Malachi151

In preps for my talk I'm trying to list all of the descrepancies between Biblical and non-Biblical history.

So far I have:

1) John the Baptist – Killed early in gospels, died in 36 CE according to others. Had more written about him than Jesus.

2) Sermon on the Mount – No mountains in Galilee.

3) Jesus “of” Nazareth – No record of place called Nazareth prior to Jesus. “Jesus the Nazorean”.

4) Bodily ascent into heaven – Accompanied by blackout of sun and earthquake in gospels, no record of this by others. (Bodily ascent of Mary)

5) Roman census in Jesus birth story – No record of any census that matches this description.

These are just talking points.

Does anyone have anything else to add, or comments to make on this points?

As a side note, I think that the issue of the bodily ascent of Mary into heaven is a very important point.

The bodily ascent of both Jesus and Mary essetially says "there is no evidence of the existance of these people".

Now, assuming a purely historical view, that there was some human Jesus and a human Mary, and that this Jesus had some follwers and was worshiped during his lifetime, wouldn't there be SOME record of the death of his mother, the second most esteemed person in the religion, the "mother of God"?

The reality is that there is no record of Mary either. If there was any weight to this story at all, then his mother would have been honored in some way and she would have a known grave site, yet there is no mention of this, so we are asked to believe that either there was some "real Jesus" figure, who was just some guy, and was so vague that his mother wasn't even honored after her death, or that Mary really did trancend bodily into heaven, as much later theologeans made up based purely on theology, without there even claiming to have been witnesses to the fact. There wasn't even a story to base this claim on, it just became a way to darw an end to an open ended question.

vsop44

The star of Betlehem that guided the 3 wise men to the stable where Jesus was born ; There is no record of an additional star in the skies during that period !

Anat

Although most of them are rather low, they are considered colloquially as mountains. The lower Galilee is strewn with hilltops associated with Jesus' itinerary. Also, considering that the Sea of Galilee (actually a lake) lies well below sea level, looking from the east peaks of not-so-high hills appear even higher.

aa5874

I don't know if you already have noted the improbabilty of the miracles in the Bible, but I believe that showing no miracles occured , and that there were no eyewitnesses to those so-called miracles can be effective.

The story of the Ten Plagues in Exodus ch7-13 is a good example of fiction. The magicians turned all the water of Egypt into blood and created frogs to cover the whole of Egypt, to date no Christian has been able to tell how that was done. Those two fictitious acts undermines the Exodus.

Another fictitious act that undermines the historicity of Jesus is the casting out of a demon from a person who was deaf and dumb. The story is in Mark9:14-29. The amusing folly of this story is that the boy's father claim that his son had the dumb spirit since he was a child. But we all know, today that spirits do not make persons deaf, dumb, blind or dead. The diagnosis was false, the entire story is false. There could have been no eyewitnesses to that miracle.

Malachi151

Perhaps, but the "Sermon on the Mount" is only referred to in one gospel, Matthew, and has many common elements with the "Sermon on the Plain" in Luke. In addition, the framing of the sermon as being "on a mountian" has mythic justification in relation to Moses' exclusive ascent of Mount Sinai. Moses went up Mount Sinai alone to talk to God, and God said that he would smite anyone who dared to set foot on the mountian while he was meeting with Moses, in the Sermon on the Mount, however, Jesus is shown to "invite everyone up the mountian with him".

Given the lack of any true mountian in Galilee, the fact that another gospel sets the sermon on a "flat and level place", and the fact that literary allusion makes more sense of this setting than anything else, I think its safe to discuss this as a mythic construct which we can conclude does not match a historical record.

Jack the Bodiless

The Herod/Quirinius contradiction is a biggie. Luke's Jesus was born at least a decade after Matthew's Jesus (Herod died 4 BC, Quirinius appointed 6 AD). At least one of them has to be contradicting extra-Biblical history.

Also, no "Massacre of the Innocents" reported, even by those who reported Herod's other atrocities.

Of course, the Genesis creation and flood stories also qualify (the Egyptians don't seem to have noticed that they were underwater for a while), as does the Tower of Babel incident (no common language in earlier writings, no sudden worldwide change in written records when God "confounded the languages").

Then there are the historical errors in Daniel (Belshazzar wasn't king, "Darius the Mede" did not exist). And I suppose the failure of Ezekiel's Tyre prophecy counts as a "historical contradiction" too.

Your examples are NT. Is this what you want to focus on?

Malachi151

Good ones, how could I forget the Massacre of the Innocents? Yes, I am focusing on the NT.

Ted Hoffman

No cliff in Nazareth. Mark says Jesus was thrown off a cliff.

No synagogues as architectural edifices in first century Nazareth.

Keith&Co.

The bodies of the dead saints that rose from their graves and walked through the city? Why didn't Pilate write home for help against necromancers with such power? Why didn't anyone else write about the mummies?

jjramsey

No record is technically correct ...

... but misleading:

If you look at the question of Nazareth's purported refounding, the debate pertains to a concentration of archaeological evidence dating from two or three centuries B.C.E.