"I think you have missed my point. You say the apostles were real, historical figures, and they clearly believed in the physical, historical Christ. This leaves two options; Jesus is real or they are lying. Which one will it be?"

Dagda what you fail to see is that the apostles existence is irrelevant to the existence of Christ.Simply because they might have been trying to promote a religion based on older traditions of the gnostics.Not to mention that the apostles never wrote one word about Christ in the bible.Their names were later added to the gospel narratives in the year 180 AD before that those books were known as anonymous works.Most biblical scholars agree on these findings and they have yet to be refuted.So those responsible for writing the gospels are in fact lying and not only that they are guilty of fraudulently calling their works those of the apostles.Although,this was a common practice in those day in order to give those works more authority.

If I was to accept the existence of an historical Christ in history then that still does not take away from the fact that his biography and exploits as narrated in the gospels are greatly exaggerated.So accepting the existence of Christ niether makes him divine nor the son of God.

Quote:The eventual sacking of Jerusalem in first century CE threw the Christian believers across the Roman Empire as slaves & refugees, splitting apart non-initiates from initiates and thus allowing a more literal form of Christianity to rise from the scattered ashes of the outer mystery form of the religion. The new religion preached that salvation could be found only by believing in a literal Jesus Christ and, once adopted as the official religion of Rome, hunted down the original Gnostics as heretics and apostates of true Christianity.

NICE!

Another issue is if Jesus Christ did exist as an historical figure then what was his real name?It certainly was not Jesus Christ since Jesus in Hebrew is Jehovah saves and Christ in Greek translates into the anointed or chosen one,these are titles and not names in the traditional sense.As I have said before if there is a true founder of Christianity as we know it today it has to be Paul of Tarsus.His gospel of John and the subsequent letters/epistles to the various churches that flourished in various towns due to his evangelization are proof of this.

In fact Paul's gospel stands out from the synoptic gospels because he is the only one that focuses his entire book and teachings on the divinity of Christ.There is not much historical or bibliographical information in the book of John or the epsitles that follow.

Put me squarely in the mythical jesus camp. Xtianity is based on little more than special pleading and, as Professor Bart Ehrman has shown in "Misquoting Jesus" the so-called gospels were heavily edited to conform to later doctrines of the power mongers of the early church. We cannot even be certain that they existed in their present form until some time in the middle ages.......(for example, the well known story of "the woman taken in adultery" does not appear in early version of xtian bibles and the original "gospel" of mark ends when the women run away. Both were "improved" by later scribes.

There is not a single contemporary first century reference to any xtian claims. The earliest contemporary reference to xtians (but not "jesus") is Pliny the Younger and his report to Trajan (early 2d century) is not something that xtians are proud to point to (although they do it because of their desperation to find some record of their boy in the record. The fact that later xtian writers inserted fraudulent claims into Josephus suggests that when they came to power in the 4th century they were highly embarrassed by the lack of historical detail and set out to correct the problem.

There are few historical markers in the gospels themselves and those there are are frequently contradictory.

I have yet to meet the xtian who can answer these questions:

When was your boy born?

When did he die?

It is up to the proponents of a theory to answer questions about it. It is not up to us to disprove them. We merely point out the fallacies.

In addition, while reading through earlier posts I noted the old canard that archaeology is proving the "exodus" or some such nonsense. It is not. In fact, modern archaeology, and by that I mean in the last 30 years, has more or less trashed the old testament account.

Link

Quote:That is no longer the case. In the last quarter century or so, archaeologists have seen one settled assumption after another concerning who the ancient Israelites were and where they came from proved false. Rather than a band of invaders who fought their way into the Holy Land, the Israelites are now thought to have been an 'indigenous culture that developed west of the Jordan River around 1200 B.C. Abraham, Isaac, and the other patriarchs appear to have been spliced together out of various pieces of local lore.

The Davidic Empire, which archaeologists once thought as incontrovertible as the Roman, is now seen as an invention of Jerusalem-based priests in the seventh and eighth centuries B.C. who were eager to burnish their national history. The religion we call Judaism does not reach well back into the second millennium B.C. but appears to be, at most, a product of the mid-first.

It is necessary to dismiss 19th and early 20th century "archaeology" which is truth was little more than clerics masquerading as archaeologists and going to Palestine with a bible in one hand and a shovel in the other and pronouncing every rock they turned over as something that Moses pissed on. Their agenda was to "prove" the bible and, of course, they thought they did so. But modern science has relegated them to the dustbin of history and their bible along with them.

Minimalist I agree with you 100 % most religionist so called archaelogist are just looking to prove the bible true.They have their preconceived ideas as to what to look for and they don't allow science to prove them wrong.

I actually had one fundie claim that archaeology had it right but in the last 30 years has gone completely crazy because it has trashed the bible.

I asked him if he would go to a doctor who hadn't read a medical book published after 1925? He tried to change the subject!

That is funny minimalist nice going!My most hated christian system of so called thought is apologetics.It's hard to believe that there are people out there with all sorts of college education and degrees who feel that they have to defend the bible against logic and reason when there is absolutely no logic or reason in the entire bible.

This particular fundie claimed to have a PH. D. in "archaeology." As it turned out, what he had done was go to some xtian diploma mill and pay the fee. He may as well have gotten his "degree" out of a cereal box.

In addition to being fools, they have a terrible tendency to lie a lot.

Have you ever seen this one?

Richard Carrier

Quote:We all have read the tales told of Jesus in the Gospels, but few people really have a good idea of their context. Yet it is quite enlightening to examine them against the background of the time and place in which they were written, and my goal here is to help you do just that. There is abundant evidence that these were times replete with kooks and quacks of all varieties, from sincere lunatics to ingenious frauds, even innocent men mistaken for divine, and there was no end to the fools and loons who would follow and praise them. Placed in this context, the gospels no longer seem to be so remarkable, and this leads us to an important fact: when the Gospels were written, skeptics and informed or critical minds were a small minority. Although the gullible, the credulous, and those ready to believe or exaggerate stories of the supernatural are still abundant today, they were much more common in antiquity, and taken far more seriously.

Quote:Put me squarely in the mythical jesus camp

"To sum up, modern critical methods fail to support the Christ myth theory. It has 'again and again been answered and annihilated by first rank scholars.' In recent years, 'no serious scholar has ventured to postulate the non historicity of Jesus' or at any rate very few, and they have not succeeded in disposing of the much stronger, indeed very abundant, evidence to the contrary." - Michael Grant, Jesus: An Historian's Review of the Gospels (Scribner, 1995).

Quote:I have yet to meet the xtian who can answer these questions:

When was your boy born?

When did he die?

He was born sometime between 7BC and 3 AD, died sometime around 33-37 AD. Pretty much every Christian & Muslim in the world would give you that answer. It's amazing that you have never met a Christian who couldn't answer, they probably decided to ignore you.

Can you answer me a question, when was Julius Caesar born?