Actually Luke wrote that Joseph and company went to Nazareth after "…they had performed all thing according to the law of the Lord…"God giving a direct command would certainly fall under the purview of His law.
No reason according to whom? I admit I do not know the reason for Joseph and company’s return to Bethlehem but I do know the text (in Matthew) says he did.
You cannot visit Jerusalem from Egypt?
Jefferson never denied Jesus existed and he wasn’t a religious kook. Within the Enlightenment, Newton was a religious kook. I would argue that Michaelangelo and Da Vinci were not religious kooks.
Anyway I disagree with thelabdude on this narrow point. Once you get to, say, 400AD the events in question were rather distant. It wouldn’t occur to many that Jesus had never existed, and even if it had most would have the good sense not to meddle with the authorities. More to the point, there are all sorts of ideas (quantum mechanics, relativity) that scientists living before 1900 where wholly unfamiliar with. That didn’t make them kooks, just understandably ignorant, as are humans in any age.
You don’t have to throw out the Bible either: you just have to interpret it as an primary source document. I’ll repeat the link I mentioned earlier: http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=553596&highlight=“historical+Jesus”&page=3
I’ll also repeat that I find the mythicist position to be highly tenuous, though not ludicrous.
Josephus has two passages putatively mentioning Jesus. One of the passages is at least partially interpolated, and possibly entirely. He has another very brief passage mention the the execution of one James, “…the brother of Jesus, the [so] called Christ,” which is generally regarded as authentic.
Yes, there was a Christian movement, but this is not in question by mythcists.
The Suetonius passage is very unlikely to be a reference to Jesus. Chrestus (a Latinization of a Greek word meaning “fit for use,” “useful,” “servicable.” “managable” was a common name given to Roman slaves. Suetonius says this Chrestus incited Jews in Rome, but Jesus never went to Rome, much less incited Jews there. The identification of “Chrestos” with “Christos” is entirely baseless.
Yes, Christians existed, and Tacitus even says that their namesake was crucified by Pilate, but he gets Pilate’s title wrong, and it’s entirely possible he got his information from Christians themselves (or from scuttlebutt about them). Tacitus may or may not be an independent source from Christians themselves.
[quite]This points, I suggest, to the existence of a Christian movement in the mid first century, which was large enough to have spread to Rome.
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As Tacitus cynically pointed out, pretty much every crackpot cult ended up in Rome.
This whole “people were still alive who would have know” angle is completely fallacious. First, the vast majority of the audience were gentiles and diaspora Jews who were not there, but more to the point, how were they supposed to know or prove that somebody did not exist?
If you lived in Chicago 20 years ago and hear a story about a guy named Bob getting arrested there once, are you going to have some kind of encyclopedic memory of every human being who lived in Chicago at the time or whether they got arrested?
Understand that some crank getting arrested and strung up by the Romans in Judea during Passover was no more significant than somebody getting tossed into a Chicago drunk tank on Christmas Eve.
There actually was likely nobody in these audiences from Galilee, but even if there were, they’d have had no reason to ever be aware of this Jesus. Keep in mind that the more fantastic stories involving public spectacles like healing mobs of people or the triumphant entry into Jerusalem did not enter Christian mythology until the Gospels began to be written outside of Palestine, in a Gentile language, 40 years after the alleged events.
Let’s also say hypothetically that somebody would have stood up in the middle of one of these obscure little congregations (which typically consisted of maybe a couple dozen people in someone’s private home during Paul’s ministry), and said, “I lived in Galilee, and I don’t remember this Jesus.” So what if they did? Who was going to give a shit? Do you think that would have just stopped Christianity cold right then and there? Why would it?
This is extraordinarily grasping since Luke makes no mention of any such thing, and it still does not solve your problem that Herod died a decade before Luke’s census, so he couldn’t have been slaughtering innocents in Bethlehem at the time.
According to Luke. According to Luke, Joseph’s business in bethlehem was finished.
No it doesn’t.
Not without going to Judea, which Matthew says Joseph stayed away from.
In short…yes a miracle and I was trying to say Joshua was not conflicting with what we know of the solar system today. And come to think of it…it was a horrible example of figurative speech.
A better example would have been:
Job 28:24
“For He looks to the ends of the earth…”
We know there is no literal “end” this globe but the author was just making a point by using a figure of speech. Inspiration IMO is allowed to use metaphors too.
I know I am just asking for trouble by bringing the word fruit into the conversation but…Matthew 7:20
“Therefore by their fruits you will know them.”
“Fruits” are in the eye of the beholder.
I seem to recall some ancient thinkers presenting a skeptical view of Greek mythology along the lines of, “The oracles say all sorts of things.” Sorry for the vagueness.
Lucian was a 2nd century CE satirist of pagan and Christian religions (and was a proto-SF writer besides). One of his works was A True Story which was a fantastical parody of Homer’s tales. The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Works of Lucian of Samosata — Volume 02, by of Samosata Lucian
No offense taken but I beg to differ…Joy is well defined.
http://www.thefreedictionary.com/joy
Just having a little fun…hope you are not offended and I do see your point.
I have the feeling that DtC will not be impressed but to define the changes in my life a little better. I give more and yet have more money in my pocket. I get in less arguments, I worry alot less even tho my son is 21 and acting just like I did at that age. My marriage is better (yep the sex too) I work on my house more and am really enjoying it when it used to be a chore. Maybe it has nothing to do with me taking my religion more seriously than I ever have but its a very odd coincidence if that is true.
And I am certainly not asking anyone to take my word for it…I am asking you to try it with an open mind and see for yourself.
I believe you think religion helps you. I just don’t care. I’m already happy without it. I don’t need it.
And it’s not volitional anyway. I couldn’t possibly ever buy into it.
So school me Diogenes! Why do you trust the dating of Herod and Quirinius so much? What sources do you use? We are talking about 10 years here 2000 or so years ago. The leaders of our country cannot remember what they promised a couple of months ago and I have hard time remembering what I had for supper.
Nope…Luke says Joseph did what he was told before going to Nazareth. If you said Luke implied I could see it as a valid point.
Yep it does.
Ok I see your point on this one and I cannot get around it…I will concede that at least for now and study further…Matthew 2:13 does say “stay there” and that is pretty strong…I will get back to you on this one way or another.
BTW I have missed none of your posts and am dodging none of them but I will not have the time tonight to answer to the things I missed.
Cheers
OK, I admit that I am assuming that if the Christian movement was noticeable in Rome and was found in Corinth, Galatia, Thessaly and so forth, it was also to be found in Jerusalem and elsewhere in Judea and Galilee. And it’s the people there who would be in a position to evaluate the stories about and claims for Jesus against their own experience and memories of Jesus.
It’s not just the crucifixion. I agree, crucifixions were common. But the claims about Jesus included claims that he initially attracted a large following, that he was controversial, etc. Even leaving aside supposed signs and wonders, if claims were made that events of this type had happened in my home town city or thirty years ago, yes, I would expect to have been aware of them at the time. I would expect accounts offered now to be ringing bells in my mind. And if neither I nor any of my friend or family or neighbours could recall anything of these events, I think the proponents would have a credibility problem.
And why would those behind the Jesus movement expose themselves to such a problem? Sure, if your new religion gets past Judea and to exotic places like Rome and Corinth, it may escape this particular scrutiny. But if you’re starting it in Judea, you’re setting yourself up to fall at the first hurdle, and the question of how it will be received in Corinth seems unlikely ever to arise. And you don’t have to do this; as you point out, crucifixions were common, and there were plenty of real itinerant apocalyptic preachers. If you are, for whatever reason, determined to attribute your ideas to someone whose career appears to have ended in total failure, why not pick a real person whose career ended in total failure?
In short, the notion that Jesus was real seems to be a more parsimonious explanation of the origins of the Jesus movement than the notion that he was entirely made up out of whole cloth.
The dating is multiply attested in ancient sources, notably by Josephus, but also by others, and these are cross referenced by corroborating regnal dates for Herod’s successors (his sons, one of whom, Archelaus, is mentioned by Matthew as still being tetrarch in Judea when Joseph got back from Egypt), and this is further corroborated by a coincidental lunar eclipse which is multiply attested by ancient sources as having occurred near Herod’s death, and which can be dated mathematically.
Moreover, we know the order of succession in Judea. Herod the Great was given all of the Palestinian region as a client kingdom for being an ally to Augustus in 40 BCE. Under Herod the Great, no part of his kingdom was subject to tax or census. That was the deal. After Herod died (in 4 BCE), his kingdom was divided up between his sons. Herod Antipas got Galilee (where Nazareth was), and a son named Archelaus got Judea, and another son Philp got Perea (the region across the Jordan). Archelaus was so brutal and incompetent, that the Romans removed him from power in 6 CE, annexed Judea (but not Galilee or Perea) as part of the province of Syria, and imposed its very first census and tax under the Syrian Governor, Quirinius. This census caused massive rioting.
So no matter how you slice it, the order is Herod-Archelaus-Quirinius. Judea was not a Roman province while Herod the Great was alive.
Luke says that Joseph was supposed to go to Bethlehem for the census, then he went to Jerusalem, then he went home to Nazareth (contradicting Matthew’s claim that Jospeh lived in bethlehem to begin with and only relocated to nazareth after returning from Egypt). It does not remotely say or imply that Joseph was supposed to flee to Egypt. It merely that Joseph was supposed to present Jesus in the temple in accordance with Jewish law. More importantly, though, Herod was already ten years dead, so he couldn’t have been slaughtering innocents. There is no way around this. It’s as hard a contradiction as there is in the Bible.
Please cite the chapter and verse where Matthew says that Joseph was supposed to return to Bethlehem once he left it the first time.
If he didn’t exist, they would have no memories of him. Even if he did exist, he was a pretty obscure figure.
[quite]It’s not just the crucifixion. I agree, crucifixions were common. But the claims about Jesus included claims that he initially attracted a large following, that he was controversial, etc. Even leaving aside supposed signs and wonders, if claims were made that events of this type had happened in my home town city or thirty years ago, yes, I would expect to have been aware of them at the time. I would expect accounts offered now to be ringing bells in my mind. And if neither I nor any of my friend or family or neighbours could recall anything of these events, I think the proponents would have a credibility problem.
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These claims were not made until 40 years after they allegedly occurred, made outside Palestine to an audience that was virtually all non-palestinian gentiles and diaspra Jews, and were made after the regions in question had been destroyed by a war.
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And why would those behind the Jesus movement expose themselves to such a problem?[.quote]
There wasn’t any problem.
What hurdle? We don’t know exactly what the first claims or beliefs were, nor would there have been a way to prove a negative. It seems to have been a law abiding Jewish sect who thought that some kind of crucified Messiah was going to return from the sky. Judeans are either going to buy that or not buy it, but we don’t actually know for a certainty that this first Jesus cult in Jerusalem actually believed or taught themselves that Jesus was a historical person rather than being (as he is in mythicist model’s like Doherty’s and Carrier’s) seen as a purely cosmic figure existing only in a spiritual realm. Jesus isn’t really spoken of in historical/earthly/biographical terms until Mark’s Gospel.
I’m not necessarily disagreeing. Like I’ve said, I lean toward the historical, but it’s not cut and dried. There’s really no smoking gun. Even if a historical Jesus did exist, I think he’s all but irrecoverable at this point.
Of course he was. Hell, he believed God was a sort of thin gas.
I wasn’t aware either of them were considered Biblical scholars.
Even if we assume that Jesus was mortal, he could have predicted that the animosities between the Jews and the Romans would culminate in a rebellion that the Jews would lose. Of course, if He is the Son of God, an accurate prediction about that would not be surprising. What matters is that the Jewish Uprising is not specifically mentioned. You can argue that it is alluded to, but it is not specifically mentioned.
The razing of the Temple mount is mentioned. The revolt is mentioned obliquely because Mark didn’t want to piss off the Romans.
Correct me if I’m mistaken, but isn’t the Greek word that we translate as “Christ,” the equivalent of the Hebrew word for “messiah”? If that’s the case, then I can’t see the Jews in Jerusalem referring to some random rabble-rouser named Yeshua by a Greek word that means he’s the nation’s hero.
I’m happy for you that you’re enjoying your life more. But does any of that stuff have anything to do with whether your religious beliefs are true? That’s what we’re talking about here - not whether people’s religious beliefs can serve as their inspiration to settle down and get more out of their life, but whether those beliefs are true. You see the difference, right?
That Greek word is Christos (“anointed”), not Chrestus, which is Latinization of Chrestos, a completely different word, with a completely different meaning, and which was a name commonly given to slaves (it basically had the same kind of tone and association as naming a dog Fido).
Yabbut the implication I get from the religious people who bring this up is that “Chrestus” is really similar to “Christ” so that must be just a slight misunderstanding, or simply a different spelling of the same basic word. They’re using this reference to “Chrestus” to say that they must have been talking about “Jesus Christ.” But that makes no sense.
Not exactly. ‘Christos’ means ‘anointed’ in Greek and "moshiach’ means ‘anointed’ in Hebrew, but ‘moshiach’ does not mean “messiah”. The kings of ancient Israel, for example, were anointed. Indeed, the entire concept of the Messianic Age is different in Judaism than it is in Christianity, and as such, the Jewish concept of a ‘messiah’ is radically different than the Christian one.