This is a complete load of crap and Strobel is a joke. There is no such archaeological evidence, full stop. This is a common apologetic claim, but it’s total bullshit.
Furthermore, it would be irrelevant even if Quirinius had been Governor of Syria when Herod was alive* because when Herod was alive, Judea was not yet part of the Syrian province. While Herod the Great was King, all of Israel was a client kingdom, not a Roman province. That means it was not subject to Roman taxes or Censuses, and the Syrian Governors had no jurisdiction over it. After Herod’s death, his kingdom was divided between his sons. Galilee (where Nazareth was) was given to Herod Antipas. Judea (where Jerusalem was) was given to a son named Archalaus, who was such a disaster as ethnarch that Rome removed him from power and annexed Judea (and only Judea, not Galilee) as part of the Syrian province in 6 CE. The first order of business for the Governor then was to perform a census. That’s WHY Quirinius peformed a census in 6 CE, because he had just been given Judea.
To reiterate:
The assertion that any archaeological evidence has been found that Quirinius was Governor of Syria more than once is ripe horseshit.
Even if he had been, he would have had no jurisdiction over Judea while Herod the Great was alive.
Lee Strobel is a buffoon.
*by the way, there is no mystery as to who was Governor of Syria when herod died in 4 BCE – it was a guy named Publius Quinctilius Varus.
Out of curiosity – is there any credence given to “Mark” being the young man in the Garden of Gethsemane, who became scared and fled, leaving his clothes behind? (Mark 14:51-52) That particular passage appears nowhere else in the Gospels, so some people have speculated that the boy might have been Mark himself.
So on the one hand we have John McRay, author of Archaeology and the New Testament and among the most cited experts in the field of archaeology. On the other hand, we have some loner on the internet whose “debunking” consists mainly of repeatedly declaring that anyone who disagree with him is “insane”, “ludicrous”, “absurd”, and so forth. I will treat your webpage the same way that I treated the post by KGS, by assuming that the author is flinging around juvenile insults in an attempt to distract us from his lack of any actual evidence. (And note in passing that he’s addressing a strawman claim of Quirinius being governor twice, and makes no mention of the actual argument that there were two people named Quirinius.)
More fact-free name calling, more confirmation that Strobel’s scholarship is untouchable.
I agree the authors were not journalists or investigators. I don’t think they were eye-witnesses either.
Yet the entire Christian religion rests on their claim that Jesus rose from the dead.
Are you saying it doesn’t matter if it’s not literally true that Jesus rose from the dead?
Yes, I do. There’s no reason to believe he did so, therefore I believe he did not do so.
Actually there’s quite a lot of reasons why Christianity should be considered separately from this. One of the most obvious ones is that the history of the Christian church does not fit in with the models of the cults you name. Cults generally work like this: leader makes astonishing claims of supernatural powers, small group of followers gathers around, leader fails to demonstrate truth of claims (or dies), cult rapidly disintegrates. That’s the pattern that we can observe in countless separate examples. True, there are some cases, such as with Scientology where the cults outlasts its leader. L. Ron Hubbard was more clever than most and set up an infrastructure that managed to remain stable after his death, but Scientology has hardly taken the world by storm.
Moreover, the same basic pattern has occurred throughout history. In fact, even in Palestine around Jesus’ time there were a plenitude of groups gathered around a would-be miracle worker. Josephus lists several of them. But he also records those groups falling apart after the promised miracles fail to arrive.
So the question has to be asked, why the standout performance of Christianity? Why did the Apostles and a sizable group of other followers continue to band together after Jesus died? Why did they have such good luck recruiting new followers among the Jews mere months after the crucifixion? Why were their evangelizing efforts so successful in so many places: Asia Minor, Egypt, Greece, Italy, Syria, and further east? There’s a plain and obvious response to your interpretation. Early Christianity simply does not fit into a standard pattern of cult-like behavior. Rather it stands out for failing to do so. Why?
One can assert, of course, that people joined up because they were stupid. But if so, why Christianity rather than any of the others? And why did Christianity rapidly become popular in the intellectual and political centers of the Mediterranean world? And how does it keep going to this day? One can live in denial and claim, as KGS did, descend into insults while refusing to confront the facts. But once you acknowledge the fact that Christian scholars have done more research on the topics of the Bible, the historical context, and the early church, where does that leave you?
The evidence would be in that most modern day cult leaders do. If 70% of cult leaders do it, and Mark is a cult leader, there’s a 70% chance that he was doing it too.
How is any of that different from Joseph Smith, Mohammad, Gautama Buddha, Guru Nanak, or any other founder of a religion? Buddhism and Hinduism don’t exist on the planet? They don’t have founders with magical stories attached to them? Why do you accept the stories told by Christians but not the stories told by other religions? Why is that 95% of people born to Christian parents believe the stories about Jesus and think everyone else is nutty, and 95% of people born to Buddhist parents believe the stories about Buddha and think everyone else is nutty, and so on and so forth? You can’t arbitrarily choose that only one of these is right when there’s no particular reason to distinguish them from one another.
And “lasting ability” is a rather silly qualifier to begin with. Who cares if Jesus’ teachings went on for millenia and Charles Manson’s didn’t. Joe the Plumber has been on TV and Bill Gates have been on TV, they both wanted to start their own business and become famous. Maybe Joe the Plumber will get his own one day. It might only last a few months, while as Gates’ company could last for decades or even centuries. “Skill” at accomplishing what you want to isn’t any sort of proof of godliness. It’s not because Bill Gates is more in tune with God’s message that he pulled ahead of Joe the Plumber.
And there’s no particular indication of skill on Jesus’ part. He happened to be a preacher in one of the largest empires on the planet. One emperor happened to like his stuff and made it popular. That could certainly be God’s will, but if so, how do you distinguish it from Confucius who happened to be a philosopher in one of the largest empires on the planet, and one emperor happened to like his stuff and made it popular? How do you distinguish it from Marxism? A couple of revolutionaries happened to like his stuff and went on to take over large sections of the globe. But people who liked Adam Smith also happened to take over large sections of the globe. God likes both Capitalism and Socialism and Confucianism and Christianity? This seems unlikely. It seems a lot more likely that if you get lucky enough to influence people who will have strong control over large parts of the planet then ideas spread, and if you’re philosopher X living in Podunksville, Nowhere, your ideas don’t spread.
Jesus’ message was sufficiently non-nutball that it got accepted by a lot of people. How is that proof of anything?
They’re probably doing better than Christianity was 20 years after the death of Jesus.
I trust that you are a Mormon, then, since they faced even greater difficulties after the death of their prophet, and yet have prospered.
Rapidly? Hardly. In any case, there is a sort of anthropic principle at work here. Any religion that survived can be considered correct by virtue of having survived. Is Islam correct for your reasons? Judaism has lasted longer under worse conditions, is it correct? As for comparison with modern religions, remember that back then leaders of nations felt justified in mass converting their populations. Mitt Romney becoming president and mass converting the entire country to be members of the LDS wouldn’t make it any righter.
Bottom line, you’re special pleading.
ETA: Mormonism is such an obvious counter-example, no surprise at the simulpost
Actually, that’s another case of outdated information. We know have several independent sources pointing to the existence of two separate persons named Lysanias. The later one did carry the title of Tetrarch. The Younger Lysanias probably ruled over a much smaller area than the original domain. It’s been speculated that the younger Lysanias was the son of the older. The reign of the younger Lysanias certainly could have included the necessary time period.
See here: CATHOLIC ENCYCLOPEDIA: Gospel of Saint Luke
(And learn about several other instances where archaeology has confirmed the books of Luke and Acts while you’re at it.)
What never made sense to me, even when I was a devout-ish kid, was the
For several reasons this just did not make sense. I remember asking my elementary teacher about it (I went to a Christian school) and even she said she didn’t really understand it (to her credit she didn’t get mad as some teachers did when the Bible’s logic was questioned, and even admitted she didn’t know). Problems that I had with this even as a kid, though I probably wouldn’t have expressed them in quite as much detail at the time:
1- It’s a census, and it’s specifically for taxation/raising money, so what on earth is the logic of going to the city of your ancestors? Wouldn’t it make many times more sense for Quirinius/Augustus (whichever one was holding the census) to want to know where the person lived now? (My male line ancestors came to Philadelphia in the 18th century, a whole lot more recently than Christ’s descent from David, and nobody would consider it of any importance whatever in my identity, residency, or any other thing that even the nosiest of governments could conceivably need to know about me.)
2- Joseph’s of the House of David. Okay. However (and even as a kid I knew this because we talked about David’s wives and marital adventures) David was a polygamist with many sons (I think the Bible names about 20 or so), and his son Solomon had hundreds of wives and concubines and Solomon’s son Rehoboam alone had 88 children (most of them sons), and they all lived centuries before Jesus. This means that probably half of Israel could trace David on both sides of the family, but even his male line descendants alone would have been conservatively in the many thousands. Does this mean that ALL Jews who had talk of David in their ancestry (and as somebody who’s traced his ancestry with the help of microfilm and the Internet and modern record keeping I can tell you that most families don’t keep records for centuries) had to go to Bethlehem? And again, why would Caesar care— it seems he’d be more interested in knowing “How many people live in Nazareth?” rather than “How many had ancestors who lived in Bethlehem?”, info I can’t imagine being of any conceivable use to anyone in Rome.
3- Why was it necessary to take Mary? It’s not like the Romans were taking snapshots of the family. Even today you can tell a census taker “I have a wife, she’s pregnant, she’s away right now” without having to actually present her to him, plus women had no real value in the ancient world anyway. The things you’d want to know on a census/tax rolls would be “How large is your family? How many are adult males? What’s your occupation? How much money do you make?”
Even in ancient times people understood that it wasn’t a great idea for a woman in the third trimester to ride a donkey plus even if her husband’s a misogynist he would know that she’s going to slow him down, so it’s not likely a man would make her accompany him but would want her to be at home where midwives could help her if she went into labor.
Anyway, the reason for mentioning this is that even as a kid who believed most of the words in the Bible, this didn’t seem true. To quote Stan from South Park, there’s some information missing. When I was still a Christian I figured out “oh, okay, they were trying to make the square peg of Jesus’s birth fit the round hole of the prophecy”. Though even then couldn’t they have just said 'Well, Jesus was born in Bethlehem because his family moved there briefly for a job, but Nazareth was really there home so that’s where they moved back and where he grew up (after a possible sojourn in Alexandria)?" It’s a lot simpler and makes more sense.
I’ve already listed instances that make early Christianity unique and see no need to repeat myself.
Hinduism sure doesn’t.
To actually answer your question, I’m quite willing to listen to the evidence presented by followers of other religions, and to study the facts surrounding them. When I encounter rational and convincing claims of supernatural events, I’m quite willing to give them the benefit of the doubt.
Do you have any evidence to prove either of these assertions?
This and the rest of your post are argument by greatly overextended analogy. Suppose I assert that more people eat pizza than brussel sprouts because pizza tastes better. You then counter, “Oh, and I suppose that more people wear cotton than flannel because cotton tastes better?”
I choose my religious beliefs based on things relevant to religion, not on things irrelevant to religion.
PS- Were any miracles ascribed to bar Kokhba? I usually just associate him with military skills, but his life is better documented by contemporaries than Jesus’s (largely because he was such a thorn in the side of Rome) and there were some who hailed him as the Messiah, so I was wondering if he was considered a miracle worker as well.
The exact definition of cult varies from dictionary to dictionary of course, but the vast majority would agree with something akin to “an unorthodox religious movement, often centered around a charismatic founder”. ALL religions, every last one, began as a cult- has no bearing on their truth value. (Whichever of the one true religions yet formed or yet unformed either did or in all likelihood will begin as a cult.) If Mark was a leader in early Christianity, and it would be easy to assume if he was the gospel writer then he was among their leaders, cult leader is not only fair but not insulting.
You don’t have the slightest idea what you’re talking about, you really don’t. You are seriously out of your league here and you don’t even know it.
Let’s back up a little bit. What exactly do you believe this alleged “newly found” archaeological evidence is for your second Quirinius? Be specific. Let’s discuss the evidence itself instead of leaning on your flailing appeals to an apologist with a PhD.
If you’d read Carrier’s piece (and Carrier ALSO has a PhD, so how about that?), you’d see what McRay’s claim (a claim never published for peer review) was actually based on and how ridiculous it truly is. I suggest you read this exact part of Carrier’s piece and then decide if you really want to pursue this any further. Please be warned that trying to dismiss Carrier out of hand won’t work fotr you because you are the one making the claim. I point you to Carrier only so that you can see exactly what McRay’s argument is based on so that you can make an attempt to intelligently defend it.
I would also like to know how you get around the fact that Judea did not become part of the Syrian province until 6 CE.
Oh, and the “two Quirinius” thing is sheer speculation on McRay’s part and based on absolutely no evidence.
Strobel is not a “scholar,” by the way. He’s just a journalist turned evangelist. His books are not remotely scholarly works (and Strobel is utterly uncredentialed in any relevant field), but are pop, fundy apologist screeds written in the form of fake investigative journalism. When I tell you that Strobel is a joke, I’m trying to help you. You will never get anyone at all educated in these subjects (and that includes mainstream Christian scholars) to take you seriously if you go around spouting Strobel. It identifies you as an uninformed amateur.
Historians have actually uncovered census forms from the Roman Empire, and they confirm that this was the method of taking a census. Everybody returned to the town or city of their birth, and families were required to go with the head of the household. The same procedure was used all across the Roman Empire for a period of centuries. Thus on that topic the gospel accounts match up extremely well with known history.
(As for why, I’ve never heard a historical argument, but I can speculate. The census was for taxation purposes as you say. The authorities would not want people decamping en masse during the census just to avoid taxes. Hence they required everyone to remain in their birthplace. Keep in mind that in those times most people stayed in one place for their entire lives. Only a small portion of the population would have to move long distances to fulfill the orders.)
With all due respect, it seems to me that the question of authorship comes up more often ( at least on these Boards ) regarding the Gospels than it does for many other ancient world texts. Is there the same level of doubt regarding authorship of these texts?
Just by example, none of the three texts are hotly debated. In the case of the first two, people accept that Virgil and Homer were real people, and that they authored the stories. In the case of the third, if an author’s name for this 2,350-odd year old text were provided, why would we doubt it?
The emotionally charged Gospels seem to stand alone in this regard. Date of authorship and provenance of authorship are impossible to prove with utter accuracy.
You write something 30 years after the event, an event that has changed the course of history, you’d expect there to be doubt. Read first person accounts of September 11th, or of Pearl Harbor. Emotionally charged events do yield wildly varied accounts- even on the day or within the week.
30 years later? 60 years later? Please. Either one believes, or one does not. Until someone has proof, hard cold proof, that everything remembered from 30 years hence and written down is utterly accurate, these accounts will always require a leap of faith.
That’s twice recently you’ve mentioned that book. I’ve read it and I’d say by itself , without questioning the evidence he presents or the people he interviews it can be convincing. I’ve seen it trashed here on the SDMB as pretty unreliable so I looked for some reviews.Here’s something interesting.
the article goes on in much more detail but this makes the main point. You don’t establish any real credibility as an investigative journalist looking for the truth by only interviewing people with one point of view and an agenda. A listing of opinions by Christian apologist’s doesn’t really make a Case for Christ IMHO.
Believe me, I’m well aware of the fact that you atheists seriously resent the success of Strobel’s books. There’s no need to point that out.
I am a person who enjoys being educated and informed and in getting information from many different perspectives. I’m willing to take on an author who I disagree with. I am not willing to take on an author who spends most of his article calling names at everyone he dislikes. Intellectuals do not call their opponents insane or retarded. Intellectuals do not insist that their opponents are ludicrous or preposterous. Intellectuals defend their statements with facts, not by descending to the level of an angry child. So when Mr. Carrier decides he’d rather have a juvenile name-calling match then uphold intellectual standards, he joins Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris on the list of people not worth paying attention to. And that’s true Ph.D. or not. A Ph.D. is not an excuse to behave like a five-year-old.
Now if there is actual evidence to refute McRay’s assertion, there must surely be some intelligent adult who has presented that evidence. So tell me where I can read the presentation by that intelligent adult, and let’s bypass Mr. Carrier. The fact that atheist arguments depend so heavily on people like him could help to explain why atheists don’t win many converts.
(And as for your attempt to “help me”, spare your breath. Strobel is an author. His “Case for” books consist of interviews with people who have outstanding credentials. As for your warning about how I won’t be taken seriously, I’ll take my chances.)
If I were in a snarky mood, I might suggest that it’s rather hypocritical for someone at infidels.org to make such a complaint. Instead, I’ll say this. Strobel’s book is called The Case for Christ. It contains a case for Christ. If the book were called An Even-Handed Investigation into the Evidence for and Against the Veracity of the Gospels then there would be legitimate reasons to complain. But as it is, he interviews the experts on his side and lets them list what evidence they have and explain what it means. He has plentiful citations and suggestions for further reading. Moreover, he does not call the people who disagree with him “insane” or “retarded” or “demented”, which moves his credibility up a big notch.
If you want to convince me of your side, send me to books and articles written by adults who behave like adults. I am more than willing to read them.