Joshua featured on Veritas Forum

@SuperBigV

I think you may be making too much of this point. The mystical ideas behind the Enochian literature that was common during the time of Jesus, as well as the Eastern ideas imported from the Persians, inspired the devout to look for the return of holy men from prior generations.

If anything, this primed them all the more to find it believable that if Jesus died… he just might come back himself!

If Jesus could be the returned John - - it was certainly just as possible, if not more likely in the minds of the masses back then that Jesus could return - - as himself!

It’s been over a year and I just came across this response.

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@archicastor1 thanks for posting this. The article was reposted again for Easter this year, with over 80,000 views. That may be why it was engaged recently.

Thanks for finding this and posting. How did you find it?

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I’m familiar with Barry “the stalker” Jones, the owner of that blog. He sued Christian apologist JP Holding for libel time ago (I don’t know how it ended) and they still have some trouble.

I talked with Holding some time ago (it was about something else and I mentioned Barry), and he told me “Aren’t his arguments horrible?”

Without the physical Resurrection, two thousand years of history are left begging for explanation, like a movie missing a key scene. No other event in all recorded history has reached so far across national, ethnic, religious, linguistic, cultural, political, and geographic borders. The message spread with unreasonable success across the world. During just the first few centuries, it spread without political or military power, prevailing against the ruthless efforts of dedicated, organized and violent opposition. How did a small band of disempowered Jews in an occupied and insignificant territory of ancient Rome accomplish this unequaled act?[2] What happened so many years ago that reframed all human history?

I don’t find this to be a coherent argument. I think the teachings of Christianity (which taught welfare for the poor) revolutionary for their time, gave it appeal to the masses.

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  1. With dates established by radiometric analysis, prophecies from centuries before Jesus’ birth predict his life, death, and resurrection.[3] The great scientist Blaise Pascal identifies this as the “tangible proof” for people who want evidence that God exists. These prophecies include specific details that Jesus and His followers could not control. For example, before the Romans invented crucifixion, Psalms 22:16 described the piercing of Jesus’ hands and feet. Isaiah 53 is a particularly important prophecy that lays out the story of Jesus and the meaning of the Resurrection (Isaiah 52:13-53:12). Is this evidence of an Intelligence outside our time confirming Jesus’ authority?

Whilst interesting, and whilst I do not doubt the historicity of Jesus of Nazareth, as a messianic figure from Nazareth, with a brother named James, baptised at age 30 by John the Baptist. Could elements of his story not have been made up to shoehorn him into OT passages such as Isaiah 53?

  1. Accounts of the Resurrection include inconvenient and unflattering details, that make most sense as attempts to reliably record what had happened, free from embellishment. They do not fit expectations of a fabricated account. For example, women are the first witnesses of the Resurrection. In a culture that did not admit the testimony of a woman as valid evidence in court, this detail is surprising. Likewise, all the disciples, the leaders of the early Church, flee as cowards when Jesus is taken.

Again, could not these unflattering details have been added to the religion to give it more legitimacy?

That may be a fair question. But on the one hand, detractors want to brand the people back then as naive (pre-scientific) believers in any and everything that comes along. But then in the next moment we are asked to imagine they were shrewd enough to anticipate that sprinkling in a few non-flattering, non-optimal details here and there will help their account seem more authentic to future skeptics. In an age that is used to magnificent hyperbole in their scriptural expressions; […rocks split, the earth shook …] it doesn’t seem likely to me that going the other way (adding in false modesty) was something that would occur to them.

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@Reggie_O_Donoghue, Exactly. And there is the converse:

For example: Isa 7:14 - Therefore the Lord himself shall give you a sign; Behold, a virgin shall conceive, and bear a son, and shall call his name Immanuel.

This is notoriously interpreted as a reference to the birth of Jesus…when it was a prophecy about an entirely different birth, 700 years prior to Jesus, regarding a completely different woman.

“Isaiah is in any case talking about his own immediate circumstances in the year 735 BC, not the distant future. In Isaiah the Immanuel prophecy has an immediate aim…”