darstec

And like the proverbial broken clock, Roger finally gets one right! Although the time in question in my opinion is closer to the mid second century CE, other collaborators certainly might have written about the walking dead, and their writings could very well have disappeared.

As we know, by the time Christians gained the upper hand by being thralls of Constantine, they had free rein to kill their opponents and destroy their opponents literature. Ergo, if the topic was written about, in the negative that is, one should expect to see exactly what Roger maintains, the literature was destroyed, or simply not copied.

However it would be preposterous to maintain that those very Christians would let the evidence for their god to go uncopied, most especially if that evidence was provided by non Christians or heretical Christians.

Thank you Roger for such a clear synopis of the problem. You solved it neatly -- the evidence never existed in favor of the walking dead.

Malachi151

BTW, here is a copy of my presentation (minus the commentary that goes along wiht it of course)

http://www.iidb.org/vbb/showpost.php...21&postcount=8

jjramsey

And who did the renaming? Christians under Constantine would be a dodgy choice, given the timeline. Why don't the stories of Constantine's mother finding Nazareth mention anything about having to change the name of the town "back" to Nazareth after the Jews or heathens had called it something else? That leaves the Jews to do the renaming, and why would they happen to rename it such that its name is the same as a place in the Gospels?

Paging Mr. Occam ...

aa5874

In fact, the book called Matthew is an embarassment. I hope it will be de-cannonised as soon as possible.

jeffevnz

Nevermind records. The notion of a star guiding you to a particular stable or even a town doesn't make sense.

jeffevnz

The event would have been shocking to a rational person, but most people aren't rational. You gotta remember, most people back then, just like most people now, believe in all kinds of weird crap; ghosts, aliens, angels, God(s), etc. I don't think the majority of people at any time would be too terribly shocked to hear about something like this actually happening. They may not even be able to distinguish it from the fairy tales they hear and already believe in.

I agree that we should have a much greater expectation of finding surviving testimony of walking zombies than something mundane, but I think you overstate the conclusiveness of the silence on the walking zombies.

I should add, IMO, that the contradiction of natural law is more than enough to rule out this event.

Mythra

And about a hundred other events as described in the bible.

It's kind of humorous that we even have to talk about the dead coming out of their graves as though there is the slightest possibility that it actually occurred.

The sad thing is that so many people still buy every word as though it were gospel truth.

Malachi151

Interestingly, however, Matthew was given the prominent position in the Bible because it was viewed as the most important book. Matthew has become the basis of most Christian beliefs about the story of Jesus.

Malachi151

It is essential, however, to take this approach. If we just discount it as impossible based on it being supernatureal then it doesn't do anything for those people, including many secular liberals, who hold out the possibility that "supernatural" things can/could happen.

The issue is not whether or not this conforms to out understanding of nature, the whole story is anti-natural, the issue is evidence. If all this stuff did happen, and "we aren't saying that it *couldn't have*", where is the evidence?

The thing is, is that there are several claims made in the Bible, about 10 in the gospels and more in Acts, that, if they really happened, we would expect then to have been documented by other people. Out of all these events, not a single one is documented anywhere outside the Bible.

Its not just that one or that one isn't documented, its that NONE are documented.

In addition, we know that if these things were wirtten about by anyone back then, the early Christians such as Origin would have siezed on it.

In addition to all that, when we get to Acts and many of the other later Christian writings we have a large number of stories about all of these people going out into the wold and engaging on a large scale healing campaign.

According to the Christians, there was a revolution in health and healing based on the teachings of Jesus. We see no evidecne of this whatsoever. No one wrote about a new wave of healing in the cities, asside from the Christians, there is no evidence that mortality rates declined during this period. There has been no lasting advantage from these "healing arts". In fact, health and medicine declined with the rise of Christianity, they didin't improve. We know, for a fact, that mortality rates increased from the time that Christianity came to power until the revival of science.

So, I think that its importnat not to just discount Christian claims because they are "supernatural", but to look for evidence that the claims are true. We can prove that there is no evidence for these claims, and in that some cases there is evidence that contradicts these claims.

jjramsey

There is also this matter that if one rejects accounts of the supernatural solely because they are supernatural, then one has made unfalsifiable one's position that the supernatural doesn't happen.