J think he’s just a mole for the Jllumjnatj.
We already talked about your nutjob-this thread is about another nutjob.
Are we only allowed one nutjob per thread?
Let’s hope not, or we are going to have a whole lot of really short threads on the SDMB.
Of course, I expect the number of nutjobs on the SDMB to decrease by at least one in the near future, if you catch my drift.
Regards,
Shodan
Atheists already don’t believe ancient texts
why would they care what this one says
absolutely false statement - atheists do not belive in ‘god’ - has absolutely nothing to do with validity of ‘ancient texts’ -
I fully doubt a singular historic Jesus existed, and this stinks of nutjobbery even to me. I mean, seriously, it’s like a Dan Brown novel - “You need to decipher the code hidden in these 1st century documents” is right out of his playbook.
It just reeks of the tortured logic of conspiracy theory.
I very much doubt that enough actual documentary evidence exists to back it up, although I can certainly understand the impulse to want to “Prove those Christians wrong once and for all.”
It’s not a healthy or useful impulse, and it’s also not necessary. It kind of makes everybody involved look desperate.
Nothing will make a Believer stop listening to you faster than claiming that you can prove, via some tortured logic, that Jesus doesn’t exist. You might as well just stop talking at that point, because I can guarantee that they aren’t listening.
They already have a chosen conspiracy theory, as presented by their personal theology. What possible reason could they have to abandon that position, as poorly supported as it is, in order to take up another position that also requires that they accept massive leaps of unsupported logic. It’s just not going to happen.
Atwill seems to be aware of this, from the press release article "what my work has done is give permission to many of those ready to leave the religion to make a clean break. " It’s red meat for newly converted Atheists… he’s simply helping them replace one conspiracy (christian theology) with another, more emotionally pleasing, conspiracy.
To quote Bob Price, “All conclusions are tentative, which is why you cannot dogmatize as a historian… Some people cannot sleep at night; they want the teddy bear of certainty, but I am afraid it is time to leave that sort of toy land behind.”
Wait, didn’t Billy Meier invent Oxyclean?
He did. But then the MiB stole it and got that Billy Mays guy to sell it for them.
And Meier didn’t notice for years he wasn’t getting the royalties.
Why, exactly, would the Romans try to undermine a group they had pretty clearly beaten on the battlefield? And why wouldn’t they target their new religion more specifically to the Jews (e.g. write the NT in Aramaic rather than Koine Greek), rather than allowing it to escape that region and became a new problem for the Romans (as Tacitus remarks on the fire at Rome during Nero’s reign)? Why, in fact, would any later Roman criticize Christianity if it had been designed by Romans to be Roman-friendly? And beyond just Jesus, the theory seems to require that Paul’s letters were also faked–or at least that Paul was part of the conspiracy.
There are plenty of good reasons to doubt the historical content of the NT. Atwill isn’t one of them.
My first thought on opening this thread was that we had all time traveled to April 1, 2014.
Almost all ancient texts are literary to some degree, as the authors made stuff up to increase reader interest. Look at all the weird stuff in works of geography. And not just ancient - look at Parson Weems.
From the link.
After the Council of Nicea First Council of Nicaea - Wikipedia canonized Jesus’ teachings, it suited Rome (and the Church) just fine. To whit, tithe and love your asshole masters.
Aloha
In your opinion, which stories and sermons in the gospels can be shown to be related to other earlier works and traditions?
Moreover, why would that be a reason for stripping them out? Much of what Shakespeare wrote is related to earlier writings, yet most people still agree that Shakespeare existed. (Though, of course, a few crackpots don’t.)
Shakespeare was the author - Jesus wasn’t - we have no writings at all associated with Jesus’ authorship.
One would not suggest that “King Lear” existed simply because there is a book ‘about’ him, would they?
I think you’re missing ITR champion’s point. The Gospels contain lots of statements that they attribute to Jesus, i.e., of which Jesus was allegedly the author. They also contain other statements about Jesus.
Likewise, Elizabethan literature contains many poems and plays ascribed to Shakespeare. It also contains lots of other documents and remarks referring to Shakespeare.
The evidence for the historical Shakespeare’s existence may be much stronger than that for the historical Jesus’s existence (it was much more recent, for one thing), but the two situations are basically parallel.
And consequently, the fact that Jesus’s alleged sayings or Shakespeare’s alleged original works of literature have connections to earlier traditions doesn’t mean that there wasn’t actually somebody called Jesus, or somebody called Shakespeare, who lived and produced the version of them that’s ascribed to him.
The analogy with King Lear is misapplied because Lear is presented from the get-go as a fictional character. He may have been inspired by some historical or pseudohistorical sources, but AFAIK nobody has ever seriously claimed or believed that Shakespeare’s Lear was a historical person. A more appropriate analogy would be between Shakespeare’s Lear and, say, the prodigal son in Jesus’s parable, who AFAIK is also never claimed or believed to have an identifiable historical existence.
Of course, just because lots of people claim or believe in the historicity of Jesus (or Shakespeare, for that matter) doesn’t prove that any such person existed. But the standard historiographic default assumption is that most people who are referred to in ancient documents as contemporaries or near-contemporaries of the documents’ authors did exist, and it requires pretty strong evidence to establish a counterclaim that there was actually never any such person at all.
Mr Pink said the truth!
CJJ,
Paul was a Roman tax collector, so that would fit into the conspiracy theory.
Perhaps it was a political scheme that got out of hand - like the Republican government shut down.
Crane
I’ll admit that I may have missed the point somewhat - thank you fro that - all I was saying is that we have nothing that Jesus personally wrote down - we only have sayings that are ‘attributed’ to him - While I am an atheist, I have no problem believing that there was possibly a man called Jesus (or whatever the correct local name would be at the time) that probably did some preaching/attempting to change some things - and who’s story ‘grew in the telling’.
Further - any ‘evidence’ that would purportedly be ‘uncovered’ at this point that would ‘prove’ that he did not I would eye with as much suspicion as all the evidence that keeps being ‘found’ that ‘proves’ he did.
(the Lear analogy was just the first name that came to mind from shakespeare - s/Othello, etc if you like - in the end - its the same thing - having works,words associated with a given ‘name’ is only evidence of that - to ‘prove’ that said person did or did not exist takes a bit more when the authors are not available (or did not leave clear words that are indisputable) to answer that question.