Interesting articles. I’ve heard of most of these before, but there’s also some new information.
Anyone want to respond to the article about David and Goliath? Specifically the idea that Elkanah was written as the original killer of Goliath, and then it was rewritten to be David later on.
He was God’s son. If He wasn’t born to a virgin and in the circumstances described, I think that would be fantastical. The humanity, the unusual, fine details, are not the kinds of things I find in fictional accounts generally speaking. If those who wrote the accounts of his birth had wanted to fabricate a story to introduce the King of Kings and Lord of Lords as He made his entry into earthly affairs, I suspect they would have fashioned a royal reception of unprecedented pomp and circumstance.
Vinny, “An actual virgin birth is not essential to Christianity and the actual infancy narratives fall under a clear convention of assigning wondrous births to your deity.”
He wasn’t the product of human reproduction. He was and continued to be God always. Man didn’t create Jesus. He always was. He was as vastly different from us in his nature as his father has always been different from us. God moved upon Mary, another profound mystery, and she was with the child Jesus. God made the arrangements for his reasons.
Vinny, “You are also forgetting that the only thing I have EVER asked for was justification for the statement that the Biblical birth narratives are credible while all the other ones are not.”
I assume you mean “narrative” singular? God Almighty was never born in any other birth narrative.
God was not, but Jesus entered the world in human form somehow. Whether it started in Mary’s belly or in Joseph’s sperm that reached one of her eggs is the question under discussion. Jesus may very well have had a miraculous birth. The infancy narratives as writ, however, are fiction.
Vinnie
As the ressurection ?
Haven’t we been down this road already? Since the accounts are contradictory they certainly aren’t all true as written. I’m not 100% certain there was an actual tomb that was empty. There could have been. I do believe Jesus was raised from the dead by the father. The incarnation and Resurrection define Christianity. Nothing else.
Whtas accounts?And arent the scholars 50-50 on this?Meaning half of them do believe the accounts of his death?
Which these accounts hold the same weight as the virgin birth no?So it sounds strange to reject the one and accept the other.
The details in the 4 gospels are not all harmonious in my view. Therefore, all the details in them, as written, cannot possibly be historically true.
Yes, many scholars accept the empty tomb story and many do not. My research has left me undecided.
Genesis is inspired by God just the same. Does it also have to be literally true in every detail? Was Jonah really in the Belly of a whale three days? Christianity is based on faith and personal experience. Your looking for proof and certainty type of arguments don’t do anything for me. I’ve dropped your standard as inadequate.
Not to mention, entire streams of NT thought exist perfectly fine without the infancy narratives. Outside the two infancy narratives, Luke’s which was probably added in a later addition of his own work (see Fitzmyer’s ABD commentary) can not be demonstrated to be found anywhere else. Why you are so hung up on something taught so minimally in sacred scripture is beyond me.
The belief in Jesus’ resurrection comes from real life changing beliefs of his original followers. A crucified Jesus would have otherwise been the end of it. The infancy narratives have no historical evidence in their favor (just about all of it is against) and they fit convention the world over.
Vinnie
Comparing Genesis with the nativity is an oxymoron. Plus some people here (myself including ) do believe part of it to be literal(ie a couple ofevolved humans making a deal with their creator),
Thats the most weak argument ive ever heard.By this logic then almost everything is based on faith and personal experience in life ,not even christianity and certainly not religion in general.
Couldnt care less to be honest i just dont understand your thinking of “picking whats suits me from the bible”.
What?Arent the infancy naratives from the same authors in the bible who wrote down the events of the Jesus followers caliming to have seen him ressurected? Either provide extra-biblical evidence for your claim or
this hold true for the followers of Christ who seen him ressurected as well
Both Genesis and the Nativity fit snuggly within the realm of mythological narratives.
But that belief in it was historically held by his first followers is historical. You cannot say the same for the virgin birth which shows up a few of the many streams of thought 80-100 years after it supposedly occurred. That is the historical distinction.
I am sorry you consider faith weak and pathetic. That is what we have. Faith based on personal experience. You are a hamster in a wheelchair if you spend your life looking for proof of your religious convictions.
Everyone does this whether they care to admit it or not. Next time a woman talks in church please tell her to STFU and quote the appropriate passages from the Pauline corpus. Good luck.
Vinnie
Where?How?Tell me what historical records there are that Paul and the others existed and believed in a ressurected Jesus outside of the Bible?
Your argument was weak and couldve been implied for everything thats all i was saying .
Sure but not when it comes to “is this historical or not” kind of spectrum
Bashing me with this results in nothing but idiotic behaviour .Slander and irony are not arguments
Your claim “outside the Bible” is nonsense. I don’t treat the Bible as a singular document when attempting to do history. I treat each book as a separate work-as its own document from history. I don’t need to justify inside or outside the bible because I am not a fundamentalist or a Jesus mythicist. That category makes no sense to me. What I have are early Christian documents. We have actual writings from Paul. Non-existent people don’t write letters. Acts, even though filled with many errors, corroborates details of Paul’s missionary journeys we see in his own letters. Paul makes mention of people like Peter, James and the other disciples. He met and conversed with them. This is contemporary-primary data for their existence and beliefs.
And if you want “extra-Biblical” 1 Clement mentions the martyrdom of Paul and alludes/reference several of his authentic works. 1 Clement is dates ca. 70-130 CE. Multiple Deutero-Pauline works in the New Testament canon itself also serve as evidence of Paul’s historicity. Ignatius mentions Peter and Paul right after the turn of the century as well.
Please drop the Jesus mythicism silliness.
An experience with God is better than any man made argument. QED.
I don’t arbitrarily pick and choose. I pick and choose based on faith, personal experience, the teachings of the Church and historical analysis. But what I DON’T do is pretend to believe the ENTIRE bible then only quote the stuff that agrees with me while ignoring the rest.
My point was that the majority of Christians don’t listen to Paul here. They do however listen to him when it comes time to tell homosexuals they are sinners though. They even listen to Deuteronomy at that point! Maybe soon they will stop shaving, eating shellfish and pork, wearing clothes of two different fabrics and stat stoning their neighbors who cheat on their spouses, work on sunday and those who watch harry potter and practice witchcraft. We can quote a lot of passages from Jesus many Christians don’t also follow and explain away.
No one actually accepts the whole Bible whether they claim to or not.
Vinnie
Ok only Paul then exists it seems. What about the others? We have nothing
Silly thinking ,you might want to change that
Why would i accept something that was written to iliterate people,living in a desert with no judicial or moral system acting as primates?
You just said we have evidence in another post. I can easily justify the historicity of the twelve and many of its prominent members. John Meier wrote an excellent paper on the twelve and discussed them at length in one of his works as has probably every scholar who reconstructs Jesus, even the few who disagree with the historicity of the twelve as an institution during Jesus’ ministry. What is your evidence?
I wouldn’t. I accept Jesus. When you read the Gospels you have to be open to it’s message and allow God to work through you. Unless you read the Bible through the Spirit it’s nothing more than any other human work. Filled with errors, contradictions, immorality, primitive divinity, prescientific thought and so forth. Until we get to the words of Christ which some of the Prophets also glimpsed. Several epistles also speak strongly to the human conditions and I mean the practical one. How now shall we live? Read James, not Romans. It’s a lot simpler. You are reading the Bible with the wrong lenses. As if it’s an encyclopedia of factual and theological knowledge. That is not the role of scripture. That is where the experience of God comes in to play. I hate to break it to you but the only evidence is God. The power of the Gospel does not dependent upon us making it historically palatable. God saves when the Gospel is read with an open heart. Countless Christians experience the Divine reading scripture and only then become theologians and apologists after the fact. Because their experience was real. He works through the reader. Besides an experience with the divine there is not much else. I mean, the world is general is just like the Bible. Filled with love and hate. Beauty and horror. Knowledge and misinformation. We are not saved because we finally learn the clever arguments allowing us to prove God exists. As Christians we experience that presence in the person of Jesus. The incarnation we believe on Faith and it tells us God loves us. Though we know Jesus was real and many of the things the Gospels say about him he actually said and did.
I am sorry but Josh McDowell, Norman Geisler and Lee Strobel apologetics are failures. It’s easy to bankrupt them all on intellectual grounds. Lewis’s trilemma is equally a silly argument with no probative value. It rests on the assumption that Jesus walked around claiming to be God. In other words it assumes the historicity of the Johannine sayings material. Assuming is not arguing. The Gospel of John is absolutely true despite much of it not being history-remembered. Rather, it a realization of who Jesus was. Who he is and recasts his earthly life in that framework. John is correct. The transforming and risen Jesus is most certainly the way despite probably never issuing long monologues about his personal divinity and co-eternity with the Father while waking around Palestine.
It is God Nick. It’s Jesus and an experience with them. That is the only reason for being a Christian. Not because you can prove Christianity is true with clever arguments. The Bible looks like nothing but a compilation of individual books, purely human, often clever pieces of literature with the Spirit guiding us.
Vinnie
Again it was for the first Christians.Not for the apostles
Me too.Different times,different needs maybe.
I think reading and writing were not as uncommon as is many scholars believe.
The Jews in particular relied up the written word as a prominent means to hold their community together. Someone wrote the books of the OT and he/she/they wrote very well. Moses knew how to read and write centuries before Christ came along. In addition, the Jews have established themselves as the most scholarly, the most capable and talented academically of all people groups. Reading and writing are not that difficult to learn, especially for a people whose God chose to communicate with them through the written word.
Whoever wrote the passage about the adulterer, expected her accusers to know what Christ wrote in the sand and probably her, too. It just isn’t that far fetched. Most of us learn to read by the third or fourth grades.
If literacy was so foreign to them at around 30 C.E. why and how did Paul and the authors of the rest of the NT use writing to communicate not much later, and expect someone would be able to read the contents to others?
As I mentioned, in Acts 6 the apostles gave themselves to prayer and “the word”. That is significant to me. From the get-go these guys were entirely committed to prayer and to “the word” so that they could be effective ministers. “But we will devote ourselves to prayer and to the ministry of the word.” I suspect they were already studying what was written down. Why wouldn’t they hire others who could write, if they couldn’t. Paul realized the value of writing to the churches very soon after he began to establish churches. You and I would realize its importance. These guys weren’t whistling Dixie. They were prepared to die for Christ and his message. Some did as we know. They gave up everything to reach every person on earth. They couldn’t help it and religious leaders who beat and killed and tortured them couldn’t stop them, even when they knew they murdered Christ for no reason.
I think higher criticism makes assumptions too easily. I think some people find a groove and gather information to establish their hypothesis and momentum builds and an impressive theory becomes more or less the way the majority looks at something. It is my tendency, that’s for sure.
What is your evidence and why is the consensus of virtually every historian across the board wrong? Have you consulted their arguments and read their works and found them defective? If so on what grounds?
Those who could read would read the written text and others would listen to it. Probably in the synagogue. So yeah, we would guess the priestly class could read.
They were meant to be read out loud. Do you think every single member of the local church was made a copy of the letter to take home? Do you understand the difficulty of writing and expenses involved in antiquity?
Christians sometimes did. Paul gives this away in one of his letters.
Yes he could communicate with them and many churches without having to travel to each one himself. Letter writing had value.
You have not provided a single instance of how scholars mistake literacy levels in antiquity. The authors of the NT, if they didn’t pay a secretary, clearly represent the small number of literate people at the time. That scripture and Paul’s letters were all read aloud and that people could be paid to write for you explains all your issues.
Even Papias ca. 110CE (our earliest witness to Mark and maybe Matthew) says he prefers oral preaching and a living voice over “things found in books.”
Vinnie
They’re wrong. 2 congressman voted against the Gulf of Tonkin resolution. 2,000,000 civilians on both sides and some 1,100,000 North Vietnamese and Viet Cong fighters were killed. The U.S. military has estimated that between 200,000 and 250,000 South Vietnamese soldiers died.
58,220 of our kids perished.
How does this relate to what we are discussing?
Vinnie
Only if you take “the word” to mean a written text. In verse 7 you find “The word of God kept spreading;”. Given the NT hadn’t been written yet it is obvious Luke was talking about spreading the idea of Christianity by the spoken word, which is what the underlying Greek actually means.
“Let your conversation be always full of grace, seasoned with salt, so that you may know how to answer everyone.” -Colossians 4:6
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