mountainman

Yeah right. As if Eusebius is going to sign and date the gospels
in his capacity as their forger. That is simply not the modus
operandi of fraudulent misrepresentation.

Best wishes,


Pete Brown

angelo

The message is only a common sense approach to life. 'The Golden Rule'
Do unto others as you would others do unto you. That message has been around for centuries before Jesus was supposed to have lived.
In fact, most of his teachings were borrowed from the Pagan religions of the Roman Empire and beyond.

mountainman

Well beyond in some instances, such as that of the
carbon dated fourth century Nag Hammadi text
"The Acts of Peter and the Twelve Apostles"
which cites the Bagavad Gita.

Best wishes


Pete Brown

mens_sana

I tend to be more interested in the biblical experts who are attached to secular institutions of higher education. A number of them are not Christians — and all of them are subject to walking the academic plank through peer review if their hypotheses are not solidly founded. The civil nastiness of expertise in peer review action can ruin academic reputations — witness Carsten Peter Theide!

I'm not Christian, I think Jesus existed, so your "not many" argument is more rhetoric than logic.

mens_sana

This is a common argument among conservatives. The trouble lies in the unspoken a prioris upon which it rests.

It assumes that the Book of Daniel not only has a special, divinely ordained status, but also that the book is what it claims to be, namely a book of prophecy hidden since the Babylonian Exile. So, when was this book "unhidden"? And what does it say about a deity who would not only hide the truth, but at the same time offer his chosen people foolishness for several hundred years? Aside from that little ethical consideration, historical criticism, the rigour of examining a document with the aim of establishing its specific time and place, requires that special status be "shelved" for the duration. I shelved that special status somewhere around 1962 and have seen no particular reason to re-cloak the work with such any time since.

The book works very well as an encouragement to Jews in the face of persecution by Antiochus IV Epiphanes, promising them that justice will be served and the persecutors vanquished in God's own sweet time — a note still sounded in pulpits today.

mens_sana

That appears to be a reasonable conclusion. So why muddy it by conflating "Jesus the Christ," a divine being, with "Jesus of Nazareth," a 1st century itinerant preacher of the apocalypse?

mens_sana

The evidence of a village named Nazareth is also nearly nonexistent outside the NT. People have made much of that, as they used to capitalize on no historical mention of Belshazzar. We found out differently about Belshazzar and Nazareth has a nice entry in the Oxford Encyclopedia of Archaeology in the Near East (V.4,p.113). Please tell me why the Essene sect library should have mentioned a little-known itinerant Galilean preacher who was neither a friend nor an enemy, nor a member.

aa5874

Well, do you think Jesus existed because others think he existed, or do you just go with numbers regardless of the evidence?

With respect to my investigation of the evidence of the history of Jesus, I am not obliged to agree with the "experts" from either side.

angelo

Of course a human Jesus or Yeshua existed 2000 odd years ago. There were thousands of Jewish males named Yeshua around at that time, being a very popular name, as was Mirian. That one got himself executed would not be surprising. But that's as far as it went. There was no biblical Jesus who walked on water, turned water into booze, [ that would be a mean trick] ect, ect. Anyone that believes otherwise should also believe in Luke Skywalker.

Solitary Man

The Dead Sea Scrolls predated Jesus.