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Forgetting Jesus Freak Bullshit, Let's Stick To History:
#1
Forgetting Jesus Freak Bullshit, Let's Stick To History:
Rather than continue playing games with the lunatic fringe about their miraculous godboy I have decided to make some postings of excerpts from a book which concentrates on the history of jesusism.  To avoid the "He's not a REAL SCHOLAR ( because he doesn't agree with ME!)" horseshit we see so often I will not identify the work or the author at this time.
I will say that it is not Carrier or Price or Loftus.  

For reasons which are completely arbitrary, I elect to begin with Lucian of Samosata who many xtians love to trot out as "evidence" for their bullshit.

Quote:Lucian of Samosata (c.125-180 C.E.)
 
Lucian was the Mark Twain, Jules Verne and James Randi of the second century all rolled into one. Brilliant and sarcastic, he studied rhetoric to be a courtroom advocate, but after practicing law in Antioch for a time he gave it up in favor of his true calling: to travel extensively throughout the empire - Asia Minor, Greece, Italy and even Gaul - giving improvisational comic lectures as he went along, and winning fame and fortune. He was also a popular novelist, one of the first in western history. He wrote wildly imaginative tales like the first science fiction novel, A True Story. In it adventurers sail beyond the Pillars of Hercules only to be caught up in a giant waterspout and dumped on the Moon, where they quickly find themselves in a war of the worlds between Endymion, the king of the Moon and Phaethon, the king of the Sun, over colonization rights to Jupiter (no joke!).
 
Plato's Symposium is a philosophical discourse set at a dinner; in Lucian’s Symposium, the diners get drunk, tell dirty stories and behave badly. In other works he gleefully took on the Greek pantheon and the mortals who love them (Dialogues of the Gods), the afterlife (Dialogues of the Dead), and pointed out the ineptitude of certain contemporary philosophers (The Sale of Lives). He also wrote a scathing expose on Alexander of Abonutichus, a sham cult leader who convinced his flock that a trained snake with a puppet head (complete with blond hair) was the Macedonian serpent god “Glycon.”
 
He also turned his attention to Christians. In the Passing of Peregrinus he gives the dirt behind a well-known Cynic philosopher–turned-Christian named Proteus Peregrinus (who is mentioned with respect by a number of ancient writers). After series of misadventures (being caught in adultery and fleeing the scene naked with a radish sticking out of his rear end; corrupting a handsome boy and bribing his parents to avoid charges; strangling his father to death) he went into exile and wandered from one country after another:
Quote:“During this period he apprenticed himself to the priests and scribes of the Christians in Palestine and became an expert in that astonishing religion they have. Naturally, in no time at all, he had them looking like babies and had become their prophet, leader, head of the synagogue and whatnot, all by himself. He expounded and commented on their sacred writings and even authored a number himself. They looked up to him as a god, made him their lawgiver, and put his name down as official patron of the sect, or at least vice-patron, second to that man they still worship today, the one who was crucified in Palestine because he brought this new cult into being.” 18
 
Before he is spotted eating at a pagan sacred banquet and finally kicked out, he is able to live very well by lucratively milking his Christian flock. Lucian notes that Christians are a con artist’s dream come true: zealous, credulous and easy marks: “If any charlatan and trickster, able to profit by occasions, comes among them, he quickly acquires sudden wealth by imposing upon simple folk.”19 Of their legendary founder, Lucian adds “it was impressed on them by their original law giver that they are all brothers, from the moment they are converted, and deny the gods of Greece, and worship the crucified sage, and live after his laws.” He also remarks disapprovingly that “the poor wretches” take all this on faith, “receiving such doctrines traditionally without any definite evidence.”
 
These two bare remarks are all there is all to Lucian’s “witness” of “that crucified guy the Christians worship.” He clearly only knows this founder by hearsay, not to mention being a little fuzzy on the details of both him and his fringe cult. And this backhanded testimony makes more trouble for Christians than it solves.
 
First of all, how desperate for historical verification do you have to be if you’re forced to scrape from the idle banter of a comedian 150 years after the fact? All the historians ignored Jesus, but a Roman era Jerry Seinfeld is supposed to have researched and vouchsafed the matter for us? Lucian himself makes no claim that he guarantees the veracity of this information; quite the opposite, in fact – he tells us the Christians get their doctrines handed down to them and accept them with no evidence whatsoever.
 
But though he’s not offering evidence for a historical Christ, he is offering testimony Christians today don’t want to hear: that even in ancient times Christians were considered ready-to-fleece simpletons, and worse, this rascal Peregrinus is the real author of a number of Christian scriptures! (A shocking charge, but it would explain why there are so many Cynic influences in the Gospels…)
 
It’s a shame that Lucian could not have foreseen that nearly two millennia later modern descendants of Peregrinus’ gullible flock would be using him as a “historical witness” to their disputed founder. Though would he have laughed or cried?

The bolded part above is the gist of the matter.  This is what the xtians consider "evidence?"
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#2
RE: Forgetting Jesus Freak Bullshit, Let's Stick To History:
From the same book:

Early xtian writers who say one thing and then say another!


Quote:Pagan critics noticed this as well. Celsus accused the early Christian scribes of unscrupulously altering texts left and right:
 
 
Quote:“Some believers, as though from a drinking bout, go so far as to oppose themselves and alter the original text of the gospel three or four or several times over, and they change its character to enable them to deny difficulties in the face of criticism.”20
 
 
The Church Father Origen responded to this charge of Celsus by claiming that he knew of no one who had altered the Gospel except heretics,21 so this was no argument against True Christians, who would never do such a thing. In private writings, however, Origen changes his tune:
 

 
Quote:“The differences among the manuscripts have become great, either through the negligence of some copyists or through the perverse audacity of others; they either neglect to check over what they have transcribed, or, in the process of checking, they make additions or deletions as they please.”22
 
 
The two faces of Origen: when confronted with a nonbeliever’s accusation, Origen actually denies that Christians changed texts, but when talking to his fellow Christians, he turns around and complains about the exact same thing himself! Origen was not the only one complaining that “heretics” altered the texts of scripture to make them say what they wanted them to say; it was a very common charge from early Christian writers.23
 
But Bart Ehrman observes that increasingly, the evidence of our surviving manuscripts points the finger in the opposite direction (besides, we must remember Origen himself was eventually condemned as a heretic – so when he complains about “heretics” he may well be talking about Christians we would call “orthodox.”). In his popular book Misquoting Jesus and his well-documented scholarly study The Orthodox Corruption of Scripture, he carefully details examples of the “official” Church scribes quietly changing the scriptures to make them less useful to heretical arguments and bring them more in line with their own dogma.
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#3
RE: Forgetting Jesus Freak Bullshit, Let's Stick To History:
In the midnight hour, I want.................
I don't have an anger problem, I have an idiot problem.
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#4
RE: Forgetting Jesus Freak Bullshit, Let's Stick To History:
Quote:"Christians, needless to say, utterly detest one another; they slander each other constantly with the vilest forms of abuse, and cannot come to any sort of agreement in their teaching. Each sect brands its own, fills the head of its own with deceitful nonsense..."


Celsus, Greco-Roman philosopher c 185

Not from the book in question but rather a comment by the writer on xtian bullshittery even in his day.
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#5
RE: Forgetting Jesus Freak Bullshit, Let's Stick To History:
I was going to cite this section of the book but this fellow makes the point more succinctly and includes a very useful chart to boot.

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/crossexamin...-big-deal/

Quote:It’s a popular Christian argument: historians have roughly 25,000 manuscripts of New Testament books, far more than any other book from ancient history. Compare that with 2000 copies of the Iliad, the second-best represented manuscript. Even more poorly represented are the works of Herodotus, Thucydides, Aristotle, Julius Caesar, Pliny, Tacitus, and other great figures from history, for which we have more like a dozen manuscripts each.

Quote:
Quote:The first problem is that more manuscripts at best increase our confidence that we have the original version. That doesn’t mean the original copy was history—just like the original copy of The Wizard of Oz or the Arthurian legends wouldn’t be a record of history.

Quote:The “best attested by far!” claim for the New Testament is true but irrelevant. It’s not all that surprising that a handful of early documents from a popular religion in a dry climate were preserved until today, and let’s acknowledge that that’s impressive and historically important. But that we have 1090 manuscripts in the original Greek from the twelfth century is not much more helpful in recreating the originals than that we have 100 million new copies printed each year. What matters are the earliest copies—perhaps the hundred from first four centuries. And the hundred dwindle down to just a relevant handful of copies that are larger than scraps.

25,000 New Testament manuscripts? Big deal.
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#6
RE: Forgetting Jesus Freak Bullshit, Let's Stick To History:
Quote:I will not identify the work or the author at this time.
I will say that it is not Carrier or Price or Loftus.

psst. *nudge* I know who it is. shhhhhh..........

Boru
‘But it does me no injury for my neighbour to say there are twenty gods or no gods. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.’ - Thomas Jefferson
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#7
RE: Forgetting Jesus Freak Bullshit, Let's Stick To History:
You can PM your guess.  If correct, I'd give you a rep point but I've already done so.
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#8
RE: Forgetting Jesus Freak Bullshit, Let's Stick To History:
(September 27, 2015 at 1:44 pm)Minimalist Wrote:
Quote:"Christians, needless to say, utterly detest one another; they slander each other constantly with the vilest forms of abuse, and cannot come to any sort of agreement in their teaching. Each sect brands its own, fills the head of its own with deceitful nonsense..."


Celsus, Greco-Roman philosopher c 185

Not from the book in question but rather a comment by the writer on xtian bullshittery even in his day.
Even the Bible has several stories about that stuff.
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#9
RE: Forgetting Jesus Freak Bullshit, Let's Stick To History:
Waiting for aractus to show up and call you a cunt.
(August 21, 2017 at 11:31 pm)KevinM1 Wrote: "I'm not a troll"
Religious Views: He gay

0/10

Hammy Wrote:and we also have a sheep on our bed underneath as well
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#10
RE: Forgetting Jesus Freak Bullshit, Let's Stick To History:
Those that choose to forget the jesus freak bullshit are doomed to repeat it.
I don't have an anger problem, I have an idiot problem.
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