ApostateAbe

Welcome to the forum. The divine origins of the NT would be another debate. It is not just that Peter is claimed to have existed by the NT. In the epistle to the Galatians, Peter is a character in Paul's account of a bitter theological dispute about whether or not uncircumcised gentiles should be fully accepted as members of the church. Peter (Cephas) would not sit with the gentiles at a meal, and Paul writes that he confronted Peter to his face and said that he stood condemned. There is no conceivable reason that either Paul or anyone else would just make this up. The plausible and explicit Christian interest was to portray the apostles as unified behind a single doctrine, as we see in the book of Acts (in which Peter starts out disagreeing with Paul but comes around to Paul's way of thinking beautifully).

outhouse

becauze thats not how history or scholarships work.

Its not that easy.


it would do you wise to study what scholarship actuially is

sotto voce

Is there some inherent defect about religions that makes them invalid as factual sources?

SkyGuy

I would say yes, because no one, even among the believers, can agree on what they say, or what they "mean". It seems to be that either you need divine inspiration to understand how to get around inconsistancies, or they are just stories told to explain more emotional stands than rational ones.

outhouse

false all of it

smeat75

"Is there some inherent defect about religions that makes them invalid as factual sources?"

If you are looking at a document full of stories of people raising others from the dead, being released from prison by angels, wandering around the world performing signs and wonders and miracles and so on it is reasonable to question whether those events ever happened and if anything narrated in those documents is credible.

SkyGuy

Do you mean the texts or my post?

spin

It's not a factor of religion per se. The issue is the nature of a tradition. Once information enters a tradition it loses whatever its prior status was. There is no tangible way of separating fact from non-fact once it has been drawn into the tradition. For centuries the vast majority of writers of past events were more hagiographers and purveyors of traditions. Just look at works such as those by Geoffrey of Monmouth. Once something is tradition it loses any historicity it may have had and becomes a part of a story of the past. It's hard to say when a datum entered the tradition. Can you say when the woman taken in adultery entered the christian tradition? It isn't in any of the earliest manuscripts, but it was considered kosher by everyone before the time of Erasmus and probably before the 19th century. We need outside help to get some understanding of the developments in a tradition. That's how we learnt of the status of the adultery story. Extractable history is not to be found in a tradition.

smeat75

There were many competing ideas in the early church, weren't there? It is at least conceivable that "Paul" and "Peter" were invented as personifications of the theological communities whose ideas the characters promote and that there were never such actual people.

sotto voce

Peter and James were apostles, plural. Still no problem.

But Marcion did not claim authorship.

Exactly. Propaganda is free! You tend to get what you pay for.

Why do people spend $10,000+ on expertise, if they can get it all on Wiki? You could spend your whole life correcting the religious entries of Wiki, because there is an abundance of falsehoods in them, and someone would reinstate the falsehoods before very long. It's Stalinist.

Oh, right. Like Peter and Paul, then.

Why is that improbable, if Paul was an apostle of the creator?

One must avoid circularity.

That does not mean that they did not also speak Greek koine, the regional lingua franca, or even Latin, having been occupied by Rome for fifty years. They evidently knew and loved Graeco-Roman deities, anyway.