Why do atheists even bother about debating Jesus?

[Ryantology]

Human sacrifices are evil, that's why God trolled Abraham into coming within a second of performing one before he dropped in and said j/k bro.

[catfish]

According to the text, God spoke to a prophet and said that He never commanded sacrifices when He brought them out of Egypt.
There are numerous passages where God supposedly condemned sacrifices and that he was "sick of their burnt offerings".
Then there's a passage where God is supposed to have said to NOT worship Him the way the heathens do.
Blood sacrifices were only attonement for "unintentional" sins according to Jewish tradition.
Human sacrifice has always been considered an evil practice in the Bible.

So God condemned human blood sacrifices then sent his son to Earth as a human so Jesus could be sacrificed to save us all. There would have been a lot of blood what with scourging and being nailed to a cross and the crown of thorns could have resulted in bleeding scratches as well. Was Jesus as a sacrifice supposed to be OK because he wasn't burnt on an altar?

Maybe Jesus, if he existed, was just executed for being a public nuisance - this would make more sense than God being against human sacrifice except where his son was concerned.

This is where you use your God-given right to be a cherrypicker and trust in your own moral judgement.

According to the text:
No man can be ransomed who is/was doomed to destruction. (all of us?)
No persons should be put to death for the sins of another.
There would be secret heresies introduced.
The people and teachers would turn aside to myths.
There is no mediator between man and God.
YHWH is salvation...
.

---

The Romans were pagans, I don't think anyone denies that, right?
I don't trust them fuckers, period!
.

---

Human sacrifices are evil, that's why God trolled Abraham into coming within a second of performing one before he dropped in and said j/k bro.

You really don't understand my position of the bible nor the Jewish views of it, do you???


Thank you, try again...
.

[Brian37]

God didn't give me any rights, just like Thor didn't give us lightening.

[catfish]

Maybe God gave you lightning, and perhaps Thor gave you rights...
.

[Confused Ape]

This is where you use your God-given right to be a cherrypicker and trust in your own moral judgement.

According to the text:
No man can be ransomed who is/was doomed to destruction. (all of us?)
No persons should be put to death for the sins of another.
There would be secret heresies introduced.
The people and teachers would turn aside to myths.
There is no mediator between man and God.
YHWH is salvation...

Jesus is supposed to have known Jewish law inside out and he often called the Pharisees hypocrites. If God is meant to have condemned animal sacrifices, Jesus's motives for The Cleansing Of The Temple would have been about more than just livestock sellers making money.

John 2:13-16
English Standard Version (ESV)

13 The Passover of the Jews was at hand, and Jesus went up to Jerusalem. 14 In the temple he found those who were selling oxen and sheep and pigeons, and the money-changers sitting there. 15 And making a whip of cords, he drove them all out of the temple, with the sheep and oxen. And he poured out the coins of the money-changers and overturned their tables. 16 And he told those who sold the pigeons, “Take these things away; do not make my Father's house a house of trade.”
.

The establishment wouldn't want him going around telling everyone that sacrificing animals was a pagan practise if that's what he was really doing. Isn't Crucifiction Against Jewish Law?

Secondly, Jews did not have the authority at any level to execute anyone. All legal discussions were theoretical. Jews were subject to Roman occupation from the time of Herod the Great (approximately 30 BCE), who was appointed by Julius Ceasar.

The High Priest was also appointed by the Romans. It is possible that he bought the position. We know that the High Priest and some of his followers were collaborators with the Roman authorities, but we don't know definitively why they did so.

Doing a deal with Pilate would be the only legal way of getting rid of a public nuisance if the above is true.

---

The Romans were pagans, I don't think anyone denies that, right?
I don't trust them fuckers, period!
.

---

Talmidi Judaism has some interesting things to say about what St. Paul promoted as being Christianity.

We see Talmidaism as a spiritual descendent of early 'Jewish-Christianity'; this term was dropped because of possible misconceptions that could be carried in such a name. We believe that as a Jewish prophet, 'Jesus' would have remained faithful to the ideals and principles of the Israelite religion, and therefore would never have envisioned himself as a god, since the Israelite religion, as a core fundamental of its theology, is founded on the precept that YHVH has no physical form or incarnation - unlike the gods of pagan religions. YHVH is holy - different and distinctive - and is therefore not like pagan gods.

Their views on why St. Paul didn't know what he was talking about where Jewish law was concerned makes interesting reading.

Paul Of Tarsus, The Deciever

[catfish]

You are starting to build a reference library that has helped formed my case against "modern Christianity"
.

---

Jewish temples are believed to be early banks. Notice how there were "money-changers" AND "those who sold pidgeons"?

If you read the story Pilate, the crowd says some crazy things that I believe are Roman forgeries to defer blame.
.

[Confused Ape]

You are starting to build a reference library that has helped formed my case against "modern Christianity"
.

---

Jewish temples are believed to be early banks. Notice how there were "money-changers" AND "those who sold pidgeons"?

Looks like Jesus thought the money-changers should have set up a bank somewhere other than the temples.

If you read the story Pilate, the crowd says some crazy things that I believe are Roman forgeries to defer blame.
.

I think you made a post about that somewhere in this topic. The idea presented in this post was that the Romans wouldn't want to hear that they were responsible for executing God's son so the account was forged to blame the Jews. This makes a lot of sense.

God On The Brain suggests a line of speculation in relation to all this.

PROF VILAYANUR RAMACHANDRAN (University of California, San Diego): It's possible that many great religious leaders had temporal lobe seizures and this predisposes them to having visions, having mystical experiences.

NARRATOR: St Paul is a case in point. He famously encountered god who appeared to him in a blinding flash on the road to Damascus.

RAMACHANDRAN: Many religious mystics, including St Paul, some of the experiences they describe sound quite similar to the sorts of things you hear from patients, so it's quite possible that he had seizures.

What if Paul really did have a temporal lobe seizure and interpreted it as Jesus telling him off for persecuting his followers? The bit about Paul's companions also hearing the voice could have been added to make people believe that it was a real event and not something which was all in his own mind. Once Paul believed that he was meant to convert people to Christianity he made things up as he went along because he didn't have a clue about what Jesus really taught.

[Minimalist]

Philo was not present, however; he was at Alexandria,

Philo however had the advantage of being alive at the time.

If we're supposed to accept Josephus's history books as proof of Pilate's existence without archaeological backup we'll have to do the same for Jesus and John the Baptist.

Did "john" (who also appears in Josephus...briefly) and "jesus" mint their own coinage?

http://www.forumancientcoins.com/catalog...p?vpar=932

I'm afraid that multiple references in written sources for someone - especially when those sources did not know each other - is about as good as it gets in ancient history. Josephus' reference to John is an aside to demonstrate the failings of Herod Antipas and, in the case of "jesus" is an interpolation by later xtian writers who were chagrined at not being able to find legitimate references to their godboy in one case and a simple bit of wishful thinking in the other.

BTW, the timing of Pilate's term is interesting. He began in 26 and lasted to 36. 26 just happens to be the year that Tiberius "retired" to Capri leaving the empire in the hands of Lucius Aelius Seianus (a/k/a Sejanus). Thus it is likely that Sejanus actually appointed Pilate to the post of prefect. The official governor of Syria, of which Judaea was part, was Lucius Aelius Lamia, a kinsman of Sejanus' (probably his uncle) however Lamia never went there. Things were quiet, he was an old man and various surrogates actually ran the province. When Sejanus fell in 31 he'd had 5 years to install his loyalists in various posts of which Judaea would have been one of the least significant. Lamia, in spite of his relation to Sejanus, was a confidant of Tiberius' and retained the nominal post of governor of Syria until his death in 33. At that time someone seems to have said we need to do something about Syria ( one of the most significant military postings in the empire ) and a man named Lucius Vitellius was carefully groomed. He was elected consul in 34 and at the completion of his year was then eligible for the post of governor. He would have arrived sometime in 35 and finally got around to replacing Sejanus' man, Pilate, with an officer of his own, Marcellus, who was presumably loyal to Vitellius and Tiberius in 36. Josephus claims that he broke up an armed mob of Samaritans and this got him in trouble but suppressing armed mobs was what a Roman magistrate was supposed to do. Whereas, being loyal to a disgraced pretender to the throne is not something that Vitellius would have overlooked.

[Question Mark]

Human sacrifices are evil, that's why God trolled Abraham into coming within a second of performing one before he dropped in and said j/k bro.

People always like to mention Abraham, despite the fact that in the story, Abraham fully expected that his God would ask of him human sacrifice, but no one seems to like to mention the tale of Jephthah

[Minimalist]

Oh the yahweh butt sniffers can work themselves into a lather trying to get out of the Jepthah problem.

It's fun to watch them twist their scrotums into knots on that.