dockeen

Fascinating. In replying to someone who has stated that they are precluded from
being in the bible, you reply with a statement about people who believe in the bible.

rlogan

Hilarious. How about "it didn't happen" instead of miserable excuses being offered.

So therefore the literate won't notice it is dark?

One of the things you learn as a defense mechanism for an indefensible position is to use insinuation and vagueness instead of making complete arguments. They sound stupid if you are forced to state them completely.

Additional points are scored with the mentally challenged when you can make an answer sound "snappy" or "elegant". There is a chiasm, or poetic structure deployed by religious charletans eg "The bigger their eyes the less they see", and this tradition goes all the way back to Mark where it is full of much more complex Chiasms.

A chiasm or poetic structure is pleasing in the same way music is, and a clever person can exploit the deception that there is more logic or power behind the words delivering it this way. It can be a memory device too.

This one is an epic fail logically.

Toto

sotto voce's digression on true Christianity has been split off here

sotto voce

Then why did a succession of emperors confirm and increase the coercion? Because it was the story, as believed by a minority who caused Tertullian to warn that the blood of martyrs was the seed of the church, that inspired the church. That purifying influence was what forced the hand of the imperium, inherently corrupt as it was, to force everyone to be 'Christian'. The Romans, who accommodated Jews as well as Greeks, were apparently unable to destroy faith in the gospels, so historical and geographical discrepancies in them either did not exist, or did not matter. So it does not really make a difference if Mark did not know where Dalmanutha was. The proof was in the pudding, which was not at all to the taste of greedy patricians who enforced lives of misery on people from Hadrian's wall to the Persian border. That in itself is an achievement of the gospel authors that deserves recognition.

Toto

So clearly they did not matter then. But now, in this materialistic age, they do matter to a lot of people.
Proof of what? Certainly not historical accuracy.

sotto voce

The millions of slaves of Rome, virtual and actual, would have been surprised to learn that the elite they kept in luxuries, at the expense of their own rights to decent existence, were not materialistic.

John Kesler

It appears that you are conflating Matthew's "resurrected saints" with Paul's "more than 500 bretheren" (or as the NRSV states, "more than five hundred brothers and sisters").

You are begging the question of such a record's existence. Why didn't Mark, Luke, or John record this event? And if they did, how could such an event be allowed to be lost from the Bible?

sotto voce

Which event?

mrsonic

this one

Matthew 27:51-53 And, behold, the veil of the temple was rent in twain from the top to the bottom; and the earth did quake, and the rocks rent; And the graves were opened; and many bodies of the saints which slept arose, And came out of the graves after his resurrection, and went into the holy city, and appeared unto many.

54When the centurion and those with him who were guardingh Jesus saw the earthquake and all that had happened, they were terrified, and exclaimed, “Surely he was the Son of God!”i

john who was writing for an audience of disbelievers left out the words of disbelievers who were convinced that jesus was a son of god. why would he do that? why an eyewitness of the crucifion left out golden nugget events which convinced disbelievers that jesus was son of a god?

and if the event is complete bs, then matthew put eyewitnesses in an event he created in his mind.

John Kesler

The one you were talking about here, which appears to be Matthew's "resurrected saints."