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Christians are like little robots without processors. They dubstep into church to listen to their preacher give a lot of dishonest spiel about Jesus and Christianity, never once processing any of it from a skeptical view. Then they dubstep out of church and forget it all week until Sunday rolls around again.
But to a few now-former Christians like you and I, we actually said to ourselves, "Hey, that doesn't sound exactly right. Did both thieves mock Jesus or did one? If Luke is only noticing this in 120 CE or so how come Mark wasn't aware of it when he wrote his gospel first circa 90 CE?"
When you confront a Christian like Baptist or Omega or nerfball about thousands of these discrepancies they shrug and say, "Why does it matter?" Well, for a brain without a processor maybe it doesn't matter. But for a brain WITH a processor something doesn't jive when you're told all your life "The Bible is inerrant--there are NO mistakes!" and then you find more errors than an an English usage volume written by a Tibetan monk.
Christians don't think critically. That process has been wiped clean by their pastors and peers who pound into their brains not to question God under any circumstances. They tell Christians it's a sin but what they're really terrified of is Christians finding out the truth and then falling away. Pastors couldn't care less about your salvation--well maybe a few could--but most of them only care about losing their meal ticket when enough Christians stop going to church because they don't believe anymore. Then the pastors are thrown out on the street with their wife and six kids in tow and no job skills to keep them from the bread lines.
You don't think Mike Licona wasn't made painfully aware of this when he was unceremoniously fired from his teaching position at Southern Evangelical Seminary for questioning the veracity of the very topic of this thread??????
There's that ugly word, "inerrancy" again. Christians are SO insecure their holy book will be found at fault they shiver at night wondering when the house of cards is finally going to collapse with them inside it, so "Maintain the status quo at all costs!!!!" they scream. They're all secretly hoping the charade doesn't come to light until after their retirement nest is feathered and they and their families are dead and gone.
Excellent post. I heard - I can't vouch for it - that believers eagerly going to seminary to study the Bible, come out knowing that it isn't true.
All I know is that you can make a damn' good case for enough of it being wrong or at least very slanted or dubious that to talk of 'Innerrancy' is a hoot. It's odd that some Bible apologists accuse atheist bible -critics of thinking 'innerrancy'. When it clear that what is really going on is questioning reliability. It isn't about the exact words said at the resurrection or how many disciples were there on the Sunday night, but about whether one can believe a story told by one who swears that the women ran into Jesus and fell at his feet and he had a chat with them when the other one says that they never saw him at all.
In fact while the Nativity and the resurrection are two of the most ramshackle episodes in the gospels, it's pretty much open to dispute all the way through, apart from some events which, for a laugh, I take as being true because the evangelists cause contradictions by altering the story to try to cover up what actually happened.
Yes - there's history, but for another laugh, when we finally disentangle the true history from the fabrication, the believers wish you hadn't, and ponder the indication that Hezekiah submitted to the Assyrians, agreed to become Sennacherib's vassal again and paid tribute, and if the King left some dead Assyrian troopers behind, it wasn't because YHWH had smitten them.
The authorship of Matthew is of no particular concern to me, but I note that you consistently err in your descriptions of early church history. Matthew is reliably dated to 80-90 A.D. and is believed to have relied on both Mark and the source known as Q, both of which are reliably believed to have arisen out of eyewitness accounts of Jesus and the oral tradition.
Apologetics noted.
Matthew is often dated 80-90 AD by apologists, but historians usually give a wider date range, including the early second century AD. As to being based on a eyewitness account, the fact that Matthew copies large parts of Mark, and it's Chiastic structure would suggest otherwise.
While Q is often said to rely on some teachings of Jesus, there is absolutely no evidence for it's existence. When one looks at the alleged Q material, it also contains narrative, which makes the idea of it being a sayings document suspicious.
Relying on an alleged document we have no evidence for is bad history.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Nerfball
Concerning the first mention of Matthew: ...
We have no reliable dates for Papias, and we have reasons to suspect this passage as Matthew shows no evidence for being written in Hebrew (especially as he plagiarizes Mark).
Straw man at work. We all need to prove what we say or admitwe can't.
Yes, and your straw man is also a false dichotomy.
Transponder is correct, the Christian argument that it can only be prophecy is refuted by looking at possible alternatives. And once we have more rational possibilities, the argument for the supernatural becomes much weaker.
We do not need to prove this as probability is on our side.
Quote:
Originally Posted by omega2xx
This is a perfect example of what I just said. It is easy to pontificate, it is difficult to back it up, and in this case it is impossible. If you can't back, up what you say even a cave man would not believe it.
You dismiss miraculous claims of other religions because they are unbelievable, we do the same with all miraculous claims. We are the ones being consistent.
Another perfect example of the secular fundie, omniscient conduct disorder--blovation with no verifiable evidence.
Which applies to you as well. And we have probability on our side, a point you seem unable to grasp.
Quote:
Originally Posted by omega2xx
I have written records.
With NO evidence they are correct. Whereas we have evidence they are fiction.
Quote:
Originally Posted by omega2xx
All you have is opinions based on ignorance. Externals evidence is another straw man.
And you are back to the same dishonest routine, omega.
Quote:
Originally Posted by omega2xx
It is not necessary unless you can prove even one Messianic prophecy wrong, and you can't.
No, you must prove they happened. And it is you who can not.
Quote:
Originally Posted by omega2xx
Lets look at something you believe, but have no external evidence. A land animal became a whale.
Note: A necessary comment to keep this post from being deleted: My comment is not about evolution, it is an example of believing something with no external evidence.
Whale anatomy is the evidence you claim I do not have. So once again you are wrong.
And you have no evidence they did. It seems unlikely 4 tgells some of th same sories many years aparet.
No you haven't. You have offered a very biased OPINION they did. That is basically because you do not understand the Bible.
Let me help you out here. Biased OPINIONS are not evidence. The OT is the claim, the NT is the evidence unless you can prove it wrong, and you can't. You even have to claim translation are influenced by bias. Another claim you can' support. I have challenged you to prove it, and you have no. Indicating you can't.
When the prophecy says he Messiah will be born in Bethlehem and he was, that is he only evidence necessary, unless you can prove it wrong, and you can't.
The biggest lie is you saying you have evidence for what you say.
Paul tells us he only knows of Jesus through revelations such as dreams and visions, or through scripture. Even Hebrews only talks about a divine being that is described using OT passages. For the Jews and early Christians of that time, this was normal, to see a text that can be read literally to include a second, hidden meaning.
From there it was an easy step to invent gospel Jesus out of the OT. The author of Mark did this throughout his gospel. This does not mean he was completely invented this way, there may have been a historical Jesus, but it does make it impossible to get to this person using the gospels.
And from there to 'prophecy'. So when Christians point out the many 'fulfilled prophecies', all they are really doing is demonstrating just how fictional gospel Jesus is. The greater the number of 'fulfilled prophecies', the more mythical Jesus becomes.
Exactly. I can write Jesus' whole story using only two prior sources that were around before Jesus: the Old Testament and dying/rising god legends. Just as an example let's look at Moses as a template for constructing important events in Jesus life:
1a.Moses escaped being killed as a baby when the decree of a king (Pharaoh) had condemned all male infants to death (Ex 1:8–22)
1b. Jesus escaped being killed as a baby when the decree of a king (Herod) had condemned all male infants to death
(Mt 2:1–16)
2a. Moses was not an Egyptian, but lived among Egyptians (who preserved his life) when an infant (Ex 2:1–10)
2b. Jesus was not an Egyptian, but lived among Egyptians (who preserved his life) when an infant (Mt 2:13–15)
3a. Moses was raised with the legal right to become a king but belonged to a nation (Israel) oppressed by a pagan and foreign government (Egypt)
3b. Jesus was raised with the legal right to become a king but belonged to a nation (Judah-Israel) ruled by a pagan and foreign government (Rome)
4a. Moses freed his people from slavery through a “lamb … without blemish, a male of the first year” (Ex 12:5)
4b. Jesus freed his people from sin through his own blood, being the “lamb of God” without blemish (Jn 1:29; 1Pt 1:19)
5a. Moses came out of Egypt (Ex 13:8–9)
5b. Jesus came out of Egypt (Mt 2:14–15)
6a. Moses spent forty years in wilderness (Deut 8:2)
6b. Jesus spent forty days in wilderness (Mt 4:1–2; Mk 1:13; Lk 4:1–2)
7a. Moses fasted for forty days and forty nights (Ex 24:17–18; Deut 9:9)
7b. Jesus fasted for forty days and forty nights (Mt 4:1–2)
8a. Moses while in the wilderness, was administered to by angels and was tempted (Ex 23:20–23; 17:2, 7)
8b. Jesus while in the wilderness, was administered to by angels and was tempted (Mk. 1:12–13; Mt 4:8–11)
9a. Moses gave the law from a mountain (Ex 19–24)
9b. Jesus gave the new law from a mountain (Mt 5–7)
And that's just one character out of the Old Testament upon whom the gospel writers drew material. We haven't even touched David, Solomon, Joshua, etc. or the prophets yet.
Bottom line question: did Jesus really "fulfill" all these things OR did the gospel writers merely create Jesus' life from this wealth of material sitting in the Old Testament and pagan legends?
Certainly a few posters have convinced me that Matthew got some pointers from the Moses story and since finding out that he might have read the Hebrew scriptures in a version not unlike a hebrew original of the Septuagint (and the Qumran books of the Torah) he might have been a converted Jew, though he seems to have had a searing hatred for those Jews that hadn't converted, which was pretty much all Jewry of his time.
It's rather clever that he uses the Moses prophecy and perhaps the story as a method of shifting Jesus from Judea and sending him to Galilee, despite that being rulesdby another Herodian. But this is all Matthew's plot -writing. This is not an eyewitness recording what he remembered which seems to have escaped the attention of every other gospel -writer, including Luke who wrote about the Bethlehem birth as well. Well -we know Matthew can't be an eyewitness or he would never have got the two donkeys wrong.
Certainly a few posters have convinced me that Matthew got some pointers from the Moses story and since finding out that he might have read the Hebrew scriptures in a version not unlike a hebrew original of the Septuagint (and the Qumran books of the Torah) he might have been a converted Jew, though he seems to have had a searing hatred for those Jews that hadn't converted, which was pretty much all Jewry of his time.
It's rather clever that he uses the Moses prophecy and perhaps the story as a method of shifting Jesus from Judea and sending him to Galilee, despite that being rules by another Herodian. But this is all Matthew's plot -writing. This is not an eyewitness recording what he remembered which seems to have escaped the attention of every other gospel -writer, including Luke who wrote about the Bethlehem birth as well. Well -we know Matthew can't be an eyewitness or he would never have got the two donkeys wrong.
Not just that but I think even some Christians here (maybe it was nerfball...or Omega...maybe it was Baptist--nah, it couldn't be Baptistfundie ) admit that Matthew drew from Mark. Now if Matthew was an actual eyewitness to the events why on earth would he have to copy over 90% of Mark when he could just write his own first-hand account?????????? This is what Christians deliberately fail to see because they simply don't want to know pertinent truths about their religion that could undermine their faith and cause their entire world to collapse.
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