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Jesus, Lord, Liar or Lunatic
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Summer Wine



Joined: 20 Mar 2005
Location: Next to a River
PostPosted: Thu Apr 13, 2006 7:38 am    Post subject: Reply with quote
Quote:
These aren't exactly smoking gun stuff. "Hey, oppressed, whipped people, you're going to be a great nation one day." What oppressed people doesn't have such prophesies? The Muslims sure do. The North American Indians sure do.


How many Baal worshippers, philistines, amorites, jebusites, etc do you know at the moment? I heard of a country called Israel the other day Wink Isn't that funny.
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Porter_Goss



Joined: 26 Mar 2006
Location: The Wrong Side of Right
PostPosted: Thu Apr 13, 2006 8:32 am    Post subject: Re: Jesus, Lord, Liar or Lunatic Reply with quote
laogaiguk wrote:

Quote:

I cannot personally conclude that Jesus was a liar or a lunatic. The only other alternative is that He was the Christ, the Son of God, as He claimed.


I believe this sentence is enough to sway intelligent readers not to bother wasting the few minutes I did.


Thanks.
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SirFink



Joined: 05 Mar 2006
PostPosted: Thu Apr 13, 2006 12:24 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote
rapier wrote:
There are no contradictions in the bible. Just misunderstandings by skeptics who simply read the Bible in English on their own terms and do not even bother to try to understand it in terms that those who wrote it would.


What about this:

2 Samuel 8:3-4 says "David smote also Hadadezer...and took from him...seven hundred horsemen..." 1 Chronicles 18:3-4 says "David smote Hadarezer...and took from him...seven thousand horsemen..."

Please explain how this was taken out of context. Or am I reading it "on my own terms?" And if it's simply a typo, why didn't the most powerful being in the Universe prevent such an error from occurring at the printer's? Does God not protect and preserve His word?

This error is just one of many.
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mindmetoo



Joined: 02 Feb 2004
PostPosted: Thu Apr 13, 2006 3:55 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote
Summer Wine wrote:
Quote:
These aren't exactly smoking gun stuff. "Hey, oppressed, whipped people, you're going to be a great nation one day." What oppressed people doesn't have such prophesies? The Muslims sure do. The North American Indians sure do.


How many Baal worshippers, philistines, amorites, jebusites, etc do you know at the moment? I heard of a country called Israel the other day Wink Isn't that funny.


The Mormons certainly moved to Utah based on prophesy. Jonestown wasn't created to get into the kool aid manufacturing business. Lots of religious groups migrate and create communities and even nations based on what they think is prophesy in a religious text. Arabs kinda went from a polytheistic, loosely organized tribal people to a major world religion in a very short span of time. You think maybe they acted on what they believed was prophecy? And that they control one of the world's economic levers isn't to them proof of the veracity of their religion and prophesy? Did god give the jews all that oil, power, and money? Nooooo. He gave it to the Muslims, didn't he? Tut tut. That Koran is just a bunch of squiggly lines and contains no prophecy that Muslims interpret as earnestly as Rapier and Xian as being solid proof that the promises Allah made have been fulfilled? Didn't the Vedas predict quantum physics 'n' all that crap? Good golly, only a people with a direct line to god like the Hindus could have know about quantum physics!

Simply because you've only heard of Israel doesn't mean Israel is the only example of a cryptic prophesy resulting in a nation springing up. Your ignorance is not evidence.

There's a notion called "self fulfilling prophesy". "We think it's mapped out this way, so that's the way we do it."
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Xian



Joined: 08 Jan 2006
PostPosted: Thu Apr 13, 2006 5:17 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote
MMT,

My apologies, I posted the wrong link. Anyway, here is a link to early secular accounts of Jesus.

http://www.gotquestions.org/did-Jesus-exist.html

I know you might have reasons to not agree, that is fine. Knowledge without revelation doesn't 'save' (as Christians put it). I post it to show that when it comes to evidence, Christianity above any other religion and cult has historical and archaelogical evidence that confirms the events it claims. New and Old Testament. It isn't the blind faith people claim it to be, despite many of us having no idea about many of these things when we first believed.
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SirFink



Joined: 05 Mar 2006
PostPosted: Thu Apr 13, 2006 5:41 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote
The extra-Biblical "evidence" of Jesus is simply a couple historians who said things like "there's a group of people who claim this Jew died and rose from the dead three days later."

It's no different than a modern-day historian writing "there's a group of people who think they've been abducted by aliens." 2,000 years from now will people be pointing that out as proof that aliens visited the Earth?
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rapier



Joined: 16 Feb 2003
PostPosted: Thu Apr 13, 2006 7:08 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote
SirFink wrote:
What about this:

2 Samuel 8:3-4 says "David smote also Hadadezer...and took from him...seven hundred horsemen..." 1 Chronicles 18:3-4 says "David smote Hadarezer...and took from him...seven thousand horsemen..."


Its one of several copyist errors, none of which change the theology or instruction of the bible. The vast majority of these variations are single letter or number variations that make very minor changes in the text, and the copyists were extremely honest in the way that they transmitted these errors down through the ages, afraid to make changes that would ��correct�� the discrepancies in fear of the fact that they would be tampering with the Word of God. As a result, the variations come down to us in complete honesty.
As the scriptures were laboriously copied by hand down the generations, it appears that someone added an extra zero to the figure. But the rest of the passage indicates the error and with the perspective that 1000 chariots were mentioned, 700 horsemen appears more reasonable. But its not important. It doesn't challenge the existence of God or the message of the bible. And the error was always highlighted/ annotated by the copyist.
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Troll_Bait



Joined: 04 Jan 2006
Location: [T]eaching experience doesn't matter much. -Lee Young-chan (pictured)
PostPosted: Thu Apr 13, 2006 8:05 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote
Xian wrote:
MMT,

My apologies, I posted the wrong link. Anyway, here is a link to early secular accounts of Jesus.

http://www.gotquestions.org/did-Jesus-exist.html


A few months ago, we had a thread about Did Jesus Really Exist?

He's what I originally wrote there.

(It refutes everything provided in the link.)

"It has served us well, this myth of Christ."
- Pope Leo X, 16th, century

Like many Christians, I took it as a given that there was a historical Jesus Christ.
He may not have walked on water or come back from the dead, but underneath the fastactic tales accreted onto him, there was a wandering, first-century rabbi whose wisdom has touched us all.
Like many, I thought that there was ample historical documentation of his existance, left to us by the Romans.
Right?

First of all, we should understand that there are very few periods in the history of the ancient world that are as well-documented as when the emperors Caesar Augustus and Tiberius reigned.
In the first and second centuries, there were approximately forty historians writing in the Roman Empire.
Only three seem to mention this Yeshua of Nazareth: Flavius Josephus, Cornelius Tacitus, and Suetonius.

In Josephus' "Antiquities of the Jews," he wrote one paragraph describing Jesus as a wise man who was crucified by Pilate. Most historians believe that this paragraph to be partly or completely a forgery that was inserted into the text by an unknown Christian. The passage "appears out of context, thereby breaking the flow of the narrative." Even many Christian historians have acknowledged it as a forgery since the early 1800s.
One reason for this is because the passage is not mentioned by any Christian church fathers, not even those who quoted Josephus, until the middle of the fourth century, when Eusebius suddenly "found" it.
Even the Catholic Encyclopedia, unwilling to acknowledge the passage as a forgery, grudgingly concedes: "The passage seems to suffer from repeated interpolations."
Another reason for this is because Josephus not only lived around the same time and place as Jesus, but was a well-educated Jewish priest whose passion was to study his people and their history. He wrote forty chapters about a single king, but only one paragraph about a man whom many believed was the Messiah?
Furthermore, his group, the Pharisees, had been accused not only of executing an innocent man, but of deicide. Josephus was known to be a fierce debater, and it's almost inconceivable that he would have penned this without any kind of rebuttal.

In his book "Annals," Tacitus wrote that arson in the city was started by followers of "Christus" who "was put to death as a criminal by the procurator Pontius Pilate." There are two problems with this:
1. He was an imperial writer, and no imperial document would ever refer to Jesus (or anyone else, for that matter) as "Christ."
2. Pilate was not a "procurator," but a prefect, and Tacitus would have known that.
Also, this passage is not mentioned by any early Christian church fathers, including Tertullian (who read and quoted Tacitus extensively) and Clement of Alexandria (whose job was to scour Pagan sources for evidence of Jesus). In fact, no mention of this passage was ever made before the fifteenth century. Nor are Christ, Christianity, or Christians ever mentioned in any of Tacitus' other writings.
This seems to be another example of an interpolation.

In "The Lives of the Caesars," Suetonius wrote: "Since the Jews constantly made disturbances at the instigation of Chrestus, [Emperor Claudius in 49 CE] expelled them from Rome."
Many people have concluded that "Christ" was misspelled into "Chrestus."
However, Chrestus was in fact a common Greek name.
Also, Claudius reigned from 41 to 54, around ten to fifteen years after the crucifiction of Christ, so it is likely that the reference is to a Jewish agitator in Rome by the name of Chrestus.
To conclude that this ambiguous passage is historical evidence of Yeshua of Nazareth requires connecting some distant dots.

As Tom Harpur (a former Anglican priest) wrote in "The Pagan Christ," the further back in time we go, the more and more ethereal Yeshua of Nazareth becomes.

Review:
Out of about forty historians, only three make mention of Jesus.
Out of those three, two seem to be interpolations, and the third, ambiguous.



I didn't mention Pliny the Younger because he's almost not worth talking about.

He describes Christians, but that is not evidence of any supposed historical Jesus.

If someone describes the beliefs and practices of Greek Pagans, is that evidence as to the existance of Zeus?



Of all the books dealing with this topic, the best are probably

The Jesus Puzzle: Did Christianity Begin with a Mythical Christ? Challenging the Existence of an Historical Jesus, by Earl Doherty
and
Challenging the Verdict: A Cross-Examination of Lee Strobel's "The Case for Christ", by Earl Doherty

Xian wrote:

I know you might have reasons to not agree, that is fine. Knowledge without revelation doesn't 'save' (as Christians put it). I post it to show that when it comes to evidence, Christianity above any other religion and cult has historical and archaelogical evidence that confirms the events it claims. New and Old Testament. It isn't the blind faith people claim it to be, despite many of us having no idea about many of these things when we first believed.