mountainman

Good people were certainly called "chrestos".
This conflation assisted the forgery.



We have no hard evidence (and I mean C14) earlier than
the year 290 CE plus or minus 60 years. Go figure.



Rome, 312 CE. Things were looking up for the boss. He made good use of the Roman libraries, and of Eusebius.


Best wishes,



Pete

rlogan

Absolutely. If you assume there is a real base character.



Careful there. Please provide examples of these fantastic claims. I am familiar with quite a number of those actually known to Josephus by the name Jesus, and there are no fantastical claims about them at all.

Jesus is what is left after you remove the miracles? I understand the tendency to want to do this, but it isn't actually submitting any evidence for something.

How does removing the easily falsifiable things from a story make the remaining text true?

I think you believe that there must have been a preacher who inspired a movement leading to Christianity.

That seems to me what approach you are really taking. There must be a progenitor. The story we see is mythical. So therefore remove the myth and you are left with the progenitor.

It is circular reasoning and I don't think you realize that you are doing it.

As scientific method, it clearly fails. And in doing it you remove things that are absolutely essential to a movement - the religious theory behind it.

If you take the golden goose and remove the gold - then you have a story that there once was a goose.

Now you have removed the reason for telling any story in the first place.


The major problem with this is a complete failure to acknowledge we can very well see where Jesus Christ came from.

He came from mining the Hebrew Bible. And the things about him they copied out of the Hebrew Bible are not things we remove to find some "core"

They are instead so central to his character that removing them extinguishes the whole point of telling any story about him in the first place.


If you remove the miracle working you are left with many features about Jesus that are not controversial at all. But they are still directly mined from the Hebrew Bible and in fact are proudly cited as evidence he was the Christ. Born in Bethlehem. Comes out of Egypt...on and on.

It is not removing the miracles that allows us to remove the wool over our eyes. It is removing all of the character traits of Jesus that were mined from the Hebrew Bible.

aa5874

I disagree.

If the miraculous is removed from the Jesus story, then more controversies arise.

If the miraculous is removed from his birth, baptism, temptation, the miracles themselves, the transfiguration, resurrection and ascension, Jesus is reduced to nothing but fiction.

Everyone associated with Jesus, even Jesus himself would have misrepresented the truth.

Doug Shaver

You've been posting to this forum almost as long as I have. I have made perfectly clear, in posts to you as well as to lots of other posters here, what I believe about Jesus, the disciples, and Paul. If you have ignored me up until now, you'll just ignore me again, because you're so fixated on your own repetitious rantings that you just don't pay a bit of attention to anything said by anybody who disagrees with you.

aa5874

How, can you say I am ignoring you? I have responded to your post.

Now, look, you have ignored my plea, again. I have asked you, very politely, to tell me the Truth about Jesus, his disciples and Paul and you simply have refused to do so.

patcleaver

According to the rules of logic and evidence, the positive proposition has to be proven before it should be believed.

The negative proposition is simply a denial that the positive proposition has been proven, and the denial should be presumed to be true until the positive proposition has been proved.

The negative proposition does not have to provide any evidence, and is simply presumed to be true, until the positive proposition is proven to be true.

There is no god is presumed to be true, until the existence of god is proven.

Jesus is a myth is presumed true, until the existence of a historical Jesus is proven.

Paul is a myth and his epistles are forgeries is presumed to be true, until Paul is proven to exist and the epistles are proven to be authentic. Even if you could prove that Paul existed, and that his epistles were authentic, then each part of Paul's epistles would be presumed to be an interpolation until you proved that the part was authentic.

The gospels are fiction is presumed to be true until it is proven that the gospels are reliable. There are things in the gospels that are true just like there are things in Moby Dick that are true, but the fact that they are in today's gospels is not evidence that they are true. Even if you proved that the gospels were histories, then you would have to prove that Jesus really said each part that it is written that he said, because in ancient histories dialogs were invented. Even if you proved that the Gospels were histories, every part of the gospels would still be presumed to be an interpolation until you proved that the part was authentic.

There was no town in Galilee called Nazareth in the first century is presumed to be true until it is proven that there was a town called Nazareth in Galilee in the first century.

Mary, Joseph, the 12 apostles, Abraham, Moses, and all the other characters and activities in the bible are presumed to be myths until their existence is proven. We would not believe that Pontius Pilot or Herod were real people unless we had independent verification that they were real people, and we would be correct to believe that they were myths if we did not have other evidence that they were real.

Do you have any evidence or just bald assertions of mythology?

mountainman

This is not good enough Pat, since it assumes there may be a method by which it may be proven that the gospels are reliable when they may not be in fact so. The gospels need to be examined as fraudulent misrepresentation of ancient history by specific authors and their (imperial) financial sponsors, since the truth of the historical evolution of christianity is inextricably involved with fraudulent misrepresentation (at least) from the 4th century, and every century thereon just accumulates more fraud. (eg: James Ossary)

Nothing may be presumed. All pathways need to be examined with equal and objective scholarship. The evidence alone should be admitted, but no assumptions. This evidence needs to include every single citation towards the existence of early christianity which was once accepted as sound, but which in todays world of scholarship is regared as a forgery.

Starting with the fraudulent leters of Paul and Seneca, every century through to the present. One gigantic mountain of citations which are all and each now regarded as fraud. Where are the "genuine citations"? How many are there? I have made a list. And how many fraudulent citations now, or once existed? What miniscule percentage of early christianity citations are not so classified as fraudulent misrepresentation by various parties in the period?

The fourth century is the ground of future evidence.
IMO.


Best wishes,


Pete

patcleaver

I agree with everything you said except the first sentence.

I believe that if theists actually presented sufficient evidence to prove that the proposition that gospels are reliable was more likely then not, then I should believe it. I can't even imagine how they could do that. Of course all the fraud and other evils that has been committed by Christians is evidence against that proposition, and of course whatever I believe according to the evidence that I am aware of, I could be wrong. However, in this world, I think that the only honest thing to do is to follow the evidence.

Believing a negative, based on the rational presumption, is not as satisfying as establishing the truth of positive facts, but negative presumptions is the only knowledge we have about some things.

I have looked through your site, and I think your radical ideas have made important contributions to the field, and I agree that they are a lot more likely then the orthodox position. From an abductive viewpoint, it is probably the most likely hypotheses out there, and should be pursued. However, I do not think that it is something that is more likely then not simply because there is so little reliable evidence in this field, and there are so many alternate theories that are possible at this stage of research.

One problem with your hypotheses is that there is good evidence that Mark was written as fiction possibly in response to the question “Where is the prophesized messiah”, and I do not know how that would fit into the puzzle. Perhaps Mark was essentially a private document until the 4th century, or perhaps very few who read it thought that it was true.

Another problem with your theory is that there is little evidence that Eusebius could not be an invention of Theodosius I the Great (and even later Christians), to establish a history of Christianity.

One issue I find fascinating is the question of earliest provable dates. What is the earliest date that can we reliably establish that there were Christians who believed the four gospels? What is the earliest date that we can we reliably establish that the gospels actually existed? Before we had printed books, documents are unreliable and ancient archeology is very thin.

Do you have a list of ancient Judao-Christian documents that are reliably dated with radioisotope techniques – the gospel of Judas, the dead sea scrolls, the Nag Hammurabi documents, the codex khabouris (Khaboris, Khaboris, Yonan). Do you have any more?

mountainman

Pat,

See new post about fraud and history and forgery and C14 dating.
http://iidb.infidels.org/vbb/showthread.php?t=246668







Best wishes,


Pete

Doug Shaver

And I'm telling you that I have done so. But, I'll do it once more and we'll see how long it takes you this time to ask the question again.

Unlike you, I do not claim to know the truth about Jesus, his disciples, and Paul. What I believe about them is as follows:

• Jesus: He never existed.
• Disciples: Two or three of them existed, the others did not.
• Paul: He existed.