Pyper:
I am going to post my pet theory about (one of the reasons) Dio bothers so many people on this board. In every other forum on the Internet, it’s considered typical for posters to loudly spout their opinions and basically engage in shouting matches until one side gives up. But the Dope is about fighting ignorance. One thing I admired about this board when I first lurked is that if one poster provided a cite proving another poster wrong, the second poster would accept the correction with grace and say, “Ignorance fought.” That is the culture of this board: you provide evidence for your assertions and you are open to learning about new evidence. It’s the scientific mindset.
My first encounter with Dio, I noticed that he had used some education terminology incorrectly. I provided him a cite showing him the correct usage, but he just responded, “Well, I worked in special education, so I know better.” I provided another cite, and another, and he just kept repeating the same old, “I worked in special education.” I could have engaged him in a dick-measuring contest with my own special education credentials, but I am aware that “My post is my cite” is not a valid debating technique.
The point is, I came to realize that Dio is not a typical Dope poster. He will never back down or allow himself to be wrong, not matter how much evidence you show him. The only solution for it, to use some behaviorist terminology, is extinction: total ignoring. Of course new posters will stumble into his trap like I did, not knowing what he is like, but the reinforcement he gets from headbutting against regular posters will be greatly reduced.
Guilty.
Then, once it was clear that I made my points, he said, “The bible is fiction anyway, and we don’t even know if that word was used.”
So why were you trying to tell me you knew what it meant in 30 BCE, Dio?! You don’t even think it was used!
Then he told me that you can’t use the Bible to make any case about Jesus since the Bible is fiction. Okay, so then how can he can tell me “facts” about Jesus?
The Christian Bible is not historically reliable and cannot be cited as evidence.
I am posting in this thread to provide as much factual information as I can to the question asked. We can’t really know much about Jesus, but **we can know something **about the cultural context he supposedly grew up in, and he grew up in a context where there is virtually no chance he could have had access to formal education.
Oral facility with Hebrew scripture? Quite possibly. I would even say probably. Actual book learning - nope.
Am I the only one who sees the :smack: in that?
I did it again. I wasted an hour of my time debating the use of the Hebrew word ‘rabbi’. He wanted to tell me he knew what the 4,000 year old word originally meant 2,000 years later based on * Greek *translation.