ible

At least with regard to Christianity and the Middle Ages: Myth of the Flat Earth

So apparently the religions of today (secularism) continue to fabricate history to smear other religions (Christianity, etc). Which isn't too different from secularists' beliefs about other religions' starting points (fabrication of events). Except, instead of "fear," we're dealing with derision. Secularists, apparently, like to deride and destroy other people's ideas, beliefs; when the smoke clears, secularism will be standing, right? (Some random passage if you will read it: 2 Peter 3. In particular, verse 3 and 16.)

Llyricist,
Thank you for your information on other animals. If I do further research on them, I will keep your thoughts in mind.

No Robots

I am saying that there is no evidence in anything that Christ is reported to have said that he was in any way influenced by anything other than Judaism.

While Paul's thought was touched by Hellenism, he remained essentially a Jew. All mainstream scholarship attests this. Traditional Christianity took Paul's speculative theologizing and ran with it. It seems that you follow this practice.

There were many Gentile "God-fearers" throughout the empire who participated in Jewish observance.

Greek was the common literary language of the eastern Mediterranean. Hebrew was essentially reserved for liturgical writing. All mainstream scholarship attests that the Gospels as we have them derive from oral sources.

The country was destroyed in AD 70.

You have been quoted as having written:

As Price has said, New Testament scholarship has done it's best over the last 60 years or so to completely skewer the mainstream 'take' on the origins of Christianity *away from* its non-Jewish roots and precedents.

How do you square this with the reappropriation of the New Testament by Jewish scholars like Leo Baeck, Joseph Klausner and Samuel Sandmel? And lest you think that I am picking only scholars from the past, here is the atheist William Arnal:

No one in mainstream New Testament scholarship denies that Jesus was a Jew.
The Symbolic Jesus: Historical Scholarship, Judaism, and the Construction of Contemporary Identity, p. 5.

Is not the mythicist project, by arguing for an essentially non-Jewish origin for Christianity, a kind of throwback to traditional Christianity, which saw itself as radically separated from its Jewish roots? Is it not an act of cultural appropriation to claim that the NT is fundamentally non-Jewish when all mainstream scholars, including Jewish scholars, hold that the NT is fundamentally Jewish?

Barrett Pashak

GakuseiDon

Well, after 1300 posts here, this will be my final one for a long while, since I am becoming involved in another project: writing fiction a la Da Vinci Code about late 2nd C CE Romans who are trying to stop people learning the Mithraist "Great Secret" -- the Precession of the Equinoxes -- a secret which will rock people's beliefs in the immutability of the heavens (okay, I know that that secret was known from the 2nd C BCE, but this is fiction) There'll be no albino monk, but there will be a psychopathic Christian called Alexmenos, worshipping his god.

If anyone can recommend any good books or especially links detailing the day-to-day life of Romans around 180 CE, I'd really appreciate it.

I have a great interest in early Christian and pagan literature. I don't know much about it, and I can't read any of the original languages, and I've only read a fraction, and I am a liberal Christian to boot thus I read through a set of pre-existing biases. So when I say that the literature simply doesn't support Earl's thesis, it should be taken with a grain of salt. Richard Carrier believes that the literature does (with reservations), and I think that any intelligent person, faced with a choice between Richard Carrier and me, would choose Richard. And I don't fault anyone for that (Though note that I think that Richard's use of Plutarch as support is simply atrocious).

Earl continually says that I am too literal, and need to use more imagination. That to me is a sign that the evidence in the literature simply isn't there. On the other hand, it may be a sign that I am being too literal and need to use more imagination. But I think I am right: the evidence simply isn't there for the "world of myth", "fleshy sublunar realm", "great spiritual and mythical sea beyond the earth", "dimension near to and overlapping our own", whatever term you want to call the place where the people of that time placed the activities of their gods. They were pretty clear on that topic, and IMO there is nothing like that in the literature. Earl's examples are arbitrary and don't fit the thinking of the day, IMHO.

But I'm uneasy in concluding this. Not because I think I may be wrong -- on the contrary, from the research that I've done I'm dead certain that's the only possible conclusion -- but because I'm an amateur in every sense of the word. There are a lot more knowledgeable people out there -- real scholars -- who I think could quickly validate or invalidate a lot of what Earl and I have been arguing about. I think it's time to leave it to them.

Earl, I wish you the best of luck. I've thoroughly enjoyed my debates with you, and you have always debated clearly and with respect, which I really appreciate. I strongly encourage you to publish your ideas in a peer-reviewed publication. I have no doubts about the results myself, but who knows? Australia beat Japan at the last minute in the World Cup last night, so anything can happen. Good luck in your second edition of your book, also, I'll look forward to reading it.

Thanks everyone, and bye for now.

Clivedurdle

Keep the albino monk!

Try Davies - Falco - Roman Crime Fiction - it is a hundred years earlier in Rome but covers the main structures of the society well.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/arts/bookclub/

andrewcriddle

Try Neropolis by Monteilhet.

A Lurid account of Nero's Rome with vast quantities of obscure erudition and a young aristocratic hero who sees Christianity as the only escape from going to bed with his stepmother.

Andrew Criddle

Rick Sumner

You speak of "Pharisaism" and "Diaspora Judaism" as though the two are mutually exclusive. Why? Surely, putting even fleeting stock into Josephus' claim to have studied three major sects (even if he didn't actually do it, which I suspect might be the case, it still reveals the possibility that one could, if one was so inclined), one should reasonably expect the lines were not that hard. What would prevent a diaspora Jew from coming to Jerusalem to study Pharisaism? Or a Pharisee from leaving Jerusalem for the diaspora? Or, because of people who had done so, an almagamation of both being present in either?

Pharisaism is too quickly defined by Rabbinics, a stance that really isn't justifiable on the weight of the evidence--or, more aptly, the lack thereof. Of the extant literature we can attribute with any measure of certainty to a Pharisee, there is but one author: Paul. We can add him because he tells us so. I suppose we could add Josephus as one trained in Pharisaism (though not a Pharisee himself at the time of his writing), yet he simply exacerbates the problem inherent in the hard lines so frequently drawn.

Also, as somebody or other (I think Mark Nanos) once pointed out on the Corpus Paul list, Paul is writing to the diaspora, surely this affects the tact he takes in his epistles, perhaps causing him to highlight "Hellenism" in his writings.

Regards,
Rick Sumner

Sven

:huh: How does teaching them when to feel guilt teach them how to feel guilt?

Hey, doubting is not an argument. Apart from this, animals also punish their young for "bad" behaviors. Why don't they learn a morality this way? What's different?

Interestingly, by googling for "guilt in animals" I got only one hit: 'In his Descent of Man, Charles Darwin argued that even lower mammals seemed to exhibit symptoms of what we'd call "guilt".'

But this video also seems quite on point - has anybody seen it or likes to buy and report on it?
An omnipotent being does not need to use destruction and punishment against evil things.

No context will ever justify genocide.

I see, pointing out genocide is "blowing things up".

This way, any holy book will be found to be inerrant. Is this your goal?

See, exactly this way scholars have found that the bible is false often.

If you like to abandon logic, fine. But then arguments about the bible loose every meaning. Fine. No problem. But why are you still arguing?

Umm, a perfect, omnipotent being easily should be able to provide us with "the hearts and minds of the people being punished/forgiven".

Sven

I nearly liked the article - would it not have been for the poisoning of the well at the start and the last paragraph:

The reason for promoting both the specific lie about the sphericity of the earth and the general lie that religion and science are in natural and eternal conflict in Western society, is to defend Darwinism. The answer is really only slightly more complicated than that bald statement. The flat-earth lie was ammunition against the creationists. The argument was simple and powerful, if not elegant: "Look how stupid these Christians are. They are always getting in the way of science and progress. These people who deny evolution today are exactly the same sort of people as those idiots who for at least a thousand years denied that the earth was round. How stupid can you get?"

:banghead:

It's quite possible that the story was invented to make Christians look stupid - but to tie this to defending evolution is well, stupid.

aa5874

Ible, have you heard about Galileo? The Christians, of the day, did not tolerate any one who said the earth revolved around the sun. The Christians would simply burn you at the stake, or if you were lucky, life in jail. Galileo lived only a few hundred years ago.

Didymus

A. Are you suggesting that Paul could have been a God-fearer?

B. Although we have manuscripts found in Egypt and Syria dating to the early 2nd century, I have been unable to find information about any archeological, paleographic or epigraphic evidence of Christian activity in Palestine until the Megiddo church, which is currently dated at the mid-3rd century and said to be of Byzantine origin. Evidence of early Christian activity in Palestine is clearly plausible; look at the furor that was created by the fake James ossuary. And back in the late forties some "early Christian ossuaries" were found beneath a church near the Mt. of Olives; they were also taken as evidence of early Christian burials. The crude Christian symbols turned out to be nothing more than construction marks.

In fact, leaving aside the gospels, whose locations like Galilee and Jerusalem are infused with great OT significance, and the most-likely-imagined mass conversions described in Acts, there doesn't seem to be any reason at all to place the founding of Christianity in Palestine.

To me, Christianity seems like a religion by and for the Greek-speaking Diaspora.

Didymus