outhouse

The article was written with very good information based on my studies. It was very complete in all aspects of jewish first century passover traditions.

pretty hard for christians to write biased jewish information, not that I put it past them.



As well the work within it was based on secular scholars


then you would have to refute something that was wrong for this to be true.

Duke Leto

Given that you reject ANY refutation out of hand, that'd be pretty tough.

outhouse

how would you know?


just because you keep getting shot down, doesnt mean that applies for everyone.


Your issue/problem is focusing on how it couldnt work without the knowledge to do so.

your not fighting me, your fighting modern scholarship's and all the historical work done to determine what is most plausible.


If you cant refute teh basics what can you refute?

SPACE -- 30,000 could but its not realistic, I agree. If 20,000 people can fit in a acre, then how many people can stand on 35 acres? what if we limit that to 10,000? well then we have exactly what Sanders states.

they had space, because thats not even counting the land in the city.


WATER --- You failed with water, we know there was enough and shortages have been reported in the past. A aquaduct was built and storage was built.

They had water.


POPULATION-- this was a jewish holiday that many others attended. the jewish population is enough on its own, yet we know gentiles also made the journey. It was a highly celibrated required tradition in the jewish community , that they wanted to participate in.


So you have tried gates and other piddly objections. without realizing "where there is a will there is a way" and they made it happen.

your biggest failure is to object to the fact the temple and city filled to overflowing, unless your claiming that is a lie. SO did the city overflow or not? and if it didnt, why did they claim the "p[assover of density" took place.

as well as the passover of the crushed?

Duke Leto

Throughput is still a problem if the only way to access that water was the pools. They'd each need to be accessed by 300 people at a time 8-10 hours a day, more the day before the big ceremony. I'd need to relook at my figures from above to check but I think I gave them credit for only a liter or a gallon a person but either one is too little. Realistically we're looking at a mob of thousands of people crowded around each pool trying to get in at it to refill several waterskins. That's assuming they're smart enough to send one person per huldah.

And you've never even acknowledged the real problem, 90-95% of the water in the cisterns is going to be dedicated to the mikvah. How much mikvah water does each person need, how much dirt will the priests allow to accumulate before they refill the basin? Are they refreshing it in a constant stream? A bathtub contains something like 70 gallons, shall be say each Jew needs 30 gallons of pure mikvah water? That puts you into the tens of millions of gallons range... How many public mikvah were there in Jerusalem? what was their capacity? If all 400,000 are going to bathe it had better be enough for 1,500 at a time if you want to get it done in 24 hours


Over and over and over again we've shown you the number of Palestinian Jews you fervently believe must have existed simply could not have. You haven't even acknowledged that your assertion that 120,000 Romans or Roman allies fought with Titus is just flat out wrong. 4 legions, 5,300 soldiers in a full strength legion equals 21,200. Carrier quoted a number suggesting one auxillia per regular legionary, that is 45,000, MAX.


Will is a nice thing but it doesn't mean shit when it comes up against flat out physical impossibility. If "Where there's a will there's a way." worked like that we'd have fusion power, 10 cent gasoline and cars that get 500 miles a gallon.

The "Passover of Density" didn't happen as stated. I think you're vastly overestimating the number of people it takes to fill up the streets of 1st Century Jerusalem. Even then, you only have to fill up the streets a few blocks away from the gates to give the impression that the city is completely overflowing to someone standing at the entrance of one of the gates or on Wilson's Arch. 10,000 to 20,000 would probably do the job. Next, you don't have to fill the entire Temple Mount to give the priests the impression that it was filled to overflowing. Their field of vision can't have extended much beyond the nearest 5 acres. All you have to do is crowd them in 10,000 to an acre within the immediate vicinity of the Temple itself and the crowd will look infinite to someone in the center.

After the destruction of Jerusalem Jews weren't allowed back to the ruins for a couple of centuries, so most of the population that wrote the Talmud and so in Galilee had no reference to the city's actual size, just memories of past greatness. And most people, particularly ancient people, have absolutely no sense of scale. Both Jews and Christians long accepted without criticism the numbers in the Torah and the Tanakh that state the size of Moses' exodus and David's army were in the department of three or four million, numbers that go sailing past exaggeration into utter insanity. As time passed, the memory of Jerusalem and the Temple grew more and more absurdly grandiose in the minds of the Jewish people, especially as more and more often they got crowded into urban ghettos with populations about the same as old Jerusalem, the conviction that old Jerusalem must have been huge to accommodate all their ancestors got more and more entrenched.

The fact that you're just not getting is that Herod did not engineer the Temple Mount to accommodate the maximum number of worshipers that would show up, he built it to say "I'm Herod the Great, look on my works ye mortals, and despair! Have I mentioned I built a full scale palace on top of god-damned mountain?" He strikes me as a bit like Kim Jong Il. The guy was more than slightly nuts even when you do discount the toddler massacring myth.

The Passover of the Crushed? I assume you are referring to the story Robert Graves recounts in "Claudius the God" where a Roman soldier exposes himself, causing a riot, causing a stampede that kills something like like 40-50,000 people? Absolute absurdity. Apart from the fact that almost no one could see the soldier causing the incident, the worst outdoor crowd crush in modern history I can find occurred at a soccer game in Sheffield, where a panic of something like 20-25,000 people caused the death of about 100. The worst indoor crush happened in an air raid shelter in China during World War II where 4,000 were suffocated, but this is Kuomintang doing the counting. In any case, theatre panic stampedes have led to death tolls in the dozens, so a 5-10% casualty rate for people stampeding out of insufficiently large exits (which we've established to be the case on the Temple Mount) isn't out of the question. I assume Graves got the story and the number from Josephus, and we know that Josephus liked to make up numbers for casualty figures. If the death toll was as little as 1-2,000 it would be a sufficient national tragedy to be remembered for generations (3,000 odd on 9/11). That's still probably too big a number. 40,000 bodies clogging the gates and surrounding streets would take quite a while to clean out. That's more corpses than Gettysburg and a lot more people were doing the cleanup at Gettysburg than we could reasonably assume could get into the smaller gates where most people would have died.

You and others keep citing the number of besieged attested by Josephus and Tacitus. I keep pointing out that the numbers would be ridiculous in modern terms. 300,000 people dying in Jerusalem is a little more than the total number of Americans killed in the entirety of World War II. It's more than the fire bombing of Dresden. It's more than all the Allied soldiers that landed on D-Day. It's more than the Atomic Bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki put together. It's as many as the Japanese killed when they captured Nanjing, a city that actually did have one or two million people in it before they got there.

It simply astounds me that you can keep on defending this position.

Sarpedon

It amazes me that you are persisting in what amounts to an argument from authority. You are saying that these guys are scholars, and we are not, therefore none of our objections make any sense.

You ignore that other scholar's work has been presented, showing a much lower estimate.

You ignore the fact that your scholars may be seen as biased, because christians and jews DO have a vested interest in exaggerating the importance of judaism in ancient times.

You ignore that they are taking ancient 'traditions' at face value.

You ignore that they make their living based on people's interest in ancient religion, and are therefore unlikely to do anything to contradict people's beliefs.

You harp on the idea that every Jew who could would have gone to Jerusalem for the ceremony because it is a religious requirement, then you use the anecdote about the kidneys, even though it is in direct contradiction to Jewish religious customs; The worshippers are required to eat the ENTIRE sacrifice (except the blood, which is unclean. By the way; How much blood would 600,000 sheep have? According to ritual law, it must be all drained before the beast is consumed. Where does it all go?) . Saving the kidneys would violate that.

And I can only laugh at your naive belief that every lie contains part of the truth within. By believing the kidney anecdote, you demonstrate that you have not a single bone of real scholarship or skepticism in your body. You can not comprehend that a priest has a motive to exaggerate the number of sacrifices he has performed, or that a king has a motive to exaggerate the number of people in his kingdom.

Basically, you are taking priests at their word, with no other evidence presented. What kind of person does that?

I say it again; all that can be said that a lie establishes is that it itself is not true. I can say that 20,000,000,000 people came to Minneapolis for Kramarcyk's Kielbasa festival. What amazing facts can you deduce from that lie? Please tell me how many people actually attended.

No one is denying that there was a festival, and that many people attended. However, there's a difference between 'many' and 6 million, which is what your lying anecdote says. The idea that you can conclude that the city was filled to overflowing based on that lie is utterly baseless. A massive crowd is massive whether there are 10,000, 50,000, 100,000 or 1,000,000. A man who's up to his knees in blood from doing sacrifices all day will doubtless have an exaggerated estimate of the number of people who's filed past in that time, even if he's being completely honest.

ETA: 2 million kilograms of blood from 600,000 sheep. assuming small sheep.

semiopen

I'm at a loss to understand your posts.

You haven't shown any evidence for any of the points that you mention here.

For example, the water sources for Jerusalem are well understood. There was not enough water for more than 100,000 people. 350,000 gallons were probably available on a daily basis, a post I made referenced an opinion that this would support 70,000 people.

Given the murky nature of the data, I could see an intelligent argument being made that there was more water; but I havent seen you make it.

This is a shame because a knowledgeable debater could make a decent job of arguing some of your positions. I don't see anything other than you just writing the same baseless assertions over and over again.

outhouse

you should stay out of post you cannot understand, you have missed the mark in every assumption of me you have stated







I have only stated, that 300,000 to 400,000 showed on passover, I have only presented the evidence scholars use to make their determination as to how man people at passover made the journey.


Do some work if you want to mouth off, no scholars have been presented that state lower numbers. One said its a possibility that a lower number then josephas reported. Hell I even stated I found a scholar who reported less. Carrier states "he doesnt know"

outhouse

thats ignorant


I have provided evidence with someone who started this thread and called me out on it.

I have Used E.P Sanders numbers because thats what I feel the evidence shows. Not because thats what he did.

Sarpedon

I hope you are proud of being a member of the religious propoganda team. Atheist or not, you are furthering their agenda by mindlessly accepting their lies, repeating them, and trying to suppress skepticism and doubt.

You have long ago stopped making any rational argument, and have resorted to sarcasm and insults. You have decided that certain scholars word is gospel, and denounce everyone who disagrees with zealot fervor.

I'm not going to continue to give a platform to someone who won't make an argument, and is clearly carrying water for the enemy. When you are ready to stop being a slave to the priests and theologians, come back.

outhouse

why dont you read, I wont hold your hand, the evidence has been posted



So you know all the water storage the temple had? and how many GPM of water flowed in the aquaduct, how much water was in the spring's?

You understand the water shortages were reported by ancient historians, its also why the aquaduct was built.



with storage ponds let me do some simple math for you already posted in this thread on how little water it takes.


a gallon a day would keep someone alive, the amount over that can be used with said math.

I'll deal with the aquaduct, springs and storage.


1 gpm which is 7 times less then your standard water house, will supply enough water for 1,400 people a day. a stream about the size of your pinky running slow.

10 gpm 14,000 people a day, that is a hair over what a simple water house will produce.

100 gpm will supply enough water for 140,000 people a day provided there is storage.


a 100gpm is a very small stream about 12" X12" running pretty fast.


300 gpm will supply enough for 420,000 people a day, for rationed survival. this still amounts to a small stream


the aquaduct and springs could supply enough water to keep solomans pools full, and by the way your IGNORANCE is oustanding, the storage pools were 53,000,000 gallons, about 7 acres of surface water.


not enough water is about the stupidist uneducated remark anyone could make about the passover at jesus time.

have anything else you want to insert youir foot in your mouth with?



I figured the 53,000,000 galon storage was enough without even having to mention the great cisterns under the temple that Duke found out about after this thread started