In his lifetime, Jesus did not impact the entire world or even the entire Roman world. His ministry was limited to a small region of northern Judea and the city of Jerusalem. There was nobody in Alexandria or Rome who had reason to write about him.
I don’t believe that “rome [sic] had all people put to death written down”; I think you’re making that up. If you can actually prove that the Romans had all (not just some) of those they condemned to execution recorded in writing and that there is a list of executions from the relevant time and place which does not include Jesus, I’ll look at it. But of course you can’t prove any such thing, because you made it up.
Second, your argument could be summarized as: “We know the Bible is fictional because there’s no historical record of Jesus. We know there’s no historical reocrd of Jesus because the Bible is fictional.” A classic case of circular reasoning.
Would it be possible to take this elsewhere and get back on topic?
edited to add: There are on-topic questions in post #133 that should be answered, for instance.
And by the way, in the future I would appreciate your using the full quote rather than take only the portion you intend to refute. My claim was a great deal broader than your edited quote would indicate.
Also, since you had no intention of using the study to support your argument, I would assume that you used it instead as a ruse to see if Diogenes would reject it for the right reasons or the wrong reasons. If so, it had the effect of misleading people who are not sufficiently familiar with the technology to realize how utterly useless it was to the issue at hand, i.e., whether or not Christianity is the true religion.
What is indisputable is that Matthew and Luke share material in common which did not come from Mark. This material is called Q, and for various reasons, it’s pretty clear that this material was not original to either of them, notwithstanding minority hypotheses that one may have copied the other. Even the other hypotheses do not require (and the stylistic analysis of the writing cuts against) any necessity for the material to have been original to either one of them. Q is a shared common source. This is by far the prevailing theorty and the one most supported by evidence.
There are no arguments against it. There are argments as to its source.
yes we can, both because of its genre (sayings gospel, non-narrative), because of it’s lack of developed Christology in its sayings and because Matthew and Luke diverge significantly from each other in narrative material (especially the nativity and appearance narratives) which does not come from mark. If Q had miracle stories, they would have used them, but they share no narratives in commo=n that did not come from Mark, which indicates strongly that such material did not exist in Q.
No, he makes it clear that bodily resurrection is not possible. He says that phsyical bodies are replaced by spirirtual ones. Jesus was supposed to have been resurrected in a physical body, not a spiritual one. Paul also seems to show no awareness of the three people that Jesus raised from the dead in physical bodies. Why don’t you actually read the relevant passages.
This is true. The stories of Roman persecution of Christians are greatly exaggerated.
Cite for the Romans killing 2000 Christians a day?
And you can’t just reduce the Spanish Inquistion to executions. You also have to count the mass, forced conversions, the torture, the expulsions, the discriminatory laws, etc.
The Romans didn’t give much a fuck about Christians, truth be known. Their occasional persecutions were sporadic, whimsical and localized, generally not long lasting or widespread and it wasn’t 2000 people a day. The largest persecution took about 3000 victims total (and that wasn’t in Rome, but in Palestine and Egypt). The Romans were generally pretty tolerant of Christans, even though Christians were disliked by the public because of their perceived un-patriotic, anti-Roman hostility, their refusal to honor the state gods, their refusal to serve in the military and rumors of unsavory practices like ritual cannibalism. They were occasionally scapegoated in an ad hoc way, but they were not systematically targeted and perscuted as pervasively as Jews were during the Inquisition.
Some Roman authorities were actually annoyed and grossed out because there was a period when Christians had a martyrdom fetish and were endeavoring intentionally and in groups to provoke their own arrests and executions. Tertullian wrote of one Roman governor who became disgusted enough with Christians trying to turnm themselves over to him for martyrdoms that he told them there were plenty of cliffs they could jump off if they really wanted to do.
In any case, while it wasn’t exactly Edenic, the pagan Roman world was still, by and large, more hospitable to Christians than the Inquistion was to Jews (and I notice you truncated Carrier’s quote, but he’s even more right if he’s comparing those respective treatments of Jews. The Romans were very tolerant of Jews and religious freedom in general.
I think most of what he and Dio have been posting in this thread has been an off-topic argument, and I’d like to actually talk about the OP.
Edited to add: For instance, it would be nice to know what “evidence” led him to his particular sect of Christianity-that would definitely be on topic.
Personally I have tried repeatedly to get ITR to focus on his rationale for believing that Christianity is the true religion - something that, unless I’ve misunderstood, would in fact be on point. I can’t blame Diogenes for responding to so many of his biased and unscholarly claims. It has been extremely educational and I thank him for his efforts. I especially liked the anecdote from Tertullian about the martyrdom fetish. Fascinating stuff!
ITR champion, which religions did you seriously consider before you decided on your current religion, and what was the evidence that pointed to it and not to any of the others?
Most of them are in the deistic category, since if you believe without any contact with god you can assume that others do also. Some are in the toss away anything inconvenient - though here they kind of toss away the tenets of other peoples faith. Polytheists have it a bit easier, since your religion describing n gods in no way prevents there from being n+1. But even they toss away the tenets of other religions.
I can see that. Religion A describes how their god creates the world, while Religion B has a different god creating the earth in a different fashion. Unless the polytheist believes that all the deities took turns creating and then destroying the world so that that the next god in line could have his turn doing the same, polytheism has a problem.
I’m not sure how wedded they are to a particular creation myth, but I generally agree. There is a deeper problem - once those in Religion A start using science or history or logic to downgrade Religion B, they need to explain why the same tools can’t be used on their religion. Done properly it is kind of like a circular firing squad, with those who say they believe only on faith wandering around blind bumping into things, and atheists in a foxhole (protected from the bullets) laughing our asses off.
Note that first line again. “Many have taken in hand to set in order a narrative…” meaning that Luke’s Gospel was not the first. There were other, competing Gospel narratives out there. And Luke sets about to write his own, because he claims to have had “perfect understanding from the very first”, strongly suggesting that he thought his version was more accurate.
Ergo: Disagreements about the Christian narrative existed from the very beginning of the faith.
You’ve never proven me wrong. You just throw up typical unsubstantiated (and unsubstantiat-ABLE) religious bullshit, along with a few specious demands for “cites”, which I have no interest or obligation to give you. (I also find it deliciously ironic that religious believers try to appropriate an evidentialist tactic in debates, when their very belief systems are utterly unsupportable in the first place).
I have just demonstrated to you, using textual evidence from the scriptures of your own religion, that “heresies” existed since the very beginning of your religion. Perhaps Gnosticism itself didn’t, but you clearly can’t argue that early Christianity was a homogeneous and monolithic belief system, which is what you were trying to do upthread.
There were other narratives of the life of Jesus out there. There’s zero evidence that any of them were “competing with Luke”. They may well have been in full agreement.
It suggests nothing of the sort, strongly or otherwise, and in any case if Luke thought his narrative was the most accurate, that wouldn’t imply that it contradicted any others. If I believe that Hallett’s Calculus book is better than Stewart’s, that doesn’t mean that they disagree about anything, only that one is more thorough than the other.
Prove it.
Funny that you, just like Dio, say that you’re not interested in providng cites whenever you’re asked for cites. A skeptic might wonder whether you’re saying that only because you’re not able to provide any cites, owing to the fact that your statements are untrue.
You’ve demonstrated no such thing, and your placing of the word heresies in quotes is bizarre since that word doesn’t appear in the quote from Luke.
ITR champion, Diogenes the Cynic, and Cyningablod, (and anyone else interested in debating the origins of the Christian scriptures), please take it to a new thread. I would agree that it is an organic hijack, (meaning it arose from issues in the current thread), but it is still a hijack and it does not belong in this thread. Open a new thread if you wish to continue the discussion.
If, as the OP proposes, a “God” exists, then wouldn’t we have to know the nature of this being before we decide to worship her/him/it? It might be that attracting the attention of this being is a bad thing-that we have gotten as far as we have precisely because we are being ignored.
To clarify, all the OP stipulates is that “God” exists. Is there any evidence(outside of the many conflicting religious tomes) that She/He/It desires our worship? I think that this should be determined before we decide on how best to do so.