Knowing everything and allowing evil

[Abracadabra]

@Abra, ah I see. So, as long as one doesn't just look at the text, and as long as one does not assume that he said what he is supposed to have said...then Jesus is salvageable. What was that you said at the start about creating jesus? Wow Abra...just wow.

What "makes sense to you" and what "makes sense" don't appear to be universally equivalent.

Well, what do you think the New Testament is?

It's a creation of Jesus as "The Christ" via rumors.

Rumors that the Jews themselves didn't even buy into and it was based on their religion to begin with!

So why should anyone just settle for the Christian rumors?

What are you doing?

In a very real sense you are rejecting the fables as nothing more than fiction whilst simultaneously demanding that they must be accepted verbatim.

That's pretty weird I think.

Clear the New Testament rumors are not entirely based on fiction. I mean, it's perfectly clear that they are a take-off based on the Torah. They are trying to claim that some guy is "The Christ".

So if they are based on that, then why should it be so hard to imagine that there may have been a real person involved that gave rise to these rumors?

After all, if there was no actual event that sparked these rumors, then how do you explain that they became so well accepted?

If they just popped up out of the blue as a work of pure fiction the people of the times would have said, "What they hell are you talking about? We don't remember any rumors about any guy being crucified on charges of blaspheme?"

The people at that period in time must have had some rumors floating around about a real person so that when they heard these stories they would think to themselves, "Oh yeah, I heard stories about that guy".

There had to have been an event that started rumors.

You don't just write up a totally fictional story, dump it onto a culture and have them accept it like that without at least having some sort of an event that people can identify with.

Even in Greek mythology there were actual events associated with the stories of their Gods. For example the Athenians sent out a large navy to go into battle. There was a huge storm that destroyed the bulk of the navy before they could even make it to the war zone. An angry Posiden was said to have caused the storm and destroyed the ships.

Well, there probably were ships that were destroyed in an abnormally nasty storm. But did any gods have anything to do with it? Probably not.

It's the same way with Jesus. Did some guy reject the immoral teachings of the Torah, call the Pharisees hypocrites, and eventually end up being crucified for blaspheme? Probably so.

Does this mean that he was a demigod? Probably not.

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Based on your views, what are you going to do if the Christians someday find proof that Jesus actually existed? Are you going to then suddenly become a believer that he was "The Christ" just because some guy existed?

That wouldn't automatically make the rumors true verbatim.

The Christians could find proof that some guy existed and was indeed nailed to a pole on charges of blaspheme. But that wouldn't change my views about Christianity in the slightest. I expect that such an event actually happened. That wouldn't even remotely be close to proving that Jesus was "The Christ". All it would do is prove that some guy got himself nailed to a pole and that event sparked a bunch of rumors that became that eventually became the New Testament.

But trust me, if the Christians found proof that some guy had been nailed to a pole on charges of blaspheme they'd be running around proclaiming to have rock solid "proof" that Jesus was "The Christ".

It simply doesn't follow. That wouldn't be anywhere near proof that the outrageous claims of the rumors that followed that even were true verbatim.