Vorkosigan

When he does, I hope his position is more than "you guys haven't really looked at the evidence" and "you must be dishonest."

Chili

Nobody here actually doubts that you claim to be a Christian but the problem is that Jesus himself did not become Christ until after the actual crucifixion and resurrection. You may have noticed that Jesus was never addressed as Christ in the Gospels and did not become fully Christ until he spoke the words "it is finished." After this, please take note, doubt had to be removed wherefore Thomas needed to be convinced and when all doubt was removed Thomas exclaimed "my Lord and my God" at which time Peter was defrocked and had no faith left.

So when you say that you are a believer you already tell the keen observer that you are not a Christian because believers have doubt and if believers can go to heaven doubters can go to heaven . . . which would be wrong in view of the many Christians that have died in the Lord and have enjoyed heaven on earth (Rev. 14:13).

Degrees of honesty mean nothing. It is your 'wounds' (metaphor) that count.

Chili

The above proves the mythical Jesus without even a shadow of doubt!

Happy New Year aChristian and you best go back to the drawing board.

josephpalazzo

I disagree. I would say that Darth Vader is more credible as a historical person. In fact anyone wearing black has more credibility.

But more to the point, you believe what you want to believe. To those who believe in GOD/JESUS, I say, good for you. To those who don't believe, I say, good for you. Everyone is entitled to his/her opinions.

Be good to each other.

Skeptical

Your probably right. Too bad, this was starting to get interesting.

aChristian

I have studied it. The rabbis who translated it had also probably studied it. Since they were probably more familiar in the Hebrew and Greek of that day than anyone living today, I would assume that they purposely chose 'parthenos' because of the context, not because of an error in their translation capabilities. Parthenos would qualify as a sign up to the heavens or below the earth, young woman would not.

Yep. We're still in them. Jesus is coming again soon. No, I don't know the day or the hour.

You really have no way of knowing that. The pastor involved has a long (50 years) track record of honesty and integrity. There are scam artists and you should be skeptical when someone claims a supernatural occurence, but this doesn't fall into the category of something that you can honestly discount. You can believe that he is lying about this if you want, but that is just blind faith. As one more familiar with the case, I can tell you that your scam theory is nonsense.
This is a telling comment, however on how you are examining the evidence.

I have a question. Do you believe that Eusebius believed that what he wrote was true? Do you think that he was lying? Do you think that he was gullible?


Daniel was written in the 6th century B.C. Here is what I was talking about earlier when I mentioned attempts to late date OT books.
As for your comment on Daniel's prophecies going unfulfilled, to anyone interested, a book by Sir Robert Anderson, The Coming Prince, describes the prophecy of the Messiah's coming on Palm Sunday. There is a summary of it in Josh McDowell's book, 'Evidence that demands a verdict'. There are a lot of conservative commentaries that give good details about fulfilled prophecy given by God to Daniel.


I probably won't be spending too much time on the internet. I have been on a holiday vacation and have been sick. This has given me more time than usual to spend on this site. I will probably still check in now and then. I enjoy debating, but only have so much time. However, I do not debate just for fun. I am convinced of the truth of Christianity and want everyone to know the truth. Heaven and hell are real.

Jobar

Heh. When I first saw aChristian's screen name, I thought it was meant in the same sense as aTheist. Apparently, I was wrong...

I meant this poll as a fairly quick and dirty way to gather stats on the opinions of the many scholars and highly informed laymen who post in BC&H, not as an arena for believers like aChristian to defend literalism. aC, you were told early on that you were and are out of your depth. Plus you haven't voted!

If you wish to defend a literalist interpretation of the NT, feel free to start your own thread to do so; you'll get minced there too, but please cease getting blood all over this one. A suggestion- you might start a poll for HJ believers, breaking them down into literalists/inerrantists, believers in a Divine Jesus who think that the NT isn't inerrant, and believers in HJ who don't consider him divine.

--------------------------

I'm in the process of reviewing Wells' 1986 edition of Did Jesus Exist? and hope to post a selection of quotes from it demonstrating the anhistorical nature of the Christ that Paul preached. Since the epistles of Paul and Acts are the earliest Christian works known, the extremely 'blurry' and impersonal Christ of those works (the closest to any supposed historical Jesus) show, IMO, that neither Paul nor any of the believers he quotes actually knew of any HJ.

Me 'at's off to the experts here, by the bye- I knew we had some mighty impressive scholarship in BC&H, but daaaaaaamn! :notworthy

aChristian

I have read a few papers by scholars listing the reasons that the resurrection and ascension stories do not qualify as something that could be explained as a delusion or an hallucination. Apart from these papers, however, anyone can read the gospel accounts and see that there is no way the disciples could be imagining it. They saw Jesus die and didn't believe he was alive until they saw him with their own eyes because it seemed like nonsense to them. They had to all be imagining the same thing at the same time, including conversations, meals eaten, having Jesus give them another miraculous catch of fish (which I assume they had for a while to confirm their experience), having Jesus miraculously walk through walls, having Jesus cook a meal on the shore for them which they ate when they got ashore, etc. John said that he could have written more about what Jesus did and said, but that the whole world wouldn't have room for the books. Luke said that Jesus showed himself alive after the resurrection with 'many infallible proofs'.

I do not think I am too emotionally committed to the result to prevent my being honest in evaluating the evidence. It is like being on a jury and thinking that the accused is probably guilty because of what you have seen on the news about the crime. If you are honest and are concerned that everyone gets a fair trial because you don't want to mistakenly convict an innocent man, then you can listen to the evidence impartially and give the man a fair trial. It all depends on you honesty. There are cases where you may need to ask to be excused because you feel you cannot be unbiased for some reason, but in this case, I feel I am being unbiased.

No. They could still be eyewitnesses, but need God to help them to remember the exact quote. God could have (and I think probably did) helped each one individually. They might have used a common Q document to get the quote right, but I doubt it since I don't see the historical evidence for a Q document.

There are reputable Biblical scholars who agree with me. I don't doubt it because God tells me so, but because the evidence as I see it is against copying.

I have talked to a lot of people, scholars and janitors alike, about Jesus. I have found that when I talked to them, their faith that Christianity is not true is often based on emotion. I have seen scholars who will be quite careful and rational when discussing other matters, get very emotional and irrational when I hit on the truth that they are trying to deny. I have also found that being a Christian tends to make people more honest and objective, in every area of their life.

If I get more time, perhaps we can stick to one point and follow it through, however, I usually don't have this much time to spend on the computer. I thank you for your time and comments and hopefully I will still be able to log in every now and then.

aChristian

I didn't vote because there weren't any selections that I agreed with.
Thanks for starting the thread.

Diogenes the Cynic

It wasn't supposed to be a "sign" merely because a woman was pregnant, It a marker of time. The woman was already pregnant. "God" was saying, "See that pregnant chick? Before that kid grows up, your enemies will be taken care of."You haven't read the story in context, you're uninformed about it and you're not presenting yourself as anyone who deserves to be taken seriously/ Isaiah 7:14 has no Messianic significance whatsoever and was never intended to.
Ooh...look at me shake.
You got scammed or you misunderstood what you saw or someone is exaggerating. It is impossible to grow back an amputated finger. It didn't happen. As for "examining evidence," you haven't provide any evidence to examine. You told a story on an internet message board. There is no way your story can be evaluated empirically since anybody can make up a story on the internet. but I can state with utter confidence that there wasn't any miracle.
He probably believed most of it.
Let's just say he was not especially rigorous in his skepticism.
Wrong. Daniel contains linguistic and historical markers which date it pretty precisely. It's one of the only books of the Bible that we can nail down virtually to the year. 164 BCE to be exact.
Well, the attempts to date Daniel have been successful. 164 BCE.
McDowell is pretty much a joke.

Daniel was written in the 2nd century BCE and his legitimate attempts at prediction did not come true. Educated people know this. I've heard the apolgies. They're nonsense.
You're probably not going to accomplish much with witnessing around here. Nothing personal but we've heard it many times. I would at least advise you to construct some more sophisticated and knowledgable tactics if you really want to reach anybody. Yelling that "Isaiah predicted a virgin" is not going to impress many people on a board such as this.