"The United States is a Christian-founded nation"

[DeistPaladin]

Evidence that people had an experience with the full glory of the risen Christ? We have evidence of that certainly, I can point you towards the text. It doesn't prove they didn't have a collective mass hallucination or something but I don't know how you would prove something like that. All the people involved are dead at this point as well so that would hinder that line inquiry but we have what the wrote. Here you go.

You're using folklore to prove mythology.

It's not necessary to speculate on "mass hallucinations" or any such things. The apostles and their supposed experiences and personal transformations are, at best, matters of folklore. We don't need to explain away that which is not yet proven.

I'm being sympathetic here because I know you view the Bible as a collection of "historical documents" written by "reliable eye-witness accounts". For me, it's no better or worse than the Koran or the Iliad as far as stories go.

We do know there was a Trojan War. The ruins of Troy have confirmed this. Does that mean Zeus and other gods, whose activities were recorded in The Iliad, are also true? Does that mean we take seriously the legend of Achilles and how he was impervious to harm except in his heel? Does that mean we believe the fanciful tales of Odysseus and his ten year journey home?

"But that's different," you might object, "The Iliad and The Odyssey were written by anonymous bards long after the events."

Guess what, the New Testament is just as dubious as source material.

Half of the epistles of Paul, much of which document the supposed "early church", are considered to be of dubious authorship by modern scholars. In these days, the problem of pseudo-epigraphy (i.e. forgery) and interpolation (alteration of authentic documents) were rampant in religious circles. If you had an idea about God you wanted to promote, the easiest way to do it is to take the name of a noted theologian and then "discover" a letter of his. Alternatively, you could take an authentic work and add to it, as we're all but certain bishop Eseubius did to Josephus' Antiquities where a highly questionable paragraph about Jesus was added.

Christianity at that time was actually composed of many rival groups which had radically different ideas about Jesus. Some believed he was born of a virgin, some that he was born the way all babies are born and only later became divine after being adopted by God as a son (Ebionites) and some believed he was never born but rather a higher god who came down to earth one day (Marcionites) and some believed he was never really on earth at all but only appeared as an apparition (Docetics).

Echoes of the early struggles among rival Christian groups is found in the canonical Bible, specifically 1John 4:1-3 and 2John 1:7, where John, supposedly a disciple of Christ, condemns the Docetics as anti-Christians working for evil spirits and that we should have faith that Jesus existed in the flesh.

The "beloved disciple" John appealed to faith? Shouldn't he have appealed to recent history that many people would have remembered?

These early Christians also differed on many other points of theology, including how many gods there were, whether the OT laws should be kept and what the proper path to salvation was.

Modern Christians like to dismiss the "heterodox" Christians as schismatics and insignificant splinter groups but it's clear that they first warranted mention in the canonical scriptures and later the full force of the Roman Empire following Nicaea. The Christian faction that emerged triumphant became what we know today and the others were forcefully stamped out.

So how about this Paul character? Who was he again?

He was the poster boy for the Marcionite Christians. His writings were originally "discovered" by Marcion, a leader of a powerful rival sect of Christians that preached that Jesus was a higher god, superior to that inept demiurge Yahweh, and he rejected all things Jewish. For him, there was no Old Testament, no Mary and Joseph and Jesus was never a baby or "born" on this earth. Jesus was a higher god who appeared on earth as all other gods do, as a fully grown adult in the temple one day to preach a new message of salvation from that inept idiot god, Yahweh. Paul was the man held up by Marion as the prophet who had seen this superior god, Jesus, and pointed the way to salvation by faith.

Strange that the writings of Paul we have today suggest a Trinitarian godman Jesus who was born of a woman and of the bloodline of David, no?

It's almost like Marcion never actually read the writings of the man he held up as the principle prophet of his sect...

...or maybe he did read the letters of Paul and was just hoping no one else would...

...or maybe we don't have "clean" copies of what Marcion originally discovered.

Remember the problems of pseudo-epigraphy and interpolation I told you about earlier?

OK, so what about the Gospels themselves?

Mark: Non-witness, attributed to be the author by "tradition", who only heard about the story of Jesus from Peter, who in turn was not a witness to all of the events (hearsay upon hearsay) and all of this was written down 70 CE, four decades later. Subsequent Gospels were clearly derived from this dubious source.

Matthew: Matthew, or whoever the author was, was clearly a liar from his misquotes of the Old Testament, trying to create "prophecy" where none existed. This source is hardly reliable.

Luke: Non-witness, a companion of Paul.

John: This strange Gospel doesn't agree with any of the others and its "advanced" theology, including referring to "The Jews" as a separate hostile group, suggest a much later date of publication.

And even among these sources, they contradict each other on exactly what Jesus was, when he lived and what he did but that's a more involved discussion. And this is on the life of Jesus. We have even less reliable information on the apostles or how they died. Good luck ever separating any truth, if there even is any to be found, from fanciful legends and myths.

Don't use folklore to try to prove mythology. It won't work with anyone not already indoctrinated by Christianity.