"But what about the moderates?"

[DeistPaladin]

Discard the OT? Absolutely not! It's an essential part of Christianity.

Sorry if I misunderstood. That seemed to me to be what you were saying.

Perhaps some form of summary might help here. The Bible has a meta-narrative of 'Sin, exile, forgiveness, restoration'. Thus we have the story of Adam (the Hebrew word for humanity), gone wrong. We have a creation gone wrong. We have a nation, Israel, charged with sorting out the problems of humanity (the promise to Abraham), but also they kept going wrong.

The whole idea of sin entering the world because of a choice of rebellion is the theme of the story. At what point in our evolution was that choice made.

Tell you what, let that go. Never mind. If sin entered the world with "humanity", for which Adam and Eve are symbolic representations, how did even the early stages of humanity evolve. Remember we have to go back to single cell organisms here. Evolution doesn't work without death and death didn't enter the world until sin but sin requires choice and choice requires a brain capable of understanding and making choice and that doesn't exist with single cell organisms which operate according to stimulus-response.

And so it still falls apart.

And then you have Jesus. As Israel's Messiah, he accomplished Israel's rescue from it's own plight. As Israel-in-person he completed Israel's vocation to rescue humanity. As the truly human one, he re-established God's rule over the cosmos. Three stories, one meta-narrative.

Fail on all counts.

Jesus was most assuredly not the Messiah to the Jews. That's why there are Jews in the world today. The Messiah they expected, the one they prophesied, was a warlord (not even necessarily divine) who would lead Israel to glory over her enemies, not some hippy preaching peace and love to all of humanity.

The first writings about Jesus reflected this expectation better than the Gospels. I refer to the first book of the NT that was written: Revelation. This Jesus has little in common with the gentle carpenter we think of. This Jesus is more the messianic warlord who was born in Heaven and would come to rule on earth, as opposed to born on earth and would rule in Heaven. More to the point, this Jesus was to bring pain and devastation to Israel's Roman oppressors.

When the expected invasion of angels failed to materialize, the followers of Jesus apparently decided that the promised kingdom, part of the pact between Yahweh and David, must exist in a higher realm. Jesus was reworked and you can see the progress if you read the books of the NT in the order in which they were written: Revelation, Mark, Matthew, Luke, and finally John.

Jesus certainly failed to rescue Israel, since Israel was utterly wiped off the map during the Bar Kochba revolution. Their temple was destroyed and their people scattered.

Israel had no such vocation to rescue humanity. The idea of a lamb of god come to rescue all of humanity from sin and be the intercessor between us and the divine is utterly foreign to the original Jewish faith. The entire Christian scheme of salvation is more rooted in pagan influences. Search the OT in vein for the word "Hell". You won't find it except for mistranslated words for "Sheol", which just means "the grave". Satan gets a makeover in Christianity, from the punisher and tempter working for Yahweh in the OT (see Job) to the mortal enemy of Yahweh in the NT.

Most notable of all is how utterly blasphemous Christianity's core idea of an intercessor with the divine is. The Jews had a direct relationship with Yahweh, a god that tolerated no distractions and delegated the role of judge and savior to no one. They neither required an intercessor nor did their god allow for it.

Where the OT forbids an intercessor the NT requires it.

I'm not sure how Yahweh has restored his rule over the cosmos. You'll need to elaborate on that one further.

There's history there, some of it is just plain accurate, but best not to use it uncritically.

Fine, we'll put Acts aside.

There's plenty of room for such a census (if Rome wanted one, a wave of a sword would have done the trick).

I could conduct a Roman census in Judea prior to 6 CE for you right now.

Roman Citizens in Judea prior to 6 CE: None.

There you go. By definition, citizens of Judea were Judeans. Judea was an ally of Rome, not a province. Ergo, a census would be rather moot.

But let that go. Rome had no motive to order such a census in an ally kingdom but maybe they just did it for craps and giggles. But then we run into the "governorship of Quirinius" problem.

Perhaps there were two governorships of Quirinius. That would be unheard of in Roman custom but hey, maybe they made an exception for good old Quirinius. Absence of evidence isn't evidence of absence, right?

The earlier census was 9-8 BCE. Whoops, we know where Quirinius was at that time and it was a governor of a province in modern day Turkey.

OK, forget Quirinius! Maybe Luke meant to say "the census BEFORE Quirinius was governor of Syria". There's no reason to think so but we're having fun with ad hoc hypotheses to try to salvage the historicity of the Gospels, right?

Now Jesus is born at the latest at 7 BC. This makes him too old to be "about 30" at the time that John the Baptist was arrested. According to Luke, JtB didn't even get started until 28 CE at the earliest. JtB was arrested and put into prison before Jesus got started in preaching his gospel. Given other historical landmarks, such as Herod Antipas' marriage to Herodius and war with Aratas, we can maybe push JtB's arrest as early as 34 CE. A Jesus born in 7 BCE is too old to be "about 30".

The questions of history supporting Xianity and NT accuracy would require very long answers. My new years resolution for 2014 was to do shorter posts; and while there's still time...

I probably need to make a similar resolution.