Evidence of a historical Jesus Christ

Great Debates
121

And yet, you still haven’t come up with even a single example of truly innocent people being massacred, let alone enough examples to show that it was so routine that it would be ignored. Convicted criminals or disgraced military units are not innocent civilians. Nor were martyred Christians, once their religion had been outlawed.

And it wouldn’t matter if you could, because all your nonsense about how nobody would care about Herod’s slaughter ignores Luke. Please explain why Luke would go into detail about Mary’s pleasant visit to her cousin, but not say a single word about fleeing for her life to Egypt.

Exactly the kind of thing I was referring to a couple weeks ago, when I said that the Iliad had been vindicated in the same way the Bible has.

I must concede that first-century writers knew the names of some first-century towns. Very impressive.

I would. But for the umpteenth time, you don’t have the right to be talking about secular historians until you can explain the contradictions between Matthew and Luke. But you can’t, and that’s why you keep throwing up these smokescreens about people yawning at the massacre of infants.

No, you don’t; not in general. I approach the Bible in exactly the same way that you and your pals would approach the Quran, or the Book of Mormon, or Dianetics, or any other book claiming to contain supernatural knowledge. It’s just that when it comes to the Bible, you resort to all this comical special pleading.

Instead of agreeing that it’s preposterous to think that Augustus would order a world-wide census requiring people to travel possibly hundreds of miles, to the city their ancestors lived in a thousand years earlier, and nobody but Luke would even mention it, you say, “I’d not be surprised if new research shed light on the issue.”

If Tom Cruise said that the jury’s still out on whether an alien named Xenu used hydrogen bombs to kill billions of his people on earth 75 million years ago, you would have exactly the same regard for his sanity as I have for yours.

122

Maybe Abraham Lincoln was really shot in 1875 instead of 1865. Who knows what the future will reveal? How dare anybody state that he was assassinated in 1865 as a fact.

123

IMO they are extremely important. It is a central tenet of Christianity that Jesus was not merely a great prophet, but the literal Son of God. The birth narratives are the only stories that explicitly show this.

124

Furthermore, I find it perfectly reasonable that no secular historians mentioned that Lincoln instituted a tax to pay for the war, and required everyone in America to travel to the city where his ancestors lived a thousand years earlier, to pay it. Or the fact that he killed all the children in Richmond in an attempt to keep Robert E. Lee Jr. from growing up and running against him in 1900. Or that he fled to Canada shortly after the war began, and remained there until he heard that Jefferson Davis was dead.

125

naysayer

126

I’ve come up with many; you’ve just ignored them. However, I did make a major mistake in this thread. I thought you were actually interested in having a debate. Now that you’ve made it clear that you only wanted to call me “stupid” and “insane” over and over again, I think I’ll depart while thanking God that I have better things to do with my life.

127

If the birth narratives are so crucial to establishing Jesus as the Son of God, why do the gospels of Mark and John, both of which insist on Jesus’s identity as the Son of God (cites: Mark 1:9-11; John 20:30-31), not include them?

128

That is not true. Your examples are of executed criminals or decimated soldiers, not innocent civilians. And what has been ignored are my constant pleas for you to address the internal contradictions in the Gospels, rather than repeating ad nauseum your claim that massacred babies were a boring fact of life in the Roman Empire.

Don’t let the doorknob hit you where the good lord split you.

129

As others have noted, “Son of God” is an expression that was used of various people, including Jewish heroes and the Emperor Augustus. It was a title of respect, and it implied that one was a favorite of the gods.

But Christian belief goes beyond that, and asserts that Mary was literally impregnated by God, with no participation by Joseph. The authors of Mark and John don’t say that. Don’t ask me why; ask them. Oh wait, you can’t, because nobody knows their real names.

130

Why did the psalmist tell the people he was talking to,they were gods, and the sons of god? Jesus used this quote to ask why people said he blasphemed when He called God his father.

131

Well your post was long and detailed, but does anybody else see anything in it dealing with the visit to the temple being within days of the birth and the visit of Magi much later? The people proclaiming Jesus to be the Messiah were common, simple people, zeros in Herod’s radar.

What doesn’t make sense are your posts. While the Magi were learned men, they may not have had a copy of Micah to check on the birth place. Besides, no matter where the crazy star went, a king to be should be born in the palace.

Now as far as making stuff up, you don’t make up things there is no oral tradition to back. The birth narratives are there to tie Jesus to the Old Testament prophecies. Even at the time Mathew and Luke were written, there were people whose family traditions would back the census, the slaughter, and maybe even the star. We may have no record of them, but the slaughtered babies would be remembered for generations.

132

I think it’s kind of (like many things from way back when), kind of a historic version of the game Telephone. You have some guy who’s born in Nazareth, goes to Bethlehem, maybe he’s even in a manger at some point. He does a couple notable things for his class and people mumble about him a little, then he becomes a bit of a self-styled philosopher, maybe attracts a handful of followers, becomes a bit of a rabble rouser and gets crucified. Hell, if we want to stretch it, maybe somebody bribed the guards and took the body away to burn it in effigy, or give it a proper burial and you have your mysterious body disappearance. Then, at some point posthumously somebody, either jokingly or mostly-seriously starts telling what amounts to Chuck Norris jokes about him involving stories of other template messianic miracles attributed to others.

Suddenly 60-70 years later you this rather unremarkable figure has this intense mythos behind him (again, like Chuck Norris jokes, except more serious) and somebody decides to actually write this down, since fact checking the life of a nobody is rather hard in those days, it’s not surprising accounts of even basic information between different gospel writers differs, especially since from village to village the story probably got warped a little differently.

133

I used to think that, but ITRChampion has convinced me that slaughtered babies were an everyday occurrence in 1st-century Palestine. As were angelic choirs, worldwide censuses, magic stars, three-hour solar eclipses at the time of the full moon, and zombie saints.

134

I’m currently working on a novel about a plausible historical basis for the origins of Christianity. Historical Jesus is a subject that’s all but impossible to research because there’s so little hard data, and every scholar has his own pet theory (wherein Jesus is usually in philosophical accord with the writer. People tend to want to project their own ideologies onto Jesus. I’ve been guilty of this myself. It’s a pernicious, subconscious tendency that’s hard to get rid of). I basically just decided to tell something that would make plausible historical sense and at least would not contradict any known history (or contain any supernatural elements, of course).

My basic narrative:

Jesus comes from a peasant laborer family, under the heel (as were most other families of his time and place) under the heels of an oppressive, tax happy class system and of the Romans. It’s an era of Messianic hopes and apocalyptic fervor. Jesus becomes a follower of John the Baptist, who is heralding the coming of the “one like a son of man” who Daniel says will descend from the sky to bring about the Messianic age. After John is arrested and killed, Jesus undergoes a period of psychological crisis culminating in ecstatic, mystic states where he believes he is in communication with God. He continues to preach the coming of the Son of man and the imminent Kingdom of God. Ultimately (for a variety of reasons), he begins to see the temple as an obstacle to be destroyed in order to bring about the advent of the Son of Man, launches his assault, and (to his own amazement) is simply hunted down, arrested by temple authorities and handed over summary execution by the Romans. The Son of man doesn’t come. The Kingdom doesn’t come. God takes no notice. His followers flee back to Galilee, emotionally destroyed,

Some time later, Simon the Rock has a visionary experience of Jesus, then one or two other followers make the same claim, then they decide that Jesus himself was the son of man, and that he will soon return in glory from the clouds. Then an over educated snot from Tarsus named Saul takes that ball and runs with it, adding his own highly idiosyncratic interpretations to it.

I’m finding that it’s actually a kind of humorous story when written down. I’m using the device of having a young Roman convert try to collect recollections from surviving apostles (think the Gospels crossed with World war Z), and the disciples were crude, uneducated vulgar men. They curse and swear. They have ribald senses of humor. They are not pious twats, but genuine, salt of the earth, blue collar guys. I’ve tried for years to approach thsi project, and when I finally hit on the device of just letting these guys talk like fishermen and construction workers would really talk, it finally clicked.

I’ve probably revealed too much.

135

I hate to tell you this, but Monty Python beat you to it with “The Life of Brian.”

136

The problem is that we are only getting one side of this religious “Telephone” game, making it hard to identify it as such. We haven’t got a clue as to how the story began, so we have no possible way of telling how distorted the final outcome is.

137

Yes, except the whole story about being born in Bethlehem is clearly mythical. The writers of Matthew and Luke desperately scoured the Old Testament looking for anything that could be considered a prophesy. There was one, from 700 years earlier and clearly talking about events during that time period, which said that one would be born in Bethlehem, which is where David supposedly was from.

So Matthew and Luke, in order to make this implausible connection, came up with two implausible and mutually contradictory stories about how this Jesus character could have been born in Bethlehem when everyone knew he was from the Galilee area.

138

So, I’m an atheist from a Christian upbringing. I generally consider myself above average in understanding of Christianity, although far from an expert. More of a lifelong hobby; It’s always been an interest. I’ve read some pop theology and tracts, debated with numerous Christians, seen quite a few film adaptations, attended church religiously for the first ten-or-so years of my life, and even read fair snippets of the Bible in various translations. Most of the arguments in this thread are ones I’ve heard before and am decently familiar with.

But I absolutely swear this is the first time I’ve ever heard of the Massacre of the Innocents. I’m flummoxed. How did that get there?

139

Don’t feel bad; you probably still know the Bible better than most Christians.

Based on years of discussions and correspondence, most Christians have spent more time studying for their driver’s license than they have studying the Bible. And all you have to do to verify that is to look at the pageants and displays every Christmas. Most of them have the Magi visiting the baby Jesus in the manger, with the cows watching them present their gifts. But that is conflating two contradictory stories. There was no visit (except by shepherds) in Luke, and no stable and manger or inn’s barn in Matthew (he says Jesus was in a house, and there is no indication that Mary and Joseph ever lived anywhere but Bethlehem in their entire lives, until after they ran away from Herod).

140

That’s one of Matthew’s less fantastic claims. Are you familiar with his description of a zombie assault on Jerusalem?