Quote:BTW, the gospel story of John the Baptist is good evidence that there is a historical kernel to the life of Jesus.
In "Drums Along The Mohawk" there are appearances by Benedict Arnold, Nicholas Herkimer, and Joseph Brandt. That does not make the main characters, Gil and Lana Martin, any less fictional.
Moving on.
Quote:I'm sure the fat cats among the Jews were fairly satisfied with the situation, but I doubt that the peasants were dancing in the fields.
Do you think the peasants were dancing in the fields, ever? In a fairly short period time Judahite peasants went from Judahite overlords to Babylonian overlords to Persian overlords holding the whip? Do you think they celebrated when the Babylonians left? I doubt they even noticed. The commons was virtually an irrelevancy in antiquity. Revolts were led by disaffected nobles who, when so inspired, brought out their retainers to do the actual fighting.
On top of that, though, have you ever noticed that there is one thing which is conspicuously absent in Herod the Great's reign? Popular unrest. The nobility was pissed about him but his massive building projects provided employment ( and therefore wealth) to the commons at the expense of the nobles. It's a complex subject by itself, though.
Quote:So why would this fictitious story about a Palestinian Jew evolve in the Hellenic world of the 2nd century?
Because it was not unique (there were many dying and resurrected gods throughout the ANE.) Remember, the earliest xtian art we have depicts "jesus" as a clean-shaven, Greco-Roman, toga-wearing, philosopher. Odd, no?
Quote:Paul is mentioned in the epistles of Clement (ca 95 CE), Ignatius (ca 110 CE)
But are those real or pseudoepigraphic bullshit?
http://www.bible.ca/history-ignatius-for...-250AD.htm
Somewhere around here was a discussion about Clement of Rome who seems to be as fictional as Ignatius. The Xtian Forgery Mill was going great guns by the 3d-4th century. I'll see if I can find the Clement reference.
Quote:In any case, you must know, or should know, that there was no authoritative committee, at least not for over 1000 years.
Athanasius was writing his commentary on what should go in the canon some 40 years after the earliest bible we have: The Codexes Vaticanus and Sinaiticus. Vaticanus is missing 1 and 2 Timothy, Titus, Philemon, and Revelation which indicates that the process was still going on long after the so-called bible was written. IN addition there are numerous verses and phrases from other books which did not make the cut....or which were added in later for political purposes.
The issue remains not that we have this nonsense in the 4th century but that we have no record of it in the first.
Quote: In his Antiquities (ca 94 CE) modern scholars almost universally accept the references to James, the brother of Jesus, and to the story of the imprisonment and execution of John the Baptist. There is a broad consensus that the reference to Jesus himself contains an authentic kernel, but it has been subject to Christian interpolation.
Deist-Paladin is much more of a hardliner on the James reference. I see it as an innocent mistake by a later scribe. Some xtian scribe sees the word "christos" in the text and wets his pants shrieking "There's Jesus!" But what did "christos" mean to Josephus? It was an act of anointing a king or high priest and virtually everyone in that passage with the exception of the two Romans was anointed at one time or another. So a helpful scribe moving a marginal note into the text does not impress me....but neither does it rise to the level of full-blown forgery as the Testimonium Flavianum does.
The JtheB tale does not conform to the gospel accounts. We have only the gospel tales linking the two anyway. So what?
Quote:There's lot of fantastic shit in Herodotus, but I wouldn't dismiss him as 100 per cent fable.
I regard Herodotus as a gullible old fool. There is a lot of fantastic shit in Pliny's Natural History, too. But there is not a word about a dead criminal coming back to life.
