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This is actually kind of cool. it left evidence to the exact opposite. and you didn't care back then.
why not?
I don't comprehend what you're trying to say. Are you actually saying God >>>DID<<< leave us evidence of Jesus son of God and God himself that is indisputable, incontrovertible and beyond doubt???????
I mean that a person isn't justified (rational or morally correct) in opposing/antagonizing theism unless and until they can give a good argument for why we should think theism is false. Think about it. Would it automatically be okay to oppose any other worldview? Or would you be expected to have a good reason for doing so? I think the same should go for theism. No reason to oppose it? Then don't.
I don’t oppose theism for those who believe. I simply said I do not believe in God or gods.
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Originally Posted by thrillobyte Yes, it does. Why don't you sit down and try to write a biography of Peter Stuyvesant without using any reference materials.
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Originally Posted by Rafius
...including verbatim, what he said, to whom and when
Exactly! Thank you, Rafius. What astonishes me about the human race is that for 2000 years the vast majority of Christianity were completely bereft of critical discernment skills. They blindly accepted that everything in the gospels were solidly spoken by Jesus. They never stopped to reason,
"Wait a second. Was John, leaning on Jesus breast, actually scribbling all this down with a stylus on wax tablets and grabbing a new one from a stack of 200 blank wax tablets next to him while he pitched the old one to Peter, who carefully stacked them as quickly as John scribbled them?????"
I mean how naive do these churchmen think we are? But Christian patsies bought this bunk for 2000 years on the church's assurance that it was the Holy Spirit who was "inspiring" John to remember Jesus' last supper speech and write it all down word-for-word some 70 years later.
Seems to me that was the point, that we should look at the evidence and not think that the presence of "supernatural stuff" undermines it.
And the fact that his biographies were written some 400 years after his death doesn't affect the reliability of those biographies.
That the church renamed a collection of documents "The New Testament" doesn't magically strip them of their reliability, at least on certain points. As Ehrman and others have said, there's more evidence that Jesus existed than most figures of antiquity. That's just the fact; and it doesn't matter that the church later claimed that evidence as its own for the purposes of constructing "The Holy Bible".
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Originally Posted by Harry Diogenes
True, THAT is not why the NT is regarded as unreliable.
A 'fact' based on Christian apologetics and invented histories.
If some religion had adopted existing writings about Alexander as the Son of Zeus into their Holy Writ would all the writings be considered Alexandran apologetics and invented histories????? You ignore the fact the Alexander was a prominent secular figure and Jesus was essentially a secular nobody in a backwater of the Roman Empire, yet there was more ancient writing about Jesus than Alexander.
Very true. So let's looks at the evidence for Jesus. What do you see?
Early, independent sources attesting to many of the same things about this man. Compared to most figures of his time, he's apparently very well documented.
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Ehrman has a job to protect.
And all the others? Lol. I'm sorry, this is amusing, how many conspiracy theories do we have to come up with to explain this, that, the other thing, and pretty much everything away...
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And doesn't the fact that the council at Nicaea picked and chose what to include in the Bible strictly according to what THEY wanted included in it bother you in the least?
What is that suggesting? Are we going to appeal to as as-yet-to-be-constructed alternative historical document now?
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Jesus existed in two possible ways: as an ordinary man or as the unique son of God. We have no evidence for either outside the gospels.
And the letters from Paul. And keep in mind that all of these are reasoned by NT scholars to pull from earlier sources. But even without any of that, it's already more documentation than most people from that time period.
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Ehrman argues an ordinary man named Jesus existed and was crucified. He has never argued the latter. I maintain it's possible an ordinary man named Jesus existed. In fact, hundreds of men named Jesus existed at that time.
See that's where you go off the rails. The evidence isn't that some person named Jesus was crucified. It's that a particular person named Jesus was crucified, and the vast majority of scholars agree that we can know additional things about him.
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You tell me which of them is the subject of the gospels and show me some proof why you chose that particular one out of the hundreds of others who were claiming to be the Messiah at that time.
I would instead challenge you to give evidence there were hundreds of men named Jesus claiming to be the Messiah! And I think it's pretty clear that the four gospels and Paul are talking about the same man.
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Show me the evidence outside the New Testament.
You mean, later accounts? Like Josephus? If we're trying to get in touch with the historical method, why are we favoring later accounts over the earlier ones?
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When the argument is airtight that's all you need to prove Jesus does NOT have God's stamp of approval. What else could you possibly need to prove to yourself Jesus is just an ordinary man?????
You didn't understand me. I had to change your argument to make it logically airtight, but the result was just an argument that "if a god wanted us to believe now that Jesus was his son, etc., he would have left us evidence (well, actually, absolute proof) of that." But it's no part of Christianity that god wants everyone to believe Jesus was his son immediately. Indeed, about 25% of Christians hold to Universalism and so they might not even believe god wants us to believe it any time before we die.
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If people can live on possibilities and base their entire way of living on a possibility then God bless them.
They would only be using that possibility to refute an argument against Christianity. Obviously, Christians believe in their god for entirely different reasons.
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I dont classify myself as a mythicist. I can accept there might have been a Jesus upon which the gospels were based. But the gospels were written 100 years after this Jesus.
1. Well, the earliest gospel is dated to A.D. 70 (or earlier), neverminding the preMarkan passion narrative which is obviously earlier still.
2. The letters from Paul are said to be earlier than the gospels, with the four-line formula about Jesus' death and alleged resurrection possibly being written within five years of his passing.
3. Even if all of these writings were in fact written 100 years after Jesus' death, they would still be mined for historical facts. Again, we've got examples such as Alexander the Great's biographies that were written much later than that.
Early, independent sources attesting to many of the same things about this man. Compared to most figures of his time, he's apparently very well documented.
Vague words, Vic. What exactly are these "early, independent sources" apart from the Bible?
Vague words, Vic. What exactly are these "early, independent sources" apart from the Bible?
The early, independent sources were the documents later collected by the church, then put into the New Testament. These are the documents most discussed (because they're the earliest sources) and they consist of Paul's writings and the four gospels.
I mean how naive do these churchmen think we are? But Christian patsies bought this bunk for 2000 years on the church's assurance that it was the Holy Spirit who was "inspiring" John to remember Jesus' last supper speech and write it all down word-for-word some 70 years later.
Not to mention John transcribing verbatim in chapter 17 the prayer of Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane, while being 50 metres away, tired, hungry and SLEEPING with all the others.
Sorry pal but Ehrman looses all credibility if he hangs his hat on the likes of Ken Dark and Yerdena Alexandre. Ms Alexandre (the last time I looked) had not even submitted her work for peer review.
However, your hero Ehrman concludes in his 'blog' ...
The AP story concludes that “the dwelling and older discoveries of nearby tombs in burial caves suggest that Nazareth was an out-of the-way hamlet of around 50 houses on a patch of about four acres… populated by Jews of modest means.”
That I have no problem with and have not said anything to the contrary. As I said in my post which you probably overlooked in your frantic haste to score a point for Christianity, there was no TOWN or CITY (with a synagogue) as described in the gospels at the time of the Christian man-god for him to have come from. Thus, yet again the gospels are found wanting when it comes to truth. According to the archaeological evidence we have, what Nazareth was at the alleged time of the Christian man god, was a few hovels and a farm or two. No town, no city, no synagogue. It expanded in the mid-first century after the Jewish wars, when passing displaced Jews were looking for a place to settle.
Sorry pal but Ehrman looses all credibility if he hangs his hat on the likes of Ken Dark and Yerdena Alexandre. Ms Alexandre (the last time I looked) had not even submitted her work for peer review.
I don't care what your feelings are about any of these three. The evidence was found and can't just disappear because you forgot to put a wand in your hand while waving it.
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However, your hero Ehrman
You mean the New Testament scholar Ehrman, surely.
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concludes in his 'blog' ...
The AP story concludes that “the dwelling and older discoveries of nearby tombs in burial caves suggest that Nazareth was an out-of the-way hamlet of around 50 houses on a patch of about four acres… populated by Jews of modest means.”
That I have no problem with and have not said anything to the contrary.
You said what I quoted you as saying. "...and yet there was no 'city'/town' of Nazareth at the alleged time of the Jesus man-god"
Quite literally, that was it.
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there was no TOWN or CITY (with a synagogue) as described in the gospels at the time of the Christian man-god for him to have come from.
Besides the fact that this doesn't address Ehrman's point about how you could possibly know that yet (you can't), it is at best evidence that Nazareth wasn't as described. But apparently there was a town of Nazareth and so it's perfectly possible that Jesus was from there as reported.
And of course the final point you failed to address was that even if it turned out that there was no Nazareth, it still doesn't issue in the conclusion that Jesus didn't exist. Nor does it render anything else in the gospels false.
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