"Gospel Quest" (or The Jesus Timeline)

[Minimalist]

I'm working on my cross-examination of John now...

Waterboard him.

---

I have not yet dug up that quote myself but I trust ProfMth as a thorough researcher.

Permettez-moi

Chapter XXII.-The Thirty Aeons are Not Typified by the Fact that Christ Was Baptized in His Thirtieth Year: He Did Not Suffer in the Twelfth Month After His Baptism, But Was More Than Fifty Years Old When He Died.

Irenaeus of Lyons- Against Heresies Vol 2. XXII

[RobbyPants]

No one suggested an eyewitness wrote the gospels. That does not prove they did not get the accounts from eyewitnesses and those that might have written things down in the meantime.

Actually, I've talked to numerous Christians who assert that two or three of the gospel authors witnessed the events first hand. I have no idea how you make the claim that "no one" has suggested this.

And, yes, this in and of itself doesn't preclude that they weren't accounts of eyewitness testimony, but it doesn't mean they were, either. You have to assume in either case, and at the end of the day, we're talking about potential eyewitness testimony of otherwise unsubstantiated miracles, often said to be witnessed "by multitudes", yet strangely not recorded elsewhere.

[Simon Moon]

No one suggested an eyewitness wrote the gospels. That does not prove

You do know that you can actually got talk to 1000's of people from all over the world that claim they were abducted by aliens, right? Even multiple people to the same event.

These are direct eyewitnesses, not people writing it down a few decades later. Most of them report pretty similar experiences.

Do you believe them? Do you believe they are actually relaying accurate experiences?

Why does it become more credible to you if the story is in an ancient book written by people that knew a lot less about the world than we do?

[Minimalist]

Hey people have seen Elvis, too.

[Tonus]

Where is your proof that no one wrote anything down? Guess what, most paper documents don't survive.

I get the impression that pen and paper weren't a common sight in those times. The idea that people were taking notes and somehow these notes got into the hands of a single individual who used them to write a viable second-hand account years (possibly decades) later seems far-fetched. I mean, geez... a man breathes his last breath and suddenly the skies go dark, an earthquake strikes, the curtain in the temple is rent in two, and great men of old rise from their tombs and visit the city, and the best anyone can muster are notes???

[Minimalist]

Guess what, most paper documents don't survive.

But parchment and papyrus have survived and many documents have been copied and re-copied...although their faithfulness to the originals will never be known....down through the centuries.

Paper was introduced to Europe by the Arabs well into the middle ages.

[DeistPaladin]

So with the Gospels being irreconcilable with one another or with what we know of history and the supposed eye-witnesses having been discredited, the Christian Apologists will just give up and join the natural universe with the rest of the grown ups, right?

"NO!"

"Never give up! Never surrender!"





"Your orders, sir?"

"Activate the Unlimited Ad Hoc Hypothesis Generator"

That's right. Why accept defeat when your entire worldview rests upon an admittedly unproven assertion about the existence of things which must be believed in without evidence and against all evidence? Since the gods you believe in are made up, why not also just make up reasons why contrary evidence can be explained away?

And if those reasons to dismiss the evidence are themselves debunked, you can just improvise either new reasons to dismiss the contrary evidence or reasons to dismiss the contrary evidence against your made up reasons to dismiss the evidence.

And so on... and so on... repeat as needed.

The great thing about this approach is you can just pull reasons to dismiss the contrary evidence out of your ass, even improvising them on the spot.

There's no need to worry about providing any evidence for your improvised ad hocs. All you have to do is say, "It coulda happened".

It doesn't matter that the ad hocs are extremely unlikely. They need only be remotely plausible. And if they're not, you can just improvise more ad hocs to make the proposed ad hocs plausible.

And you can smugly grin to yourself as the skeptic must now do the legwork to fact check your improvised bullcrap. And when he/she comes back with evidence against your ad hocs, just make more up. Then watch them scurry about playing wack-a-mole.

Eventually, you "win" when the skeptic gets tired and goes home. Since it's logically impossible to prove a negative, you're guaranteed to be able to churn out more ad hocs than the skeptic can possibly disprove.

Monte Python demonstrates the effectiveness of this technique.





"He's dead"
"No, the parrot is resting" (ad hoc)
"OK, if he's resting, I'll wake him up" (evidence against ad hoc)
"He's stunned. You stunned him as he was waking up." (ad hoc to cover ad hoc)
"Maybe he's pining for the fjords." (a new ad hoc)
"The Norwegian Blue prefers to mourn on its back" (ad hoc to cover ad hoc)
"Well, of course he was nailed there..."

With the discussion of the Ad Hoc Hypothesis finished, we come to the show put on by the apologists. They have no evidence. They have no contemporary accounts. They have no artifacts. Their presentation lacks any substance. Still, they put on quite a show.





One of the rabbits pulled out of a hat by appologists is the "earlier census". This is not just one ad hoc but a flourish of them.

First, they assert that the "census" being referred to by Luke was an earlier census, one conducted in 9-8 BCE.

Second, they must move Quirinius about so they assert that either the text says "before" and not "when" or "during" (and all the English translations have gotten it wrong since then) or that Luke wasn't referring to Quirinius as a governor but an administrator of the census (and again, all the translations are wrong).

Translation errors are still errors. If the Holy Spirit watched over all the scribes but didn't oversee the translations, it renders the supervision of the original texts rather moot. Oh well, let that go.

Third, if Quirinius wasn't the governor of Syria, they needed to make him an administrator of the earlier census, brought in to micromanage the actual governor of Syria at that time.

The problems with this apology are legion:

• The assertion that there was a census in 2 BCE by the article is not supported in any publication that I know of. The links that seemed to be footnotes on the site don't work. What a surprise!
  
• If the census was taken in 8 BCE, Jesus would have been too old by the time Luke tells us that JtB even started his ministry in 28/29 CE, never mind when JtB was jailed.
  
• We know where Quirinius was and it wasn't in Syria micromanaging some stupid census that the local authorities could have managed. He was either conducting important military campaigns or being governor of another provice (in modern day Turkey).
  
• The narrative of Luke's reference to Quirinius and the tax census is when Rome took over the new province and Augustus wanted to know how much tax revenue could be generated.
  
• Prior to 6 CE, Judea was not a Roman province and its citizens were not Romans. It was a client kingdom run by Herod the Great. Its citizens would have been Judean, not Roman.
  
• The census in 8 BCE would have been too late for Jesus to be about 50 when he was crucified in 28 CE according to John.
  

But fear not, true believer, for the apologist will stand ready for a fresh round of ad hocs that I'm supposed to research and come back with more evidence disproving them.

Luckily for me, I'm armed with Occam's Razor.





The simplest explanation is it's exactly what it looks like. The reason they SEEM to contradict each other is because they DO contradict each other.

[Minimalist]

Yeah - they despise facts because they have none....and we have plenty.

8. When I was consul the fifth time (29 B.C.E.), I increased the number of patricians by order of the people and senate. I read the roll of the senate three times, and in my sixth consulate (28 B.C.E.) I made a census of the people with Marcus Agrippa as my colleague. I conducted a lustrum, after a forty-one year gap, in which lustrum were counted 4,063,000 heads of Roman citizens. Then again, with consular imperium I conducted a lustrum alone when Gaius Censorinus and Gaius Asinius were consuls (8 B.C.E.), in which lustrum were counted 4,233,000 heads of Roman citizens. And the third time, with consular imperium, I conducted a lustrum with my son Tiberius Caesar as colleague, when Sextus Pompeius and Sextus Appuleius were consuls (14 A.C.E.), in which lustrum were counted 4,937,000 of the heads of Roman citizens. By new laws passed with my sponsorship, I restored many traditions of the ancestors, which were falling into disuse in our age, and myself I handed on precedents of many things to be imitated in later generations.

--From Res Gestae Divi Augustus ( Acts of the Divine Augustus)

As the emperor himself tell us, the lustrum was concerned with the number of Roman citizens which even had he existed jesus was not.

Augustus did not give a fuck how many jews there were. That was a matter of no importance. Curiously, the last lustrum of Roman citizens was conducted by Vespasian at the end of the civil wars which put him on the throne. Vespasian's lustrum was much closer in time to the date when this gospel horseshit was cobbled together.

[Undeceived]

What if there are logical explanations? What if it's all true? What then?

Tell them: Thus says the Lord:
When someone falls, do they not rise again?
if they turn away, do they not turn back?
Why then do these people resist
with persistent rebellion?
Why do they cling to deception,
refuse to turn back?

[DeistPaladin]

...

Hello?

SteveII, are you there?

Is this thing on?

Hey asshole, I made this whole thread for you! You said my case was "utter nonsense" so I spelled it all out for you. It shouldn't be that hard for you to knock it down since you said it was so ridiculous. Get your holy saved ass back here!

Any other Christians?

IS THERE NO ONE ELSE?





I'll wait...