(June 8, 2021 at 11:54 pm)Rev. Rye Wrote: Mostly because the core story of an itinerant rabbi who may or may not have been named Jesus and preached many of the same things Jesus preached and perhaps ended up pissing off the Romans enough to give him a drawn-out death by crucifixion is plausible enough to have perhaps been real?
But did Jesus in the Gospels piss off Romans? It seems he pissed off Jews.
teachings of the Bible are so muddled and self-contradictory that it was possible for Christians to happily burn heretics alive for five long centuries. It was even possible for the most venerated patriarchs of the Church, like St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, to conclude that heretics should be tortured (Augustine) or killed outright (Aquinas). Martin Luther and John Calvin advocated the wholesale murder of heretics, apostates, Jews, and witches. - Sam Harris, "Letter To A Christian Nation"
