sotto voce

Very good.

mountainman

Historical truth cannot be constructed from transcendental evidence. The Jews had their holy book stolen, Hellenized, encrypted and bound to the New Testament of the One True Monotheistic Roman Empire God, who was incarnated inside the Roman Empire, and not the Indian or Persian or Chinese or Barbarian empire or even from the Great Southern Land.

Bilbo Jesus Baggins can be Jewish is you want him to be, but my advice is to check out the military credentials of the major publisher. War was a racket.

Adam

Why, indeed! Had he done that, he might have gotten himself arrested, tried, flogged, and crucified.

stephan huller

Read origen's against celsus for god's sake! jews could not mistake jesus for the messiah because nothing about him was messianic. Hearing uninformed people "debate" this is insufferable. Its like the drunk, horny guy at the bar mistaking every bit of eye contact from a woman no matter how accidental as a "come hither" request

sotto voce

But transcendental evidence confounds history, doesn't it. Ever since the guilty silence of history was pointed out, people have been trying to explain it away. The verdict is that light came into the world, but the world pretended it wasn't there.

sotto voce

Quite; he was just an artisan, like the guy who fixed my kitchen floor, whose name I can't remember.

mountainman

This verdict was rigged by the theologians. A study of the secondary causes (See Gibbon above) indicates that a great Christian darkness came upon the world in the 4th century and extinguished the light of the Greek civilisation for well over 1000 years.

The world has pretended that the great Christian 4th century darkness of persecution and intolerance wasn't there, and that the "Good Early Christians" frollicked in the pre-Nicaean seas for 300 years just like Hans Eusebius Anderson's "Little Mermaid". This is a fairy story, just like Big Jay and the ascension to the Mother Ship.

sotto voce

The only theologians with the appropriate motive are unknown before the 14th century. And they were mostly burned, drowned and hanged. Where the light was not ignored, it was extinguished wherever possible, with a cardboard cutout erected in its place.

J-D

By that kind of logic, couldn't one also argue that if there really were any historical methodology of any kind that was valid in any context, then one would expect some agreement among historians? But historians continually disagree with each other. If disagreement among historians is sufficient evidence to invalidate their methodologies, how does it not follow that all study of history is invalidated?

And if this sort of argument against the possibility of meaningful study of history is justified, doesn't the same sort of argument apply to other fields of study as well? Which fields of study are there where the practitioners aren't continually disagreeing with each other?

A more sensible line of reasoning is to say that where people disagree, they can't all be wholly correct; but that's not enough reason to conclude that they must all be equally in error.

No Robots

It is not surprising that a charismatic teacher would inspire his followers to think of him as the Messiah, despite the fact that he does not have the requisite attributes. Indeed, we have the very recent example of Schneerson.