Tristan Scott

Now it's you that is not understanding. I never said I thought you were mean and nasty, I said you appeared to be pretentious. I have read many of your posts and find that you spend much of your bandwidth doing what you are doing with me. This is an imperfect way of communication, and it is made more difficult when you forget that there are actual people on the other end who are probably not going to take your shit.

You say you are looking for evidence, my question is where are you looking? Most Jewish scripture is layered in allegory. Those that wrote this stuff would be puzzled at modern attempts to find verification of the actual events depicted in scripture. They would think you were missing the whole purpose of the writings.

spin

You are being presumptuous with my intentions.

And I never said you thought so. I merely wanted to attenuate something I was trying to communicate to you.

Yes, I noted that: that's why I talked about your need for a shoemaking apprenticeship in order to make better fitting shoes.

However, this is your original statement:

I guess I missed the "special pleading", whatever the hell that is. All I see is the usual pretentious posturing and pompous pontificating that seems to be the norm from the internet scholars that frequent this board.

Without understanding what you were talking about you went on to be just plain rude. What sort of response do you think you deserve? The normal process is to ask about what you don't understand and perhaps someone my explain, rather than brushing the comment aside and having a shot anyway.

There are enough people around, who like crapping on and don't like to be questioned or challenged. You may not be crapping on, but there is no harm to be questioned on your content or purposes.

There are others who try to deal with issues less defensively with fewer assumptions and more constructively.

So it's all right for you to give your "shit" untinctured, I guess, according to you. It doesn't matter so much about methodology or evidence, according to you.

I have a fair understanding of the mechanics of ancient Hebrew literature. However, we are dealing not with Hebrew literature per se, but literature that appears to be derivative of Hebrew literature written in Greek. Your pronouncements on that literature need to be related to the way koine Greek was used at the time.

One's ideas of what the whole purpose of the writings are need to be based on very close understanding of the texts in their contexts and these contexts must be ascertained through historical means before you can hazard any declarations of "whole purpose of the writings". But this is only part of the story. We have to consider what the writers' intentions were, but we have to consider numerous other factors, how the writer's ideas fit into the general context, how they would be received by their audience, what they were basing their content on, what their intentions were in writing and many other things.

You got a "why bother" out of Amaleq13, but I sure as hell can't out of you. Why not?


spin

Wiploc

The bible says Jesus was born in Bethlehem because of a census that required everyone to return to his city of birth. Asimov says this census never happened. He says censuses were noteworthy because they were about setting tax rates, so they caused riots and got into the history books. We know when the censuses happened, and this one didn't. We also know how they happened, and they didn't involve ordering people back to their cities of birth. What the tax officials, census takers, wanted to know, was how many chickens you had. There was no point in a resident of Galilee going to Bethlelem to tell somebody there how many chickens he had in Galilee!

Plus, it just wouldn't work. Imagine the chaos that would be caused---even today, when we have cars and paved roads and hotels---of telling farmers and hotel keepers and employees to leave their crops and hotels and employers in order to return to their towns of birth. If that had happened, it would have been a big deal; it would be in the history books.

It isn't in the history books; it didn't happen. The story doesn't even make sense; it didn't happen.

My point---and I do have one---is that they probably wouldn't be telling a story that bad unless they had an even worse problem to conceal. The "worse problem" that occurs to me is, what if people knew Jesus was from Galilee, but the savior was supposed to be from Bethlehem? The census story could be an attempt to harmonize the one with the other, Jesus' origin in Galilee with the savior's origin in Bethlehem.

So, I take the census story to be some evidence that Jesus was originally a real person, enough, perhaps, to justify a very lightly held belief that the legend was based on a real person.
crc

dantonac

Mod note: Keep this thread on topic, personal disagreements need to be discussed via PM.

shunyadragon

[QUOTE=Amaleq13]Nope, I asked exactly the question I wanted answered. I was interested in the methodology you employed to identify the alleged oral traditions.

My review of the current most reliable analysis of the Gospels best supports a cut and past collection from different written sources. The analysis did not fit a collection from oral traditions like Gilgamesh and other ancient works in history.


Go with the flow the river knows.

Frank

rlogan

An interesting idea, Wiploc. Of course, it is the HB "credentials" they are weaving into this character, and there are three locations they have to insert:

- Bethlehem, Micah 5:2

- "out of Egypt", Hosea 11:1

- Nazareth. Judges 13:7

So the Egypt trip is a similar situation. Ostensibly it is to avoid the slaughter of the innocents. But this is also absent in the histories.

Spin has written on these different versions of Naza-whatever. He might disagree with me on the Judges 13:7 passage, which is "Nazarite" in my King James version. I think the gospel perps made an error here where an HB "nazarite" basically is someone who is dedicated to religion from birth. But they think it means he has to be from a place named naza-something.

But if this is a translation error similar to the "virgin" birth, it makes sense that he ends up in Nazareth after Bethlehem and Egypt. That's because the judges passage says he shall be a Nazarite from the womb until his death.

So they stick him in Nazareth at the womb. He's born in bethlehem. He comes out of egypt. And he's a Nazarite or "of Nazareth" from then on to his death.

They just need the story of the census and the slaughter of the innocents to move him from one place to the other.




Oh, and there's the one about "he shall be a sodomite". Vinnie has clued us in on that one on another thread.

Wiploc

Nice.

crc

Tristan Scott

Maybe Jesus was a Nasoraen.

rlogan

Matthew tells us in Ch 2:

"23": And he came and dwelt in a city called Nazareth: that it might be fulfilled which was spoken by the prophets, He shall be called a Nazarene.


The problem is the only thing you can find in the HB is "nazarite". There are a couple of references. One I cited. I forgot where the other one was, but they are the same "nazarite".

Neither one is referring to a place.


These are the sorts of things though that add too much weight to counterbalance on historicity.

The fundies would like to say we prove his existence by all of this miracle prophesy-fulfillment. But that's all there is to the Jesus story - a bunch of HB prophesy cobbled together.

Wiploc

What is "HB"?

crc