(March 31, 2015 at 7:34 pm)Minimalist Wrote:Quote:So you're willing to allow that historians writing 200-300 years after the event can cite reliable testimony but you don't allow testimony in the context of a religious movement that is purporting to write about a person who lived within the last 20-80 years?
Yes, because THEY are citing their sources...some of whom actually were with Alex. More than that, what is their agenda? They are relating history they were not trying to create a god cult based on Alexander. Xtian writers never seem to lose sight of the propagandistic mission. They are trying to convince the gullible that their godboy was real. Alex was real. His body was preserved in Alexandria until the 4th century AD and everyone knew it.
Where is your boy? Oh, right. He flew up to the sky. Just like "Romulus."
You have yet to present any sort of reliable testimony. Xtian propaganda does not cut it.
There is no credible reason in the propagandistic mission of the early Christians that they should claim the Messiah to be from a town called Nazareth, with a mother named Mary and a carpenter father named Joseph, with brothers and sisters, baptized by John the Baptist, and then brutally dehumanized by Roman crucifixion. If your goal is to make a god cult that will appeal to either Jews or Greeks, these are not the elements you would choose to include... unless they are facts that you can't get around any other way than that which the NT writers actually attempted to do. Would it make any difference if the writers, instead of saying, "This is what I heard and saw" had said, "This is what I heard from so-and-so at place X and time Y"? Not unless we have better reasons to trust so-and-so over the writers themselves, which would be impossible since the writers themselves are our sources of the claims. With "Jeez" we have people conveying information that they obtained by revelation, but like "Alex," also from those whom they alleged knew Jesus, even one close enough to be repeatedly distinguished as Jesus' brother. If your justification for believing that Jesus didn't exist lies in the facts that his body wasn't reproduced after his alleged crucifixion, and that people came to develop mythological and theological explanations for this traumatic event, consider me unpersuaded.
He who loves God cannot endeavour that God should love him in return - Baruch Spinoza