Merged Topic - Historical Reliability of the Gospels

[Sargon The Grape]

You really think an all powerful god would have an issue making this happen?

Well it's not like God can split himself into a trinity or anything. What do you want, a miracle?

[aitm]

How would God Incarnate, Jesus Christ, live and die and rise again among the Romans, the Ming Dynasty and the Celts all at the same time?

sure….sure…..and yet the creator of the entire universe, knowledgeable about the laws of all physics was stymied by a woman's period…LOLOLOL…yer a smart one all right. And yet you think that a god as great as yours could not even convince the jews when he actually showed himself to them and did all these miracles for them that he could not convince them……granted it was always the third time he was successful…LOLOLOL…what a god.

[AllPurposeAtheist]

Oh, and the whole book of Revelations?  Must be all undisputed FACT except the parts that don't make a lick of sense which by the way is nearly all of it..
But hey, even back then people swallowed substances that caused hallucinations..

[Gawdzilla Sama]

Yes and no.

No.

[aitm]

Truly I say to you, this generation shall not pass before all these things come true...somewhere in matthew....

Yeah.....the NT is accurate..LOLOL... what a pos of a god you splay yourself to at least you could worship Odin, he promised no ice giants and we don't see none of those fuckers eh? WHO-HOO go ODIN!!

[Randy Carson]

But as you already know ... even if I had a 1st century Jesus guy, literate enough to write his own stuff, and we had the original text ... it wouldn't matter to me.  So that disposes of the textual criticism.  I agree that is a red herring ... but is red herring kosher for Passover?  That I don't know.

Now, we're finally getting somewhere. If Jesus really existed, if he wrote a book, if we had that original autograph...it wouldn't matter to you.

And why is that, Baruch?

[Randy Carson]

I told you already, if the guy existed or not is completely irrelevant. I doubt it but I am open to any evidence presented.

You're open to any evidence presented? Well, that's nice to hear. I'd hate to think I was presenting all this material to someone who was simply going to ignore it.

The point is that he was portrayed as the Messiah a few hundred years after he allegedly existed and that is bs. No divinity, no miracles, no resurrection etc.

A few hundred years? reasonist, what about the evidence that I already presented demonstrating that the texts of the NT were written within a few years of his death and resurrection?

What makes all this unbelievable is the suspension of all laws of physics and claims of the supernatural. Virgin birth, the most nonsensical part of your cult, is prevalent in over 30 other ancient myths thousands of years prior. That should be enough for anybody with a logical thought process to classify the good book as fiction. But wait! There is more! Dionysus turned water into wine too, so what? All that rubbish was written many, many moons before your Jesus was born of a virgin!

Why should I give a rip about Dionysus if you and I can both agree that it is "rubbish"? The existence of false claims does not diminish my ability to evaluate whether the claims of Jesus' disciples are true, does it?

See, you're making the mistake of looking at ALL religious claims equally...and writing ALL of them off because MOST of them are obviously bogus. But this shows a lack of real discernment. The existence of counterfeits does not mean that all are fake. This is not good logic.

So by all means relinquish or suspend your faculty of reason and wallow in wish thinking, by all means believe in anything you want but don't come here and bullshit us. Others have tried and failed, you are not the first. I am up for any decent discussion but if I see that one side ignores factual evidence and tries to deceive others, I tend to remove myself from that confrontation. You are still entertaining so I wait.

The real issue here, reasonist, is that you haven't actually presented any thing that resembles "factual evidence", so there really hasn't been anything for me to ignore. You simply make these long, rambling posts completely devoid of hyperlinks to scholarly articles, no quotes with attribution to books that I can research for myself, nothing of this sort. You simply assert what you believe and then accuse ME of ignoring your evidence. WHAT EVIDENCE?!?

[Randy Carson]

I like Randy too, otherwise I wouldn't bother.  All of these points were discussed by the pre-Nicene Fathers ... and if you read that stuff, you will read a few whoppers!  Ah yes, Satan carefully convinced the pagan priests to come up with counterfeit myths, sufficiently similar to, yet different from ... the myths approved by the pre-Nicene Fathers ... just to mess with all the potential Christian converts who would be appearing sometime in the future.  Yeah, right ;-)

Interesting.

Now, let's consider this. IF, and I'm just saying IF for the moment, God and Satan both exist, wouldn't it be reasonable for Satan to establish counterfeit religions to lead people astray? To mock and copy the true religion? Would that be a reasonable strategy for Satan to adopt in his opposition to God?

I mean, the Allies set up all sorts of fictitious operations designed to deceive the Germans into believing that D-Day was going to happen at Calais, right?

[Randy Carson]

Wow, Randy!  You do get it!  Just because you have a perfect text of the bible (which has never, ever been the case and would be impossible to have or find) does not make Jesus real.  And thanks for the link between the Cheshire Cat and jesus.  I had not seen that before.

You're welcome.

Since I do "get it", does this mean that you will interact with me a little more sincerely now that I have demonstrated to you that I am not as clueless as the other bible-thumpers you have met previously?

[Randy Carson]

[Mike Cl]

You're welcome.

Since I do "get it", does this mean that you will interact with me a little more sincerely now that I have demonstrated to you that I am not as clueless as the other bible-thumpers you have met previously?

You are making the mistake of confusing sincerity with agreement with you.  I have not told you one lie about what I think about anything.  I am sincere about my thinking, reasoning--and even my beliefs.  But that really means little.  Hitler was sincere as well.  So what?  I base my thinking, not on the sincerity of my thinking, but the accuracy of that thinking.  It would serve you well to do the same.

[Randy Carson]

Is it? Jesus is being removed from historical entries. One by one. Oxford did this. It's not 'Before Christ' any more, for example. It's Before Common Era.

Yes.

In the next century, it will be just a mythical character like Hercules is now. They are going to make cartoons about it for children and that will be it.

Fools have been making assumptions like this for 2,000 years. Empires have come and gone. The Church is still here. Don't hold your breath.

According to you? Unfortunately, you don't qualify for deciding who is more knowledgable or not. You have demonstrated you do not understand what is knowledge. This subject can be discussed from the point of why myths were 'necessary', why did people create them, but that's too advanced for you as far as I see.

Yeah, completely beyond my ken.

Also, you are not having a discussion we haven't seen -literally- a hundred times or presenting something even remotely interesting.

Nor am I hearing responses that I have not heard before in forums very, very similar to this one. However, if there is nothing "even remotely interesting" about this thread...why are you posting in it?

Do you have any idea how many fantasy characters and myths we need to refer to study human history? That doesn't change the tiny bit of the fact they are myths. The Jesus myth, Christianity is also a huge part of human culture.

Oh, Christianity is a huge part of human culture, alright. But even your fellow atheists mock the stupidity of the Jesus Mythicists.

For example, you cannot study western art without reading the bible. It has nothing to do with religion, it is the part of the classical western education.

Indeed. That somehow bugs the hell out of you, doesn't it?

Also don't make several threads of the same subjects please. You are not inspiring, 'proving' or 'teaching' anything to anyone. In fact, you have no idea how boring you are.

Well, I can certainly understand that you're not really paying attention since the material is so "boring", but if you had been following along, you would have noticed that each thread is addressing a single, specific point in the argument in favor of the historical reliability of the NT.

See, people who think they already know it all have to have everything explained to them more slowly.

Does that make sense, drunkenshoe? Do I need to slow down even more for you?

[Randy Carson]

You really think an all powerful god would have an issue making this happen?

Not without violating our free will, I think.

As you note, precisely because of God's omnipotence, He must act very carefully to avoid coercion.

[widdershins]

Okay, define "accurate".  It seems like you are trying to prove the text is "accurate", meaning, "It is relatively unchanged for its original intent" to show that it is "accurate", meaning, "Every word is true".  That's the impression I'm getting, though, admittedly, I have not read and will not read 4 walls of text you ripped from a source I would never go to on my own.

Let's say for a moment that you have just proved that the text of the Bible is an accurate depiction of the original intent (you have not and you cannot, you are, instead, trying to invoke the principals of probability to prove an absolute, which will never happen, even if the probability you used were not skewed horribly).  But let's say you just showed us that the text, as it is today, is substantially similar to the text as it was written.  So what?  How does that prove that magic is real?  How does that prove that it is anything but a collection of fantastical magical stories with no basis in reality?

You can rewrite history all you want by quoting all the fringe nuts who disagree with the preponderance of evidence which has convinced a vast majority of scholars until you're blue in the face.  It still doesn't prove Jesus went to Hogwarts.

[widdershins]

Not without violating our free will, I think.

As you note, precisely because of God's omnipotence, He must act very carefully to avoid coercion.

But that's not true.  Free will as a gift from God is a human construct not found in the Bible.  In fact, God readily violates free will when dealing with Pharaoh because he really wanted to punish Pharaoh for not doing as he asked, so he "hardened his heart" to make sure that he would get to punish Pharaoh.  Essentially, he made sure Pharaoh disobeyed his command so that he could punish him for his disobedience.  Since God had to go out of his way to "harden Pharaoh's heart" one can only assume that, had God not done that, Pharaoh would have let the Jews go.  God, being all knowing, certainly wouldn't have bothered to harden Pharaoh's heart if it were not necessary to do so to get the result he wanted.