Shit. What The Hell. Jesus Never Existed

[Minimalist]

Take your time to reply.  I'll be busy most of tomorrow.

[Wyrd of Gawd]

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Ok.  You took the time to give an honest answer so I'll tone it down.

Here's the problem.  You are speculating.  We both know what the book says.  It is right there for everyone to read if they so desire.  Just like the absurd census of Augustus serving as the need for Joseph and Mary to go to Bethlehem it is a literary construct to get Paul to go to Damascus where he has his "flash" in the road.

No that's not accurate. You're comparing apples with oranges. Think of it this way, if I told you a story about my childhood and my friends told you the same thing you could be inclined to believe it. But actually I made it all up. It's very hard to corroborate childhood events, which is what the nativity is speaking of, whereas Paul's conversion is something contemporary and the author of acts either knew Paul personally or was a close associate of Luke who did know Paul personally.

But there is no source that says other than that Paul was going to Damascus to drag recalcitrant jews back to jerusalem to be punished by the Sanheddrin.  Remember, this is the same bunch of schmucks who just a few years earlier couldn't even punish a blasphemer without Pilate's permission....or so the story goes.  You need to face the fact that anything other than what is on the page is something which you just invented.  We can call it the Gospel of Danny, for short.  Who knows?  In 2,000 years they may make you a saint.

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No, they did practise stonings etc. According to the gospels the Jewish authorities couldn't stone Jesus to death because he hadn't breached a law that required it - it had nothing to do with whether they were capable of doing it. However, as you would well know, I don't agree that the Jews were responsible and neither do most scholars.

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You need to face the fact that anything other than what is on the page is something which you just invented.  We can call it the Gospel of Danny, for short.  Who knows?  In 2,000 years they may make you a saint.

Well that's not true, there is other evidence that suggests that in some respects the gospel accounts of the death of Jesus are not entirely accurate. That doesn't alter the fact however that most scholars agree the overwhelming evidence shows that Jesus was killed by Roman crucifixion. Every ancient text contains at least some factual errors in it, that doesn't mean none of them are useful for understanding history.

I have the same problem with Josephus.  In 250 AD we have Origen quoting from Book XVIII of Antiquities of the Jews and he does not know shit about the Testimonium Flavianum.  Never mentions it in spite of the fact that it would have nailed the point he was trying to make.  C. 325 we have the TF in Eusebius in all its glory.  In fact, not one to waste a good thing Eusebius used the TF in two other works of his.  Understandable, Handel was especially known for taking a rollicking good tune from one opera/oratorio and inserting in to another.  But.  Between Origen's conspicuous silence and Eusebius' over-the-top bullshit we have a vast chasm and this is not lost even on modern apologists who can't pretend that Eusebius' oeuvre could have been written by a first century jewish aristocrat.  So they try to scale it down so that it does not look like such an obvious forgery but the basic problem remains.  We do not have it - or a reference to it - from any xtian or pagan writer prior to Eusebius.  And, as noted, when it appears it is with trumpets blasting in all its 4th century xtian panoply of all things jesus.

Testimonium Flavianum refers only to Ant.18.3.3. Ant.20.9 and Ant.18.5 are viewed as genuine by most historians. Again just because 18.3.3 specifically is a fraud doesn't automatically make any other part of it fraud Min. I don't think we can distil absolute truth from 18.5 and 20.9 but at least they do corroborate the facts that Jesus had lived and that James the Just and John the Baptist were martyred (killed as a result of their religious beliefs). I'm sure you would agree that a person's religious beliefs are not a reason to persecute and kill them.

Note that 18.5 and 20.9 both contradict the early church (2nd cent. accounts) to some extent. Not entirely but in the details. If it was a Christian alteration you would expect it to agree completely with the Christian accounts. In particular the death of John the Baptist's death is quite different and if it was a Christian alteration it would have been more in-line with the Christian account. But the facts that are the same are the time-frame he was killed in and the reason.

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You are a great comedian.  A supposedly believer who calls the biblical fairy tale a lie.  The Jews were always trying to kill Jesus but they were incompetent.  The priests came up with the BS that it wasn't lawful for them to put anyone to death and they were the same ones who revolted against Rome and got Jerusalem sacked.  

Anyway, the Bible plainly says that the Jews killed Jesus.
1 Thessalonians 2:14-16  https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=1%20Thessalonians%202:14-16&version=DRA;MEV;KJV;CEB;CEV

Besides, in the Babylonian Talmud the Jews brag about how they killed Jesus using five different methods of execution.  They really wanted him dead.  So not only are you calling your favorite ethnocentric Middle Eastern religious fairy tale a lie but you are also calling the Jews liars for admitting that they killed Jesus.  You really should become an atheist.  

[Aractus]

then it doesn't matter if John is alive and well for several years after Jesus meets his death.

Yes...but that is not what the books say.

Mark claims the godboy was baptized  and then hightailed it for the "wilderness."  Then it claims that after John was arrested jesus went into Galilee preaching the gospel.  Before that, he didn't seem to do shit.

Matty makes similar claims.  Jesus gets the holy soaking, goes and plays with the devil for a while and then hears John was arrested and picks up the flag.  Even more clearly than "mark" it notes that "from that time onward, jesus began to preach."

Luke botches the whole story - dealing with it as a flashback of Antipas' after throwing in jesus' genealogy at a particularly questionable place.

Again, this stuff does matter.  If xtians can't get their story straight why should anyone believe anything they say?

Well a Christian would say to you that Josephus made the mistake end of discussion. Plus most reconcile John's three passovers and therefore would date it around 33AD. And neither you or I know which of them (Mark or Josephus) made the mistake, or whether both of them made a mistake in the timing of the death of John.

This does not really affect the date that Jesus dies however. The synoptic gospels, the gospel of John, and Annals (Tacitus) all say that Jesus was killed under Pontius Pilate.

Also I'm not asking you to believe what Christians say, just what qualified unbiased historians say.

[Minimalist]

Well a Christian would say to you that Josephus made the mistake end of discussion.

Snuck in before leaving for the day.  What's Josephus' motivation?  What point of view is he trying to promote?  Xtians have every incentive to make up tales about their boy.

These "historians" of whom you speak are not unbiased.  Most have some attachment to the religious establishment and I would call most of them theologians before historians. 
They interpret the hell out of these books and cherry pick what they want and ignore what they dislike. 

The bottom line remains that we have one original story (mark), two fanfics ( matty and luke ) and a re-write, John.  We have an earliest date for them (70-71) but the latest date is all the way to the mid second century.

[Wyrd of Gawd]

Well a Christian would say to you that Josephus made the mistake end of discussion.

Snuck in before leaving for the day.  What's Josephus' motivation?  What point of view is he trying to promote?  Xtians have every incentive to make up tales about their boy.

These "historians" of whom you speak are not unbiased.  Most have some attachment to the religious establishment and I would call most of them theologians before historians. 
They interpret the hell out of these books and cherry pick what they want and ignore what they dislike. 

The bottom line remains that we have one original story (mark), two fanfics ( matty and luke ) and a re-write, John.  We have an earliest date for them (70-71) but the latest date is all the way to the mid second century.

As a poster pointed out, there are no surviving original manuscripts.  So of course later story-tellers added new details to the oral stories when they wrote them down.  The guys who wrote the Islamic hadiths did so centuries after Mohammed supposedly bit the dust and they are ful of all kinds of BS details.  People will always support their favorite religious lies.  It's basic human nature.

[Aractus]

Snuck in before leaving for the day.  What's Josephus' motivation?  What point of view is he trying to promote?  Xtians have every incentive to make up tales about their boy.

These "historians" of whom you speak are not unbiased.  Most have some attachment to the religious establishment and I would call most of them theologians before historians. 
They interpret the hell out of these books and cherry pick what they want and ignore what they dislike. 

The bottom line remains that we have one original story (mark), two fanfics ( matty and luke ) and a re-write, John.  We have an earliest date for them (70-71) but the latest date is all the way to the mid second century.

Well as I've pointed out to you before we don't know the dates that the gospels were written but mid second century certainly isn't possible. You believe that they all had to have been written after 70 AD but I don't. Yes it's possible that they were written as late as 90 AD, but it's also possible and I would argue quite likely that Mark, Luke and Acts (and therefore Matthew) were written down by 60 AD. The curious problem of the late dating of the gospels is that Matthew is very Jewish and is writing to a Jewish audience, and that points to a date earlier than 70 AD. Even if Luke and Matthew are written about 80 AD that is still about 15 years before Antiquities.

No historian is completely unbiased. But I'm not asking you to listen to apologists, evangelicals, fundamentalists, or theologians now am I?

[Aractus]

As a poster pointed out, there are no surviving original manuscripts.  So of course later story-tellers added new details to the oral stories when they wrote them down.  The guys who wrote the Islamic hadiths did so centuries after Mohammed supposedly bit the dust and they are ful of all kinds of BS details.  People will always support their favorite religious lies.  It's basic human nature.

You really need to start learning Wyrd. Islam believes that the original wording of the Bible was lost, and therefore Muhammad was tasked with fixing it. It's an elaborate lie that the bible was "systematically altered over time" and this has been proven by the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls. Of course that doesn't mean that what we have today is exactly what was written down in 700 BC or whenever it was that the Old Testament was written, since most scholars do believe that the Pentateuch in particular was written down in stages by multiple authors.

That doesn't apply to the New Testament. Each NT author has their own style, their own unique vocabulary which fingerprints their work. In particular I'm talking about Paul and Luke who both wrote quite a bit, and even though Paul used scribes (and Luke probably did as well but he doesn't explicit say so) their style is recognisable from their works.

The gospel of Mark could have been written down in stages, and this has been theorised. It appears that both Luke and Matthew had an earlier version of the gospel from which they copied into their works. Most scholars believe they also had a sayings document similar to "Thomas".

[Wyrd of Gawd]

As a poster pointed out, there are no surviving original manuscripts.  So of course later story-tellers added new details to the oral stories when they wrote them down.  The guys who wrote the Islamic hadiths did so centuries after Mohammed supposedly bit the dust and they are ful of all kinds of BS details.  People will always support their favorite religious lies.  It's basic human nature.

You really need to start learning Wyrd. Islam believes that the original wording of the Bible was lost, and therefore Muhammad was tasked with fixing it. It's an elaborate lie that the bible was "systematically altered over time" and this has been proven by the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls. Of course that doesn't mean that what we have today is exactly what was written down in 700 BC or whenever it was that the Old Testament was written, since most scholars do believe that the Pentateuch in particular was written down in stages by multiple authors.

That doesn't apply to the New Testament. Each NT author has their own style, their own unique vocabulary which fingerprints their work. In particular I'm talking about Paul and Luke who both wrote quite a bit, and even though Paul used scribes (and Luke probably did as well but he doesn't explicit say so) their style is recognisable from their works.

The gospel of Mark could have been written down in stages, and this has been theorised. It appears that both Luke and Matthew had an earlier version of the gospel from which they copied into their works. Most scholars believe they also had a sayings document similar to "Thomas".

Your position is that some guys named Paul, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John wrote the "New Testament" in the First Century and that their work survived intact. 

My position is that the primary source material was oral with a few bits and pieces of ragged scrolls.  An English committee wrote its version of all of that in the illustrated Codex Amiatinus around the year 700AD.  The Bible simply didn't exist before that.  

Later on other writers divided the books into chapters and added numbered verses and probably changed the sequence of the books themselves.  

During later rewrites the writers added some little gems to support their political bosses, such as King James.  And they changed the names of some of the major characters to make it more user friendly.  

In the meantime everyone and his brother was busy churning out extra BS to support the Big Lie, just like the hadith writers made up BS to support Mohammed and the Koran that Uthman's committee wrote at his direction.  

And since most people, including priests and preachers, don't know the real Ten Commandments it's useless to cite them as authority figures about the Bible.