About other gods-question for theists

[Jenny A]

Just because you can look on the net and see two sides to a question doesn't mean that the both have an equal claim to truth. Here's the particular discrepancy you tried to answer:

The Bible says Jesus was born during Census of 6-7 CE and reign of Herod. Sometime after Jesus' birth, Joseph takes Mary and Jesus to Egypt and stays there with them until Herod dies. Jesus is supposed to have died in Jerusalem in about 32 CE.

The problem is that there is no King Herod or even a combination of Herods that squares with the 6-7 CE birth date.

Again, I find two sides to the story. Check out these.

http://www.biblearchaeology.org/post/200...px#Article

Why do you totally trust Josephus?

http://www.biblearchaeology.org/post/201...ensus.aspx

You tend to trust secular historical evidence as factual and biblical evidence as non-factual.

Why do I trust secular historical evidence more than the Bible? Not so much because it is secular, but because unlike the Bible it is not the only history we have from the time period. When looking at historical sources, whether it is contemporary; whether it is corroborated by other contemporary sources; whether it has a motive political, religious, or otherwise; what we know about the author; how reliable our copy is all matter.

Josephus is corroborated by other sources. The Bible is not though there are many places where one would expect there to be corroborative evidence but there isn't. There are places the NT Bible is corroborated. We are really sure both that John the Baptist and Paul existed because they are corroborated. Jesus is not. But those are few and far between. More often the Bible is contradicted by contemporary sources.

We do not know who wrote the gospels. They are written by anonymous, thirty to 60 years after Jesus' death. They contradict one another. With the exception of stone engravings, we mostly know who our secular sources were.

Also, various parts of the Bible are written to show the fulfillment of OT prophecy. Many of the contradictions are found in the NT Bible revolve around this issue.

This does not mean all religious sources should be tossed out. Kings and Chronicles in the OT are to some extent collaborated elsewhere, and are therefore more believable. This is not true of the rest of the OT despite various places where there ought to be Egyptian corroboration.

Also much of what we know about the social and local history of the Middle Ages comes from monks. But they are contemporary accounts and they do independently corroborate each other and are corroborated by secular documents. That is an advantage they share with Josephus, but not the Bible.

With regard to miracles, like the virgin birth, I am extremely skeptical, because extra ordinary events require extra ordinary proof. The Bible with it's 30 year later anonymous authors does not nearly reach that level of proof.

[The Grand Nudger]

Kings has what we might even call an authoritative view of the experience of internecine and tribal warfare in the time frame of it's origin. Nowhere near the time-frame that some believers may desire, but oh well, them's the breaks when it comes to evidence and history.

[Lek]

With regard to miracles, like the virgin birth, I am extremely skeptical, because extra ordinary events require extra ordinary proof. The Bible with it's 30 year later anonymous authors does not nearly reach that level of proof.

Are you saying all the authors of the bible are anonymous? Why? What would you call extraordinary proof?

[The Grand Nudger]

I think we ought to set the bar a little lower first. We need to see that some proof exists, before we can determine whether or not it's "extraordinary" (wonders what the phrase "extraordinary proof" could even mean).

I haven't seen any, not in all my life, and certainly not in this thread.

[Jenny A]

With regard to miracles, like the virgin birth, I am extremely skeptical, because extra ordinary events require extra ordinary proof. The Bible with it's 30 year later anonymous authors does not nearly reach that level of proof.

Are you saying all the authors of the bible are anonymous? Why? What would you call extraordinary proof?

I'll start with extra ordinary proof.

If I were to tell you I spent part of last night in the driveway with my family setting off fountains and playing with sparklers, you'd probably believe me. It's an ordinary thing commonly done by many people on the 4th of July and there's no reason to doubt me.

If I told you I was 120 years old, you might question that though it's in the realm of possibility, just rather unlikely. So you might want to know if I can send you a picture, link some press coverage about my last birthday, etc. before you'd believe me.

If I were to tell you my mother was dead for several days and then rose out of her coffin and went on with her ordinary life, I suspect you want more than a newspaper story. You'd want medical confirmation and a whole host of other things. But it's still sort of within the realm of possibility because there have been people who were thought dead who have woken up in the morgue. They were not of course dead, just in very deep comas.

But if I insisted that she really was absolutely clinically dead, no brain activity, not heartbeat however faint, and that she'd begun to rot first I doubt a newspaper story and a single doctor's testimony would do it for you.

If I told you that well, really only a few people saw her after she rose from the dead and that she's since moved away and I don't know where she is, I think you'd smell a rat or think I was crazy or deluded.

But history is full of such claims and not just in the Bible. Miracles in ancient times are a dime a dozen. It's only when the concept of scientific proof and greater knowledge of how the world works that miracles begin to disappear.

For extraordinary claims like: ESP, UFO visitations with or without medical exams; talking to the dead; dragons in the backyard; we need more than eye witnesses testimony. I would need scientific proof, in the form of experiments independently reproduced.

In ancient times miracles were a dime a dozen and not just in the Bible. Notice in Exodus that Moses' miracles are just bigger and better than the Pharaoh's magicians' miracles. But the more people learn about how the world works the fewer miracles there are. That's because we've learned to ask questions when someone suggests the impossible has happened, or even when we think we've seen something impossible.

Should one of my teen age daughters claim she's both a virgin and pregnant I'm going to have a lot of questions. And though I love and trust her, I wouldn't take her word on that one.

Or as Martin Luther put it "There are five miracles we see in Matthew’s account of our Lord’s birth. He
was born of a virgin, God became man, his birth was
foretold by Isaiah seven hundred years before it
happened, Joseph believed it, and we believe it."

[Lek]

was born of a virgin, God became man, his birth was
foretold by Isaiah seven hundred years before it
happened, Joseph believed it, and we believe it."

So the only way you would believe this is by going back in time and doing a physical examination of Mary, talk to God in person and interview Joseph. I guess the early christians weren't smart to verify that Jesus existed and worked miracles even though they were his contemporaries, before being run out of town by the Jewish leaders and used as torches and lion food under the rule of Nero?

[Jenny A]

With regard to miracles, like the virgin birth, I am extremely skeptical, because extra ordinary events require extra ordinary proof. The Bible with it's 30 year later anonymous authors does not nearly reach that level of proof.

Are you saying all the authors of the bible are anonymous? Why?

Because other than tradition there is no reason to think otherwise. The first five books of the OT are attributed to Moses, but contextual analysis (including the fact that the last book tells of his death) make it clear that they were written, compiled, and piece together over a long period of time. Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus and Numbers were probably put together in about 450 BCE. You don't need a degree to see some of what the scholars are saying here. Notice the duplicate stories in Genesis that show more than one source. Notice also that there seem to be two gods in Genesis one unseeable and incorporeal, and one who walks on Earth. Most duplicates show both gods. They have different names in Hebrew too. The scholarship on this isn't new.

Deuteronomy has a different linguistic style and a single source whereas the first four books appear to have four separate sources.

I could go I but I refer you to the wikapedia article on Bible Authorship

Regarding the gospels it says:

The gospels (and Acts) are anonymous, in that none of them name an author.[70] Whilst the Gospel of John might be considered somewhat of an exception, because the author refers to himself as "the disciple Jesus loved" and claims to be a member of Jesus' inner circle,[71] most scholars today consider this passage to be an interpolation (see below).

Paul actually wrote most the the Epistles though.

If you have any interest in this I suggest the following books: Who Wrote the Bible by Richard Friedman (who is a belieiver if that matters to you); Who Wrote the New Testament, The Making of the Christian Myth, by Burton Mack (obviously not Christian). There are a host of other good possibilities many of them in Kindle format.

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was born of a virgin, God became man, his birth was
foretold by Isaiah seven hundred years before it
happened, Joseph believed it, and we believe it."

So the only way you would believe this is by going back in time and doing a physical examination of Mary, talk to God in person and interview Joseph. I guess the early christians weren't smart to verify that Jesus existed and worked miracles even though they were his contemporaries, before being run out of town by the Jewish leaders and used as torches and lion food under the rule of Nero?

Considering the number of other miracles by other gods they believed in during the time period, no I wouldn't take even purported eye witnesses testimony for that (and that we don't have)---especially not since they waited a good 30 to 60 years to write it down. Do you believe people are visited by UFO's because there's actually better evidence for that. But it's better only because it's contemporary and you can ask them about it.

---

Or to put it most bluntly: If you wouldn't take my daughter's word for it that she's a pregnant virgin, why would you take the work of someone writing 60 years after the event that another girl was a pregnant virgin?

It's a weird sort of miracle anyway, since it so very hard to prove. How did anyone know Mary was a virgin?

[The Grand Nudger]

Upping the ante by a Nero? Probably a bad move - are you ready to demonstrate the veracity of the whole Nero The Lion King mythos? I don't know, I'd probably flesh out the first set of claims before I added to the burden, if it were me.

A good starting point. How many christians, do you imagine, were in Rome during the reign of Nero - to be persecuted at all?

[Minimalist]

Are you saying all the authors of the bible are anonymous?

The Bible is filled with discrepancies, many of them irreconcilable
contradictions. Moses did not write the Pentateuch (the first five books of the Old Testament) and Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John did not write the Gospels. There are other books that did not make it into the Bible that at one time or another were considered canonical—other Gospels, for example, allegedly written by Jesus’ followers Peter, Thomas, and Mary. The Exodus probably did not happen as described in the Old Testament. The conquest of the 6 j e s u s , i n t e r r u p t e d
Promised Land is probably based on legend. The Gospels are at odds
on numerous points and contain nonhistorical material. It is hard
to know whether Moses ever existed and what, exactly, the historical
Jesus taught. The historical narratives of the Old Testament are
filled with legendary fabrications and the book of Acts in the New
Testament contains historically unreliable information about the
life and teachings of Paul. Many of the books of the New Testament
are pseudonymous—written not by the apostles but by later writers
claiming to be apostles.

--Bart Ehrman - Jesus Interrupted Pgs 5 and 6.

Everyone seems to know that except you, Lek.

[Lek]

You're right that Moses didn't write all of the Pentateuch. There were parts added by other authors. The truth is that you are all making assumptions for which you have no proof. You're not following the scientific method at all. Someone has decided that the early christian church was not aware of who wrote the books of the new testament, although they have no way of knowing that. It's all conjecture on the part of those who determined that to be the case. Why couldn't the church know who wrote those books? Even if they were written a generation or two after Christ died, that's not a long time to pass down knowledge of authorship. If my father or grandfather wrote a book as important as that I'm sure I would know. As for the omitted gospels, the church decided which books would be contained in the new testament according to whether they supported the doctrine held by the christian church and who authored them. Doctrine, at first, was passed along orally.