Calzaer

Um, that's the problem. There IS NO CASE for these events. None. Nada. Zip. Zero. Even if we look at Biblical evidence, it still comes up short. Only Matthew mentions the event... out of how many separate authors? It's not like this was an insignificant event in Jesus's life, either.

If you would like to present a CASE FOR these events, we'd love to hear it. Now please stop trying to shirk the burden of proof.

Tercel

Um, excuse me, but the Gospel of Matthew records these events. Now even if you consider Matthew a really really really unreliable source, that is still some evidence. If there really was no reason at all, zip, zero, nada, nil, zilch, to think the events might possibly have ever happened, we wouldn't be having this discussion.

I'm a liberal okay? I agree that the Bible's got errors and I'm amused and annoyed by fundamentalists as much as the next person.

But as usual, in their biased eagerness to find innumerable errors in the Bible in an attempt to rationalise their unbelief, many posters here seem to take the position that we can be certain these events did not happen. Did the event under discussion really occur? Quite possibly not. Can we be certain of that? I don't think we can have any reasonable degree of certainty at all one way or another. We're talking about an area of history covered by a grand total of three authors by my count - Matthew, Luke and Josephus. One mentions the event, two make no mention of it. It's not exactly an earth-shattering event so the non-mentions aren't particularly worrying. But neither is the one witness considered particularly reliable.

shirk the burden of proof?!?
Er, elementary burden of proof education:
You are trying to proof something, namely that the event recorded in the Gospel of Matthew did not occur.
I am not trying to prove anything other than that the evidence is not sufficient to prove anything.
Hence it is up to you to provide "proof" and up to me to shoot down what you provide.

You appear to be working under the assumption that historical events are untrue until proven and that therefore your position is somehow the default one. That seems a very strange position, but then I suppose you've simply applying atheistic logic to the task. I would remind you that a great much of history stands completely unproven and nonetheless true despite it. I'm not suggesting you believe the unproven, merely that you don't gullibly declare things untrue until there's reasonable evidence against their truth - unproven is not equivalent to untrue nor does it imply it. Try being a bit more consistent and applying a little skepticism to you skepticism of events.

Toto

A great deal of history is unproven and therefore unknowable. There's no peculiar atheistic logic in asking for some proof before you believe in something, but there is some strange thinking behind the statement that there are some things that cannot be proven but that nonetheless must be true.

It may help if you get out of your binary logic trap. With imperfect information, we can't decide if everything is true or false - some things are possibly true or false. Most historical events cannot be proven true or false, but are still probable or improbable, or highly likely or unlikely.

There is the same sort of proof of the slaughter of the infants as there is that George Washington chopped down the cherry tree. The difference is that in George Washington's case, we know that the cherry tree myth was written by Parson Weems for a quasi-theological purpose, because he admitted it. In the case of Matthew, we don't have a signed confession, but the incident is reported as part of a document that recounts supernatural events in a legendary fasion, has none of the characteristics of straight historical reporting, and appears to have been written for theological and not historical reasons.

So a secular historian would have to say that there is no credible historical evidence for the slaughter of the innocents, even if it cannot be disproven, and that it is highly unlikely to have happened. This is close to what you say, except that you think this leaves the door open to claim that it could have happened, and then that people who don't believe that it happened are using warped "atheist logic."

In another place you say

I don't know what the smiley means in this situation. You have also said IIRC that there is no real evidence of the historical Jesus, but nevertheless anyone who doubts the existence of a historical Jesus must be some kind of nut. I don't know how you manage to believe all these things simultaneously.

Calzaer

Tercel, if you can't believe Jesus was the messiah while simeultaneously believing Matthew is an accurate document. Matthew (and only Matthew) lists Jeconiah as a direct ancestor to Jesus, which according to Jeremiah 22:28-30, expressly disqualifies Jesus from being the Messiah.

If your only evidence is a chapter in Matthew about the event, well, hell, I can write a paragraph about you killing all the babies in your neighborhood. It's up to you to prove it false, eh?