This is all tangential to the current thread. But when I, out of curiosity, googled bible inconsistencies (and got lots of hits including secularist/atheist sites, fundamentalist sites, and a pretty good Wikipedia article), one of the first sites that came up included this disclaimer:
So how long was it after the crucifixion before Jesus reappeared to his followers? One version is in human days and the other in dog days, or somesuch?
He could also have been making a statement somewhat akin to this: “I am the Son of God, just as all of us are children of God. Over yonder walks the Son of God who bakes bread. Down the path to my right travels the Daughter of God who takes in laundry. I happen to the the Son of God who bears to you a message from God. You shouldn’t believe that just because I say it is so, but you should listen to it and make up your own mind. If it’s from God, you’ll know. It’ll make sense and shit. But at any rate, you should never dismiss another person as insufficiently holy to be bearing a message of that importance because we’re all children of God even if we don’t always act like it”
In fact, the number who can make that commitment honestly is exactly zero, with allowances made for those whose commitment is an honest mistake due to mental incompetence.
OK… “…when Quirinius was governor of Syria.”
The historical record proves that Quirinius was only ever governor of Syria long after Herod was dead. Fix it.
coulda/woulda/shoulda - I can make all kinds of stuff up that he could’ve been saying.
I’m surprised that you would turn to such a weak, well-known “problem” as your attempt at a gotcha. It’s really quite pathetic. I learned the solution to this one when I was a child.
#1–
It really does not matter what the historical record shows. The history was written by fallible, error-prone mankind. The Bible was inspired by infallible God. Therefore, if there is a conflict between the two, the Bible wins by default.
#2–
You really should keep up with the times. Even disregarding the Bible, it has been shown that Quirinius was in Syria twice.
If you actually put some thought into it, maybe you can do better next time. I’m tired of these weak, lame, pathetic, half-assed attempts. My grandma, who never graduated from high school, could have answered this one without breaking a sweat.
I do hope that your first response was a joke. As to your second response, I do not doubt that websites dedicated to promoting the Bible made such a conclusion from such weak evidence, but could you perhaps provide a cite from a more impartial source that came to the same conclusion?
Yeah, but he only said that to get triple the Christmas presents. And it worked !
Bullfeathers. I know from experience that having your B-Day on Xmas means “I got you one big present.”
Gold, frankincense AND myrrh. I rest my case.
rebuttle:
1 gift from each ‘wise’ man.
Point. Dammit, I hate being out-smartass’d.
That’s just an Aramaic expression for a person. It is pretty much the equivalent of calling oneself a “just a regular guy.” There’s nothing mysterious about it. It’s in a few other places in the bible, and it’s in the Talmud.
To the extent that moshiach (messiah) is referred to as a “son of man,” the understanding seems to be the he will be an ordinary person, which would seem to rule out someone who was in any way divine-- albeit, in Judaism, such people do not exist. Half-gods were an Egyptian and Hellenistic thing.
But that’s not necessarily the way the phrase is used in the Gospels. Wikipedia has a whole big article on the phrase.
Sigh. Try Genesis 1 and Genesis 2. In the first man and woman are created together, after vegetation is created. In the second Adam is created, when no shrubs are there, then God plants the garden in Eden, then Eve is created.
Sure literalists weasel their way around this. Sarah Huckabee Sanders says Trump never lies. If you want something, it is easy to blind yourself to the obvious.
Lucky God didn’t create editors first. If he did this nonsense would have gotten rejected with a check mark by return mail.
The Bible is written by God because it says it was written by God? That proof texting would be laughed out of any mainline Protestant seminary. I’m not Catholic, but I wouldn’t be surprised if the same happened in most Catholic seminaries. Many of us Christians don’t believe the Bible was handed down by God on some type of celestial dictophone.
Also worth noting is that the idea of deifying human people - apotheosis - was well-established in the ancient world. This was most evident with rulers, who helped tie down their legitimacy through associating themselves with the gods or becoming gods themselves, such as through through the use of an imperial cult. The Egyptian pharoahs were considered gods by their people, as were many Roman emperors and some members of their families. Julius Caesar was formally deified in the year 42 BCE, and Caesar Augustus, who was emperor during the time of Jesus’ birth and early childhood, became known as divi filius (“Son of the Divine One”). A century later, Vespasian even deified a young Greek youth, his young lover Antinous, following his early death and a cult dedicated to him developed throughout the Empire.
Alexander the Great had also considered himself a deity, although there is debate as to whether this was due to his megalomania or pragmatism, due to the need to rule over conquered peoples who had believed their old kings to be gods. Members of the Ptolemaic dynasty, Alexander’s successors in Egypt, were also raised to the status of divinity posthumously.
Wikipedia has an interesting list of people who have been considered deities with other examples.
Jesus would seem to be a bit different from most other cases described above in that he’s not a ruler, instead being a humble carpenter, and he’s not part of a polytheistic religious belief system, Judaism being strictly monotheistic by Jesus’ time. A person claiming divinity is more likely to be remembered in the historical record if they are a ruler or if people keep following them for a long time, so that perhaps doesn’t rule out there being other Jesus-like figures who are forgotten by history, just as Jesus does not have a lot of historical evidence outside of the Bible.
One non-ruler of a similar time and location to Jesus who appears to have been considered as divine by his followers was Simon Magus (“Simon the Magician”). A convert to Christianity living in the 1st century AD, Simon founded the Gnostic sect known as Simonianism, which survived for another three hundred years. He makes an appearance in the New Testament, which begins:
According to the 2nd century Greek cleric Irenaeus,
As an aside, it was interesting, with Jesus being known as the “Good Shepherd”, to read here that kings in the ancient Near East were styled as shepherds from much earlier times.
Quite a few things in the Bible have no other source to back them up, most notably Jesus rising from the dead. When I asked a rah-rah Christian to back this up, he stated “5,000 people saw him after he rose from the dead.” And where did he get that idea? “Well, the Bible says so.”
Arguably, every Gospel account (Matthew, Mark, Luke and John) have Jesus claiming to be God or equal with God. I say “arguably” because some of the claims have plausible deniability. For example, in Mark’s account of Jesus’ trial he is asked if he is the Messiah (being the Messiah did not imply Godhood – the Jews did not have any expectation that the Messiah would be God, but a human savior along the lines of King David.) Not only does Jesus agree that he is the Messiah, but he says, “I am.” This echoes the words of God to Moses in Exodus, when Moses asks for God’s name and says “When I go make these demands of Pharaoh, who shall I say sent me?” and God says “I am who I am. When you go, tell them that I AM sent you.” That’s where the name of God (YHWH/Yahweh/Jehova) comes from. When Jesus is asked if he is the Messiah and says “I am” he may be not only assenting, but claiming the name of God for himself.
But even if you dismiss that, Jesus throughout the Gospel takes it upon himself to forgive the sins of others, which only God can do. He was accused and tried by the Jews for blasphemy, for making himself equal to God. So at least they understood him to be claiming that he was divine.