Ron Garrett

Rad:

Couldn't possibly keep up with all your posts on each thread. 330 since August makes you a candidate for the "No Life Club."

BTW, I don't think I'm reading into your posts all that much. You implied a disbelief about any beneficent motives on the part of the skeptics here. There are actually some amazingly giving and caring folks here who genuinely are dtermined to prevent others wasting their lives on lies.

As for th rest, perhaps your reading into my tendentiousness while I am reading into your suspiciousness? I'll cop to the tendentiousness, but plead provocation by your obtuseness and intransigence.

Radorth

That is not why I respect them. I respect some of them because they are insightful enough to recognize the hypocrisy of an atheist who demands proof while defending tendentious nonsense. I trust agnostics really do want more proof, but they apply their skepticism even-handedly. There is evidence they have functioning right brain hemispheres as well.

Rad

Yellum Notnef

What tendentious nonsense are they defending?

Are you referring again to Doherty and the "Jesus mythers" or do you have another example?

Fenton

lpetrich

Proposing the Jesus-myth hypothesis seems like a fun way of trolling; it's fun to watch the extreme emotional reactions that it provokes.

However, I do think that that is a hypothesis worth considering -- that the Jesus Christ of the Gospels was essentially mythical, and had little connection with whatever "historical Jesus" had existed.

Stephen T-B

A Virgin birth; a nativity denoted by an anomalous star, announced by choirs of angels and attended by kings from afar bearing gifts; a short life filled with miraculous occurrences, including the raising of a corpse; a remarkably quick death in circumstances guaranteed to produce a very prolonged one, followed by a Resurrection. A Resurrection!!!!!
All this yet the vast majority of Jews didn’t believe that Jesus Christ was their Messiah. And still don’t.
I wonder if this strikes Radoth as odd.
It strikes me as being very odd indeed because all these events were so extremely public, and took place within a relatively small community through which news would quickly have spread by word of mouth.
In fact, if the accounts of the Gospels are to be relied upon, it is highly unlikely that Jesus wasn’t, by the time of his death, the most famous personage in the kingdom - and news of his resurrection would have made him even more famous in death than he had been in life. It is therefore reasonable to assume that he would have figured prominently in contemporary Jewish and Roman records, regardless of his Messianic status
Yet only in the Gospels do we have details - and not very consistent ones - of his life, death and resurrection, and the Gospels are not such impressive historical records that the Jews have incorporated the accounts they give in their history.
Radoth’s impermiable belief system means he won’t be troubled by the unlikelihood of one such as Jesus Christ slipping unnoticed through Jewish history, but I hope he will have the grace (not often much in evidence, I have to say) to ackowledge that it has the possibility of making some people think that something here doesn’t quite add up.