For People Who Think There Was No Historical Jesus

[tokutter]

The Fallacy of the Pre-Determined outcome goes something like this...

There is a baseball game and late in the game one team is losing by a run. They get a runner on base who tries to steal second and is thrown out. On the next pitch, the batter hits a home run. One announcer notes that if the runner had not been caught stealing they would now be in the lead.

The problem here is that it assumes the result would have been the same.

If the runner had not tried to steal the pitcher may have thrown to first, he may have thrown a different pitch in that situation or he might have pitched out in an effort to anticipate the runner stealing. And what of the batter. With a runner on first the manager could have signaled him to sacrifice bunt? Or try to hit behind the runner to advance him to third? The batter may have even taken a pitch to give the runner a chance to steal. There simply is no way to know what would have happened next. However, with no one on base the entire situation changes and the batter is free to swing away and the pitcher is not distracted by the runner.

The is a guy over at FRDB who wrote this extensive list of ancient writers and came up with a reason why none of them mentioned Josephus' TF. Very impressive except all he showed is that none of them knew about it. You can always make up reasons why someone did not do something but Occam's Razor suggests that had the TF existed someone, particularly a xtian writer, would have mentioned it.

Similarly here. IF Paul was an actual person who lived a century before Justin and wrote these critical epistles it simply boggles the mind that Justin never heard of him and used the name. This is very close to the "Great Christian Paradox." Jesus was so fucking dangerous that the powers that be had to break every rule in their own book to deal with him YET at the same time he was so inconsequential that no one noticed him? If Paul was this towering figure in the first century bringing this semi-jewish shit loaf to gentiles then the Gentiles should have known all about him and revered him, shouldn't they? Instead, we find "his" epistles being trotted out by Marcion and, it would seem, only later being adopted into the growing xtian bullshit story of the day.

Call me suspicious.

Well my day has not been a waste. Another lesson well learned from Min. Thank you sir.