Why can't Christians Verify Exactly Where Jesus Was Buried?

[Aractus]

Just one last post, to expose your blatant lying. As Minimalist has already pointed out Irving has been shown in a court of law to have extensively lied in order to promote his holocaust denial, and by all accounts is essentially a neo-nazi.

So? That just proves my point. My point is that they're the bottom of the barrel, they're the lowest and least respected in their fields, their theories are completely discredited by their academic peers, and finally, many of them (as I noted about James McGrath) are not open to receiving academic criticism for their positions. With that said, not all 'deniers' (Christ deniers or holocaust deniers) are as bad as Irving, but the academic standard is not much better anyway, and their versions of history have been rejected by their academic peers.

Arno Mayer doesn't dispute the holocaust happened, he simply disputes some of the consensus about how and why it happened (he believes it wasn't as planned as most historians do, and he also ties it in to the larger European anti-semitism following WW1 much more than most Europeans). Mayer's biggest controversies vis a vis the holocaust is his stance that Israel is milking the genocide to mask its own bad deeds, and that it wasn't a planned genocide. He doesn't dispute that 6 million people were killed.

Right, that's a form of denial. It was a planned genocide, and (IIRC) three camps were specifically designed as execution camps, not as concentration camps, and that has been well established. So for his position he needs to deny the existence of purpose-built execution camps.

And Faurisson is the French David Irving, another holocaust denier, who has gone so far as to claim to have been beaten up by a fictitious jewish terrorist group in order to "silence the truth", who used a letter written on his behalf by Noam Chomsky in another matter to try and legitimise his holocaust denial.

And let's not forget there are 40,000 Scientologists who also deny the Holocaust. That is to say they blame the discipline of psychiatry and not Nazi Germany, which is a form of denial, and I think demonstrates clearly there are way more holocaust deniers than there are Jesus mythicists.

As you just noted, people will misuse stuff written by serious academics for their wacky ideas when they can't amass actual academic evidence; this is no different for Mythicism. There is no academically vetted evidence, so instead they use arguments from outside the disciple and poorly adapt them to use within it. This is what Carrier does anyway, and it's a bit like saying "I'm going to tell you what women's rights were in the Third Dynasty of Egypt, by looking at the Yellow River Civilisation". It's like trying to categorise the culture of Australian Aborigines before white settlement by looking at the Sentinelese people.

I'm not trying to convince you that Christianity is correct. Just that objectivity and academia is what gives us an accurate picture of the past, not opinions held by people who are not qualified historians or scholars. There are some people who claim that Shakespeare didn't write his plays, there are even some that claim that he didn't even exist. Yet both English Historians, and English Literature Scholars firmly reject that argument.

You said earlier "The consensus of biblical scholars is as valuable as the consensus of creatards." So my question to you is are you going to apply the same level of disrespect equally to ALL historians and scholars, or is this a prejudice you specifically have against NT scholars? And if so why do you stigmatise one group of academics and continue trusting others? That is the part I don't understand. Yes, in any field there are wackjobs - in Egyptology there are vocal loons. There are historians in every field that have crazy ideas. But we can weed them out and find the respected academics among them, just as we can do the same for NT scholarship.

So we've got one proper historian, who doesn't discredit the Holocaust, just disagrees with the mainstream on some aspects of it, and we've got two professional liars who have both been found out in court, and who have subsequently decided to turn to the neo-nazi community for their income.

No wonder nobody takes you seriously, Aractus. When your ideology falls apart from your inability to defend it you resort to lies and racism.

I'm not pushing an ideology, I simply do not understand why you think you can say the experts are all untrustworthy? Do you think this of other fields as well? Do you think all physicians are untrustworthy? I mean where do you draw the line? If you understand history properly you can effectively attack any religion you want; if you don't then you can't launch an effective argument. This goes right back to the thread topic - "why can't Christians verify exactly where Jesus was buried", which I answered from a purely critical point of view: that is historians wouldn't expect us to know that. We don't know where John the Baptist was buried either, and he (it is believed) had a greater following than Jesus during his lifetime.

A much better question is this - why was the Old Testament written in a horribly primitive language? It could have been written down in a form of Greek very similar to Koine Greek, which is what was used for the New Testament. It would have been much more expressive and easier to understand, and there would be many many more scholars today who could read it in its original language, and ordinary laypeople could read it even today without much trouble if they learned Greek. Not to mention we wouldn't have had the awful LXX or the other 2nd century translations (Theodotion, etc) created either. And because of its ease of use, there would have been plenty more copies made of it, just like the New Testament. The choice of Hebrew indicates that Jehovah either: 1. didn't want the laity reading the Bible, or 2. was too incompetent to give people an easy-to-read original. Which is it?


See? A perfect argument that Christians cannot refute, based on real evidence and not opinion.