arnoldo

He actually refused to answer this question when posed by the the chief priests. . .

ApostateAbe

That is a good point. It speaks to the possibility that Jesus really did keep silent about where his information came from, at least silent with respect to the public.

aa5874

Do not FORGET that it was the OFFSPRING of the Holy Ghost who REFUSED to answer the question.

It is EXTREMELY important TO REMEMBER who Jesus was in the synoptic Gospels.

See Matthew 1.18-20 and Luke 1.26-35

Sheshbazzar

The greater possibility is not that Jesus kept silent about his information,
rather that 'Jesus' never spoke a single word to anyone about anything;
because there never was any 'Jesus Christ' outside of the writers imaginations.
Simple, and with "The best explanatory power".

What did Clark Kent ever 'speak' about to anyone?

ApostateAbe

OK. How do you go about deciding which conclusions of history are more probable than others? Are your opinions influenced in some part by historical patterns? If so, how do I have the wrong idea of historical patterns in my argument?

Sheshbazzar

Very little within the Bible is real history, mostly just a string of fantastic tales composed by an ancient society, with a Middle Eastern setting (naturally) being the only one they were somewhat familiar with, and even then the stories are full of anachronisms and muddled 'history' resulting from attempts to place the stories and writings into time periods far earlier than their actual dates of composition.
Do you also accept '1000 Arabian Nights' and the tale of "Ali Babba And The Forty Thieves" as being historical?

As a witness The Bible perjures itself. It has been caught in dozens of false statements, errors, and willful distortions of historical fact. It has proven itself to be untrustworthy and unfit as witness.
Thus you have NO case unless you can provide a credible contemporary witness to these claimed religious 'historical' events outside of these fabricated Biblical texts; Not one sentence of which is to be trusted.
The testimony of a perjured false witness cannot be employed to validate that same witnesses testimony.

Sheshbazzar

Are my opinions influenced in some part by historical patterns?
Certainly, as I previously pointed out the shaman's and priests of every primitive and ancient society spoke, without exception for their gods. to con, and to control their societies.
There is not one iota of evidence that any god has ever once spoken for itself.
Religions and holy books that make such claims, invariably prove to be fraudulent fabrications.
On what basis is one to accept any of the contents of these fraudulent fabrications, outrageous claims, and outright lies as a valid trustworthy source of human 'history' ?
Do you likewise trust the contents of The Book of Mormon as a valid source of history?
If not, Why not?
An attempt to construct a religions history using the Bible as building material is like trying to construct a castle using shit for the bricks.




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aa5874

You have ALREADY stated that we cannot TRUST the NT Gospels so you cannot even attempt make any conclusions of history based on the NT.

The NT Gospels has the same face value as MYTH and Fiction which support the theory that the Jesus character was ONLY BELIEVED to have existed but was NOT.

Any ATTEMPT to claim that Jesus, described as the child of a Ghost and a woman, was ACTUALLY human with a human father COMPOUNDS your PROBLEM.

You have in effect DISCREDITED your source.

If Jesus a man with a human father then the birth narratives in Matthew 1.18 and Luke 1.35 are FALSE.

What else is false in the Gospels ? Why are the Gospels history?

Perhaps the Entire story.

ApostateAbe, you have ONLY one choice just PROVIDE a credible historical source for your Jesus and stop wasting time with sources WE CAN'T TRUST for historical purposes.

You know if Jesus just a man that the NT is NOT Credible and cannot be trusted.

ApostateAbe

Just as a right-thinking judge generally would not take the testimony of a perjury-prone witness as significant evidence of what reality is not, so I think we should be careful of the a priori antipathy that seems to have you strongly lean toward the belief that any given historical claim in the Christian canon is more likely to be wrong just because it is in the Christian canon. I am not suggesting that the alternative is to trust the canon. I am saying that we should be leaving our dogmas out of it if we want to make fair judgments of history. And, there are ways to do that. I do not accept any of the claims in the Book of Mormon, because we really can make the best sense of it with the hypothesis that it is all 19th-century invention. What is the way to make the best sense of the New Testament? Is it more likely explained as the product of one man's imagination, as aa5874 or mountainman may propose? Is it completely the product of gradually-evolving myth that was all historically late, as PhilosopherJay or stephan huller or Doug Shaver may propose? Did have its origins very early, as spin may propose? All of these hypotheses use the Christian canon as evidence. They certainly don't trust the claims within the canon, but they use the canon as evidence all of the same. Some of them have that certain dogma--"We can't possibly accept any historical conclusion if our only evidence is Christian writing." There are a few historians who do history that way ("minimalists," as they are known). But, it is a dogma, and it is driven by an anti-religious or anti-Biblicist bent, not by reason. If we disbelieve all of the canonical claims, then we do it because that is the way to make the best sense of the history, not just because the canonical documents have the demonstrated capacity to contain falsehoods, or else we would be treating the claims contained within every historical document with the same dogmatically-skeptical derision, as they all contain some degree of falsehood. Some minimalists really do that, and of course it needlessly spirals into a postmodernist non-position of almost no historical knowledge at all.

spin

Stop the biased presentation and get that last statement accurate: "There is no way to accept any historical conclusion if our only evidence is an untested text."

If you can't live with that then you are meddling with things that are not relevant to you, ie history.

ApostateAbe, you are talking utter drivel, when you claim to understand "minimalism". Where is the dogma in minimalism? It is historical research applied to biblical issues and the only people who object to it are those people who have dogma.

E-.