The bible

**Into Тhe Night** · 11-29-2022, 07:13 AM

Originally Posted by PostmodernProphet

the fact is, all four of the gospel authors were contemporaries of Jesus......Matthew and John were of the 12 disciples......Luke was a follower of Jesus and accompanied Paul on many of his journeys......Mark was a disciple to the Apostle Peter and often carried messages between Peter and Paul.......

Lol.

**Into Тhe Night** · 11-29-2022, 07:16 AM

Originally Posted by PostmodernProphet

of course......there are atheists everywhere.....but, the issue is whether they are scholars trained in biblical research who have evidence to support their denials......the vast majority of those who have actually studied the issue of the authenticity of the scriptures agree that the gospels were written by those they were named for.....

If by "scholar" you mean evangelical preacher who has an agenda, then sure. But if you're talking about legitimate scholarship that demands peer review, then no.

**Into Тhe Night** · 11-29-2022, 07:17 AM

Originally Posted by PostmodernProphet

every atheist is entitled to his beliefs......just realize we have equal proof that your story is bullshit........you know it all boils down to faith, not reason....

Lol. I literally reasoned out in my post why the story is bullshit. How do reconcile Mark's depiction of Mary with Matthew/Luke?

**PostmodernProphet** · 11-29-2022, 07:26 AM

Originally Posted by America

Lol.

laughter is not an argument......trot out one of your "scholars" and prove its not true......

here are the sources for my statements.....

Matthew
https://www.gotquestions.org/Matthew-in-the-Bible.html
https://www.biblestudytools.com/bibl...-disciple.html
https://www.christianity.com/wiki/pe...testament.html
Mark
https://www.britannica.com/topic/Gos...ording-to-Mark
https://www.gotquestions.org/John-Ma...the-Bible.html
https://www.crosswalk.com/faith/bibl...ch-father.html

Luke
https://www.christianity.com/wiki/pe...testament.html
https://www.britannica.com/biography/Saint-Luke
https://www.britannica.com/biography...phy/Saint-Luke

John
https://overviewbible.com/john-the-apostle/
https://www.britannica.com/biography...hn-the-Apostle

**Into Тhe Night** · 11-29-2022, 07:27 AM

Originally Posted by PostmodernProphet

laughter is not an argument......trot out one of your "scholars" and prove its not true......

here are the sources for my statements.....

Matthew
https://www.gotquestions.org/Matthew-in-the-Bible.html
https://www.biblestudytools.com/bibl...-disciple.html
https://www.christianity.com/wiki/pe...testament.html
Mark
https://www.britannica.com/topic/Gos...ording-to-Mark
https://www.gotquestions.org/John-Ma...the-Bible.html
https://www.crosswalk.com/faith/bibl...ch-father.html

Luke
https://www.christianity.com/wiki/pe...testament.html
https://www.britannica.com/biography/Saint-Luke
https://www.britannica.com/biography...phy/Saint-Luke

John
https://overviewbible.com/john-the-apostle/
https://www.britannica.com/biography...hn-the-Apostle

Yeah, I'm not wasting my time reading your links. Your claim is clearly faith-based.

**PostmodernProphet** · 11-29-2022, 07:28 AM

Originally Posted by America

If by "scholar" you mean evangelical preacher who has an agenda, then sure. But if you're talking about legitimate scholarship that demands peer review, then no.

by scholar I mean those who have actually studied the topic.......and by peer, I assume you limit the field to your fellow atheists.......sorry those that reject biblical authorship are a tiny minority.....

**PostmodernProphet** · 11-29-2022, 07:30 AM

Originally Posted by America

Lol. I literally reasoned out in my post why the story is bullshit. How do reconcile Mark's depiction of Mary with Matthew/Luke?

your distinction of depictions is literally "reasoned"out in your mind......I see no reason to compare your fantasies with biblical scholarship.....

**PostmodernProphet** · 11-29-2022, 07:32 AM

Originally Posted by America

Yeah, I'm not wasting my time reading your links. Your claim is clearly faith-based.

I don't care if you read my links.....but if you actually had any I would read yours, critique them and prove where they are wrong.......the difference between us will be obvious to anyone reading this thread........you claimed the ability to discredit the scriptures.....so far you have nothing beyond your imagination......

**PostmodernProphet** · 11-29-2022, 07:35 AM

Originally Posted by Amurky

They'rz skolars!

thanks for the debate.....you're like most atheists I've met on the internet.....

**Cypress** · 11-29-2022, 08:14 AM

Originally Posted by America

This is the kind of crap you might find on an evangelical apologetics website.

1. Again, there are plenty of scholars who deny Christ ever existed. You don't have to be employed at a "prestigious American university" to be considered a scholar, or even a good scholar. (And what about universities outside of America? Lol.)

2. The gospels are so full of mythology as to be meaningless. Mark, the earliest, was written about 40 years after Jesus' alleged existence. Matthew and Luke use Mark as a primary source, and both offer plenty of contradictory details. John, written probably in the early second century, is so far removed from the time period in question and so full of its own contradiction as to be meaningless.

3. There were not "several dozen" first-century writers commenting about Jesus. Some of the writers of the New Testament wrote their texts in the later part of the first century, but none of them knew Jesus or were witnesses of his ministry. They were all writing decades after the fact. Josephus' single comment about Jesus, written almost half a century after a fact, has been toyed with over the centuries by Christian copyists. This is an agreed-upon fact among scholars. They fabricated the famous passage in question in an attempt to give an air of credence to the story of Jesus (which actually says a lot about the lack of contemporary witness to Jesus).

The fact is that there isn't one single contemporary writer who wrote about Jesus. Take Philo. He was a prolific writer who lived at the same as Jesus allegedly did and wrote extensively on life and current events in Jerusalem, yet he writes absolutely nothing about a magical Jewish wizard performing miracles for the three years before crowds of people. If the gospels are to be believed, Jesus was practically a celebrity and people would pour out of cities to see him. Yet Philo, who writes about Pilate and mundane politics in Jerusalem, is quiet on the subject. If Jesus caused such a ruckus for three years and was the equivalent of a movie star (at one point, the gospels tell us, the crowd was so large that Jesus had to get on a boat to preach), then why does nobody who was alive at the time write about him? Why are the earliest writings about him decades later from the hands of pious believers? Why is there no secular eyewitness account of the magical Jewish wizard celebrity? (The answer is painfully obvious, but religious faith has a way of blinding people.)

4. Yes. I agree that Christianity was just one of many messianic sects. Messianism was popular in first-century Palestine. The Jews wanted the Romans gone and people wanted a messiah to free Israel from outside rule. The fact that the Jesus sect got popular and none of the others did is due to random circumstances. Many of the Christian rituals, like baptism and the eucharist, actually come from the so-called "mystery religions" that existed in the empire at the time and they have no Jewish origin whatsoever.

5. I never claimed that Mark made up Jesus. But there is a clear evolution in the Jesus story. Mark, the earliest gospel, makes no mention of the virgin birth. Mark's version of Mary also depicts her as being embarrassed when Jesus begins his ministry and wondering if he is out of his mind. Mark also depicts Jesus as having brothers who attempt to get him to stop preaching so he doesn't embarrass the family.

None of that jives with the virgin birth stories of Luke and Matthew, which were written decades after Mark. I mean, how can a rational believer reconcile those two very different depictions of Mary? Why would she be embarrassed of Jesus' ministry if she she had been visited by angels thirty years prior and told that her baby was the son of God?

Clearly, the virgin birth story is bullshit. It was extremely popular in ancient times to claim that someone was born of a virgin as a means of giving that person credibility. The claim was made of Alexander the Great. It was even made of Hercules (lol). Most likely, as the Jesus story evolved, people began adding the virgin birth nonsense as a way to give him more credibility.

So, again, I don't claim that Mark simply "made up" Jesus. But there is clearly an evolution of the story.

I already wrote that the stories of miracles can be described as embellishments. There are embellishments about the life of Siddharth Gautama, The Buddha, but it curiously doesn't bother you.

If your advice were followed, we would have to throw out
almost everything we know about the ancient world if it's not written by eyewitness in real time as the events happened. Our knowledge of the Persian wars in Herodotus comes from sources and second hand testimony living decades after the events Herodotus describes.

Jesus is attested to independently by more sources than almost any other sage, prophet, or mystic of the ancient world. More than The Buddha, more than Confucius, more than Laozi, more than Zarathustra. James was the brother of Jesus, Mark was supposed to be a companion of Peter, and Paul met and intimately knew both James and Peter - and we have letters and Gospels from all of them. But even ignoring them there are at least two dozen other letters and epistles from the first century independently attesting to knowledge of the historicity of Jesus.

To me, it looks pretty foolish to claim that Paul or Mark made up Jesus from whole cloth, and all these other first century writers just picked up the lie and ran with it.

You would have to provide a list of these Jesus myth authors so I can confirm if they are actually prestigious scholars employed one the faculty of top tier universities.

**Into Тhe Night** · 11-29-2022, 09:13 AM

Originally Posted by Cypress

I already wrote that the stories of miracles can be described as embellishments. There are embellishments about the life of Siddharth Gautama, The Buddha, but it curiously doesn't bother you.

If your advice were followed, we would have to throw out
almost everything we know about the ancient world if it's not written by eyewitness in real time as the events happened. Our knowledge of the Persian wars in Herodotus comes from sources and second hand testimony living decades after the events Herodotus describes.

Jesus is attested to independently by more sources than almost any other sage, prophet, or mystic of the ancient world. More than The Buddha, more than Confucius, more than Laozi, more than Zarathustra. James was the brother of Jesus, Mark was supposed to be a companion of Peter, and Paul met and intimately knew both James and Peter - and we have letters and Gospels from all of them. But even ignoring them there are at least two dozen other letters and epistles from the first century independently attesting to knowledge of the historicity of Jesus.

To me, it looks pretty foolish to claim that Paul or Mark made up Jesus from whole cloth, and all these other first century writers just picked up the lie and ran with it.

You would have to provide a list of these Jesus myth authors so I can confirm if they are actually prestigious scholars employed one the faculty of top tier universities.

I'm going to stop replying to PostmodernProphet because she's clearly in the deep end. You seem somewhat reasonable.

That being said, I would like to see how you argue against my points about Philo and Mark's depiction of Mary. Also:

1. Buddha probably didn't exist, either. The earliest stories about him were at least two centuries after his death and they can't even agree on when he lived. (Interestingly, a lot of early Christian writers disagreed on when Jesus lived.)

2. For the second time, I never claimed that the NT writers invented Jesus from thin air. But there is clearly an evolution of the Jesus myth during the first century. There were oral traditions and various Christian groups had their own version of the Jesus story. There were a lot of conflicting beliefs about Jesus and about Christian doctrine in general, which is attested to by Celsus when he mocked Christians for being unable to agree on even the simplest teachings.

3. Being a scholar has nothing to do with being employed by a "top tier university."

But you want scholars?

Ok.

Robert Price, PhD in theology.

Wikipedia: A former Baptist minister, Price was a fellow of the Jesus Project, a group of 150 individuals who studied the historicity of Jesus and the Gospels, the organizer of a Web community for those interested in the history of Christianity,[4] and a member of the advisory board of the Secular Student Alliance.[3] He is a religious skeptic, especially of orthodox Christian beliefs, occasionally describing himself as a Christian atheist.[5] Price eventually moved to a maximalist (or rather minimalist, by analogy with biblical minimalism) position in favor of the Christ myth theory, believing that neither Jesus nor Nazareth itself existed in Roman Galilee.

Richard Carrier, PhD in Ancient History:

Wikipedia Carrier describes the application of Bayes' theorem to historical inquiry in general, and the historicity of Jesus in particular.[56] According to Carrier, Bayes’ theorem is the standard to which all methodology for any historical study must adhere in order to be logically sound. In his Bayesian analysis, the ahistoricity of Jesus is "true": that is, the "most probable" Bayesian conclusion. By the same methodology, Carrier posits that Jesus originated in the realm of mythology, rather than as a historical person who was subsequently mythologized.

Earl Doherty, BA in Classical Studies.

Wikipedia
Earl J. Doherty (born 1941)[1] is a Canadian author of The Jesus Puzzle (1999), Challenging the Verdict (2001), and Jesus: Neither God Nor Man (2009). Doherty argues for a version of the Christ myth theory, the thesis that Jesus did not exist as a historical figure. Doherty says that Paul thought of Jesus as a spiritual being executed in a spiritual realm.

Thomas L. Thompson, PhD in Old Testament Studies

Wikipedia
In his 2007 book The Messiah Myth: The Near Eastern Roots of Jesus and David, Thompson argues that the biblical accounts of both King David and Jesus of Nazareth are not historical accounts, but are mythical in nature and based on Mesopotamian, Egyptian, Babylonian and Greek and Roman literature.[331] Those accounts are based on the Messiah mytheme, a king anointed by God to restore the Divine order at Earth.[73] Thompson also argues that the resurrection of Jesus is taken directly from the story of the dying and rising god, Dionysus.

**Cypress** · 11-29-2022, 09:17 AM

I've taken the liberty of looking up the biographies of some noted Jesus myth authors.

None of the ones I reviewed were actually employed on the faculty of a prestigious American university.

One thing they seem to have in common is being former fundamentalist christians who became atheists. Like the attitude ex-smokers have towards smokers, former christians traumatized somehow by an association with fire and brimstone fundamentalists tend to evolve Into anti-Christian zealots.

I identify as agnostic, and I believe the miracles in the New Testament can easily be considered embelishments. But there is sufficient historical scholarship to convince me of the historicity of a Jewish mystic named Jesus from Galilee who was executed by Roman authorities

**Into Тhe Night** · 11-29-2022, 09:27 AM

Originally Posted by Cypress

I've taken the liberty of looking up the biographies of some noted Jesus myth authors.

None of the ones I reviewed were actually employed on the faculty of a prestigious American university.

One thing they seem to have in common is being former fundamentalist christians who became atheists. Like the attitude ex-smokers have towards smokers, former christians traumatized somehow by an association with fire and brimstone fundamentalists tend to evolve Into anti-Christian zealots.

I identify as agnostic, and I believe the miracles in the New Testament can easily be considered embelishments. But there is sufficient historical scholarship to convince me of the historicity of a Jewish mystic named Jesus from Galilee who was executed by Roman authorities

Why do you think that being employed by a university is the defining qualification of a scholar? That makes no sense. Also, I think it's dishonest for you to engage in ad hominem attacks against a scholar for being a former Christian.