joelr
Well-Known Member
where do "we" show the millions of Mormons that Smith was "clearly" lying and making stuff up? There are 16 million Mormons. They believe the revelations.
See how easy you call other revelations BS yet think your are legit. Absolute confirmation bias.
What I've shown is the the NT is a bunch of trendy Greek and Persian theology. Including the idea of having a fallen soul that can be redeemed through a savior and get to an afterlife (salvation).
They don't tell you in church that all the Mystery religions did the same, had baptism and the eucharist and a savior who underwent a passion to defeat death and provide something for followers.
It was too early for Justin Martyr to lie and use denial like it is today so he had to blame it on Satan going back to the future and setting it all up.
Then it can be shown there is only one story the others were crafted from. And that one story uses OT narratives, Paul, Romulus, Jesus Ben Ananias and other stories (leaving nothing for any oral stories) and exclusively uses layers of parables. Jesus teaches in parables, the story is often a parable, it's not written as history but as historical fiction.
The story is anonymous and non-eye-witness (of course). You can't get any more layers of "clearly making stuff up".
You can only look at the historical evidence. You cannot get more fictive than what I just laid out.
Well you can with this religion. We have fake Epistles written by late Church Fathers and 36 other gospels, known fakes. One partial Dead Sea Scroll was found hidden quickly, as if authorities were nearby. A scribe was taking sayings from a book of a known philosopher of the time and writing a Gospel. He was taking the sayings and attributing them to Jesus. But it was half finished and had to be swept into the cave. It was found in this condition next to the book of original sayings.
As well as all sorts of tampering, like adding the Creeds of Christianity to Josephus by Eusebius.
So yes, people were getting in on writing this fiction.
It's also known that literalism was NOT A THING originally. It built up as each Gospel was written.
Carrier has a article on this -
So let’s assume we are looking at the New Testament as it probably was in the year 200 or thereabouts (and we’ll use the names of the authors of its books as would then have been claimed). It’s true that Mark never says anything he is writing is true, or a history or biography or anything the like, and his text is completely devoid of historical consciousness (e.g. he never references or discusses methods, sources, alternative accounts, or why we should believe anything he says), and in Mark 4:9-13 he even seems to covertly tell us his whole book is mere parable, represented as factual to “outsiders” but as symbolical and allegorical to “insiders” (one can argue that point, but it still appears to be so, and I even believe it’s so). So one can wonder at what Mark was on about. But as soon as his Gentile-aimed text gets redacted to support its opposition, a loyally Jewish Christianity, by Matthew, it starts getting “pimped out” with historicizing assertions, at this point with repeated declarations that what is being reported happened so as to “fulfill prophecy” (which entails the assertion that it must indeed have happened) and the inclusion of a historicizing apologetic for the empty tomb that Mark invented actually being real (the first instance of historical consciousness appearing in the Gospels).
This trend only grows thereafter. When Luke got a hold of these texts and composed an apologetic amalgam of them both—and even if by that we mean the final redactor of that effort before the end of the second century—he made these historicizing elements explicit, insisting that what he was writing is indeed what the first Christians themselves personally witnessed, and even purporting to historically date the events they related. Sure, he is conspicuously vague as to whether that’s what he is really doing. His words can be interpreted as affirming he only is preserving what he deems to be the orthodox stories, and that the only thing originally “witnessed” was the “Logos,” i.e. revelations of a celestial Jesus Lord. But the fact that Luke is being so deliberately obscure as to which he means evokes once again Mark’s winking revelation that the literal sense is meant for outsiders, and the real meaning for insiders. But even this entails Luke wants someone to mistake what he is saying as historical fact, and endeavors to dress his account up to look a lot like that.
By the time we get to John, all coyness and pretense is abandoned, and we are outright told what he is saying is literally true, and he “knows” it’s true because he (actually, they) consulted the diary of an eyewitness, and if you doubt that you’ll probably be damned. Thus the Gospels actually grow in historicization, becoming more historicized over time (which is indeed indicative of the Gospel tale beginning not in history but as myth, and only being converted into history slowly over time, as Mark 4 pretty much warned us). And by the end of this process, not only has what began as allegorical myth become insisted-upon history (with even fabricated evidence being cited to prove it), but it is now being suggested that anyone who tries to backslide into thinking its allegory and not historical fact is literally ‘a goddamned heretic’.
Then it gets even more explicit in the forgery of 2 Peter, as I have explained before. Here is what someone attempted to fake a letter from the Apostle Peter saying (in 2 Peter 1:15-2:3):
This passage is indisputably rebutting the claims of what this author says are the false Christian teachers he is condemning—and not just condemning, but elaborately warning his readers to shun. Those teachers are “heretics” who rely on “made up stories” that amount to “even denying the Master who redeemed them.” In other words, these are Christians teaching that the Gospels are mere myths. So someone faked a letter from Peter insisting stories like the Transfiguration are not “cleverly devised myths” that “deny the Master” but were real historical events, “because I was there, we were there, this really happened!” Which is a lie—this author is not Peter, and wasn’t there, nor evidently knew anyone who was. But this proves there were Christians who insisted the Gospels were historically true and not allegories. It also proves there were Christians teaching they were allegories and not histories; but our Bible doesn’t come from them. We only get to read works approved by the historicizers. Like this faked letter.
We see this same trend toward insisting the Gospels are literally true and attested by eyewitnesses, and condemning other Christians treating them as myths and fables, elsewhere in the Bible, too, in 1 John 1, 1 Timothy 1, 2 Timothy 4—even 1 Timothy 6, if we take that faked testimony of Paul saying “Jesus witnessed the good confession before Pontius Pilate” as yet another affirmation that the Gospel tales are factual and not mythical.
Ignatius
And sure enough, shortly after or around the very same time John and 2 Peter and the Pastorals and Johannines are being composed or redacted to push this new literalist party line within the very Bible itself, we get it explicitly spelled out in the letters of Ignatius—which purport, in our extant version, to date to the 110s A.D. yet which many experts on them believe likely date as late as the 140s or even 160s—but nevertheless, before 200. As I pointed out before, Ignatius (or whoever is pretending to be him) is now outright declaring:So not only is this “Ignatius” insisting the Gospels are relating historical facts, but he is declaring that any Christians who say otherwise are to be outright shunned. Which does mean there were Christians saying otherwise. But it also quite decisively proves that this other strain of Christianity—which we might call Ignatian, and which happens to be the one that in a couple of centuries would gain absolute political power over the whole of the West and control nearly all document preservation for a thousand years, eventually becoming today’s plethora of Christendom—was adamantly literalist. They were shunning, expelling, damning any fellow Christians who dare suggest the Gospels are but allegories and not to be taken as historically true..........
Establishing the Biblical Literalism of Early Christians • Richard Carrier Blogs
Usually I don’t have to argue this because it’s obvious. But there are a few who have attempted to contend that early Christians—say, before the fourth century—never took the Gospels as factually true reports of events but only as allegorical tales, fables conveying a point or deeper...
www.richardcarrier.info
