JUST OPEN YOUR HEART, DAMMIT!

[T.J.]

Christians are in more denial about magic being in their book than GRRM is in his.

Just get to the White Walkers, and stop trying to be a historical text because you're not!

Not historical. Is that what atheist Bart Ehrman, professor at UNC - Chapel Hill has said?

"Serious historians of the early Christian movement—all of them—have spent many years preparing to be experts in their field. Just to read the ancient sources requires expertise in a range of ancient languages: Greek, Hebrew, Latin, and often Aramaic, Syriac, and Coptic, not to mention the modern languages of scholarship (for example, German and French). And that is just for starters. Expertise requires years of patiently examining ancient texts and a thorough grounding in the history and culture of Greek and Roman antiquity, the religions of the ancient Mediterranean world, both pagan and Jewish, knowledge of the history of the Christian church and the development of its social life and theology, and, well, lots of other things. It is striking that virtually everyone who has spent all the years needed to attain these qualifications is convinced that Jesus of Nazareth was a real historical figure." (Ehrman, Bart, Did Jesus Exist?, 5-6.)

He also wrote:

“It is a historical fact that some of Jesus’ followers came to believe that he had been raised from the dead soon after his execution. We know some of these believers by name; one of them, the apostle Paul, claims quite plainly to have seen Jesus alive after his death. Thus, for the historian, Christianity begins after the death of Jesus, not with the resurrection itself, but with the belief in the resurrection” (Bart Ehrman, The New Testament: A Historical Introduction to the Early Christian Writings. Third Edition. New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004, 276).

Jesus being real doesn't automatically mean that all of it was real, or even that he was the Son of God. Just like Vlad Dracula being real doesn't mean he was really a vampire.

All the second paragraph proves is that they believed it. Not that it was. I can also make a claim that I saw someone reported to be dead alive as well. People do it with Elvis all the time.