patcleaver

They should discount the bible - it is just fiction - it has no historic reliability at all.

This is irrelevent. What does some historian have to do with fictional works like the books in the Bible.

Fiction is more popular than biography - nothing new here.

Dozzens of famous Christian scholars have already admitted that the Testamonium Flavium is just another Christian fraud.

This is not relevent. Mark is fiction. Both Josephus and Tacitus are well know for repeating fictional tails.

We know Jesus never existed because Mark is fiction and Matthew and Luke copied Mark and John tries to resolve differences between Matthew and Luke. Jesus is just a fictional character in a fictional story just like Harry Potter or Luke Skywalker.

In their hearts all Christians apologists know that Jesus never existed. The only response I have ever seen from the Christian apologists regarding this factual statement is useless ad hominem. That is absolute proof that Jesus never existed.

patcleaver

The wide spread persecution of Christians in the Roman Empire is just a Myth. It was the Christians who forced their religion on the pagans of the Roman Empire by fire and sword.

After the Christians conspired and murdered Julianus, they were in complete control, but they never tried to factually refuit Julianus because he spoke the truth.

It is really funny to hear a Christian attempt to smear the Pontifex Maximus by claiming that he was involved with neoPlato sun God worship and practicing ritual magic when the Christianity itself is just neoPlato sun God worship and the sacraments and prayer are all just ritual magic.

patcleaver

Textual dating (paleontological dating) is only used by historians to establish the earliest date that a work may have been written. When an historian says that some work is textually dated to 120 CE, he just means that it was written after 120 CE. It could have been written anytime later than that date - even hundreds of years later. Forgery of ancient documents has always been rampant. For aesthetic reasons, copiers often copied documents in ancient textual styles, so all you can really say is that the document was written after that style was first introduced.

For example, textual dating determined that the Khaburis Codex was from 120 CE. Later it was carbon dated to between 1040 and 1090 CE.

BTW, the oldest carbon dated copy of the Gospels is the Khaburis Codex dated 1040 and 1090 CE, and there is no reasonable evidence of what the gospels said before that date.

There may be some fragments that were carbon dated earlier. Do you know of any earlier carbon dated fragments of the Gospels?

George S

Forgive me butting in, my friends, but it is neither a reliable historic source, nor fiction.

Fiction is sometimes written with a moral to the story, but, more often than not it is a confabulation of the conflicts in the human condition. But everyone knows it is just a story. Aesop's Fables, Grimm's Fairy Tales.

There is another kind of fiction that contains historically accurate data. It is the historical novel. Set in the real past with fictional characters. The places are real, the words, acts and deeds of the protagonists fiction, with cameo appearances by known characters from the time.

The Bible (and Koran) go quite beyond being historical novels, although in many ways they are. They explicitly deny the fictitious nature of the writing and claim all is fact. It was written, not as an historic novel, but as a story with a moral. Its purpose not to entertain or even provide insight but to expose the moral of the story. Learn how to be good and social in a social society: just follow these complex rules to the letter (Pharisees) or take a big picture view and follow the moral principles (Christianity). But in the cases of the Torah, Bible and Koran, the intent is entirely social order through authority at the expense of justice and individual rights.

Those who reject the Bible by labeling it "fiction" are being a little shallow. It has served a noble purpose in providing a sense of unity and belonging, being in a group that shares a common morality and common purpose.

These are a good thing in small groups. When the authority idea is taken to extreme we get Crusades, Inquisitions, Jihads and Zionism. With groups this large unity thinking can be positively dangerous.

What we need is a Bible-like text we can rally round for unity. When that text is a constitution we get patriotic fervor. When that text is religious we get the British Protestant soldiers killing Catholic children without shame.

How can we get the unity that Bible-like texts provide without the drawbacks of religion?

aa5874

This Jesus in Josephus was some kind of a ghost type creature. How did he manage to be actually dead and then resurrect himself and fly to heaven? Josephus' Jesus cannot be real.

I don't see how you could confuse the name Jesus with Christus. And where does Tacitus write that Christus was crucified? And by the way, Pilate did not regard Jesus as a criminal, according to the NT.
Luke 23.4,"Then said Pilate to the chief priests and to the people, I find no fault in this man".
Pilate even tried to release Jesus in exchange for a known murderer,Barabbas, according to Mark 15.7

So if Pilate considered Christus a criminal, this is another indication that Christus was not Jesus as described in the NT.

And I accept that the birth of Jesus, the offspring of the Holy Ghost, is total fiction.

patcleaver

Pope just means father, and it was common to call anyone in authority father. The point was that Julian was the Pontifex Maximus which is the official title of the Catholic Pope.

In ancient Rome, a pontiff was the head of a religious group and all the pontiffs would meet (called the College of Pontiffs) and resolve disputes and agree to rules that applied to all the religions. The head of the collage was called the Pontifex Maximus. When Julius Caesar became the first emperor (60 BCE), he took over the collage and became the Pontifex Maximus. The Roman emperors regularly used the title Pontifex Maximus until the 5th century CE. There is only one example of the bishop of Rome ever using that title in ancient times (that was in 377 CE) and lots of examples of emperors using the title until well into the 5th century.

We know that the gospel of Judas existed in 280 CE. We do not know whether readers thought it was fiction or not.

We do not know whether the Canonical gospels were written prior to that date. All we really know about the date that various versions of the Canonical gospels were written, is that they were written before the earliest version that are carbon dated.

I do not know of any Canonical gospels carbon dated to a date before the Khaburis Codex of 1040 and 1090 CE. I think that date is amazingly late. If you know of any earlier carbon testing dates of Canonical gospels please post them.

these were in response to an obvious bald faced lie that "Bigfoot and Loch Ness monster, and crop circles, etc, have been demonstrated to be frauds. The Hebrew God has no such evidence against him."

George S

There were, at that time, a number of Christian sects. They had as their godhead someone who had been Anointed. That is what the title "Christus" is: Anointed. And, as luck would have it, not all of these Anointed ones went by the name of Yeshua. Another went by the name of Mithras. There were other lesser known ones too. Any historic reference to very early Christians, before Nicea, must include an indication of which Anointed figure was meant if we want to know beyond a doubt what they really were referring to.

aa5874

I just want to make it clear that Tacitus did not write in Annals 15.44, that Yeshua of anywhere, was crucified by Pilate.

Yellum Notnef

[QUOTE=George Hathaway;5018166]Ding! Ding! Ding! Wait for it........

The one man anti-Mithra crusade should be here any minute now.

GakuseiDon

Well, thank goodness someone is doing it. I think anyone who provides corrections to misinformation like that should be commended, personally.