Evidence: The Gathering

[TheRocketSurgeon]

I don't mention it just as a way of name-dropping, but by way of explaining that A) this is how I know these things, and not from reading internet forums, as has been suggested in one of these recent threads, and B) as a way of pointing out that, once I learned a lot more about first- and second-century culture/history in that region, I was surprised that I ever was able to look at things the way I did while I was a Christian.

This jumped out at me, I suppose, because you're saying you are now in possession of some information that you did not have when you were a Christian - information which has convinced you that Christianity is untrue.

What is that information, specifically?

I'm sorry, I thought I was being clear. The information is the fact that Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John (and of course Acts, which dovetails with Luke and was most likely written by the same person) were not all written at once, by the disciples themselves, soon after the death of Jesus and then distributed among the faithful immediately after Jesus' death, as I had envisioned while a Christian; most Southern Baptists pretty much see the Canon as a single piece, essentially all handed down in a King James leather binding with all 66 books together, and don't consider the first- and second- century environment in which they were penned, both in historical terms and in terms of how people wrote back then as compared to how we write today. None of what I learned is even particularly radical, outside of fundamentalist circles, it's just that I did not have that information, upon which for form my ideas about how the New Testament was written, why it was writen, and how it was edited/assembled into our modern Canon.

---

Addendum: If you're interested in more of the specifics, it's a lot more than I'm willing to hash out in an internet forum, but there are dozens of books on the subject of first century culture, history, and writing styles. However, if you're talking specifically of the Gospels and their history, Aractus actually did a good job of summarizing most of it here:

http://atheistforums.org/thread-36295-page-7.html

http://atheistforums.org/thread-36295-page-10.html

---

Second Addendum: It occurs to me you may have been asking what exactly it was that convinced me that the Biblical stories were not an accurate or believable description of God's interaction with mankind. In that case, I'm referring to realizing that the human race is not 6000 years old and extant throughout the historical timeline, but are actually a blink in the history of the universe, and that it makes no sense for God to have waited to reveal Himself through the first >97% of the time Homo sapiens have been around (that's using Francis Collins' 100,000 year number; I actually think it's closer to 200-250K), only to appear to one particular Bronze Age tribal sheepherder people, and just happening to share all their values, instead of appearing to the Chinese, the Kelts, the Malians, the Sumerians, the Dravidians, the Aryans, the Hyksos, the Egyptians, the Etruscans, the Greeks, the Hittites, the Inca, or any of the major civilizations that have come before. Or to all of them, everywhere and often, so we wouldn't slaughter each other in the name of the "right" set of beliefs. The Judeo-Christian story just doesn't make sense to me on an evolutionary timeline, no matter how you dress it up.