No they aren’t. They were written decades after the fact by ignorant men.
Pretend for a second that they are simply the mundane writings of an early church and don’t have any real supernatural significance. How would the necessarily be different? Every religion has bullshit stories. All of them are wrong except the one you like? What are the odds?
The NT is evidence that primitive men wrote some stuff. It is not evidence that the supernatural stuff they wrote actually happened.
They aren’t reliable because they were written decades after the fact, they depict supernatural happenings, they are in conflict about many issues, and they are just like other religious writings that you think aren’t real.
Let’s be honest here. You think they are evidence because you believe in them. But if you were to honestly apply your standards, you’d have to accept the Quaran as real as well.
Sethianism and the Ophites predate Christianity and are both wholly Jewish. Mandaenism considers its founder to be John the Baptist. Philo was a Jewish philosopher, contemporary of Jesus, who wrote to describe the unification of Judaism and Platonism. Justin Martyr used Philo’s terminology to describe Christianity. Origen and Eusebius later continued this tradition.
Your assertion that Gnosticism is not Jewish and post-dates Christianity is wrong.
How are they independent of Paul, if the people who assembled and passed those documents on to modern day were Paul’s followers?
You’re implying that we don’t discount a lot of what we understand of ancient history. The grand majority of what was written about Genghis Khan is clearly fiction (poems and stories by the Chinese). The parts which are consistent among tales, that match against archaeological evidence, and which require no magic are held to be “likely”. Everything else – the majority – is stripped away and largely ignored.
Jesus’ resurrection is consistent among the most widely read sources, has no archaeological evidence to support it, and requires magic. 1 out of 3 is not sufficient.
Fortunately, we don’t have to wonder about what God did or didn’t do two thousand years ago. We can see whether he keeps his promises today.
There’s a case in the news right now about some parents, devout Christians, who decided to use prayer on their premature baby rather than call a doctor. Of course the baby died.
Jesus promised that believers would get anything they asked for in prayer. Obviously, it doesn’t work.
Anonymous reports of miracles should be held to a higher standard of evidence, and if you don’t get that, then there’s not much anyone can tell you. But all I’m asking for now is that you hold God to the same standard that you would hold a plumber. If a plumber promises to fix your toilet, and fails, you stop using him. If God promises to give you whatever you pray for, and fails, why don’t you stop believing in nonsense?
There are a few problems with discussing “Gnosticism”. One is that the very term assumes that there is some coherency between the different groups around in the first few centuries, which does not appear to be the case. There was not one “Gnostic” movement, but several, independent beliefs floating around. The other problem is that there isn’t really very much evidence to say what exactly it was that these groups believed. Unfortunately a lot of the Gnostic texts did not survive (probably because the communities that valued them died out) and so we have to re-construct their beliefs from others writing about them.
The point that I wanted to make was in response to what I assumed was the idea, made popular by people like Bart Ehrman and Elaine Pagels that in the first century there was not a single Christian movement, but several competing “Christianities”, of which the one we have today was simply the one that won out in history. The problem with these theories is that there is little to no evidence that these groups actually existed in the first century believing what is usually attributed to them. In this book Darrell Bock does a good job of showing that the earliest documents all have a unified view of Jesus, and that it is not until the later pseudopigraphal works that the views of Jesus begin to diverge. This shows that the later Christianities were 2nd century or later groups. These groups were obviously influenced heavily by Judeo-Christian thought, but were also influenced by Greek thought as well.
So overall I think that the explaination that the Christian view of Jesus is merely the one that won out over competing claims to be not very likely. The competing “Gnostic” ideas of Jesus are clearly later, and the earliest and most reliable tradition we have is in the NT.
As far as we can tell the gospels are literarily independent of Paul’s writing, and so are independent in that sense.
The other question though is how much influence did Paul actually have in the early church? Paul has obviously been influential to the development of Christianity in the second century and beyond, but in his own day it is likely that Paul did not have all that much authority in the wider church. Especially since Paul spent nearly all his missionary career going to unreached people it is not clear that Paul had either the political clout or the desire to effect the transmission of the early Christian traditions. It is quite likely that the people that composed the gospels were not followers of Paul (with the exception of Luke, which the traditional view holds was a travelling companion of Paul). In the first century Christianity was larger than Paul or any other single person. Therefore to suggest that the earliest Christian traditions have all been systematically tampered with one would need some sort of evidence / argument.
I agree that a lot of ancient accounts are discounted by historians, because the accounts themselves were not written to be taken seriously. The ancient world had a variety of opinions as to the value of history, and so there are some people groups that had no interest in accurately recording history because it was felt to be of no value. From those people-groups you could discount nearly everything that they wrote because it was not intended even at the time of writing to be accurate.
The gospels are a different genre of literature and were intented at the time of writing to be taken seriously has history. The Israelites had a high view of history, and so it is very unlikely that the gospels could have been originally conceived of as myth.
Here again you seem to be slipping back into pre-suppositionalism. So far there has been no argument presented as to why miracles are a priori impossible or why accounts with miracles in them must necessarily less trustworthy. It is entirely circular to argue that miracles can’t happen because of lack of evidence while also claiming that accounts of miracles are unreliable because miracles don’t happen. So if a miracle were to actually occur it is not clear that you would actually accept that it did because you have as one of your historical criteria that miracles can’t happen.
Using my criteria of “the best explaination” it is possible to accept miracles when there is no other likely explaination, and also reject miracles when other explainations seem better. In my opinion, in view of the early nature of the gospel traditions and the surrounding Jewish culture I think that the view that the gospels were simply made up more fantastical and problematical than Jesus rising from the dead.
I simply reject the premise that God promises to give anything at all to those that ask for it. I think you are mixing Christianity up with “The Secret”.
Which bible passage/s are you baseing this view on? Passages like Luke 11:1-13 do not mean that God will give people who pray absolutely anything. Jesus says that God gives good gifts to those that ask, not anything. While it may be difficult to work why particular actions of God may be good (for instance allowing the premature baby to die) God simply has in view more things than we can fathom, so it would be nearly impossible to definitely state that any action of God was not in fact good, or at least as good as logically possible.
Well, if you’re going to define “bad” as “good,” or “whatever happens” as “good”, or “tragic and heartbreaking” as “good,” then I think I gotta agree with you that God is certainly good and does only good things for the human race.
There’s nothing that you just said which couldn’t be said about the writings of Mormon, of anything which would have been written by the followers of Heaven’s Gate about aliens, or anything which would have been written by the followers of David Koresh about him, and so on. The level of the aggregator’s sincerity, when compiling stories that were told by men who claim divine inspiration, isn’t really the issue. We have thousands of documents and would have millions if all minor cults wrote down such things, from various religions all over the world which all contain magical stories. Nearly all of them advocate some sort of moral code that is perfectly reasonable, so it’s not like (from a Christian viewpoint), those religions are the result of Satan playing around. But they do conflict with archaeology, with known science, and with each other. If we took all of these spiritual documents, carefully compiled by very sincere men, with no desire greater than to preserve the history and traditions of their faith, and trusted them simply because of this great sincerity and care, we’d all have to believe thousands of different mutually exclusive religions. And all of it against all secondary evidence saying that there’s no particular reason to believe it beyond the sincerity of the writer.
There are many holes in the Shroud of Turin stories, I have exchanged emails with one of the people who examined it. If the head cloth was found separate from the other cloths and in a differen place, the head cloth would have absorbed the blood so it would have had a deeper stain then the cloth. and according to the NT writer, the Apostle is quoted as seeing the ‘cloths’ which would mean more than one long cloth. The examiner I wrote to had no meaningful explaination for that!
I am not a Catholic, but I know that Catholics" DO NOT" worship Mary( the called Mother of Jesus), they honor her, like we honor our own Mother’s and have a day for that!
Not my fault. They both promise everything, and deliver only what is explicable by random chance.
I thought I had gone through all this already, but I’ll be glad to repeat it for you.
Matthew 21, NIV, emphasis mine:
"18 Early in the morning, as Jesus was on his way back to the city, he was hungry.
19 Seeing a fig tree by the road, he went up to it but found nothing on it except leaves. Then he said to it, “May you never bear fruit again!” Immediately the tree withered.
20 When the disciples saw this, they were amazed. “How did the fig tree wither so quickly?” they asked.
21 Jesus replied, “Truly I tell you, if you have faith and do not doubt, not only can you do what was done to the fig tree, but also you can say to this mountain, ‘Go, throw yourself into the sea,’ and it will be done.
22 If you believe, you will receive whatever you ask for in prayer.”
So there you go. The passage is not edited to remove any conditions or caveats; the verses before and after are about different events, so the context is complete. The only requirement to get ANYTHING you want is belief. There is no requirement that your prayer be for something noble, or unselfish, or in accordance with what God wants. For the slow learners, Jesus emphasizes this with not one, but two examples, both of which show that what you ask for can be stupid, or even spiteful — throwing a mountain into the sea, which can have no purpose but to show off, and killing a fig tree for not bearing fruit out of season, which is just petty and childish.
It doesn’t address the question of what happens if two believers ask for contradictory things, like each of them becoming King of the World. My personal theory is that the universe splits at that point, and each of them get their wish in their own reality.
And note that the promise is for instant, tangible results. Jesus didn’t have to wait years for a “sign” that God had heard his prayer; the fig tree withered away “immediately.”
Your only out on this verse is the single condition of belief — you can say that nobody in the last 2000 years has had enough belief to demonstrate that this promise isn’t pure bullshit. But Jesus slams that door in Matthew 17:20 --“I tell you the truth, if you have faith as small as a mustard seed, you can say to this mountain, ‘Move from here to there’ and it will move. Nothing will be impossible for you.”
Same stupid example of moving a mountain, and you allegedly need only the tiniest speck of faith to do it.
The central promise of Christianity, John 3:16, is that those who have belief get eternal life. So now you have a way to know for sure if you have enough belief or not — just pray for anything you want — a billion dollars, your boss to get cancer, Sarah Palin to be President. If you don’t get it, immediately, then clearly you don’t have enough faith to activate the promises of Jesus. And you are not getting eternal life. Thanks for playing.
Refuted above.
That’s not what Jesus promised. He said you get whatever you ask for. It doesn’t have to be something good, but surely keeping a baby from dying in agony as it exhausts itself trying to breathe with underdeveloped lungs qualifies as something good, as do millions of other prayers every day for relief of suffering that go unanswered.
Unless you completely deny reality, you know as well as I do that the prayers of Christians are “answered” just as often as the wishes of atheists. If you pray for success in your job, any preacher will tell you that god helps those who help themselves, so if you work very hard for several years, you might get a promotion. Praise Jesus! But Jesus said you can be CEO tomorrow if you pray for it.
So — no need to wonder about events 2000 years ago. There is a way to test the validity of the Gospels TODAY. And you won’t even try, because you know it will fail.
One could think the resurrection of Osiris was even more remakable, he was cut to pieces, then Isis gathered his parts,took the form of a dove, and brought him to life, then conceived Horus…now that is some resurrection! There are many accounts of people resurrecting in ancient times.
This unfortunately I think represents some lazy thinking. The problem here is that you assume that every miracle claim has equal epistemic warrant, and therefore are all indistinguishable. I think that is clearly not the case. Each claim of a miracle is independant and must be evaluated on its own grounds.
So for instance you mention the claims of the Mormons. Here I think the historical claims of Mormonism are several orders of magnitude more problematic than the gospels. For a start you have the problem that the book of Mormon can be seen to be ideologically and literarily dependant on works at the time, including the King James bible and books like “The view of the Hebrews”. The temple rituals of Mormonism likewise seem to been adopted largely from the Freemasons. More fundamentally the book of Mormon makes several specific claims as to the pre-Columbus history of the Americas that not only have no evidential support, but are conspicuously absent of support (ie: if they were true we would have found some artifacts from the people-groups mentioned). These are all problems that are not faced by the New Testament, and therefore the claims are simply not of the same historical warrant.
More to the point the Mormons, like a number of other faiths, do not even seem to value historical evidence as a means for determining the truth of their beliefs. Mormons typically talk not of believing Mormonism because of external historical or other evidence, but because of the internal “burning in the bosom”. So for many faiths the proof of the faith is not in the historical accuracy of their accounts, so lumping together religions that do value historicity with those that don’t is IMHO intellectually lazy.
Secondly I still question your use of “science” as a criteria for historicity. So for no-one has provided any solid argument as to why “supernatural” events are logically impossible. This is simply an assumption of the naturalistic worldview that people bring, but it has not been demonstrated that it is at least more likely than not that this assumption is reasonable and valid. Using the impossibility of miracles (especially based on lack of evidence) as an assumption to disprove the existence of miracles is circular. The outcome is not determined by the quality of the evidence, but simply by your own worldview.
To put the objection another way, if conforming to science is one of your criteria for historicity, is it actually possible for you to establish that a miracle has in fact happened? If it is not then I think you are simply begging the question in assuming this.
The passage in Matthew in my bible (ESV) reads:
Mat 21:21 And Jesus answered them, “Truly, I say to you, if you have faith and do not doubt, you will not only do what has been done to the fig tree, but even if you say to this mountain, ‘Be taken up and thrown into the sea,’ it will happen.
Mat 21:22 And whatever you ask in prayer, you will receive, if you have faith.”
The “and” is the critical part, as it connects the two statements, and is also present in the Greek. The passage connects faith of the individual with the efficacy of prayer. If someone actually has faith (in the gospel context, not just belief but trust) in God, then you will naturally ask for whatever will further the Kingdom of God. Asking for random selfish things is a sign that you don’t have faith, and therefore the prayer is ineffective.
As for the mustard seed passage in Matt 17:20, given the context that the disciples have just failed at casting out a demon Jesus is engaging in hyperbole to get across his point, as Jesus was want to do.
I don’t think that the bible teaches that God is some sort of magic genie. The Old Testament in particular contains several references to God “hiding his face” from people and not listening to their prayer because of their sin. While I wouldn’t say that unanswered prayer is necessarily a result of some sort of sin, it does show that God is able to leave prayer unanswered.
To quote you: “given the data at hand, what hypothesis best accounts for all of the data that we have.”
What hypothesis best accounts for the supernatural in the past, when all instances of the supernatural in modern day have been demonstrated to be the results of fallacies and cognitive bias? Take the example of Koro or Yogic masters who claim to experience themselves levitating, anyone who hasn’t been taught to go along with the story, doesn’t see anything happen. Is it more likely that the proximity of white people dispells a witch’s curse and causes people’s penises to return, that the human brain can be taught to experience fiction as reality, or perhaps even most likely is that if everyone in town says that something is a particular way, the average person tends to go along with everyone else? If a group of people in a religious fervor say that they’re speaking in tongues, using a language used by the gods, but then we can take that language and analyze it and discover that depending on what language that person speaks, the mix of syllables they use is exactly the same as their own language, and that any person, religious or not, produces the same output if hypnotized by a stage magician, then why wouldn’t we conclude that they’re just performing on demand?
When all evidence points to magic being the result of people misunderstanding the failings of the human mind, and its ability to be perverted or misled, the default explanation for magic which hasn’t or can’t be investigated, is that it falls under the same heading.
Anyone who believes in magic, point in fact, is perfectly free to demonstrate this before all. If he could so, he could make a pretty penny. You’d have seen a TV show at some point of your life of Yogis hovering in mid-air. Instead, you see monks performing very impressive forms of martial arts, but nothing more, and all proven to be within the realms of human capability.
So killing a fig tree for not having fruit was not a random selfish thing? All the millions of prayers of devout 14th-century Christians to spare their children from the Black Death, which killed just as many in Christian regions as it did in pagan and Muslim regions, were random selfish prayers?
So how do you know he wasn’t doing it when he talked about heaven and hell, salvation and doom?
You would laugh your head off if some Muslim gave answers like yours when defending the Quran.
You discount the book of Mormon because of specific claims that are false yet you ignore the evidence that.
The great flood as described in the bible never happened.
There is no evidence that exodus ever happened.
The Egyptians probably never enslaved the Jews in a way to even allow exodus to happen.
David, if historical, was never a great power in the region and thus never had a “Kingdom”
There never was a census that would have required Mary and Joseph to go to the home town of a long dead relative.
I could keep going but it would be easier to list the few items the bible probably did get right.
I am not sure how Christians or Jews can claim to be any more “evidence” based than the Mormons, where as there are grains of truth in the bible they never seem to match up with the evidence.
It should also be noted that Jesus seemed to be unaware of the historical inaccuracies of the Old Testament. For example, archaeology tells us that Yahweh is one of the sons of El or at least a subordinate god to him, and it is El who created the world and rules the Elohim. But at the same time that Zeus (just North) usurped his father Cronus as the head god of the religion, Aten started to take over in Egypt (in the South West), and Ashur overtook the Assyrian pantheon (in the East), Yahweh was put into prominence for henotheistic reasons.
I would think prayer is a lack of faith. If This God is all knowing and loves his children, then prayer would be unnecessary, the child would know the fahter would give them all they needed, and not give anything that was not in the child’s best interest. A human father would wonder about a child thata sked for a gun to shoot some one, and would not answer the request, so a supreme being should know more than a human. One if they believe their god is all knowing, and loving would just trust the being that if they had something it was for their good ,if they didn’t it would be harmful.