People in bible never existed according to head of Theology at a university in UK!

[Amarok]

, it's the experts, whom by your own admission you believe without question.

he never said anything to this effect . Once again your dishonesty on full display .

[Minimalist]

Finkelstein sounds like a hater...

Compared to you, Finkelstein is a genius. 

BTW, Finkelstein's Low Chronology has been sustained by carbon dating studies.... but you don't care about that because all that matters to you are your fucking fairy tales.


Why don't you try to exert your brain and figure out who else might be on the Philistia-Judaean border?  This was 200 or so years after the Philistines had arrived in the area... something else your silly bible fucks up...and so they had plenty of time to establish themselves.  Judaea, sadly for you and your bullshit, remained a shitty little desert area where an relative handful of mainly nomadic people herded sheep and goats and made no mark on the world at all.  Unless you consider sheep shit making a mark?

Sucks to be a jesus freak, hey huggy?

[Godscreated]

...
it matters what God is doing in her life.
...

Man, that sounds so weird!  

Mother-in-law-gods or stalker-gods?  Either way, I hear the rebuttal, "Will you please just get outta my life!?!?!"

 I din't think so.

GC

[Fidel_Castronaut]

Just because she is a professor it doesn't mean she is a Christian, it's more like she wanted to do this for a job and doesn't care about the truth. I've seen many theological professors that do not accept what the Bible teaches and/or the truths of scripture. For many of them it's just a job and why they do it I have no idea, you would think they would find something they believe in. Guess it's more like a philosophy to them, who knows, what matters is what you know to be real and the truth, don't get upset because some people want to make a name for themselves instead of searching for the truth.

GC

Francesca is confusing me.
She says she loves the bible, and yet she talks about the people being made up, including some of the authors!

Not mutually exclusive.

One can love the Odyssey and not believe in Odysseus. To people who do not espouse the bible as literal truth, the two are, mythically speaking, identical.

[Fake Messiah]

Thanks for the link to Francesca Stavrakopoulou. She's great! History isn't one of my subjects. It's nice to find someone who explains it so well.

And after watching this and seeing what kind of force is invested trough money and all sorts of interests to discover any archaeological evidence for king David and after all that all they got is two seals that the best thing that they have going for them is that they can't be dismissed to be from David. No castles, no buildings, no clay tiles writings, no statues...

[Minimalist]

https://www.biblicalarchaeology.org/dail...jerusalem/

The next period Geva considers is the period of the United Monarchy, the time of King David and King Solomon and a couple centuries thereafter (1000 B.C.E. down to about the eighth century B.C.E.). In David’s time, the borders of the city did not change from the previous period. However, King Solomon expanded the confines of the city northward to include the Temple Mount. This increased the size of the city to about 40 acres, but the increase in population was not proportionate since much of this expansion was taken up with the Temple and royal buildings. “It is likely that Jerusalem attracted new inhabitants of different social classes,” Geva tells us. “Some of these people came to reside in the city as a consequence of their official and religious capacities, while others came to seek a livelihood in its developing economy.” Geva estimates the population of the city at this time at about 2,000. (Previously, other scholars had estimated the number of people living in the city at this time as 2,000, 2,500 or 4,500–5,000.)

Even with a few obvious problems....such as there being no evidence whatsoever for any fucking temple existing in this miserable little shithole... the population estimates are hardly indicative of a major capital city.

[Fake Messiah]

While most people today don’t believe Hercules was actually born of a virgin or was half god, there is universal agreement among Zeus-worshiping scholars that there was a real historic Hercules. In fact, only those who have an anti-Zeus bias reject the historicity of Hercules.

University of Notre Dame Philosophy professor Gary Gutting, recently wrote an article in the New York Times arguing against the atheistic view toward Zeus. He argues that Zeus very well may have actually existed. I think that if Zeus existed, than Hercules must have existed too. If we were to reject the historicity of Hercules, then we would also have to reject the historicity of Socrates, Plato, Jesus, and Bill Clinton.

Gutting has a PhD. in Philosophy of Religion. He studies religions for a living. This isn’t just a faith-based opinion; he is an expert and a scholar. So Fox News should stop embarrassing itself by questioning his faith.  ....

Hercules was at least alleged to be a half person, but still there is no reason to believe that his exploits were based off any real person. Yahweh and Jesus are much the same. They are purely fictional characters – who are we going to look for next, the historical Superman? You don’t know that there wasn’t someone named Clark living in Kansas.

Despite the fact that there are zero contemporary accounts of Jesus and all we have are the Gospels and some vague references to someone called “the Christ” in writings written many years after his alleged death (which may have even been forged), there is nothing and yet we have scholars and experts (mostly Christians) who assert that there must have been a historical figure that these fanciful tales were based on. Why?

Okay, where is the evidence? The answer is the authoritative word of PhD scholars like Reza Aslan and others. In fact, the belief in a historical Jesus is apparently “universally accepted” by theologians and Christian historians. There is more evidence for a historical Jesus than there is for Socrates, Plato, Hercules, and Bill Clinton!

Okay, where is the evidence? Repeat. These people have PhDs! They are scholars and therefore have authority. There is just one problem; the evidence is where the real authority lies and there is no evidence that Jesus or Hercules were anything more than fictional characters. If you strip Hercules of his half-godness, why would anyone accept anything else about his exploits as possibly true? Same thing applies to Jesus. If you strip him of his supernatural magic, then why would anyone take seriously anything else from the story?

https://www.skepticink.com/dangeroustalk...-hercules/

[Wyrd of Gawd]

https://www.biblicalarchaeology.org/dail...jerusalem/

The next period Geva considers is the period of the United Monarchy, the time of King David and King Solomon and a couple centuries thereafter (1000 B.C.E. down to about the eighth century B.C.E.). In David’s time, the borders of the city did not change from the previous period. However, King Solomon expanded the confines of the city northward to include the Temple Mount. This increased the size of the city to about 40 acres, but the increase in population was not proportionate since much of this expansion was taken up with the Temple and royal buildings. “It is likely that Jerusalem attracted new inhabitants of different social classes,” Geva tells us. “Some of these people came to reside in the city as a consequence of their official and religious capacities, while others came to seek a livelihood in its developing economy.” Geva estimates the population of the city at this time at about 2,000. (Previously, other scholars had estimated the number of people living in the city at this time as 2,000, 2,500 or 4,500–5,000.)

Even with a few obvious problems....such as there being no evidence whatsoever for any fucking temple existing in this miserable little shithole... the population estimates are hardly indicative of a major capital city.

Maybe the David story was cooked up centuries after it supposedly happened?  

We know that Jerusalem was an important town during the First Century when the Romans destroyed it and took the population as slaves.  Then in the 600s the muslims got their mitts on it.  So how would the Christians and Jews get it back?  They would make it super important by claiming that it had been the large capital of the mighty King David from centuries ago.  

So how did they do that?  They simply made up the story and put it in the biblical fairy tale that they wrote to counter the muslims' Koran that Uthman's committee wrote in the 640s.  And since people were ignorant they were able to get away with it because no one knew anything abut ancient history at that time.

[dyresand]

Bolding mine. My experience with the search for truth leans more towards this kind of lie being a Lie for Christ™. I hope that before you die, you have a chance to repent.

 I've repented to the One who is in control of all things and He is the only one who counts. It is those like you that I worry about, after death there are no second chances with God.

GC

Why a HE though pretty sure god of the bible is an IT because the bible never stated god had a gender. Besides isn't the concept of god and gender redundant if god was a guy
and its only him.. what is he doing right now other than godly masturbation.

[The Grand Nudger]

To require details to match exactly seems pedantic.  I'm an Atheist, obviously I don't believe in miracles. However Alexander the great, Ghenghis Khan, even modern people like Geranimo have miracles associated with them. I don't not believe they existed because people associated miracles with them.

Not speaking for Boru, but "miracles" are why I don't believe in the christ myth.  I don't believe in the jesus legend because it's no better supported than the christ myth and has problems all it's own.  It;s the same reason I don't believe in the Paul Bunyan legend, regardless of whether or not there was a mythically large blue ox.

Alexander, Ghenghis, Geronimo...these were real people with legends and myths attached.  Each very well established. With "jesus"..the reverse seems to be true.  Myths and legends with a man attached as an afterthought.

As far as what you specified as the core, as it were, of some jesus the man....well, why bethlehem, why nazereth? We were willing to negotiate on so much of the other particulars how about these as well? If not...why not, honestly? Early christians were certainly divided over the details of the "mundane" jesus...and even whether or not there was one. The man we know as the hypothetically historical jesus is just as much of a story as the supernatural stuff. Their are, in fact..entire genres of fiction with no ghosts and ghouls in them (I find it ironic that we're even discussing that in the context of a story that -is- about ghosts and ghouls).


So long as we're willing to race to the bottom in search of even a single similarity I'm sure we could find 100's of jesus' (can we call them je-si, lol?) in the ANE. Just as we'd be able to find a bunch of french lumberjacks applying a pthalo blue pesticide and antifungal to their oxen. Tics, there are metric shotloads of tics in trees. They have a tendency to jump ship when you cut one down. They'd really cake in on to prevent the spread of disease. Will we believe either story is more or less a biography after having done so?

Not for nothing, the human origin of the bunyan myth -and- legend as having a proto-paul who atually lived is on more solid ground than the historical jesus narrative...and neither rise to the level of Alexander, Ghenghis, or Geronimo.