Minimalist

Ask him about his 'doctorate' from the xtian diploma mill.

Kapyong

Gday,

Oh please -
even Christian tradition says Mark was no eye-witness, merely a secretary of Peter in Rome.

And Luke was not an eye-witness, but merely a follower of Paul.

Anyway - NONE of the others actually say they were by an eye-witness (apart from the forged 2 Peter) - a fact you keep ignoring.

You could instantly show us wrong by just quoting an example of an eye-witness claim - but you don't, 'cause you can't, 'cause there aren't any.


K.

mountainman

OMG.

LouisSA

Even better. Now it reads: 2 a : an extraordinary power or influence seemingly from a supernatural source b : something that seems to cast a spell : ENCHANTMENT. Still exactly as you described it, still magic!

I agree. That is why I try learning by examining evidence, not through magic, as no supernatural forces have ever been proved to exist.

Oh, you think I am magic or even God too?

First you have to define 'kind' before you can make an assumption like that. I can also give you a hint: no creationist has ever been able to do that.

Where in your Babble did you read that it was going to happen in 1948?

Millions upon millions of Jews live in other countries, while only 3 million of them live in Israel. So no, they have not returned.

archaeologist

You go live in denial. I have provided enough evidence to refute your claim. i am done with you.

As i have stated, wiki is not a credible source and certainly not trustworthy.

Sorry but you have not presented any legitimate evidence that 2 Peter was forged, so stop saying that (and it wasn't)

Also, tradition isn't the final say on things. Now if you would read Luke 1: 1 - 4 you would see this:

Luke does not deny being an eyewitness, Mark having been written prior to his volume would make him an eyewitness and if it was Peter telling Mark what to write then itis stil an eyewitness account.

You people should know better thanto listen to minimalist. he distorts everything about me and guess what--he has no clue which universities I have attended because i have never told him. Oh and I have never attended diploma mill.

Jayrok

This seems to actually speak more to the idea that Christianity as you view it in the 1st century was insignificant to outsiders. And is evidence that no one cared to oppose it until the 2nd century after the gospels were being circulated about. It follows that those in opposition would then stand up and say "What are you talking about?"

Those who opposed it never heard of it until 2nd century Christians passed around the gospels... and as you said, by that time anyone who would have opposed the original disciples were now dead too. So the opposition only had these writings to oppose. Where are the opposing accounts in the 1st century? There was nothing to oppose in the 1st century. If there were so many enemies of Christ and the disciples in their day we'd probably have written refutations to them. It seems the silence on the matter is telling.

Think about it.

mountainman

What if we dont?

Rooster

archaeologist, I realise you have a lot on your plate in this thread, but I'd be interested in your response to the questions in this post, which may have been lost in amongst the others.

graymouser

There are several very good reasons why we would expect the absence of extant opposition accounts to Christianity.

First and foremost, something like 95% of all ancient literature is lost to us. That's always going to be a problem when you're looking for ancient writings - the lacunae are vast and we have to deal with the 5% or so that survived. And that brings us to the second point: one of our main vectors for ancient writings from the Mediterranean world goes straight through Christian monasteries. We would expect texts that are more favorable to orthodox Christianity to be preserved, and other texts survived mainly on the basis of how well regarded they were. Finds like Nag Hammadi are objective proof that there was a good deal of heterodox Christian literature that didn't survive. Pagan anti-Christian writings mostly survive when quoted in polemics like Contra Celsum. These two facts mean that we have to adopt a position of neutral agnosticism (hard for people who want black and white answers, I know, but that's history for you) with regard to anti-Christian polemics before the mid 2nd century CE.

The third problem with this claim is that Christianity followed the growth pattern of new religions in general, meaning that it wasn't a major social force in its early years. Up until the time when we start seeing major anti-Christian writings, there wasn't much perceived need to refute Christian thinkers. Before this point it was too small and too peripheral to bother with. So we do start to see evidence of such polemics at around the time in the religion's growth that we would expect them.

The fourth thing we need to take into consideration is that new religious movements do not grow with reference to the truth or falsehood of their scriptures. Period. The Book of Mormon contains claims that are simply objectively false, anyone could easily verify that the events depicted in it didn't happen. Yet there are twelve million Mormons in the United States, and it's a growing faith. That's because the kind of person who joins such a movement is more convinced by the spiritual aspects of the religion (the Mormons call it the "burning in the breast") than by the facts, and generally isn't a skeptic who does intensive research on them. Christianity could have thrived on such people for a hundred or a hundred and fifty years, and then start to grow into a major social force only after there was no longer anyone able to refute its factual claims - which seems to be precisely what happened. (People in the ancient Roman Empire also believed in the supernatural in a way that is unfathomable to us - there was no "divide" between natural and supernatural, disease was believed to come from demons not germs, and so on. So if these movements can grow in a time like ours with skepticism and the scientific method, how much more in a time of universal superstition?)

Johnny Skeptic

But there is not any evidence that more than a relatively few people paid any attention to Christianity in the first century. In "The Rise of Christianity," Rodney Stark estimates that in 100 A.D., there were only 7,530 Christians in the entire world. Christian apologist James Holding says:

Please note "a tiny group who, for the first two or three generations at least, could hardly have mounted a riot in a village, let alone a revolution in an empire." Obviously, such a small group of people would not have attracted a lot of opposition.

You need to ask youself, where are the confirming non-bibical, non-Christian, first century accounts that Jesus performed miracles?

If Jesus did not perform any miracles, that explains the very small growth of Christianity during the first century since most people would have testified that they did not see Jesus perform any miracles.

Why do you rule out a reasonable possibility that Christians destroyed many competing texts?