RE: Imagine this...
May 3, 2021 at 5:22 am
(This post was last modified: May 3, 2021 at 5:23 am by Fake Messiah.)
(May 3, 2021 at 4:50 am)WinterHold Wrote: Maybe Josephus was anti-Christian, or just denying the truth out of hatred for Jesus's religion.
TBH; God gave a hard strike to Judaism by sending Jesus -peace be upon him- as a prophet, so I would expect a Jewish "grudge".
Jews declined in numbers, and became a "minority" when most of them converted to Christianity, so if Josephus was smart enough he will know that Jesus is a threat to his religion.
So I expect him to use the same exact tactics of "character assassination" towards the new threat;i.e Jesus peace be upon him.
Yeah, it is a Jewish conspiracy. Even the Matthew gospel ends with claims that it is the Jews who are buying and hiding the truth about Jesus.
But there were other very noticeable events in the life of Jesus that many people would notice and would be hard to hide, like:
- Herod's slaughter of all the baby boys in Bethlehem
- Jesus' triumphant entry in Jerusalem, where the entire city welcomes him as their king
- Jesus casting out moneychangers from the temple (in the area about 34 football fields)
- Two earthquakes hit Jerusalem
- Supernatural darkness covers "all the land" for hours
- The sacred temple curtain tears from top to bottom
- All the dead holy men in the cemetery come out of their graves and wander Jerusalem, "appearing to many"
AND YET CONTEMPORARY HISTORIANS AND CHRONICLERS IN THE TIME OF JESUS DIDN'T WRITE ABOUT ANY OF THIS!
teachings of the Bible are so muddled and self-contradictory that it was possible for Christians to happily burn heretics alive for five long centuries. It was even possible for the most venerated patriarchs of the Church, like St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, to conclude that heretics should be tortured (Augustine) or killed outright (Aquinas). Martin Luther and John Calvin advocated the wholesale murder of heretics, apostates, Jews, and witches. - Sam Harris, "Letter To A Christian Nation"