:dubious:
If everything in the Bible was 100% true, and God created you, and offered you eternal happiness, you would say “Sorry, I’d rather burn for all eternity”?:dubious:
Neither uses either date. Matthew sez “In the days of Herod the King” (who died in 4BC). Luke used Cyrenius as Governor of Syria, but he had two terms- 6-4BC and 6-9AD. Thus 4 or 5 BC works. Now we do know there was a Census during Cyrenius 2nd term according to Josephus, however there could have been one earlier also, carried out by order of Herod. Of course, there’s no evidence of it, but if it had been ordered by Herod, the Jews would not have had the issues with a Census following Jewish customs and laws, so it might not have been notable.
John was also a very old man when/if he dictated his Gospel, his memory wasnl;t likely all that sharp for details.
1 Peter 5:1 “The elders which are among you I exhort, I who am also an elder, and a witness of the sufferings of Christ, and also a partaker of the story that shall be revealed.”
I’m not an expert on Biblical Greek, but as I understand it, Greek “martus” or “witness” in Christian writings of this period generally did not mean “eyewitness”, but rather a Christian believer, one who “bore witness” to the claims of the Christian faith, even at the cost of oppression or persecution.
So this passage doesn’t necessarily constitute a claim on the part of its author that he actually saw, with his own two eyes, in historical time, the actual physical crucifixion of Jesus.
NO. If I had claimed that Paul’s encounter automatically proved the existence of Jesus, then your objection would be relevant. I made no such claim, though; rather, I was addressing the specific claim that there are no eyewitness accounts of anyone meeting Jesus in the New Testament. I did not claim that this automatically proved his existence; quite the contrary, I emphasized that the implications of his account are a matter of further philosophical inquiry.
Again, no.
First, your language (“assume that the impossible is impossible”) is an obvious example of circular reasoning. Surely I need not explain why.
Second, the logical approach is to assume that something might be possible in the absence of compelling reason to believe that it is not. Note that I say “compelling reason.” I’m not about to demand proof, for only a fool will claim that only proven things are worth believing.
Your argument amounts to saying “We must assume that miracles are impossible because they are impossible.” Those are words of emphatic declaration, not sound logic.
This is not only utterly false, but also irrelevant. First, there isn’t the slightest evidence that Quirinius was ever Governor of Syria before 6 CE, secondly, even if he had been (which he wasn’t, and I assure you, you can’t back up that assertion), it would be irrelevant because Judea did not get annexed as part of the Province of Syria until 6 CE. Prior to that time, Judea was not subject to taxes or censuses.
There isn’t the slightest evidence that Quirinius had more than one term, and in fact, it was the practice at the time NOT to give the same Governor more than one term of the same Province.
This is not true either. It would have been HUGE deal. They didn’t like censuses conducted by [anybody. Moreover, it’s highly implausible that Herod would have tried since he had no reason. His tax system did not require a head count, he collected tributes by territory and didn’t care how many people were in it. A census would not only have been both expensive and unpopular but without question would have been recorded by Josephus, who was a native Galilean.
Even if we accept this tortured, reaching hypothesis as plausible, Luke would still be wrong since he clearly stated it was a ROMAN census conducted under the authority of both Augustus and Quirinius. Judea did not come under direct Roman rule until 6 CE. The annexation of Judea as part of the Syrian Province was the reason for the Quirinian census.
The contradiction between Matthew and Luke on the year of Jesus, birth is one of the clearest and intractable contradictions in the NT.
This piece by historian, Richard Carrier goes into great detail and debunks every conceivable apologetic attempt to reconcile, including the canard that Quirinius served two terms as well as the notion that maybe Herod did it.
Carrier is admittedly an atheist, but everything is thoroughly sourced and cited.
The Gospel of John says nothing about Jesus’ birth (except to arguably imply that he was born in Nazareth). What does John have to do with anything?
Once more, anything which would violate the laws of physics is physically “impossible” by definition.
To put things a different way, one must presume that the laws of physics have not been violated until proven otherwise.
But you were unable to provide a counterexample except by distorting the meanings of the words “eyewitness” and “meeting” from their commonly understood senses as used when writing history.
The discipline of history is about reconstructing and analyzing realistic narratives of past events. The conditions on “realistic” include “in accordance with the laws of nature”. I have no objection to somebody writing theological doctrine on the assumption that Paul’s claim is evidence that he did literally and truly have an actual experience of encountering a divinely resurrected and embodied Jesus, but that wouldn’t be history.
History, like science, can certainly allow that supernatural phenomena might be possible, but cannot base any of its own deductions on that possibility. History and science both operate with strictly materialist views of reality which exclude the supernatural a priori. Historical narrative rejects the claims that Jesus was resurrected from the dead, that Rama (if he existed as a historical person) had an alliance with a kingdom of talking monkeys with supernatural powers, that Muhammad conversed with the Angel Gabriel, and a whole host of similar miraculous assertions. Miracles, being supernatural and thus in conflict with realistic assumptions about the types of events that can happen in the world, are excluded from history, as they are from science.
That certainly doesn’t mean that miracles can’t actually be true. It just means that history is the wrong place to look for acknowledgement of their truth. History and science wisely limit their worldviews to a set of assumptions that’s consistent with the laws of nature. If that means that historical narratives might exclude some miraculous event that in fact did actually happen, well, too bad.
Or, as Cecil says:
Nitpick: To give credit where credit is due, that column isn’t by Cecil. It’s a Staff Report by CK Dexter Haven and Eutychus (with input from cmkeller and tomndebb). (See second-to-last paragraph here.)
You’re right, of course, and I recall when those excellent essays were written and by whom. But it looks like the separation between Staff Reports and Cecil Pontificates has grown less, as both are now published on the web under the same headline and sideline banners. There’s no doubt that Cecil is endorsing all.
We now return to your regularly scheduled program.
I had read the link before; thank you for bringing it up again.
I’ve made a note of it.
One can only hope that this will lay the matter to rest. But I doubt it.
- “Jack”
Just to nitpick a little. Calling it “psychosis” is going a little far. You’re forgetting one of the most important factors surrounding many visions in the old world: Ergot
Ergot is a mold that grows on bread and is quite hallucinogenic
I think this link might work a lot better (I amputated an “h”):
I think that’s the whole point. There is nothing contemporary. We already know the Romans were pretty anal about record keeping. If Jesus had been the pain in the ass to the local power structure that the Bible made him out to be, Pilate would have documented his execution if for no other reason than to cover his own ass with Rome.
This Roman record keeping thing is actually overstated, especially as it pertains to the privinces and especially especially as it pertains to Judea. The Emperors didn’t care about the daily administrative details of backwaters like Judea as long as the taxes got paid and there weren’t any revolts. If prefects like Pilate had been expected to document and ship records of everytrial and execution, the Emperor would have been overwhelmed with paperwork (which would have been pointlessly expensive to ship in the first place). Guys like Pilate were mostly left to their own devices. All he had to do was keep the peace and collect the taxes.
Even if Pilate had kept records of executions in Judea, they probably would have been destroyed in the first Jewish-Roman War anyway.
DtC and I actually agree here. If you are going to use “lack of documentation” as evidence, then what you have to show is that we have scads and scads of Roman execution records from the days of Pontius Pilate, but we’re somehow missing Jesus. In actuality, I don’t beleive a single document or order that Pilate signed survived the war and the ages after.
We have *one *recently discovered monument that mentions Pilate, and then a few histories by Tactitus from later. In other words, from things dating from the actual time of Pilate, we have one badly damaged monument that Pilate put up. No execution writs, etc.
What we do know is that later anti-Christian Roman propaganda (what little there is) debunks Jesus as a “mere man”, but there’s no claim Jesus did not exist in the few few centuries. Even there it’s only a few mentions, mind you.
Note that DtC and and I don’t differ by a huge gap, either.
I agree Matthew, Mark & Luke were not written by one of JC’s Apostles. I think that Matthew and Luke might have been written by a disciple of an Apostle. In other words, the authors did not see any miracles by Jesus themselves- but maybe they heard about these miracles first hand.
I (and most experts) think that the Apostle John had some voice in the Gospel by that name. But even so, John deals very little with miracles, was the remberance of a very old man, and was dictated to and edited by that Apostle’s followers, who could well have made some changes after John died. Thus the Gospel of John is not a great cite for a first hand account of miracles, either.