Modern examples of gullibility as evidence against Christian claims

[DeistPaladin]

You'll need a mallet and a spike to get through the thick skull of that shithead, D-P.

Plenty of paper towels and Clorox Wipes for all the shit that will likely splatter everywhere. He's really full of it.

---

Seriously though, I hope I've successfully pounded this point into your skull:
MARK...
WAS...
NOT...
AN...
EYE-...
WITNESS!

Evidence?

Excuse me a moment...



...OK, I'm back. Re-read my previous posts where I've been patiently trying to correct your delusion that Mark was a witness. I'm done repeating myself.

If you're going to start quoting scholars questioning Mark's authorship at all (based on lack of evidence for his authorship), what can I say to that?

I know I didn't mention this before but these are Christian scholars, not skeptics. They acknowledge that Mark is of dubious authorship. I suggest you go buy a plane ticket to England and take it up with them. Present your evidence to Oxford that Mark was not only the author of his Gospel but that he was an eye-witness to the events in the alleged life of Jesus. I'm sure they'll be impressed by your presentation.

I'm not here to cross-examine a point that has been conceded by mainstream Christian scholarship.

I presented my case that Mark probably wrote the Gospel of Mark, and that, given textual clues and a chance line from Hippolytus, he probably was an eyewitness. If that’s not enough to convince you, fine. I set out to show how the Gospels were likely constructed, as well as how 2nd century Christians would have seen them, and you began demanding more “extraordinary evidence.”

What you presented were blogs and forum posts. I'm going to go with the good folks at Oxford University. I seem to have heard that name before. I assume they know better than some-guy-with-a-blog.

That’s your translation, and it as no backing.

So now you're disputing that oral history and folklore aren't as reliable as documented history?

We have no evidence of any embellished oral accounts. The idea of the Jews being liars and turning truth into fiction is groundless.

Actually, that's the way it works in ALL cultures, Jewish and otherwise. Oral history and folklore are by their very nature prone to embellishment. Further, it's a very simple matter for fiction to make its way into urban legend and then to "true story". This sort of thing happens today, even in our modern age where debunking an urban legend is just a Snopes check away.

The OT has three thousand years of copies—and has never changed once. The NT two thousand.

I know I haven't mentioned this before but MARK CHAPTER 16! Here we have a classic example of embellishment that we know about and is not disputed by Christian scholars.

First off, Mark has a mere thirty years to gather these distortions (during which witnesses were still alive).

Try at least 40 years according to mainstream Christian scholarship where the date of authorship is placed at 70 CE (in reality, more like a century but I'm taking Christian claims at face value).

Furthermore, how long was George Washington in the grave before that melodramatic folklore about the cherry tree was told? Did anyone cry "false"? Elvis was not long dead before supposed sightings and urban legends about his faking his death started to spread (and persist well into the 80s). And these are secular figures, not religious icons. And these are examples in the relatively enlightened era, not during a superstitious time when the ancient Jews were hungry for any sign of their messiah who would deliver them from Roman oppression.

Christians like to have it both ways. There's no contemporary evidence for Jesus because it was a primitive time, people outside Jesus' following didn't care about some rabbi that much, "whattaya want, more evidence than we have for Alexander the Great?", etc. etc. But when it comes to speculation on whether or not the Gospels might be true, that's when the ancient world was populated by fact checking commandos that would descend upon rabbis with military efficiency to cry "false" if they ever so much as uttered an exaggeration.

Second, I question how much “extra opportunity to lie” there really was. If multiple people telling the story each embellished their own way, which do we now have? And wouldn’t one have rebuked another, saying “that’s not how it happened!”

Which is precisely what happened!

Oh, I'm sorry, are you under the delusion that Christianity got started as a singular faith and spread rapidly despite persecution?

Go research "Marcionite", "Docetic", "Ebionite" and other early Christianities. There's a reason the Council of Nicaea was such a circus.