In your recent thread, you used the argument from Josephus not mentioning the slaughter of the innocents and other events as supposed proof that the gospels were “a hoax” and then used that to buttress your claim that religious people in general were crazy. You apparently thought the argument was unbeatable. Now we’ve seen that it’s easily beatable. As for the more general issues surrounding the infancy narratives in Matthew and Luke, I’ve already stated my position in the thread started by Kinthalis–the same one in which stpauler supposedly handed me my ass–so read that if you want my response. There’s no reason to repeat the exact same thing in this thread.
If that is your idea of accurate, I begin to see why you think the gospels are accurate. I consider the lack of extra-Biblical sources for events that had to be seen by many and were spectacular or notorious to be evidence, but not proof. And I don’t consider any argument unbeatable. I suggest that you confine yourself to discussing what I write, rather than what I think.
In the sense that you seem to have offered yourself as a counterexample to my belief that nobody with any sense could possibly believe that such an event would go unreported, yes.
Thank you for the pointer. I actually made a post very late in that thread, but as you can tell by reading it, I did not slog through all 160 posts preceding it before doing so.
And I see why you do not care to repeat your response here, because I find it incredible.
In a nutshell, you admit that Luke contradicts Matthew, so at least one of them is wrong, but you say that even if the first two chapters of Luke (i.e. the life of Jesus from his birth to age 12) are a complete fabrication, you don’t see why that should cast any doubt on the reliability of the rest of Luke.
Is that a fair characterization of what you said then, and what you think now?
If so, I find it stunning. I think it’s fair to say that the vast, vast majority of Christians, if they were debating a Muslim on the accuracy of the Quran, and the Muslim admitted that some very crucial suras, the basis of some of the most pervasive traditions of Islam, were likely complete fiction, but then went on to say that their fabrication had no bearing on the validity of the stupendous and unverifiable claims made by later suras — I think most Christians would consider that they had disproved the validity of the Quran to their satisfaction.
Or to put it another way, he had his ass handed to him.
Should we get independent verification of the ass-handedness or just use the premise that in a debate you failed to volley back?
That premise isn’t going to stand up very well. To recap my participation in the thread in question:
Kinthalis began by stating the the gospels had many “outright fabrications and errors”, “contradictions”, and “make believe”. In post #56 I asked him to tell me what exactly he was referring to and I never got an answer, so there was nothing for me to “volley back” to.
In post #59 Razncain asked me about the dates of Herod and Quirinius conflicting and claimed to have 609 other objections that he wanted me to respond to. Someone else addressed the Herod and Quirinius question in the next post, and Razncain never told me what the other 609 objections were, so I had nothing to “volley back” to there either.
Lastly, Diogenese the Cynic asked me to respond to three supposed errors in the gospels: one involving the location of a story in Mark’s Gospel, one involving John mentioning the expulsion from the Synagogue, and one involving the definition of blasphemy as used by Mark. I responded to the first in posts #92 and #141 and to the second in post #105. Other posters responded to the third. So you can’t say that I didn’t “volley back” there either.
I think everyone but you understands that we are talking about your lack of response to the contradictions between the birth narratives of Matthew and Luke. In post 49 that other thread, you say, “Even if I accepted, for the sake of argument, that everything in Luke 1-2 was fabricated it wouldn’t have a bearing on the main thrust of the reliability of that Gospel or any other.”
That statement is simply absurd, and it is a testimony to the power of childhood indoctrination that you cannot see how absurd it is. If a biography of George Washington began with two chapters about how space aliens delivered the infant George to his parents inside a giant egg, nobody would bother reading the rest of the book, except for entertainment.
You made post after post in my thread about how different the Bible was from the Iliad because it was intended to be taken as a reliable history, apart from its theological value. You have been hoisted on your own petard, because admitting that the first two chapters of Luke were either fabricated, or uncritically parroted from a spurious source, completely destroys the credibility of the entire gospel. And IMO it destroys the credibility of the other gospels, since whoever voted on their inclusion to the canon apparently did not have the wit to recognize the glaring contradictions between Matthew and Luke.
And as I said in my earlier post, I do not use the word “proof” lightly, but IMO the fact that even you admit that at least one of Matthew and Luke is flat wrong about the first third of the life of Jesus, is PROOF that the gospels are not divinely inspired, and that anything that smacks of the miraculous should be assumed to be embellishment until overwhelming proof to the contrary is provided. Which will never happen.
By the way, I compliment you on your intellectual honesty in at least admitting that the contradiction cannot be resolved. That puts you ahead of most apologists I’ve encountered.
How exactly is childhood indoctrination involved here? My parents were both atheists. Are you saying that atheists indoctrinated me into not being able to see whatever it is that you want me to see?
I never made a single post that mentioned the Iliad in any way, shape, or form. If you don’t believe me, try reading the thread.
Who has been hoisted on their own petard?
Really? You argue that a single error from a particular source “destroys the credibility” of that source? Look at how many errors you’ve made in this thread and in the last one. I guess your credibility is destroyed by your own standard. Good day.
Simple question.
Should a book, no THE book, that’s supposed to be divinely inspired, contain such errors?
If your first exposure to Christianity truly was as an adult, then you have a different problem, but I doubt that was the case. Even if your parents were not religious, it’s impossible to be raised in the US without constant reminders that Christianity is the dominant religion, presumably for good reason.
There are churches every few blocks; there are all the ceremonial prayers at public functions (relatively recently banned in public schools, thank god, but still in our Congress, for example); our years are numbered from the alleged birthdate of Jesus; our money says “In God We Trust;” etc. And of course, every Christmas and Easter, the TV and radio are full of movies and songs that are essentially Christian propaganda. Even horror movies feature vampires and werewolves who are invincible to almost everything but a cross or holy water.
You have my sincere apologies. I confused you with JThunder.
Not in general. It depends on the nature of the error, and the claims of the source. A typo in a math book wouldn’t bother me. Complete fabrication, in a book that claims that I am doomed to eternal torment unless I live my life in accordance with other miraculous assertions in that same book, is indeed grounds for discarding the whole thing.
I reluctantly concede that you have reasonable grounds to no longer consider me infallible, or even divinely inspired.
What you said was “It is impossible to believe that secular historians would not have recorded some of the events that only Matthew writes about”. [Emphasis mine.] We seem to have a case here of “you keep using that word, but I don’t think it means what you think it means”. As we’ve seen, once we know that Josephus was the only historian writing about Palestine during Jesus’ lifetime, and that he was focused on major affairs of state rather than minor events involving peasants as the slaughter of the innocents was, it’s actually expected that Josephus wouldn’t mention it if it happened. But as it seems we’re now in agreement that what you labeled “impossible” is possible, I suggest we drop that topic.
As I said, I find it likely that one gospeler made a mistake. However, I also pointed to JThunder’s post #60 in which he presents alternate explanations. It’s merely that like most folks, I find the issue to be too trivial to care much about. I didn’t ever say that I found it likely all of Luke’s infancy narrative was a fabrication.
(It does raise an interesting issue though. You’re confident that Herod died in 4 B.C. and that Quirinius became governor of Syria in 6 A.D. Why are you so confident? The only sources for this information are Josephus and Tacitus, though you and others who obsess over this triviality may be unaware of where the information comes from. Josephus and Tacitus both made mistakes, contradicted each other, and believed in the supernatural. By your standards, then, they are “hoaxes” and “fabrications” and have “completely destroyed their credibility”. Why are you still willing to trust them?)
When I read the Koran I considered and evaluated the work in its entirety, as opposed to honing in obsessively on a single trivial clause and using that clause to dismiss the entire thing.
Your basic argument still boils down to assuming that if you find any mistake in the gospels, then you’ve shown all the gospels to be a “hoax”. If you followed this logic consistently, what wouldn’t be a hoax? If you want to know how I feel about errors in the gospels, I wrote a lengthy blog post here.
Good point. If you run into a Jehovah’s Witness, Seventh-Day Adventist, or member of any other church whose official position is that every word of the Bible was divinely inspired, I guess you can stump them with that question. Most major churches don’t have that position, as we’ve established at great length in previous threads on this board.
Whereby you admit it’s not divine.
Written by men, with certain agendas and, like your Illiad, full of contemporary superstional embellishments.
“WE” did not see that; YOU saw it. I refuted it. You are free to consider my refutation inadequate, but not to claim that I agree with you. As for my “impossible to believe” statement, I have already conceded that I failed to account for extreme gullibility and/or indoctrination. I should have said that it was impossible for any objective person to believe.
Once again, you mischaracterize what I said. I took great care to be fair with you and include your alternative explanation that it was not a fabrication, but was copied by Luke from some source in Aramaic that turned out to be spurious.
As for “most folks” not caring about it, that is not my experience. My experience is that “most folks” (and I cite the same percentage as you do), including devout Christians, are unaware of the contradiction (which does not speak well for them. I can’t understand how anyone can claim to base their life on a book that they have never read, or at least not very carefully.)
They are vaguely aware that there is some discrepancy over the date of Jesus’ birth, but they are certainly not aware that the birth narrative of Luke contradicts that of Matthew in many important details. You have only to look at any Christmas pageant, blissfully displaying the Magi presenting their gifts to the baby Jesus in the manger, to see this.
And in my experience, once it is pointed out to them, they think it is VERY important, to the point that they make ridiculous attempts to resolve the contradiction. I have known people to seriously argue that the Star of Bethlehem actually led the Magi to Nazareth.
In fact, I have been debating Christians for decades, and unless my memory fails, you are the first to claim that the contradictions between Matthew and Luke are too trivial to worry about. The birth narratives are not minor incidents; they are establishing Jesus’ bona fides as the Son of God.
The central doctrine of Christianity is that Jesus was not merely a man, but God made flesh. I don’t see what could be more important.
Questions like that are what makes me so sure that you are deeply indoctrinated — it’s the only possible explanation of how someone whose quality of writing shows so much intelligence, could ask such a stupid question.
Whether Herod died in 5 or 4 or 3 BCE really is a trivial point. I don’t much care, and I wouldn’t care at all, if Matthew hadn’t claimed that Herod was alive after Jesus was born. And whether Josephus is a year or two off doesn’t affect my opinion of his credibility, because it’s not that high to begin with.
I EXPECT that Josephus used spurious sources, took liberties with transmitting the facts as he knew them, and even fabricated some of his alleged facts (such as those concerning Cyrus). He’s the best source for some things we know about 1st-century Palestine, but is not to be absolutely trusted on anything. If there is nothing to contradict him on mundane details about Herod fighting a war or building a Temple, I’ll accept it until we find a better source that contradicts him. But if he says anything that violates natural law or common sense, like Herod mounting a winged horse and flying to Rome, then I wouldn’t consider believing it for a second.
And that is exactly the way I treat the Bible. Before the work of people like Finklestein, I was prepared to accept that David and Solomon ruled a united Israel. I am still prepared to accept that they existed, just I provisionally believe that Jesus came from Nazareth and had a cult following. But I never in my adult life believed that God parted the Red Sea, or the sun stood still, or Jesus walked on water, or returned from the tomb.
No, my basic argument is that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and that claims of miracles, and even more so claims that someone speaks for the One True God of the Universe, require that the source be completely unimpeachable and infallible. Even that isn’t enough; the mere fact that there are no obvious internal contradictions in a book doesn’t mean any claim it makes is true. But the presence of errors and contradictions makes it OBVIOUS that its miraculous claims should be ignored, and that any claims to historic validity should be given no more weight than those of Josephus or Herodotus, i.e., not much.
Too late to edit, but I see that that came out wrong. I am not claiming that any typo in a modern history book makes it no more reliable than Herodotus. I am claiming significant errors and contradictions in any part cast serious doubt on its overall reliability, and that ANY substantive errors obviously disprove claims of infallibility.
I don’t see why you think sarcasm is called for. Absolute divine inspiration is the only reasonable position to take for any book that claims to know what God thinks, let alone one whose authors are largely anonymous.
Where does the “magic” part of a magic star come from?
Several astronomical events could have been the basis of the story.
From the perspective of a new person, and not having read the previous threads, I appreciate it being raised again. People who didn’t have a chance to participate before may have points not made before–and given the significance of this question in our culture, I think it’s worth going over a few times.
As to the O.P. I think it is more likely than not that a historical Jesus lived. I also think that many of the miracles attributed to him weren’t quite as supernatural as fundamentalists would like to think. Given certain symbolism in the bible involving words like “wine” “fish” and “bread” I think it is reasonable that some of the so-called supernatural stuff was more along the lines of a philosophy being taught.
This suggests the real miracle of the bread and fishes was that 5000 people all understood what was being taught.
You are mistaken. I’m aware of articles that speculate about whether it might be a supernova, comet, or planetary conjunction. Any astronomers who contribute to such foolishness should be ashamed of themselves.
Matthew says, “lo, the star, which they saw in the east, went before them, till it came and stood over where the young child was.”
There is no astronomical object that behaves like that. The sun, moon, planets, and stars, no matter whether they are in conjunction or not, and no matter how bright they are, appear from the earth to travel from east to west across the sky at essentially a constant rate of speed. They do not travel at the pace of a laden camel from north to south, and then stop over a house. In fact, it makes no sense to say that a star can lead you, or stand over a spot — over a short period of time, every star appears to move with you, no matter which direction you move, because it’s so far away that every line between it and the earth is parallel.
Besides, in those times of no headlights and bad roads, nobody would travel at night anyway, unless it was life or death. And a nova bright enough to be seen in the day would have been widely reported.
It had to be magic.
Now I have a question for you: if the Star led the Magi to Bethlehem and then stood over the spot where Jesus was, as Matthew said, then why did they have to stop in Jerusalem as ask directions?
I think you are adding in complications not in the text. It could mean the magi were in the east when they saw it. All they have to do is spot an event on the western horizon and follow that direction
The text says that the star “went before them, till it came and stood over where the young child was.”
That is leading and stopping, not just occurring in some general direction. Besides, stars don’t stay on the western horizon (unless they are magic), they move across the sky from east to west, just like the sun. Several hours after it set in the west, it would reappear in the east, and the magi would have to travel back the way they came.
Poetic imagery. They went in the direction of the star.
I ran a planetarium program called Redshift a few years ago and went back to about 9 B.C. and set the view on the western horizon. I ran the program for a one day at a time check at the same time each day for dusk.
Mars was behaving quite unusually. it was in approximately the same spot every night for many months, maybe it was fifteen months or something (I do not remember the details clearly). Yes Mars still moved around the earth from east to west (as seen from earth) but it somehow seemed to linger around the same spot in the west every night. I’ve tried to wrap my brain around that, as I am generally quite familiar with the ways planets move, but I do not have the skills of calculus. I ran the program back to 3000 B.C. (or whatever the limit of the program was) and also into the future for several thousand more years. I never saw anything like it again.
Right before Mars went below the horizon so as not to be seen right after dusk, it had conjoined Jupiter and another–I can’t remember which, one of the gas giants I think.
This was happening between about 9-7 B.C. or maybe into 6 B.C. I just can’t remember that. I do remember to get right before it happened in the program I’d set the clock for 9 B.C.
I figure this could have gotten the attention of the Magi who then embarked on a journey that may easily have taken a few years.
There are some free online sky modeling programs, I think googling “virtual planetarium” might be the best keywords.
I don’t know how to cite this other than telling you to go check it out.