davidstarlingm

I have a feeling I'm going to regret this....but oh well.

Please tell me which first century writers you expect would have written about Paul or Jesus. List their date of death, date of birth, place of birth, and the places they lived. List all their individual works, the subjects and lengths of each work, the dates and places each work was written, and whether any of these writers have other works that did not survive.

Otherwise you are just making empty claims from silence and from personal incredulity that do nothing but hurt your credibility.

mountainman

So do I.


Have you read Remsberg ?

aa5874

You have feelings?

Well, you gave me a long list but I will try to answer you questions.

I have two 1st century Jewish writers that should have been very much interested in the Pauline Jesus. They were supposed to be contemporaries of the Pauline writer who claimed he was a Hebrew of Hebrew and a Pharisee.

The Pauline writer made what appears to be BLASPHEMOUS claims about a character called Jesus Christ whom he called GOD'S OWN SON, the End of the Law and that this Jesus Christ had a NAME above even the DEIFIED EMPERORS of Rome and that every KNEE should BOW before the name of Jesus Christ.

And this Pharisee called "Paul" went ALL over the Roman Empire with these very claims and DOCUMENTED his claims in Epistles to Churches for OVER 17 years according to the same Epistles.

Well, Josephus also a PHARISEE claimed he LIVED in Galilee and was born sometime around 37 CE. See the "Life of Flavius Josephus". This Josephus should have heard and even seen some of the WRITTEN Jesus stories.

But, all we have are forgeries about a character called Jesus Christ and NOTHING about the Pharisee called Paul who CLAIMED he PERSECUTED the Church of God and WASTED it.

When the Jewish Temple fell, Josephus did NOT write that Jesus the Messiah of Nazareth predicted the Fall of the Temple instead he thought it was Jesus Son of Ananus that PREDICTED that there would be some calamity in Jerusalem. See Wars of the Jews 6.5.3.

Jesus the Son of Ananus was a LONER but Jesus Christ was the Jewish Messiah, the END of the LAW who was supposed to have PREDICTED the Fall of the Temple, Mark 13, and had Stories written about him and THOUSANDS of followers yet Josephus who claimed he LIVED in Galilee where Jesus PERFORMED many miracles did NOT write about the PREDICTION of the Jewish Messiah only the prediction of an insignificant, obscure Jesus the Son of Ananus who said "Woe unto Jerusalem".

Why did Josephus write about the prediction of the LONER Jesus Son of Ananus and NOT about Jesus Christ,God's OWN SON, the LORD and SAVIOUR, who was the END of the Jewish LAW, who could REMIT the Sins of Jews by his resurrection when he had PREDICTED the FALL of the Jewish Temple and that the PREDICTION OF Jesus Christ should have been DOCUMENTED in the Gospels by the time Josephus was writing?

The answer is so PAINFULLY OBVIOUS, if you have feelings, that there was no character named Jesus Christ, God's own Son, the End of the LAW who had a name above every name in the Roman Empire and there was NO "PAUL" the Pharisee who preached Jesus Christ.

Josephus REMEMBERED Jesus son of Ananus so he should have REMEMBERED stories about Jesus the Son of God. There were supposed to be BOOKS about Jesus Christ of Nazareth, God's OWN Son and Josephus may have MET MARY and Joseph in Galilee but he did NOT write about that.

Josephus MENTIONED virtually ALL the places Jesus of Nazareth visited EXCEPT Nazareth. Josephus was WITHIN 3 miles of present day Nazareth but still failed to mention the MOST SIGNIFICANT character a Jewish Messiah of NAZARETH but remembered Jesus the Son of Ananus said "Woe unto Jerusalem".

Now, Josephus wrote "Wars of the Jews", "Antiquities of the Jews", "The Life of Flavius Josephus and "Against Apion" or up to around 98 CE and claimed that it was VESPASIAN who was the PROPHESIED Jewish Messianic Ruler and did NOT even say a single word about Jesus the Jewish MESSIAH from his OWN HOMETOWN of GALILEE.

Josephus LIVED in GALILEE and should have heard that JESUS was the PROPHESIED MESSIAH who CORRECTLY PREDICTED the FALL of the Temple but he wrote about Jesus son of Ananus and VESPASIAN instead.

See WARS of the Jews 6.5.3 and 6.5.4.

I don't argue from FEELINGS. I argue from EVIDENCE from antiquity.

Jesus Christ and "Paul" are ALL FICTITIOUS characters.

jgoodguy

My personal favorite trick is to ask a Remsberg devotee to list the authors and the subject matter of their books, along with the dates they lived and died and ask the question of why the heck would they have had knowledge and reason to write of the goings on in Judea during the most common date of Jesus' ministry.

mountainman

My personal favorite trick is to ask a Eusebius devotee the same questions. After all, Christianity only had to survive apocalypic failure until the 4th century since the solid architecture of basilicas served thereafter quite successfully. Questions were not required for many centuries.

Toto

At one point, we went through Remsberg's list. There is no slam dunk there, although the cumulative effect might impress you.

It is important to note that Remsberg was not arguing against the existence of a Jesus who was a minor wisdom teacher or rabble rouser who was executed by Pilate. He was arguing against the existence of a rock star level Jesus who did the wondrous deeds described in the gospels.

The historicists have scaled back on their expectations of Jesus to the point where he was too obscure to rate any attention. One may wonder how this Jesus came to start a new religion.

Toto

Eusebius is off topic in this thread.

Toto

Here's an archived 2005 thread on the Remsberg list where Iasion (now known as Kapyong) goes through the list and evaluates it. I think there is a more recent version of this.

ETA: there is an updated discussion in this thread starting at post 41

davidstarlingm

Well, there was this little matter of a resurrection. Apparently a bunch of dudes were convinced that a publicly executed criminal came back to life and spoke and ate and walked with them. Little stunts like that have the tendency to kick-start an otherwise less-than-notable faith.

Anyhow, I read Remsberg and looked at the other thread where the list is reviewed point by point. Obviously, a lot of the authors listed shouldn't be on there at all, but there are several that bear mention -- Philo and Josephus particularly.

I'm not very impressed by the extremely subjective "this one should have" approach, though. Maybe it's just the physicist in me, but I like to have objective assertions and facts to wrap my head around.

The way I see it, the argument is a valid one: if Jesus existed as the gospels describe, his deeds or the deeds of his followers would have been mentioned by the given set of writers; neither his deeds nor those of his followers were mentioned by the given set; therefore, Jesus probably did not exist as the gospels describe. On the minor premise I think there is no significant debate. The major premise is the big question, though. I think, however, that it can be posed objectively, rather than being based entirely on subjective opinion.

In order to say that Jesus would have been mentioned, we need to be able to evaluate the notability of the given events described in the New Testament in comparison to the notability of events mentioned by the historians. A statistical analysis will then tell us the probability that the events of the New Testament happened without being noted.

To begin with, we would need a baseline for what documents we will be analyzing. It's silly to base this on the authors themselves, when we can just limit our research to the documents.

Works to include:
•Anything produced before 100 that mentions at least one event in Judea between 25 and 40.
•Anything produced before 100 that mentions at least one religious controversy in Jerusalem between 40 and 70.
•Anything produced before 100 that mentions at least one religious controversy in one of the cities Acts records Paul traveling to around the time he supposedly traveled there.

Exclude all other works.

Use a comparative ranking system to rank the events described in the included documents based on the notability of the events. Develop a curve that relates textual rarity to notability (notable events happen more rarely, but more common events are individually less likely to get recorded).

At this point, all you have to do is plug the events described in the NT into the notability/textual mention curve. How many events of similar notability were happening at that time, and what percentage of those events actually got mentioned in the documents surveyed? That will provide the probability that the New Testament is bogus.

Unless we have that sort of objective study, though, all we have to deal with is the subjective "well so-and-so should have mentioned Jesus" drivel that convinces no one except the person saying it.

Steven Carr

We do get a lot of people patiently explaining why a credible person is a person who does not even expect there to be evidence of the existence of Jesus.

As it happens, the author of 2 Peter wrote about Paul. Not first century, but some evidence that Paul had written letters.

Where did Tacitus and Josephus get there information about Jesus, bearing in mind that credible people pour scorn on the idea that anybody would have written about Jesus?


'Please tell me which first century writers you expect would have written about Paul or Jesus. List their date of death, date of birth, place of birth, and the places they lived.'


Gosh, people even want provenance.

They'll even start wondering about who wrote the Gospels next, and about the provenance of the Gospels - works universally held to be exempt from any questions about their provenance, as they are in the Bible.