Occams_Razor

The best response to this is probably, "huh?" But I'll bite briefly: if such a counter movement is at all necessary or dispositive of anything (it isn't) what would you have had its members do where lack of evidence wasn't enough?
The breadth and power of some people's ability to rationalize is astounding. Let me get this straight. You're suggesting that the historians who didn't record fantastic events happening during their lifetime, where they lived and among the population they were chronicling, did so because others were recording these events orally? I guess then the more historically important the event, the more newsworthy and thus the more buzz surrounding it, the more likely it is that historians won't bother to write it down. As to the events being "propagated...textually," thats exactly what we are complaining did not happen but should have.
???

bfniii

we know that the most significant way that events were recorded at that time in that culture was orally. if someone like josephus heard the stories of miraculous events and disbelieved them, why didn't he write so? "there's this incredible story floating around, but i know someone who was there and he denies the testimony of the christians". as far as i can recall, we don't see that. forget about josephus, how about the true opponents of christianity, the people that crucified Jesus or martyred christians. where is their denial of these fantastic events? they certainly had motive. again, it appears that non-christians don't deny that the events happen. they simply don't become converted to the movement.

i assume you're referring to josephus. was he an eyewitness to these events you mention? would he have recorded an event he wasn't an eyewitness to? maybe he was indisposed and merely heard about the event. have there ever been other geological events that went unrecorded by historians? what if the or other historians didn't want to give any credence to the event to undermine christianity? we see that frequently in media today. the media is biased on many occasions. what we do know is that the event WAS recorded and accepted by many people. the problem is, critics of christianity complain about WHO recorded the event and who didn't without examining motive, bias and availbility. that sounds like rationalization. additionally, these other historians don't deny the event. so, in the end, we have a reliable document that relates a fantastic event that isn't denied by other reliable historians. what reason do we have to doubt it's veracity?

muidiri

So... when you see a guy on the street corner claiming to be the son of Allah, and claiming that he has done miracles in his life... you take the time to stop and write down "You know, I saw this guy on a street corner claiming to be the son of a god. But I know this isn't true." ? If you hear a story of ghosts and goblins observed in a haunted house... do you take the time to write down that it is false?

If everyone at the time had reason to believe that Jesus either (a) did not exist as a real person or (b) existed, but not as a messiah in any form, what reason would they have to write down contradictions to what is otherwise an urban legend? If they find the idea dismissable, then it isn't even worth writing about it. Given that Jesus' fame and popularity didn't occur until quite a while after his death (so I understand)... then there would be no call for anyone to counter a relatively non-existent movement.

If however, the claims of supernatural events in heavily populated areas had any basis in fact, we would expect to see some mention of them in texts written at the time - much as you would expect to see a plethora of news articles and emails if Aliens actually showed up in downtown LA and started handing out pamphlets for their vacation getaway in the Crab Nebula... or if a pack of ravenous dragons started stalking the streets of Rome on a weekly basis.

DramaQ

:rolling: So you're taking Josephus' silence on this to mean that he DIDN'T DISBELIEVE it?!

Uh... yeah! That makes SO much more sense than he was silent on it because he never heard anything about it in the first place.


So you start by assuming there ARE people who "crucified Jesus" as part of your proof that Jesus was crucified.

And if you think there was no one out there refuting Christianity early on, you've obviously never bothered to read the second century apologists. Who do you think they were apologizing to??

Uh.... you do realize that most of the extant material from that time was maintained for many centuries by CHRISTIANS, right? Speaking of media bias. Is it so surprising that most of what we have is pro-Christian with very little of the opposition remaining?

When a geocentric universe was first proposed, no "reliable" scientist of the time refuted it with a heliocentric model. I guess their failure to refute it then means the sun still revolves around the earth, huh?

With an approach like this, no wonder the argument from silence gets so much negative press.

dq

Mageth

The Bible claims, for example, that God flooded the entire earth, killing all but a few people and pairs of animals on a wooden boat.

The Bible also claims that a man, dead for three days, rose from the dead, hung around for forty days or so, ate fish, and then rose up into heaven.

Those are only two of the fantastical, incredible claims made in the Bible, claims not supported by anything outside the Bible; for many of them (like Noah's flood), there is evidence outside the Bible that indicates that the accounts are mythical.

And, importantly, none of the five points you listed above makes those fantastical, incredible Biblical claims the least bit "credible". It indeed takes a "leap of faith" to accept those fantastical, incredible claims.

Mageth

There were many sects of Judaism at the time, all of which considered themselves "devoted to the truth". The new, initially small, sect of "Christians" were just one more among many, initially considered just another messianic sect of Jews with some rather strange beliefs, such as that their "messiah" had been "resurrected" (although "resurrection" was not an unknown belief among the sects), and not considered as a particular threat to Judaism as a whole. The Romans certainly didn't consider this tiny new sect of Judaism in a remote, backwater province to be much of a threat. So what if they believed someone they executed (which I am assuming they did here) was "resurrected"? They were much more concerned with the other "Zionistic" sects of Jews in that province who were pushing for the freedom of Israel, causing trouble, and inciting rebellions. The Christians apparently weren't into that.

It seems that, despite Biblical claims to the contrary, the early "church" (prior to the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 CE) was quite small, and of not much concern to the Romans (who dealt with hundreds of such religious sects) and, apparently, of not much concern to the Jews of the time either, who looked upon it as just one more splinter sect of messianic Judaism, of which there were many at the time, and not considered to be of much consequence or as a threat. By the time the church had grown significantly, which was long after 70 CE, the "historical claims" of the Christians (which were until this time apparently not written down) were too far in the past to be directly "refuted" as you seem to think they should have been.

Correct - but the stories we have today were apparently not recorded "textually" until long after the events, when the movement had grown, and started splintering into different sects itself, some of which didn't believe in the physical resurrection. The "stories" were recorded to support certain interpretations of the "gospel", and many more were recorded than just the few we find in the Bible today, which were selected centuries later to "canonize" a particular "orthodox" account. The "stories" were adaptations and embellishments of oral traditions, oral traditions which had had decades to grow, as oral accounts tend to do, before they were "recorded", and possibly some earlier written partial accounts that we have no access to outside of inference from what's survived until today.

By the time the stories were recorded, and circulated, the alleged events they describe were too far in the past to be verified.

In addition, the Gospels were not written as literal, linear accounts of Jesus' life, death and resurrection. They were written as "faith documents", documents intended to support a certain interpretation of the life of Jesus, a certain "gospel" of the growing Christian Religion. We have no way of determining for sure whether that Jesus actually existed or is purely mythological, or, if he existed, if the events depicted therein are historical events, inventions, or a mixture of the two.

To accept the Gospel accounts as "literal history" does, always has, and always will require "faith".

Heh. Many people throughout history, back to at least the First Century, and including myself and others on this thread, have and do refute the historical credibility of the events depicted in the Gospels.

For the people in the first four decades after Jesus' alleged crucifixion and resurrection, there is a much simpler explanation than that they knew the events to be true but refused to accept them. That explanation, as outlined above, is simply that they didn't consider this new sect to be significant or dangerous enough to refute. It was just one more Messianic sect among many. By the time Chrisitanity had grown enough to be considered significant or even "dangerous", the events they claimed as historical were too far in the past to be easily refuted.

newtype_alpha

There's a supposed reference to Jesus in the Babylonian Talmud and mentions a certain heretical would-be prophet who was stoned to death for heresy. It mentions him by the name of "Yeshu" and mentions several of his followers. There is also an account in Rabbinical literature that is thought by some to be fictional (personally I'm undecided) that says that after Jesus was crucified and burried, a gardner named Juda caught wind of a plot by his disciples to steal his body and then claim he had risen from the dead and gone into hiding. Juda and two of his men broke into the tomb before they could succeed and burried the body in his garden. The chief priests heard about the resurrection, but were relieved to hear that Juda had actually hidden the body from the desciples; he sold them Jesus' corpse for thirty pieces of silver, and the chief priests dragged his body through the streets of Jerusalem, mocking the desciples who claimed he had risen.

Tacitus also makes direct reference to Jesus: Note that this is, in fact, one of the earliest if not first references to Christians by any rebutable historian we know of.

If they wanted to undermine the event they would have described it as a falsehood. In truth, none of them really knew anything about Christianity other than the most basic forms, thus the resurrection story was just one among many goofy beliefs they had compared to the rest of Pagan rome. I doubt any of the historians found Christianity all that interesting until Constantine's conversion.

"Recorded" meaning "written in the Bible," and for the record, the resurrection story is one of the things in scripture which is highly contradictory in terms of continuity. There is evidence that none of the events depicted in the gospels is in any way historically accurate, and in fact there are so many different versions floating around in addition to the gospels that I wouldn't be surprised of the rumor of the "Resurrection" itself was what prompted the writing of the more detailed story. :huh:

Lack of denial is not a confirmation. These same historians don't deny the fact that Jesus was abducted by space aliens do they? Nor do they deny that Jesus was married to Mary Magdelene and had three kids and a concubine named Sophia.

Historians also do not deny that Jesus' second coming took place in 70 AD at the end of the Jewish-Roman war in which the Romans massacred the Jews, sacked Jerusalem and the prophecies of Revelation were fullfilled in full. And yet a surprising number of Christians have made this assertion based on historical evidence that is far better documented than the Bible :thumbs:

newtype_alpha

Or beter yet: if on the day of a heretic's execution, a large group of people rise from the dead, claw their way out of their graves and start preaching to people. Three out of four gospels seem to miss that particular tidbit of "historical" informaiton. :huh:

Incidentally, Mathew seems to be a gospel constructed from a series of hearsay, word of mouth "urban legend" type stories he probably cobbled together into a single coherent form. Strikingly, close to the end of his gospel, the chief priests supposedly paid the two roman guards (who do not appear in the other three gospels) to spread a rumor that the desciples had stolen Jesus' body.

bfniii

the analogy you use doesn't seem to be equal to the purported events during biblical times. it's not uncommon to see someone strange on a street corner making outrageous claims. however, if someone were to say "there was an earthquake at the game" and i went to the game knowing that there wasn't one, i would probably take the time to refute the alleged earthquake to set the record straight.

are you equating the general public encountering an urban legend with denial that the events didn't happen or weren't true? just because people didn't encounter it or believe that it was a divine event doesn't mean it didn't happen or wasn't true.

this reply doesn't address the oral tradition of translating events. again, a historian of an opposing religion who is probably preoccupied with roman occupation of his land, might not see the relevance of recording stories that are being transmitted orally by people (mostly of a fanactical sect of outsiders) that his religion is trying to oppress. he would certainly have motive for not recording such events. in addition, aliens showing up downtown is a little different than a geological event that does occur naturally from time to time.

bfniii

why not? critics of christianity claim that the TF was later appended by christian apologists. why can it not also be the case that the sanhedrin (or whomever) later removed passages regarding biblical events such as this? maybe a geological disturbance wasn't a big deal to him. there are reasonable explanations as to why it might happen that way especially when the person may have been motivated by religious reasons.

so i read an article about a game i went to. the article relates events of the game that were unique and true. what reason do i have to record the events in a permanent way? but what if the article's claims were untrue. well, then i certainly have reason to speak out.

the assumption wasn't the starting point. the historical documents that make the claim are the starting point. josephus doesn't contradict it. until we have a document that does, why doubt it?

so these opponents, where is their opposing testimony? they had motive to make a permanent record to refute the claims of these religious fanatics.

so what you are saying is that critics of christianity either forgot how to read, or read the material maintained by christians and didn't respond when christians altered the originals or just forgot how to write meaning they couldn't respond.

also, having many manuscripts to study and being able to see that they were maintained with integrity would seem to exonerate much christian "bias" meaning the critics of christianity may not have had much to complain about.

CNN is pro-christian? whoa. that's a first. i must say i have never heard that.

so what you're saying is that someone has found a historical document that contradicts biblical claims. the geocentric model was the best model based on information at the time. new information came along which cast a new light on old theories. what i'm saying is that based on the information we have, why doubt documents we know to be reliable from that time? it seems unnecessary to argue that because one person didn't mention it, it didn't happen. if it didn't happen, there would be multitudes of people who would set the record straight thus discrediting the claims of christianity.