(September 14, 2017 at 1:42 pm)LadyForCamus Wrote: Okay so...to re-cap, so that I can wrap my brain around all of what I've read here, and what I've been reading on my own to fill in knowledge gaps:
Have I got this timeline right enough that we all (Theist and atheist) more or less agree?
-Jesus died around year 30
-Paul's letters weren't written until around year 50
-Gospel of Mark -not until around 70
-Luke, Matthew (taken from Mark and hypothetical Q) approx. 80's/90's
-Then John
And the final version of the NT that we know today, after being picked over several times, wasn't solidified until around year 390ish?!
How, in the name of the Flying Spaghetti Monster, could any rational person take the supernatural claims in this story seriously? I mean, no one can even be sure that Paul himself ever met Jesus, and the gospel writers, whoever they were, came way too late! But Christianity is somehow more "evidenced" than Mormonism? Or any other religion? What evidence?! Stories passed down across a hundred or so years? This is special pleading. Cry me a river. And it's even worse than I'd realized.
You were close enough up to the point of 390. Most scholars (including Bart Ehrman) believe the books are 99% as they were originally. They also agree the 1% difference does not change any important textual meaning.
Do you think that people did not live into their 70s and 80s in the first century? John is thought to have been in his mid-90s.
For there to be special pleading, you need the circumstances to be the same (or similar) and treat them differently. Do you imagine that all the authors, all the surviving text making claims about public events and existing churches before any of the writings are similar to one person's claims of what happened to him when he was all by himself? If you think this is similar, your bias and/or intellectual honesty is so far out of whack there is no sense in continuing debating this issue.
Like I have said before. Joseph Smith's claims is the appropriate comparison (for once) to the atheist's favorite alien abductions.