Biff the unclean

Well Ruth that's hardly different from the "free will" chestnut Christians keep bringing up here. An excuse why God does nothing and doesn't leave a trace.
Of course traceless nothing is exactly what you would expect from a God who doesn't exist.

jbernier

Exactly. This comes to a classic problem: The absence of evidence is evidence of absence if and only if one would reasonably expect the presence of evidence given the presence of a particular phenomenon. Which is to say that one must make a positive argument for why one would expect to have writings from Jesus.

Now, I can make several arguments for why one would not expect such. First, Jesus' ministry was largely a preaching and teaching ministry, similar to that of the early Rabbis. Now we have no writings from Gamaliel, Hillel and others of the early Rabbis; we do have many writings attributed to them in the later midrashim, Talmud, etc. This seems to be a fairly standard practice amongst the early Rabbis (and Jesus was very close to this group, we must add): That venerated teachers have words ascribed to them in retrospect as opposed to writing them down. We see something similar at Qumran with the Teacher of Righteousness. This is all to say that the idea of a Jewish teacher who leaves no writings himself and whose followers later records his ideas is completely in keeping with general Palestinian Jewish practice of Jesus' time. To be logically consistent, if one is to use the absence of evidence that Jesus wrote anything as absence of evidence for Jesus' existence then one must do so with the vast majority of the early Rabbis. Thus one is not challenging the existent of one historical figure but of dozens. This hardly strikes me as the most parsimonious solution to a problem that might not even be a problem at all, given the evidence.

KingLouie

I don't know.

From the Jungles of Not Knowing,

Kang Louie

Eazy

This is true. In fact, in New testament Scholarship(Christian or secular), Christ Mythicism never really caught on. Whatever fire it did get was about 20 years ago, and it died out. The miracles are highly contended, but it is accepted as historical fact that he existed, by almost all people regardless of their philosophical platform or religious affiliation.

From some of my experience I've found historicity of Jesus discussions to be incredibly futile so I'm not going to be getting too deep into this one.

Eazy

Interesting. I'll delve into it.

Yes, but the point is that they felt the need to do it, which means that you saying they didn't have to is erronous. There are so many marks of integrity like this in the NT.

I disagree. I'll have to check out those other threads(Do you remember what they were called?), but the biography written in the nearest proximity to Alexander(Can't wait for the film!) was 400 years after the events transpired. "He didn't claim he was the son of God"(which he did, BTW) is not a valid argument. This applies to quite a few other historical figures and events, who have had "errant" documents, hearsay, embellishments,etc. that were used as historically accurate sources. Sources that were also written quite a while after the events transpired. If we were being honest, the historicity of Jesus has been scrutinized a LOT more than most other history.

That would be quite a fantastic feat. Plus we don't even know what Jesus looked like really. Philip Of Macedon, Casaer, etc probably had statues and portraits done of them. Jesus didn't. Whether it's the eastern version of portraits, western version of portraits, or perhaps the reconstrucion of the people of the time in Judea, we don't know:
http://popularmechanics.com/science/...us/index.phtml

So, If Josephus were authentic you would have thought it was remarkable? What if, let's say, Mark was not part of the Canon, would you have accepted it?

lpetrich

(Why is there a Bible?)
It would be MUCH better to reveal it to the consciousness of everybody who has ever lived -- and to reveal it in unmistakable terms, like the fashion in which I usually post here.

And in response to the expected response that this would take way people's free will, it would do no such thing. Free will would still be present. And if free will leads to wicked things, then it is best to get rid of it, as Jesus Christ had advised about body parts that make one commit sins.

Magus55

Well, what about those people who don't want to hear about the Bible? Is it fair to force them to have knowledge of it?

lpetrich

So what? How is such coercion so much worse than sending people to some realm of eternal torment?

In what language?

What trinity was that? I've never heard of it. Although Dionysus was known for water-into-wine miracles.

The description, "kicking at the goads" and all, was taken out of Euripides's The Bacchae.

That was invented by an early theologian named Eusebius, who had attempted to calculate when Jesus Christ was born. I think that if we had not started using that system, we would have continued to use the ancient Roman system, Anno Urbis Conditae (AUC), "in the Year of the Founding of the City" -- Rome. This event is traditionally dated at 753 BCE, meaning that our current year is 2757 AUC.

Biff the unclean

Actually the term was "kicking at pricks." Since the definition of the word "prick" has changed over the years the unintended humor really makes that line jump out of both texts

Gawen

On our way to BC&H