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Old 02-25-2015, 09:49 AM
 
Location: "Silicon Valley" (part of San Francisco Bay Area, California, USA)
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Quote:
Originally Posted by valsteele View Post
There is physical evidence of those people (coins with their faces, etc). I don't need to quote anecdotes.
lmao ok then there is physical evidence of Jesus because we have coins with his face and paintings of him etc. What a lame comment.
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Old 02-25-2015, 09:51 AM
 
Location: "Silicon Valley" (part of San Francisco Bay Area, California, USA)
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Quote:
Originally Posted by valsteele View Post
You can't compare Jesus to George Washington. We still have George Washington's teeth for crying out loud. There's zero evidence of Jesus aside from written hearsay.
I agree but I was responding to the argument "Jesus is said to have walked on water, therefore there was no such thing as Jesus".

That is an illogical statement.

Quote:
And cutting down a cherry tree has nothing on walking on water.
So? They're both myths. Hell there are myths about me, people claim I did things as a kid that I didn't really do lol...I guess by your logic I don't exist either.
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Old 02-25-2015, 09:54 AM
 
Location: "Silicon Valley" (part of San Francisco Bay Area, California, USA)
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Quote:
Originally Posted by valsteele View Post
I'm sure there have been thousands of Harry Potter fanfictions written since the first book was released in 1997. So I'd say pretty high.
That's different. Harry Potter is written as fiction. The gospels claim that Jesus was a real person.
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Old 02-25-2015, 11:19 AM
 
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Quote:
I think Jesus is like John Frum or Santa Claus - maybe very loosely based on
a real man, but so loosely it wouldn't even make much sense to say he was a
"real person".
Fair enough from that approach. Though from a historical research perspective, we have the situation that the name 'Jesus' is not simply one but really fashioned of two entitities living in time. We arguably have a 'Jesus before' and a 'Christ' now'. Sort of two really different essences of the individual as time moved on from the first century.

In the construction above, if we term Santa say as a 'Christ' we still apparently have an early 'Jesus' hovering there in the background. And Jesus as an entity sure seems solid to those who study him as a historical and religious personage through the ages. Really utterly fascinating to see. Good historians may need to work with both in their research and that necessitates great control of personal bias that could creep into the analysis.
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Old 02-25-2015, 12:07 PM
 
914 posts, read 764,103 times
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I'm going to go ahead and re-post the primary sources I provided yesterday. These are contemporaries who were living at the time and were actual historians, just like Herodotus and Thucydides were contemporaries in some of the events they wrote about. No serious historian questions any of the works of Josephus, Herodotus, Tacitus, or Thucydides. I also re-issue my challenge to the OP Valsteele to provide the thread with contemporary sources to prove the existence of Julius Caesar, Mark Anthony, Alexander the Great or Socrates (He can take his pick and no memorial coins or statues). If the OP can not provide these sources, then by his metric we can not believe ANY history to be true. See below:

Flavius Josephus (94 CE) Antiquities of the Jews Book 20, Chapter 9, Verse 1:

Festus was now dead, and Albinus was but upon the road; so he assembled the sanhedrim of judges, and brought before them the brother of Jesus, who was called Christ, whose name was James, and some others, [or, some of his companions]; and when he had formed an accusation against them as breakers of the law, he delivered them to be stoned: but as for those who seemed the most equitable of the citizens, and such as were the most uneasy at the breach of the laws, they disliked what was done; they also sent to the king [Agrippa], desiring him to send to Ananus that he should act so no more, for that what he had already done was not to be justified; nay, some of them went also to meet Albinus, as he was upon his journey from Alexandria, and informed him that it was not lawful for Ananus to assemble a sanhedrim without his consent.

Book 18, Chapter 3, Verse 3:

Now there was about this time Jesus, a wise man, if it be lawful to call him a man; for he was a doer of wonderful works, a teacher of such men as receive the truth with pleasure. He drew over to him both many of the Jews and many of the Gentiles. He was [the] Christ. And when Pilate, at the suggestion of the principal men amongst us, had condemned him to the cross, (9) those that loved him at the first did not forsake him; for he appeared to them alive again the third day; (10) as the divine prophets had foretold these and ten thousand other wonderful things concerning him. And the tribe of Christians, so named from him, are not extinct at this day. (This was in the VERY earliest mss of Josephus and can't be successfully challenged).



Cornelius Tacitus (115 CE) Annals Book 15, Chapter 44:

But all human efforts, all the lavish gifts of the emperor, and the propitiations of the gods, did not banish the sinister belief that the conflagration was the result of an order. Consequently, to get rid of the report, Nero fastened the guilt and inflicted the most exquisite tortures on a class hated for their abominations, called Christians by the populace. Christus, from whom the name had its origin, suffered the extreme penalty during the reign of Tiberius at the hands of one of our procurators, Pontius Pilatus, and a most mischievous superstition, thus checked for the moment, again broke out not only in Judaea, the first source of the evil, but even in Rome, where all things hideous and shameful from every part of the world find their centre and become popular
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Old 02-25-2015, 02:16 PM
 
Location: Texas
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I also ask "What the heck is "secular science"? Science is about real matter and builds and organizes knowledge in the form of testable explanations.

Belief in God or spiritual belief is a different thing not inclusive or exclusive to science. Sometimes a scientist may feel an affinity with God, a God and sometimes be an atheist or questioner.

Do you mean to ask why are scientists not trying to prove the existence of God using science? if so, I believe some are.
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Old 02-25-2015, 02:21 PM
 
Location: "Silicon Valley" (part of San Francisco Bay Area, California, USA)
4,375 posts, read 4,056,852 times
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Quote:
Originally Posted by creepy View Post
I also ask "What the heck is "secular science"? Science is about real matter and builds and organizes knowledge in the form of testable explanations.

Belief in God or spiritual belief is a different thing not inclusive or exclusive to science. Sometimes a scientist may feel an affinity with God, a God and sometimes be an atheist or questioner.
I agree.

Quote:
Do you mean to ask why are scientists not trying to prove the existence of God using science? if so, I believe some are.
I think OP's agenda may be to say that "if there never was a real person known as Jesus, therefore there is no God", which is obviously nonsense. Whether or not Jesus of Nazereth ever existed has nothing to do with whether there is a God.
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Old 02-25-2015, 03:36 PM
 
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Quote:
Originally Posted by TenorSax83 View Post
These coins aren't any better than medieval statues of the virgin Mary, because many of these coins had these faces placed on them centuries after they supposedly lived, you know like Lincoln and Washington. So again, I ask you to use your same metric and provide proof of any of these men from sources contemporary of the time.
No, there were coins of the emperors minted during their own reigns, which I think qualifies as being proof they were actual people.
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Old 02-25-2015, 03:39 PM
 
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Quote:
Originally Posted by neutrino78x View Post
That's different. Harry Potter is written as fiction. The gospels claim that Jesus was a real person.
Reading the Harry Potter text without the obvious context that it's fiction, would also suggest it's about a real person.
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Old 02-25-2015, 03:40 PM
 
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Quote:
Originally Posted by neutrino78x View Post
I think OP's agenda may be to say that "if there never was a real person known as Jesus, therefore there is no God", which is obviously nonsense. Whether or not Jesus of Nazereth ever existed has nothing to do with whether there is a God.
That's not my agenda at all. I'm undecided on whether I believe in a God.

What confuses me is why even secular historians generally believe in Jesus. I've studied the evidence of Jesus well and it is not strong. At all.
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