars in the field.
No one who has ever read a word of any of these authors could ever characterize them this way.
These are the archaeologists and biblical scholars who establish the consensus, and they promote no "proofs" that conflict with anything. You're imagining things. Get your head out of the mythicist claptrap and read some actual scholarship.
I try, but sadly, for me we're on totally different intellectual levels. I tried reading your thesis and it's uhh...Greek to me. I just don't have the capacity to dig down to those finer subtleties you're able to get to. Much of my post was written before I saw your post right after mine where you were talking to the other fellow about the Moses myth coming from the northern parts so no offense intended. I gathered from your belief about Moses being a myth that your religion would not be a problem in your scholarship as it is with jerks like WL Craig and Strobel, nice as they are.
A true believer is never going to believe the evidence because their faith relies on inerrancyIt the Bible isn't inerrant then they have a hard time believing. So they would rather ignore the discrepancies and assume there is an answer to them all. A lot of these people will try to use Bob Cornuke and Ron Wyatt as sources, which tells you that you will never get them to listen to reason.
Yes. If only we could make fundamentalists understand this principle. I think their faith, strong as they like to pretend it is, is in actuality so fragile that the slightest challenge to its credibility sends them into a tizzy. Then it's all-out war against the infidel liberals. Makes you feel like you're dealing with an Americanized hillbilly version of the Taliban.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Lucidkitty
Assuming those events actually happened and were not made up for consumption. The concept of miraculous men in the Greco Roman world was not new and even many early 1st century rabbis had mystical "powers". Miracles are the least likely thing to have happened, thus we can draw from that and say they likely don't happen. That doesn't mean they are impossible, just that without any way to test miracles impiraclty we had to conclude that any story involving them are either lies or simply people seeing what they want to see. Example: A woman goes to Jesus saying she is sick and he puts his hands on her and she immediately feels better. People seeing this believe she was healed and tell their friends. They don't notice that this woman dies the next week from the illness she was "cured" from. She might of wanted to believe she was cured and her mind *Which is a powerful motivator* made her believe she really did feel better through a burst of chemicals in the brain. You an I understand that can happen, but a 1st century peasant, not so much.
My point is that if you want to search for the Jesus of history you must always discount the miracles. You have to go by the stories from a historical critical view. Looking at the customs, the people, the time. And from a independent attestation point of view. I.E. the more times a separate source tells a story, the more likely it is to be true. For example the Eucharist is reported in early Christian writings, all 4 Gospels, and Paul's letters. We can conclude from this that this was likely an actual event. On the flip side though, the Birth narratives only appear in 2 Gospels, and are completely different from on another. Early Church Fathers also never mention the event. We can conclude that these stories are made up and written to serve a theological point. I.E. Jesus is the new Moses/David and John is the new Prophet to herald that arrival. Each one having several parallels to make that seem obvious.
I agree 100%. No arguments from me there and you just earned a rep
I don't know that I've ever read such a weak response. Be intellectually honest with us and yourself and admit that your argument is fallacious and move on to the next one.
Oh, I just thought of a weaker one, when a theist recently stated that he knew his assertion was correct because...... drum roll......"he just knew".
So you use math to try to prove your theory and then say it doesn't matter when it's dis proven? Gotcha!
The Jews had been scattered to the 4 winds of the Earth.
They were even put in ovens.
They were to be punished for their own reasons, and they lost their authority, their city, their nations.
They went out and were persecuted for 2000 years.
God has accomplished an Exodus, and this is a miracle, because it could not have happened but by the cruelest humans, and pure evil.
By the works of pure evil, the world was astonished at the propensity of evil that dwells within man.
Because this evil was so horrendous and unbelievable, the nations decided to accomplish the impossible.
The land of Israel was given back to the people of Israel.
It matters very little what math you put to this.
The fact being that after 2000 years, and after God had said that he would bring them back and make them a nation again, PROOVES their Exodus.
Math doesn't enter into it.
If somebody wants to deny the truth, let them.
The truth being, that after 2000 years, God fulfilled what he said he was going to do even though it was impossible.
Had the evil not taken place, and had the world not been so damned repulsed, it would have never happened, Israel would still not be gathered, but they are.
That's the fact of the matter.
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Now if you could just convince the good pastor Vizio and jeffbase of this fact. 
.
