aa5874

So I ask, if Jesus was never resurrected but people believed he did, would they die for him, especially when the bible says, "He that believes on me shall be saved"?

Agemegos

Since that is the case, I reckon that it would be a useful service to Burning Flames to give him or her the URL of the Skeptics' Annotated Bible. Its tone is strident, and it is often nit-picky, but it is easier to skim it for substantial problems with the Bible than to comb through the original.

funinspace

You seam to be on an honest quest. It seams that you probably need to do some deeper background reading on human and Biblical history from all directions. It appears you have been getting to much of your information from Josh McDowell and other fundies/evangelicals, if I had to guess. Anywho, my thoughts...
*Yet, over 90% of the world does not consider Noah's Deluge nor a 6,000 year old human earth to be anything but fantasy.
*Where are the Charubims? Ge 3:24 Charubims and a flaming sword are guarding the entrance to Eden.
*The Babel event is unnoticed by history, and fits no archeological timeline.
*The Exodus is invisible to history.
*Where is Joshua's and Hezehiah's solar object demands within history? Why did only this tiny area notice these events in the 12th and 8th century BC?
*The impressive United Kingdom with it's amazing temple was also virtually unnoticed by history.
*Why did history not notice Solomon, the wisest man in the world?
*The earthquake and blood red sky upon Jesus' death were unnoticed by history yet again.

Are you seeing a pattern here?

From Paul's writings to maybe the latest John/Revelations. is the mid 40's to the upper end 120AD. So it is more accurately, within 90 years. Only the inerrantists/fundies believe 50 years. However, the oldest near complete NT copies of books start nearly 200 years later. We know next to nothing of how well Christianity spread within Judea, partly due to the Roman destruction around 70AD. It is apparent that is spread much better in other parts of the Roman empire, where little "eye witness" substantiation could be provided. So how would people know? The Mormon's claim that Joseph Smith had eye witnesses as well, so it must be also true? I would suggest you read some more skeptical books on Biblical consistency, before repeating such a claim.

And how do you know when Daniel was written? Since Moses purportedly existed around 1400BCE, the books could not have been written over any time frame longer than about 1,500 years. Consider the honesty/integrity of your sources.

Read the rest of the chapters around such claimed prophecies of birth location et.al. Does Jesus fit the whole of the specific chapter(s)?. Say, read all of Isaiah 7. Openly read the birthing tales from Matt and Luke, and consider how these 2 books mesh or don't mesh. Was his family really from Nazareth or Bethlehem? Did he go back home to Nazareth, or take a 2 year journey off to Egypt? Why was his family heading back to Bethlehem, then having a dream to not go back, if his family was from Nazareth? Accurate to the day? Hell, we don't even know the year for sure.

Sure if all the claimed prophecies actually applied; were made before hand; weren't later manufactured into the story told decades later; weren't twisted out of context from the Hebrew texts, it would be impressive.

Now you have proven Joseph Smith (was killed by Christians while in a jail cell) and Jim Jones, just to mention 2, to be fully honest. This is one of the biggest Christian LIES. People are willing to die all the time for strange ideas. It's time to get over the notion.

Cege

I'm a liberal Christian according to others of my faith. My husband calls me a flaming liberal. I'm not deconverted, but understand how someone could become deconverted upon examining the scriptures and the claims made by preachers, etc

Scripture examination doesn't hold up well to reality and sanity checks if the Bible is held to be inerrant. IMO we all mostly believe what we've been taught, at least up until the time we question what we've been taught and are willing to research and examine what it is we really believe and why we believe it.

burning flames might be on the same type of quest that I'm on.

Hex

Cege, you're not alone. One of the classes I teach, at the college level, is on the anthropological views of the supernatural: The cultural functionings, the ways the beliefs work to keep people in line and structure the random aspects of the chaotic world they live in. And, I am sometimes amazed at how much 'tunnel vision' some people have when it comes to religion and the supernatural.

That's not to say that they are dim or stupid or anything, but rather that they have never ventured outside 'what they've been taught'. They have no concept that other people do things differently, or could do them for a 'sane' reason, or that their way of doing things/understanding the universe could be viewed as crazy from someone else's standpoint.

Many religions don't 'add up' logically. They are inconsistant unless you know the whole cosmology that rationalizes the inconsistancies. This board, and it's focus on mixing the Bible with history and archaeology, is a place that looks for just such inconsistancies and points them out. If you're looking here for a sanity check, then you've jumped right into the fire, IMHO.

And hence, when people like burning flames posits such statements, with such glaring inconsistancies with history and archaeology, people jump on them. Others, like Larsguy47, are more fine-grained in their postulation, but still operating from a position where they are working within a particular cosmogeny that doesn't jibe with logic, as much as they want it to.

In either occasion, the view of the person coming in is seriously important. True seekers, ones who are questioning things themselves, probably get a lot more out of this than those with strong religious convictions. They aren't likely to be swayed by logic or facts (the stock and trade of the board), and are likely to retreat back into their cosmogeny to try and get out of inconsistancies that spoil their arguement.


For what it's worth, burning flames, I admire your willingness to post, but I can't support any of your posits. Not a one, sorry.

Atheos

Others have made excellent rejoinders to the OP. I'd like to toss in just another observation or two.

This just isn't true for several reasons. First of all, not everything we know about history comes from written documentation we find. We find lots of artifacts, coins, pottery, fossils, etc., none of which are written documentation, but all of which can give us clues as to how people (and other species) lived long ago. Secondly, historical figures such as Julius Ceaser, Socrates, Plato and others are often attested to by other artifacts, as well as objective and even hostile writings about them. Scholarship involves separating the most likely things about historical figures from the less likely things (possibly made-up anecdotes that could be true but are probably just stories) and certainly from the absurd things that we know aren't true. As an example there is abundant and varigated evidence in support of the existence of George Washington. The likelyhood that George Washington was the first president of the United States of America is extremely high. The likelyhood that he chopped down a cherry tree and told the truth about it as a child is suspect, but certainly could have happened. The likelyhood that he hurled a coin across the Potomac River is absurd and rejected by reasonable scholars.

These assertions have been repudiated by others. Actual findings from archaeology indicate that there never was a massive Exodus of Hebrew people from Egypt, and they strongly disagree with the stories about the Hebrew people conquering the land of Canaan. With all the archaeological evidence available for lesser kingdoms it strains credulity to imagine that nothing would remain of the fantastic kingdoms of David and Solomon if they were as described in the bible (e.g., the Queen of Sheba declaring that "the half has not been told" during her visit to King Solomon).

The assertion that the "documents are very consistent with each other too" bears special treatment. Few christians today would argue that the central, focal point of their theology rests on the resurrection of Jesus from the dead. Yet the four gospel writers tell extremely contradictory renditions of this very basic event. They can't even agree on whether or not Mary Magdalene saw the angel descend, roll back the stone and proclaim that Jesus was alive (GMatt) or she came early in the morning to discover an empty tomb with the stone already gone and no one there to explain what had happened and ran back to the disciples with the news that "they have stolen the body" and "we know now where they have laid him". Read the four resurrection accounts and see if you really believe that they are in agreement.

As others have pointed out this is a very difficult proposition to defend. If the prophecies had been as specific as Jesus's alleged prophecy to Peter that he would deny he knew Jesus three times before the rooster crowed the next morning (something else the gospel writers don't agree on detail-wise) then I might be impressed. But when you take vague, Nostradamus-style ramblings and force fit them onto things that happened later you're just engaging in wishful thinking. It is a very questionable standard of judgment used by people who will loft one book with vague prophecies and proclaim them to be valid, yet decry the claims of fulfilled prophecies of other religions and people like Nostradamus.

I have serious misgivings about whether or not "Jesus" ever actually existed. Does it not make sense that if the anonymous "gospel" writers were making the story up they would make up a story that appeared to fulfill any relevant prophecies about the character? Matthew's tendency to obviously misinterpret certain prophecies and apply them to devices in his particular narrative should raise some serious red flags. Isaiah 7:14 is a prime example of lifting such a verse out of context. Read the entire chapter of Isaiah 7 and see how many other aspects of that passage obviously refer to Jesus. Hell, for that matter, when did they ever call Jesus "Immanuel"? Answer: Never. Other examples include Matthew's misquoting of Micah 5:2, his misapplication of Hosea 11:1 and Jeremiah 31:15.

As I (and others) have mentioned, these are by no means "accurate" prophecies. If someone had accurately predicted the number of battles, casualty counts, outcomes and eventual surrender of the South in the Civil War I'd be impressed. But when folks claim these vague snippets of ramblings are "accurate" prophecies about specific events it's hard to see how they keep a straight face.

Now we're getting into the worst sort of apologetics. First of all there is no evidence anywhere in support of the claim that the "disciples" all died horrible deaths (except for John). There is very little reason (once again) to believe any of these people actually existed, apart from some fantastic stories collected in a book of fantastic stories.

Try convincing someone who lost a loved one in the World Trade Center bombing that nobody would die for something that wasn't true.