Toto

You should read clearly. You claimed that JesusNeverExisted did not specify Paul's letters, when the text clearly does. In fact, the only evidence of Paul is his letters, and for most people "Paul knows nothing of Nazareth" and "Paul's letters do not mention Nazareth" make exactly the same claim. If the author of Acts puts words into the mouth of a character named Saul or Paul, that says nothing about what the Paul who wrote the letters knew.

But that argument might require a bit more familiarity with the subject matter than you appear to have.

FathomFFI

Correction:

Is there any way I could have made it any more clear? They make two assertions:

1. St Paul knows nothing of 'Nazareth'.

2. Rabbi Solly's epistles (real and fake) mention Jesus 221 times, Nazareth not at all.

# 1 has been proven false.

Toto

Yes, you could be a lot clearer. You could clarify whether you think that you can include Paul's speeches in Acts as sources for what we think we know about Paul.

Hint: if you think that you can, please drop all pretense to being scholarly or unbiased.

FathomFFI

Are you suggesting that someone needs to be a scholar to contest jesusneverexisted's assertions?

Please be serious.

Much of what is written in Acts concerning Paul can be correlated with his letters. This is known. It is also known that the letters of Paul do not conclude near the end of his life, as Acts does.

spamandham

...now you're claiming possibly thousands of years!!!!

The old religious book you are discounting as relevant, was still being actively modified even during the first century CE according to James King West. The idea that it was a complete work hundreds ~1000 years BCE is laughably unrealistic.

However, lets say that most of it was penned in the 7th century BCE and Nazareth is absent. Yes, that's relevevant, because it makes the standard story more complicated. We are not involved in a decutive proof here, we're looking for the simplest explanation of the facts.

...hmmm, this sounds like an argument from absence to me. It would be helpful if you made up your mind whether such things are categorically invalid or not.

Thanks! I am having a bit of fun with this.

Yes, because it means the author of Acts was putting words into Paul's mouth as opposed to recording Paul's actual words. The mere existence of quotation marks do not a quote make.

Iasion

Hiya,

Pardon?

P52 is variously dated :
* 2nd C. (100-199)
* early 2nd C. (100-149)
* 170CE +/- 25 (145-195)

Schmidt's dating of 170 +/- 25 is the most recent.


Iasion

FathomFFI

Yep, I have recognized that and put a fair date of it at AD 180 a few posts back.

Toto

Of course, not, but perhaps I was mistaken. I thought you were claiming some sort of scholarship on the issues.

Well, you have just arrived here, and you have missed the particulars of that debate. Yes, Paul's letters can be correlated with Acts - most probably because the author of Acts mined Paul's letters for details.

If you are going to try to support the idea that someone who traveled with Paul wrote Acts, please start another thread. There is a general scholarly consensus among almost everyone except Christian apologists that the author of Acts was not a companion of Paul, in spite of the "we" passages.

FathomFFI

Oh this is rich! Red herring anyone?

How does anything you've said contest our position that the OT should not even be remotely considered as supporting evidence for the non-existence of Nazareth in the 1st century?

Are you trying to say that just because the OT was still being worked on in the 1st century that they should have included a history of Nazareth into the text to demonstrate it existed hundreds of years previous?

The simplest explanation of the facts cannot be ascertained from examining a text which recorded the supposed history of the Jews hundreds, and yes, thousands of years before the Gospels. This argument is outside reason for it positively fails to consider that many towns sprang up between the last recorded history in the OT and the time of the Gospels. We are speaking about a history of the OT which purported ended at least 500 years previous to the Gospel, with most of that history depicting events that supposedly happened well over 1000 years before the time of Jesus.

We can list many towns in Galliliee found in the NT that are not found in the OT. Why? Because they obviously didn't exist at the time of the history of the OT.

Any argument against this logic is a total act of desperation.


It's a suggestion, and it is a valid one. If such text were to exist, you might have a claim.


Can you prove this? You are making a positive claim.

FathomFFI

No, we are a group of hobbiests, and although we do have some connections to some noteable scholars, we are primarily just a group of people and students with a common love for ancient history.


That might be a good discussion, since our evidence (we students) shows no 1st person narrative until chp 16 of Acts, where-after 1st person narrative is seen numerous times to the end. This indicates redaction, and that Acts was written by two authors.

But yeah, another discussion.