Freethought & Rationalism Archive

mountainman · 04-07-2012, 06:49 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by outhouse

The evidence is overwhelming, you cannot discount the gospels as being empty of historical facts.

Any given source may be forged or corrupted.

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To do so would only discredit ones credibility regarding historical studies.

Core principles of the Historical Method

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Any given source may be forged or corrupted. Strong indications of the originality of the source increase its reliability.

aa5874 · 04-07-2012, 08:47 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Diogenes the Cynic

"Son of God" is a completely human designation in Judaism. It usually just an honorific for kings (like "Messiah"), but it can also just mean people in general. Luke calls Adam nios tou theou as well. It signifies nothing otherworldly. It's just Mark calling Jesus the Messiah....

Again, your claim is erroneous. The term Son of God does NOT mean Messiah and is NOT translated to english by the Greek word for Christ or the anointed.

But in any event, Jesus was the ONLY BEGOTTEN son of God--God's OWN Son.

Now Adam is a perfect example of a MYTH.

Apologetic sources claimed Adam and Jesus were NOT from sexual union.

Adam and Jesus are perfect analogies of Mythological characters.

Adam was formed from the earth by God --and Jesus was formed by the Holy Spirit of God.

1 Corinthians 15:47 KJV

Quote:

The first man is of the earth, earthy: the second man is the Lord from heaven.

Surely you can now understand how rather easy it was for people to BELIEVE the Myth Jesus story.

Surely you can see that if Jesus was human that he would have NO ability to REMIT Sins.

Jesus was BORN of HOLINESS and INCORRUPTIBLE.

Adam, though created by God, had NO ability to REMIT sins he was born CORRUPT

In the NT, Jesus was the ONLY begotten Son of God, God's OWN Son, so your "honorific title" is really a useless notion.

John 3:16 KJV

Quote:

For God so loved the world, that he gave his ONLY begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish , but have everlasting life.

It is clear that people of antiquity BELIEVED God made ADAM so it it was RATHER easy to believe Jesus was the ONLY BEGOTTEN son of a GOD without a human father just like Adam.

PhilosopherJay · 04-07-2012, 09:59 PM

Hi Pete,

Thanks.

There's a good article on Herndon here from the Journal of the Abraham Lincoln Association. This was in 1993 when the viewpoint of Lincoln historians were beginning to undergo their drastic shift and they were beginning to appreciate that Herndon's reaearch, which they had dismissed as absurd slander and heresay for so long, might actually have great historical value.

Warmly,

Jay Raskin

Quote:

Originally Posted by mountainman

Hi Philosopher Jay,

This is a most excellent point that should be repeated.

There can be no absolute conclusions in the business of doing history, because not only can new evidence enter the arena to reverse the tide of opinion, but old evidence can be revised in the light of modern scholarship to overturn previous opinions. All conclusions must therefore be of a provisional and hypothetical nature in the field of history.

Best wishes

Pete

Quote:

Originally Posted by PhilosopherJay

Hi smeat75,

Historians often change their opinion about what is historical and what is not.

For example, a man named William Herndon spent 25 years gathering material about Abraham Lincoln after he died. For more than a century the best Lincoln historians dismissed all of Herndon's work as false inventions and fabrications. For almost a century almost no major biographer of Lincoln used Herndon's material for fear of being laughed at by his colleagues.

In the last 20 years, there has been a considerable reevaluation of Herndon's work with many Lincoln historians now seeing Herndon's work as generally reliable and giving us important insights into the life of Lincoln before he became president.

If all historians in a field could be wrong about material relating to a modern figure like Lincoln, is it not quite conceivable that all or most historians could be wrong about material relating to an ancient figure?

Warmly,

Jay Raskin

Steve Weiss · 04-07-2012, 10:06 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by PhilosopherJay

Hi smeat75,

Historians often change their opinion about what is historical and what is not.

For example, a man named William Herndon spent 25 years gathering material about Abraham Lincoln after he died. For more than a century the best Lincoln historians dismissed all of Herndon's work as false inventions and fabrications. For almost a century almost no major biographer of Lincoln used Herndon's material for fear of being laughed at by his colleagues.

In the last 20 years, there has been a considerable reevaluation of Herndon's work with many Lincoln historians now seeing Herndon's work as generally reliable and giving us important insights into the life of Lincoln before he became president.

If all historians in a field could be wrong about material relating to a modern figure like Lincoln, is it not quite conceivable that all or most historians could be wrong about material relating to an ancient figure?

Warmly,

Jay Raskin

Quote:

Originally Posted by smeat75

Very very interesting, thank you very much for posting that for me to read, I found it quite fascinating. I'm afraid it doesn't change my mind at all though in fact the article has reinforced my confidence that Tacitus in particular is reliable testimony to the existence of Jesus.

This article doesn't actually say much about Michael Grant or his book "Jesus: An Historian’s Review of the Gospels" except that Grant notes that the position that people here call "mythicist" has been "annihilated" by "first rate scholars" and references people that Doherty does not think have annihilated anything at all. One that Grant references is Oskar Betz, "What Do We Know About Jesus?" who includes "a paragraph outlining “non-Christian sources” which “permit no doubt as to the actual existence of Jesus of Nazareth.” They include, of course, Josephus, Tacitus, Pliny the Younger and Suetonius".
All of these are quite scornfully dismissed by "mythicists" as forgeries or worthless or both, but here's a serious scholar who says they "permit no doubt as to the actual existence of Jesus of Nazareth".
Then Doherty says "Grant himself, not a New Testament scholar, is prey to the same restricted and simplistic thinking that refuters of the myth theory often themselves betray."
The fact that Grant was a secular classical historian and not a NT scholar is the very reason why I trust and accept what he wrote. He came to the subject of Jesus with no theological bias, he was not teaching at a seminary or holding a position in theology at a university or similar, he could not lose his job or be black-listed from journals etc for coming to the "wrong" conclusions. Grant wrote excellent books about many people from antiquity, Julius Caesar, Cleopatra, Herod the Great, many many books on Roman history and applied the same methods to his book on Jesus.
Then the Doherty article goes on to a long discussion of the work of Maurice Goguel "Jesus the Nazarene: Myth or History?" and describes how Goguel came to the conclusion that "“But one fact is certain, and that is, Tacitus knew of a document, which was neither Jewish nor Christian, which connected Christianity with the Christ crucified by Pontius Pilate. The importance of this observation does not require to be emphasized.”
Since this book was published there have been quite a few passages in Tacitus identified that show that he did have access to, and consulted, official Roman archives. Tacitus was a senator and this presumably gave him this privilege. The passage Doherty quotes from Goguel does not say a word about the Tacitus passage being a forgery, or an interpolation, or saying "procurator" instead of "prefect" or "Chrestians' instead of "Christians". And Doherty doesn't say any of those things either, he seems just to complain that Goguel isn't being logical.
Anyway, thanks again Toto, I enjoyed reading it!

Raskin is correct about the tenuousness of the historical record, and one does not have to go back to Lincoln for examples of revisionism and inaccuracy as orthodoxy. Who killed JFK? Did FDR know about the attack on Pearl Harbor in advance? And countless others.

The further one goes back into time the less validity there is likely to be in history since evidence is often fragmentary and is frequently lost. I lost my university ring before I even graduated, so though I once possessed it, it is a lost artefact from only a few decades earlier. Strange as it may seem, some artefacts are even forgeries or are made out of whole cloth, so there may be an intention to rewrite history according to a predetermined agenda. See Orwell's 1984.

mountainman · 04-08-2012, 11:30 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Steve Weiss

Strange as it may seem, some artefacts are even forgeries or are made out of whole cloth, so there may be an intention to rewrite history according to a predetermined agenda.

It is such intention that the historicists either ignore or classify as conspiracy theory. <off topic reference removed>

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See Orwell's 1984.

Jesus is watching your every move.

But was Jesus an historical personality?

Or did he first appear as a central character in an old codex?

outhouse · 04-08-2012, 11:36 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by mountainman

Quote:

Originally Posted by outhouse

The evidence is overwhelming, you cannot discount the gospels as being empty of historical facts.

Any given source may be forged or corrupted.

Core principles of the Historical Method

Quote:

Any given source may be forged or corrupted. Strong indications of the originality of the source increase its reliability.

and if a source is forged or corrupted, one needs a replacement hypothesis for the material in said source that is credible.

we have credible material within the gospel pages that date them, as well as other facts backed up by archeology.

its pretty much know the cross cultural version that exist only from oral tradition, was redacted many times with forgeries and corrupted.

yet we still pull valuable information deemed historical by those who do the work, many of which are not biased.

Toto · 04-09-2012, 12:07 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by outhouse

Quote:

Originally Posted by mountainman

Any given source may be forged or corrupted.

Core principles of the Historical Method

and if a source is forged or corrupted, one needs a replacement hypothesis for the material in said source that is credible.

we have credible material within the gospel pages that date them, as well as other facts backed up by archeology.

What are you talking about? And why can't you use capital letters?

We have no credible means to date the gospels, and no support from archaeology for the events.

If you are going to make claims like this, at least provide a source.

Quote:

its pretty much know the cross cultural version that exist only from oral tradition, was redacted many times with forgeries and corrupted.

yet we still pull valuable information deemed historical by those who do the work, many of which are not biased.

There is no evidence of an oral tradition.

There is no accepted way to pull historical information from corrupted texts.

tanya · 04-09-2012, 03:01 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Diogenes the Cynic

What would refute a mythical Jesus? That's exactly the question I'm trying to ask.

How does one refute any falsehood?

To demonstrate that Mark's gospel repudiates, rather than supports, the notion that Jesus was a supernatural entity, one must deny the literal meaning of the text.

"υιου του θεου" is not the language one associates with "genuine", "honest", "literal", or "laudatory". It is the language one associates with belief in something outside of nature. This may or may not be true in the texts of Jewish authors, but Mark's gospel is not about Judaism. It is a Greek story about an heroic figure, who gave his life to help mankind.

In my opinion, you cannot look to the ancient Jewish texts to clarify Mark's intent. If you seek to repudiate Mark's myth of Jesus, you must look to GREEK texts, not Hebrew.

There are two ways then, to refute the concept that the Jesus story is a myth:

a. demonstrate that Mark's text does not define Jesus as literal, physical son of God; (Is it not curious, though, how many folks jump up and down, demanding that Galatians 1:19 be taken at face value, but then wish to find some alternate explanation for Mark 1:1 ???)

b. demonstrate that Jesus really was the son of god.

Since there is no method to accomplish b, one is left with a.

You need to explain why Mark 1:1 does not correspond to physical, literal, son of god.

It accomplishes nothing, to refer to the meaning of this phrase in Hebrew literature. Mark was written in Greek. Please find some Greek novel, in which a particular phrase is written, but is meant by the author to suggest something entirely different from what is written. Then, please apply that logic to Galatians 1:19.

Diogenes the Cynic · 04-09-2012, 07:47 AM

Mark's intent is irrelevant. Mark is not a witness to anything and doesn't understand that phrase. He could well have misunderstood the "son of man" sayings (wherever they came from) as having a titular significance when they did not.

If you said "bar'nash" to the average person in 1st Century Jerusalem, though, they would have just heard it as "human being."

aa5874 · 04-09-2012, 10:16 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Diogenes the Cynic

Mark's intent is irrelevant. Mark is not a witness to anything and doesn't understand that phrase. He could well have misunderstood the "son of man" sayings (wherever they came from) as having a titular significance when they did not.

If you said "bar'nash" to the average person in 1st Century Jerusalem, though, they would have just heard it as "human being."

What a load of BS.

The author of gMark CLEARLY demonstrated that his Jesus was NOT human and that he was NOT writing history when he stated Jesus WALKED on water, Transfigured and was the Son of God.

And to show that gMark was NOT writing history the author who used virtually all of gMark stated Jesus was FATHERED by a Holy Ghost.

And the very next author of gLuke who used gMark ALSO made a very similar claim--Jesus was Fathered by a Holy Ghost of God.

It cannot EVER be shown that gMark is history when virtually all the Activities of Jesus are either TOTAL Fiction or IMPLAUSIBLE.

1.The events at the Baptism of Jesus are TOTAL FICTION.

2. ALL the supposed Miracles of Jesus are Total Fiction.

3. The events at the crucifixion are NOT Plausible.

4. There is NO corroboration for a human Jesus.

5. The claim by Jesus that he will resurrect on the third day only makes sense if gMark's Jesus was believed to be non-human.

It is MOST unlikely that the Jesus cult was started by those who propagated KNOWN lies.

It is FAR MORE likely that it was the STORY and NOT a man that started the Jesus cult.

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04-09-2012, 07:47 AM	#169
Diogenes the Cynic Moderator - Join Date: Sep 2004 Location: Twin Cities, Minnesota Posts: 4,639	Mark's intent is irrelevant. Mark is not a witness to anything and doesn't understand that phrase. He could well have misunderstood the "son of man" sayings (wherever they came from) as having a titular significance when they did not. If you said "bar'nash" to the average person in 1st Century Jerusalem, though, they would have just heard it as "human being."

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