Adam

The Adventist tradition of Old Testament ultra-Protestantism (think Jehovah's Witnesses, Mormons) that Sotto Voce is into is very much into works-righteousness. Salvation is not based on faith alone. (Which is a good thing, in my opinion.)

steve_bnk

Answer the questions I asked you.

aa5874

The current evidence from antiquity does support an argument for a mythological Jesus.

Let us reason.

If Jesus was a Myth character would you NOT expect Jesus to be described as a Myth?? Yes or No!!!

Please tell me how is Jesus described by Apologetic sources and in the Existing Codices???

In the Canon, Jesus was described as Non-human, the Son of a Ghost, the Son of God, God the Creator that walked on water, transfigured, resurrected and ascended in a cloud

Again, If Jesus was a fabricated Myth character and merely inserted in the 1st century from around 1 BCE-33 CE by story-tellers would you NOT expect that there would be NO actual figure of history that would have written about him??

No accepted figure of history mentioned Jesus or that he lived at any time in the 1st century and before 70 CE and 100% of DATED Texts EXCLUDE a character called Jesus from the 1st century.

If Jesus was Myth would you NOT expect that any writing which mentioned Jesus as a REAL human being would NOT be credible???

A character called Jesus Christ is mentioned in Antiquities of the Jews 20.9.1 and 18.3.3 but those passages are Forgeries or questionable.

But, MOST significant, and augments the MJ argument, is that Apologetic Contemporaries of the supposed Jesus did NOT claim they met Jesus as a man.

There can be NO stronger ARGUMENT for a Myth character.

Every single PARAMETER to support an argument for a Myth Jesus is in place.

It can be argued based on the abundance of evidence that Jesus was virtually a PERFECT Myth.

sotto voce

If you believe in an eternal reward, it's because you believe that actions that relate to material things are the basis for that reward.

spin

And, naturally, this knowledge, ie that the things that we know are not worth knowing, is by necessity not worth knowing.

Lots of ancient dudes who had difficulty in grasping the notion of death came up with all sorts of theories mainly based on the untested assertion of a mind/body separation along with the survival of that which the mind manifested after the body ceased to function. Reincarnation. Union with god. Reaching nirvana. (All based on a pessimism concerning life that a thinking person could understand if they read another ancient person's confrontation of the issue, a work called "On the Brevity of Life" by Seneca.)

The separation is not based on any evidence and its validity can be conveyed analogically by asking what happens to flame after the candle has run out of wick.

And they should know? But it's not worth knowing, is it?

But they had no way of knowing¹, which I guess is a virtue for you, who puts no worth in knowing anything. The things that you don't know seem to be better than those which you do.


[hr=1]100[/hr]
^1. Ugly epistemology strikes once again.

Kapyong

Because only atheists would disagree with your faithful beliefs, right?

K.

sotto voce

It is? So it is important to represent other people's opinions correctly?

:constern01:

Kapyong

Numerous people DID assess your theses and found them totally un-convincing.

But because posters disagreed with you, you pretend no-one assessed your posts.


K.

Atheos

I have assessed your theses. They don't move the balance. Sorry. Feel free to move directly to the part where you undermine my qualifications to assess your theses.
In no place have I ever declared your results wrong. They could be correct. They are well thought out and present scenarios that are quite plausible.

However, I just suggested an alternate scenario a few posts ago without giving it more than about 5 minutes thought. Everything that I currently know about the historical record, and everything I currently know about historical behavior of human beings who feel their deeply held beliefs threatened by some opposing opinion is consistent with the scenario I presented.

From where I'm sitting the only differences from a purely academic standpoint between the silly scenario I presented and the well-reasoned one you have is that mine isn't shared by the majority of biblical scholars and it didn't take me more than a few moments of mental exercise to produce it.

Other than that it is completely consistent with the historical record. It explains the existence of the Passion Narrative along with a good explanation for its disappearance. Now that I think about it your scenario is deficient in explaining the disappearance of this source document. One would think that if it were of such value as to be one of the foundational sources for two of the four canonical gospels that at least someone would have felt it worthwhile to preserve in its original form. Unless, of course it expressed content they wanted to eliminate - quite consistent with the scenario I presented.

But the point of all this is not to bandy about the merits of my 10 cent theory as opposed to the product of your scholarship and years of research.

The point is that without actual evidence that tilts the balance in favor of either direction both are equally plausible explanations of all the available evidence provided by the historical record.

You may be right.

But there is a virtual infinitude of other possibilities equally consistent with the available data based on the historical record.

So you may also be wrong. Until you can substantively demonstrate why one must discard the alternative scenario I presented, my cracker-jack theory is every bit as reasonable as your well reasoned one. All the harumphing and brow furrowing in the world won't change that simple fact.

I see no contradiction in my position. If a contradiction exists it exists somewhere. Feel free to point out the contradiction and I'll be happy to admit it if I'm wrong. I've been wrong before and I'm actually quite good at it.

I've never said your conjectures aren't worth studying to see if they're even evidence. I've studied them. They're conjecture. I've made my case as to why I believe they're conjecture. Have you actually read my arguments or did you just skim them looking for talking points? It cuts both ways.

Adam

I'm having difficulty reconciling this statement with denying that I have presented "evidence". Apparently you mean "proof", not "evidence".The problem is that your scenario has no objective textual support. I use stylistic differences, comparisions between extant texts, and the perspective from which the author writes.The Passion Narrative got copied into four extant texts, so it would have been too late to destroy it. That is was in Aramaic in Jerusalem at the time of the destruction in 70 CE would doubly account for its demise.
....
As I stated, the contradiction is to state that we cannot know something, but we CAN know that that something is false. Acceptable would be to say we don't know something with certainty, but it is contradictory to say we are certain we don't know it.
Yes, you said I made three assumptions. I denied that I made any of those assumptions, and I evens said I argued against the third. You assumed that I could not reach my conclusions based on objective study, that everyone else must share your presuppositions to be able to find truth.
Now, since my arguments were not based on the assumptions you believe false, they are not conjecture. My theses could be wrong, but the evidence and arguments must be considered before rejecting them. as you have done by calling them "conjecture". You can, of course, just take the agnostic position that we can never be certain about these matters, as you do elsewhere in a prior post copied in this post by acknowledging