cb

Well yes, but the gospels that we use are the ones that were written early on, before hellenistic corruption. There of course were gnostics gospels, but they were always known to be frauds by the early christian leaders.

cb

Hi again,

This was not addressed to me, but whatever...
Well the reason why some scholarship dates it in the 60's is because the book does not mention the death of Paul, or Peter or James. Instead the book ends with Paul under house arrest. It does not mention the destruction of Jerusalem. It does not mention the persecution under Nero. If it was written years after the events, you would think that the person would have included these things in the story. The only conclusion that I can think of is that the writer was thinking of coming up with a "Part III". Also, if we can date Acts to around AD 64, Then Luke would be written before that, and the other two sypnotics written even before that.
I cannot see how anyone could think that Acts was written A.D. 150, since early church fathers such as Ignatius (c. 70-110 AD) quotes from the book in his letters.

[ March 10, 2002: Message edited by: cb ]</p>

cb

*sigh*
Someone please tell me what I did wrong on the quotes?

Toto

You have produced a rationalization of the why the gospels are true if we grant you certain facts to start off with, that the gospels were written by the men whose names they bear, that Acts is true, that there was a Jesus who was crucified. I think there are a lot of problems with your rationalization, but I do not grant you those assumptions. I don't think that the narrative in the gospels bears any resemblance to actual history, and I think that the people who wrote the gospels thought they were writing some higher truth or allegory, not a literal history.

Please read the Jesus Puzzle, either the book or the website. Then we might have a more productive discussion.

About quotes: click on the 'UBB Code is enabled' link on the left hand side when you are writing a post. It will explain things. [b] and its end will make things bold, [BOLD] will not.

Kosh

First off, the markup tags are similar to
HTML. They must be closed off symetrically...
ie, in reverse order. So it would be:

quote qb..../qb /quote (square brackets removed
so it will dsplay to you).

Think of it as nesting.

Also, you got the QB mixed up as BQ a couple
times. Think of is "Quote Bold".

Lastly, I recommend that you and LuvLuv read
Doherty's "Challenging the Verdict"...

<a href="http://www.infidels.org/cgi-bin/offsite?http://www.magi.com/~oblio/jesus/StrobelIntro.htm" target="_blank">http://www.infidels.org/cgi-bin/offsite?http://www.magi.com/~oblio/jesus/StrobelIntro.htm</a>

Since this will address many of the apologetics
you have presented here.

Toto

What Hellenistic corruption are you talking about? If Jesus existed, he, like Paul, lived in a Hellenistic society. There were mystery religions around him. The Gospels were written in Koine Greek, as they would be for a Hellenistic society, not in the Aramaic that a Palestinian Jew would presumably speak.

The early Christian leaders included some Gnostics. The ones who won out decided the Gnostic gospels were false.

If you want to have an intelligent discussion of this, read

<a href="http://www.magi.com/~oblio/jesus/home.htm" target="_blank">The Jesus Puzzle</a>

<a href="http://www.magi.com/~oblio/jesus/CTVExcerptsIntro.htm" target="_blank">The problems with The Case for Christ</a>

<a href="http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/theism/christianity/apologetics.html#strobel" target="_blank">other critiques of Lee Strobel</a>

<a href="http://iidb.org/cgi-bin/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic&f=51&t=000014" target="_blank">My review of The Jesus Mysteries</a>

Vorkosigan

[QUOTE]Originally posted by luvluv:
[QB]Firstly, I do not understand how anyone can take the Gospels to be allegory, unless I misunderstand the word. Are you saying that the original readers of the Gospels read it as I might read the Canterburry tales? And on the basis of this they consented to be mauled by lions?[/b]

"Allegory" does not necessarily mean what you imply here. The national flag is a symbol, but men have done really wacky things for it. In how many battles have you read "When Smith was shot, Jones picked up the flag, after Jones went down, Brown picked it up and carried it forward to the enemy lines, the troops at his heels" or "Hirumi was desperate to get off the sinking ship, but first he went to the bridge to rescue the Imperial portrait and the Rising Sun." People frequently die for beliefs that make no rational sense.

So, yes, if people believed that they will have life eternal, regardless of the facts, they will suffer and die for it.

And at any rate, Jesus healed and interacted with many children it would seem. Would it really be foolish to assume that many of the people whom he fed and preached to, hundreds... possibly thousands of people, would not have been alive in the cities mentioned in the Gospels at the time these things are said to have happened?

Millions of people know Uri Geller is a fraud. But his supporters go on writing about him as if this had never been proved. Millions believe that prayer cures, although there is no scientific evidence to support it. Millions think Lourdes cures, although there have been no cures. People continue to worship Sai Baba, although he is a fraud and a pedophile. Really, do you think human nature is so coldly rational?

Besides, almost no writing at all from this period in Palestine has survived. The only historian of Judea and Galilee who lived there in Jesus' time, Justus of Tiberias,did not even mention Jesus. Josephus, the other major historian of Palestine of that time, did, but the mention is hotly disputed. Either Jesus did not exist, or he was just one marginal preacher (or nationalist bandit, or both) among many. Just think of all the street preachers you've met in your life -- I can't even remember the name of single priest I saw in my childhood, and the only preacher I remember from college was the colorful Jed Smock.

Also, given that the Christian church did indeed thrive and experience an explosive growth before the Gospels were wide-spread, is it at all unlikely that it spread based upon the same stories as the ones that are mentioned in the Gospels? In short if Christianity had spread on the belief that this dead guy Jesus had some good philosophies, and then the Gospels all of a sudden show up claiming that he was divine...

Unless, of course, as several writers have argued, the Christian Church grew out of an established movement, such as Essenism. Note to that it piggybacked across the Med in diaspora jewish communities.

In any case, religions do grow explosively. I commend to you the history of Islam, and spread of Buddhism in Central and East Asia. Read!

might not the Christians who had converted based solely on his teachings not be suprised at his sudden divinity and his ability to heal?

Why? People invent such stories all the time. Schneerson has also acquired a post-mortem ability to heal.

Surely there had to be some basis for this belief already present in the Christian population, and the stories probably existed within that community before they were set to paper.

I agree! Only they were stories in the OT, other jewish writings, and stories about other figures. Also, I suspect some of the miracles in Mark are his own invention, using Homer as a framework. See MacDonald's The Homeric Epics and the Gospel of Mark.

Given that Christianity was an unpopular variation of an unpopular religion, is it at all likely to have converted anybody if most of it's stories were demonstrably false?

Given that some versions of Mormonism are an unpopular variation of an unpopular cult, don't you think that they wouldn't be able to find any converts? Luv, have you ever known a religion NOT to find converts? Here in Taiwan some nut got thousands of people to give up their life savings to go to Texas to get on a UFO. Ever heard of Yi Guan Dao? Some fruitcake out in California got 24 people, most of them educated, to sacrifice themselves to get on a fake UFO behind a comet. For Pete's sake, is there any belief system dumber than Scientology? Explain that one in terms of your "rational" view of human nature.

turt, how do you know that other criticisms of the Gospels exist, if they were never found?

Because the Christians often preserved their responses -- though not the criticisms, and because of the rise of apologetics. This suggests widespread criticism.

Would you care to point me to the Old Testament passages which correspond to the following parables: the prodigal son, the ten virgins, the Good Samaritan, the parable of the sower, the parable of the sheeps and goats, and the sermon on the mount. Thanks, I should learn a lot from your answer.

You know, you are awfully quick with the sarcasm for someone who doesn't know a thing about what he is talking about.

To take the Ten Virgins, the conservative Christian scholar Dodd believes that this parable was never taught by Jesus and originates with the early Christian Church. Others accept it as a genuine parable of Jesus. Why don't you crack open a copy of Five Gospels by Mack and decide for yourself?

Also, the Ten Virgins comes from Q, as I recall. The sources of Q are hotly disputed -- the existence of Q is hotly disputed -- so I won't weigh in on that one. See Mark Goodacre, Michael Goulder, and Christopher Tuckett's Q and the History of Early Christianity.

"When the Plains Indians chiefs met with Wovoka, they went home a few days later saying that he had flown over their heads on a magic horse.

Well, true enough, but the fact is that most of the early Christians were risking their lives to believe what they did. Why would they consent to be eaten by lions or hung on a cross for idle fancy?

Why would David Koresh's group all kill themselves for a passing fancy? UFO nuts in California off themselves for a passing fancy? What about Aum Shinrikyo? Why would Japanese men volunteer to kill themselves in a cause many knew was hopeless? Human nature has a kind of rationality, but not in the way that you appear to think it is....


Excuse me, authors research their own memoirs?

Excuse, if Luke was writing a memoir, why did he copy from Mark and Q? Excuse me, if Matt was writing a memoir, why did he copy from Mark and Q? If John was writing a memoir, why did he borrow John 21 from Mark, and why did he find it necessary to edit his gospel at least three and possibly five times over the course of a century?

Oh BTW, how do people write memoirs about things they never witnessed. Excuse me, will you drop out of this conversation, go out, spend a little money, and purchase a copy of Bart Ehrman's Introduction to the New Testament so I don't have to educate you in things every first-year student of the Bible knows?

I'll say it: Nobody thinks that the writers of the gospels were witnesses except a few conservative Christian scholars. They all wrote by copying sources oral and written, or by making things up.

Your sarcasm is extremely unwarranted. Please stop.

Also, does anyone have any theory on what seminal event prompted someone to collect all these random stories and to promote them as a singular man with a singular ministry.

Yes, it was the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 AD. By destroying the collective memory of the area, it enabled his followers to construct a myth about what had happened, and gave them the emotional catalyst to do so. Without that, and without Christianity's peculiar ruthlessness and intolerance, it would have been another minor cult, and eventually vanished.

If the catalyst for the Christian explosion was not the death of Christ, what force motivated Christianity to flourish 100 years after he (whoever he was) died?

I do not know when Jesus died. I do not know if the gospels are correct in their claim that he was executed under Pilate. In the Robin Hood legends, he is associated with the reign of the hated Prince John, but the tale seems to date back before that. Similarly, the tale of Arthur is placed out of its putative time. I do not know what kind of tradition the gospels record, so I cannot be sure when he was executed.

A number of scholars have come round to the position that Christianity in some form predates Pilate, sometimes by a century -- see, for example, Michael Wise or Alvar Ellegaard. Eusebius records a tradition that Jesus was executed in 21, which was 8 years before scholars believe Pilate appeared on the scene. They are currently a minority, however. The vast majority of scholars believe Jesus was executed under Pilate.

So I don't know how to decide, in what is clearly religious propaganda, which parts are true and which are false. For it is a salient fact that for practically every aspect of Jesus' story, there is a sober mainstream scholar somewhere who considers it a myth. NT scholars excel at textual analysis, but they have not yet discovered any reliable and convincing way to demonstrate which parts of the NT legend cycle reflect reality, and how they reflect it. So they all disagree on which parts are true and which are false. That is why so many versions of Jesus -- the wandering Cynic philosopher, the Bandit Nationalist, the Peasant Revolutionary, the Eschatological Teacher -- have been developed over the years.

I suggest you read wildly opposing books side by side. First, check out John Meier's three-volume biography of Jesus. Then read Crossan's The Birth of Christianity. At this point, all I can do is recommend that you read, read, read. I myself am not a professional NT scholar, and so cannot give you the kind of education you need.

At least, type "the Synoptic Problem" in google and start reading. Or go to Mark Goodacre's New Testament Gateway. There are thousands of scholar sites.

Michael

Michael

[ March 10, 2002: Message edited by: turtonm ]</p>

lpetrich

They got in trouble with the Empire because they refused to worship the official gods of the Empire. However, persecution of them was very off-and-on; the Roman authorities were rather half-hearted about it. If the early Christians had consented to worship the official gods as if they were the Christian God and some angels in disguise, the authorities would never have bothered them.

I'm not sure what you mean, but it's interesting that the only outside references are some decades after his death; surely someone so famous would have attracted more attention.

Luvluv, people have been willing to die for the weirdest things. And even if the Gospels had originally been seen as allegories, they would nevertheless have been seen as containing Truth.

Consider the Islamic Paradise. It's rather glaringly obvious wish-fulfillment, yet many Muslims seem convinced that that's what one will get for being a good Muslim. And this includes men getting lots and lots of very nice new wives, without women getting anything comparable.

There need be no event -- just something that gradually grew up. Check out <a href="http://www.jesuspuzzle.com" target="_blank">The Jesus Puzzle</a> for a good presentation of the hypothesis that he had been a myth.

The New Testament and the noncanonical Gospels suggest otherwise; that's a rather mixed collection of documents, and Jesus Christ comes off very differently in different places.

Vorkosigan

[QUOTE]Originally posted by cb:
Hi again,
Well the reason why some scholarship dates it in the 60's is because the book does not mention the death of Paul, or Peter or James.

Actually, Acts does mention the death of Paul. It alludes to it in ....I have forgotten the exact reference. &gt;sigh&lt;

Instead the book ends with Paul under house arrest. It does not mention the destruction of Jerusalem. It does not mention the persecution under Nero. If it was written years after the events, you would think that the person would have included these things in the story.

Why? Maybe he did, and the next installment is lost. Who knows?

More importantly, because Luke copied from Mark, who wrote after 70, that sort of rules out an early date for Acts.

Some believe Luke used Josephus as a source. That would put him or her after 100.

I cannot see how anyone could think that Acts was written A.D. 150, since early church fathers such as Ignatius (c. 70-110 AD) quotes from the book in his letters.

Were is this? Acts 1:25? That's the only reference I can find, and it is extremely vague.

Ignatius never mentions Acts as such. Does this mean that Acts is copying Ignatius, or Ignatius is citing Acts?

In any case, Detering has argued persuasively that Ignatius letters are later forgeries from around the mid-century.

Michael

spin

Much of the previous discussion seems to me to indicate a certain commitment to the belief that there is some historical basis to the gospel reports. However, there is no way that I can see to validify them as witnesses to the period they claim to be dealing with. We don't know who wrote them, why exactly they wrote them, to whom they wroter them or where they wroter them. One of the few things we know is that they have been edited and re-edited making it even more difficult to extract anything historically useful from them.

We know that at least some of the material is not historical. Think of Jesus praying in the garden of Gethsemane with his faithful three sleeping. Have you ever wondered how we got the story of the prayers and the discourse while the disciples slept? Obviously, as Jesus was arrested there he had no time to tell anyone his last words, so we must conclude that they are a literary effort of one of the earlier writers of the gospel of Mark. If some material can be shown to be not historical (we could add the discourse with the devil -- unless we want to believe that Jesus related exactly what happened), then we really have no way of knowing just how much of the material is not historical.

Paul for example never knew Jesus, but developed his complex religious system, without any input from Jesus, who was presumably dead.

I've seen the vain attempts to pile up references to Jesus or to Christians in classical writers as somehow relating the gospel material to history, but this only relates that there were believers of Jesus messianism, which obviously won't do. References to Chrestus incidentally tell us nothing about Jesus, for Chrestus was a name in itself in circulation in the Roman world.

I would like to propose that it is not wise to accept any of the unique material in the gospels as being related in any way to historical events, until such time as we can provide clear background data to the production of the texts. As this is not forthcoming, I think most of the discussion is rather vain.

People like Crossan are not able to take serious steps toward historical analysis, for they assume Jesus and look for what they can reclaim of his history. That assumption is unfounded, indicating that the Historical Jesus Movement is one big waste of time.

So, if we return to the original question about Jesus, his death and an empty tomb, we can only rely on the gospels and their worth as testimony to history is in no way shown.