John Deere

Juliana:

Odd things is Carrota also gets upset when I misspell his name. He has trouble with mine sometimes as well.

Joe

Johann_Kaspar

:huh:
http://www.iidb.org/vbb/showpost.php...3&postcount=86
http://www.iidb.org/vbb/showpost.php...4&postcount=92

John Deere

Spin:

Let's try a different tack. When you say Habbakuk tests "wholly" to pre1Ce what do you mean?

Joe

Johann_Kaspar

And one more question for Joe:
Do you know Hebrew?

John Deere

Johann;

There was not a single question, only comments, in your posts.

Joe

John Deere

Johann:

Yes, I have heard of it.

Joe

spin

The date range provided by C14 puts Pesher Habakkuk into the 1st c. BCE claiming a 95% accuracy.

Perhaps you are prepared to try to bring down the validity of C14 testing in general to rescucitate a 1st c. CE dating for Pesher Habakkuk.


spin

John Deere

Spin:

What do you mean by 95% accuracy?

Joe

John Deere

Spin:

FYI. Next I am going to ask you what you mean by "wholly".

Joe

John Deere

Johann:

Someone has posted as interesting reveiw of Caesar's Messiah on Amazon.com. Given your skeptical attitude I thought you might find it interesting.



Explains WHY Christianity arose in the first place, September 27, 2005
Reviewer: Paul Lauderbach (Latin America) - See all my reviews
In my view, the greatest contribution of Joseph Atwill's book _Caesar's Messiah_ is not just that it offers a brilliant collation of the gospels and the works of the author known as Josephus, but that it offers a cogent explanation for why Christianity arose in the first place. Please bear with me as I explain why this is the case.

First, a little background will help you see that I am not predisposed to oppose Christianity. In fact, I am active in Christian work. By training, I am a linguist. By profession, I am a translator and editor of Christian works of various kinds, both popular and scholarly. I have translated a number of works into Spanish, and edited hundreds more, including study Bibles and a Bible atlas. I am currently serving as a missionary engaged in the translation of the Bible into one of the many native languages of Latin America. In addition to this professional activity, I read a lot of history and books critical of the traditional evangelical Christian understanding of the Bible. I came to a point where I decided that pursuing the truth, however uncomfortable, was better that blindly adhering to demonstrably false dogmatic assertions about the Bible and Christianity.

Over the years, my professional work and my personal reading have caused me to become aware of many of the inconsistencies and even absurdities of the Bible. Nevertheless, I continue to believe that the Bible has positive moral and social values. And, until recently, I have believed that it generally follows, at least in broad terms, an accurate outline of history. Sure, David may not have killed Goliath (2 Samuel 21:19), but he was a great king, and his son Solomon was even greater. Likewise, there were some contradictions in the accounts of the events following Jesus' resurrection, but he was in fact resurrected and his sacrifice had secured salvation for all who would believe in him.

However, in the case of the Hebrew Scriptures, archeological work and the analysis of its findings has reached a stage at which it can be shown that even the broad outline of Israel's history presented in the Bible is not accurate (see, for example, _The Bible Unearthed: Archaeology's New Vision of Ancient Israel and the Origin of its Sacred Texts_ by Israel Finkelstein and Neil Asher Silberman, New York: The Free Press, 2001). David and Solomon were, at best, local chieftains, petty kings of the kind common in ancient Palestine and its vicinity. They built no grand palaces, erected no monumental temple. All of this was wishful thinking projected backward in time by exilic or post-exilic writers seeking to bolster their cause and the morale of their people.

In the case of the New Testament, scholarly work (for example, _The Five Gospels: What Did Jesus Really Say?_ by Robert W. Funk, Roy W. Hoover and The Jesus Seminar, HarperSanFrancisco, 1993, and _The Lost Gospel: The Book of Q and Christian Origins_ by Burton L. Mack, HarperSanFrancisco, 1993) has shown that little, if anything, can be known about a man known as Jesus of Nazareth. Maybe he existed, maybe he didn't. Maybe he had a band of counter-cultural followers, may he didn't. But however that may be, it is absolutely certain that the narratives in the gospels about his life, death and resurrection are not based on actual historical events.

Christianity has a great deal more in common with the so-called "mystery religions" that abounded in the Roman Empire than with the Hebrew Scriptures which it allegedly fulfills. How, then, did it get started? Why would "Saint" Paul/Saul of Tarsus have gone to the trouble of trying to graft yet another mystery religion onto Judaism? Weren't there enough mystery religions around already? What need was there to link one to the faith of the notoriously independent Jewish people? Anyone who wanted could convert to Judaism anyway, and many did. Why "fix" it to attract more converts? Or even just to give the Jews a new "flavor" of their traditional faith?

This is where Joe Atwill's book comes in. Mr. Atwill finally provides an answer to the "why" of Christian origins. In brief, Christianity was created by the Flavian emperor Titus and propagated using taxpayer denarii in order to solve a problem of "national security." What was the nature of the threat to the security of the Empire--or at least one of its eastern provinces? A fanatical messianic movement that attracted hordes of malcontents willing to kill anyone who stood in the way of their goal (God-ordained, in their view) of political and religious independence. This group is known as the Zealots or Sicarii.

After fighting a prolonged war against the Sicarii (ca. 67-73 C.E.), the Roman authorities decided that it would be more effective to create a new "strain" of Judaism that promoted pacifism and paying taxes. They would then "inject" this "strain" into the ignorant masses from which the majority of Sicarii came, and thus wipe out the "infection" of fanatical, religiously motivated nationalism. As it happened, this new, peaceful religion succeeded beyond the wildest dreams of the Flavians, and one of the world's major religions was born.

I started my reading of this book in chapter 11, which deals with Josephus' famous _Testimonium,_ the passage touted by Christians as being virtually the only near-contemporary testimony to Jesus' life outside of the New Testament. I picked this chapter based on another review that highly recommended it. As I read, I found myself frequently chuckling at what a great joke the Romans had put over on the world. As I read through the rest of the book, I was again and again amazed at the ingenuity of the authors of much of the New Testament and Josephus.

One of the notable merits of Atwill's work is that he points out in several places that his hypotheses are falsifiable (e.g., on p. 145: "My theory is also solid in the sense that it is so easily _disprovable_" [emphasis in original]) and he invites readers to do their own analyses in order to test his. This sets his work above that of the "lunatic fringe" of religion and other fields (e.g., _Chariots of the Gods_). I recommend that people such as Bob Turkel (alias James Patrick Holding) take Atwill up on his challenge instead of dismissing his work by deliberately misreading it and nitpicking at unfortunate but ultimately inconsequential and easily corrected errors such as the attribution of John the Baptist's words to Jesus (p. 296).

To be sure, Atwill's work needs to be integrated with broader New Testament scholarship, such as Q studies and Dennis MacDonald's work on the Homeric influence on their composition. I don't think there are any irresoluble conflicts among these approaches; they just need to be brought together.

I am grateful to Joe Atwill for the painstaking work he has done on this topic, and for being willing to stick his neck out to publish it. It will certainly be the target of plenty of attacks from those unwilling to face its implications.

I heartily recommend _Caesar's Messiah_ to everyone interested in Christianity or in Western civilization in general. And I hope that, as enough people read it and absorb its implications, it may serve to reduce the abuse of conservative Christianity by certain right-wing politicians in the United States. Titus was not the first to use religion to manipulate the masses, and he certainly wasn't the last!