Did Jesus Christ Actually Exist?

[1213]

No, that is an unsupported claim.

Maybe for you. But, for the people who were with Jesus and saw the things, don't you think it was a sign for them, if it really happened?

...scholars of the Bible are very sure that the Gospel of John was not written by the apostle John. None of them are eyewitness accounts.

Sounds very convincing.

 

[Subduction Zone]

Maybe for you. But, for the people who were with Jesus and saw the things, don't you think it was a sign for them, if it really happened?

Here is your problem. There may have been such people. You really had no clues as to what they said. None of the Gospels are eyewitness accounts and they all disagree with each other.

Sounds very convincing.

It should be. People who are not afraid of reality can show that those two dates disagree with each other by ten years.

And you never answered why you do not accept the date in Luke.

 

[jimb]

Yes, Jesus Christ actually existed. Prior to becoming human, while He was human, and after He was resurrected.

 

[Subduction Zone]

Yes, Jesus Christ actually existed. Prior to becoming human, while He was human, and after He was resurrected.

How would you prove that? I am willing to say that Jesus probably existed, but there does not appear to be any good reasons to believe in the mythological Jesus Christ.

 

[1213]

Here is your problem. There may have been such people. You really had no clues as to what they said. None of the Gospels are eyewitness accounts and they all disagree with each other.

Sorry, I don't think they disagree with each other, if correctly understood. But, you can't answer even a hypothetical question?

It should be. People who are not afraid of reality can show that those two dates disagree with each other by ten years.

I think they can only show what they believe, not any facts.

 

[Andrew Stephen]

Peace to all,

I think logically, before creation was ever created was even created Jesus existed as the Word, the eternal Priestly authority and spirit and life of the infallible laws of the eternal universe.

And in logic, to save the mortal and corrupt flesh and spirtis of Created Adam and Eve, The Word became flesh from the Power of the Person of the Holy Spirit conceived in the Person of Jesus to manifest the defiled state of mankind becoming transformed immortal and incorruptible through the intelligence of the fulfilled faith and morality of Christ into becoming again glorified and transfigured in the image of the Creator, God, The Father as one in being, together.

Peace always,
Stephen Andrew

 

[joelr]

Will address this, of course, but you are presenting only a viewpoint of someone who doesn’t believe which doesn’t negate those who have a different understanding… which is my point.

No, I am presenting expert views from someone who 100% believed and through seeing the evidence then realized his beliefs were unfounded. So your point is completely debunked.


Ehrman from Jesus Interrupted:

Studying at Moody was an intense experience for me. I had gone there because I had had a “born-again” experience in high school and decided that to be a “serious” Christian I would need serious training in the Bible. And somehow, during my first semester in college, something happened to me: I became passionate—fierce, even—in my quest for knowledge about the Bible. At Moody not only did I take every Bible and theology course that I could, but on my own I also memorized entire books of the Bible by rote. I studied during every free moment. I read books and mastered lecture notes. Just about every week I pulled an all-nighter, preparing for classes.

As a committed Bible-believing Christian I was certain that the Bible, down to its very words, had been inspired by God. Maybe that’s what drove my intense study. These were God’s words, the communications of the Creator of the universe and Lord of all, spoken to us, mere mortals. Surely knowing them intimately was the most important thing in life. At least it was for me. Understand¬ ing literature more broadly would help me understand this piece of literature in particular (hence my major in English literature); being able to read it in Greek helped me know the actual words given by the Author of the text.

I had decided already in the course of my freshman year at Moody that I wanted to become a professor of the Bible. Then, at Wheaton, I realized that I was pretty good at Greek. And so my next step was virtually chosen for me: I would do a doctorate in New Testament studies, and work especially on some aspect of the Greek language. My beloved professor of Greek at Wheaton, Gerald Hawthorne, in¬ troduced me to the work of Bruce Metzger, the most revered scholar of Greek biblical manuscripts in the country, who happened to teach at Princeton Theological Seminary. And so I applied to Princeton, knowing nothing—absolutely nothing—about it, except that Bruce Metzger taught there and that if I wanted to become an expert in Greek manuscripts, Princeton was where I needed to go.

Some things don’t go as planned. What I actually did learn at Princeton led me to change my mind about the Bible. I did not change my mind willingly—I went down kicking and screaming. I prayed (lots) about it, I wrestled (strenuously) with it, I resisted it with all my might. But at the same time I thought that if I was truly committed to God, I also had to be fully committed to the truth. And it became clear to me over a long period of time that my former views of the Bible as the inerrant revelation from God were flat-out wrong. My choice was either to hold on to views that I had come to realize were in error or to follow where I believed the truth was leading me. In the end, it was no choice. If something was true, it was true; if not, not.

I’ve known people over the years who have said, “If my beliefs are at odds with the facts, so much the worse for the facts.” I’ve never been one of these people. In the chapters that follow I try to explain why scholarship on the Bible forced me to change my views.

This kind of information is relevant not only to scholars like me, who devote their lives to serious research, but also to everyone who is interested in the Bible—whether they personally consider them¬ selves believers or not. In my opinion this really matters. Whether you are a believer—fundamentalist, evangelical, moderate, lib¬ eral—or a nonbeliever, the Bible is the most significant book in the
history of our civilization. Coming to understand what it actually is, and is not, is one of the most important intellectual endeavors that anyone in our society can embark upon.

Some people reading this book may be very uncomfortable with the information it presents. All I ask is that, if you’re in that boat, you do what I did—approach this information with an open mind and be willing to change if change you must.

Yes… standard response. As if a person who studied can’t be both a scholar and a theologian.

Yes, incorrect response. A strawman, I never said theologians are not scholars. I said they start with assumptions. Islamic scholars who are theologians assume their text is the true word of God, as do Mormon theologians. You can see the obvious problems with this.

Historians only want to know what is true, where did the stories come from, what does evidence provide about history.

Yet the opposite it true. There are many that began as atheists or agnostic and having looked at the evidence decided it was true. People like Josh McDowell, J. Warner, Nicky Gumbel, C.S.Lewis and so many others

Because they never saw the full scope of the historical evidence. No one went into historical studies and said "wow this must be true", the evidence is against that in so many ways. Just like Zeus, Mormonism, Hinduism, Islam isn't real, neither is Christianity.

Josh McDowell is an evangelical Christian apologist, he doesn't have a PhD in history, he doesn't know critical-historical studies and like most fundamentalists they don't want to know or feed themself lies. None of those mentioned probable even read the top 10 historical writers in Christianity.

You don't think I can name a bunch of Islamic theologians who decided the story was true and became theologians to study the text?
They don't know the historical studies done that show it's completely a product of it's time and mirror Persian, Arab, OT folk tales that were popular at that time and place. They are not interested in asking the question, is thhis true, what does comparative religions say, what does archaeology say?

And, basically, you are using an appeal to authority for your basis which is a fallacy

No, I'm using an appeal to evidence. Things that can be demonstrated and give good evidence. I care about what is actually true, not what story I can make true by twisting history and cherry-picking data.

I think I answered this above.

You didn't. Dr Miller specifically, who was a theologian but transferred to historical studies went through an extremely emotional time when he began to see the evidence that in theology is ignored. He explains how had it was to have to let go of his beliefs. Critical-historicity doesn't support these myths being true in any way.

As Ehrman says:

Scholars of the Bible have made significant progress in under¬standing the Bible over the past two hundred years, building on archaeological discoveries, advances in our knowledge of the ancient Hebrew and Greek languages in which the books of Scripture were originally written, and deep and penetrating historical, literary, and textual analyses. This is a massive scholarly endeavor. Thousands of scholars just in North America alone continue to do serious research in the field, and the results of their study are regularly and routinely taught, both to graduate students in universities and to prospective pastors attending seminaries in preparation for the ministry.

Yet such views of the Bible are virtually unknown among the population at large. In no small measure this is because those of us who spend our professional lives studying the Bible have not done a good job communicating this knowledge to the general public and because many pastors who learned this material in seminary have, for a variety of reasons, not shared it with their parishioners once they take up positions in the church. (Churches, of course, are the most obvious place where the Bible is—or, rather, ought to be—taught and
discussed.) As a result, not only are most Americans (increasingly) ig¬ norant of the contents of the Bible, but they are also almost completely in the dark about what scholars have been saying about the Bible for the past two centuries. This book is meant to help redress that prob¬ lem. It could be seen as my attempt to let the cat out of the bag.

The perspectives that I present in the following chapters are not my own idiosyncratic views of the Bible. They are the views that have held sway for many, many years among the majority of serious critical scholars teaching in the universities and seminaries of North America and Europe, even if they have not been effectively com¬ municated to the population at large, let alone among people of faith who revere the Bible and who would be, presumably, the ones most interested. For all those who aspire to being well educated, knowl¬ edgeable, and informed about our civilization’s most important book, that has to change........



.....A very large percentage of seminarians are completely blind-sided by the historical-critical method. They come in with the expecta¬ tion of learning the pious truths of the Bible so that they can pass them along in their sermons, as their own pastors have done for them. Nothing prepares them for historical criticism. To their sur¬ prise they learn, instead of material for sermons, all the results of what historical critics have established on the basis of centuries of research. The Bible is filled with discrepancies, many of them ir¬ reconcilable contradictions. Moses did not write the Pentateuch (the first five books of the Old Testament) and Matthew, Mark, Luke, and lohn did not write the Gospels. There are other books that did not make it into the Bible that at one time or another were consid¬ ered canonical—other Gospels, for example, allegedly written by Jesus’ followers Peter, Thomas, and Mary. The Exodus probably did not happen as described in the Old Testament. The conquest of the Promised Land is probably based on legend. The Gospels are at odds on numerous points and contain nonhistorical material. It is hard to know whether Moses ever existed and what, exactly, the histori¬ cal Jesus taught. The historical narratives of the Old Testament are filled with legendary fabrications and the book of Acts in the New Testament contains historically unreliable information about the life and teachings of Paul. Many of the books of the New Testament are pseudonymous—written not by the apostles but by later writers claiming to be apostles. The list goes on.

 

[joelr]

Obviously you aren’t a scholar nor have you studied the bible as you have used proper hermeneutical pocesses. I use to used coined phrases like these because I never studied the bible… as apparently you haven’t either. But I found that when you actually studied the above, it has been interpreted wrongly.

Great. So we are going to take scholarship seriously. Let's just ignore that and stick to the experts, like I generally do. Just remember this moving forward, you can have your scholars do the interpretation and we are going to have historical scholars do their thing, without cherry-picking.

What I am saying is that if you are looking for it to be wrong, you will grasp those things that support your position at the expense of that which doesn’t.

The scholars are looking for the most probable truth. Nothing supports superatural tales being true, everything supports the tales being made up mythology, like 10,000 other nations also did.


The Mystery religions are a specific sub-set that the NT is a part of. All the nations that were occupied by the Greek colonists had their religion changed in the same way.






Carrier:






Most of what we mean by Christianity is Jewish, it comes from Judaism. If we go back many centuries we can talk about the surrounding cultures that influenced Judaism and Egypt would be one of them, among several others. Christians probably were not even aware of this as it was centuries old by then.










Most of it is borrowing this package of ideas called the Mystery cults, which was a Hellenized version of local tribal cults. We have a Syrian version, we have a Persian version, an Egyptian version, it’s the same package that spreads from the Greek colonists. It’s very Greek but borrows from local cultures.






From a lecture by Dr James Tabor, specialist in Hellenism and it's influence on the NT,



-Hellenistic period - the Hebrew religion adopts the Greek ideas. (As all Mystery cults did)


-Sources the Britannica article by J.Z. Smith) and explains it’s an excellent resource from an excellent scholar.


-In the Hellenistic period the common perception is not the Hebrew view, it’s the idea that the soul belongs in Heaven.

-The basic Hellenistic idea is taken into the Hebrew tradition. Salvation in the Hellenistic world is how do you save your soul and get to Heaven. How to transcend the physical body.


-Greek tomb “I am a child of earth and starry heaven but heaven alone is my h


-The basic Hellenistic idea is taken into the Hebrew tradition. Salvation in the Hellenistic world is how do you save your soul and get to Heaven. How to transcend the physical body.


-Greek tomb “I am a child of earth and starry heaven but heaven alone is my home


-The basic Hellenistic idea is taken into the Hebrew tradition. Salvation in the Hellenistic world is how do you save your soul and get to Heaven. How to transcend the physical body.



Hellenistic Greek view of cosmology

Material world/body is a prison of the soul
Humans are immortal souls, fallen into the darkness of the lower world
Death sets the soul free
No human history, just a cycle of birth, death, rebirth
Immortality is inherent for all humans
Salvation is escape to Heaven, the true home of the immortal soul
Humans are fallen and misplaced
Death is a stripping of the body so the soul can be free
Death is a liberating friend to be welcomed
Asceticism is the moral idea for the soul

A parable is a parable. a person is a real person. Apparently you have simply taken what other people said to support your position.

Ah, I knew this was coming. First I'm not a scholar. Then, when I use scholarship I'm "simply taking what someone said". What a mess. The reason I pointed out we are now taking scholars serious, your point.



This is a fact. Carrier, as a PhD historian agrees but sources 9 other peer-reviewed journal or monographs on the topic of John (in just 3 pages). But here we go with the twisting and tapdancing.


This is by far the historical consensus by people who study the original Greek versions and are not looking for a specific outcome. What the evidence shows, it shows.




Just like you would expect historians studying Classical Greek pantheon scripture to say these were mythic tales, you cannot have a separate standard of logic because you like a story. That is not how truth is found. That is special pleading.



Yes a parable is a parable. When it is later changed into a real person, we have a made up story.

Yes… Bart is your god… except he is wrong.

He is not even my favorite Biblical historian. First he is a man and a good scholar.I enjoy the work of many scholars. I also like Paul Davies, I don't say Paul is wrong about quantum mechanics just because I don't like something he says. Maybe I'll research something to see if all physicists agree to see if it's consensus or a fringe idea.


Ehrman is a NT scholar, there are many many other NT scholars. Litwa offers a great course on the Mystery religions and the influence on the NT. Tabor, J.Z. Smith, Klauck also do the same.


There are experts on "Q" like Goodacre or Robert H. Stein's work on the Synoptic Problem The Synoptic Problem: An Introduction. And in every case they use all the past peer-reviewed work to build a case. This is mostly consensus information, proven over and over again to be by far the most likely.

There are specialists in many areas. They all agree on the general aspects, especially the Persian and Greek influence, Gospels dates, Gospels being anonymous (they say it in Greek), non-eyewitness, re-working OT naratives and other myths and the other 3 being re-workings of Mark.


This is done in many ways but the evidence is massive and beyond reasonable.In fact even the massive

Encyclopaedia Biblica : a critical dictionary of the literary, political, and religious history, the archaeology, geography, and natural history of the Bible


by Cheyne, T. K. (Thomas Kelly), 1841-1915; Black, J. Sutherland (John Sutherland), 1846-1923

an apologetic work, still admits the NT is Greek.


"We must conclude with the following guarded thesis. There is in the circle of ideas in the NT, in addition to what is new, and what is taken over from Judaism, much that is Greek ; but whether this is adopted directly from the Greek or borrowed from the Alexandrians, who indeed aimed at a complete fusion of Hellenism and Judaism, is, in the most important cases, not to be determined ; and primitive Christianity as a whole stands considerably nearer to the Hebrew world than to the Greek."


"Except he is wrong". What a surprise, a general statement you cannot backup. Does that mean he's wrong about everything? So his teacher Bruce Metzger (Bruce Manning Metzger was an American biblical scholar, Bible translator and textual critic who was a longtime professor at Princeton Theological Seminary ) considered the top expert on the Greek Gospels, was all wrong.


Wow, so a minute ago you complain I am not a scholar, and NOW you can say all of the PhDs, all of the consensus evidence, including archaeology is just "wrong". Because you says so, yet have zero expertise in history or archaeology, never read one Ehrman book or any of his contemporaries, know nothing about any of the actual evidence, proofs, yet just can say the are "wrong".

So you are clearly not interested in what is actually true, just making claims, like all religions. In fact, this is delusional territory.


Meanwhile all Muslims say the same about you, and all Mormons and all Hindu and no one has any evidence. It's very clear you are playing a huge game of confirmation bias because you cannot have a reasonable conversation.



It's like saying all the medical experts are "wrong"because in James 5 it says faith shall heal the sick. Yet statistics show cancer takes anyone, anytime, any age, despite religion, no special compensation for any religious group.


What's worse is you cannot demonstrate, with scholarship (your standard) that Ehrman is wrong about anything.


Yes historians have disagreements. But as Carrier says about the consensus in the field.

So What About Hannibal, Then? • Richard Carrier Blogs

This kind of argument has been tried again and again and again. I’ve discussed every one. (See Okay, So What about the Historicity of Spartacus?) It’s always of this form: P1. We should not doubt [x] existed. P2. The evidence for Jesus is better than for [x]. P3. The same standards of evidence...

www.richardcarrier.info

All mainstream scholars agree Jesus as demigod is a mythical savior deity. They all agree the Gospels are myths about him. They simply conclude that those myths contain some kernels of fact, and that Jesus was originally not a flying, magic-wielding supergod. But they agree the super-Jesus, the only Jesus about whom we have any accounts at all, didn’t exist. They think some mundane Jesus did, who was dressed up with those legends and beliefs later. But that still admits he belongs to a reference class that the Hannibals of the world do not: that of mythically-attested savior gods who speak to their followers in dreams and visions. So we actually need more evidence for Jesus than we have for Hannibal, to be sure Jesus isn’t just like all other mythical savior gods, who also had amazing stories about them set on earth history, and who also appeared to people in dreams and visions—yet never plausibly existed.

 

[joelr]

Yes… there are myths. However, the Roman Empire, the destruction of Jerusalem, Peter, Paul, James, John et al are not myths. And, please, don’t use the overused “Well, Iliad and the Odyssey has real places too” as a basis for denying what is written in the compiled books called the Bible.

Greco-Roman biographies mix real history with supernatural tales and false "eyewitnesses" constantly.


"The Greco-Roman literary world is full of authors who didn’t think twice about inventing eyewitnesses to spice up their stories. This was so common we should not trust claims about anonymous witnesses in the Gospels, Pauls Creed or Papias’ work. The art of fabricating sources was well-practiced making the supposedly eyewitness-backed miracles in these text highly questionable.


Emperor Vespasian, reportedly did many miracles. Tacitus claims 2 men approached the emperor with serious ailments. One was blind and the other had a useless hand. Vespasian cured both. Tacitus writes: The hand was instantly restored to use, and the day again shone for the blind man. Both facts are told by eye-witnesses even now when falsehood brings no reward. Tacitus, Histories 4.81."

C. Hanson



Paul was real, 6 of the Epistles are considered forgeries by all historical scholars. Some theologians cannot allow for this. The evidence suggests otherwise.

"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. New Testament Letter Structure, from Catholic Resources by Felix Just, S.J.

Yes the Roman Empire and the Jewish War was real, all historical fiction is done this way. The Hindu text use real wars and add characters and Krishna and so on.


The Roman founder, a myth about Romulus, from ~700 BCE, found written by a historian in 300 BCE, was clearly fiction but featured a real place and real leaders. Just Romulus was the myth. For example:


Romulus

1- The hero son of god

2 - His death is accompanied by prodigies

3 - The land is covered in darkness

4- The heroes corpse goes missing

5 - The hero receives a new immortal body, superior to the one he had

6 - His resurrection body has on occasion a bright shining appearance


7 - After his resurrection he meets with a follower on the road to the cit

8 - A speech is given from a summit or high place prior to ascending
9 - An inspired message of resurrection or “translation to heaven” is delivered to witnesses

10 - There is a great commission )an instruction to future followers
11- The hero physically ascends to heaven in his divine new bod
12 - He is taken up into a cloud

13 - There is an explicit role given to eyewitness testimony (even naming the witnesses)
14 - Witnesses are frightened by his appearance and or disappearanc
15 - Some witnesses flee
16 - Claims are made of dubious alternative account

17 - All of this occurs outside of a nearby but central city
18 - His followers are initially in sorrow over his deat

19 - But his post-resurrection story leads to eventual belief, homage and rejoicin

20 - The hero is deified and cult subsequently paid to him (in the same manner as a God)

And yes, the IIliad has real places. Your supernatural stories are not any different than any other. The first Gospel not only re-writes the OT stories, Paul, Romulus and other tales, it's written like fiction, using ring structure, triadic inversions and all sorts of high level Greek-school fictive literary devices. The miracles gives are the same given to Ascepelis centuries before, standard practice to make your hero stand out.

You should try to refrain from words like “all” and “none’..

The 20 Most Influential Christian Scholars

No, I was completely correct. Your list:


1)evolutionary biologist

2)Pope

3)sociologist,

4)theology advocate and senior pastor

5)neurosurgeon

6)geneticist

7)John Dominic Crossan doesn't believe in a supernatural Jesus, historian. You are making my point. More on this.


8)Professor of Jurisprudence

9)Christian theology

10)Swiss Catholic priest

11)public face of intelligent design

12)authority on the separation of powers between church and state


13)professor of systematic theology


14) Nazi


15)professor of philosophy


16)fiction and non-fiction writer


17) feminist theologians,


18)observational astronomer



19)advancing peaceful co-existence of diverse cultures


20)Anglican bishop


Not one Biblical historical scholar, archaeologist. Guess what. Islam also has these types of diverse members. People who know nothing about the historical facts and truth, people from all walks of like who buy into a story and accept it as true. Mormonism has millions of members, in all these walks of life.


None of these people know what historians clearly know, these are re-worked, literary fictional tales, created in all nations to give an identity, not a historical truth.


You don't think some of those billions of Muslims also work these fields? They do, people accept, hope they are true and there is a heaven. They don't know that these are Hellenistic myths, already used by every nation and this is the last version. Made up stories.

There are 1 billion Muslims and 1 billion Hindu. Obviously 2 billion people can buy into a fictional story and believe it's true.


There is no exception in Christianity. People just don't care about are their beliefs actually true, as the millions of others who accept, psychics, mediums, astrologers, witchcraft, alien abductions, ghost stories, healings, all with no actual evidence.


That isn't "proof" of anything expect people don't care about truth and they will use confirmation bias if they like a story and want it to be true


I said, historians and archaeologists.

AGAIN, you said I am not a scholars. GREAT, let's stick to scholars, and here you are naming astronomers???? Priests?????? What?????


Yeah, Muslims can name religious leaders as well, does, not, make, it , true.

Let's remind you because this is nonsense

So What About Hannibal, Then? • Richard Carrier Blogs

This kind of argument has been tried again and again and again. I’ve discussed every one. (See Okay, So What about the Historicity of Spartacus?) It’s always of this form: P1. We should not doubt [x] existed. P2. The evidence for Jesus is better than for [x]. P3. The same standards of evidence...

www.richardcarrier.info

All mainstream scholars, All mainstream scholars, agree Jesus as demigod is a mythical savior deity. They all agree the Gospels are myths about him. They simply conclude that those myths contain some kernels of fact, and that Jesus was originally not a flying, magic-wielding supergod.

Yes… that is my point. You have atheists who turn to Christians, Islamists who turn to Christianity, Christians who turn atheists and everything in between.

You cannot be serious? That doesn't mean they are correct? It means they don't care about what is true. You ALSO HAVE Christians who switch to Islam. Huge numbers.


In fact, look at this:

"According to Pew Research, about half of all converts to Islam in the United States identify as Protestant before converting, while 20% are Catholic. In general, 77% of new converts to Islam are from Christianity, while 19% are from non-religion"

So your point actually works against you.


But it isn't even my point. All historical scholars, upon seeing the unending evidence, which they thought would confirm their beliefs, do the opposite, because Christianity has good evidence it's a borrowed, made up story. And like all others, zero evidence it's real.


Let's see more evidence of this:


Bible Scholar & Missionary Dr. Matthew Monger Leaves Christianity

Bible Scholar Dr. Dennis R. MacDonald Leaves Christianity

Bible Scholar Dr. Kipp Davis Leaves Christianity

Christian Apologetics Is A Grossly Dishonest Game of Ignorance | Dr. Richard C. Miller (former evangelist)

Critical Thinking Skills Destroyed My Faith In Christianity - Jen Fishburne

 

[joelr]

Yes… that is my point. You have atheists who turn to Christians, Islamists who turn to Christianity, Christians who turn atheists and everything in between.

You cannot be serious? That doesn't mean they are correct? It means they don't care about what is true. You ALSO HAVE Christians who switch to Islam. Huge numbers.

In fact, look at this:


"According to Pew Research, about half of all converts to Islam in the United States identify as Protestant before converting, while 20% are Catholic. In general, 77% of new converts to Islam are from Christianity, while 19% are from non-religion"

So your point actually works against yo


But it isn't even my point. All historical scholars, upon seeing the unending evidence, which they thought would confirm their beliefs, do the opposite, because Christianity has good evidence it's a borrowed, made up story. And like all others, zero evidence it's real.


Let's see more evidence of this:

Bible Scholar & Missionary Dr. Matthew Monger Leaves Christianity

Bible Scholar Dr. Dennis R. MacDonald Leaves Christianity

Bible Scholar Dr. Kipp Davis Leaves Christianity

Christian Apologetics Is A Grossly Dishonest Game of Ignorance | Dr. Richard C. Miller (former evangelist)

Critical Thinking Skills Destroyed My Faith In Christianity - Jen Fishburne

Your “peer-reviewed” issue is also a fallacy.

No, I don't see anywhere where something being peer-reviewed is a fallacy. It just means it was fact checked by other experts, so you are not geting a bunch of false information. You still need evidence.

Can a Christian present a position to the peers who are all atheists and have the position that you have? Hardly. Have an atheist present a paper to a group of peers that are Christians and let them review it. Do you think it would pass?

You are fully confused. Yes a Christian can present any paper for peer-review. Here is the problem.


Imagine you are a historical scholar and you have a paper about how Zeus was actually real. It won't pass. Why? Because there is no evidence that Zeus is real.


why are historians atheist? Listen to the explanations I have given you, from people in that position. I gave you the words of Ehrman. And many videos of explanations of why fundamentalists scholars had to give up their beliefs. They are as supported as Zeus or Romulus. One of the videos is about how apologetics is grossly dishonest. None of the apologetics are true, they distort what is true and what is evidence.



Yes atheists have present papers to Christians. In the 1970s Thomas Thompson, an archaeologist was one of the first to give solid evidence Moses and the Patriarchs were literary characters only. His PhD work was supposed to be accepted by a Cardinal. He was refused and had to go to Canada to work. His story is easily found.


Eventually, scholarship kept confirming his ideas over and over and now they are standard and he is accepted as doing great work.


Since then archaeology has moved the bar way forward.



The Historicity of the Patriarchal Narratives: The Quest For The Historical Abraham


Thomas L Thompson (Author)


Completely dismantles the historic patriarchal narratives. His impeccable scholarship, his astounding mastery of the sources, and rigorous detailed examination of the archaeological claims makes this book one I will immediately take with me in case of a flood. And it still hasn't been refuted. I am well aware of the excellent work of William G. Dever, and his critique of the "minimalists" and his harping against Thompson, but it is his other books Dever has the most beef against. This one stands stellar and strong. I was absolutely bowled over by it. The second time through is even more astonishing.


BTW, Dever also believes the Bible is a mythology.

No apologetics holds up and you can research any of it and find out why.

I can’t go through all these points and still address your first one.

I didn't say address them all, I'm backing up what I am saying with scholarship, do what you will with it.

Flooding a post with a pool of diarrhetic statements

attacking my post like that just reveals massive insecurity.

to the point that I can’t even answer because of the limit on letter count

the irony is I'll have to answer this in parts, because of the limit, wow that was easy to work around. I'm sure you will complain about that as well. And call it gross names. Classy.

doesn’t really help your case.

My case doesn't need help. It's already made. No historian finds evidence for any folk tale. Or evidence that it wasn't borrowing from older theology, especially the exact religions that occupied Israel or they were exiled too. And archaeology shows Israelites and Judahites come from Canaan, DNA and archaeology confirm this. But that is another topic.



The borrowings are to the letter almost. The Gospels are written as historical fiction, using all the literary devices taught by the Greek school, which I can demonstrate for you.

Like all Greco-Roman bios they invent miracles, the same usual things, healings, casting out devils, healings, ascending to heaven. this was happening for centuries before the Gospels. Personal salvation is a Hellenistic invention, souls going to heaven is not in Judaism, that is where Yahweh alone lives. The NT is Greek. There is no case.



As the

, the Oxford Annotated Bible (a compilation of multiple scholars summarizing dominant scholarly trends for the last 150 years) states (p. 1744):



"Neither the evangelists nor their first readers engaged in historical analysis. Their aim was to confirm Christian faith (Lk. 1.4; Jn. 20.31). Scholars generally agree that the Gospels were written forty to sixty years after the death of Jesus. They thus do not present eyewitness or contemporary accounts of Jesus’ life and teachings.



Unfortunately, much of the general public is not familiar with scholarly resources like the one quoted above; instead, Christian apologists often put out a lot of material, such as The Case For Christ, targeted toward lay audiences, who are not familiar with scholarly methods, in order to argue that the Gospels are the eyewitness testimonies of either Jesus’ disciples or their attendants. The mainstream scholarly view is that the Gospels are anonymous works, written in a different language than that of Jesus, in distant lands, after a substantial gap of time, by unknown persons, compiling, redacting, and inventing various traditions, in order to provide a narrative of Christianity’s central figure—Jesus Christ—to confirm the faith of their communities."

 

[joelr]

Sorry, you can continue.

Don't need your permission.

But, why would you expect anyone to believe your claims without any good reasons?

I don't expect anyone to do anything. If someone cares about what is true then they can investigate the scholarship I presented, see it's backed by massive evidence, based on other scholarship with evidence and as the scientific method is, is our best attempt at what is true. it's most likely the best version of truth. In some cases it's beyond any doubt.

However some people don't care about truth and delude themself into thinking archaeology and critical-historical studies are wrong, not because they have better evidence but because their amateur opinion based on amateur church leaders and claims in fictive stories we don't have original sources from and don't know who wrote, are correct. Just like every other religion, cult, ghost story and myth, You can continue to believe in Romulus, Inanna, Jesus or whomever you choose, I do not care. I am interested in truth.


So when you have good evidence, please let me know.

 

[joelr]

Bible tells signs were given.

The other Gospels tells Jesus for example healed people (Matt. 4:23), is that not a sign?

This is giving evidence John is rewriting Matthew who rewrote Luke.


After we concede to the fact that John is using the other Gospels as sources, we can take notice of the fact that John intended on rebutting a particular theme that those previous Gospels all had in common, that “no sign shall be given” that Jesus is the Messiah (e.g. Mark 8.11-12), which was in line with what Paul said when he mentioned that no signs were given to the Jews that Jesus was the Christ (1 Cor. 1.22-24). So in Mark for example, even though he invents miracles to put in his stories as allegories, he is careful to make sure that only the disciples (no independent witnesses) are the ones that ever notice, mention, or understand those miracles. The only thing remotely close to an exception to this in Mark is at the end of his Gospel, when the three women saw that the tomb was empty and heard from a man sitting inside that Jesus had risen (which wasn’t really a miracle that they witnessed, but they were surprised nevertheless), and yet even with this ending we are told that the women simply ran away in fear and never told anyone what they had seen (Mark 16.8).


Matthew had already added to this material in Mark, “correcting” it by instead having Jesus say that “an evil and adulterous generation seeks a sign” and therefore “there shall no sign be given except the sign of Jonah“, meaning the resurrection of Jesus on the third day (Matt. 12.39, 16.4). Thus we can see that Matthew took what Mark wrote and went one step further, by allowing that one sign, and narrating the story so that the Jews “know” about it (hence his reason for writing Matt. 28.11-15). So Matthew invented new evidence that we never saw in Mark. Luke merely reinforced what Matthew had written (Luke 11.29), yet added to it with his invention of the parable of Lazarus (Luke 16.19-31) as well as the public announcement that was made to the Jews (Acts 2), thus illustrating the previous Gospels’ “no sign shall be given” theme.


John rebuts this entire theme by packing his Gospel full of “signs” and by taking Luke’s parable of Lazarus and turning it into an actual tale of Lazarus (John 11-12). We even read in John 2.11 that “Jesus did this, the first of his signs, in Cana of Galilee, and revealed his glory; and his disciples believed in him“, thus implying that it was because of these signs that his disciples believed in him (something we don’t hear about in any other Gospel). We read just a few verses later in John 2.17-18 that when Jesus was asked for a sign, he simply says that his resurrection will be a sign. Notably however, John doesn’t say here that this will be the only sign. Quite the contrary, for in John 2.23 we hear that “When he was in Jerusalem during the Passover festival, many believed in his name because they saw the signs that he was doing“, and later we read that “a great multitude followed him because they beheld the signs he did ” (John 6.2), followed by John telling us that when people “see the sign he did“, they declared that Jesus was a true prophet (John 6.14). In John 3.2, we read that a Pharisee named Nicodemus said to Jesus “no one can do these signs that you do, unless God be with him“, and even in John 4.48-54 we read that Jesus said “You will in no way believe unless you see signs and wonders” and then he provides them with a miracle to see. We are even explicitly told that these signs were indeed the evidence that showed that Jesus is the Christ (John 7.31, 9.16, 10.41-42), and there are several other references to the signs that Jesus gave, including John telling us that there were even more than those mentioned in his Gospel (John 20.30). So John clearly attempted to rebut this theme present in the other Gospels, and made it blatantly obvious that he was doing so.

That is ridiculous. Don't you see the contradiction here? If they don't have the original, how can they know what was in the original?

This is the funniest thing I have seen in a while.
You really can't figure this out?

We don't know. But you are correct, we cannot know. What do you think I have been telling you all along??????? It's not a "paradox" it's church people telling you non-truths. Or making it sound as if we know more than we do. You are getting a small glimpse at the truth and your mind is like "wait, what, this cannot be possible, it's a contradiction..."
No, along the way, church fathers and scribes made things up or changed things to fit their theology. Like the 6 fake Epistles attributed to John, written by late church fathers to make it look like Paul agreed with the Gospel stories.


"The earliest known manuscript of the Gospel of John is the Rylands Library Papyrus P52, which is the size of a business card and may date back to the first half of the 2nd century. It is considered the oldest fragment of the New Testament"


Other early manuscripts of the Gospel of John include:

• Muratorian fragment
  Dated to 170 AD, this fragment cites verses 1–3 of chapter 1 in a discussion of the Gospel of John
  
  
  
• Papyrus 9
  From the 3rd century, this manuscript has parts of verses 11–12 and 14–17 of chapter 4
  
  
  
• Papyrus 66
  This manuscript contains the use of Nomina Sacra and may have been worked on by three people: an original scribe, a corrector, and a minor corrector
  
  
  
• Papyrus 119
  Written around 250 AD, this manuscript contains John 1:21–28
  
  

"By way of very simple background for readers not completely on top of the textual situation we are confronting when it comes to the Gospels (or any of the other books of the New Testament) (or of any ancient Christian writings at all) (or, in fact, of any writings of any kind at all that come down to us from antiquity) we do not have the “originals” (however we define that term: see below!). What we have are copies made from copies, which were themselves made from copies. Most of these copies are hundreds of years after the books were put in circulation, and all of the surviving copies contain mistakes of one kind or another. T"


Bart Ehrman

 

[joelr]

It s interesting how people come to that translation, when according to the Bible, people who heard Jesus, thought he was calling Elijah.

And about the ninth hour, Jesus cried out with a loud voice, saying, Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani; that is, "My God, My God, why did You forsake Me?" And hearing, some of those standing there said, This one calls Elijah.
Matt. 27:46

Mark was clearly riffing from the OT here,


Only a few verses later, we read about the rest of the crucifixion narrative and find a link (a literary source) with the Book of Psalms in the Old Testament (OT):


Mark 15.24: “They part his garments among them, casting lots upon them.”


Psalm 22:18: “They part my garments among them, and cast lots upon them.”


Mark 15.29-31: “And those who passed by blasphemed him, shaking their heads and saying, ‘…Save yourself…’ and mocked him, saying ‘He who saved others cannot save himself!’ ”


Psalm 22.7-8: “All those who see me mock me and give me lip, shaking their head, saying ‘He expected the lord to protect him, so let the lord save him if he likes.’ ”


Mark 15.34: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”


Psalm 22.1: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”


On top of these links, Mark also appears to have used Psalm 69, Amos 8.9, and some elements of Isaiah 53, Zechariah 9-14, and Wisdom 2 as sources for his narratives. So we can see yet a few more elements of myth in the latter part of this Gospel, with Mark using other scriptural sources as needed for his story, whether to “fulfill” what he believed to be prophecy or for some other reason.

It's made up.



Earlier in Mark (chapter 5), we hear about another obviously fictional story about Jesus resurrecting a girl (the daughter of a man named Jairus) from the dead, this miracle serving as another obvious marker of myth, but adding to that implausibility is the fact that the tale is actually a rewrite of another mythical story, told of Elisha in 2 Kings 4.17-37 as found in the OT, and also the fact that there are a number of very improbable coincidences found within the story itself. In the story with Elisha, we hear of a woman from Shunem who seeks out the miracle-working Elisha, finds him, falls to his feet and begs him to help her son who had recently fallen gravely ill. Someone checks on her son and confirms that he is now dead, but Elisha doesn’t fret about this, and he goes into her house, works his miraculous magic, and raises him from the dead. In Mark’s version of the story (Mark 5.22-43), the same things occur. We hear about Jairus coming to look for Jesus, finds him, falls to his feet and begs him to help him with his daughter. Someone then comes to confirm that she is now dead, but Jesus (as Elisha) doesn’t fret, and he goes into his house, works his miraculous magic, and raises her from the dead.





As for some other notable coincidences, we see Mark reversing a few details in his version of the story. Instead of a woman begging for her son, it is a man begging for his daughter. While in 2 Kings, an unnamed woman comes from a named town (Shunem) which means “rest”, in Mark we have a named man coming from an unnamed town, and the man’s name (Jairus) means “awaken”. In Mark’s conclusion to this story (5.42), he mentions that “immediately they were amazed with great amazement”, and he appears to have borrowed this line from 2 Kings as well (4.13 as found in the Greek Septuagint version of 2 Kings), which says “You have been amazed by all this amazement for us”. It’s important to note that this verse from 2 Kings (as found in the Greek Septuagint), refers to an earlier encounter between the unnamed woman and Elisha where he was previously a guest in her home and this verse was what the woman had said to Elisha on that occasion. Then Elisha blesses her with a miraculous conception (as she was said to be a barren woman in 2 Kings). In fact, this miraculous conception was of the very son that Elisha would later resurrect from the dead. So to add to this use of 2 Kings we also have another reversal from Mark, reversing the placement of this reaction (double amazement) from the child’s miraculous conception (in 2 Kings) to the child’s miraculous resurrection (in Mark 5.42).

Another notable finding within the Passover Narrative are parallels to Jesus’ Baptism mentioned earlier in Mark. For example:
A- John cries with a loud voice (1.3)

A – Jesus cries with a loud voice (15.34)

B – An allusion is made to Elijah (Mark 1.6; 2 Kings 1.8)

B – An allusion is made to Elijah (15.34-36)

C – The heavens are torn (1.10)

C – The temple curtain is torn (15.38), which is a symbol of the barrier between earth and heaven.

D – Holy Spirit descends upon Jesus (1.10)

D – Holy Spirit departs from Jesus (15.37)

E – God calls Jesus his son (1.11)

E – The centurion calls Jesus God’s son (15.19)

Obviously they are not saying the same thing, only part of a bigger story.

A story that changes with Persian and Hellenism is added. Originally Mesopotamian.

 

[joelr]

It is possible they burn forever, even if they are not conscious. Tormenting fire doesn't necessary mean the burning matter is conscious.

I'm not interested in speculation, especially about fiction and from Mr "I don't believe scholars" you want to be that guy, go ahead, but if you care less about knowledge, I'm not interested in your speculation.

There is no hell in the OT and a firery hell is a Persian myth they borrowed.


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


Nick Gier. Emeritus Professor of Philosophy University of Idaho

Again you are making up stuff that is not in the text.

: In Psalm 88:12 and 115:17, Sheol is associated with inactivity and unconsciousness, where the living can't praise or remember God.


I also seem to know scripture, among other things more than you.

Paradise means garden, and God planted a garden in the Eden. Therefore Garden in the Eden is the same as paradise.

Yes, again, more Persian influence, originally Eden was east. The Persian influence, once again. It became paradise because the Persians associated it with that. And they had a myth about a final battle and a bodily resurrection where earth would become a paradise. Borrowed by Jewish myth.

Originally the Garden of Eden in Hebrew meant:

After forming the first human being, God planted a garden in a region called Eden. English translations of this verse all include some concept of "east" in describing the location of this garden. The original Hebrew says gan b ē'den mi qe'dem, which most literally means "a garden towards the east, in Eden." It should be pointed out that "Eden," literally speaking, is the territory where the garden is located, not the actual garden itself. From the geography given in the following verses, it seems logical to conclude that Eden was in the region of Mesopotamia. By implication, Genesis' original audience would have been to the west of that area.

The Hebrew word pardes appears in the Bible after 538 BCE in the books of Song of Songs, Ecclesiastes, and Nehemiah, and it means "park" or "garden". This is the word's original Persian meaning, as it was used by Xenophon in Anabasis to describe the royal parks of Cyrus the Great. PERSIAN

In Second Temple era Judaism (PERSIAN OCCUPATION), the word "paradise" became associated with the Garden of Eden and prophecies of Eden's restoration, and eventually transferred to heaven. The word entered Jewish beliefs as a Greek translation for the Garden of Eden in the Septuagint, an early Greek translation of Jewish scriptures. The Greek word paradeisos comes from an Iranian word and means "enclosed park".

Smith's Bible Dictionary - Paradise​

Paradise. [N] https://www.biblestudytools.com/dictionaries/bakers-evangelical-dictionary/paradise.html [E]
This is a word of Persian origin, and is used in the Septuagint as the translation of Eden. It means "an orchard of pleasure and fruits," a "garden" or "pleasure ground," something like an English park. It is applied figuratively to the celestial dwelling of the righteous, in allusion to the garden of Eden. ( 2 Corinthians 12:4 ; Revelation 2:7 ) It has thus come into familiar use to denote both that garden and the heaven of the just.


Sometimes at funerals the priest will slip up and use both Greek/Persian myths. When they lower the casket he will say "here they await until the final resurrection, when they will rise again in paradise on earth". That is the Persian story

Later they will say, "their soul is now with Jesus in. heaven". Hellensim. Whoops. 2 different theologies, Jewish and Christian. or Persian/Greek.

 

[joelr]

Yes… by your definition you are correct. But your definition is not mine.

Like I mentioned before… have your scholar submit to a group of Christian peers and have them review it to be accepted. Please...

There is no such thing. There is just the field of history, they have the same standards of evidence for everything and everyone.
If a Christian can get something passed because it met standards of evidence it would.

A "Christian panel" is not qualified to review a PhD historical paper because you have to be a Biblical PhD historian to peer-review it. ALL OF THE SCHOLARS. BECAME SECULAR. I have given you multiple, long, emotional stories, given by actual scholars. None of them remained religious. Ehrmans is in print, Miller, Kipp Davis and others are in interview.
That is the problem of the religion and it's complete lack of evidence. Not the scholars.


If a "Christian panel" accepted claims of miracles and resurrections they would also have to accept the revelations from the Quran, Mormonism, Bahai, you either have good standards or you don't. "Your definition" is anecdotal non-evidence that Islam can also use and isn't empirical evidence by any standard. You are special pleading.


So, let's look at some scholarship by believing Christians, who are serious about standards of evidence. They agree the gospels are anon, non-eyewitness, using Greek material, because they cannot ignore evidence and cannot introduce anecdotal apologetics.

Guess what, you cannot make any myth pass a critical review, not Mormonism, not Islam, not Scientology.

Would a panel of Islamic fundamentalists pass a paper supporting the revelations of the Quran? YES. Do we care? NO BECAUSE THEY ARE NOT PhD HISTORICAL SCHOLARS who use the same standards of evidence as everyone else. No exceptions. Islamic fundamentalist panels already believe claims. Critical-historical scholars DO NOT. There are no respected scholarly publications who do peer-review who are passing the Qurans evidence. Same for Christianity.
Scholars care about one standard, do you have good reasonable evidence. You do not. Or everyone would be Christian. Islam does not, Mormons do not, you have vague claims, typical of the period, nothing unusual, just a Jewish version.

Would you be upset if historians said "we say the Quran has so much good evidence and miracles, we suggest it become the new world religion and all others be outlawed:" Well they don't have good evidence, so that cannot happen. But you don't either. Deal.


Christian scholars stay away from Persian/Greek history and many topics but they do study the Synoptic Problem and once the Greek stuff was mentioned in an apologetic work. Nowdays, it's ignored.

Oxford Annotated Bible (a compilation of multiple scholars summarizing dominant scholarly trends for the last 150 years) states (p. 1744):

Neither the evangelists nor their first readers engaged in historical analysis. Their aim was to confirm Christian faith (Lk. 1.4; Jn. 20.31). Scholars generally agree that the Gospels were written forty to sixty years after the death of Jesus. They thus do not present eyewitness or contemporary accounts of Jesus’ life and teachings.




Encyclopaedia Biblica : a critical dictionary of the literary, political, and religious history, the archaeology, geography, and natural history of the Bible

by Cheyne, T. K. (Thomas Kelly), 1841-1915; Black, J. Sutherland (John Sutherland), 1846-1923

"We feel that we have moved more out of a Hebrew into a Greek atmosphere


in the Pastoral Kpistles, in Hebrews— which is beyond doubt dependent both in form and in contents on the Alexandrians (e.g. , 131814) — and in the Catholic Epistles ; the Epistle of James, even if, with Spitta, we should class it with the Jewish writings, must have had for its author a man with a Greek education. Tt was a born Greek that wrote Acts. If his Hellenic character does not find very marked expression it is merely due to the nature of his work ; no pure Jew would have uttered the almost pantheistic -sounding sentence, ' in God we live and move and have our being' (1723). In the Fourth Gospel, finally, the influence of Greek philosophy is incontestable. Not only is the Logos, which plays so important a part in the prologue (Ii-i8), of Greek origin ; the gnosticising tendency of John, his enthusiasm for ' the truth ' (svithout genitive), his dualism (God and the world almost treated as absolute antithesis), his predilection for abstractions, compel us to regard the author, Jew by birth as he certainly was, as strongly under the influence of Hellenic ideas. Here again, however, we must leave open the possibility that these Greek elements reached him through the Jewish Alexandrian philosophy ; just as little can his Logos theory have originated independently of Philo, as the figure of the Paraclete in chaps. 14-16 (see J. ReVille, La doctrine du Logos dans le quatrieme Evangile,. Paris, '81). Cp JOHN [SON OK ZKBEDEE], § 31."





We must conclude with the following guarded thesis. There is in the circle of ideas in the NT, in addition to what is new, and what is taken over from Judaism, much that is Greek ; but whether this is adopted directly from the Greek or borrowed from the Alexandrians, who indeed aimed at a complete fusion of Hellenism and Judaism, is, in the most important cases, not to be determined ; and primitive Christianity as a whole stands considerably nearer to the Hebrew world than to the Greek."


Modern Christians who try to deal with Greek syncretism use strawmen and go after Horus and Mithras, both not Hellenistic demigods. They ignore the other 95% of Hellenistic borrowings.
When Mike Licona debated Carrier, every time Carrier presented historical consensus Licona was like "well we will just agree to disagree and move on". Pointless. He had no evidence, just his feelings.



bible.org, a scholarly resource for believing Christians who take academia seriously. A small excerpt on evidence of how we know the other Gospels copied from Mark. This is a small part of a long paper on evidence.

The Synoptic Problem | Bible.org

Any serious discussion of the Synoptic Gospels must, sooner or later, involve a discussion of the literary interrelationships among Matthew, Mark, and Luke. This is essential in order to see how an author used his sources (both for reliability’s sake as well as for redactional criticism), as...

bible.org

Any serious discussion of the Synoptic Gospels must, sooner or later, involve a discussion of the literary interrelationships among Matthew, Mark, and Luke. This is essential in order to see how an author used his sources (both for reliability’s sake as well as for redactional criticism), as well as when he wrote.

Robert H. Stein’s (a believer) The Synoptic Problem: An Introduction1 summarizes well the issues involved in the synoptic problem—as well as its probable solution. For the most part, our discussion will follow his outline.

A. The Literary Interdependence of the Synoptic Gospels​

It is quite impossible to hold that the three synoptic gospels were completely independent from each other. In the least, they had to have shared a common oral tradition. But the vast bulk of NT scholars today would argue for much more than that.3 There are four crucial arguments which virtually prove literary interdependence.

1. AGREEMENT IN WORDING​

The remarkable verbal agreement between the gospels suggests some kind of interdependence. It is popular today among laymen to think in terms of independence—and to suggest either that the writers simply recorded what happened and therefore agree, or that they were guided by the Holy Spirit into writing the same things. This explanation falls short on several fronts.

​

​

5. CONCLUSION​

Stein has summarized ably what one should conclude from these four areas of investigation:

We shall see later that before the Gospels were written there did exist a period in which the gospel materials were passed on orally, and it is clear that this oral tradition influenced not only the first of our synoptic Gospels but the subsequent ones as well. As an explanation for the general agreement between Matthew-Mark-Luke, however, such an explanation is quite inadequate. There are several reasons for this. For one the exactness of the wording between the synoptic Gospels is better explained by the use of written sources than oral ones. Second, the parenthetical comments that these Gospels have in common are hardly explainable by means of oral tradition. This is especially true of Matthew 24:15 and Mark 13:14, which addresses the readers of these works! Third and most important, the extensive agreement in the memorization of the gospel traditions by both missionary preachers and laypeople is conceded by all, it is most doubtful that this involved the memorization of a whole gospel account in a specific order. Memorizing individual pericopes, parables, and sayings, and even small collections of such material, is one thing, but memorizing a whole Gospel of such material is something else. The large extensive agreement in order between the synoptic Gospels is best explained by the use of a common literary source. Finally, as has already been pointed out, whereas Luke 1:2 does refer to an oral period in which the gospel materials were transmitted, Luke explicitly mentions his own investigation of written sources.6

When one compares the synoptic parallels, some startling results are noticed. Of Mark’s 11,025 words, only 132 have no parallel in either Matthew or Luke. Percentage-wise, 97% of Mark’s Gospel is duplicated in Matthew; and 88% is found in Luke. On the other hand, less than 60% of Matthew is duplicated in Mark, and only 47% of Luke is found in Mark.10

 

[Kenny]

There is no such thing. There is just the field of history, they have the same standards of evidence for everything and everyone.
If a Christian can get something passed because it met standards of evidence it would.

A "Christian panel" is not qualified to review a PhD historical paper because you have to be a Biblical PhD historian to peer-review it. ALL OF THE SCHOLARS. BECAME SECULAR. I have given you multiple, long, emotional stories, given by actual scholars. None of them remained religious. Ehrmans is in print, Miller, Kipp Davis and others are in interview.
That is the problem of the religion and it's complete lack of evidence. Not the scholars.


If a "Christian panel" accepted claims of miracles and resurrections they would also have to accept the revelations from the Quran, Mormonism, Bahai, you either have good standards or you don't. "Your definition" is anecdotal non-evidence that Islam can also use and isn't empirical evidence by any standard. You are special pleading.


So, let's look at some scholarship by believing Christians, who are serious about standards of evidence. They agree the gospels are anon, non-eyewitness, using Greek material, because they cannot ignore evidence and cannot introduce anecdotal apologetics.

Guess what, you cannot make any myth pass a critical review, not Mormonism, not Islam, not Scientology.

Would a panel of Islamic fundamentalists pass a paper supporting the revelations of the Quran? YES. Do we care? NO BECAUSE THEY ARE NOT PhD HISTORICAL SCHOLARS who use the same standards of evidence as everyone else. No exceptions. Islamic fundamentalist panels already believe claims. Critical-historical scholars DO NOT. There are no respected scholarly publications who do peer-review who are passing the Qurans evidence. Same for Christianity.
Scholars care about one standard, do you have good reasonable evidence. You do not. Or everyone would be Christian. Islam does not, Mormons do not, you have vague claims, typical of the period, nothing unusual, just a Jewish version.

Would you be upset if historians said "we say the Quran has so much good evidence and miracles, we suggest it become the new world religion and all others be outlawed:" Well they don't have good evidence, so that cannot happen. But you don't either. Deal.


Christian scholars stay away from Persian/Greek history and many topics but they do study the Synoptic Problem and once the Greek stuff was mentioned in an apologetic work. Nowdays, it's ignored.

Oxford Annotated Bible (a compilation of multiple scholars summarizing dominant scholarly trends for the last 150 years) states (p. 1744):

Neither the evangelists nor their first readers engaged in historical analysis. Their aim was to confirm Christian faith (Lk. 1.4; Jn. 20.31). Scholars generally agree that the Gospels were written forty to sixty years after the death of Jesus. They thus do not present eyewitness or contemporary accounts of Jesus’ life and teachings.




Encyclopaedia Biblica : a critical dictionary of the literary, political, and religious history, the archaeology, geography, and natural history of the Bible

by Cheyne, T. K. (Thomas Kelly), 1841-1915; Black, J. Sutherland (John Sutherland), 1846-1923

"We feel that we have moved more out of a Hebrew into a Greek atmosphere


in the Pastoral Kpistles, in Hebrews— which is beyond doubt dependent both in form and in contents on the Alexandrians (e.g. , 131814) — and in the Catholic Epistles ; the Epistle of James, even if, with Spitta, we should class it with the Jewish writings, must have had for its author a man with a Greek education. Tt was a born Greek that wrote Acts. If his Hellenic character does not find very marked expression it is merely due to the nature of his work ; no pure Jew would have uttered the almost pantheistic -sounding sentence, ' in God we live and move and have our being' (1723). In the Fourth Gospel, finally, the influence of Greek philosophy is incontestable. Not only is the Logos, which plays so important a part in the prologue (Ii-i8), of Greek origin ; the gnosticising tendency of John, his enthusiasm for ' the truth ' (svithout genitive), his dualism (God and the world almost treated as absolute antithesis), his predilection for abstractions, compel us to regard the author, Jew by birth as he certainly was, as strongly under the influence of Hellenic ideas. Here again, however, we must leave open the possibility that these Greek elements reached him through the Jewish Alexandrian philosophy ; just as little can his Logos theory have originated independently of Philo, as the figure of the Paraclete in chaps. 14-16 (see J. ReVille, La doctrine du Logos dans le quatrieme Evangile,. Paris, '81). Cp JOHN [SON OK ZKBEDEE], § 31."





We must conclude with the following guarded thesis. There is in the circle of ideas in the NT, in addition to what is new, and what is taken over from Judaism, much that is Greek ; but whether this is adopted directly from the Greek or borrowed from the Alexandrians, who indeed aimed at a complete fusion of Hellenism and Judaism, is, in the most important cases, not to be determined ; and primitive Christianity as a whole stands considerably nearer to the Hebrew world than to the Greek."


Modern Christians who try to deal with Greek syncretism use strawmen and go after Horus and Mithras, both not Hellenistic demigods. They ignore the other 95% of Hellenistic borrowings.
When Mike Licona debated Carrier, every time Carrier presented historical consensus Licona was like "well we will just agree to disagree and move on". Pointless. He had no evidence, just his feelings.



bible.org, a scholarly resource for believing Christians who take academia seriously. A small excerpt on evidence of how we know the other Gospels copied from Mark. This is a small part of a long paper on evidence.

The Synoptic Problem | Bible.org

Any serious discussion of the Synoptic Gospels must, sooner or later, involve a discussion of the literary interrelationships among Matthew, Mark, and Luke. This is essential in order to see how an author used his sources (both for reliability’s sake as well as for redactional criticism), as...

bible.org

Any serious discussion of the Synoptic Gospels must, sooner or later, involve a discussion of the literary interrelationships among Matthew, Mark, and Luke. This is essential in order to see how an author used his sources (both for reliability’s sake as well as for redactional criticism), as well as when he wrote.

Robert H. Stein’s (a believer) The Synoptic Problem: An Introduction1 summarizes well the issues involved in the synoptic problem—as well as its probable solution. For the most part, our discussion will follow his outline.

A. The Literary Interdependence of the Synoptic Gospels​

It is quite impossible to hold that the three synoptic gospels were completely independent from each other. In the least, they had to have shared a common oral tradition. But the vast bulk of NT scholars today would argue for much more than that.3 There are four crucial arguments which virtually prove literary interdependence.

1. AGREEMENT IN WORDING​

The remarkable verbal agreement between the gospels suggests some kind of interdependence. It is popular today among laymen to think in terms of independence—and to suggest either that the writers simply recorded what happened and therefore agree, or that they were guided by the Holy Spirit into writing the same things. This explanation falls short on several fronts.

​

​

5. CONCLUSION​

Stein has summarized ably what one should conclude from these four areas of investigation:

We shall see later that before the Gospels were written there did exist a period in which the gospel materials were passed on orally, and it is clear that this oral tradition influenced not only the first of our synoptic Gospels but the subsequent ones as well. As an explanation for the general agreement between Matthew-Mark-Luke, however, such an explanation is quite inadequate. There are several reasons for this. For one the exactness of the wording between the synoptic Gospels is better explained by the use of written sources than oral ones. Second, the parenthetical comments that these Gospels have in common are hardly explainable by means of oral tradition. This is especially true of Matthew 24:15 and Mark 13:14, which addresses the readers of these works! Third and most important, the extensive agreement in the memorization of the gospel traditions by both missionary preachers and laypeople is conceded by all, it is most doubtful that this involved the memorization of a whole gospel account in a specific order. Memorizing individual pericopes, parables, and sayings, and even small collections of such material, is one thing, but memorizing a whole Gospel of such material is something else. The large extensive agreement in order between the synoptic Gospels is best explained by the use of a common literary source. Finally, as has already been pointed out, whereas Luke 1:2 does refer to an oral period in which the gospel materials were transmitted, Luke explicitly mentions his own investigation of written sources.6

https://bible.org/article/synoptic-problem#_ftn6

When one compares the synoptic parallels, some startling results are noticed. Of Mark’s 11,025 words, only 132 have no parallel in either Matthew or Luke. Percentage-wise, 97% of Mark’s Gospel is duplicated in Matthew; and 88% is found in Luke. On the other hand, less than 60% of Matthew is duplicated in Mark, and only 47% of Luke is found in Mark.10

Talking about a diarrhetic flood of a response. It would take me a day to pluck out the weeds and 50 posts to answer So, I realize that you are definitely firm on your position and the voluminous post means no pearls are needed to be offered.

I am totally fine with you having your position of which I totally don’t agree with. For that matter, Jesus had those type of responses too. He basically just talked to the everyday person who had ears to hear.

Taking His example will be the best thing I can do.

 

[Subduction Zone]

Sorry, I don't think they disagree with each other, if correctly understood. But, you can't answer even a hypothetical question?

There was no hypothetical question. You only had unsupported claims. Perhaps you mean to ask one.

As to the ten year difference between the dates of Luke and Matthew. We know when the first census was held in Judea and why it was held. It could not have been held while Herod was alive. It was not held until after he die, passed Judea on to his son Archelaus and he failed so badly that the Romans had to take over. You have no explanation for the facts.

I think they can only show what they believe, not any facts.

Okay, so you do not know what facts are either. No, all of the facts tell us that the dates could not happen at the same time. You are just using the ostrich defense.

It is a shame when a person's faith is so weak that he cannot deal with reality. The strong in faith will simply not mind that both versions of the Nativity story are likely myths. Jesus was almost certainly born in Nazareth. There is no good reason at all to claim that he was born elsewhere.

 

[jimb]

There is no such thing. There is just the field of history, they have the same standards of evidence for everything and everyone.
If a Christian can get something passed because it met standards of evidence it would.

A "Christian panel" is not qualified to review a PhD historical paper because you have to be a Biblical PhD historian to peer-review it. ALL OF THE SCHOLARS. BECAME SECULAR. I have given you multiple, long, emotional stories, given by actual scholars. None of them remained religious. Ehrmans is in print, Miller, Kipp Davis and others are in interview.
That is the problem of the religion and it's complete lack of evidence. Not the scholars.


If a "Christian panel" accepted claims of miracles and resurrections they would also have to accept the revelations from the Quran, Mormonism, Bahai, you either have good standards or you don't. "Your definition" is anecdotal non-evidence that Islam can also use and isn't empirical evidence by any standard. You are special pleading.


So, let's look at some scholarship by believing Christians, who are serious about standards of evidence. They agree the gospels are anon, non-eyewitness, using Greek material, because they cannot ignore evidence and cannot introduce anecdotal apologetics.

Guess what, you cannot make any myth pass a critical review, not Mormonism, not Islam, not Scientology.

Would a panel of Islamic fundamentalists pass a paper supporting the revelations of the Quran? YES. Do we care? NO BECAUSE THEY ARE NOT PhD HISTORICAL SCHOLARS who use the same standards of evidence as everyone else. No exceptions. Islamic fundamentalist panels already believe claims. Critical-historical scholars DO NOT. There are no respected scholarly publications who do peer-review who are passing the Qurans evidence. Same for Christianity.
Scholars care about one standard, do you have good reasonable evidence. You do not. Or everyone would be Christian. Islam does not, Mormons do not, you have vague claims, typical of the period, nothing unusual, just a Jewish version.

Would you be upset if historians said "we say the Quran has so much good evidence and miracles, we suggest it become the new world religion and all others be outlawed:" Well they don't have good evidence, so that cannot happen. But you don't either. Deal.


Christian scholars stay away from Persian/Greek history and many topics but they do study the Synoptic Problem and once the Greek stuff was mentioned in an apologetic work. Nowdays, it's ignored.

Oxford Annotated Bible (a compilation of multiple scholars summarizing dominant scholarly trends for the last 150 years) states (p. 1744):

Neither the evangelists nor their first readers engaged in historical analysis. Their aim was to confirm Christian faith (Lk. 1.4; Jn. 20.31). Scholars generally agree that the Gospels were written forty to sixty years after the death of Jesus. They thus do not present eyewitness or contemporary accounts of Jesus’ life and teachings.




Encyclopaedia Biblica : a critical dictionary of the literary, political, and religious history, the archaeology, geography, and natural history of the Bible

by Cheyne, T. K. (Thomas Kelly), 1841-1915; Black, J. Sutherland (John Sutherland), 1846-1923

"We feel that we have moved more out of a Hebrew into a Greek atmosphere


in the Pastoral Kpistles, in Hebrews— which is beyond doubt dependent both in form and in contents on the Alexandrians (e.g. , 131814) — and in the Catholic Epistles ; the Epistle of James, even if, with Spitta, we should class it with the Jewish writings, must have had for its author a man with a Greek education. Tt was a born Greek that wrote Acts. If his Hellenic character does not find very marked expression it is merely due to the nature of his work ; no pure Jew would have uttered the almost pantheistic -sounding sentence, ' in God we live and move and have our being' (1723). In the Fourth Gospel, finally, the influence of Greek philosophy is incontestable. Not only is the Logos, which plays so important a part in the prologue (Ii-i8), of Greek origin ; the gnosticising tendency of John, his enthusiasm for ' the truth ' (svithout genitive), his dualism (God and the world almost treated as absolute antithesis), his predilection for abstractions, compel us to regard the author, Jew by birth as he certainly was, as strongly under the influence of Hellenic ideas. Here again, however, we must leave open the possibility that these Greek elements reached him through the Jewish Alexandrian philosophy ; just as little can his Logos theory have originated independently of Philo, as the figure of the Paraclete in chaps. 14-16 (see J. ReVille, La doctrine du Logos dans le quatrieme Evangile,. Paris, '81). Cp JOHN [SON OK ZKBEDEE], § 31."





We must conclude with the following guarded thesis. There is in the circle of ideas in the NT, in addition to what is new, and what is taken over from Judaism, much that is Greek ; but whether this is adopted directly from the Greek or borrowed from the Alexandrians, who indeed aimed at a complete fusion of Hellenism and Judaism, is, in the most important cases, not to be determined ; and primitive Christianity as a whole stands considerably nearer to the Hebrew world than to the Greek."


Modern Christians who try to deal with Greek syncretism use strawmen and go after Horus and Mithras, both not Hellenistic demigods. They ignore the other 95% of Hellenistic borrowings.
When Mike Licona debated Carrier, every time Carrier presented historical consensus Licona was like "well we will just agree to disagree and move on". Pointless. He had no evidence, just his feelings.



bible.org, a scholarly resource for believing Christians who take academia seriously. A small excerpt on evidence of how we know the other Gospels copied from Mark. This is a small part of a long paper on evidence.

The Synoptic Problem | Bible.org

Any serious discussion of the Synoptic Gospels must, sooner or later, involve a discussion of the literary interrelationships among Matthew, Mark, and Luke. This is essential in order to see how an author used his sources (both for reliability’s sake as well as for redactional criticism), as...

bible.org

Any serious discussion of the Synoptic Gospels must, sooner or later, involve a discussion of the literary interrelationships among Matthew, Mark, and Luke. This is essential in order to see how an author used his sources (both for reliability’s sake as well as for redactional criticism), as well as when he wrote.

Robert H. Stein’s (a believer) The Synoptic Problem: An Introduction1 summarizes well the issues involved in the synoptic problem—as well as its probable solution. For the most part, our discussion will follow his outline.

A. The Literary Interdependence of the Synoptic Gospels​

It is quite impossible to hold that the three synoptic gospels were completely independent from each other. In the least, they had to have shared a common oral tradition. But the vast bulk of NT scholars today would argue for much more than that.3 There are four crucial arguments which virtually prove literary interdependence.

1. AGREEMENT IN WORDING​

The remarkable verbal agreement between the gospels suggests some kind of interdependence. It is popular today among laymen to think in terms of independence—and to suggest either that the writers simply recorded what happened and therefore agree, or that they were guided by the Holy Spirit into writing the same things. This explanation falls short on several fronts.

​

​

5. CONCLUSION​

Stein has summarized ably what one should conclude from these four areas of investigation:

We shall see later that before the Gospels were written there did exist a period in which the gospel materials were passed on orally, and it is clear that this oral tradition influenced not only the first of our synoptic Gospels but the subsequent ones as well. As an explanation for the general agreement between Matthew-Mark-Luke, however, such an explanation is quite inadequate. There are several reasons for this. For one the exactness of the wording between the synoptic Gospels is better explained by the use of written sources than oral ones. Second, the parenthetical comments that these Gospels have in common are hardly explainable by means of oral tradition. This is especially true of Matthew 24:15 and Mark 13:14, which addresses the readers of these works! Third and most important, the extensive agreement in the memorization of the gospel traditions by both missionary preachers and laypeople is conceded by all, it is most doubtful that this involved the memorization of a whole gospel account in a specific order. Memorizing individual pericopes, parables, and sayings, and even small collections of such material, is one thing, but memorizing a whole Gospel of such material is something else. The large extensive agreement in order between the synoptic Gospels is best explained by the use of a common literary source. Finally, as has already been pointed out, whereas Luke 1:2 does refer to an oral period in which the gospel materials were transmitted, Luke explicitly mentions his own investigation of written sources.6

When one compares the synoptic parallels, some startling results are noticed. Of Mark’s 11,025 words, only 132 have no parallel in either Matthew or Luke. Percentage-wise, 97% of Mark’s Gospel is duplicated in Matthew; and 88% is found in Luke. On the other hand, less than 60% of Matthew is duplicated in Mark, and only 47% of Luke is found in Mark.10

Anyone can "prove" a false premise. The Gospels -- a small part of the Bible (which clearly testifies to Jesus' divinity) -- are NOT Western-type journalism. God will "open the eyes" of anyone who seeks to understand His truth.

 

[oldbadger]

I think we all know about the controversial writings of The Antiquities of the Jews by Flavius Josephus and The Annals of Tacitus for example. Some say the parts about Jesus in their writings were forgeries and others think they were authentic. But these men were not even born at the time of the supposed crucifixion of Jesus that happened in 30-33AD. They were born after his death.

So, what is the evidence for Jesus?

There can be controversy about anything written two thousand years ago, but the writings of Josephus can help to show that the man called Jesus did exist, not from the words seen there now but within the spaces where they were written! Just look at where he is mentioned. The space is surrounded by people who were not particularly good, which gives me a fair idea about what Josephus actually thought about him. The mention of John the Baptist (whose memory was respected by Josephus) is far away.

But let's see what Jesus's enemies thought. Fortunately the claims of Celcus (Celsus) survived because a respected Christian copied some of his works in order to refute them. Celcus not only told some very interesting anecdotes about Jesus but he clearly believed in his existence.

Thirdly, the gospel of Mark (less the Christian edits and insertions) tells the story of a very real man and most of the Miracles described have possible explanations. That includes the walking on water stuff, by the way.

Later gospels turn Jesus in to a Lord, and then a God, so I just tend to look at G-Mark for most of the real story, but it's a story about an amazing man whose mission sadly failed.

 

[oldbadger]

Well but we sort of are, right? SInce its not like there's two distinct people, we have one person, of whom people say all sorts of conflicting stuff. Either one group is right or the other is, but its one person either wya- it just depends who is right in what they say about him. So its not two people, its one person of whom we have conflicting accounts and so its up to us to sort the plausible from the absurd.

.............

Two separate persons.
Even on the last week there were two separate persons.
Two men came to Jerusalem and were welcomed by the common people. Both were loved. Both of them caused mayhem at that time. Both were tried and convicted of crimes. Both were called Jesus, and one was a son of man, the other was a son of God.

And I notice that there were two different persons right through the synoptic gospel accounts.

Yep.... Two persons called Jesus.