sschlichter

Doug,

Something about the way you quote my original statement makes it disappear when I hit the quote button. I am probably doing something wrong but since there are about 20 replies, I am not really up to trying to match each one up with what I originally said. I expect you will not be too disappointed if I only respond to the ones that I can tell what you are responding to.

I think you are suggesting here that the identity of the risne Christ in gal, col, eph, phil might be someone different from the one from the gospels. Here are some reasons why I find that hard to believe.

(Gal 1:1) From Paul, an apostle (not from men, nor by human agency, but by Jesus Christ and God the Father who raised him from the dead)

Gal 2:1 - 10 is indicating that Pauls' message is the same as that as the other apostles. Seems to address your statement.


I think you are talking about Revelation.

(Rev 1:1) The revelation of Jesus Christ, which God gave him to show his servants what must happen very soon. He made it clear by sending his angel to his servant John,

(Rev 1:5) and from Jesus Christ - the faithful witness, the firstborn from among the dead, the ruler over the kings of the earth. To the one who loves us and has set us free from our sins at the cost of his own blood

Seems to belevie that the person in question was once dead and lost some blood in the process.

for worshipping someone whe was crucified. (and therefore presumably not dead any longer)

I only need to trust that he belevied that Christians actually beleived that Jesus rose from the dead to make the point that early Christians belevied that Jesus rose from the dead.

Pliny says "I have never participated in trials of Christians." meaning he was aware that 'Christians were being tried and he was aware that Trajna knew what he was talking about and they have the same name as referred by Tacitus where they were identified as those who worshipped Christ who had been crucified under Pontius Pilate.

Pliny says "others many years, some as much as twenty-five years.". that brings us back about 80 AD that another group of people were calling themselves by the same name.

Pliny says "they were accustomed to meet on a fixed day before dawn and sing responsively a hymn to Christ as to a god" They worshiped Christ on a set day as did the christians in the book of Acts.


of course not, I think the genre of canonical fiction that reads like historical narrative that is not true but is not a lie on the part of the author is made up. It appears to be the same genre as the next century of christians write in, but in their case, they are far enough removed from the events where you do not need a motive for lying, you only need to explain why they were not aware of the genre of fiction.

and when Plato invented a dialogue, it was to make a point. In this case, Justin martyr is responding to the accusation that the Jews call the Christians heretics because they TEACH THAT JESUS ROSE FROM THE DEAD. You do not have to believe that Trypho was real, only that common sense states from Justin Martyr's dialogue (real or not) that it was commonly held understanding that Christians think Jesus rose from the dead.

Are you saying that you do not belevie there were more Christian in the 3rd century than there were in the 1st century? You need numbers for that?

Susan2

Houston, you have many problems.


Women are not allowed to testify as witnesses. It is unlawful. So, when the young man in Mark tells the women to ‘witness’ to Peter, what was the young man attempting to do? Was he attempting to cause them harm? Is that why they were afraid? And what happened to those women?



They were afraid and told no one. Why would they tell no one? It was against the law.

Why would it later be claimed that they did tell Peter? To charge them with having broken the law?


Of course that didn't, and apparently still doesn't apply to women (in case you didn't know that).


As to Roman women:




The plight of a woman, even in Jewish circles. Denial of the most basic of rights. The Catholics state that a woman upon marriage has no legal standing. "Her legal existence is suspended." And amongst the Jews, to this day, a woman cannot file for divorce, but must rely upon her husband to do so. I guess her legal existence is suspended as well.

And so men have forced women to stand up and fight like a man, literally, as in the suffrage movement. Ain't life grand? Weren't the gnostics wonderful?


The guards became as dead men.......................they have to be able to speak to impeach them.

Therefore, who were the soilders if to the victors go the spoils, and the opportunity to rewrite history? Where they the Roman's?


As to the Sanhedrin............... I don't think the modern day Israeli scholar did them any service when she recently claimed that the Jewish sages had to haul up in the upper room and do some fast rewriting, after the Bar Kochba revolt.

Crazy shit.

Toto

The women were not called on to testify in court, so any alleged prohibition of women testifying is irrelevant here.

Richard Carrier has some extended comments on the status of women here.

Doug Shaver

No. I need numbers to believe your assertion that the number of converts grew exponentially during the second and third centuries.

I'll get to the rest of your post a little later.

spamandham

Hopefully you realize that belief, even wide spread belief, does not strengthen the veracity of a claim.

No-one is researching whether or not there were guards at the tomb. There is no research that could even be done on such a thing.

We are left to our own devices to determine whether or not the story is plausible. I think I've already made the case the story is grossly implausible, and is thus not historical. You are free to ignore the arguments if you choose, or address them head on.

1. Why would Rome willingly hand the body over for burial to the Christians, and then place guards at the tomb?

2. If the guards were Jewish rather than Roman, then this indicates the Jews were worried about Christians stealing the body. If that's the case, why didn't the Jews themselves demand the body in the first place? After all, they clearly had sway over Pilot who had just given in to their demands to have an innocent man crucified.

3. Was it commonplace for Rome to hand over the bodies of crucified men? To my knowledge, there is only one recorded instance of this outside Christian texts about Jesus, and in that case, the request was made by a personal friend (Josephus) of the emperor (Titus), in hopes that the lives of his 3 crucified friends could be saved. Sadly, two of the crucified men died, while the third recovered.

Is it your contention that a single author wrote both Matthew and Mark? If so, what is that contention based on? If not, then why do you treat the two stories as if they were written cohesively?

Doug Shaver

Yes. That is what I meant to suggest.

You will have to explain why that statement makes it hard to believe that Paul was not referring to a Galilean preacher who had lived just a few years earlier in Palestine and had been executed by Pontius Pilate.

That would help us a great deal in figuring out what Paul believed, if we had some reliable information about what the apostles who were contemporary with him believed. But we don't have that information.

That is correct.

How does that imply anything about who he thought that person was?

According to Tacitus, Nero blamed them for starting a fire, nothing else.

Tacitus says that the sect thus accused by Nero got its name from someone he called "Christus," who "suffered the extreme penalty" at the hands of Pontius Pilate. Tacitus does not say that this "Christus" was worshipped by anyone and he says nothing else to imply, suggest, or otherwise hint that anybody thought he had returned to life after dying.

Considering the context, you have an odd notion of "early." Lucian wrote that satire in the late second century.

And his next sentence is: "I therefore do not know what offenses it is the practice to punish or investigate, and to what extent." This implies that he does not know even so much as what they had been accused of.

He assumed that Trajan would know. An assumption is not semantically equivalent to an awareness.

Here it is in context: "Others named by the informer declared that they were Christians, but then denied it, asserting that they had been but had ceased to be, some three years before, others many years, some as much as twenty-five years."

Let me repeat my request: Tell us what Pliny says about what Christians believed. That doesn't say anything about what they believed.

OK. They worshipped him. They worshipped him in a way that was like the way people worshipped gods. And so we can infer that, probably, they believed he was either a god or something like a god.

And what else can we infer, from what Pliny tells us, about what Christians believed?

That depends on what you mean by "commonly held." The understanding did not have to be widespread. If some Christians during Justin's time believed that the gospel stories were historically factual, then just about everybody who knew those Christians would have been aware that they believed those stories were historically factual. And some of those people would have been Jews, and some of those Jews would have accused those Christians of believing a bunch of nonsense. That would have been all the excuse Justin needed to write his dialogue.

Susan2

This is very interesting, and adds to some thoughts of my own, however, my thought, coupled with some research, is taking me in a completely different direction then either Holding or Carrier.

From start to finish, the bible and it's stories are a religion work. A religious work like any other written work, such as fiction, biographies, secular law, etc., have an agenda. The stories perhaps once oral, are now set in stone as a written work, let the work/agenda begin. The bible is thus the frame, and it simply needs a picture in order for it to be the completed piece of craft from once it began. In order for it to become true, as the truth, it needs life. The authors of these works hope it is me, hope it is you. The people who first crafted and then practice this written work are determined to make it so, and they don't care if we go to heaven or hell.

It is a mind game, a power play, that begins before we were conceived in our mothers womb, like it or not, agree with it or not, it is what it is.

One can't agree or disagree without knowledge of history, so as to the ascertain the agenda and what is actually true. That is why it is important to the fundamentalist agenda to dumb us down, as you have shown in your thread in C&SS concerning the Texas School Board rewriting history.


Jesus specifically asserts in Matthew that he has not come to abolish the law of Moses, but to fulfill it, fulfill being a key word as to intention, especially later in the works of Paul a Jewish/roman citizen. One could ask, what law was that? To which the answer could be, the Old Testament. Which Old Testament? And important question to ask is, why is Pilate and other Romans brought into the story? Do they too have an Old Testament too? And how are those two Old Testament similar, if not the same? Is this the agenda of Jesus, to make them the same, one? One God? Or, is this the agenda of Paul? Old testament, new testament converged into one new testament? One God?

I am very much interested in this idea of One God/Monotheism. What does it mean?

Please note that many of the quotes provided below are contained within the writings of Paul.

Carrier and Holding, as do other scholars, seek to prove whether or not there was a Jesus, or so it seems to me from my limited readings in regards to both on these forums. I am taking a different approach, and presume that there was, even if only in theory. From there, what was Jesus' agenda? Who were his supporters?

Below, please find some interesting quotes from an article

http://web.mac.com/heraklia/Dominae/...men/index.html


I am not sure if the above quotes are too many, and in violation of copy right, and ask that they be deleted if found to be so.


My argument would be that this new religion and it’s supporters were indeed attempting to upset the current Roman Empire, as laid out in the Carrier quote that you have provided, and that this continued for some time. Perhaps the religion would be suppressed, and then resurrect itself over a period of time, resulting in the persecutions that were said to take place at that time.


I also believe that contained within the stories of the NT are those who began practicing the teachings of this old/new movement and that the women would not have been allowed to testify. Therefore in order to convict them, the false ending to Mark had to be added.

Iow’s, imbedded within any work of fiction are historical truths, along with metaphors, and allegories for good or ill intentions. This story is purposefully filled with them.

bacht

I think you're assuming a lot. The Old Testament is a heterogeneous collection of writings spanning several hundred years. The collection as we have it dates to the 1st/2nd C rabbis who finalized the Hebrew canon and decided which text family would be official (which became the Masoretic text). Theirs is only one perspective, we can't assume that the Jews saw their tradition the same way in all times and places before the 1st C.

You seem to be of the conspiracy theory mindset, which has its place I guess, but the fact that the Mosaic tradition lasted so long suggests it had some positive value to the Israelites. Maybe for a small nation with limited resources the Torah was the best they could come up with. If their scriptures hadn't been adopted by catholic Christians the Jews might have disappeared from history altogether, at least in the West (the Sumerians were forgotten until modern times in spite of their tremendous contributions to Mesopotamian history).

Susan2

Assuming? I am not assuming anything. To assume something is to do so without evidence. I have presented my evidence. And I believe that I can further support that evidence within the text (scriptures) themselves.

Conclusions are derived from facts. I have presented facts. Rather then drawing conclusions of your own reason and logic, to refute my argument, you have resorted to calling me a conspiracy theorist .................. would this be a strawman argument? Not sure. I never seem to get those different arguments committed to memory.


And? What we can’t assume is that Christianity, is an new religion. It is one of many sects of that time, if I understand correctly. We can’t assume that these were not Jews, or that there weren’t radical Jews involved, nor can we assume that there wasn’t Romans in agreement with this fundamental sect. After all, the Romans have a history not dissimilar to this particular other fundamental sects, peoples, nations of the time, including the Jewish people. I think it is a huge mistake to lay this at the Jewish feet, as Jewish origin.

Having said that, the Jewish writings contain similar stories within their texts.

This from the Jewish Encylopedia.

http://www.jewishencyclopedia.com/vi...0ben%20shetach


WTF?

Testing the waters. I believe that this is not dissimilar to the women at the tomb.

Perhaps it is that the women were the guards, in that the word used means to see, observe, and as Joseph W so correctly points out, it was the women seeing and observing.


To which Israelites? To the ones who have been slaughtered because of it, or the ones who lived off the slaughtered, the fat of the land?

I can ask the same about Christians/Catholics, Protestants, and Islamists?


That is BS. The Catholic and Christians have their own history to partake of, as I have shown, which does not necessarily have anything to do with the Jewish peoples. How do you know that the Romans and later Roman Catholics didn’t influence the Jewish peoples? If you have evidence to the contrary, then show it. Wasn't it the Romans who were out to conquer the world?


? Out of context for the purpose of my immediate inquiry

bacht

I'd like to see a thread about women's place in the ancient world, but not this one

Your post that I responded to was kind of all over the place, I wasn't trying to deal with all the points you raised, just the idea that the Bible was a tool of conspirators before the Christian era.