(May 7, 2016 at 11:15 pm)Jehanne Wrote:

(May 7, 2016 at 10:41 pm)Minimalist Wrote: The fucking bible is not evidence.  Find some evidence that anyone resembling jesus ever walked around and I'll examine it.

Moses. Mohammed.  Zeus. Shiva. And Quetzlcoatl do not get a pass.  Neither does the xtians godboy.

The best evidence is probably the Q document:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Q_source#S...ature_of_Q

If only there were a "Q" document.

Rather it is just a 19th century hypothesis by German scholars.  Not a single writer in antiquity refers to anything like it.

It is the equivalent of the Tachyon

Could it exist?  Maybe.  But as of now there is no evidence of it.
[url=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tachyon][/url]

(May 7, 2016 at 11:22 pm)Homeless Nutter Wrote:

(May 7, 2016 at 11:15 pm)Jehanne Wrote: The best evidence is probably the Q document:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Q_source#S...ature_of_Q

Oh, right - that document that no one's seen in thousands of years, if it existed at all - and we're only able to guess its potential content by examining... the bible?

Sounds legit.

It's a really good hypothesis to explain the similarities between Matthew and Luke that are not found in Mark.

Occam's Razor has a better answer.  Whoever the fuck wrote "Luke" copied from "Matty" and "Mark."

(May 8, 2016 at 1:17 am)Minimalist Wrote: Occam's Razor has a better answer.  Whoever the fuck wrote "Luke" copied from "Matty" and "Mark."

Then why the fuck did he not copy the nativity story from Matthew or even acknowledge it?

(May 7, 2016 at 10:11 pm)Alasdair Ham Wrote: The Bible is not evidence of a historical Jesus.

I think it is some evidence of Jesus, however weak or faint. 

Here's my theory: 

Asimov says that census didn't happen.  And the censuses that did happen didn't happen in that way.  You don't go to where you were born to be counted, because that would be useless.  A census is so the local tax collector will know how many chickens you have.  I was born in California.  What would be the point of me going to California to tell people there how many chickens I have somewhere else? 

So Joseph did not take his family to Bethlehem because of a census.  What, then, is the point of that weird and implausible story?  What if it's point is to harmonize Jesus with the legend of the savior?  Everybody knew Jesus was from Galilee, and everybody knew that the savior had to come from Bethlehem, so the story is an elaborate way of saying, "Hey, this guy from Galilee is also really from Bethlehem."

If Jesus were entirely mythical, then they wouldn't have had that problem, and so they wouldn't have needed that solution. 

This is not a compelling argument, of course, but it is enough that I have a lightly-held belief that a real person named Jesus was at the core of the legend about the superhero called Jesus.

(May 8, 2016 at 1:23 am)Irrational Wrote:

(May 8, 2016 at 1:17 am)Minimalist Wrote: Occam's Razor has a better answer.  Whoever the fuck wrote "Luke" copied from "Matty" and "Mark."

Then why the fuck did he not copy the nativity story from Matthew or even acknowledge it?

Because he wrote his own...for a different audience.  A Greco-Roman audience who didn't give a flying fuck about Herod or Moses but who might relate to real Roman figures like Augustus and Sulpicius Quirinius.

The most important thing you can do to begin to understand this shit is to utterly dismiss the fiction that the church has put out.

Well, I'm not a Mythicist, but I agree that the concept of Q is highly speculative, for reasons already mentioned (thanks, Min). Even if you accept the Q-document as actually being a real thing, it's just evidence for a very human (non-magical) guy, and not for the "Son of God" depicted by the time the myth had built up nearly a century later, with the writing of John.

From the Wiki article you cited,

"The Q document must have been composed before Matthew and Luke. Some scholars even suggest that Q predated Mark. A date for the final Q document is often placed in the 40s or 50s of the first century, with some arguing its so-called sapiential layer (1Q, containing six wisdom speeches) was written as early as the 30s.

If Q existed it has since been lost. Some scholars believe it can be partially reconstructed by examining elements common to Matthew and Luke (but absent from Mark). This reconstructed Q does not describe the events of Jesus' life: Q does not mention Jesus' birth, his selection of the 12 disciples, his crucifixion, or the resurrection. Instead, it appears to be a collection of Jesus' sayings and quotations."

(Emphasis mine.)

In other words, it supports my working hypothesis that Jesus was an apocalyptic preacher who developed a cult following, due to the fear-culture among the Hebrews at the time, in the wake of the Roman takeover of Judea. Keep in mind that the Hebrews were in open rebellion only a few decades after Jesus' death. There is some fair inference, I think, that the collection of Jesus' sayings, such as the Sermon on the Mount, were legitimate. He would doubtless have attracted followers who considered him the Messiah, even if the real Jewish scholars would have laughed at the idea (since he really doesn't fit the attributes, even after all the post-death fiddling by Christian storycrafters). After his execution for "rabble rousing" against the "rightful rule of Rome" (as the Romans would have seen it), when they killed him like a common criminal, this loss of the "Messiah" cult-leader required explanation among the Believers, and it's not hard to see how the traumatized followers would start crafting ever-increasing stories of how amazing he was, which led to more claims of magic, which led by the time of the Gospel of John's writing to actually calling him God incarnate.

The pattern of myth-building should be obvious to anyone.

Edit to Add: The most sneer-inducing amusement, to me, is when Christian apologists try to point to the writings of the early church fathers, all written at the time of or much after the time of the writing of John, at the point when the myth-building was at its highest peak, as "evidence" that the Gospels are legitimate, since the Orthodox fathers were of course the very people promoting the Jesus-as-God story that had been developed by that time. It speaks absolutely zero about what the early Christians thought, almost a century before, any more than we could speak on what our great grandparents thought about as twentysomethings.

I think there's some misunderstanding about what the mythicist position actually is. It is almost always presented as a strawman.

It's not saying the entire story is fictional. It is saying that there isn't enough evidence to reasonably pinpoint a single historical figure; so that its most likely to be a mixture of several historical figures, or else so vague that it could have been based on hundreds of different real people without making any difference.

It's a position I lean towards myself, and I think it's perfectly reasonable. So no, I don't think it gives atheism a bad name. The strawmen presented about it may cause problems however. The arguments and evidence for pinpointing a single, distinct historical figure are (in my opinion) terrible. It's the default position as far as I'm concerned, after the HJ has failed to meet its burden of proof.

(May 8, 2016 at 1:56 am)Minimalist Wrote:

(May 8, 2016 at 1:23 am)Irrational Wrote: Then why the fuck did he not copy the nativity story from Matthew or even acknowledge it?

Because he wrote his own...for a different audience.  A Greco-Roman audience who didn't give a flying fuck about Herod or Moses but who might relate to real Roman figures like Augustus and Sulpicius Quirinius.

The most important thing you can do to begin to understand this shit is to utterly dismiss the fiction that the church has put out.

Then why didn't he do that with the rest of what he supposedly copied from "Matthew" and made such copied content appeal more to the Greco-Roman audience?

(May 8, 2016 at 3:22 am)robvalue Wrote: I think there's some misunderstanding about what the mythicist position actually is. It is almost always presented as a strawman.

It's not saying the entire story is fictional. It is saying that there isn't enough evidence to reasonably pinpoint a single historical figure; so that its most likely to be a mixture of several historical figures, or else so vague that it could have been based on hundreds of different real people without making any difference.

It's a position I lean towards myself, and I think it's perfectly reasonable. So no, I don't think it gives atheism a bad name. The strawmen presented about it may cause problems however. The arguments and evidence for pinpointing a single, distinct historical figure are (in my opinion) terrible. It's the default position as far as I'm concerned, after the HJ has failed to meet its burden of proof.

Technically, you could be a christian mythicist (sort of), I think. You could find that the objective evidence does not accurately pinpoint a certain historical figure; yet you still believe a specific figure did exist and was magic. In other words, the evidence is not accurate or reliable enough, but you go ahead and believe in the magic Jesus for whatever other reasons. From a historical records point of view, you would be a mythicist. You just then have their own personal beliefs on top of that, not based on (regular) evidence.

Some people actually do this, in my opinion, but without explicitly saying so. It's where "faith" comes in. If the evidence alone was sufficient, faith would be unnecessary.