aa5874

You mean Jesus believers were totally dishonest people in antiquity? How is it even remotely possible that Jesus believers would just proceed to fabricate stories about a man knowing that it was totally false right in Jesus' hometown and neighborhood?

How could supposedly honest Jesus believers go to Nazareth, Capernaum, Bethsaida, Gadara, Tiberias, Galilee, Jerusalem and just lie about Jesus walking on water, talking to a tree, and then ask Jews to worship him as a God?

Now Jews would not worship a man as a God so for Jesus believers to lie about Jesus claiming he was a God in his hometown would have been just extremely dangerous and suicidal and it would be expected that sect members would have been beaten to a pulp, murdered or stoned to death long before the Fall of the Temple.

Even in the Jesus story, the Jesus character only managed to escape death because he was a God or had supernatural fore-knowledge and the ability to escape or had a predestined time to die or else he would have been stoned to death very, very early.

And in Acts of the Apostles, it was only because the Holy Ghost was with the apostles that they managed to survive. Without the Holy Ghost, the sect would have been quickly destroyed just like Jesus.

If Jesus was just human and Jews knew he was just a man, it made no sense to lie about him to the very Jews in Jesus' hometown and still call yourself an honest Christian.

mountainman

Hi Philosopher Jay,

How could be forget Virgil? In his Oration at Antioch, according to the treatment of Robin Lane-Fox, Constantine himself takes the stand and informs us that the advent of Christ had been predicted by Virgil (70-19 BCE) in a Latin poem, written 40 BCE, to the poet's patron Pollio.

Fox says:

"Constantine cites Latin's loveliest Eclogue to a christian audience for a meaning which it never had." ... Constantine began with the seventh line, in a free Greek translation which changed its meaning"

"Has there ever been such a sequence of misplaced discoveries in a christian sermon, let alone in a speech at the end of a Christian synod?

p.651, Pagans and Christians, Robin Lane-Fox

Some might ask where did Eusebius get his licence to fabricate and lie and falsely present ancient history and ancient texts? The answer, at least to me, appears blatantly obvious. He received such a licence from his imperial sponsor.

spin

Your claim is this:

I treat Nazareth as a special case, because I take it to be pretty much the only name like it.

No argument here. You assume your conclusion. Nothing more need be said. You have no evidence; you don't deal with evidence. You simply declare how it is. This is a fact free approach to debating. This is what preceded your declaration:

You would have to exclude both non-transliterated words and common names. That leaves you only with uncommon names. But you should also exclude uncommon names that were sourced from writing. That leaves you with uncommon names that were sourced from oral myths.

Again, totally fact free nonsense.

The reason why I have aa5874 on ignore is that he will not show any reflection in his comments. This is the same for you. I tell you what you can be dismissive of me and I can put you on ignore. Is that what you want? That way I won't get tempted to hope that you are going to say something that considers evidence and is rationally argued. (I can't really see why you left your religion.)

You haven't supplied any reasons. Go back and look at the stuff you posted. Show me the actual reasoning.

Look at this again:

1. You would have to exclude both non-transliterated words and common names.

This is ambiguous of course because I don't know if the "non-transliterated" also refers to common names, but, assuming it doesn't, no reason is given for excluding common names, if by common names you mean names such as Zadok and Isaac. Next try this:

2. That leaves you only with uncommon names. But you should also exclude uncommon names that were sourced from writing.

Why exclude them (whatever they are that is different from "common names")? Who the fuck knows? There is certainly no reasoning here. To help you, you need to add a few "becauses" or "sinces" with meaningful rationale behind them. Then:

3. That leaves you with uncommon names that were sourced from oral myths.

We get to the payload of your little performance. No evidence. No reasoning. This was a foregone conclusion, yours a priori. And you cannot see what you've done.


spin

spamandham

We *know* the texts were wholesale interpolated and we know the practice was acceptable at the time. Anachronisms fill the NT and noncanonical works. Half the books previously attributed to Paul have been shown by well qualified scholars to be pseudepigrapha, and the remaining texts show signs of rampant rework, referred to as various 'layers' by scholars.

What possible justification is there for your assumption? Don't make me rip Occam's arm off and beat you with the bloody end.

spamandham

How could Paul portray Christ as crucified before their very eyes if he was referring to a historical Roman crucifixion?

2 Cor 3:14 works equally well for the idea that crucifixion is a spiritual concept. That's why i left it unhighlighted.

Well, I was specifically looking at variants of 'crucify' - though looking back over my post I don't think I stated as much. But looking at this passage, don't you find "being found in appearance as a man" a bit out of place?

It seems to me, that Paul uses the word 'crucify' in most instances to mean a spiritual allegiance resulting from the complete abandonment of bodily concerns.

ApostateAbe

Sorry, spin, I should have made my reasons clear. Too often, I forget that my assumptions are not shared with others.

"non-transliterated" -- By far, most words and phrases translated from Aramaic to Greek would not preserve the Aramaic pronunciation, nor would the attempt be made. The preservation of the pronunciation would be made only with names, if only a rough preservation. That is what I have called, "transliteration."

"common names" -- I exclude common Jewish names because there would be a standard among scribes on how to pronounce them and how to transliterate them. We would not expect the name, "Yeshua," to have variations in spelling among authors and scribes, because the standard was established in the LXX (or elsewhere). "Yeshua" was Joshua, an Old Testament hero, and the name remained common.

"uncommon names that were sourced from writing" -- For this, I depend on your authority. If there was a standard of transliterating Semitic characters to Greek, then we would expect all uncommon names that were sourced from writing to be transliterated the same way, even if they are names that the authors never heard any other time in their lives. A bilingual author would know that a written Semitic Tsade is pronounced the same as a Greek Sigma.

But, an uncommon name that comes to a Greek Christian author only through oral tradition, a name of an obscure Galileian hamlet that nobody has heard of--how would you expect that the pronunciation could be preserved through a lineage of Aramaic and Greek speakers, some educated and some not? Would we not expect variations? Do you see the point I am making now? Do you not agree that "Nazareth" should be given special treatment?

spin

I think you mean, you should enunciate your reasons.

You would have been clearer had you said you would consider material that is transliterated rather than translated, which is obvious.

You need in passing to see how they handle the phonological issues, otherwise you have little to gauge your analysis by. We find the notion that Tsade is transliterated as sigma in all common names. This sets up a standard for an oral influence behind the written text. Obviously, you must exclude these as your special plea would be lost.

We have a lot of infrequently used names rendered in the LXX. Of those featuring a Tsade, the great majority of them return a sigma in Greek. I can understand why you won't consider these, as they won't help you avoid the linguistic issue.

I can expect some variation as the Greek is confronted by a strange name, but we see from the earlier case, the Greek will tend to render a Tsade as a sigma anyway.

As to the name of the town, we know from a Hebrew inscription from Caesarea Maritima that the town was called נצרת in the 3rd/4th century, not נזרת with a Zayn (=zeta). It is also the case that it was called נצרת in the Syriac Aramaic version of the gospels. The modern Arabic name for the town is an-Nașeriyya. All the evidence we have for the name of the town other than the gospels is coherent.

Understand that people with a normal English upbringing are clueless with regard to the simplicity of a phonetically based writing system. It is farcical to someone with such a writing system that English speakers have competitions about how to write words, when writing words is so obvious to them. An English speaker is simply mystified regarding phonology. One sound can be written so many ways in English. Think of "sh" in "ship" or in "sure" or "nation" or "mission" or "suspicion", etc. You need to get over your naive smoothing over of sound differences based on the lack of preparation (that a native English speaker usually gets) in order to process the linguistic evidence.

The only people who seem to have had a problem with the pronunciation of this town are Greek christians and the evidence I've put forward which you haven't deigned to consider suggests that the name of the town wasn't originally based on the Semitic town name at all.


spin

ApostateAbe

Cool, spin. You said, "I can expect some variation as the Greek is confronted by a strange name, but we see from the earlier case, the Greek will tend to render a Tsade as a sigma anyway." Sorry, what earlier case are you referring to? If there was a good comparison to the name of Nazareth, then that is what you would build your case upon, but I don't think there is. I think you need to make a better case that an oral lineage of largely uneducated Greek speakers, or a Greek author at the tail-end of that lineage, would preserve the pronunciation of the name of an otherwise unknown Galilean town. If you can not, then your argument seems tenuous at best.

Kapyong

Gday,

Wrong.

There are other possibilities :
* mistake
* misinterpretation


Nonsense.

Paul wrote vague religious themes,
Then A.Mark wrote a story, and others copied it.

No liars there at all.

Do you consider the Greek myths to be LIES?

Do you consider Shakespear LIES?

Do you consider Harry Potter LIES?

Of course not !

The argument that it must be LIES, if it's not true, is complete bollocks.



Rubbish.
Suetonius refers to Chrestus making disturbance in Rome in the 40s - do you think that is Jesus? Why?


Bollocks.
Pliny wrote about Christians - who DID exist.
No planted evidence there.

Ah,
so when you say "planted evidence", you mean interpolations in texts.

But we KNOW texts are interpolated - whether MJ or HJ is true - it proves nothing. Are you trying to pretend that those texts were NOT interpolated?


K.

aa5874

But, what happens if your scenario is not true. It could very well be that the Pauline writers did not write anything in the 1st century.

There is no external corroborative evidence whatsoever to show that the Pauline writers wrote anything in the 1st century and the author of gMark used the Pauline writings.

The placing of the Pauline characters in the 1st century before the Fall of the Temple appears to be lies, planted evidence or deliberate mistakes from the Church writers.