RE: I still don't understand why anyone would make up a person like the Biblical Christ..
September 9, 2011 at 7:49 pm
(August 13, 2011 at 11:57 am)Rhythm Wrote: The idea that the writers had to shoehorn a real man into the narrative is a sort of atheist version of the "embarrassing details" argument. There are prophetic reasons (and mis-translations in prophecy) that explain this, more over there was no census. In looking for physical evidence of jesus we come up well below the bar. That's taking aside the fantastic. Hercules is a demi-god, and mythical, but Jesus, also a demi-god was historical? Even after removing all of the miracles it is still special pleading. When's the last time you heard a discussion about the historical Hercules? One set of rules for everyone elses myths, another for judeo-christianity?
You still haven't proven why any first-century Jews would invent a Messiah who was NOT a political/military deliverer from Rome. If that's what they had done, then we wouldn't even be having this discussion-because we would know that it didn't happen. And that, history tells us, is EXACTLY the type of Messiah that the Jews were looking and hoping for-not someone like the Biblical Christ.
I've been on the Skeptics Annotated Bible site, and apparently they don't understand that a Bible verse written in the Old Testament CAN apply to Jesus. Simply because his name isn't in the verse-which it wouldn't have been since Jesus is a Greek name-that does not prove that he didn't fulfill said verse.