Johnny Skeptic

Suffice it to say that if God was marking a trail in the first century, he wasn't much of a boy scout. A good boy scout will mark a trail so that people can easily find him. There is nothing easy about finding God, but it ought to be if he exists.

Amaleq13

Your "position", specifically with regard to the crucifixion being derived from Hebrew Scripture, has already been shown to be without merit and you've yet to offer anything credible or substantive to the contary. Rather than attempt to intelligently address the issue, you choose to simply repeat your cherished belief once again. What a surprise.

aa5874

These are some of the verses from Hebrew Scripture used in the Gospels' crucufixion scenes for Jesus, son of a ghost: Psalms 26.6, 109.25, 69.21, 22.18, 22.8, Joshua 2.19, Zechariah 12.10, and Isaiah 53.12, 50.6.

And if you want the last words of Jesus to be, " My God, My God, why hast thou forsaken me?" as in g Matthew and gMark, you could refer to Psalms 22.1, "My God, My God, why hast thou forsaken me?".

Or if you want the final words of Jesus to be, ' Father, into thine hands I commend my spirit, " as written in gLuke, then you make reference to Psalms 31.5, "Into thine hands I commit my spirit."

There appears to be no historical accounts of this Jesus, son of Mary and the Holy Ghost, even the most distinguished Church Father, Eusebius, could not get his date of birth right.

Amaleq13

Unfortunately for your "position", none is credible as the source of belief in a crucified messiah. Are you even aware that nothing in your post actually supports your "position"?

Antipope Innocent II

Gregory Vlastos. He devotes part of a chapter in his Socrates: Ironist and Moral Philosopher (or via: amazon.co.uk) to the question of how we can separate a historical Socrates from the literary figure in Plato's works and if we can say a historical Socrates exists at all.

The Jesus Seminar took 14 years to produce their final report on what they thought were likely to be genuine words of Jesus. So I take it that it will be okay to get back to you in 2021?

Such as, dear chap?

How the hell can a provisional position be "overly dogmatic"?

Quips often strike me as an appropriate way to deal with someone whose online debating tactic consists of posting with affected weariness and pretentious lofty condescension.

Toto

Thanks for the reference. I guess it took you a while to find this.

Take your time.

Easy. You harshly ridicule people who have not reached the same provisional position.

I appologize. The weariness is not affected. This is a part time unpaid job, and when I find people who jump in here and start repeating arguments that I've heard for the last seven-odd years, with nothing new to say, it sometimes takes a lot of effort to keep going.

Antipope Innocent II

No - I've been travelling on business for the last week, which is why I haven't posted here for a while.

Some early posts by me did come across that way. I accepted that this was so and assured you that I'd make sure I didn't post in that style again. I've not done so since that I can tell.

The weariness may not be affected, but the tone of condescension that seems to derive from it doesn't seem to be. I've looked back over many of oft-repeated arguments on these topics here and have found that, while they are oft-repeated, they certainly aren't definitively settled one way or the other in any of them that I can see. So waving newer posters away to check the archives as though their points have been already answered is not exactly honest debating. Weary certainly, but to pretend that these things have somehow been settled here long ago is inaccurate.

mountainman

There is nothing easy in finding anything about the
christian god in the first century, or the second, or
indeed the third century. It's a totally different
story however in the fourth century, when god
is in everyone's face.

The explosion of evidence concerning the christian
god in the fourth century, and the paucity of the
same --- rather, according to my research, the
same lack as in the first century --- in the Pre-
Nicene Epoch, someday someone is going to
have to begin a check that the whole shooting
match did not enter the world out of a supreme
imperial sponsorship in the fourth century, and
no earlier alas.


Pete Brown

Roger Pearse

I do understand, but I think that perhaps this is a little hard on Toto.

I've been online for 10 years now, and I have seen some stuff so many times that I could scream. What I try to remember is that, to the newbies posting, this is new and fresh and exciting. We were all cubs once, after all. Unfortunately their very innocence means that they assert with the utmost dogmatism things that we have all grown rather stale over. It can be nearly impossible to reason with them. I'm human too. How many times can I post gently and respectfully that (e.g.) the canon of the NT was actually not decided at Nicaea before the urge to say something summary kicks in?

On the other hand there are people who have been posting for years, and have simply ignored every correction and refused to find out, yet still post what by now is certainly a lie. There seems no pressing reason not to treat these people as vermin.

The problem is that doing so tends to spill over into how we deal with everyone. Most newbies are human, after all. If you cut them, do they not bleed?

All the best,

Roger Pearse

Antipope Innocent II

Not really. If he's seen certain topics so many times he's weary of them, that's understandable. I've been online for 15 years, so I've seen plenty of topics I know a fair bit about done over and over and over again. But the solution I adopt is to simply not bother posting to topics I've seen done to death and am totally bored with. No-one has a gun at Toto's head forcing him to post.

I simply tell them the canon wasn't even discussed at Nicea and invite them to produce evidence that proves them wrong - that usually does the trick.

But it's not like I'm a newbie to the JM debate and the weary condescension of spin and Toto in this thread is, at best, laziness and, at worst, a cheap tactic. Spin uses arguments against a historical Jesus and then plays tricksy games when I (quite reasonably) assume he's a JMer. Okay, he's not, as it turns out - but he's still a non-HJer. It was easier for both spin and Toto to sneer that spin wasn't a JMer than to bother making his (marginally different) position clear. Not that it made a speck of difference to what we were discussing anyway.

If Toto is too bored to bother discussing things without that kind of sloppy condescension he should feel free to simply moderate. I moderated a forum for five years and saw the same topics come up over and over. If they bored me, I didn't contribute to them. And I sure and hell didn't talk down to the participants for whom they were not boring at all, even if they were saying things I disagreed with.