Open debate: What does Jesus teach?

[Aractus]

Sweet Reason you are deluded, clearly desperate to find credibility in your fairy tales.

"My" fairy tales?

The burden of proof is not on me to discredit every letter of the Gospel accounts.

The burden of proof isn't anywhere but on the person making the claim. If you are making the claim that the events recorded in the gospel are wildly inaccurate you have to find sufficient evidence, not evidence that Luke got the nativity wrong (one of the only things he got wrong when considering historicity).

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".

I didn't call them reliable eye-witness accounts, the writers weren't eye-witnesses.

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.

Maybe you misunderstood me. We can have a high degree of confidence, for instance, that Pontius Pilate was a real person and that he served as governor and that he presided over the tial of Jesus. Now, many historians have pointed out that it seems unlikely that a Roman official would be "reluctant" to carry out the sentence against Jesus as described in the gospel accounts - but that fact alone doesn't mean that he didn't preside over the trial.

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.

Of course there are plenty of critical scholars who think all the Synoptic gospels were written after 70AD that would place John around the same time by their reasoning, however I don't believe that theory for a second because it's based on such a flimsy assumption that the gospel writers knew of the 70 AD siege against Jerusalem. Since Acts ends in the present and that is around 61 AD it means that Luke-Acts is most likely to be written around that time. Mark of course is written before Luke and Matthew is written around the same time as Luke.

You're dating it by an event that never takes place anywhere in the gospels - so by that reasoning if the 70 AD siege had happened in 100 AD you'd claim that's when the gospels were written.

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".

Again, you're misusing information. Yes they're both based on Mark or proto-mark, but that doesn't mean they're "elaborations of Mark" as you just put it - and that would be especially true of Luke who doesn't use "all" of Mark in the way that Matthew does.

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.

Paul knew the family of Jesus and the disciples who Jesus taught, he was present at the Jerusalem council in 50AD and had been taught theology as he himself says in his epistles for instance this creed in 1 Corinthians 15:

• Now I would remind you, brothers, of the gospel I preached to you, which you received, in which you stand, and by which you are being saved, if you hold fast to the word I preached to you—unless you believed in vain.
  
  For I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received: that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the Scriptures, and that he appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve. Then he appeared to more than five hundred brothers at one time, most of whom are still alive, though some have fallen asleep. Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles. Last of all, as to one untimely born, he appeared also to me. For I am the least of the apostles, unworthy to be called an apostle, because I persecuted the church of God. But by the grace of God I am what I am, and his grace toward me was not in vain. On the contrary, I worked harder than any of them, though it was not I, but the grace of God that is with me. Whether then it was I or they, so we preach and so you believed.

Of course Paul is a reliable source for what he talks about. I'm not talking about theology I'm talking about the history of the early church.

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".

He doesn't have Mary with a 10 year pregnancy, he has simply been taught, received, or copied a nativity that was wrong. There's very little you can say with confidence about the nativity of Jesus - that doesn't negate what you can say with confidence about the teachings of Jesus. That's two different things.

...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.

It reads pretty consistently to me. Show me where the inconsistency is?

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.

And even the most sceptical scholars will tell you that you can derive historically significant facts from it.

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.

Of course I can prove it, asshole:

Is 7:14 (LXX): διὰ τοῦτο δώσει κύριος αὐτὸς ὑμῖν σημεῖον ἰδοὺ ἡ παρθένος ἐν γαστρὶ ἕξει καὶ τέξεται υἱόν καὶ καλέσεις τὸ ὄνομα αὐτοῦ Εμμανουηλ

Matt 1:23: Ἰδοὺ ἡ παρθένος ἐν γαστρὶ ἕξει, καὶ τέξεται υἱὸν, καὶ καλέσουσιν τὸ ὄνομα αὐτοῦ Ἐμμανουὴλ, ὅ ἐστιν μεθερμηνευόμενον, μεθ᾽ ἡμῶν ὁ Θεός

If you know anything about Greek you'd know that this is impossible to happen by chance.

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:

I'm not defending Matthew, nor am I calling him a prophet. I'm simply saying that your assertion that he's a "liar" is unfounded, he's recorded what he was taught.

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.

At least 30 years after his birth. 28-29AD is perfectly consistent with him being born 6-5 BC.

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.

That's right, there isn't, but it's an event that we know about because of the bible.