The Deceptive Mechanisms

[FallentoReason]

Read the Gospels and Josephus side-by-side and tell me which one sounds more like genuine history.

Both check out with other sources. There are references to places and people that turn out to be real, and no contradictions.

Ok, so it seems like I'll be forced to believe that you have faith that Achilles was a great warrior who fought at Troy because Troy was a real place and it's found in the Iliad. How's that working out for you?

A real place in a story =/= true story. It doesn't get any simpler than that.

Where do you get your idea of how Roman historians write?

Just this semester gone by I did ancient history as an elective unit. I'm hoping that my university taught me well.

Josephus' style and Mark's style are not so different from Tacitus or Suetonius or Livy. If Mark’s account pays extra attention to Jesus’ actions it’s because he has already been convinced by his actions that Jesus was God. If you had been in his position, would you have written differently?

If we assume that this is all true and I was in his position, I would have definitely written the same content, but as an historical account. "Mark" never once says where he got his information from, who he is, doesn't use a first person p.o.v. style of retelling events (which would be second nature in explaining to someone an event)... I mean it just doesn't sound like this author was writing genuine history. It's instead an oral tradition that god knows where it came from. Pure hearsay from someone who saw nothing for themselves.

Of course it's not, but the fact they do makes the gospels’ case stronger than contemporaneous myths’. We're not trying to prove anything with black and white evidence. But some evidence makes it more likely that certain events are true. Enough small clues and it becomes unreasonable to chalk events up to coincidence or conspiracy.

Except the evidence stacks up against you. As a whole, we have the godman whom no author ever met, whose very attributes were a jumble of different things that covered a ridiculous spectrum, who supposedly caused an uproar where ever he went but never gets a credible mention in history, whose early followers talked about him in mysterious/cultish-sounding ways, whose only evidence is written by unknown people, whose very words got tampered with (extra verses that had been added after a couple of centuries for which we have evidence of)... shall I keep going?

these Scriptures had been subjected to severe abuse in their interpretation

The article relies on this assertion. Does it provide any evidence in its support?

I'm quite sure a Jew would be happy to show you how Christianity hijacked the religion in a nonsensical way.

And yet myths took off still. You've disproven your own argument therefore leaving the doors open still.

Took off? They're dead now. They never left their originating culture. Christianity is one of the few belief systems to have leapt cultures.

You've got Constantine to thank for that. Politics unfortunately my friend