Did Jesus Christ Actually Exist?

[joelr]

Spoke and worked together? By what I see, the devil was at war already in the Genesis. Do you think Genesis is from Persians?

Sorry, I don't believe that is true in every case.

Joseph Campbell knew this as well:

"
“MOYERS: What about this idea of good and evil in mythology, of life as a conflict between the forces of darkness and the forces of light?

CAMPBELL: That is a Zoroastrian idea, which has come over into Judaism and Christianity. In other traditions, good and evil are relative to the position in which you are standing. What is good for one is evil for the other. And you play your part, not withdrawing from the world when you realize how horrible it is, but seeing that this horror is simply the foreground of a wonder: a mysterium tremendum et fascinans.
"All life is sorrowful" is the first Buddhist saying, and so it is. It wouldn't be life if there were not temporality involved, which is sorrow -- loss, loss, loss. You've got to say yes to life and see it as magnificent this way; for this is surely the way God intended it.”

Excerpt From: Joseph Campbell. “The power of myth.” Apple Books. "


“ MOYERS: But Genesis continues: " 'Have you eaten of the tree of which I commanded you not to eat?' The man said, 'The woman whom thou gavest to be with me, she gave me fruit of the tree, and I ate.' Then the Lord God said to the woman, 'What is this that you have done?' The woman said, 'The serpent beguiled me, and I ate.' "
You talk about buck passing, it starts very early.

CAMPBELL: Yes, it has been tough on serpents. The Bassari legend continues in the same way. "One day Snake said, 'We too should eat these fruits. Why must we go hungry?' Antelope said, 'But we don't know anything about this fruit.' Then Man and his wife took some of the fruit and ate it. Unumbotte came down from the sky and asked, 'Who ate the fruit?' They answered, 'We did.' Unumbotte asked, 'Who told you that you could eat that fruit?' They replied, 'Snake did.' " It is very much the same story.”

Excerpt From: Joseph Campbell. “The power of myth.” Apple Books.

 

[Augustus]

First, where? Please link to this statement so I can see the context. Second, I'm going on the material I linked to, a summary of all the latest scholarship, not one paper? If it was one paper I would not have presented it the same way and I don't care what he may have said about one paper. I'm interested in what the evidence looks like.

It's in the article you have posted about 5 times, in which he states in 2 places you must read and respond to his work before you can be considered an expert.

Also almost all of those papers address the TF, not the James reference.

New Essential Bibliography

Alice Whealey. 2016. “The Testimonium Flavianum.” A Companion to Josephus in His World, eds. Honora Howell Chapman and Zuleika Rodgers (John Wiley & Sons), pp. 345–55.

[Which fails to take into account any of the following (except Whealey 2008 and Olson 1999), which is reflective of the problem that needs correcting.]

Richard Carrier. 2014. “Josephus and the Testimonia Flaviana.” On the Historicity of Jesus: Why We Might Have Reason for Doubt (Sheffield-Phoenix), pp. 332–342.

Paul Hopper. 2014. “A Narrative Anomaly in Josephus: Jewish Antiquities xviii:63.”
Linguistics and Literary Studies: Interfaces, Encounters, Transfers, eds. Monika Fludernik and Daniel Jacob (de Gruyter), pp. 147–169.

Ken Olson. 2013. “A Eusebian Reading of the Testimonium Flavianum.” Eusebius of Caesarea: Tradition and Innovations, eds.
Aaron Johnson and Jeremy Schott (Harvard University Press), pp. 97–114.

Ken Olson. 2013. “The Testimonium Flavianum, Eusebius, and Consensus.” The Jesus Blog (August 13): http://historicaljesusresearch.blogspot.com/2013/08/the-testimoniumf lavianum-eusebius-and.html.

Louis Feldman. 2012. “On the Authenticity of the ‘Testimonium Flavianum’ Attributed to Josephus.” New Perspectives on Jewish Christian Relations, eds.

Elisheva Carlebach and Jacob Schacter (Brill), pp. 13–30. Richard Carrier. 2012. “Origen, Eusebius, and the Accidental Interpolation in Josephus, Jewish Antiquities 20.200.” Journal of Early Christian Studies 20.4 (Winter 2012): 489–514 [Reproduced in Hitler Homer Bible Christ: The Historical Papers of Richard Carrier 1995-2013 (Philosophy Press, 2014), pp. 337–68.]

Alice Whealey. 2008. “The Testimonium Flavianum in Syriac and Arabic.” New Testament Studies 54.4 (October): 573–90.

Ken Olson. 1999. “Eusebius and the Testimonium Flavianum.” Catholic Biblical Quarterly 61: 305–22.

G.J. Goldberg. 1995. “The Coincidences of the Testimonium of Josephus and the Emmaus Narrative of Luke.” Journal for the Study of the Pseudepigrapha 13: 59–77.

How many of these have you read directly rather than assuming they support his arguments as he says they do?

I looked at the first one, and there are 2 chapters (including the one he cites as well as chapter 9) that argue against his overall conclusions (to be fair, there is another chapter: 23 that says the James reference could be an interpolation but leaves it quite open)

For example:

Along somewhat similar lines, Bardet has argued that the passage is unlikely to have been fabricated out of whole cloth in part because its implicit Christology is too archaic and thus too much like Jewish Christianity to have been written by a Christian of the mainstream church after about 150 C.E. (2002, 229–230).

This sort of argument is even more cogent regarding Josephus’s passage about James the brother of Jesus (Ant. 20.200), the authenticity of which is in any case accepted by most contemporary scholars (Feldman 1984, 704–707), than it is regarding the Testimonium. Josephus’s portrait of James, his information about how, why, and when he died, and even about his relationship to Jesus is too different from Christian traditions about James from about 150 C.E. onward, to have been interpolated by a Christian after that date. By the mid‐second century most Christians maintained silence about Jesus’ New Testament brothers altogether. Because of the growth of belief in Mary’s perpetual virginity, if Christians from that period mentioned them at all, they used the theologically safe biblical title “brother of the Lord” (Gal. 1:19; 1 Cor. 9:5); or they qualified the term “brother” with phrases like “said to be”; or they explicitly denied that Jesus had had biological brothers at all by portraying them as stepbrothers or cousins (Whealey 2003, 2–5; 2007, 111–115). This reluctance to openly affirm that Jesus had brothers is incompatible with Christians interpolating a reference to James into Jewish Antiquities 20.200.

I have read exponentially more scholarship on early Islamic history than early Christian. One thing you notice is there are so many competing theories on everything. Any new theory that has plausibility tends to produce significant amounts of similar scholarship.

You reach a point where you read one article and think “wow, that’s a great theory” the. You read the next one which contradicts it and think “wow that’s a great theory too”. Without specialist technical knowledge though it became impossible to evaluate competing ideas.

Mainstream scholars believe anything from the Quran is from Muhammad and the sirah is pretty much accurate minus the miracles, to the sirah is (almost) entirely fabricated and the Quran either predates or post dates Muhammad (and a few fringe scholars even doubt he existed). Not to mention all kinds of alternative theories that fall within the poles.

Offering new and innovative arguments is a way to gain kudos within a field, so diversity of perspective is to be expected. It is also to be expected that no single scholar will be getting everything right and thus over reliance on a single scholar or even school of thought will likely make you overconfident in the accuracy of their views.

One thing I notice is that nothing in this field is even remotely as convoluted as Carrier’s arguments are despite the complexity of the material and paucity of evidence at times.

At some point we need to trust some experts over others as we can’t evaluate directly.

This is where I get to with this issue too (and find it much less interesting). But there doesn’t seem to be any great degree of support for Carrier’s position, which I find strange if his arguments are even 1/4 as good as he thinks they are. Especially as there is a lot of inventive to be revisionist in history

When we judge competing arguments of purported experts that we can’t evaluate professionally we take a range of things into consideration. This will involve a combination of things like ideology, prior beliefs and heuristics used to evaluate competing ideas.

One of my heuristics is that when someone makes a series of complex and counterintuitive arguments that are out of step with most experts from a wide range of backgrounds and all these, often convoluted arguments align with the ideology and self interest of the person making them then I tend to be sceptical of them. Carrier is an apologist and a polemicist, this doesn’t make him wrong and doesn’t mean his ideas can be dismissed out of hand, but does make him less credible in many people’s eyes.

The fact remains Carrier’s paper hasn’t been persuasive to many scholars in the past 12 years in a field where revisionism is rewarded. So I don’t really see any reason to take him at his word that it is the benchmark text on this topic.

So given Jesus would be completely unique in being a “god” written about as a human by his contemporaries if he had never existed, and that other near contemporary sources have him as a human (at least according to most experts) and that no one really argued he never existed in the complex sectarian environment he emerged from, it seems more plausible that he existed.

It’s not impossible that he was a space Jesus made from cosmic jizz and that everything inconvenient was interpolated by devious scribes or means something other than what most scholars believe it means, but the odds are against it.

Earlier I mentioned the above, especially regarding the difficulty of evaluating specialised technical arguments (stylometric arguments, those related to points of grammar, genre characteristics of ancient texts, etc.)

When I check other sources, they tend not to agree with Carrier's overall thesis, even if they do agree on some aspects of his arguments.

What criteria are you using to judge highly technical arguments? How widely do you read beyond Carrier and the sources he points you to?

There are many things you have not responded too. Like my entire last post.


This is my source on Josephus. Not one Carrier article from his book. Not a strawman from 100 years ago.

You applying double standards is significant to how I should judge what you say though. 15 years - too old. 110 years from largely discredited school of though - quality and reliable source.

You seem not to be able to explain this double standard though, so I will assume you cannot.

How many of the above have you actually read directly? If you have read extensively, why always quoting Carrier (or people quoted by Carrier)?

Arguing with you copying Carrier's blog is a pointless endeavour if I need to find multiple peer reviewed sources to reply, and you will just quote Carrier again.

I learn nothing more than reading his blog myself.

Ok, but that isn't Carrier.

Something else we disagree on then.

 

[1213]

Yahweh sends the "Angel of Yahweh" to inflict a plague against Israel...

Actually it says:
Again the anger of Yahweh was kindled against Israel, and he moved David against them, saying, Go, number Israel and Judah.
2 Sam 24:1

Who do you think the anger of Yahweh is? Why do you think he was sent by god to do the job?

The satan appears in the Book of Job, a poetic dialogue set within a prose framework,[26] which may have been written around the time of the Babylonian captivity.

Or not.

[26] In the text, Job is a righteous man favored by Yahweh.[26] Job 1:6–8[27] describes the "sons of God" (bənê hāʼĕlōhîm) presenting themselves before Yahweh.[26] Yahweh asks one of them, "the satan", where he has been, to which he replies that he has been roaming around the earth.[26] Yahweh asks, "Have you considered My servant Job?"[26] The satan replies by urging Yahweh to let him torture Job, promising that Job will abandon his faith at the first tribulation.[28] Yahweh consents: the satan destroys Job's servants and flocks, yet Job refuses to condemn Yahweh.

They are clearly friends.

I don't think there is enough evidence for friendship.

I don't care if you don't believe what is demonstrated in history.

Sorry, I don't think there is any good reason to believe that.

Zoroaster was thus the first to teach the doctrines ...

How do you know that is not a lie?

 

[IndigoChild5559]

Actually it says:
Again the anger of Yahweh was kindled against Israel, and he moved David against them, saying, Go, number Israel and Judah.
2 Sam 24:1

Who do you think the anger of Yahweh is? Why do you think he was sent by god to do the job?

It is an anthropomorphism of God, similar to talking about the arm of God (referring to his might). God cannot be said to have emotions, since emotions have their source in our limbic areas, and God has no physical brain. Rather, this passage is simply stating that God found certain behavioral unacceptable, and disciplined it. In human beings, this sort of thing would cause anger, so the passage nails down the gravity of the offense by referring to God's figurative anger.

 

[joelr]

It's in the article you have posted about 5 times, in which he states in 2 places you must read and respond to his work before you can be considered an expert.

Also almost all of those papers address the TF, not the James reference.

Where Carrier said that was actually about the James reference. He put together a paper in 2012 with a summary of the arguments as well as his own.

• This James passage was unknown to Origen (despite his explicit search of Josephus for Jesus material in his answer to Celsus). All claims to the contrary until now have been mistaken on that point.
• Because in fact, it’s objectively evident that Origen mistook a story about James in Hegesippus as being in Josephus (a kind of mistake I document Origen sometimes made).
• All other accounts of the death of James the brother of Jesus do not match this one in Josephus; they therefore had no knowledge of this passage being about the Christian James (Eusebius is the first author to ever think so; and the first to ever quote it from Josephus).
• We know Acts used Josephus as a source text for historical color, yet the author of Acts never noticed this passage as being about Jesus Christ (which is inexplicable, given that if it was, then it shows Jews being punished for persecuting Christians, exactly the kind of thing the author of Acts strove to include; instead, Acts never mentions this James even being martyred).
• If Josephus had written this passage as about the persecution of Christians, he would have explained things, as is his style consistently in all his historical writing; only a Christian would just assume all those obscure things were already known to the reader (like what a “Christ” was; that James was a Christian; that Jews sought to kill Christians; and why, we must then suppose, the Jewish elite and Roman authorities opposed the killing of James if he was a Christian).
• The words tou legomenou christou, “the [one] called Christ,” is for these and many other reasons most likely a marginal note (by Origen or Pamphilus, or another scribe or scholar in the same Library of Caesarea), expressing belief rather than fact (possibly trying to find the passage Origen claimed he’d seen here but mistakenly saw instead in Hegesippus).
• That marginal note was then accidentally interpolated into the manuscript produced or used by Eusebius (which would have been a copy of the one used by Origen), a very common form of scribal error.
• Possibly by replacing ton tou damnaiou, “the son of Damneus,” in the same place. That same line is repeated at the end of the story. Repetition of that identical phrase a few lines after may have led a scribe to suspect the marginal note was correcting a dittograph (an accidental duplication caused by a previous scribe skipping some lines by mistake, starting at the “wrong” Jesus in the story). But more likely, that duplication is exactly what Josephus meant: Ananus is punished for killing the brother of Jesus ben Damneus by being deposed and replaced by Jesus ben Damneus.

All arguments against interpolation in print to date have assumed the entire passage was interpolated (not just the one phrase) and that it was deliberate (instead of accidental or conjectural). Consequently, none of those opinions is citeable. Because they have not taken into account this alternative theory of the evidence or the evidence in support of it.

• Marian Hillar, “Flavius Josephus and his Testimony Concerning the Historical Jesus,” Essays in the Philosophy of Humanism 13 (2005).
• Nicholas Allen, “Josephus on James the Just? A Re-Evaluation of Antiquitates Judaicae 20.9.1,” Journal of Early Christian History 7.1 (2017) and Christian Forgery in Jewish Antiquities: Josephus Interrupted (Cambridge Scholars 2020).
• Chris Hansen, “Jesus’ Historicity and Sources: The Misuse of Extrabiblical Sources for Jesus and a Suggestion,” American Journal of Biblical Theology (2021).

Finally, some of these (and other) scholars also suspect the Josephan passage about John the Baptist of being interpolated. I believe only one line in it was. See Josephus on John the Baptist.

How many of these have you read directly rather than assuming they support his arguments as he says they do?

He summarized the James evidence in these articles

Josephus on Jesus? Why You Can't Cite Opinions Before 2014 • Richard Carrier Blogs

On whether Josephus actually ever mentioned Jesus, usually you hear people claim “the consensus is” or “such-and-such renowned Josephus expert said” that he did, so shut-up already, nothing more to see here, “move on!” Well, there are two reasons you can’t do that anymore. General Principles...

www.richardcarrier.info

• 
  Mason on Josephus on James (May 2020)
• What Did Josephus Mean by That? (December 2020)
• Reading Josephus on James (December 2021)
• Sports Writer Writes Weird Word-Wall (March 2019)

If you have a counter argument, write a paper, get it peer-reviewed and I'm sure Carrier will respond. A non-expert is just going to get snowed.
If another historian who works on the NT issues has a response that would be great.

You are making some weird accusation that Carrier isn't attempting to figure out what actually happened but trying to support a conclusion. Experts on Josephus like Dr. Samuel Zinner and Dr Steve Mason agree Christians read into these texts looking for ways to make Christianity true. If they debate or talk to Carrier about it that would be great. But the evidence he presents is good.

When I check other sources, they tend not to agree with Carrier's overall thesis, even if they do agree on some aspects of his arguments.

What criteria are you using to judge highly technical arguments? How widely do you read beyond Carrier and the sources he points you to?

Carrier's work is mostly mainstream in historical studies. What do you think scholars disagree with?

From his mentioning of the Persian period being a big influence I looked into Mary Boyce and other experts on Zoroastrianism and that checked out.
The Greek influence completely checks out, the Synoptic problem updates check (Mark Goodacre is one of the best). Mythicism has a 2nd peer-reviewed book by Lataster and no work argues against his position that the evidence is shady. Ehrman should but he says he won't debate Carrier.

You applying double standards is significant to how I should judge what you say though. 15 years - too old. 110 years from largely discredited school of though - quality and reliable source.

Talk about pointless. I really have to explain this? It's one topic, not exclusive to the date but the fact that new information has been discovered, like Carrier clearly states. He even bothered to give a synopsis and a reading list.

You seem not to be able to explain this double standard though, so I will assume you cannot.

Or you could assume I don't care because it's not a legit question.

How many of the above have you actually read directly? If you have read extensively, why always quoting Carrier (or people quoted by Carrier)?

Carrier does good work. Right now the issue is Josephus and he put together good evidence against it. If Dr Steve Mason wants to speak about this evidence that would be great.

I never said I read all the list, I said Carrier has put together the evidence and included a reading list

Arguing with you copying Carrier's blog is a pointless endeavour if I need to find multiple peer reviewed sources to reply, and you will just quote Carrier again.

I don't even see you know the argument against the James passage. And yes, I would like to see a historian or Josephus expert read the evidence and comment.

I learn nothing more than reading his blog myself.

You didn't seem to do that at all. You said most of the work wasn't even about the James reference and didn't seem to realize the quote you keep hanging on about the 2012 paper is about James.

You haven't put forth a reason why the article is wrong. You should read his blog.

Something else we disagree on then.

Then tell me what part of his book On the Historicity of Jesus is so wrong it's apologetics and it also lacks support and sources.It's a monograph full of sources. But go ahead, explain where he goes into apologetics mode.

 

[joelr]

Actually it says:
Again the anger of Yahweh was kindled against Israel, and he moved David against them, saying, Go, number Israel and Judah.
2 Sam 24:1

16 And when the angel stretched out his hand toward Jerusalem to destroy it, the LORD repented Him of the evil, and said to the angel that destroyed the people: 'It is enough; now stay thy hand.' And the angel of the LORD was by the threshing-floor of Araunah the Jebusite. {S}
And David spoke unto the LORD when he saw the angel that smote the people, and said: 'Lo, I have sinned, and I have done iniquitously; but these sheep, what have they done? let Thy hand, I pray Thee, be against me, and against my father's house.' {P}


1 Chronicles 21:1[19] repeats this story,[18] but replaces the "Angel of Yahweh" with an entity referred to as "a satan".[18]



What I said.

Who do you think the anger of Yahweh is?

The Angel of Yahweh, later the same thing happens except he's called Satan. An agent of God.

Why do you think he was sent by god to do the job?

Because God in that book is an ancient deity who has a hit man angel of death. It's a myth.

Or not.

Right, and the Quran is the true word of God. Words are cheap. Evidence. Scholars have evidence for their conclusions. Why you don't care is bizarre but I suspect you secretly know none of this is historical and avoid history like a plague.

It's easy to just go into denial mode.

I don't think there is enough evidence for friendship.

Same thing, what matters is they are not mortal enemies. They speak, Satan does jobs for Yahweh when people need to be killed.
The God vs Satan thing is from Persian theology.


The Iranian Impact on Judaism


excerpted from N. F. Gier, Theology Bluebook, Chapter 12





It was not so much monotheism that the exilic Jews learned from the Persians as it was universalism, the belief that one God rules universally and will save not only the Jews but all those who turn to God. This universalism does not appear explicitly until Second Isaiah, which by all scholarly accounts except some fundamentalists, was written during and after the Babylonian exile. The Babylonian captivity was a great blow to many Jews, because they were taken out of Yahweh's divine jurisdiction. Early Hebrews believed that their prayers could not be answered in a foreign land. The sophisticated angelology of late books like Daniel has its source in Zoroastrianism.3 The angels of the early Hebrew books were disguises of Yahweh or one of his subordinate deities. The idea of separate angels appears only after contact with Zoroastrianism.


Satan as the adversary or Evil One does not appear in the pre-exilic Hebrew books. In Job, one of the very oldest books, Satan is one of the subordinate deities in God's pantheon. Here Satan is God's agent, and God gives him permission to persecute Job. The Zoroastrian Angra Mainyu, the Evil One, the eternal enemy of God, is the prototype for late Jewish and Christian ideas of Satan. One scholar claims that the Jews acquired their aversion to homosexuality, not present in pre-exilic times, to the Iranian definition of the devil as a Sodomite.8





In 1 Chron. 21:1 (a book with heavy Persian influences), the Hebrew word satan appears for the first time as a proper name without an article. Before the exile, Satan was not a separate entity per se, but a divine function performed by the Yahweh's subordinate deities (sons of God) or by Yahweh himself. For example, in Num. 22:22 Yahweh, in the guise of mal'ak Yahweh, is “a satan” for Balaam and his ***. The editorial switch from God inciting David to take a census in 2 Sam 24:1, and a separate evil entity with the name “Satan” doing the same deed in 1 Chron. 21:1 is the strongest evidence that there was a radical transformation in Jewish theology. Something must have caused this change, and religious syncretism with Persia is the probable cause. G. Von Rad calls it a “correction due to religious scruples” and further states that “this correction would hardly have been carried out in this way if the concept of Satan had not undergone a rather decisive transformation.”9

Sorry, I don't think there is any good reason to believe that.

Regarding Satan the evidence is in the Bible. He speaks to Yahweh, asks about Job, goes on a few killing missions, serves on a trial. They are definitely not enemies. He is just an angel who does what Yahweh commands.
This is in the Bible and you still go into denial when it doesn't match the modern Christian fundamentalist version? Ok?

Again, I don't care what you believe, that's your issue, I care about what can be shown to be true or most likely.

How do you know that is not a lie?

Well the answer is Mary Boyce was one of the scholars who studies the Persian religion in Iran and was able to date the religion to around 1700 BCE, far far older than Judaism. The first mentions of Persian concepts in the Bible are after the Persian occupation.

Again, I gave you a lecture by John Collins from Yale Divinity lectures, there is reasonable evidence that this is how things went.


But really if you are going to just go denial I'm not really interested because you truly don't care about what is true but only what you want to be true. When your first question is asking is all scholarship is a lie and all the peer-reviewed books and papers, and careers are just "a lie" logic has left the building. In walks special pleading, because you can ask the same question about the entire Bible, but you won't.

And it actually can be shown to be made of many lies.
The scholarly work on that was done by Bart Ehrman. He also has a layman book about it called Forged.
But the full work is :

Forgery and Counterforgery​

The Use of Literary Deceit in Early Christian Polemics​

Bart D. Ehrman​

• This is the first comprehensive study of literary forgery in the early Christian tradition ever produced in English.
• It establishes once and for all that ancient critics considered the use of false authorial names to be a form of literary deceit, lying.
• It evaluates every major aspect of the phenomenon in the ancient Greek and Roman worlds, including ancient Judaism: the extent of the phenomenon, ancient attitudes towards it, intentions of forgers, their motivations, the techniques they used to avoid detection, the methods critics used to expose them, and the reactions to forgers and their work once they were exposed.
• It considers every instance of Christian forgery produced for polemical purposes from the time of the New Testament (nearly half of the New Testament books make false authorial claims) through the second and third centuries, and up to the end of the fourth century, with the Pseudo-Ignatian letters and the pseudonymous Apostolic Constitutions.
• For works whose authorship is hotly debated among scholars (for example, 1 Peter; 2 Timothy), establishes decisive grounds for understanding the work as a forgery; in instances where there is now little debate (for example, 2 Peter, the Pseudo-Ignatians), summarizes the arguments that are widely deemed compelling.
• Establishes the polemical use of every forgery he considers, whether in Christians' conflicts with Jews and Judaism, with pagans and paganism, or with one another in the heated debates over early Christian doctrine and practice.
• Highlights in particular the phenomenon that he labels "counter-forgery," in which a forger directs his work against another work that is a forgery, seeing instances of the phenomenon from our earliest surviving traditions (2 Thessalonians) on up through the Fourth Century (the Acts of Pilate and the Apostolic Constitutions).
• Shows that some well-known works not generally considered to be forged do in fact make clear false authorial claims, including the New Testament books of Acts and 1 John.
• Set within the context of other related phenomena: the false attribution of otherwise anonymous writings (the Gospels of the New Testament), the fabrication of legendary narratives (the apocryphal acts of the Apostles, early Christian gospel traditions), the falsification of texts through scribal activities, and plagiarism - themselves maligned literary practices in antiquity.
• Concludes with a detailed discussion of ancient Christian discourses on "lying," showing that widely disparate views of the practice were held by such well-known authors as Augustine, who argued that the Christian should never lie, under any circumstances whatsoever, and John Cassian, who, with the majority of Christians, maintained that there were situations in which it was, in fact, the right thing to do to deceive another. It is within these discourses of lying and deception that the forgers' self-justifications are probably to be situated.

There were over 40 "Acts" Acts of John, Acts of Peter, and so on. They were considered forged by the church. The real Acts is written by the same people, same style, it was just accepted. 7 of the Epistles are also known to be forged by the church. Making stuff up was a big thing.

 

[1213]

16 And when the angel stretched out his hand toward Jerusalem to destroy it, the LORD repented Him of the evil, and said to the angel that destroyed the people: 'It is enough; now stay thy hand.' And the angel of the LORD was by the threshing-floor of Araunah the Jebusite. {S}
And David spoke unto the LORD when he saw the angel that smote the people, and said: 'Lo, I have sinned, and I have done iniquitously; but these sheep, what have they done? let Thy hand, I pray Thee, be against me, and against my father's house.' {P}

1 Chronicles 21:1[19] repeats this story,[18] but replaces the "Angel of Yahweh" with an entity referred to as "a satan".[18]

The angel is not the same as the "Anger of Yahweh" in 2. Sam. 24:1.

Scholars have evidence for their conclusions.

Unfortunately now you have shown only the claims, not the evidence. For example, what is the source of the Persian information? What is the age of it? How do you know?

It was not so much monotheism that the exilic Jews learned from the Persians as it was universalism, the belief that one God rules universally and will save not only the Jews but all those who turn to God.

By what is said in the Bible, right in the beginning, is the idea of universal single true God. And I don't think Bible tells that only Jews can be saved.

Early Hebrews believed that their prayers could not be answered in a foreign land.

To what is that claim based on?

Regarding Satan the evidence is in the Bible. He speaks to Yahweh, asks about Job, goes on a few killing missions, serves on a trial. They are definitely not enemies.

If we read the whole Bible, I don't see how he is not an enemy right from the Genesis fruit episode. (Yes, in Biblical point of view, the serpent is the same as the Satan).

Again, I gave you a lecture by John Collins from Yale Divinity lectures, there is reasonable evidence that this is how things went.

As you said: I don't care what you believe, that's your issue, I care about what can be shown to be true or most likely.

• ...over 40 "Acts" Acts of John, Acts of Peter, and so on. They were considered forged by the church. The real Acts is written by the same people, same style, it was just accepted. 7 of the Epistles are also known to be forged by the church. Making stuff up was a big thing.

It would be easier to believe, if we would have some real evidence.

But, it is always funny how some people say, we should have extra-Biblical texts about the matters, if Bible is correct. Now you say we have lot of those and surprisingly it goes against the Bible apparently in your opinion.

 

[1213]

It is an anthropomorphism of God, similar to talking about the arm of God (referring to his might). God cannot be said to have emotions, since emotions have their source in our limbic areas, and God has no physical brain. Rather, this passage is simply stating that God found certain behavioral unacceptable, and disciplined it. In human beings, this sort of thing would cause anger, so the passage nails down the gravity of the offense by referring to God's figurative anger.

Sorry, I think the "anger of Yahweh" is just another name for Satan.

And I don't believe God could not have emotions.

 

[IndigoChild5559]

Sorry, I think the "anger of Yahweh" is just another name for Satan.

Well, we sure get all types in this forum.

 

[Augustus]

Where Carrier said that was actually about the James reference

I know, that was the exact point.

(He also says it about the TF though)

never said I read all the list

I know, I was asking if you have read any of them, and if so which ones, as when I had a look they don't necessarily support his overall thesis and that he doesn't tell people that.

I don't even see you know the argument against the James passage.

I read his article, and I bothered to look up one of his recommendations on that topic:

This is the part you seem to have missed, so I'll paste it here again:

I looked at the first one, and there are 2 chapters (including the one he cites as well as chapter 9) that argue against his overall conclusions (to be fair, there is another chapter: 23 that says the James reference could be an interpolation but leaves it quite open)

For example:

Along somewhat similar lines, Bardet has argued that the passage is unlikely to have been fabricated out of whole cloth in part because its implicit Christology is too archaic and thus too much like Jewish Christianity to have been written by a Christian of the mainstream church after about 150 C.E. (2002, 229–230).

This sort of argument is even more cogent regarding Josephus’s passage about James the brother of Jesus (Ant. 20.200), the authenticity of which is in any case accepted by most contemporary scholars (Feldman 1984, 704–707), than it is regarding the Testimonium. Josephus’s portrait of James, his information about how, why, and when he died, and even about his relationship to Jesus is too different from Christian traditions about James from about 150 C.E. onward, to have been interpolated by a Christian after that date. By the mid‐second century most Christians maintained silence about Jesus’ New Testament brothers altogether. Because of the growth of belief in Mary’s perpetual virginity, if Christians from that period mentioned them at all, they used the theologically safe biblical title “brother of the Lord” (Gal. 1:19; 1 Cor. 9:5); or they qualified the term “brother” with phrases like “said to be”; or they explicitly denied that Jesus had had biological brothers at all by portraying them as stepbrothers or cousins (Whealey 2003, 2–5; 2007, 111–115). This reluctance to openly affirm that Jesus had brothers is incompatible with Christians interpolating a reference to James into Jewish Antiquities 20.200.

It's one topic, not exclusive to the date but the fact that new information has been discovered, like Carrier clearly states. He even bothered to give a synopsis and a reading list.

So you think the advances in Josephus scholarship since 2014 are greater than the advances in comparative mythology since the days of the Religionsgeschichtliche Schule which comprised scholars educated in the 19th c?

Or you could assume I don't care because it's not a legit question.

When you insist that you can’t quote scholars from before 2014 on one issue because that’s what Carrier said on his blog, but also think you can quote scholars from 1912 on another issue that has seen exponentially more significant change, it is a perfectly legitimate question.

Consequently, none of those opinions is citeable. Because they have not taken into account this alternative theory of the evidence or the evidence in support of it.

This is a ridiculous statement. Every time someone publishes a new theory about how to subjectively interpret textual evidence (and this doesn’t mean that previous authors never considered it) it does not negate all previous scholarship and render it "uncitable".

This is what makes someone an apologist rather than a relatively unbiased seeker of truth.

If you read many scholars in this and other issues you would be able to tell that Carrier’s bombast and conceit is not typical of scholars (although is typical of apologists).

That is why I asked how you personally evaluate specialised technical arguments (stylometric arguments, those related to points of grammar, genre characteristics of ancient texts, etc.)

When I check other sources, they tend not to agree with Carrier's overall thesis, even if they do agree on some aspects of his arguments.

What criteria are you using to judge highly technical arguments? How widely do you read beyond Carrier and the sources he points you to?

 

[joelr]

The angel is not the same as the "Anger of Yahweh" in 2. Sam. 24:1.

That works just as well. Satan is not an enemy at war with God, he's his agent. Until....Persian myths became known and respected. Then suddenly the Jewish writers were like "we too are getting new revelations from Yahweh.......he is also at war with Satan!






Whatever.

Unfortunately now you have shown only the claims, not the evidence. For example, what is the source of the Persian information? What is the age of it? How do you know?

The language of the Gathas is archaic, and close to that of the Rigveda (whose composition has been assigned to about 1 700 B. c. onwards); and the picture of the world to be gained from them is correspon,dingly ancient, that of a Stone Age society. Some allowance may have to be made for literary conservatism; and it is also possible that the 'Avestan' people (as Zoroaster's own tribe is called for want of a better name) were poor or isolated, and so not rapidly influenced by the developments of the Bronze Age. It is only possible therefore to hazard a reasoned conjecture that Zoroaster lived some time between 1 700 and 1 500 B.C

Zoroastrians-Their-Religious-Beliefs-and-Practices-MaryBoyce

Mary Boyce went and lived in Iran to study the religion. They were able to date the material based on events written about and it's very old.


The book listed above is one of her many works on the subject.

Also, it's NOT IN THE OT, at all, until the Persian invasion. Then there are radical changes, as John Collins discusses in his lectures. Providing further evidence.

By what is said in the Bible, right in the beginning, is the idea of universal single true God. And I don't think Bible tells that only Jews can be saved.

No, Yahweh is the national deity of Israel in the early material. The Bible was re-written as that is the only way back then to preserve textx and during later centuries they edited it to reflect new ideas.



Early variants and most of the first 5 books show Yahweh as a storm/warrior deity, takes human form, walks with humans and acts like a typical Near Eastern deity.


Professor Stavrakopolou has a new book on this subject God: An Anatomy.

To what is that claim based on?

Nick Gier. Emeritus Professor of Philosophy University of Idaho said it.


I was looking around for more:






"Early Hebrews believed that their prayers could not be answered in a foreign land. The sophisticated angelology of late books like Daniel has its source in Zoroastrianism. The angels of the early Hebrew books were disguises of Yahweh or one of his subordinate deities."



The quote you mention is from Albright, op. cit., p. 362.


William Foxwell Albright was an American archaeologist, biblical scholar, He is considered "one of the twentieth century's most influential American biblical scholars", having become known to the public in 1948 for his role in the authentication of the Dead Sea Scrolls.

If we read the whole Bible, I don't see how he is not an enemy right from the Genesis fruit episode. (Yes, in Biblical point of view, the serpent is the same as the Satan).

I don't care about a Christian view where they bend stories to fit their narrative. The serpent in the garden of super-fruit is a common myth in older nations. Even African myth. In an older African version the serpent told the woman to eat the fruit.


It isn't a devil, it's a bringer of knowledge.


But you cannot get around that they spoke, Yahweh asked him, "what have you been doing", sent him to deliver a plague, to torture Job.


It's in the Bible.


Satan as an enemy came along with all the other Persian changes.


Here is more:

Boyce goes on to say:


To this striking usage, Second Isaiah joins startlingly original theological utterances… markedly Zoroastrian in charcter.


Plainly they were not original in Iran but Boyce means they were in scriptural terms. This originality in Judaism is what makes Isaiah such a notable prophet for Jews and Christians.


Since Genesis and the Psalms are later than second Isaiah, the idea of Yehouah as the creator appears here in the bible for the first time too. It is a main theme of Isaiah 40-48 even though it is not directly relevant to the objective of assuring the Jews of deliverance by Cyrus as the agent of Yehouah. The implied power of the god as the creator would help assure the Jews that the prophecies would be upheld, but the extent to which the prophet dwells on the creation story shows it was not familiar to the audience. It was a new and unrecognized message to the “returners”.



The fact that he claims it is old (Isa 40:12;28) is a familiar theme of this type of propaganda. The people were being “returned” to a land that they had never known, and were being told legends they had never heard but had to accept were those of their ancestors who had been unjustly deported. So, the stories had to be presented as the ancient legacy of the people. Morton Smith sees second Isaiah as drawing on a specific Gatha of the Avesta. Yasna 44 is the source.


In Yasna 44, Zoroaster asks Ahuramazda questions to which the god replies simply such as “I am” or “I do”. Isaiah only differs in that the talking is done by Yehouah rather than the prophet.


Tell me truly Lord, who in the beginning, at the creation was the father of Justice? (GY 44.3.1-2)Rain justice you heavens… this I, Yehouah, have created. (Isa 45:8)Who established the course of the sun and the stars? Through whom does the moon wax and wane? (GY 44.3.3-5)Lift up your eyes to the heavens. Consider who created it all, led out the host one by one. (Isa 40:26)What craftsman made light and darkness? (GY 45:5.1-3)I am Yehouah. There is no other. I make the light. I create darkness. (Isa 45:7)



The passages in Isaiah are not merely translations of the Avesta but their relationship is too close to be coincidence. Someone has paraphrased the content of the Yasna for a different audience and purpose. Ahuramazda is the Zoroastrian creator, this being his main title, and this title is being given to the local Ahuramazda—God of the Heavens, identified with the Greek Zeus, just as Yehouah was.


The Reverend Lawrence Heyworth Mills wrote to the Oxford Chronicle in June 1913:


No one denies the solemn and critical facts of the identities in themselves considered: the Theology, Angelogy, Demonology, Soteriology, Virgin Birth, Immortality, Resurrection, Judgement, Chiliasm (Millennialism), Paradise, Heaven and Hell are rather more than less emphatically or repeatedly expressed in the Avesta (Persian scriptures) than they are in Exilic pre-Christian Pharisaism.

Persia & Creation of Judaism; Book 2. How Persia Created Judaism - Persians' Religious Policy - (CAIS)

Circle of Ancient Iranian Studies at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, UK, Iran & Iranian Art & Civilisation & Archaeology & Anthropolgy & Society& Race& History & Culture , Iranian Tehran Persian Iranian History web site, news culture, music archaeological news...

www.cais-soas.com

As you said: I don't care what you believe, that's your issue, I care about what can be shown to be true or most likely.

Exactly -


No one denies the solemn and critical facts of the identities in themselves considered: the Theology, Angelogy, Demonology, Soteriology, Virgin Birth, Immortality, Resurrection, Judgement, Chiliasm (Millennialism), Paradise, Heaven and Hell are rather more than less emphatically or repeatedly expressed in the Avesta (Persian scriptures) than they are in Exilic pre-Christian Pharisaism.




"Professor Mills says that even if there had been no historical contact between Judaism and Persian religion, the closeness of these themes would demand their careful study by Christians and Jews believing their own religions to have been revealed, because He must have revealed them somewhere else too! He concludes:....."




Except we know the Bible had NONE of the Persian material until centuries of letting it sink in and become part of their religion. 200 years. FAR FAR FAR more likely just like Judaism rewrote older stories for Genesis they reworked their theology, over many generations, to include Persian myth as well.

 

[joelr]

It would be easier to believe, if we would have some real evidence.

But, it is always funny how some people say, we should have extra-Biblical texts about the matters, if Bible is correct. Now you say we have lot of those and surprisingly it goes against the Bible apparently in your opinion.

We could have as many extra-Greek mythology text as you could hold in a university, doesn't make it true. These are myths, so is the Bible.



Stop saying "my opinion", how many times do Christians respond to "I'm going to investigate the claims" with "YES, definitely, do the work, investigate!!!!!!".


Yet when you figure out the apologetics are written by laymen and are not qualified in historical studies of the period and begin looking at publication companies that only do peer-reviewed works and by scholars in the field and they have come to many consensus based on solid evidence from 400 years of critical-historical scholarship, suddenly the amateur church people know more and if you talk about findings it's "your opinion".

Dude, it's not "my opinion". The Gospels are almost 100% known to be a myth in history.


As if someone said they didn't feel well and you said "why don't you bleed yourself with leeches" and they said, "that is ancient medicine and scientific knowledge has come a long way since then, we don't do that, you could get a blood test for starters?" And you were like "what is the evidence? Who are these "scholars", they just want to prove our established practices are not true..." It's absurd?



From a scholar on NT historicity:


"


Which also means you have to pretend all the other fake Christian histories don’t exist. Yet there are over twenty other “Acts” in ancient Christian literature all of which even most fundamentalists (and all actual experts) agree are bogus—making “bogus” by far the normal status of any Christian “Acts.” Besides the Acts of Peter, the Acts of John, the Acts of Paul, the Acts of Andrew, the Acts of Peter and the Twelve, the Acts of Pilate, the Acts of Carpus, the Acts of Apollonius, the Acts of Thomas, and the Acts of Perpetua, we also know of yet more Acts of John and of Pilate and of Peter and of Andrew and of Peter and Paul, as well as an Acts of Barnabas, Acts of Thaddeus, Acts of Timothy, Acts of Philip, Acts of Xanthippe, Acts of Mar Mari, Acts of Matthias, and what must have been an Acts of James. (For context, see: Candida Moss, The Myth of Persecution: How Early Christians Invented a Story of Martyrdom; M. David Litwa, How the Gospels Became History: Jesus and Mediterranean Myths; Robyn Faith Walsh, The Origins of Early Christian Literature: Contextualizing the New Testament within Greco-Roman Literary Culture; Bart Ehrman, Lost Scriptures and Forgery and Counterforgery; and Alan Cameron, Greek Mythography in the Roman World.)






Our Acts contains no indication of being any more honest or reliable; to the contrary, it’s rife with indications of being no better. Indeed, we have two entire versions of it, one some ten percent longer—and scholars cannot honestly tell which is actually the original. That is how freely Christians were willing to doctor it to suit their wishes. In actual fact, faking histories was the norm for Christians; even beyond the damning example of the entire Acts genre, the religion was always awash with forgery and lies (see for example How To Fabricate History: The Example of Eusebius on Alexandrian Christianity and The Rain Miracle of Marcus Aurelius: A Case Study in Christian Lies; for more examples and discussion, see OHJ, Ch. 5, Element 44). We therefore have no a priori reason to trust the canonical Acts at all."

How We Know Acts Is a Fake History • Richard Carrier Blogs

I was asked by a patron to evaluate an article by Neo-Christian theologian Greg Boyd on the book of Acts being “a reliable history” (“Is the Book of Acts Reliable?,” which you can find at his mission website ReKnew). Of course I have extensively argued that Acts is revisionist history—as have...

www.richardcarrier.info

Most scholars believe that Paul actually wrote seven of the thirteen Pauline epistles (Galatians, Romans, 1 Corinthians, 2 Corinthians, Philemon, Philippians, 1 Thessalonians), while three of the epistles in Paul's name are widely seen as pseudepigraphic (1 Timothy, 2 Timothy, and Titus).[1] Whether Paul wrote the three other epistles in his name (2 Thessalonians, Ephesians and Colossians) is widely debated.[1]



When they say most scholars they mean ALL historians but some theologians who grew up thinking the Bible was the inerrant word of god can't allow themself to admit this.

 

[joelr]

I know, I was asking if you have read any of them, and if so which ones, as when I had a look they don't necessarily support his overall thesis and that he doesn't tell people that.

He goes over the evidence in his book OHJ, which I have read.
OF course he talks about people who don't support his thesis?

He just did a huge written debate with a philosopher. He did one or two with Johnthan Sheffield an apologist who is serious about history as well.
He did a debate with Trent Horn who is a theologian but is well versed in the historical side as well.



His basic ides, as I said are supported by scholars.
His ideas on Acts supported by specialist Goodacre and Purvoe

His ideas on Greek influence supported by James Tabor, David Litwa, Richard Miller, Klause, Petra Pakken

For basic understanding of modern NT scholarship he points to Ehrman's Jesus Interrupted, for the OT The Bible Unearthed, Finklestein

Him and Kipp Davis had a written debate but Hebrew is not his field.


You are saying people don't support his thesis and showing one link that partially agrees. There are so many links to Josephus scholars?
You are looking for evidence to fit your conclusion. That is apologetics.

I read his article, and I bothered to look up one of his recommendations on that topic:

This is the part you seem to have missed, so I'll paste it here again:

I looked at the first one, and there are 2 chapters (including the one he cites as well as chapter 9) that argue against his overall conclusions (to be fair, there is another chapter: 23 that says the James reference could be an interpolation but leaves it quite open)

For example:

Along somewhat similar lines, Bardet has argued that the passage is unlikely to have been fabricated out of whole cloth in part because its implicit Christology is too archaic and thus too much like Jewish Christianity to have been written by a Christian of the mainstream church after about 150 C.E. (2002, 229–230).

This sort of argument is even more cogent regarding Josephus’s passage about James the brother of Jesus (Ant. 20.200), the authenticity of which is in any case accepted by most contemporary scholars (Feldman 1984, 704–707), than it is regarding the Testimonium. Josephus’s portrait of James, his information about how, why, and when he died, and even about his relationship to Jesus is too different from Christian traditions about James from about 150 C.E. onward, to have been interpolated by a Christian after that date. By the mid‐second century most Christians maintained silence about Jesus’ New Testament brothers altogether. Because of the growth of belief in Mary’s perpetual virginity, if Christians from that period mentioned them at all, they used the theologically safe biblical title “brother of the Lord” (Gal. 1:19; 1 Cor. 9:5); or they qualified the term “brother” with phrases like “said to be”; or they explicitly denied that Jesus had had biological brothers at all by portraying them as stepbrothers or cousins (Whealey 2003, 2–5; 2007, 111–115). This reluctance to openly affirm that Jesus had brothers is incompatible with Christians interpolating a reference to James into Jewish Antiquities 20.200.



So you think the advances in Josephus scholarship since 2014 are greater than the advances in comparative mythology since the days of the Religionsgeschichtliche Schule which comprised scholars educated in the 19th c?

No, a modern historian who looked at several sources, made a summary and drew a conclusion from this.
Why don't you read his article then?
Origen, Eusebius, and the accidental Interpolation in Josephus, Jewish Antiquities 20.200, Journal of Early Christian Studies, Winter 2012, pp 489-54

But you have to take into account
Doherty, Jesus, Neither God nor Man, pp 533-86
For an extensive examination of these passages see James Carleton Paget, Some Observations on Josephus and Christianity, Journal of Theological Studies 52.2 Oct 2001, pp 539-624
also
Wheatley, Josephus on Jesus: The Testimonium Flavianum Controversy from Late Antiquity to Modern Times
Van Voorst, Jesus Outside the NT, pp 81-104
Theissen and Merz, The Historical Jesus pp 64-74
G.J. Goldberg, The Coincidences of the Testimonium of Josephus and teh Emmaus Narrative of Luke, Journal for the study of the Pseudepigrapha 13, pp 59-77.

Goldberg demonstrates 10 unique correspondences between Luke's Emmaus account and the TV, same order.

There are several more, he goes over the evidence in his book, On the Historicity of Jesus.

When you insist that you can’t quote scholars from before 2014 on one issue because that’s what Carrier said on his blog, but also think you can quote scholars from 1912 on another issue that has seen exponentially more significant change, it is a perfectly legitimate question.

What issue from 1912?

This is a ridiculous statement. Every time someone publishes a new theory about how to subjectively interpret textual evidence (and this doesn’t mean that previous authors never considered it) it does not negate all previous scholarship and render it "uncitable".

This is what makes someone an apologist rather than a relatively unbiased seeker of truth.

If you read many scholars in this and other issues you would be able to tell that Carrier’s bombast and conceit is not typical of scholars (although is typical of apologists).

That is why I asked how you personally evaluate specialised technical arguments (stylometric arguments, those related to points of grammar, genre characteristics of ancient texts, etc.)

When I check other sources, they tend not to agree with Carrier's overall thesis, even if they do agree on some aspects of his arguments.

What criteria are you using to judge highly technical arguments? How widely do you read beyond Carrier and the sources he points you to?

If one scholar agrees on some aspects another scholar may have much more impactful information.

Carrier made his point, end of story. Please write a paper taking into account all sources given and explain why he is wrong and why he is an "apologist", you looked at one link?

One of the experts on Josephus is completely against the Christian reading. Josephus mentioned many Joshua Messiahs and Eusebius was involved to some degree making this look like the Bible Jesus.


Dr. Steve Mason: Josephus on Jesus & the Testimonium Flavianum

1:49:00 He may have been writing something skeptical or mocking about Jesus

1:57:00 “It’s clear he doesn’t believe Jesus is the Messiah”

2:04:37 “The Christ” means “smeared one” Josephus says there were many Joseph Messiahs, he was explaining this was the one known as the smeared one.

2:08:07 The idea that all Jews are waiting for the coming Messiah is a mistake. It’s a Christian reading of 1st century life.


Writers of the period never mention a coming Messiah.



It doesn't matter if Carrier's attitude isn't like other scholars, it's his work that matters.
Bottom line, everywhere that involves an expert, Josephus isn't adding anything.

 

[1213]

I don't care about a Christian view where they bend stories to fit their narrative. The serpent in the garden of super-fruit is a common myth in older nations. Even African myth. In an older African version the serpent told the woman to eat the fruit.

If all people come from same ancestors, Adam and Eve, they all could have similar ideas about the beginning, and it would not necessary mean someone copied something.

Satan as an enemy came along with all the other Persian changes.

So, you believe Genesis is copied from Persians?

 

[joelr]

If all people come from same ancestors, Adam and Eve, they all could have similar ideas about the beginning, and it would not necessary mean someone copied something.

Evolutionary biologists have demonstrated humanity did not start with 2 people, we developed out of H. Heidelburgensis over thousands of years.

The myths are similar because they are all found in the same area, the Middle East. They traveled as stories. They don't have them in other parts of the world. Jesus is a Greek Hellenistic demigod and the religion is very Greek/Persian.

So, you believe Genesis is copied from Persians?

No, Genesis is a re-working of Mesopotamian myths. The Persian occupation wasn't until later.

I don't "believe" it, it's what the evidence presents, I care about what is actually true, not believing what I want to be true.

The Persians allowed the exiled Kings to return and they had been exposed to these stories. Suddenly, they too had similar versions.
It's made up.


These are all peer-reviewed PhD textbooks/monographs,


John Collins, Introduction to the Hebrew Bible 3rd ed.
“Biblical creation stories draw motifs from Mesopotamia, Much of the language and imagery of the Bible was culture specific and deeply embedded in the traditions of the Near East.
2nd ed. The Old Testament, Davies and Rogerson
“We know from the history of the composition of Gilamesh that ancient writers did adapt and re-use older stories……
It is safer to content ourselves with comparing the motifs and themes of Genesis with those of other ancient Near East texts.
In this way we acknowledge our belief that the biblical writers adapted existing stories, while we confess our ignorance about the form and content of the actual stories that the Biblical writers used.”
The Old Testament, A Historical and Literary Introduction to the Hebrew Scriptures, M. Coogan
“Genesis employs and alludes to mythical concepts and phrasing, but at the same time it also adapts transforms and rejected them”
God in Translation, Smith
“…the Bibles authors fashioned whatever they may have inherited of the Mesopotamian literary tradition on their own terms”
THE OT Text and Content, Matthews, Moyer
“….a great deal of material contained in the primeval epics in Genesis is borrowed and adapted from the ancient cultures of that region.”
The Formation of Genesis 1-11, Carr
“The previous discussion has made clear how this story in Genesis represents a complex juxtaposition of multiple traditions often found separately in the Mesopotamian literary world….”
The Priestly Vision of Genesis, Smith
“….storm God and cosmic enemies passed into Israelite tradition. The biblical God is not only generally similar to Baal as a storm god, but God inherited the names of Baal’s cosmic enemies, with names such as Leviathan, Sea, Death and Tanninim.”




Noah - Also he sent forth a dove from him, to see if the waters were abated from off the face of the ground; But the dove found no rest for the sole of her foot, and she returned


Gilamesh - . When the seventh day dawned I loosed a dove and let her go. She flew away, but finding no resting- place she returned.

Noah - And the ark rested in the seventh month, on the seventeenth day of the month, upon the mountains of Ararat. And the waters decreased continually until the tenth month: in the tenth month, on the first day of the month, were the tops of the mountains seen.


Gilamesh - looked for land in vain, but fourteen leagues distant there appeared a mountain, and there the boat grounded; on the mountain of Nisir the boat held fast, she held fast and did not budge. One day she held, and a second day on the mountain of Nisir she held fast and did not budge. A third day, and a fourth day she held fast on the mountain and did not budge; a fifth day and a sixth day she held fast on the mountain.


Noah - And Noah builded an altar unto the LORD; and took of every clean beast, and of every clean fowl, and offered burnt offerings on the altar. And the LORD smelled a sweet savour; and the LORD said in his heart, I will not again curse the ground any more for man's sake;

Gimamesh - , I made a sacrifice and poured out a libation on the mountain top. Seven and again seven cauldrons I set up on their stands, I heaped up wood and cane and cedar and myrtle. When the gods smelled the sweet savour, they gathered like flies over the sacrifice.


Noah - The earth also was corrupt before God, and the earth was filled with violence.


And God looked upon the earth, and, behold, it was corrupt; for all flesh had corrupted his way upon the earth. And God said unto Noah, The end of all flesh is come before me; for the earth is filled with violence through them; and, behold, I will destroy them with the earth.



Gimamesh - “Wisest of gods, hero Enlil, how could you so senselessly bring down the flood? Lay upon the sinner his sin, Lay upon the transgressor his transgression, Punish him a little when he breaks loose, Do not drive him too hard or he perishes; Would that a lion had ravaged mankind Rather than the flood, Would that a wolf had ravaged mankind Rather than the flood, Would that famine had wasted the world Rather than the flood, Would that pestilence had wasted mankind Rather than the flood


Noah - And it came to pass after seven days, that the waters of the flood were upon the earth.

Gilamesh - When the seventh day dawned the storm from the south subsided, the sea grew calm, the flood was stilled;

Noah - And all the days of Noah were nine hundred and fifty years: and he died.


Gilamesh - Gilgamesh, the son of Ninsun, lies in the tomb.


Joel Baden is a Harvard grad, teaches Hebrew Bible at Yale

 

[1213]

Evolutionary biologists have demonstrated humanity

How?

did not start with 2 people, we developed out of H. Heidelburgensis over thousands of years.

And you believe that because?

The myths are similar because they are all found in the same area, the Middle East. They traveled as stories. They don't have them in other parts of the world. Jesus is a Greek Hellenistic demigod and the religion is very Greek/Persian.

By what is said in the Bible, Jesus is a man, not a demigod.

For there is one God, and one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus,
1 Tim. 2:5

No, Genesis is a re-working of Mesopotamian myths. The Persian occupation wasn't until later.

Ok, in that case the idea of Satan is not from Persians. And, do you mean Genesis is reworking of Gilgamesh? I don't think there is any good reason to believe so.

Noah - Also he sent forth a dove from him, to see if the waters were abated from off the face of the ground; But the dove found no rest for the sole of her foot, and she returned

Gilamesh - . When the seventh day dawned I loosed a dove and let her go. She flew away, but finding no resting- place she returned.

I think Gilgamesh is more likely copied from Jews. But, I think most likely no one copied. If the story is true, all of the people came from same source and would have had the connection to the same story, by their parents. Some people have just remembered it little differently, causing the slightly different stories. I think Jews have the most accurate version of the events.

 

[joelr]

How?

How? Humans are great apes morphologically, behaviorally and genetically we are great apes. There is so much evidence in evolutionary biology. I can't gve you a lecture, especially if you don't care about what is actually true. Anything you believe to be true, if you care about the truth, you will find ways to debunk it as hard as you can. If it can withstand that it might be true.

There is no evidence, in fact it's impossible a new species would just emerge, it takes thousands of generations. For H. sapien to evolve from H. heidelburgensis was thousands of years of small changes. But we still share the vast majority of biology.

And you believe that because?

• DNA comparisons
  DNA from modern humans and Neanderthals suggests that they both share a common ancestor, likely Homo heidelbergensis.
• Fossil remains
  Fossil remains of human species show gradual changes from great apes to modern humans, with behavioral and physical characteristics that are thought to have originated from a common ancestor. For example, Homo heidelbergensis skulls are more rounded than those of Homo erectus, but less rounded than most modern humans. Their skeletons and teeth are also usually smaller than Homo erectus, but larger than modern humans.

The entire planet is one of species evolving. Yet somehow because of a story, one out of thousands, that ancient people took serious (all people took their local mythology as true at the time), you think that overrides all the evidence?


The question is why would you ignore entire fields of scholarship, assuming your old story is true and some deity magic poofed up a new species who happens to appear as if they are related to a long chain of evolution. And the story is from a person making claims a local deity told him so. Same claim made in Islam, Mormonism, Hinduism and so on?

By what is said in the Bible, Jesus is a man, not a demigod.

In mythology, before Jesus, demigods had an earth mortal woman impregnated by a sky-father deity. Yahweh was exactly like all the other Near Eastern deities. God: An Anatomy by Fransesca Stavrakopolou, a Hebrew Bible professor explains the comparisons to the original Hebrew and all other local deities. No difference whatsoever.

So Jesus is in the Greek tradition of a god giving a messainic savior to a mortal woman. That is a demigod. It doesn't matter what the myth says. In Lord of the Rings Gandolf can say "I am not a wizard". But he still is a wizard.

Sourcing the story is not evidence. Also the writers were aware they were doing a Greek savior myth and wanted to separate themselves from the other stories as they had the "real one".
They didn't, they don't and it's all made up stories.



It wouldn't surprise me if all the Hellenistic savior cults said "and one mediator between God and men," about the messianic character.


I also cannot believe you just basically said "it's true because the book says so".

For there is one God, and one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus,
1 Tim. 2:5

You are not even using an authentic book. Ehrman has the definitive monograph on this subject. Forged is the layman version.

For a scholarly treatment with sources -

Forgery and Counterforgery: The Use of Literary Deceit in Early Christian Polemics​

There are two epistles (1 Timothy, 2 Timothy) purportedly written by Paul to Timothy but both are clearly pseudepigraphical. Bart D. Ehrman says, in Forged:

Both letters have words and phrases in common not found in any of the other letters attributed to Paul: the ‘promise of life’, ‘with a pure conscience’, ‘from a pure heart’, ‘guard the deposit (of faith)’, Paul is an ‘apostle, herald, and teacher’, and so on. What is striking is not only that these phrases and many others like them are found in these two letters, but that they are found only in these two letters.
In 1921 the British scholar A. N. Harrison wrote an important study of the pastoral letters in which he gave numerous statistics about the word usage in these writings. One of his most cited set of numbers is that there are 848 different words used in the pastoral letters. Of that number 306, or more than one third, do not occur in any of the other Pauline letters of the New Testament.
That is an inordinately high number, especially as about two thirds of these 306 words were used by Christian authors living in the second century. That suggests that this author is using a vocabulary that was becoming more common after the days of Paul, and that he lived after Paul.

The epistles deal with issues of church governance that only began to arise in the second century, as Christian communities grew larger and a church hierarchy had to be established. They also seek to delegate women to a secondary role in the church. The best way to get these messages accepted was to write epistles that would be accepted as having been written by Paul.

 

[joelr]

Ok, in that case the idea of Satan is not from Persians.

Satan was the Angel of Yahweh. They got the idea of an evil Satan at war with God from the Persians.

The Iranian Impact on Judaism


excerpted from N. F. Gier, Theology Bluebook, Chapter 12





It was not so much monotheism that the exilic Jews learned from the Persians as it was universalism, the belief that one God rules universally and will save not only the Jews but all those who turn to God. This universalism does not appear explicitly until Second Isaiah, which by all scholarly accounts except some fundamentalists, was written during and after the Babylonian exile. The Babylonian captivity was a great blow to many Jews, because they were taken out of Yahweh's divine jurisdiction. Early Hebrews believed that their prayers could not be answered in a foreign land. The sophisticated angelology of late books like Daniel has its source in Zoroastrianism.3 The angels of the early Hebrew books were disguises of Yahweh or one of his subordinate deities. The idea of separate angels appears only after contact with Zoroastrianism.





The central ideas of heaven and a fiery hell appear to come directly from the Israelite contact with Iranian religion. Pre-exilic books are explicit in their notions the afterlife: there is none to speak of. The early Hebrew concept is that all of us are made from the dust and all of us return to the dust. There is a shadowy existence in Sheol, but the beings there are so insignificant that Yahweh does not know them. The evangelical writer John Pelt reminds us that “the inhabitants of Sheol are never called souls (nephesh).”4


Saosyant, a savior born from Zoroaster's seed, will come and the dead shall be resurrected, body and soul. As the final accounting is made, husband is set against wife and brother against brother as the righteous and the damned are pointed out by the divine judge Saosyant. Personal and individual immortality is offered to the righteous; and, as a final fire melts away the world and the damned, a kingdom of God is established for a thousand years.7 The word paradis is Persian in origin and the concept spread to all Near Eastern religions in that form. “Eden” not “Paradise” is mentioned in Genesis, and paradise as an abode of light does not appear in Jewish literature until late books such as Enoch and the Psalm of Solomon.





Satan as the adversary or Evil One does not appear in the pre-exilic Hebrew books. In Job, one of the very oldest books, Satan is one of the subordinate deities in God's pantheon. Here Satan is God's agent, and God gives him permission to persecute Job. The Zoroastrian Angra Mainyu, the Evil One, the eternal enemy of God, is the prototype for late Jewish and Christian ideas of Satan. One scholar claims that the Jews acquired their aversion to homosexuality, not present in pre-exilic times, to the Iranian definition of the devil as a Sodomite.8





In 1 Chron. 21:1 (a book with heavy Persian influences), the Hebrew word satan appears for the first time as a proper name without an article. Before the exile, Satan was not a separate entity per se, but a divine function performed by the Yahweh's subordinate deities (sons of God) or by Yahweh himself. For example, in Num. 22:22 Yahweh, in the guise of mal'ak Yahweh, is “a satan” for Balaam and his ***. The editorial switch from God inciting David to take a census in 2 Sam 24:1, and a separate evil entity with the name “Satan” doing the same deed in 1 Chron. 21:1 is the strongest evidence that there was a radical transformation in Jewish theology. Something must have caused this change, and religious syncretism with Persia is the probable cause. G. Von Rad calls it a “correction due to religious scruples” and further states that “this correction would hardly have been carried out in this way if the concept of Satan had not undergone a rather decisive transformation.”9





The theory of religious influence from Persia is based not only on the generation spent in exile but the 400 years following in which the resurrected nation of Israel lived under strong Persian dominion and influence. The chronicler made his crucial correction to 2 Sam. 24:1 about 400 B.C.E. Persian influence increases in the later Hebrew works like Daniel and especially the intertestamental books. Therefore Satan as a separate evil force in direct opposition to God most likely came from the explicit Zoroastrian belief in such an entity. This concept is not consistent with pre-exilic beliefs.





There is no question that the concept of a separate evil principle was fully developed in the Zoroastrian Gathas (ca. 1,000 B.C.E.). The principal demon, called Druj (the Lie), is mentioned 66 times in the Gathas. But the priestly Jews would also have been exposed to the full Avestan scripture in which Angra Mainyu is mentioned repeatedly. His most prominent symbol is the serpent, so along with the idea of the “Lie,” we have the prototype for the serpent/tempter, in the priestly writers' garden of Genesis.10 There is no evidence that the Jews in exile brought with them any idea of Satan as a separate evil principle.





In Zoroastrianism the supreme God, Ahura Mazda, gives all humans free-will so that they may choose between good and evil. As we have seen, the religion of Zoroaster may have been the first to discover ethical individualism. The first Hebrew prophet to speak unequivocally in terms of individual moral responsibility was Ezekiel, a prophet of the Babylonian exile. Up until that time Hebrew ethics had been guided by the idea of the corporate personality – that, e.g., the sins of the fathers are visited upon the sons (Ex. 20:1-2).





In 1 Cor. 15:42-49 Paul definitely assumes a dual-creation theory which seems to follow the outlines of Philo and the Iranians. There is only one man (Christ) who is created in the image of God, i.e., according to the “intellectual” creation of Gen. 1:26 (à la Philo). All the rest of us are created in the image of the “dust man,” following the material creation of Adam from the dust in Gen. 2:7.





Nick Gier. Emeritus Professor of Philosophy University of Idaho Senior Fellow Martin Institute of

And, do you mean Genesis is reworking of Gilgamesh? I don't think there is any good reason to believe so.

It's consensus in academia. Proven with a literary technique called intertextuality.

These are all peer-reviewed PhD textbooks/monographs,


John Collins, Introduction to the Hebrew Bible 3rd ed.
“Biblical creation stories draw motifs from Mesopotamia, Much of the language and imagery of the Bible was culture specific and deeply embedded in the traditions of the Near East.
2nd ed. The Old Testament, Davies and Rogerson
“We know from the history of the composition of Gilamesh that ancient writers did adapt and re-use older stories……
It is safer to content ourselves with comparing the motifs and themes of Genesis with those of other ancient Near East texts.
In this way we acknowledge our belief that the biblical writers adapted existing stories, while we confess our ignorance about the form and content of the actual stories that the Biblical writers used.”
The Old Testament, A Historical and Literary Introduction to the Hebrew Scriptures, M. Coogan
“Genesis employs and alludes to mythical concepts and phrasing, but at the same time it also adapts transforms and rejected them”
God in Translation, Smith
“…the Bibles authors fashioned whatever they may have inherited of the Mesopotamian literary tradition on their own terms”
THE OT Text and Content, Matthews, Moyer
“….a great deal of material contained in the primeval epics in Genesis is borrowed and adapted from the ancient cultures of that region.”


The Formation of Genesis 1-11, Carr
“The previous discussion has made clear how this story in Genesis represents a complex juxtaposition of multiple traditions often found separately in the Mesopotamian literary world….”
The Priestly Vision of Genesis, Smith
“….storm God and cosmic enemies passed into Israelite tradition. The biblical God is not only generally similar to Baal as a storm god, but God inherited the names of Baal’s cosmic enemies, with names such as Leviathan, Sea, Death and Tanninim.”

I think Gilgamesh is more likely copied from Jews. But, I think most likely no one copied. If the story is true, all of the people came from same source and would have had the connection to the same story, by their parents. Some people have just remembered it little differently, causing the slightly different stories. I think Jews have the most accurate version of the events.

Hmmm, could that be because you believe the stories are real but have no evidence or knowledge of anything outside of what a religios group is telling you? Hint, all religious groups generally know nothing about the actual historicity of the religion yet give out apologetics as if they have all the truth. Islam has all the truth. Mormons have all the truth. Each religion just buys into their story and none of them care about evidence.

This is just more of the same. "I think". You asked me twice why I believed something and then turn around and make MASSIVE assumptions with ZERO evidence. This is what you want to be true. I wanted it to be true also, but I care about what is actually true so I investigated.


The OT is so inaccurate and made up, the prophecies are not for the future, they are warnings for people then to change their behavior. Not about a child born 700 years later. Most of the main characters did not even exist.

Did These Bible Characters Exist? Asking Expert Dr. Joel Baden​

Baden is a great scholar. My first thoughts were "naw, they don't know..." But it bugged me and I had to face that these people know the material way way way better and more accurate than me or any church leader who will spout apologetics. It's just a mythology with some historical things put in. No different than the Canaanite religion or 10,000 others.

How Did Israel Form If The Exodus & Conquest Aren't historically True? Dr. Joel Baden​

 

[Ben Dhyan]

Satan was the Angel of Yahweh. They got the idea of an evil Satan at war with God from the Persians.

The Iranian Impact on Judaism


excerpted from N. F. Gier, Theology Bluebook, Chapter 12





It was not so much monotheism that the exilic Jews learned from the Persians as it was universalism, the belief that one God rules universally and will save not only the Jews but all those who turn to God. This universalism does not appear explicitly until Second Isaiah, which by all scholarly accounts except some fundamentalists, was written during and after the Babylonian exile. The Babylonian captivity was a great blow to many Jews, because they were taken out of Yahweh's divine jurisdiction. Early Hebrews believed that their prayers could not be answered in a foreign land. The sophisticated angelology of late books like Daniel has its source in Zoroastrianism.3 The angels of the early Hebrew books were disguises of Yahweh or one of his subordinate deities. The idea of separate angels appears only after contact with Zoroastrianism.





The central ideas of heaven and a fiery hell appear to come directly from the Israelite contact with Iranian religion. Pre-exilic books are explicit in their notions the afterlife: there is none to speak of. The early Hebrew concept is that all of us are made from the dust and all of us return to the dust. There is a shadowy existence in Sheol, but the beings there are so insignificant that Yahweh does not know them. The evangelical writer John Pelt reminds us that “the inhabitants of Sheol are never called souls (nephesh).”4


Saosyant, a savior born from Zoroaster's seed, will come and the dead shall be resurrected, body and soul. As the final accounting is made, husband is set against wife and brother against brother as the righteous and the damned are pointed out by the divine judge Saosyant. Personal and individual immortality is offered to the righteous; and, as a final fire melts away the world and the damned, a kingdom of God is established for a thousand years.7 The word paradis is Persian in origin and the concept spread to all Near Eastern religions in that form. “Eden” not “Paradise” is mentioned in Genesis, and paradise as an abode of light does not appear in Jewish literature until late books such as Enoch and the Psalm of Solomon.





Satan as the adversary or Evil One does not appear in the pre-exilic Hebrew books. In Job, one of the very oldest books, Satan is one of the subordinate deities in God's pantheon. Here Satan is God's agent, and God gives him permission to persecute Job. The Zoroastrian Angra Mainyu, the Evil One, the eternal enemy of God, is the prototype for late Jewish and Christian ideas of Satan. One scholar claims that the Jews acquired their aversion to homosexuality, not present in pre-exilic times, to the Iranian definition of the devil as a Sodomite.8





In 1 Chron. 21:1 (a book with heavy Persian influences), the Hebrew word satan appears for the first time as a proper name without an article. Before the exile, Satan was not a separate entity per se, but a divine function performed by the Yahweh's subordinate deities (sons of God) or by Yahweh himself. For example, in Num. 22:22 Yahweh, in the guise of mal'ak Yahweh, is “a satan” for Balaam and his ***. The editorial switch from God inciting David to take a census in 2 Sam 24:1, and a separate evil entity with the name “Satan” doing the same deed in 1 Chron. 21:1 is the strongest evidence that there was a radical transformation in Jewish theology. Something must have caused this change, and religious syncretism with Persia is the probable cause. G. Von Rad calls it a “correction due to religious scruples” and further states that “this correction would hardly have been carried out in this way if the concept of Satan had not undergone a rather decisive transformation.”9





The theory of religious influence from Persia is based not only on the generation spent in exile but the 400 years following in which the resurrected nation of Israel lived under strong Persian dominion and influence. The chronicler made his crucial correction to 2 Sam. 24:1 about 400 B.C.E. Persian influence increases in the later Hebrew works like Daniel and especially the intertestamental books. Therefore Satan as a separate evil force in direct opposition to God most likely came from the explicit Zoroastrian belief in such an entity. This concept is not consistent with pre-exilic beliefs.





There is no question that the concept of a separate evil principle was fully developed in the Zoroastrian Gathas (ca. 1,000 B.C.E.). The principal demon, called Druj (the Lie), is mentioned 66 times in the Gathas. But the priestly Jews would also have been exposed to the full Avestan scripture in which Angra Mainyu is mentioned repeatedly. His most prominent symbol is the serpent, so along with the idea of the “Lie,” we have the prototype for the serpent/tempter, in the priestly writers' garden of Genesis.10 There is no evidence that the Jews in exile brought with them any idea of Satan as a separate evil principle.





In Zoroastrianism the supreme God, Ahura Mazda, gives all humans free-will so that they may choose between good and evil. As we have seen, the religion of Zoroaster may have been the first to discover ethical individualism. The first Hebrew prophet to speak unequivocally in terms of individual moral responsibility was Ezekiel, a prophet of the Babylonian exile. Up until that time Hebrew ethics had been guided by the idea of the corporate personality – that, e.g., the sins of the fathers are visited upon the sons (Ex. 20:1-2).





In 1 Cor. 15:42-49 Paul definitely assumes a dual-creation theory which seems to follow the outlines of Philo and the Iranians. There is only one man (Christ) who is created in the image of God, i.e., according to the “intellectual” creation of Gen. 1:26 (à la Philo). All the rest of us are created in the image of the “dust man,” following the material creation of Adam from the dust in Gen. 2:7.





Nick Gier. Emeritus Professor of Philosophy University of Idaho Senior Fellow Martin Institute of







It's consensus in academia. Proven with a literary technique called intertextuality.

These are all peer-reviewed PhD textbooks/monographs,


John Collins, Introduction to the Hebrew Bible 3rd ed.
“Biblical creation stories draw motifs from Mesopotamia, Much of the language and imagery of the Bible was culture specific and deeply embedded in the traditions of the Near East.
2nd ed. The Old Testament, Davies and Rogerson
“We know from the history of the composition of Gilamesh that ancient writers did adapt and re-use older stories……
It is safer to content ourselves with comparing the motifs and themes of Genesis with those of other ancient Near East texts.
In this way we acknowledge our belief that the biblical writers adapted existing stories, while we confess our ignorance about the form and content of the actual stories that the Biblical writers used.”
The Old Testament, A Historical and Literary Introduction to the Hebrew Scriptures, M. Coogan
“Genesis employs and alludes to mythical concepts and phrasing, but at the same time it also adapts transforms and rejected them”
God in Translation, Smith
“…the Bibles authors fashioned whatever they may have inherited of the Mesopotamian literary tradition on their own terms”
THE OT Text and Content, Matthews, Moyer
“….a great deal of material contained in the primeval epics in Genesis is borrowed and adapted from the ancient cultures of that region.”


The Formation of Genesis 1-11, Carr
“The previous discussion has made clear how this story in Genesis represents a complex juxtaposition of multiple traditions often found separately in the Mesopotamian literary world….”
The Priestly Vision of Genesis, Smith
“….storm God and cosmic enemies passed into Israelite tradition. The biblical God is not only generally similar to Baal as a storm god, but God inherited the names of Baal’s cosmic enemies, with names such as Leviathan, Sea, Death and Tanninim.”




Hmmm, could that be because you believe the stories are real but have no evidence or knowledge of anything outside of what a religios group is telling you? Hint, all religious groups generally know nothing about the actual historicity of the religion yet give out apologetics as if they have all the truth. Islam has all the truth. Mormons have all the truth. Each religion just buys into their story and none of them care about evidence.

This is just more of the same. "I think". You asked me twice why I believed something and then turn around and make MASSIVE assumptions with ZERO evidence. This is what you want to be true. I wanted it to be true also, but I care about what is actually true so I investigated.


The OT is so inaccurate and made up, the prophecies are not for the future, they are warnings for people then to change their behavior. Not about a child born 700 years later. Most of the main characters did not even exist.

Did These Bible Characters Exist? Asking Expert Dr. Joel Baden​

Baden is a great scholar. My first thoughts were "naw, they don't know..." But it bugged me and I had to face that these people know the material way way way better and more accurate than me or any church leader who will spout apologetics. It's just a mythology with some historical things put in. No different than the Canaanite religion or 10,000 others.

How Did Israel Form If The Exodus & Conquest Aren't historically True? Dr. Joel Baden​

Thank you joelr, an interesting take by Dr. Joel Barden, I suspect that most of all ancient religious traditions are much like that, and so the story of Jesus is no different. However, by the actual personal participation in religious practice based on some of these writings, the efficacy of such religious practice produces subjective evidence for the existence of a spiritual reality underlying our perceived 3D space-time material world, and one's personal destiny in it.
I don't imply scientific evidence, as science is pretty much confined to what I refer to as 'our perceived 3D space-time material world', but rather the subjective world of the psyche including such phenomena as visions, prescience, etc.. As to any evidence of Jesus, I am confident of replying in the affirmative, but I would not normally ever raise the issue with anyone, religious or not, as there is no way to prove it, and the experiences were/are of a personal nature.
In the same way an expert practicing scientist is so due to a lot of learning and practice beforehand, so it is with anyone who gets to experience subjective spiritual phenomena, there are generally many years of practice and learning beforehand.
Religion, like science, is not primarily based on belief, but an ongoing practice of attention.

 

[mikkel_the_dane]

Thank you joelr, an interesting take by Dr. Joel Barden, I suspect that most of all ancient religious traditions are much like that, and so the story of Jesus is no different. However, by the actual personal participation in religious practice based on some of these writings, the efficacy of such religious practice produces subjective evidence for the existence of a spiritual reality underlying our perceived 3D space-time material world, and one's personal destiny in it.
I don't imply scientific evidence, as science is pretty much confined to what I refer to as 'our perceived 3D space-time material world', but rather the subjective world of the psyche including such phenomena as visions, prescience, etc.. As to any evidence of Jesus, I am confident of replying in the affirmative, but I would not normally ever raise the issue with anyone, religious or not, as there is no way to prove it, and the experiences were/are of a personal nature.
In the same way an expert practicing scientist is so due to a lot of learning and practice beforehand, so it is with anyone who gets to experience subjective spiritual phenomena, there are generally many years of practice and learning beforehand.
Religion, like science, is not primarily based on belief, but an ongoing practice of attention.

Well, I dont practice religion or science, I do skepticism so there is a 3rd way of doing it.