Solitary Man

aa is on my ignore list. Perhaps you can summarize what has been said? As for Luke and Mark datings, I refer to my good friend Peter Kirby at his site for both works.

patcleaver

Mark is not Jewish because he is ignorant of Jewish traditions, laws and arguements of that time period. Mark's original audience must have included gentiles, because Mark explains some Jewish traditions that all Jews would already know. However, Mark's original audience were clearly students of at least some of the books of the OT so they could appreciate his midrash.

spamandham

That sounds like a personal problem.

spamandham

This sounds like a well thought out reply. Thanks!

patcleaver

Mormons claim that the angel Maroni visited Joseph Smith at night and told him where gold plates were hidden and the angel said it was Smith's duty to translate the plates using magical seeing stones. So Smith dug up the plates, and he would look into his hat or behind a curtain, where the gold plates were hidden, and dictate the Book of Mormon to someone else who would write it down.

Less then 2% of Americans are Mormon, but I would guess that at least 10 times that number know the gist of the Mormon story. The reason that the vast majority of people who have herd the Mormon story are not Mormon is because they think the Mormon story is fiction.

Scientologists believe that millions of years ago an alien named Xanu was the lord of the galaxy and there were too many people so he put the excess population into volcanoes on earth and blew up the volcanoes with hydrogen bombs and the spirits of the excess population of the galaxy became thetans who live inside you and influence what you think, but for a fee counseling by a Scientologist can free you from these thetans.

http://www.xenu.net/archive/leaflet/xenuleaf.doc

Less than .02% of Americans are Scientologists, but I would guess that at least 1000 times that number of Americans know the gist of Scientologist story. The reason that the vast majority of people who have herd the Scientologist story are not scientologists is that they think the scientology story is fiction.

In the first few centuries very few people in the Roman Empire were Christians and I would guess that at least 10 times that number of people knew the gist of the Christian story. The Christian story was probably common knowledge among the Jews of the first few centuries - Christians supposedly worshiped in the Synagogues until the mid 90's. The reason that the vast majority of the Jews did not become Christians is that they believed that the Christian story was fiction. The reason that the vast majority of gentiles who had herd the Christian story were not Christens is that they believed that the Christian story was fiction.

There were dozens if not hundreds of suffering, dying, resurrected, savior cults around the Roman Empire. There is no evidence that any of them were commonly debunked. Christianity was just another pagan cult.

Solitary Man

It's also fallacious, as anyone who interacts with modern Jewish cultures abroad know. It's hardly a well-thought-out reply if it assume that all Jews would know everything about Jewish culture. Should all black people know African tribal customs? Should Chinese people born and raised in Mississippi know everything about mainland customs? I think we're stretching reason to the extreme.

Solitary Man

And that sounds like a personal attack. I ignore aa because he has nothing good to say, and your reply to patcleaver informs me that you too probably have nothing good to say. If you are so incapable of digesting what aa has said and repeating it here, then why on earth would anyone be so inclined to think that they should listen to what you have to say? At the end of the day, you're still spouting non-evidenced nonsense.

aa5874

Especially when it appears Mark was writing about the culture upto a hundred years afterwards, I would expect him to get certain details wrong.

Toto

For Solitary Man:

Solitary Man

Thanks, Toto. Looking over the quotes, I see no support for either spamandham's original hypothesis (nor any subsequent ones) nor for aa's conclusion (which he prefaces).