Merged Topic - Historical Reliability of the Gospels

[stromboli]

Has anybody pointed out that there is no narrative or verifiable historical account that occurred during Christ's ministry and every single point of evidence is after the fact?

Also the fact that, post tense, with a large number of texts and sources to choose from, the later compilers of the bible and the religion that preceded it, could in essence invent a religion and pick and choose what they wanted in it? It is no accident that Jesus is given aspects of previous deities; rising from the dead, performing miracles and so on borrowed from Horus, Apollo, Mithra, Romulus and so on.

The historicity/mythicism argument does not at any point prove the divinity of Jesus. It merely debates whether he is founded on a real person or a total myth. The issue is existence of a divine Jesus, not whether or not a man existed to have that mantle laid on him.

There is a large number of materials to choose from. Therefore all parts of the New Testament should in theory agree across the board, but they don't. there are differences just between the 4 Gospels. Also that the Gospels, presented first in the New Testament, were not the first written? To be a witness second hand- there are no eyewitness accounts; if there are, none that can be seen as objective. 

It is debatable whether the city of Nazareth even existed during Christ's time. It is also likely that his "born of a virgin" miraculous birth is a mistranslation of Isaiah.

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/unreasonablefaith/2008/06/why-i-deny-the-virgin-birth-of-jesus/

The earliest references are late and sparse.
Why is such an important story left out of all the early sources?
Probably because it hadn’t been made up yet.
Paul, the earliest New Testament author, never mentions the virgin birth. For someone who we rely upon for much of Christian theology, it is an odd omission. Paul refers to Jesus’ birth twice (Rom 1:3; Gal 4:4) and never says he was born of a virgin or of different means than anyone else. You’d think that would be important.
The virgin birth is also not in Mark, the earliest gospel, or in John, the only other gospel not based on Mark. Why is such an important story left out of all the early sources? Probably because it hadn’t been made up yet.
Why would the story be made up? Perhaps to fulfill an old prophecy of a virgin birth, which the Gospel of Matthew cites:
Behold, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel. (Isaiah 7:14)
Some scholars say “virgin” was a mistranslation in the Septuagint (the Greek translation the gospel writers used), and should have been translated “young woman.” That means the story might have been based on a mistranslation!
It seems likely the virgin birth was created to boost the authority of Christianity through prophecy and compete with rival gods who were born of virgins.

The word translated as virgin is also the same as young woman. The whole aspect of divinity is not provable and can be seen objectively as an invention. And we are back to the borrowed myths from previous religions.

The Jews never accepted Jesus. There is not, to my awareness, any scholarly discussion that can be seen from that time period by Hebrew scholars debating the issue. In other words, acceptance or rejection of Jesus- which led to persecution, pogroms and so on- came as a result of the later formations of religions and the built in bias against Judaism for rejecting Jesus, though basically they were merely sticking to their own interpretation of the Talmud, not the Septuagint translation.

On balance, based on the uncertainty of historic accounts and the manipulation by early Christian leaders, it strikes me that making a claim of certainty is flawed, or certainly not verifiable in any provable way.

Just saying. Carry on.

[Randy Carson]

When was this book written?  If written after 1960, you would have to ask the author as to why (sometimes the most recent events are not covered, because they are too fresh).  Otherwise one is engaged in conspiracy theory ... just like the fifth generation Christians, almost all Gentiles without knowledge of, and hostile to Jews, the ones who never met Jesus, never met an apostle of the first generation, had only congregational tradition and episcopal direction (at least in the East), had hand-copied epistles and gospels of various sorts (see Shepherd of Hermas) ... and had to rely on that and their imagination, to try to understand what type of community they were a part of, and how they fit in.  Not that such people and such communities weren't historical (no miracles) or valuable in their own way (self help proletarians, not peasants).  Really not any more or less valid than equivalent pagan social groupings.  If I were alive and Jewish then, I would be a part of such a "chavurah" and we would be a synagogue any time we had a "minyan" quorum for official prayers/worship.  Institutional Judaism only came about when Jewish people were first liberated from the ghetto around 1750 CE.  Otherwise a rabbi was simply a male elder, who could read, and was noted for his piety.  At that time 1750 - 1850 Jews in Europe became liberated, but as a Jewish state within a Christian state ... as Jews had long been in Muslim lands.  Then there would have to be a chief rabbi or ethnarch, responsible politically for the Jewish community ... who may or may not have been a rabbi.  Judah haNasi was just such an ethnarch in early Rabbinic Judaism times circa 200 CE ... when the Mishnah or Oral Torah was codified.  Think of this as the core of a pre-Nicene Synagogue Fathers literature.  There were both halakhah (code) and aggadah (stories) in this literature.  The now Gentile Christians were doing the same things, but semi-universally, rather than ethnically.  Semi-universal, because only Jews had to give up their ethnicity to join the Church, no other group had to do that.

It was written before the Holocaust occurred.

[Gawdzilla Sama]

It's fun to remove "Jesus" from the Mary story.

Teenage girl gets pregnant and blames a supernatural rape.

Her husband believes this.

[trdsf]

Correct. You have not seen God.

However, you can accept the reliable testimony of honest men about Him. Or not. The choice is yours but the illustration is sound. You rely on others to tell you about things you have not seen in the natural realm, but you refuse (simply because you don't want to) to accept the testimony of reliable men regarding the supernatural.

This is not consistent, is it?

You miss the point entirely, unless you're trying to claim that you have actually seen a god and you expect me to take your word for it.

It's perfectly consistent; you're the one who's insisting on conflating anectodal testimony with repeatable observations.  They are two different things.

Also, that's a hell of a leap to think that the supernatural belongs anywhere near the same level as the natural and physical.  The fact is, every supernatural claim ever scientifically studied has either had a perfectly rational explanation, or has been demonstrated to be a fraud of some kind (another rational explanation).

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.  Mere eyewitness testimony does not rise to the level of evidence, certainly not in a scientific sense.

I am perfectly justified in rejecting claims of the supernatural in the same way that I am perfectly justified in rejecting the luminiferous aether theory of light propogation in space, or phlogiston theory.  It is not supported by the evidence.

Sure, but that's not the point. My point is that philosophically, you rely on the word of reliable men to tell you things you have not verified for yourself.

Why not apply that principle to the testimony of reliable men about God?

Because they're not reliable.  How do you get my taking the word of others, for the points that I demonstrated I was able to research for myself independent of others' claims?

I rely on common sense, mathematics, observation, and the fact that in research:

a) it is the job of every researcher to prove each other wrong, and
b) a researcher who makes stuff up or fudges their figures very rapidly is not a researcher anymore

Science is a self-correcting process.  You don't get to just say "Hey, I discovered a new element!"  You have to explain what you did, how you did it, what you observed, everything -- and then others have to verify that that's true.  Verification is not "Oh, okay, I think I believe you".  Verification is repeating the experiment and seeing if that's what actually happens.

Sir Peter Higgs theorized the Higgs boson fifty years ago.  It was accepted provisionally by the physics community for a number of reasons: it explained a number of phenomena, it was a mathematically consistent idea, and it didn't contradict existing observations.  By the time the Higgs was actually discovered at CERN, the confidence level in the existence of the particle was very high -- but they still needed to verify it was there.  In fact, they had two different hunts going simultaneously so that each was a check on the other.  It would have done no good to spot it once and say "That's it!" and shut everything down and go home.

That's not how it works.

All you're saying is, this two thousand year old guy is god and this book says so.  And when you're asked how you know that book is true, you just repeat the assertion that it is.

That's not evidence.  That's blind, unreasoning faith.

You probably consider that a compliment.

I consider it a sad indictment of your utter waste of the intellectual facilities that you are heir to after three and a half billion years of natural selection and evolution, a denial of everything that makes us human.


The tl;dr version is: your word is just not good enough, and you do not understand what constitutes evidence..

[Randy Carson]

Yes, you did say it was easy. You said that atheists exist because we want to sin. You're just trying to dig yourself out of the hole you dug yourself in.

The love I chose? What are you talking about? Are you so numb you've forgotten that the example of a man choosing to leave his religion for a boy/girlfriend was your invention? I gave up Christianity for one reason: God did not answer my prayers. Either he knew what I needed for my faith to survive and chose to do nothing, or he doesn't exist.

Once again, which of the two is the easier option?

1. Use free grace as an excuse to sin however you want.

Cheap grace. Bonhoeffer.

But worded this way, the solution becomes even more obvious, because God's mercy does not give us the excuse to sin as we please, does it?

Sin on Friday night, confession on Saturday, mass on Sunday. Rinse. Repeat.

It doesn't work like that.

2. Give up your religion, and all of its advantages, so that you can sin all you want?

Which did you choose? No. 2. Why? Because it was easier.

So, you have determined to sin either way. You're NOT going to give that up. So, you can either pretend to be forgiven (when you know you're not) or you can simply leave the Church to avoid being a hypocrite.

The latter would be more honest and therefore, probably easier in the long run.

[Randy Carson]

I'm sure they do, but then I don't see holy fantasies.

Then you have something in common after all.

Neither do they.

[Randy Carson]

And the first step to provide proof that your god exists. All you've don't is argue whether a unicorn's horn spirals clockwise or counterclockwise.

And, of course, you won't prove your god exists, you can't do that. So your argument is based on plain old bull shit and irrelevancies.

I can't offer any significant evidence until it's clear that you understand that what I show you IS credible evidence from reliable sources.

[Randy Carson]

BTW, your reasons aren't compelling unless you're invested in their being compelling. Catch that tail, puppy!

That doesn't follow.

You can hear an argument for the existence of multi-verses and find it compelling without having any vested interest in the outcome whatsoever.

[Randy Carson]

You assert that the gospels are independent reliable eyewitness accounts and that they alone should be sufficient reason to accept what they say as truth. Even if we unreasonably restrict ourselves to the 4 accounts and ignore textual criticism we are still left with blatant contradictions between your reliable eyewitnesses.

I think there are differences but no contradictions.

But hey, I learn something new every day. What are you seeing that I'm not seeing?

[Randy Carson]

Has anybody pointed out that there is no narrative or verifiable historical account that occurred during Christ's ministry and every single point of evidence is after the fact?

Also the fact that, post tense, with a large number of texts and sources to choose from, the later compilers of the bible and the religion that preceded it, could in essence invent a religion and pick and choose what they wanted in it? It is no accident that Jesus is given aspects of previous deities; rising from the dead, performing miracles and so on borrowed from Horus, Apollo, Mithra, Romulus and so on.

The historicity/mythicism argument does not at any point prove the divinity of Jesus. It merely debates whether he is founded on a real person or a total myth. The issue is existence of a divine Jesus, not whether or not a man existed to have that mantle laid on him.

There is a large number of materials to choose from. Therefore all parts of the New Testament should in theory agree across the board, but they don't. there are differences just between the 4 Gospels. Also that the Gospels, presented first in the New Testament, were not the first written? To be a witness second hand- there are no eyewitness accounts; if there are, none that can be seen as objective. 

It is debatable whether the city of Nazareth even existed during Christ's time. It is also likely that his "born of a virgin" miraculous birth is a mistranslation of Isaiah.

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/unreasonablefaith/2008/06/why-i-deny-the-virgin-birth-of-jesus/

The word translated as virgin is also the same as young woman. The whole aspect of divinity is not provable and can be seen objectively as an invention. And we are back to the borrowed myths from previous religions.

The Jews never accepted Jesus. There is not, to my awareness, any scholarly discussion that can be seen from that time period by Hebrew scholars debating the issue. In other words, acceptance or rejection of Jesus- which led to persecution, pogroms and so on- came as a result of the later formations of religions and the built in bias against Judaism for rejecting Jesus, though basically they were merely sticking to their own interpretation of the Talmud, not the Septuagint translation.

On balance, based on the uncertainty of historic accounts and the manipulation by early Christian leaders, it strikes me that making a claim of certainty is flawed, or certainly not verifiable in any provable way.

Just saying. Carry on.

Actually, you've kind of stumbled into another strength of the Christian manuscripts. Because we have so many to work with and because they are dated relatively early, we have a sufficient sample size from which we can reconstruct an accurate text.

I posted this in another thread, but you have not read it there, apparently. So again:

Consider the following message: Y#U HAVE WON TEN MILLION. DOLLARS. Notice that even with the error in the text, 100% of the message comes through. Consider also this message with two lines and two errors.

• Y#U HAVE WON TEN MILLION DOLLARS
• YO# HAVE WON TEN MILLION DOLLARS

Here we are even more sure of the message with two errors in it. In fact, the more errors like this, the more sure one is of the message since every new line brings a confirmation of every letter except one. As noted earlier, there are about 5700 New Testament manuscripts in existence which provide hundreds, in some cases even thousands, of confirmations of every line in the NT.

As a matter of fact, there can be a high percent of divergence in letters and yet a 100% identity of message. Consider the following lines:

1. YOU HAVE WON TEN MILLION DOLLARS
2. THOU HAST WON 10 MILLION DOLLARS
3. Y’ALL HAVE WON $10,000,000

Notice that of the 27 letters and numbers in line two only 7 in line three are the same. That is little more than 25% identity of letters and numbers, yet the message is 100% the same. They differ in form, but they are identical in content. The same is true of all the basic teachings of the NT.

[Gawdzilla Sama]

That doesn't follow.

You can hear an argument for the existence of multi-verses and find it compelling without having any vested interest in the outcome whatsoever.

Yeah, but you're invested in irrational.

[Randy Carson]

You miss the point entirely, unless you're trying to claim that you have actually seen a god and you expect me to take your word for it.

Forget about me. I'm just another liar for Jesus, and I'll say anything to argue my point.

You need indirect evidence that cannot change and that can be tested for consistence. Fortunately, you have Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.

It's perfectly consistent; you're the one who's insisting on conflating anectodal testimony with repeatable observations.  They are two different things.

Sure. And I know this. We are not talking about empirical evidence from a laboratory. No historian is. However, in a court of law, there are only two categories of evidence: direct and indirect, and these are given equal weight in court. Like any cold-case investigation, Christianity can be evaluated on the basis of its indirect evidence.

Also, that's a hell of a leap to think that the supernatural belongs anywhere near the same level as the natural and physical.  The fact is, every supernatural claim ever scientifically studied has either had a perfectly rational explanation, or has been demonstrated to be a fraud of some kind (another rational explanation).

Except the Shroud of Turin.

Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.  Mere eyewitness testimony does not rise to the level of evidence, certainly not in a scientific sense.

Extraordinary claims require sufficient, compelling evidence. Nothing more. If you believe the gospel writers were telling the truth, then you accept their claims as reasonable. It's really just that simple.

I am perfectly justified in rejecting claims of the supernatural in the same way that I am perfectly justified in rejecting the luminiferous aether theory of light propogation in space, or phlogiston theory.  It is not supported by the evidence.

What evidence for the supernatural have you examined?

Because they're not reliable.

Why not? What gives you reason to believe that you cannot accept the testimony of the gospel writers when you are perfectly willing to accept the testimony of other authors about subjects you cannot possible investigate personally?

I rely on common sense, mathematics, observation, and the fact that in research:

a) it is the job of every researcher to prove each other wrong, and
b) a researcher who makes stuff up or fudges their figures very rapidly is not a researcher anymore

You mean like how the Early Church Fathers tested the false apostles and false gospels by "Phillip" and "Mary Magdalene" and "Thomas" and determined that they were not to be listened to anymore? I agree!

Thank you for this keen insight into the human capacity to judge wisely.

Science is a self-correcting process.  You don't get to just say "Hey, I discovered a new element!"  You have to explain what you did, how you did it, what you observed, everything -- and then others have to verify that that's true.  Verification is not "Oh, okay, I think I believe you".  Verification is repeating the experiment and seeing if that's what actually happens.

The Early Church had a similar self-correcting process. If someone walked in and said, "Hey, Mary was not perpetually virgin", someone who knew the orthodox view shot him down. Like Jerome destroyed Helvidius. Or Athanasius took down Arius.

All you're saying is, this two thousand year old guy is god and this book says so.  And when you're asked how you know that book is true, you just repeat the assertion that it is.

That's not evidence.  That's blind, unreasoning faith.

Not exactly. Perhaps you missed it.

What I'm saying is:

1. Hey, here's an old book making some startling claims.
2. It appears that the authors were in a position to write as eyewitnesses.
3. It appears they intended to write accurate accounts of what they saw.
4. It appears that they did write accurately about the names, places, seasons, geography, language, political leaders and other facts that have been verified.
5. It appears that they encouraged their readers to ask those who were still alive whether what they wrote was accurate.
6. It appears that none of them recanted their story.
7. It appears that their disciples also recorded the message that they had heard from these authors orally.
8. It appears that the story does not change from one generation to the next and remains consistent over time.
9. It appears that Jewish and Roman authors make references to some of the major players and details mentioned in the gospels.
etc, etc.

So, no, I'm not simply begging the question. I'm presenting evidence...because I CAN.

I consider it a sad indictment of your utter waste of the intellectual facilities that you are heir to after three and a half billion years of natural selection and evolution, a denial of everything that makes us human.

I consider it a tragedy that you are created in the image and likeness of the God who put natural selection and evolution into motion with a word, but you deny His existence.

The tl;dr version is: your word is just not good enough, and you do not understand what constitutes evidence..

There are two categories of evidence: direct and indirect. Like a lot cold-cases which result in a conviction in court, I can prove my case on the basis of indirect evidence alone.

[aitm]

Genesis 1:6 tells us the sky is water. At that point the rest becomes religion for retards, idiots, ugly women, child molesters and those who seriously need a father figure. The rest of us see stupidity right off the bat.

[Randy Carson]

Jebus Fucking Christ, I DON'T FUCKING HAVE TO.  There's a little fucking thing called scientific fucking consensus which says, big fucking surprise, MAGIC IS NOT REAL, you fucktard!

There is also a little thing called scholarly consensus among historians and NT scholars which says (no big surprise), "Jesus was a real person." Only modern-day idiots deny this.

Atheist Bart Ehrman even accepts four of the five minimal facts I posted:

On the Minimal Facts

1.   Jesus died by crucifixion.

“One of the most certain facts of history is that Jesus was crucified on orders of the Roman prefect of Judea, Pontius Pilate” (Bart Ehrman, The New Testament: An Historical Introduction to the Early Christian Writings, pgs, 261-262).

2.   Very shortly after Jesus’ death, the disciples had experiences that led them to believe and proclaim that Jesus had been resurrected and had appeared to them.

“Why, then, did some of the disciples claim to see Jesus alive after his crucifixion? I don’t doubt at all that some disciples claimed this. We don’t have any of their written testimony, but Paul, writing about twenty-five years later, indicates that this is what they claimed, and I don’t think he is making it up. And he knew are least a couple of them, whom he met just three years after the event (Galatians 1:18-19).” (ibid, 282).

3.   Within a few years after Jesus death, Paul converted after a personal experience that he interpreted as a post resurrection appearance of Jesus to him.

“There is no doubt that [Paul] believed that he saw Jesus’ real but glorified body raised from the dead.” (ibid, 301).

4. James, the skeptical brother of Jesus, became a believer.

"Even more telling is the much noted fact that Paul claims that he met with, and therefore personally knew, Jesus’ own brother James. It is true that Paul calls him the “brother of the Lord,” not “the brother of Jesus.” But that means very little, since Paul typically calls Jesus the Lord and rarely uses the name Jesus (without adding “Christ,” or other titles). And so, In the letter to the Galatians Paul states as clearly as possible that he knew Jesus’ brother. Can we get any closer to an eyewitness report than this? The fact that Paul knew Jesus’ closest disciple and his own brother throws a real monkey wrench into the mythicist view that Jesus never lived." (Ehrman's blog post, http://ehrmanblog.org/brothers-jesus-mythicists-members/, quoting his book, Did Jesus Exist?)

+++

So, although Ehrman denies that Matthew and John were written by eyewitnesses, he accepts that Paul knew some apostles and that they did believe that Jesus rose. Paul's testimony provides another example of the multiple attestation of the gospels.

Further, Ehrman is an atheist who acknowledges these three facts of history. This is called enemy attestation, and it is significant.

[Poison Tree]

What are you seeing that I'm not seeing?

Was Jesus born and raised in Nazareth as one would conclude from reading the historically reliable accounts of John and Mark or was he born in Bethlehem where his parents lived until fleeing to Egypt after a visit from magi to avoid Herod's slaughter of the innocent as told in the historically reliable account of Matthew or was Jesus born while his parents traveled from their home in Nazareth to Bethlehem to register for the census before presenting him in the temple and returning home to Nazareth as told in the historically reliable account of Luke?