Open debate: What does Jesus teach?

[DeistPaladin]

Sweet Reason you are deluded, clearly desperate to find credibility in your fairy tales. I'm tempted to let your response stand on its own for fear that I'll be seen as kicking a man while he's down. But I can't let some of these assertions go.

Rubbish. You can have a high degree of confidence in some facts and a very low degree of confidence in others, that doesn't mean that because some things are unsubstantiated and probably not factually based that everything isn't.

The burden of proof is not on me to discredit every letter of the Gospel accounts. If I can show you that we can't reconcile even basic facts about the life of Jesus from all four Gospels and known milestones of history referenced in them (basic facts like "what decade was he born", "when did he start his ministry", and "what did he preach") then there's no reason to take any of it seriously, certainly not to the level of "reliable eye-witness accounts".

Having done so, the burden of proof falls on you to articulate exactly what "facts" can be gleened from the Gospels and why we have a high degree of confidence in them.

So what? The first temple had fallen to siege, Jerusalem had fallen to siege at least 4 times just in the past millennium. It since fell to siege several more times since. Jesus didn't know that the second temple would fall in 70AD and if it had instead fallen in say 120AD then you'd be trying to push the date after 120AD. Your neo-scepticism is completely irrational.

My neo-skepticism is consistent with mainstream scholarship even among Christian apologists who place Mark's date around 70 CE, when the temple was not just damaged in a siege but utterly razed to the ground. The burden of proof falls upon you to answer my question as to what source material justifies your ridiculously early dates for the authorship of Mark.

You do understand how the burden of proof works, right?

That's not entirely the case,

Actually, yes it is. Matt and Luke both read as elaborations of Mark, though each is contradictory of the other. Once again, mainstream scholarship is with me on this one and you need to do better than "nuh-uh-uh".

Luke and Paul are. [my star witnesses]

Great. Neither are witnesses at all. Paul tells us next to nothing about the life of Jesus at all, a point admitted to by Christian apologists who say this wasn't his focus.

Luke (or whoever the author of Luke-Acts was) is a credible author although he does not get all his facts right.

He has Mary with a 10 year pregnancy because of his botched understanding of when Herod the Great was King. You have to mount a better defense to keep him on the witness stand than "oh, picky picky picky".

we don't know for certain the author of Luke-Acts but we do know at least that it's a single author.

...who couldn't get straight whether the resurrected Jesus flew up into the sky on the day of his resurrection or 40 days later.

This is a pretty important and quite memorable detail, wouldn't you agree? If a man rose from the dead and flew up into the sky, I could pretty well tell you even 40-50 years later whether it happened right away or whether he hung around for 40 days preaching a gospel.





Try to do better than "oh picky picky picky".

Now the fact that Luke makes extensive use of Mark is what gives that credibility to Mark.

Did I accidentally delete a huge section of your post where you spent the needed five or so paragraphs where you explained your logic or did you just throw this assertion out there with nothing to base it on?

If the former, so sorry and could you explain your logic again?

Correct, however he is in fact a witness to much of the later part of Acts (from about chapter 15 on).

Yeah uh did I mention that Acts is so drenched in the supernatural as to be immediately dismissed as any kind of credible historical account? Seriously, even by the standards of the Bible, this book is ridiculous. But hey, if you want to actually defend the events in Acts as "no, really, that actually happened", be my guest. It should be fun.

Most scholars believe Luke-Acts is the work of a single author. The resurrection (Acts 1:2 "the day he was taken up") and ascension (Acts 1:9-11) are two different days that occur 40 days apart. Again, though, Luke is allowed to get some details wrong - he's only human - that isn't enough to cast doubt over whether there's a single author or not.

Dude, a guy rose from the dead and then flew up into the sky, taken up by a cloud. Did that happen right away or did the guy hang around for over a month talking to various people and showing them infallible proofs and such?

And your defense is "oh picky picky picky"?

This is not a picayune little detail we're quibbling over here.

Again here you go making sweeping assumptions instead of examining evidence. Yes the Is. 7:14 Prophecy is "wrong", however as it appears quoted in Matt it is near letter-for-letter identical in the LXX meaning that one had to have been copied from the other or that both were copied from a single common source. So there is is entirely possible that Matthew is simply copying from a proto-lxx Isiah document.

Well, I hope you can prove that.

And while you're at it, you can also defend Matt's assertions about the slaughter of the innocents and his misquote of Jeremiah as well as his misquote of "out of Egypt I have called my son".

Here's your prophet Matthew:

So what? Different people should have different impressions of the same person if that person is indeed a genuine person. Have you ever had friends who had physically abusive partners? Ask them to give you a description of that person and compare it to say their parent's description of the same person. Get what I'm saying?

I get what you're trying to say and again, it's the "oh picky picky picky" defense.

I'm tempted to go line by line of how radically different these two stories are, John vs. the Synoptics, but the very fact that Christians themselves call the other three Gospels "similar" tacitly acknowledges how John sits oddly alongside of them.

Again, Luke simply got that detail wrong.

His account of when Herod the Great reigned over Judea was off by a decade. This would be like me placing Hitler in the 1950s. An error of this magnitude would earn an "F" in any history class, let alone a "reliable eye-witness account".

Stop using the "picky picky picky" defense. It only makes you look pathetic.

That's the most logical explanation since we can place his baptism by John in 28-29 AD and John had to have been at least 30 to start his ministry as dictated by OT law (not to mention that it clearly says Jesus is about thirty in the gospel accounts).

No, JtB STARTED his ministry in 28-29 CE. And calling this 30 years after his birth would have placed his birth 3-2 BCE (no year 0). This would have been after the death of Herod the Great and far too early for a census of Judea under Quirinius.

The nativity has other problems between the accounts too, but that doesn't change the reliability of other parts of those same books like say the baptism by John which is widely acknowledged as a firm historical event.

Only because of Christian bias. There is not only NO evidence of this "firm historical event" outside the Bible but it makes no sense given what Josephus reported about JtB.

JtB had a successful ministry, as reported by Josephus. What Josephus and others do not report is that JtB told everyone he was just the warm-up act, a forerunner for a much greater man to come. There is NO evidence outside the Bible that he effectively submitted to Jesus or pointed to Jesus as the awaited messiah. By all accounts, the followers of JtB continued to be rivals with the early Christians for centuries, clearly not getting the memo from their leader, and even today, his followers insist he is the awaited messiah.

This is a pretty important detail that one would expect Josephus or others to mention or for his followers to believe if JtB really prostrated himself before Jesus and told everyone to follow Jesus. Instead, all indications are that his ministry was a thing unto itself, not a warm-up act for something to come.

No, that number you can't fudge. As I told you it would mean that both John and Jesus were breaking OT law (or at least tradition) by beginning a ministry before their 30th year (Numbers 4:2-3). That would have been especially noteworthy had it been the case.

Which only helps my case, not yours.

John's gospel is certainly not chronological.

On this point at least, it certainly is.

1:12 And immediately the spirit driveth him into the wilderness.

Please note the words "and" and "immediately" following the baptism.

1:35 Again the next day after John stood, and two of his disciples;
1:43 The day following Jesus would go forth into Galilee, and findeth Philip, and saith unto him, Follow me.
2:1 And the third day there was a marriage in Cana of Galilee; and the mother of Jesus was there:

The Trinitatian doctrine doesn't contradict the teaching that Jesus is eternally subordinate to the father, it's only in very recent years that the eternal subordination has come into question in Christian churches, even though it has never been questioned since the early church in Jerusalem and Rome.

The Trinitarian doctrine is barking madness, saying Jesus is God and not God at the same time, saying that Jesus is the same being as his father and yet not, saying that the Christian god is three and yet one. Nobody understand the Trinity because there is nothing to understand. It is barking madness. Nothing more.

That's not accurate - you do know much of the story. Same with Ned Kelly in Australia - some biographies written within a couple of decades after his death have erroneous details, but it doesn't change the fact that those same biographies also contain detail historically relevant and accurate accounts too.

The burden of proof requires you to do better than "nuh uh uh". Provide proof to me for WHICH parts of the Gospels I'm supposed to take seriously and WHY.