madmax2976

Nonsense. I rule out the supernatural because the weight of evidence against it is overwhelming. It has been a complete failure in its ability to explain the world around us and has continually been pushed back from the realm of probability by naturalistic explanations. Supernaturalists have continually failed to provide reliable evidence that any supernatural entities or forces exist whatsoever.

The so called evidence you do offer is pitiful at best. Some anonymous authors from the 1st or 2nd century Palestine -- whom none of us have ever met, for many of which there is virtually no biographical information, who lived in a time when supernatural forces and entities of all kinds were readily accepted by many, who wrote decades after the supposed events occured, the writings for which the original documents don't exist -- writes that someone rose from the dead and you buy it hook, line and sinker. Thats what I would term nothing but sheer gullibility.

If my best friend, living today in the 21st century, whom I knew personally and trusted very well, told me someone rose from the dead, I wouldn't believe him and rightly so. If history tells us anything, it tells us that the probability that he is dellusional, joking, lying, simply wrong or was tricked himself, are astronomically greater than the odds of someone actually rising from the dead. (particularly after decay would have set in) But at the very least I would have the ability to investigate his claim thoroughly for myself if I thought it warranted it - completely unlike what I can do with biblical claims.

You may not like the fact that the weight of evidence is against your beliefs Atticus, but don't presume to play us for fools with this so-called evidence. Your evidence is little or no better than for Johnathan Edwards, Uri Geller, Shirley McClaine, UFO abductions, Muhammed, the Vedas, the Koran, Native American spirituality, Wiccan magic spells, Gautama Buddha, Sai Baba, the Aztecs, the ancient Egyptians, Tacitus, the Moabite Stone, Benny Hinn, or that of Tarot Card reading lady on TV.

MOJO-JOJO

Atticus, you conveniently dodged my response to your question above. I will lay out the findings in Doherty's book and ask that you address his argumnets as to why the NT is simply how the christians "wish" it happened.

Here is a summary of Doherty's claims:

The Gospel story, with its figure of Jesus of Nazareth, cannot be found before the Gospels. In Christian writings earlier than Mark, including almost all of the New Testament epistles, as well as in many writings from the second century, the object of Christian faith is never spoken of as a human man who had recently lived, taught,performed miracles, suffered and died at the hands of human authorities, or rose from a tomb outside Jerusalem. There is no sign in the epistles of Mary or Joseph, Judas or John the Baptist, no birth story, teaching or appointment of apostles by Jesus, no mention of holy places or sites of Jesus' career, not even the hill of Calvary or the empty tomb. This silence is so pervasive and so perplexing that attempted explanations for it have proven inadequate.

The first clear non-Christian reference to Jesus as a human man in recent history is made by the Roman historian Tacitus around 115 CE, but he may simply be repeating newly-developed Christian belief in an historical Jesus in the Rome of his day. Several earlier Jewish and pagan writers are notably silent. The Antiquities of the Jews by the Jewish historian Josephus, published in the 90s, contains two famous references to Jesus, but these are inconclusive. The first passage, as it stands, is universally acknowledged to be a later Christian insertion, and attempts have failed to prove some form of authentic original; the second also shows signs of later Christian tampering. References to Jesus in the Jewish Talmud are garbled and come from traditions which were only recorded in the third century and later.

Paul and other early writers speak of the divine Son of their faith entirely in terms of a spiritual, heavenly figure; they never identify this entity called "Christ Jesus" (literally, "Anointed Savior" or "Savior Messiah") as a man who had lived and died in recent history. Instead, through the agency of the Holy Spirit, God has revealed the existence of his Son and the role he has played in the divine plan for salvation. These early writers talk of long-hidden secrets being disclosed for the first time to apostles like Paul, with no mention of an historical Jesus who played any part in revealing himself, thus leaving no room for a human man at the beginning of the Christian movement. Paul makes it clear that his knowledge and message about the Christ is derived from scripture under God's inspiration.

Paul does not locate the death and resurrection of Christ on earth or in history. According to him, the crucifixion took place in the spiritual world, in a supernatural dimension above the earth, at the hands of the demon spirits (which many scholars agree is the meaning of "rulers of this age" in 1 Corinthians 2:8). The Epistle to the Hebrews locates Christ's sacrifice in a heavenly sanctuary (ch. 8, 9). The Ascension of Isaiah, a composite Jewish-Christian work of the late first century, describes (9:13-15) Christ's crucifixion by Satan and his demons in the firmament (the heavenly sphere between earth and moon). Knowledge of these events was derived from visionary experiences and from scripture, which was seen as a 'window' onto the higher spiritual world of God and his workings.

The activities of gods in the spiritual realm were part of ancient views (Greek and Jewish) of a multi-layered universe, which extended from the base world of matter where humans lived, through several spheres of heaven populated by various divine beings, angels and demons, to the highest level of pure spirit where the ultimate God dwelled. In Platonic philosophy (which influenced Jewish thought), the upper spiritual world was timeless and perfect, serving as a model for the imperfect and transient material world below; the former was the "genuine" reality, accessible to the intellect. Spiritual processes took place there, with their effects, including salvation, on humanity below. Certain "human characteristics" given to Christ (e.g., Romans 1:3) were aspects of his spirit world nature, higher counterparts to material world equivalents, and were often dependent on readings of scripture.

Christ's features and myths are in many ways similar to those of the Greco-Roman salvation cults of the time known as "mystery religions", each having its own savior god or goddess. Most of these (e.g., Dionysos, Mithras, Attis, Isis, Osiris) were part of myths in which the deity had overcome death in some way, or performed some act which conferred benefits and salvation on their devotees. Such activities were viewed as taking place in the upper spirit realm, not on earth or in history. Most of these cults had sacred meals (like Paul's Lord's Supper in 1 Corinthians 11:23f) and envisioned mystical relationships between the believer and the god similar to what Paul speaks of with Christ. Early Christianity was a Jewish sectarian version of this widespread type of belief system, though with its own strong Jewish features and background.

The Christian "Son" is also an expression of the overriding religious concept of the Hellenistic age, that the ultimate God is transcendent and can have no direct contact with the world of matter. He must reveal himself and deal with humanity through an intermediary force, such as the "Logos" of Platonic (Greek) philosophy or the figure of "personified Wisdom" of Jewish thinking; the latter is found in documents like Proverbs, Baruch and the Wisdom of Solomon. This force was viewed as an emanation of God, his outward image, an agency which had helped create and sustain the universe and now served as a channel of knowledge and communion between God and the world. All these features are part of the language used by early Christian writers about their spiritual "Christ Jesus", a heavenly figure who was a Jewish sectarian version of these prevailing myths and thought patterns.

All the Gospels derive their basic story of Jesus of Nazareth from a single source: whoever produced the first version of Mark. That Matthew and Luke are reworkings of Mark with extra, mostly teaching, material added is now an almost universal scholarly conclusion, while many also consider that John has drawn his framework for Jesus' ministry and death from a Synoptic source as well. We thus have a Christian movement spanning half the empire and a full century which nevertheless has managed to produce only one version of the events that are supposed to lie at its inception. Acts, as an historical witness to Jesus and the beginnings of the Christian movement, cannot be relied upon, since it is a tendentious creation of the second century, dependent on the Gospels and designed to create a picture of Christian origins traceable to a unified body of apostles in Jerusalem who were followers of an historical Jesus. Many scholars now admit that much of Acts is sheer fabrication.

Not only do the Gospels contain basic and irreconcilable differences in their accounts of Jesus, they have been put together according to a traditional Jewish practice known as "midrash", which involved reworking and enlarging on scripture. This could entail the retelling of older biblical stories in new settings. Thus, Mark's Jesus of Nazareth was portrayed as a new Moses, with features that paralleled the stories of Moses. Many details were fashioned out of specific passages in scripture. The Passion story itself is a pastiche of verses from the Psalms, Isaiah and other prophets, and as a whole it retells a common tale found throughout ancient Jewish writings, that of the Suffering and Vindication of the Innocent Righteous One. It is quite possible that Mark, at least, did not intend his Gospel to represent an historical figure or historical events, and designed it to provide liturgical readings for Christian services on the Jewish model. Liberal scholars now regard the Gospels as "faith documents" and not accurate historical accounts.

In Galilean circles distinct from those of the evangelists (who were probably all located in Syria), a Jewish movement of the mid-first century preaching the coming of the Kingdom of God put together over time a collection of sayings, ethical and prophetic, now known as Q. The Q community eventually invented for itself a human founder figure who was regarded as the originator of the sayings. In ways not yet fully understood, this figure fed into the creation of the Gospel Jesus, and the sayings document was used by Matthew and Luke to flesh out their reworking of Mark's Gospel. Some modern scholars believe they have located the "genuine" Jesus at the roots of Q, but Q's details and pattern of evolution suggest that no Jesus was present in its earlier phases, and those roots point to a Greek style of teaching known as Cynicism, one unlikely to belong to any individual, let alone a Jewish preacher of the Kingdom.

The documentary record reveals an early Christian landscape dotted with a bewildering variety of communities and sects, rituals and beliefs about a Christ/Jesus entity, most of which show little common ground and no central authority. Also missing is any idea of apostolic tradition tracing back to a human man and his circle of disciples. Scholars like to style this situation as a multiplicity of different responses to the historical Jesus, but such a phenomenon is not only incredible, it is nowhere attested to in the evidence itself. Instead, all this diversity reflects independent expressions of the wider religious trends of the day, based on expectation of God's Kingdom, and on belief in an intermediary divine force which provided knowledge of God and a path to salvation. Only with the Gospels, which began to appear probably toward the end of the first century, were many of these elements brought together to produce the composite figure of Jesus of Nazareth, set in a midrashic story about a life, ministry and death located in the time of Herod and Pontius Pilate.

As the midrashic nature of the Gospels was lost sight of by later generations of gentile Christians, the second century saw the gradual adoption of the Gospel Jesus as an historical figure, motivated by political considerations in the struggle to establish orthodoxy and a central power amid the profusion of early Christian sects and beliefs. Only with Ignatius of Antioch, just after the start of the second century, do we see the first expression in Christian (non-Gospel) writings of a belief that Jesus had lived and died under Pilate, and only toward the middle of that century do we find any familiarity in the wider Christian world with written Gospels and their acceptance as historical accounts. Many Christian apologists, however, even in the latter part of the century, ignore the existence of a human founder in their picture and defense of the faith. By the year 200, a canon of authoritative documents had been formed, reinterpreted to apply to the Jesus of the Gospels, now regarded as a real historical man. Christianity entered a new future founded on a monumental misunderstanding of its own past.

Modern critical scholars have been dismantling the story of Jesus, attempting to salvage from it an inspiring sage for a more rational, enlightened future, and letting go the sacrificial divine Savior of an archaic past. Some of them are edging toward the admission that Paul's Christ had nothing to do with an historical man, while positioning their new teaching Jesus as only one element in the Jewish-Hellenistic synthesis which led to Christianity. The sage, however, is an artificial construct, a misreading (then and now) of the broader sectarian expressions of the day. And the links and lines of development between the various strands which scholars have created to make their scenarios hang together are largely unsupported by the evidence. The pieces of the Jesus Puzzle will not fit together except by abandoning any expectation of encountering an historical, human face (Similar to the glorified divine Christ image of medieval Byzantine worship.)

So the question remains, other than "the Bible is true because the Bible says its true", what is the overwhelming evidence in favor of an actual historical Jesus as portrayed in the NT?


Next Point - regarding "miracles' and the supernatural, the following posts have been posited and require response from you:

On the Definition of "Miracle" and Evidence for the Supernatural.

A miracle is often defined as "an event contrary to the laws of nature" and is thus touted as evidence for the supernatural. Under this definition, if it were known for a miracle to occur, it would indeed provide evidence for the supernatural. If the supernatural were true, then miracles would be witnessed on a regular and consistent basis. Contrawise, if supernaturalism were false, then miracles would not happen. We thus have the necessary implications (h->e and ~h->~e) to construct a valid evidential argument.

However, the definition of miracle above is actually incoherent, because it assumes that we can know the laws of nature a priori. However, this is not the case. The skeptic presupposes that the laws of nature are "known" (to the degree that they are known) dependent upon the events that we observe. Since the skeptic does not know the laws of nature a priori, (nor does she know them completely a posteriori from a partial set of observations) she cannot classify any phenomenon as "miraculous" under that definition.

The skeptic wishes to construct a definition of "knowledge" that allows her to claim to be able to know the laws of nature from the events she observes (if the reader is uncomfortable with the metaphysical implications of this definition of knowledge, he may substitute the term "rational belief" or something else more personally amenable).

To construct such a system of knowledge, the skeptic must make some assumptions. The most basic assumption is that the laws of nature must account for all observed phenomena, however apparently bizarre or surprising. The adoption of this assumption seems absolutely necessary; if this assumption is discarded, then she can prove any and all statements are "true knowledge" of natural law merely by arbitrarily excluding certain phenomena as "miraculous", and her system is thus explosive and useless.

Thus this definition of knowledge excludes miracles a priori--it doesn't say that surprising or difficult to understand phenomena cannot happen, it merely says that the skeptic is committed to proposing laws of nature that explain all phenomena, however surprising.

"Miracles" (and by extension the "supernatural") are excluded by the skeptic a priori because they are incoherent, relying on their definition of a contradiction of the skeptical presuppositions that 1) the laws of nature are not known a priori and 2) the laws of nature, by definition, account for all observed phenomena.

Is this (partial) definition of knowledge "true"? It is difficult or impossible to say. The skeptic merely personally privileges this definition (usually on the basis of its pragmatic value). But she is ontologically open minded in that she is committed to explaining all actual phenomena. She is metaphysically open minded to evaluating alternative metaphysical systems on the basis of pragmatic value.

It is critical to note that the definiteness of the skeptical definition of knowledge is not evidence of close-mindedness and such claims are trivially unproductive; everyone must (or actually does) create some definite metaphysical system merely to begin have a discussion. What is important is that the skeptic has a methodology for changing her own ontological and metaphysical beliefs.

Also, at some level, all minds/brains are themselves definite, especially with regard to pragmatic value. Again, singling out the skeptic for criticism on this basis is trivially unproductive.


Regarding the Existance of God, we have this argument to ponder;

From "The Freethought Zone"

Science, Complexity, and God

Natural phenomena often seem to be extremely complex. But when a scientific explanation is found, the complexity is invariably seen to originate from some simple fundamental principle. The incredible complexity of the biological world, for example, is beautifully explained by a simple process of random mutations and non-random natural selection [1]. An example from physics of apparent complexity is the proliferation of elementary particles in the early days of particle physics. Once we discovered the theory of the strong interactions, however, the seeming complexity of the "particle zoo" was seen to be a manifestation of a very simple underlying symmetry principle [2].

The notion that complexity should be explainable in terms of some underlying simple principles is itself a basic scientific principle. Indeed, science can be described as the process of discovering the underlying physical principles that give rise to the complex phenomena in the world around us.

The apparent complexity of nature leads many theists to the Argument from Design, which claims that a designer is the best explanation for the observed complexity. An important premise in any Argument from Design is the notion that an extremely complex phenomenon that is also fundamentally complex is extremely improbable. By "fundamental complexity" I mean that the complexity cannot, even in principle, be explained in simpler terms. This premise is needed to justify the claim that only a supernatural explanation will suffice, since non-fundamentally complex phenomena can, at least in principle, be explained in relatively simple natural terms. I think that the premise is correct, but what causes all Arguments from Design to fail is that there is never any demonstration that any observed complex phenomenon is actually fundamentally complex.

One of the latest incarnations of the Argument from Design, is Behe's claim that biochemical processes are "irreducibly complex" and therefore a god must have created that complexity. Behe defines irreducible complexity as follows [3]:

"By irreducible complexity I mean a single system which is composed of several interacting parts that contribute to the basic function, and where the removal of any one of the parts causes the system to effectively cease functioning."

This notion of irreducible complexity is a weaker principle than the notion of fundamental complexity discussed above. It is not enough for Behe to show that a biochemical system is irreducibly complex for his conclusion of a designer to follow; he must show that the system is fundamentally complex and he has not done this. In fact, there are several known examples in evolution that disprove Behe's claim that irreducibly complex systems cannot be obtained by the gradual processes of evolution [4]. Behe's arguments have been criticized by a number of authors for various other reasons as well [5].

Its hard to see how any Argument from Design could ever demonstrate the existence of a supernatural designer, since it is difficult or impossible to prove that any naturally occurring phenomena satisfies the principle of fundamental complexity. It is possible, however, that some abstract concepts could be argued to entail fundamental complexity. A being fitting a very general definition of God, for example, would be fundamentally complex. God is by definition a conscious being. But consciousness is itself an incredibly complex phenomenon, so God must be an incredibly complex being. Furthermore, God is fundamentally complex since God is by definition a fundamental entity; that is, God cannot be described as being evolved from other simpler entities or derived from simpler concepts. (If we found a being that we thought was God and it turned out that this being evolved from other simpler beings, we would conclude that he was not God at all, but an alien life form.) God, if he exists, would be an extremely complex being that is also fundamentally complex, and this implies that the existence of God is extremely improbable.

"Formal Statement of the Argument"

In evaluating any argument, it is always useful to formally write out the argument, explicitly listing the premises and making sure that the logical structure is valid (but then again...logic has nothing to do with "belief", right?). The main argument of this essay can be formally stated as follows, with premises indicated by "P" and inferences indicated by "I":

(P1) Extremely complex phenomena that cannot even in principle be explained as arising from simpler, more fundamental principles are extremely improbable.

(P2) God is by definition a being that is a) conscious, and b) fundamental in the sense that he is not evolved or derived from anything more fundamental.

(P3) Conscious beings are necessarily extremely complex.

(I1) From (P2a) and (P3), God is extremely complex.

(I2) God cannot even in principle be explained as arising from simpler, more fundamental principles since, from (P2b), God is defined as being fundamental.

Conclusion: The existence of God is extremely improbable [from (P1), (I1), and (I2)].


By writing the argument out like this, it is clear that the logic is valid and therefore that the conclusion will be correct if the three premises are correct. So now lets see if the premises can be justified:

I have already spent some time above in justifying (P1). To summarize, (P1) is certainly reasonable as it is always the case that when an explanation is found for seemingly complex phenomena, the explanation relies on relatively simple principles. It is also the case that (P1) is widely accepted (and it is not necessary to belabor a premise that everyone already agrees with). (P1) is widely accepted by scientists, for example, since a failure of (P1) would mean the non-improbable existence of complex phenomena that cannot even in principle be explained in simpler terms. The existence of this type of phenomena would mean that science could not proceed. (P1) is also widely accepted by theists who use this premise in an essential way, even if it is not always explicitly stated, in their Argument from Design.

(P2) gives two defining properties of God that most theists, I think, would accept. A person who claims that God does not satisfy (P2a) is abusing the English language by referring to whatever it is that he or she believes in as God. (P2b) is a necessary ingredient to the definition of God, because we would otherwise have to say that God could be a sufficiently advanced alien.

It is (P3) that I think theists would be most likely to attack. They could claim that human consciousness may be complex, but the supernatural, spiritual consciousness of God is not. This type of claim, however, cannot be correct. Consciousness by its very nature is complex; whether we are discussing the consciousness of biological organisms or the consciousness of a hypothetical supernatural being is irrelevant. To see that consciousness itself is
complex, consider that consciousness requires the ability to store and access information that is linked together in many intricate ways as well as the ability to process that information and to reason. The web of intricately interconnected data that consciousness requires is extremely complex. One measure of the complexity of a system is the logarithm of the number of states of the system [6]. Applied to a conscious system, this measure of complexity is proportional to the number of pieces of data that the conscious system knows times the degree of interconnectedness in the data.

There are three interesting things to note here: 1) this measure of complexity is very large if a large amount of data is accessible;
2) the interconnectedness of data that consciousness requires greatly increases the complexity; and
3) for an omniscient being, this measure of the being's complexity diverges.


So (P2) is true by definition, and although (P1) and (P3) cannot be proven with absolute certainty, I think it is fair to say the I have shown that it is extremely likely that (P1) and (P3) are correct. It then follows that it is extremely probable that the conclusion is correct, i.e., the existence of God is extremely improbable.

Conclusion

The notion of "irreducible complexity" as propounded by Behe is insufficient for both the theological and atheological arguments. I have shown that "fundamental complexity" is the requisite concept and that a being fitting a very general definition of God would have to be extremely and fundamentally complex. The existence of such a being is therefore extremely improbable.

References

[1] Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker (W. W. Norton & Company, 1987).

[2] Kurt Gottfried and Victor F. Weisskopf, Concepts of Particle Physics (Oxford University Press, 1986).

[3] Michael Behe, Darwin's Black Box (The Free Press, 1996).

[4] Don Lindsay, How Can Evolution Cause Irreducibly Complex Systems?
(http://www.cs.colorado.edu/~lindsay/creation/evolve_irreducible.html, 1999).

[5]See <a href="http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/science/creationism/behe.html." target="_blank">http://www.infidels.org/library/modern/science/creationism/behe.html.</a>

[6] Kerson Huang, Statistical Mechanics, 2nd Ed. (John Wiley & Sons, 1987); Thomas M. Cover and Joy A. Thomas, Elements of Information Theory (John Wiley & Sons
***********************

Okay AF.... whenever you're ready.

[ March 27, 2002: Message edited by: MOJO-JOJO ]</p>

sidewinder

But since that time, this opinion has changed. Most scholars, even most Christian scholars, agree that Matthew did not write the Gospel of Matthew. If you don't agree, can you explain why Matthew refers to himself in that gospel if he is the writer? It's an odd way to refer to yourself if you're the writer. Why not just use the first person? At least it would give it more credibility.

Atticus_Finch

I am amazed at how often this fallacy is repeated as if repitition will make it true. In I Cor. 15:3-8 Paul expressly refers to Christ as dying for our sins, buried, raised from the dead on the third day and then appearing to numerous witnesses, including Paul. Galatians 1:1 (most likely the earliest epistle) states, "Paul an apostle--not from men nor through man, but through Jesus Christ and God the Father, who raised him from the dead" There are more examples but these should suffice to show the fallacy of your assertion.

Personally, I believe that the epistles do not recount the life and acts of Jesus because the gospels, or some form of them, were already in circulation. I agree that there is scant evidence for this fact but it makes sense that Paul was aware of Luke's work and did not feel the need to duplicate it and focused his attention on pastoral letters.

Regards,

Finch

Theli

Tercel...

You don't have to say it. It goes without saying. Intelligence is a kind of order. If god had no order, was completely chaotic, then his actions aswell as his "design" must be random. I don't see how you can claim that "reason" or "purpose" doesn't need order.
Maybe I missinterpreted what you were saying.
If the creator was NOT orderly then his creation is a subject under chaos. So to have a orderly universe created by a god, that god must be orderly aswell. If not, then you admitt that the order in the universe didn't need an orderly design, and therefore no god.
If it required an orderly design, then I must ask you - Where did god's "orderly nature" come from? If it came to pass by itself then why couldn't the universe's order have come to pass by ITSELF?

This is something I can relate to. Thanks for the info.
Is there really a froof of anything outside our spacetime having influence on our universe?



Aswell as magic and wonders, don't forget that. People would much rather believe and listen to the words of Jesus if the thought he was the son of god.

Read above... Their religion and values would have been useless if noone would be there to follow them.

This doesn't really have much to to with Jesus supposed resurrection. They probably died for their god, wich they believed in before Jesus crucifiction. (damn I suck at english)

HALT!!! James? Brother of Jesus?

Woahaaa.. WHAT?

So you don't see the ressurection of Stalin as supernatural, but the ressurection of Jesus is?
BTW, if I put a label on this story of mine calling it "Supernatural", how would THAT make it more plausable?

But the ressurection of Jesus has?
And what about the idea that the witnesess might have been lying, doesn't that have any credibility either?

But then, what does?
If nothing can't disprove, or lower the credibility of a supernatural claim does that mean that all such claims made are automaticly correct?
By what criteria do you choose wich supernatural claim is false and wich is true?

hehe... not really.

And I think they made the Jesus-ressurection story up. I treat both stories the same. Why won't you?

Thanks for responding...

Hans

If we assume that Peter, John, and Matthew are not fictional it would seem a reasonable proposition that they may have conspired to embelish on lesser facts or even fictionalized their entire story. What do we have to let us know that they are not fictional and the facts of which they speak are true?

[ March 27, 2002: Message edited by: Hans ]</p>

MOJO-JOJO

Also, A_F, the SecWeb's Book of the Month may be worth reading. It also shed's doubt on the authenticity of the NT myth;

The First Messiah : Investigating the
Savior Before Jesus (Paperback)
by Michael Owen Wise

Synopsis:

In The First Messiah renowned Dead Sea Scrolls scholar
Michael O. Wise brings to light the life of Judah, a
forgotten prophet who predated Jesus as a messianic
figure by a century and has had a profound impact on the course of
Christianity and Western civilization. Unlike Jesus, Judah left behind a
personal testament, in his own words, of his relationship with God. By
analyzing the Thanksgiving Hymns discovered among the Dead Sea Scrolls,
Wise uncovers the basis of a groundbreaking understanding of the prophetic
mind. In so doing, Wise deepens our understanding of Christ, his impact on
the Jewish community of his time, and even his interpretation of his own
messianic role.

This book comes highly recommended as a companion to Jesus : One
Hundred Years Before Christ by Alvar Ellegard. If these two theories are tied
together, perhaps Judah emerges as the actual historical figure who ends up
serving as the model for Christ. This happens when St. Paul adopts for his
own religion the idea of Christ that he took from the group of Jews in
Jerusalem headed by James. Both of these theories also mesh quite well with
the holdings of Robert Eisenman in James the Brother of Jesus : The Key to
Unlocking the Secrets of Early Christianity and the Dead Sea Scrolls, which
book is also recommended, if you have not already read it. Eisenman holds
that James is the leader of the sect of Essenes founded by Judah, and so all
three theories tie together and eliminate a large number of loose ends.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Of course you could just ignore the research, but then how long can you go around sticking your head in the sand? How you decide to handle your intellectual integrity is up to you......

Atticus, let me add that all of this should, at the very least, underscore the many reasons for our skepticism. You people sit back with your noses in the bible and all your little ready-made apologetic answers and believe that it should be SO obvious to all these non-believers (or "unsaved" as you like to label us), but you have NO FRIGGIN' IDEA how convoluted and sketchy this whole God/Jesus thing truly is. There are a number of very plausible scenarios that occurred 2,000 years ago, other than what is outlined in the bible which YOU claim is true. It is ONLY true because you people WANT it to be true. And without a time machine, there is no way for us to go back and PROVE to you that you are are believing a myth created by fanatical, supersticious, religious cult members from the 1st and 2nd centuries.

[ March 27, 2002: Message edited by: MOJO-JOJO ]</p>

Atticus_Finch

First, you need to read my original post. I understand that this God/Jesus thing is not perfectly clear. If is was we would not be having this debate. However, you seem to want to have it both ways. If it is so unclear how are you so sure that it is a "myth created by fanatical, supersticious, religious cult members from the 1st and 2nd centuries".

What this comes back to is a recurring problem in this debate. The NT asserts that certain supernatural events took place. One can not objectively analyze its assertions if the first step is to state that nothing supernatural can have taken place. Only be first admitting that the supernatural is possible can you then objectively analyze whether this account of the supernatural has sufficient credibility to be believed.

Tercel, effectively countered the argument that the NT writers were either lying or hallucinating. I think it is particularly unlikely that the apostles would die for something they knew to be a lie. One person here said "If I said I had been to Jupiter last thursday, would you believe me." (not a direct quote). I ask that person, if I put a gun to his/her head and said recant your story or I'm going to kill you, what do you think he/she would do?


Regards,

Finch

[ March 27, 2002: Message edited by: Atticus_Finch ]</p>

Atticus_Finch

Now who is working on rank speculation. "May have conspired", upon what basis do you make such an assertion?

Regards,

Finch

hezekiah jones

Then anything can be "believed." So much for objectivity, and so much for keeping the debate within the confines of the alleged events of the NT.

Can you say the same for Mohammed Atta?