Christ's birthday

[Minimalist]

So now what?

[tackattack]

So now what?

so was I way off in my post. I don't have much of a reference to say usually; but usually, I express some abstract thought and get rebuttals. By the sounds of the crickets can I assume I wasn't way out there and wacky in #348?

[Minimalist]

I'm not really sure what you meant in #348 but let's take this line for a start.

I think it's the level of creditbility we disagree on the most.

In keeping with the original thread you have 2 sources which tell radically different stories. There is no reconciling them. "Matthew" and "Luke" (bearing in mind that these names were attached in the late 2d century) place the events before 4 BC or after 6 AD. One has Joseph and Mary living in Bethlehem and later moving to Nazareth, the other has them living in Nazareth and going to Bethlehem to take part in a census which is in another country and which did not happen in the manner described in the first place. One gospel claims that his parents were terrified of Herod and fled to Egypt and then were so afraid of Archelaus that they went straight to Nazareth. Meanwhile, Luke has them taking the kid to the Temple in Jerusalem and showing him off.

Now, my point here is that you have only two sources which do not agree with each other. How can you reasonably expect someone like me to give them any credibility at all?

[theVOID]

I'm not really sure what you meant in #348 but let's take this line for a start.

I think it's the level of creditbility we disagree on the most.

In keeping with the original thread you have 2 sources which tell radically different stories. There is no reconciling them. "Matthew" and "Luke" (bearing in mind that these names were attached in the late 2d century) place the events before 4 BC or after 6 AD. One has Joseph and Mary living in Bethlehem and later moving to Nazareth, the other has them living in Nazareth and going to Bethlehem to take part in a census which is in another country and which did not happen in the manner described in the first place. One gospel claims that his parents were terrified of Herod and fled to Egypt and then were so afraid of Archelaus that they went straight to Nazareth. Meanwhile, Luke has them taking the kid to the Temple in Jerusalem and showing him off.

Now, my point here is that you have only two sources which do not agree with each other. How can you reasonably expect someone like me to give them any credibility at all?

Well said Min, but i would add that the sources not only disagree with each other but are in direct contradiction to each other - there is no way that multiple eye witnesses could have reported events so differently even after generations of oral tradition, we know the oral culture of the time was far more precise than that, and there is no way that a single eye witness account could have diverged into such contradictory statements over a few generations.

[chatpilot]

theVoid I agree wholeheartedly with your assessment of those two conflicting stories but if you have ever read the N.T. you will see that it is chock full of such contradictions. If you really want to have fun just read about Jesus death on the cross and his resurrection. Stick to the synaptic gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke. Those contradictions are so great as to be an insult to anyone's intelligence.

According to 1 Corinthians 15:4-6
4.And that he was buried, and that he rose again the third day according to the scriptures:
5.And that he was seen of Cephas, then of the twelve:
6.After that, he was seen of above five hundred brethren at once; of whom the greater part remain unto this present, but some are fallen asleep.

My question is if all these people allegedly saw Jesus after his resurrection, then why did we not find any of them writing about it? I know that illiteracy was pretty common in those days among the peasant folk, but out of a crowd of 500 eyewitnesses are we to believe that not one of them could write about what he saw and what transpired?

[Minimalist]

Guys, if you have ever served on jury duty - and watched a defense attorney tear an "eye-witnesses" to shreds on cross examination - you'll know that most people are about as observant as a loaf of bread in the first place.

These books never even claim to be written by eye-witnesses. That is a later adaptation by the church to give them more authority along with the alleged "apostolic" authorship.

---

there is no way that multiple eye witnesses could have reported events so differently

No, Void, but two different authors, writing for different audiences, could well have invented stories to appeal to those audiences. "Mark" written first, does not address the question at all. Is it so illogical to think that readers of "Mark" might not ask "well, if he was a man, where did he come from?" "Matthew" writing for an apparently Aramaic-speaking audience concocts a tale drawing liberally from Jewish folklore, i.e., the story of Herod and the slaughter of the innocents which is as thinly-disguised a rip off of the Moses story as one can find. "Luke" written for a Greco-Roman audience, deals with the question in terms of Roman civil administration, which he does not understand as far as it relates to early first-century Palestine but a few references to various emperors or governors is enough to get the point across.

It is clear that both had access to "Mark" but "Luke" seems to have also had access to Josephus and worked some of that into his tale, i.e. the Quirinius reference.

[chatpilot]

Exactly right minimalist!! Nice going.

[Minimalist]

Just call me "Min," C/P. Easier to type.

Min was an Egyptian god




of something or other. Can't figure it out from the picture. Maybe the God of Turquoise?

[tackattack]

All good points. I don't believe they were eye-witness accounts other than the fact they're eyes witnessed something and they tried to explain it from their perspective to their respective audiences. The fact is that the Quran, Bible, Torah, and other documents all write Jesus was ...
what follows after is speculation or perception. You're denying that Jesus was based off of contradictions after the statement of his existance. They all state that he was. If I were to consolidate the beliefs of Christians and vote on what we were keeping and rejecting and translate it into various languages, I would have done a better job of fixing the contradictions. I have to assume that they left them in as a collection of individual sermons and stories based off of oral tradition. If I can't deny that Horus existed, how can I deny that Jesus existed? Are you questioning my belief that Jesus existed or that Jesus was the Son of God?

[Minimalist]

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:

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.