Again, there is no evidence that there is a god so he cannot have a "son." That's a rip off from contemporary pagan religions...Zeus was always sneaking down to seduce the odd maiden or two.
The first part is trickier. Was there someone named Yeshua bar Yosef? There were probably 100 of them wandering around first century Judaea as both were exceedingly common names. It is not the name that you worship it is the magic tricks. As H. L. Mencken noted:
So it isn't enough to claim that someone of that name existed you have to find one who meets the other conditions. This you cannot do because of what I like to call the Great Christian Paradox: It goes something like this:
"Jesus was so important and such a threat and had gained such a following among the people that the Sanheddrin felt compelled to break every rule in their own book to hold a trial on Passover, yet, at the same time he was so insignificant that no one in authority even bothered to pay the slightest attention to him." That, in a nutshell is your problem. Apologists make all sorts of excuses for this but they do not hold water. Judaea, ever since the completion of the port of Caesarea by Herod, was no longer a one-horse town. The building projects that Herod financed were greatly influenced by the revenue derived from the port and the increased commerce which the port made possible. The city had grown to significant size and Josephus recounts that Pilate had raided the temple treasury in order to build another aqueduct to supply water to the city. There were overland caravan routes passing through Judaea in addition to the sea-borne trade connecting it to the rest of the Empire. Had someone who was executed by a Roman magistrate come back from the dead it would have been BIG FUCKING NEWS throughout the entire empire! It would have been seen as a repudiation of the magistrate's action by the god(s). When the Romans killed people they had a tendency to stay dead. In the superstition-laden culture of the time there should at least have been some notice taken of it. But Philo, living at the time and writing in nearby Alexandria notes nothing of it; Pliny, compiling his work on Natural History never makes reference to any of it; Seneca says nothing. One could argue that when Xtianity was finally afforded its status by Constantine that the primary motivation for Eusebius' forgery of the Testimonium Flavianum in Josephus was to correct the failure of history to pay any attention to their boy. It was an embarrassment that had to be fixed. It is much more than the fact that your gospels contradict each other. As Bart Ehrman notes in Jesus, Interrupted, the gospels are telling 4 different stories. Beyond that is the obvious fact that when Xtianity grew to proportions where Greco-Roman writers began noticing it, they did begin to write against it (Celsus, Porphyry) but only in the late 2d century AD. Prior to that, we have only Pliny the Younger's somewhat bemused reference to xtians in Asia Minor at the beginning of the 2d century.
One other thing, I have been told by xtians that there "must be" some historical kernel at the heart of xtianity. Must there? I have asked them does that mean that there "must be" a historical Odin, or Zeus, or Marduk, or Quetzalcoatl, or Osiris, or Hercules, or Shiva, or Ishtar, or Ba'al, etc....etc. I never get an answer to that one. This is simply more "special pleading" that "our god is real but all the others are false." Let's remember that if mankind has invented one million gods you reject 999,999 of them as idols just as I do. We only differ on 1/1,000,000 of the issue.
The first part is trickier. Was there someone named Yeshua bar Yosef? There were probably 100 of them wandering around first century Judaea as both were exceedingly common names. It is not the name that you worship it is the magic tricks. As H. L. Mencken noted:
Quote: Either Jesus rose from the dead or he didn't. If he did, then Christianity becomes plausible; if he did not, then it is sheer nonsense.
So it isn't enough to claim that someone of that name existed you have to find one who meets the other conditions. This you cannot do because of what I like to call the Great Christian Paradox: It goes something like this:
"Jesus was so important and such a threat and had gained such a following among the people that the Sanheddrin felt compelled to break every rule in their own book to hold a trial on Passover, yet, at the same time he was so insignificant that no one in authority even bothered to pay the slightest attention to him." That, in a nutshell is your problem. Apologists make all sorts of excuses for this but they do not hold water. Judaea, ever since the completion of the port of Caesarea by Herod, was no longer a one-horse town. The building projects that Herod financed were greatly influenced by the revenue derived from the port and the increased commerce which the port made possible. The city had grown to significant size and Josephus recounts that Pilate had raided the temple treasury in order to build another aqueduct to supply water to the city. There were overland caravan routes passing through Judaea in addition to the sea-borne trade connecting it to the rest of the Empire. Had someone who was executed by a Roman magistrate come back from the dead it would have been BIG FUCKING NEWS throughout the entire empire! It would have been seen as a repudiation of the magistrate's action by the god(s). When the Romans killed people they had a tendency to stay dead. In the superstition-laden culture of the time there should at least have been some notice taken of it. But Philo, living at the time and writing in nearby Alexandria notes nothing of it; Pliny, compiling his work on Natural History never makes reference to any of it; Seneca says nothing. One could argue that when Xtianity was finally afforded its status by Constantine that the primary motivation for Eusebius' forgery of the Testimonium Flavianum in Josephus was to correct the failure of history to pay any attention to their boy. It was an embarrassment that had to be fixed. It is much more than the fact that your gospels contradict each other. As Bart Ehrman notes in Jesus, Interrupted, the gospels are telling 4 different stories. Beyond that is the obvious fact that when Xtianity grew to proportions where Greco-Roman writers began noticing it, they did begin to write against it (Celsus, Porphyry) but only in the late 2d century AD. Prior to that, we have only Pliny the Younger's somewhat bemused reference to xtians in Asia Minor at the beginning of the 2d century.
One other thing, I have been told by xtians that there "must be" some historical kernel at the heart of xtianity. Must there? I have asked them does that mean that there "must be" a historical Odin, or Zeus, or Marduk, or Quetzalcoatl, or Osiris, or Hercules, or Shiva, or Ishtar, or Ba'al, etc....etc. I never get an answer to that one. This is simply more "special pleading" that "our god is real but all the others are false." Let's remember that if mankind has invented one million gods you reject 999,999 of them as idols just as I do. We only differ on 1/1,000,000 of the issue.
