(May 24, 2016 at 8:51 pm)Godschild Wrote:

(May 24, 2016 at 9:27 am)Jehanne Wrote: This is just absolutely false, pitiful nonsense.  There is NO evidence that anyone was martyred by the Romans for just professing the newly formed Christian faith.  Other than the tale of James in Acts, which was written near the end of the first century, there is no documented evidence that the Romans persecuted Christians during the first century, other than Nero, who did persecute them in Rome around 64 AD.  But, other than that rare exception, none of the disciples were martyred for the Christian faith; those tales do not come into print until well until the second century.

 The nonsense belongs to you and you have admitted this in this very post. You start off saying and I quote "NO evidence", then you go on to confirm that Christians were killed by Nero, and if you do not think that the Christians of the day didn't consider them martyrs then why did Christianity spread so rapidly. Use your reasoning, think about it. Do you have proof that the apostles weren't killed for their beliefs, because they did not go around breaking Roman law.

GC

Roman was a political empire, not a religious one; that bullshit did not come into being under after the reign of Constantine.  The Romans respected burial places, which allowed the early Christians to meet at the catacombs in peace.  Outside of a few isolated areas, persecution of Christians was a rarity.  Usually, individuals were put to death out of obstinacy to the State and not for professing what many Roman intellectuals felt was just another dumb religion on the scene whose proponents, at least in the beginning, all believed in a flat Earth.  (See Saint Irenaeus' justification for the "Four Gospels" in the late second century.)  As for the so-called 12 disciples of Jesus, scholars know little about their fate, including, that of Paul, although, with Paul, there is some evidence that he was martyred in Rome; however, he was such a loon to begin with that the Roman authorities, after Nero's insanity, may have judged him a threat to the Empire and simply have decided to get rid of him.

(May 24, 2016 at 4:13 pm)ChadWooters Wrote:

(May 24, 2016 at 9:54 am)Jehanne Wrote: Unlike the Gospels, good historical sources from antiquity are NOT anonymous.

The gospel accounts were not anonymous. The Gospel according to John explicitly states that it was written by the Beloved Disciple, an eyewitness to Jesus who was present at the crucifixion. The pagan Celsus believed the Gospels were written by eye-witnesses even though he thought they were lying.

(May 24, 2016 at 9:54 am)Jehanne Wrote: …people write diaries with the intent that someone, someday, will read that diary!!  …  Just because someone was an eyewitness to an event does NOT automatically make their account true.  

The Gospel accounts were not diaries. Diaries are written for personal reasons to one’s self. The Gospel accounts were written to be read publicly and openly preserve a community tradition. Fabrications and inaccuracies would be quickly exposed.

(May 24, 2016 at 9:54 am)Jehanne Wrote: The author of the Gospel of Luke is not a trustworthy source.  For starters, historians do not know who he was…

You mean other than he was the gentile (Col 4:4) that wrote the Gospel according to Luke and Acts of the Apostles, Saint Paul’s sidekick (Phil 24), and a doctor (Col 4:14)?

(May 24, 2016 at 9:54 am)Jehanne Wrote: … [we don't know] when he wrote his Gospel…

Being a contemporary of Saint Paul kinda narrows it down. What do you expect a notarized form in a postmarked envelope?

(May 24, 2016 at 9:54 am)Jehanne Wrote: … the author of Luke gets some of his historical facts wrong, blatant errors;

Fortunately William Ramsay corrected the record.

(May 24, 2016 at 9:54 am)Jehanne Wrote: … his portrayal of Jesus is fundamentally different from the Jesus portrayed in Mark, Matthew and John.

I prefer complimentary.

I'm sorry, but I cannot accept the "7 last sayings of the dying Jesus".  As Professor Bart Ehrman has suggested during all of his public lectures, you need to read the Gospels horizontally (read the same passage in Mark, and then in Matthew and then in Luke) and not vertically (from start to finish).

Quote:The nonsense belongs to you and you have admitted this in this very post. You start off saying and I quote "NO evidence", then you go on to confirm that Christians were killed by Nero,

For once in your life you are correct, G-C.  There is no evidence that Nero killed xtians or even knew who the fuck they were.

Sadly, all those later traditions - which is a polite euphemism for horseshit - about peter and paul came later when the Roman church was trying to assert its dominance over the primary centers of xtianity in the Roman world:  Alexandria, Antioch, and Ephesus.

(May 24, 2016 at 7:22 pm)ChadWooters Wrote:

(May 24, 2016 at 5:57 pm)Redbeard The Pink Wrote: Is that also how you excuse the endings of all of those stories being so different from each other?

If one person says Redbeard wears a silly hat and another says he has a beard there is no contradiction. Both are true and together provide a fuller picture of Redbeard.

Ummm...ok...how does that relate to--you know what? Let's play Bible trivia. You guys like this game, right?


How many women were with Mary Magdalene when she visited the tomb on the morning of the Resurrection? Was it one woman, two women, a whole crowd of women, or was she alone?

How many angels/messengers/men/whatever-you-want-to-call-them were in the tomb when the women looked inside? One, or two?

Was the stone already rolled away when the women arrived, or did they get there in time to see the guards fainting and the stone rolling away?

When Mary Magdalene and whoever was with her (if anyone) arrived at the tomb, was it still dark out, or was it just after dawn?

Finally (and this is the big one, for me, anyway)...were the women told by an angel to inform the disciples that Jesus would meet them in Galilee, or did Jesus tell them that himself?


If you need to look some of these up, that's ok. Not everybody has memorized every minute detail of these four books. If you need to consult more than one of the gospels to come up with these answers, that's totally understandable. I suggest it, in fact. Review all four, if you must. I'll post the answers in a hide tag below so you can check them when you're ready to see how you did.

---

Yeah...the different gospels forward ALL of these story elements, even though some of them flatly contradict each other. People debate all day about the order/relevance of events that would lead to this problem with the overall narrative, but to me the killer is that last one. My understanding of Christian theology (in just about every denomination I've observed/been a part of) is that the words of Christ are by far the most important, authoritative, and relevant part of the whole document known as the Bible.


If that's true...if you're an omniscient, omnipotent creator and you're trying to get a message across to your people, and the words of your son are the most important part, how are you going to let the authors jam up whether something was said by Jesus or one of your pissant little angels?


You aren't, that's how. If your god really had the qualities most people ascribe to him, his authors would have perfect clarity and consistency, not just in doctrine and "overall message" but in every single scrap of minutiae and detail, to such an extent that human storytellers and scribes become an unlikely source. That still wouldn't prove god, but it would at least be something. What you have is a bunch of humans muddling up a story that's supposed to be under the direct authorship of the most supremely powerful being in the Universe. How does that even work?

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Christianity = the belief that a magic Jewish zombie will save your "soul" from hell fire. It's too insane to be taken seriously by rational people.

Quote:I'll post the answers in a hide tag below so you can check them when you're ready to see how you did.

I'm guessing that you'll get the "you're reading it out of context" horseshit or something just as lame.

The contradictions reinforce each other, or something.

Considering each new retelling was written by a guy who had access to the previous one, you'd think it wouldn't be too hard to keep the details straight.

I guess some Christians really think these are all genuine independent accounts written at the same time, rather than a serious of increasingly embellished tales.

Quote:Considering each new retelling was written by a guy who had access to the previous one, you'd think it wouldn't be too hard to keep the details straight.

But there was no such concern.  They were written independently for different audiences and the stories were spun to make them interesting to those audiences by whoever the fuck wrote them.

This shit existed as oral tales for a long time until sometime in the mid to late 2d century when the so-called proto-orthodox ( to steal Ehrman's term) decided that the heretic Marcion had a good idea and concocted a "canon."  What you see in the fucking bible are those documents which got a majority vote in committee.  Laws pass legislatures in much the same way and, as Bismarck noted:  "Laws are like sausages, it is better not to see them being made."

(May 23, 2016 at 8:06 pm)Jehanne Wrote:

(May 23, 2016 at 5:47 pm)Constable Dorfl Wrote: From the description in the bible, Yeshua would not have been crucified. The "crimes" he committed were ones under Jewish sanhedric (religious) law, not under Roman state law (disturbing the peace in the temple, going around preaching without the equivalent of a licence were sanhedric crimes not Roman ones), and also, Iudea was not part of Rome proper, but a client state, at that stage. Sanhedric law didn't perscribe crucifixion as a death penalty but either hanging or stoning, and as Roman law wasn't involved the Roman state wouldn't have punished Yeshua.

Assuming that Yeshua was a real person, it is far more likely he wasn't killed (at least in the way described in the bible, and to be killed by jewish religious authorities is problematic for a putative messiah) and just disappeared into the mists. The crucifixion is then inserted into the stories of the cult growing around Saul of Tarsus to embiggen its supposed founder.

Yes, the Romans pioneered federalism, and so, Judea was somewhat independent but the "sovereign power" was Rome.  And, they could crucify anyone whom the Empire deemed to be a threat to the Roman peace; as Jesus was not a Roman citizen, he did not enjoy the same rights under Roman law.  Likely, the story about him causing trouble in the Jewish temple was enough to get him arrested, and instead of a good flogging, some Jewish leaders likely convinced their Roman superiors to make an example out of him, which the Romans were all too happy to do.

Why would Pilate intervene in an internal religious matter in a potentially destabilising way? According to the bible Jesus wasn't a threat to Roman overlordship in Iudea, so therefore his heterodoxy from judaism was unlikely to be acted upon.

Thinking about the situaion I have three possibilities (assuming Jesus was real and a preacher), 1) he was the leader of a jewish messianic cult, and like later jewish messiah figures (eg bar Kochkba) was planning on overthrowing Roman overlordship and erecting a temporal theocracy centred round him (as per propesy). Thus the real Yeshua had no connection to Jesus apart from the name.
2) The gospels transferred punishment from the Sanhedrin to Pilate, because at that stage jesusism hadn't fully broken with judaism and wanted to appeal to jews still. This reading would be consistent with the bible if we accepred Jesus' divinity, miracle working and teachings.
3) Jesus was killed by neither group because he was either not real or not important enough to kill. And later christianity created a martyrdom for proselyisation purposes. Remember god figures who resurrected was a common trope in the Mediterranian world at the time, and jesusism would probably wat their god to at least match competing gods in the miracle stakes.

(May 23, 2016 at 10:52 pm)ChadWooters Wrote:

(May 23, 2016 at 9:54 pm)Godschild Wrote: Everyone needs to forget the recanting and understand these people died for their belief in who Jesus was, the Messiah. That means they believed in the virgin birth, his life lived sinless on earth, his death and resurrection and that He is the Son of God. So with this said, yes they believed in his resurrection.

 There is only one place Jesus life is recorded, the Bible and that is where we have to start and end, the rest spoken here and by others over the ages and around the world are only speculation, and everyone admits they are speculation. No evidence has ever been offered to these speculation and it's certainly true no facts have been produced for them. So why do people accept single accounts about history and claim them as truth when no facts or evidence are produced. Shouldn't the records of the NT be accepted as the other history, but then the atheist would have to believe right, right. So people dismiss the NT so they can reject God, now this is a logical conclusion a true statement.

 All the different speculations given in this thread are childish at best, why, because they do not consider the NT account to be true, none of it, yet there is no proof given that the biblical account is not the truth, only speculations. Most of the speculation twist what the Bible says so those people can speculate, is this the honesty we should expect from anyone, no, this is a moving moral standard to satisfy those who have no desire to believe. 

GC

Your point is generally valid with one nitpick. The bible is not one source. There are 4 Gospel accounts and these are four sources. Even if the synoptics are grouped together John is still an independent tradition. That makes it a minimum of 2 sources. But like I said. Atheist have no other reason to reject the gospels than the fact that they record miracles. If they had no miracles they would be accepted without question.

Wrong the bible is, at best, two sources, the synopics which are plagirisms of Matthew and John which is a book which clearly distorts the earlier messages for religio-political puroses (John is probably the genesis for much of christian anti-semitism and the first acknowedement of the break between the cult of Jesus and judaism).

And because we cannit find any independent verifiable evidence for, and we can find a lot of obviously false bullshit in the bible, it is hard to take any of the Jesus myth to be (bad pun intended) gospel.