Pagan Myths=Judeo, Christian, Islamic, religion.

[Shiranu]

Sorry Jesus, Prometheus did more for me than you ever did. He didn't die and go to paradise for my sins... he spent the rest of eternity being tortured for my standard of living and intelligence.

[WitchSabrina]

Paul is probably the most dynamic evidence for the historicity of Jesus' Resurrection.

That's like saying Edgar Rice Burroughs was evidence for Tarzan.

 :rollin:   That's laugh-out-LOUD funny, Sgos

[LikelyToBreak]

WitchSabrina wrote in part:

Just to be clear - Roman Mithrasism does not predate Christ. The rest of the planet where Mithras was a god Does predate christianity.

Thank you for clarifying that.  I was going off the top of my head from a lecture I heard on YouTube.  I forget the modern scholar's name who said that Mithras did not predate Christianty.   =D>

[Colanth]

@Solitary: Modern scholars not only study the reliability of the Christian Gospels (Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John) but also the historical accounts written by Josephus, Tacitus, Pliny the Younger, Thallus, Tertellion, and others.

Studying the reliability, rather than studying the document, isn't scholarship, it's apologism.  (Studying the reliability starts with the premise that it's reliable, then looking to see if there's anything that would contradict that premise.  As far as scholarship goes, that's a few steps down from piss-poor.)

SCHOLARS doubt most of the Bible,  Christian apologists are convinced of its reliability.

@Colanth: Could you provide Biblical references for your claims? Paul does talk about Jesus' crucifixion and Resurrection in 1 Corinthians 15 and Philippians 2, for starters. Paul wrote his letters less than 40 years after the death of Jesus.

1) There's no ACTUAL evidence that the Jesus of the Bible ever existed.

2) There's no extant writing claiming to be Paul's from "40 years after the death of Jesus".  Ignatius of Antioch wrote (ca 110 CE) something similar to parts of Romans, 1 Corinthians, Ephesians, Colossians, and 1 Thessalonians - which may or may not mean something.  (The books could have been quoting Ignatius.  Writing in 110, he would have had absolutely no first-hand knowledge of the events.  Most likely not even second hand knowledge.)  See also //http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radical_Criticism

Mark wrote his Gospel

This is one of the most common marks of a total lack of scholarship.  Almost every scholar (not apologists) agrees that the gospels weren't written by people with the names of the gospels.

about 50 years after Jesus' death.

See #1 above and, since the earliest writing that could have been part of what later became the Bible dates to 110, we can't know that.  The "no later than 60 CE" or "no later than 70 CE" are faulty textual analyses ("the author would certainly have mentioned momentous events occurring later if he had been writing later" - bullshit) by people who need the Bible to have been written by people who actually knew Jesus.  If I write a book about Lincoln's last day, now, of course I wouldn't include anything that happened after 4/15/1865, if I wanted it to claim that it was written by someone who knew him.  They may have been primitive by our standards, but they weren't morons.

Luke, Matthew, and John wrote their Gospels within the century of Jesus' death, so these documents were not written centuries later. :)

Again - no.  If you can present a manuscript that confidently dates (C-14 will do) from, say, 70 CE or earlier, everyone would be interested.

But "we have documents written by so-and-so that we know were written no later than 73 CE and mention Yeshua ben Yosuf"?  That's Christian myth, not verified history.  Only people with degrees that DON'T qualify them to know any more about it than anyone else claim that as an expert opinion.  Experts say "we don't have any evidence".

Oh, we DO have evidence that a lot of the claims are FALSE.  Like Jesus of Nazareth?  The town that didn't exist until long after he was dead?  (Where Nazareth is were 2 farms in the 1st century.)  We even know where the myth came from.  It was Jesus the Nazorite, one dedicated to God from birth.  It got mistranslated to Nazarene.  Once people believed that Jesus came from a place named Nazareth, they started going "there" (like they go to his "tomb", even though its actual location, if it even exists, is pure conjecture).  And, if you like Josephus as an accurate source, he made an exhaustive list of all cities and towns in the area - and never mentioned anyplace called Nazareth.  (And his reference to Jesus is such an obvious forgery to scholars that it's not disputed.)

There's a lot more actual evidence that the Jesus of the Bible never existed than there is that he existed (which is actually none at all).

[Colanth]

If you don't believe that the historical accounts about Jesus are accurate

There are no historical accounts of Jesus, there are only Biblical accounts.  And, since the "history" of the Bible is so obviously wrong in so many places, it's not an historical source.

Before the historical accounts of Jesus were written down, they were preserved through a very reliable oral tradition

No evidence of that AT ALL.  The disciples, the martyrs - all later Christian myth as far as actual evidence is concerned.  The fact that Christianity asserts that the Pauline works date from around 70 CE isn't evidence that they do.  The fact that Ignatius' documents (which may actually be the SOURCE of the Pauline documents) DO date from around 110 CE DOES mean that they do.

Moreover, the Gospels were written during the lifetimes of Jesus' closest followers.

As I've said before, a) "Jesus' closest followers" is myth, and we have absolutely no idea when the gospels were written (or by whom).

Furthermore, the writings of Paul can be dated earlier than Mark's Gospel and are very well validated by modern scholars.

And again, no, for reasons I gave you upthread.

We could argue all day as to why Jesus is different from pagan deities, but it really comes down to the simple fact that Jesus' Resurrection stands apart from all pagan mystery religions.

You could argue all day.  Most Christians could argue all day.  Scholars laid this to rest by the end of the 19th century.  From there on, it's just more of the myth being propagated.

[Colanth]

I forget the modern scholar's name who said that Mithras did not predate Christianty.   =D>

William Lame Craig? :shock:

[SGOS]

Before the historical accounts of Jesus were written down, they were preserved through a very reliable oral tradition

The oral tradition!  Yeah, like that's really reliable.  There is absolutely no record of the original story, so no one can go back to see what the original story even said.  There's nothing magical or superior about the oral tradition.  It was just the only thing available to illiterate primitive people who passed on stories, much the way people pass on gossip and rumors today.

[LikelyToBreak]

LikelyToBreak wrote:
I forget the modern scholar's name who said that Mithras did not predate Christianty. =D>

Colanth asked: William Lame Craig? :shock:

No, I'm pretty sure it was a woman.  It was a while back so, don't remember her name.  I do recall it didn't matter, as there were plenty of other examples of others going through a passion, death, and resurrection.  Even Hercules died and rose from the dead, and he was one of the most popular mythic beings in the ancient world.

WitchSabrina pretty well cleared up that subject though.

[Solitary]

Josephus (c37-100 AD)

Flavius Josephus is a highly respected and much-quoted Romano-Jewish historian. The early Christians were zealous readers of his work.

A native of Judea, living in the 1st century AD, Josephus was actually governor of Galilee for a time (prior to the war of 70 AD) – the very province in which Jesus allegedly did his wonders. Though not born until 37 AD and therefore not a contemporary witness to any Jesus-character, Josephus at one point even lived in Cana, the very city in which Christ is said to have wrought his first miracle.

Josephus's two major tomes are History of The Jewish War and The Antiquities of the Jews. In these complementary works, the former written in the 70s, the latter in the 90s AD, Josephus mentions every noted personage of Palestine and describes every important event which occurred there during the first seventy years of the Christian era.
 
At face value, Josephus appears to be the answer to the Christian apologist's dreams.
In a single paragraph (the so-called Testimonium Flavianum) Josephus confirms every salient aspect of the Christ-myth:

1. Jesus's existence 2. his 'more than human' status 3. his miracle working 4. his teaching 5. his ministry among the Jews and the Gentiles 6. his Messiahship 7. his condemnation by the Jewish priests 8. his sentence by Pilate 9. his death on the cross 10. the devotion of his followers 11. his resurrection on the 3rd day 12. his post-death appearance 13. his fulfillment of divine prophecy 14. the successful continuance of the Christians.

In just 127 words Josephus confirms everything – now that is a miracle!

BUT WAIT A MINUTE ...
Not a single writer before the 4th century – not Justin, Irenaeus, Clement of Alexandria, Tertullian, Cyprian, Arnobius, etc. – in all their defences against pagan hostility, makes a single reference to Josephus' wondrous words.

The third century Church 'Father' Origen, for example, spent half his life and a quarter of a million words contending against the pagan writer Celsus. Origen drew on all sorts of proofs and witnesses to his arguments in his fierce defence of Christianity. He quotes from Josephus extensively. Yet even he makes no reference to this 'golden paragraph' from Josephus, which would have been the ultimate rebuttal. In fact, Origen actually said that Josephus was "not believing in Jesus as the Christ."

Origen did not quote the 'golden paragraph' because this paragraph had not yet been written.
It was absent from early copies of the works of Josephus and did not appear in Origen's third century version of Josephus, referenced in his Contra Celsum.
Consider, also, the anomalies:

1. How could Josephus claim that Jesus had been the answer to his messianic hopes yet remain an orthodox Jew?

The absurdity forces some apologists to make the ridiculous claim that Josephus was a closet Christian!

2. If Josephus really thought Jesus had been 'the Christ' surely he would have added more about him than one paragraph, a casual aside in someone else's (Pilate's) story?

In fact, Josephus relates much more about John the Baptist than about Jesus! He also reports in great detail the antics of other self-proclaimed messiahs, including Judas of Galilee, Theudas the Magician, and the unnamed 'Egyptian Jew' messiah.

It is striking that though Josephus confirms everything the Christians could wish for, he adds nothing that is not in the gospel narratives, nothing that would have been unknown by Christians already.

3. The question of context.
Antiquities 18 is primarily concerned with "all sorts of misfortunes" which befell the Jews during a period of thirty-two years (4-36 AD).

Josephus begins with the unpopular taxation introduced by the Roman Governor Cyrenius in 6 AD. He presents a synopsis of the three established Jewish parties (Pharisees, Sadducees, and Essenes), but his real quarry is the "fourth sect of philosophy ... which laid the foundation of our future miseries." That was the sect of Judas the Galilean, "which before we were unacquainted withal."

At the very point we might expect a mention of "Christians" (if any such sect existed) we have instead castigation of tax rebels!

"It was in Gessius Florus's time [64-66] that the nation began to grow mad with this distemper, who was our procurator, and who occasioned the Jews to go wild with it by the abuse of his authority, and made them revolt from the Romans; and these are the sects of Jewish philosophy."

"Nor can fear of death make them call any man Lord." Sound a tad familiar?
Chapter 2 notes the cities built to honour the Romans; the frequent changes in high priest (up to Caiaphas) and Roman procurators (up to Pontius Pilate); and also the turmoil in Parthia.

Chapter 3, containing the Testimonium as paragraph three, is essentially about Pilate's attempts to bring Jerusalem into the Roman system. With his first policy – placing Caesar's ensigns in Jerusalem – Pilate was forced to back down by unexpected Jewish protests in Caesarea. With his second policy – providing Jerusalem with a new aqueduct built with funds sequestered from the Temple, Pilate made ready for Jewish protests. Concealed weapons on his soldiers caused much bloodshed.

At this point the paragraph about Jesus is introduced!
Immediately after, Josephus continues:
"And about the same time another terrible misfortune confounded the Jews ..."

There is no way that Josephus, who remained an orthodox Jew all his life and defended Judaism vociferously against Greek critics, would have thought that the execution of a messianic claimant was "another terrible misfortune" for the Jews. This is the hand of a Christian writer who himself considered the death of Jesus to be a Jewish tragedy (fitting in with his own notions of a stiff-necked race, rejected by God because they themselves had rejected the Son of God).
With paragraph 3 removed from the text the chapter, in fact, reads better. The "aqueduct massacre" now justifies "another terrible misfortune."

4. The final assertion, that the Christians were "not extinct at this day," confirms that the so-called Testimonium is a later interpolation. How much later we cannot say but there was no "tribe of Christians" during Josephus' lifetime. Christianity under that moniker did not establish itself until the 2nd century. Outside of this single bogus paragraph, in all the extensive histories of Josephus there is not a single reference to Christianity anywhere.

5. The hyperbolic language is uncharacteristic of the historian:
"... as the divine prophets had foretold these and ten thousand other wonderful things concerning him."

This is the stuff of Christian propaganda.
6. The Testimonium is a rather short for a genuine digression in the narrative of Josephus (the material surely was deserving of more attention than it gets). But a copyist, working with scrolls of a fixed length, would have had little space to play with.
REALITY CHECK

In fact, the Josephus paragraph about Jesus does not appear until the beginning of the fourth century, at the time of Constantine.

Bishop Eusebius, that great Church propagandist and self-confessed liar-for-god, was the first person known to have quoted this paragraph of Josephus, about the year 340 AD. This was after the Christians had become the custodians of religious correctness.
 
Whole libraries of antiquity were torched by the Christians. Yet unlike the works of his Jewish contemporaries, the histories of Josephus survived. They survived because the Christian censors had a use for them. They planted evidence on Josephus, turning the leading Jewish historian of his day into a witness for Jesus Christ ! Finding no references to Jesus anywhere in Josephus's genuine work, they interpolated a brief but all-embracing reference based purely on Christian belief.

Do we need to look any further to identify Eusebius himself as the forger?
Sanctioned by the imperial propagandist every Christian commentator for the next thirteen centuries accepted unquestioningly the entire Testimonium Flavianum, along with its declaration that Jesus "was the Messiah."

And even in the twenty first century scholars who should know better trot out a truncated version of the 'golden paragraph' in a scurrilous attempt to keep Josephus 'on message.'
The "Arabic Josephus"

In a novel embellishment to the notion of an orthodox Jew giving testimony of Jesus, defenders of the faith have in recent times tossed an Arabic version of the Josephus text on to their pile of dubious evidence. The Arabic recension was brought to light in 1971 by Professor Schlomo Pines of the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Pines himself remained cautious about claims of untampered authenticity but the brethren have no such reservations, such is their desperation to keep Josephus in the witness stand for Jesus.

The work in question is actually a history of the world to the year 941/942 penned by a Christian Arab bishop, Agapius of Hierapolis. His World History preserves, in Arabic translation, a version of the Testimonium minus the most obvious Christian interpolations.

But what does a 10th century copy actually prove?
Claims that the Arabic passage itself dates from the 4th century are untenable (written Arabic barely existed at such an early date). Moreover Agapius was a Melkite Christian (pro-Byzantium) at a time of intensifying Islamization of his native Syria. What he wrote was political correctness for his own times. A new Shia Hamdani dynasty had been established barely 50 miles away in Aleppo. Its first prince, Sayf ad Dawlah ("sword of the state"), began a century of persistent attacks against Byzantium.

 Agapius' paraphrase of a Syriac rendition of Josephus from a Greek original rather significantly mentions JC's "condemnation to die" but not the actuality of it and of JC being "alive" 3 days later – in other words, a carefully balanced compatibility with Muhammad's view of a Jesus as a prophet who did not die on the cross.

In short, the Arabic Josephus is no evidence of the Christian godman and serves only to confuse the unwary.

Justus of Tiberias
Justus was also an historian, a rival to Josephus, and from the same region. Perhaps his work was not as easily doctored – his histories did not make it through the Christian Dark Age and are – as they say – "lost to us"!

" I have read the chronology of Justus of Tiberias ... and being under the Jewish prejudices, as indeed he was himself also a Jew by birth, he makes not one mention of Jesus, of what happened to him, or of the wonderful works that he did."

– Photius, Patriarch of Constantinople, 9th Century
Christian apologists, for their own convenience, blur the distinction between evidence of Jesus and evidence of Christians.

It is rather as if a child who believed in the Tooth Fairy was to be presented as evidence that the Tooth Fairy really existed.  :roll:
Solitary

[WitchSabrina]

WitchSabrina wrote in part:

Just to be clear - Roman Mithrasism does not predate Christ. The rest of the planet where Mithras was a god Does predate christianity.

Thank you for clarifying that.  I was going off the top of my head from a lecture I heard on YouTube.  I forget the modern scholar's name who said that Mithras did not predate Christianty.   =D>

If you want more Mithras data (cause I use Mithras to question christians all the time - good weaponry lol) anyway
this article gives some good info without boring you to tears for tedious reading.  
Give it a peek when you get spare time:  http://www.truthbeknown.com/mithra.htm

cheers

[Colanth]

(cause I use Mithras to question christians all the time - good weaponry lol)

You can also ask them how Osiris fathered a child after he was dead.  Not even Jesus did that.

[Shiranu]

God damn it, making me learn stuff and stuff...

[PilatesQuestion]

Okay, so modern scholars agree (in super majorities) that these historical facts from the Gospels are absolutely true:
1. Jesus died by crucifixion.
2. Jesus' disciples went from despairing over His death to boldly believing in His life.
3. Jesus' disciples claimed to have seen Him in Resurrected form.
4. Jesus' tomb became empty for some reason.
5. The top Pharisee and rabid persecutor of Christians named Saul (Paul) of Tarsus completely changed his lifestyle after he claimed to have seen a Resurrected Jesus. He left his top political position to become one of the people he was persecuting, who did not even accept him at first.

Paul is probably the most dynamic evidence for the historicity of Jesus' Resurrection.

[youtube:2f927cus]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t-yHDBHxAfI[/youtube:2f927cus]

Well, what is your argument?

[PilatesQuestion]

If you don't believe that the historical accounts about Jesus are accurate, then you have to cease to believe that other historical accounts, such as the accounts of Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar, are also fabrications. What leap of logic makes you think that. There are historical accounts written when they existed by historians that lived at the same time period, not 40-60 years later :roll: .

Before the historical accounts of Jesus were written down, they were preserved through a very reliable Reliable? I can remember in grade school where we did a test and someone told a story to the person next to them that no one could hear. This went all around the class room and the last person told the story that didn't even resemble the original.

 Give me a break! oral tradition while Jesus' followers were still performing their ministries. Moreover, the Gospels were written during the lifetimes of Jesus' closest followers. You would think they would have written such a fantastic story then, not 40-60 years later wouldn't you?Furthermore, the writings of Paul can be dated earlier than Mark's Gospel and are very well validated by modern scholars.

We could argue all day as to why Jesus is different from pagan deities, but it really comes down to the simple fact that Jesus' Resurrection stands apart from all pagan mystery religions. This is not true at all! Get a book on myths and study it.

This actual unbiased historian begs to differ with your evidence:

http://youtu.be/mwUZOZN-9dc   :roll: Solitary

How does he account for the early creeds about the life of Jesus? Or Josephus and Tacitus?

[PilatesQuestion]

If you don't believe that the historical accounts about Jesus are accurate, then you have to cease to believe that other historical accounts, such as the accounts of Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar, are also fabrications.
Before the historical accounts of Jesus were written down, they were preserved through a very reliable oral tradition while Jesus' followers were still performing their ministries. Moreover, the Gospels were written during the lifetimes of Jesus' closest followers. Furthermore, the writings of Paul can be dated earlier than Mark's Gospel and are very well validated by modern scholars.

We could argue all day as to why Jesus is different from pagan deities, but it really comes down to the simple fact that Jesus' Resurrection stands apart from all pagan mystery religions.

Nonsense.

The actions of those and countless thousands of others are written and corroborated by countless testimonies from people at the time. Unlike the myth of Jesus where nobody even wrote about him for several decades after he supposedly died, people at the time we writing about the men (such as Caesar) and their escapades. The Romans were very good at documenting things.

You can go to the roman forum in Rome anytime you want and see busts and graffiti of Caesar, and that's not even mentioning all the other corroborating evidence that easily satisfies the question as to whether he existed.

You keep saying 'modern scholars'. Cite examples. Who are they? What have they written? Where can we find their texts so we may validate them ourselves?

Just asserting that the Jesus myth is true doesn't make it so. You need to stop using fallacious reasoning and start admitting that your beliefs are based on un-evidenced faith.

If Jesus did not exist, then Alexander the Great did not exist and thus the Greek Empire was a myth based off of previous empires.

I've cited my sources in this thread. Don't take my word for it. Check out the books for yourself. :)