Open debate: What does Jesus teach?

[Aractus]

the accounts are so dubious, so self-contradictory and so contradictory of what we know of history that we have an unsolvable mess.

Rubbish. You can have a high degree of confidence in some facts and a very low degree of confidence in others, that doesn't mean that because some things are unsubstantiated and probably not factually based that everything isn't.

I'd love to see some source material here. Even apologists seldom try to push Mark any earlier than 70 CE. This is because the "little apocalypse" of chapter 13 places the dates after the destruction of the temple in 70 CE.

So what? The first temple had fallen to siege, Jerusalem had fallen to siege at least 4 times just in the past millennium. It since fell to siege several more times since. Jesus didn't know that the second temple would fall in 70AD and if it had instead fallen in say 120AD then you'd be trying to push the date after 120AD. Your neo-scepticism is completely irrational.

Luke and Matt are clearly derived from Mark so that puts their dates even later.

That's not entirely the case, but yes they were written later than Mark but not necessarily much later.

But let's get back to Mark. Since the other Gospels are based upon Mark (with the exception of John, which is a different story about a different Jesus, as tacitly admitted by the Christian use of the word "synoptic" (similar) to classify the other three Gospel accounts), he's your star witness. The problems with Mark's credibility include:

• Dubious Source: Mark is considered the author of the Gospel by "tradition"
  
• Hearsay: This same "tradition" tells us that he penned the Gospel based on what Peter taught him.
  
• Testimony Based on Much Later Recollections: It was penned at least 40 years after the events.
  
• Contamination: We know of at least one very significant alteration to the original publication (Mark 16:8)
  
• Hearsay on Top of Hearsay: Some of the events in the Gospel are ones that Peter would not have witnessed, as admitted to in the Gospel itself. For example, it places Peter with the servants while Pilate interrogates Jesus.
  

And he's your star witness.

"Mine"? No he isn't. Luke and Paul are. Luke (or whoever the author of Luke-Acts was) is a credible author although he does not get all his facts right. Paul is also a credible author, however by volume if you reject the 2 Thessalonians and the 3 pastoral epistles he only wrote about 2/3ds of what Luke did (in 7-9 separate epistles).

We don't know who the authors of Mark/Matthew are, but that hardly matters in the question of whether they're reliable, and we don't know for certain the author of Luke-Acts but we do know at least that it's a single author.

Now the fact that Luke makes extensive use of Mark is what gives that credibility to Mark.

Luke admits in the very beginning of his Gospel that he's not a witness but has collected and recorded his accounts. Luke was a companion of Paul who in turn only met Jesus in a vision after Jesus had died.

Correct, however he is in fact a witness to much of the later part of Acts (from about chapter 15 on).

Luke can't possibly be the author of Acts of the Apostles due to a contradiction on the day that Jesus rose into the sky, surely an important detail that one would expect a single witness to be consistent about. Luke's Gospel places the ascension on the day of the resurrection while Acts places it 40 days later.

Most scholars believe Luke-Acts is the work of a single author. The resurrection (Acts 1:2 "the day he was taken up") and ascension (Acts 1:9-11) are two different days that occur 40 days apart. Again, though, Luke is allowed to get some details wrong - he's only human - that isn't enough to cast doubt over whether there's a single author or not.

Matt is clearly a liar, as evident by his misquotes of OT scripture and assertions about non-existent OT "prophecies" where he should have known better.

Again here you go making sweeping assumptions instead of examining evidence. Yes the Is. 7:14 Prophecy is "wrong", however as it appears quoted in Matt it is near letter-for-letter identical in the LXX meaning that one had to have been copied from the other or that both were copied from a single common source. So there is is entirely possible that Matthew is simply copying from a proto-lxx Isiah document.

John's Jesus is a completely different Character set in a completely different story. Cataloging all the differences would require a dissertation and I trust it isn't necessary seeing how the incompatibility is all but admitted to by even the Christians themselves.

So what? Different people should have different impressions of the same person if that person is indeed a genuine person. Have you ever had friends who had physically abusive partners? Ask them to give you a description of that person and compare it to say their parent's description of the same person. Get what I'm saying?

A consistent timeline that includes all four Gospel accounts is impossible to construct. Matt has Jesus born before 4 BCE under the reign of King Herod. Luke has Jesus conceived under the reign of King Herod but not born until the administration of Quirinius after 6 CE, meaning Mary's pregnancy lasted at least 10 years.

Again, Luke simply got that detail wrong. That's the most logical explanation since we can place his baptism by John in 28-29 AD and John had to have been at least 30 to start his ministry as dictated by OT law (not to mention that it clearly says Jesus is about thirty in the gospel accounts). The nativity has other problems between the accounts too, but that doesn't change the reliability of other parts of those same books like say the baptism by John which is widely acknowledged as a firm historical event.

If we fudge what "about 30" means, perhaps Jesus was 28, then we can make Luke's dates fit nicely with the birth in 6 CE, JtB's imprisonment in 34 CE

No, that number you can't fudge. As I told you it would mean that both John and Jesus were breaking OT law (or at least tradition) by beginning a ministry before their 30th year (Numbers 4:2-3). That would have been especially noteworthy had it been the case.

When Jesus is baptized, and this story is one that clearly got better with the telling, the synoptic Gospels tell us that he immediately went into the wilderness for 40 days but John's Gospel tells us he gathered disciples attended a wedding.

John's gospel is certainly not chronological. It's organized by topic and this has lead theologians and scholars over the centuries to suggest it was written later. But that's not necessarily true, and certainly there's no way of pinning down the date it was written to a firm period within the context of the other NT texts.

The "when"s and "where"s are hard to reconcile as are the "who" and "what" Jesus was. The synoptic Gospels have Jesus as a man who is clearly separate from and subordinate to his father while John's Gospel is more consistent with Trinitarian ideas about Jesus.

You have that wrong, but I'm not surprised - many Christians don't know the difference either. The Trinitatian doctrine doesn't contradict the teaching that Jesus is eternally subordinate to the father, it's only in very recent years that the eternal subordination has come into question in Christian churches, even though it has never been questioned since the early church in Jerusalem and Rome.

Fine. I'll assume for the sake of argument that The Historical Jesus existed ...and its moot because we'll never know what the true story was.

That's not accurate - you do know much of the story. Same with Ned Kelly in Australia - some biographies written within a couple of decades after his death have erroneous details, but it doesn't change the fact that those same biographies also contain detail historically relevant and accurate accounts too.

[DeistPaladin]

Sweet Reason you are deluded, clearly desperate to find credibility in your fairy tales. I'm tempted to let your response stand on its own for fear that I'll be seen as kicking a man while he's down. But I can't let some of these assertions go.

Rubbish. You can have a high degree of confidence in some facts and a very low degree of confidence in others, that doesn't mean that because some things are unsubstantiated and probably not factually based that everything isn't.

The burden of proof is not on me to discredit every letter of the Gospel accounts. If I can show you that we can't reconcile even basic facts about the life of Jesus from all four Gospels and known milestones of history referenced in them (basic facts like "what decade was he born", "when did he start his ministry", and "what did he preach") then there's no reason to take any of it seriously, certainly not to the level of "reliable eye-witness accounts".

Having done so, the burden of proof falls on you to articulate exactly what "facts" can be gleened from the Gospels and why we have a high degree of confidence in them.

So what? The first temple had fallen to siege, Jerusalem had fallen to siege at least 4 times just in the past millennium. It since fell to siege several more times since. Jesus didn't know that the second temple would fall in 70AD and if it had instead fallen in say 120AD then you'd be trying to push the date after 120AD. Your neo-scepticism is completely irrational.

My neo-skepticism is consistent with mainstream scholarship even among Christian apologists who place Mark's date around 70 CE, when the temple was not just damaged in a siege but utterly razed to the ground. The burden of proof falls upon you to answer my question as to what source material justifies your ridiculously early dates for the authorship of Mark.

You do understand how the burden of proof works, right?

That's not entirely the case,

Actually, yes it is. Matt and Luke both read as elaborations of Mark, though each is contradictory of the other. Once again, mainstream scholarship is with me on this one and you need to do better than "nuh-uh-uh".

Luke and Paul are. [my star witnesses]

Great. Neither are witnesses at all. Paul tells us next to nothing about the life of Jesus at all, a point admitted to by Christian apologists who say this wasn't his focus.

Luke (or whoever the author of Luke-Acts was) is a credible author although he does not get all his facts right.

He has Mary with a 10 year pregnancy because of his botched understanding of when Herod the Great was King. You have to mount a better defense to keep him on the witness stand than "oh, picky picky picky".

we don't know for certain the author of Luke-Acts but we do know at least that it's a single author.

...who couldn't get straight whether the resurrected Jesus flew up into the sky on the day of his resurrection or 40 days later.

This is a pretty important and quite memorable detail, wouldn't you agree? If a man rose from the dead and flew up into the sky, I could pretty well tell you even 40-50 years later whether it happened right away or whether he hung around for 40 days preaching a gospel.





Try to do better than "oh picky picky picky".

Now the fact that Luke makes extensive use of Mark is what gives that credibility to Mark.

Did I accidentally delete a huge section of your post where you spent the needed five or so paragraphs where you explained your logic or did you just throw this assertion out there with nothing to base it on?

If the former, so sorry and could you explain your logic again?

Correct, however he is in fact a witness to much of the later part of Acts (from about chapter 15 on).

Yeah uh did I mention that Acts is so drenched in the supernatural as to be immediately dismissed as any kind of credible historical account? Seriously, even by the standards of the Bible, this book is ridiculous. But hey, if you want to actually defend the events in Acts as "no, really, that actually happened", be my guest. It should be fun.

Most scholars believe Luke-Acts is the work of a single author. The resurrection (Acts 1:2 "the day he was taken up") and ascension (Acts 1:9-11) are two different days that occur 40 days apart. Again, though, Luke is allowed to get some details wrong - he's only human - that isn't enough to cast doubt over whether there's a single author or not.

Dude, a guy rose from the dead and then flew up into the sky, taken up by a cloud. Did that happen right away or did the guy hang around for over a month talking to various people and showing them infallible proofs and such?

And your defense is "oh picky picky picky"?

This is not a picayune little detail we're quibbling over here.

Again here you go making sweeping assumptions instead of examining evidence. Yes the Is. 7:14 Prophecy is "wrong", however as it appears quoted in Matt it is near letter-for-letter identical in the LXX meaning that one had to have been copied from the other or that both were copied from a single common source. So there is is entirely possible that Matthew is simply copying from a proto-lxx Isiah document.

Well, I hope you can prove that.

And while you're at it, you can also defend Matt's assertions about the slaughter of the innocents and his misquote of Jeremiah as well as his misquote of "out of Egypt I have called my son".

Here's your prophet Matthew:

So what? Different people should have different impressions of the same person if that person is indeed a genuine person. Have you ever had friends who had physically abusive partners? Ask them to give you a description of that person and compare it to say their parent's description of the same person. Get what I'm saying?

I get what you're trying to say and again, it's the "oh picky picky picky" defense.

I'm tempted to go line by line of how radically different these two stories are, John vs. the Synoptics, but the very fact that Christians themselves call the other three Gospels "similar" tacitly acknowledges how John sits oddly alongside of them.

Again, Luke simply got that detail wrong.

His account of when Herod the Great reigned over Judea was off by a decade. This would be like me placing Hitler in the 1950s. An error of this magnitude would earn an "F" in any history class, let alone a "reliable eye-witness account".

Stop using the "picky picky picky" defense. It only makes you look pathetic.

That's the most logical explanation since we can place his baptism by John in 28-29 AD and John had to have been at least 30 to start his ministry as dictated by OT law (not to mention that it clearly says Jesus is about thirty in the gospel accounts).

No, JtB STARTED his ministry in 28-29 CE. And calling this 30 years after his birth would have placed his birth 3-2 BCE (no year 0). This would have been after the death of Herod the Great and far too early for a census of Judea under Quirinius.

The nativity has other problems between the accounts too, but that doesn't change the reliability of other parts of those same books like say the baptism by John which is widely acknowledged as a firm historical event.

Only because of Christian bias. There is not only NO evidence of this "firm historical event" outside the Bible but it makes no sense given what Josephus reported about JtB.

JtB had a successful ministry, as reported by Josephus. What Josephus and others do not report is that JtB told everyone he was just the warm-up act, a forerunner for a much greater man to come. There is NO evidence outside the Bible that he effectively submitted to Jesus or pointed to Jesus as the awaited messiah. By all accounts, the followers of JtB continued to be rivals with the early Christians for centuries, clearly not getting the memo from their leader, and even today, his followers insist he is the awaited messiah.

This is a pretty important detail that one would expect Josephus or others to mention or for his followers to believe if JtB really prostrated himself before Jesus and told everyone to follow Jesus. Instead, all indications are that his ministry was a thing unto itself, not a warm-up act for something to come.

No, that number you can't fudge. As I told you it would mean that both John and Jesus were breaking OT law (or at least tradition) by beginning a ministry before their 30th year (Numbers 4:2-3). That would have been especially noteworthy had it been the case.

Which only helps my case, not yours.

John's gospel is certainly not chronological.

On this point at least, it certainly is.

1:12 And immediately the spirit driveth him into the wilderness.

Please note the words "and" and "immediately" following the baptism.

1:35 Again the next day after John stood, and two of his disciples;
1:43 The day following Jesus would go forth into Galilee, and findeth Philip, and saith unto him, Follow me.
2:1 And the third day there was a marriage in Cana of Galilee; and the mother of Jesus was there:

The Trinitatian doctrine doesn't contradict the teaching that Jesus is eternally subordinate to the father, it's only in very recent years that the eternal subordination has come into question in Christian churches, even though it has never been questioned since the early church in Jerusalem and Rome.

The Trinitarian doctrine is barking madness, saying Jesus is God and not God at the same time, saying that Jesus is the same being as his father and yet not, saying that the Christian god is three and yet one. Nobody understand the Trinity because there is nothing to understand. It is barking madness. Nothing more.

That's not accurate - you do know much of the story. Same with Ned Kelly in Australia - some biographies written within a couple of decades after his death have erroneous details, but it doesn't change the fact that those same biographies also contain detail historically relevant and accurate accounts too.

The burden of proof requires you to do better than "nuh uh uh". Provide proof to me for WHICH parts of the Gospels I'm supposed to take seriously and WHY.

[Minimalist]

No serious historian would agree with you- you are so far away from the academic debate.

I'm not impressed by what the bullshit artists called 'theologians' claim. They are just trying to protect their livelihood. History is silent on all of this shit until the second century. That's when it was all made up.

[Broseph Ballin]

Nothing. He never existed.

[Aractus]

Sweet Reason you are deluded, clearly desperate to find credibility in your fairy tales.

"My" fairy tales?

The burden of proof is not on me to discredit every letter of the Gospel accounts.

The burden of proof isn't anywhere but on the person making the claim. If you are making the claim that the events recorded in the gospel are wildly inaccurate you have to find sufficient evidence, not evidence that Luke got the nativity wrong (one of the only things he got wrong when considering historicity).

If I can show you that we can't reconcile even basic facts about the life of Jesus from all four Gospels and known milestones of history referenced in them (basic facts like "what decade was he born", "when did he start his ministry", and "what did he preach") then there's no reason to take any of it seriously, certainly not to the level of "reliable eye-witness accounts".

I didn't call them reliable eye-witness accounts, the writers weren't eye-witnesses.

Having done so, the burden of proof falls on you to articulate exactly what "facts" can be gleened from the Gospels and why we have a high degree of confidence in them.

Maybe you misunderstood me. We can have a high degree of confidence, for instance, that Pontius Pilate was a real person and that he served as governor and that he presided over the tial of Jesus. Now, many historians have pointed out that it seems unlikely that a Roman official would be "reluctant" to carry out the sentence against Jesus as described in the gospel accounts - but that fact alone doesn't mean that he didn't preside over the trial.

My neo-skepticism is consistent with mainstream scholarship even among Christian apologists who place Mark's date around 70 CE, when the temple was not just damaged in a siege but utterly razed to the ground. The burden of proof falls upon you to answer my question as to what source material justifies your ridiculously early dates for the authorship of Mark.

Of course there are plenty of critical scholars who think all the Synoptic gospels were written after 70AD that would place John around the same time by their reasoning, however I don't believe that theory for a second because it's based on such a flimsy assumption that the gospel writers knew of the 70 AD siege against Jerusalem. Since Acts ends in the present and that is around 61 AD it means that Luke-Acts is most likely to be written around that time. Mark of course is written before Luke and Matthew is written around the same time as Luke.

You're dating it by an event that never takes place anywhere in the gospels - so by that reasoning if the 70 AD siege had happened in 100 AD you'd claim that's when the gospels were written.

Actually, yes it is. Matt and Luke both read as elaborations of Mark, though each is contradictory of the other. Once again, mainstream scholarship is with me on this one and you need to do better than "nuh-uh-uh".

Again, you're misusing information. Yes they're both based on Mark or proto-mark, but that doesn't mean they're "elaborations of Mark" as you just put it - and that would be especially true of Luke who doesn't use "all" of Mark in the way that Matthew does.

Great. Neither are witnesses at all. Paul tells us next to nothing about the life of Jesus at all, a point admitted to by Christian apologists who say this wasn't his focus.

Paul knew the family of Jesus and the disciples who Jesus taught, he was present at the Jerusalem council in 50AD and had been taught theology as he himself says in his epistles for instance this creed in 1 Corinthians 15:

• Now I would remind you, brothers, of the gospel I preached to you, which you received, in which you stand, and by which you are being saved, if you hold fast to the word I preached to you—unless you believed in vain.
  
  For I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received: that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the Scriptures, and that he appeared to Cephas, then to the twelve. Then he appeared to more than five hundred brothers at one time, most of whom are still alive, though some have fallen asleep. Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles. Last of all, as to one untimely born, he appeared also to me. For I am the least of the apostles, unworthy to be called an apostle, because I persecuted the church of God. But by the grace of God I am what I am, and his grace toward me was not in vain. On the contrary, I worked harder than any of them, though it was not I, but the grace of God that is with me. Whether then it was I or they, so we preach and so you believed.

Of course Paul is a reliable source for what he talks about. I'm not talking about theology I'm talking about the history of the early church.

He has Mary with a 10 year pregnancy because of his botched understanding of when Herod the Great was King. You have to mount a better defense to keep him on the witness stand than "oh, picky picky picky".

He doesn't have Mary with a 10 year pregnancy, he has simply been taught, received, or copied a nativity that was wrong. There's very little you can say with confidence about the nativity of Jesus - that doesn't negate what you can say with confidence about the teachings of Jesus. That's two different things.

...who couldn't get straight whether the resurrected Jesus flew up into the sky on the day of his resurrection or 40 days later.

This is a pretty important and quite memorable detail, wouldn't you agree? If a man rose from the dead and flew up into the sky, I could pretty well tell you even 40-50 years later whether it happened right away or whether he hung around for 40 days preaching a gospel.

It reads pretty consistently to me. Show me where the inconsistency is?

Yeah uh did I mention that Acts is so drenched in the supernatural as to be immediately dismissed as any kind of credible historical account? Seriously, even by the standards of the Bible, this book is ridiculous. But hey, if you want to actually defend the events in Acts as "no, really, that actually happened", be my guest. It should be fun.

And even the most sceptical scholars will tell you that you can derive historically significant facts from it.

Again here you go making sweeping assumptions instead of examining evidence. Yes the Is. 7:14 Prophecy is "wrong", however as it appears quoted in Matt it is near letter-for-letter identical in the LXX meaning that one had to have been copied from the other or that both were copied from a single common source. So there is is entirely possible that Matthew is simply copying from a proto-lxx Isiah document.

Well, I hope you can prove that.

Of course I can prove it, asshole:

Is 7:14 (LXX): διὰ τοῦτο δώσει κύριος αὐτὸς ὑμῖν σημεῖον ἰδοὺ ἡ παρθένος ἐν γαστρὶ ἕξει καὶ τέξεται υἱόν καὶ καλέσεις τὸ ὄνομα αὐτοῦ Εμμανουηλ

Matt 1:23: Ἰδοὺ ἡ παρθένος ἐν γαστρὶ ἕξει, καὶ τέξεται υἱὸν, καὶ καλέσουσιν τὸ ὄνομα αὐτοῦ Ἐμμανουὴλ, ὅ ἐστιν μεθερμηνευόμενον, μεθ᾽ ἡμῶν ὁ Θεός

If you know anything about Greek you'd know that this is impossible to happen by chance.

And while you're at it, you can also defend Matt's assertions about the slaughter of the innocents and his misquote of Jeremiah as well as his misquote of "out of Egypt I have called my son".

Here's your prophet Matthew:

I'm not defending Matthew, nor am I calling him a prophet. I'm simply saying that your assertion that he's a "liar" is unfounded, he's recorded what he was taught.

No, JtB STARTED his ministry in 28-29 CE. And calling this 30 years after his birth would have placed his birth 3-2 BCE (no year 0). This would have been after the death of Herod the Great and far too early for a census of Judea under Quirinius.

At least 30 years after his birth. 28-29AD is perfectly consistent with him being born 6-5 BC.

Only because of Christian bias. There is not only NO evidence of this "firm historical event" outside the Bible but it makes no sense given what Josephus reported about JtB.

That's right, there isn't, but it's an event that we know about because of the bible.

[Purplundy]

If the Gospel writers were liars, wouldn't they have made their stories agree to the letter?
If they worked independently, getting different information from different people, than yeah, inconsistencies would abound, because their sources would remember or forget certain details.
This is not an end-all argument for the veracity of the Gospels, but the fact is that if they were lying, there would have only been one person or group with a single Jesus narrative and inconsistencies would be non-existent.

[Aractus]

Purplundy, to get back on-topic - I put it to you that Jesus consistently teaches to follow the whole of the OT law to the letter and not to ignore sections of it the way that Christians have done since the 50 AD Jerusalem council. I further put it to you that Jesus would have disagreed with the characterization of the early Christians who followed the OT law as belonging to the "party of the Pharisees" and that as I showed in the OP, Jesus disliked the Pharisees for changing or adding to the OT law which is essentially the same thing that Christians then went ahead and did in AD 50.

[Purplundy]

Well, Jesus clearly disapproved of parts of the OT. But he wasn't out to abolish it; the Old Testament is an insight into human nature, imperfections and all. It was the beginning of humanity's search for God that Jesus claimed that he had ended (or "fulfilled").
There is value to much of the Old Testament—after all, it's the reason that there is a New Testament. But as far as the laws of the Torah are concerned, it appears Jesus was trying to communicate that there is an overarching theme that transcends the laws and is a simpler path to a moral life.

[Aractus]

Well, Jesus clearly disapproved of parts of the OT.

Show me?

[Purplundy]

“You have heard that it was said, ‘Eye for eye, and tooth for tooth.’ But I tell you, do not resist an evil person." Matthew 5:38-39