The Historical Reliability of the New Testament

[Randy Carson]

Sounds like you want a thread on the Evidence for the Resurrection of Jesus Christ.

How 'bout a discussion on the historical accuracy of the NT before you get to the flat out impossible.

Well, in post #270, I posted a general outline, but the mods have informed me that I need to wait until 30 days have passed before I can link to outside material AND they are nervous about the size of the posts I have written in Word myself. Consequently, I'm not able to provide a comprehensive overview.

So, perhaps if you specified what you would like to know more about?

Which doesn't exactly account for the conversions of Jews, Muslims and Atheists who are converted BY reading the Bible, but whatever.

So, how do you explain those who have lost their faith after studying the buy-bull?!?[/quote]

I would say that despite Luther's claims to the contrary, the Bible is not perspicuous. It cannot be easily understood by every plow boy or milk maid who takes it up. That is why Jesus built a Church instead of writing a book. He created an infallible Church to interpret an inerrant text.

[Minimalist]

Sounds like you want a thread on the Evidence for the Resurrection of Jesus Christ.

That will be a short thread.

[rexbeccarox]

How 'bout a discussion on the historical accuracy of the NT before you get to the flat out impossible.

Well, in post #270, I posted a general outline, but the mods have informed me that I need to wait until 30 days have passed before I can link to outside material AND they are nervous about the size of the posts I have written in Word myself.  Consequently, I'm not able to provide a comprehensive overview.

So, perhaps if you specified what you would like to know more about?

Way to miss the point, dude.  I have very little confidence you're going to make it on this forum if that's what you took from your mod interactions.

[Randy Carson]

Of course, you are also familiar with the "You have heard it said...but I say..." passages, so you know Jesus offered new material, also.

Maybe, though having read most of the OT, Plato, a great deal of Aristotle, and now going through Philo's complete works, after of which I plan to read some Stoics, and eventually a behemoth, two volume set of Jewish and Christian pseudographa (mostly predating Jesus with some exceptions, namely the Christian works of course) that I plan to crack open next year, I'd be surprised if there was anything original in the NT with the exception of a few kernels here and there, as much as I'm already finding it shocking that anyone could truly believe the that NT contains *divine* wisdom, much less innovative thought. You know as well as I do that, at least for the most part, when an author using Jesus as their mouthpiece writes, "You have heard it said... but I say," he's not saying stuff that hadn't been taught by others, Jewish or Gentile, before.

Ah, but Nestor, I'm not buying into your assertion that the authors used Jesus as their mouthpiece.

However, let's pursue this for a moment. You've read the thread and know my positions, but I need to know yours.

1. Who are the authors of the gospels?
2. When were they written approximately?
3. What was their motivation for writing?

[Minimalist]

1.  We don't know.
2.  Sometime in the second century but the bigger question is, "when were they last edited."
3.  They probably genuinely believed they were recording actual events.   (But they weren't.)

[Randy Carson]

Yes, I've tried talking to God. I've tried every method I could possibly think of. Absolutely nothing happened. From my point of view, he is doing everything possible to hide from me and to make it look like all religions are baseless mythical stories. If he's trying to persuade me any of them are true, and particularly Christianity, he couldn't be doing a worse job of it. I don't need to claim they are false, any more than I need to claim the tooth fairy isn't real. But until such time as God decides to give me some evidence, then there's not much I can do. From your point of view, the best I could do is pretend to believe. That really would be a waste of time all round. And considering the God on show, even if I did believe he was real, the last thing I'd do is worship him.

Your post reminds me of one by Pyrrho or Poca-something earlier in this thread in which it was suggested that God should reveal himself to everyone and then start consulting for us whenever we have questions, etc.

The late Christopher Hitchens once said in a debate with Catholic convert Tony Blair that even if God existed, he would not worship him because such a being would, in his mind, differ little from an earthly dictator.

So, on the one hand, atheists claim that God's silence is proof that He doesn't exist. But on the other hand, they can state that they would reject Him even if He did reveal Himself because they chaffe under such authority.

This is not an intellectual rejection; this is volitional. People refuse to acknowledge God because they do not WANT to...the implications are too significant with regard to the freedom they want to live as they please.

Whatever God does will be used against him by those who reject Him.

[Ravenshire]

I would say that despite Luther's claims to the contrary, the Bible is not perspicuous. It cannot be easily understood by every plow boy or milk maid who takes it up. That is why Jesus built a Church instead of writing a book. He created an infallible Church to interpret an inerrant text.

I'm not speaking of "every plow boy or milk maid" but educated people raised in faith based homes. How can you explain someone like that losing their faith by studying the buy-bull?

Infallible church?!? Bitch, please...

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As to the historical accuracy of the NT, you don't have to link a million sites and write a fucking dissertation to get the discussion started. Of course, if historical accuracy of the non-supernatural (jeebus being of Nazareth for example) claims the NT makes is something you don't want to tackle...

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Sounds like you want a thread on the Evidence for the Resurrection of Jesus Christ.

That will be a short thread.

Or it'll be a 300 page epic crap fest.

[Minimalist]

Every sect is a certificate that God has not plainly revealed his will to man. To each reader the Bible conveys a different meaning.
-- Robert Green Ingersoll

[Jenny A]

  My major point is that you simply cannot prove god, or miracles, or a resurrection via eyewitness testimony, even if it were modern day eyewitness who you could cross-examine.  Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof in order to make them more likely than not.  For example, if I claimed my dog flies, my say so, even in a court of law under oath would be unlikely to convince anyone because the chances that I would be lying or disillusion would be much greater than the chances of a wingless flying dog.  So too if I and my whole family claimed my great grandmother rose from the dead last Friday.  That would be so even if our disinterested neighbors agreed.  To prove her resurrection would need to provide solid physical evidence of her death, produce the great grand mother herself, and provide proof of her identity.  Even then, we'd have a hard time proving that she really had died and that she wasn't someone else. This is why skeptical people do not believe in ghosts, ESP, or UFO abductions despite tons of eyewitnesses.

So, how would you go about proving to those skeptics that your dog had flown or that your grandmother had been raised from the dead? What would or could you do that the Apostles did not do? And how would you feel when EVERYONE IN TOWN began to mock you, call you a liar, and eventually turn on you even with threats against your life? Would you deny that your dog had flown even if you faced imprisonment, loss of employment, etc? Would you turn your back on what you knew to be true just because other people denied it?

I could provide the flying dog or great grandmother alive and well.  Anything less would not be sufficient proof for anyone else to rely on.  And in the case of great grandmother, I'd have to provide a plethora of evidence showing that she had actually died rather than just mistakenly been thought dead.

The thing is that eyewitness testimony about the miraculous is simply never enough to make the miracle more likely  than not to the rational outside observer.  That's the thing about miracles, they are by definition so extraordinarily unlikely that even mass hallucination is more likely than a miracle, otherwise there would be nothing miraculous about it.

The simple fact that neither I nor the supposed witnesses to the resurrection could provide proof, is not proof it didn't happen.  But it certainly is not evidence that it did.

Willingness to die for a belief is proof the belief is strongly felt, but not that it is accurate.

So, I see your quest to prove the resurrection or that Jesus was god via the Bible as hopeless.  Regardless of whether the claims you make about it above are true, the Bible is not sufficient evidence on which to base supernatural claims.  No historical account is.

Sufficient for what? To be coercive?

Sufficient to be remotely persuasive.  Are you sure you meant "coercive."  I have this silly picture running through my mind of a stack of Bibles holding someone hostage at gun point.

Once again, rational people don't believe UFO abduction reports based on eyewitness testimony for precisely the same reasons.   Other religions allege other miracles based on eyewitness testimony.  You believe in the Golden Tablets of Joseph Smith, the accuracy of the Prophet at Dephi, that Hindu priests can turn water into wine?  The evidence for those is the same as for the resurrection.  Claiming more for the Bible is just special pleading.

Have faith in it if you like, but it isn't proof.

[Minimalist]

It isn't even evidence.