Chasing slaves and getting swallowed by the sea is considered a millitary defeat? We are talking about a supernatural event in the eyes of the Pharaoh himself(or at least some general if we are to take the story seriously)
What date are we talking about so i can wrap my mind around your argument? Is it the date evangelicals try to put exodus or some other?
Any time before 500 BC is old enough.
Are you really making the argument that there are no records of egyptian history before 500 bc?
Saite period was from 664 tp 525 minding you
Yes, at that stage, though there were certainly variants, the general nature of the text is well known. We have things like Vaticanus, Sinaiticus, we get the Vulgate ca 382 etc. and we know what people were actually reading and the number of commentaries and citations is very large here. So you are comfortable with the inspiration and acceptance of the extant text when the Orthodox Church decided this issue? I tend to move in that direction as well. I canât appeal to hypothetical originals that I hope (or have faith) my current Bible looks like when I can just appeal to the extent Bible the church actually canonized. I think the whole âautographâ thing is needed by inerrancy advocates because the textual record clearly shows God does not remotely care about inerrancy. If God doesnât care about it, I am not sure why we should either.
Yes, the Gospels are literarily dependent and also used multiple sources. Let me be clear. All triple tradition material cannot be treated as independent testimony and neither can any double tradition material. Unless we have Mark-Q overlaps 
This makes up the brunt of the gospel material. Notice how much Matthew and Luke diverge where Mark o stops at 16:8 (16:9-20 is a later addition). We donât have multiple attestation or independent corroboration for a lot of the Gospel material (e.g. empty tomb) unless we take John to be independent. Though scholarship was fairly mixed on that, I think the tide has been turning towards dependence lately. It is still very much open to discussion though. Even then there are some who suggest both utilized a pre-Markan passion narrative so that is not multiple attestation either. None of this matters though. I am not a Christian because I found Craigâs bad resurrection arguments plausible.
Do you believe all the other ex eventu prophecies in history were real? Or just those in Daniel and Isaiah? From a position of faith we can believe what we want. I believe Jesus performed miracles and thatâs hard for me. But I do and believe others could have happened. But it still reads ex eventu to me and many Christians who believe in the miraculous. Iâm not even sure God could know that information. I believe in free will and that the future is open. Plus, there are failed prophecies in the Bible and those very specific predictions are certainly not the norm. From a historical standpoint the issue is dead in the water. It mentions specific events and names of historical incidents 200 years after the alleged author wrote. It dates after the last event it mentions. This is how all books are treated. I understand some want to give the Bible special privileges. From a position of faith that is fine, from a position of history it is special pleading.
Also, what positive evidence do you have that Isaiah actually wrote the entirety of the text? What texts, archives, eyewitnesses or official documents, or later witnesses with established lines of transmission tell us Isiah wrote the text? Im guessing there are none. So your statement: âThis kind of interpretation and dating only tells about the beliefs of those dating the textâ is a double edged sword. Your belief Isaiah wrote the text does exactly that since there is no good historical evidence for it and lots of reasons to view it as a composite text over time.
What ancient historical sources can you provide that demonstrate Moses existed and what his education was like? By historical I mean sources existing within close proximity to his lifetime? Or sources where known lines of transmission occur besides the circular âI think they would have preserved the record.â He may have existed and something like an Exodus (way watered down â a caravan of 2 million!?) may have happened but historically speaking, the majority of the details are lost if so.
Why do you believe Moses wrote something? Is there some historical evidence for this or do we as Christianâs just refuse to let go of our beliefs and always try to hold on to some part of them instead of just admitting they were completely wrong? No one can disprove or confirm the notion that Moses (or any other random Israelite name I could conjure up) is responsible for at least some part of the Pentateuch, even if it was worked over. I am not even sure the point in that belief? What does it matter and why hold on to it?
Define early? What are all the fragments that exist within the first hundred years of any NT works? We donât even know if there were any for certain except a small number. There are possibly 11 in the second century but many of them are pushed to the early third century and every few can be securely dated in the 2d century. P52, which offers 5 verses from John actually dates anywhere from 100-200 CE and see Nongbriâs comments on p90 and p104 are illustrative:
âTake for example the original editions of [ P90 and P104], which were both assigned on paleographic grounds to the second century by their original editors without reference to any securely dated documents or datable manuscripts. In fact, the only manuscripts discussed are other Christian manuscripts also dated only by paleography. This observation dos not mean the second-century dates assigned by these editors are necessarily incorrect. It only serves to draw attention to the strangely circular character of the discussion.â [Godâs Library]
Dating works paleographically is difficult. 100 year time spans should be given for most works and if the dating is circular, it is suspect.
But it is wise to just blindly believe Jewish tradition on the authorship of texts hundred of years after the fact with no known lines of transmission or historical corroboration? On dating and authorship, Iâll stick with scholars who publish in peer-reviewed journals and teach in top notch universities over blind allegiance to ancient Jewish traditions I can know nothing about the origin of.
Vinnie
As noted, âIf archives were kept in Jerusalem, they were destroyed when revolt broke out in 66 CE or during the subsequent war.â But you want secular, non-elite historians.
So, what secular, non-elite historians were in Jerusalem at the time?
Names please.
What writings exist from them?
Why are they going to care anymore about Jesus than the two criminals crucified next to him?
Do you realize how many people were in Jerusalem for Passover? How many crowds and incidents there actually would have been?
Too much time spent on Jesus mythicism forums will only deteriorate the quality of your historical exegesis.
As for the guards at the tomb, I am not sure I believe the tomb story so I have no interest in defending it. But for those that do, I suppose an angel can scare off a few guards and what they did next isnât certain. I donât think Rome was actually scared Jesus would rise from the dead. His disciples seemed to be shocked by this, let alone his enemies. If there was a tomb Matthew is probably getting creative with some things.
Vinnie
I dont know.But i doubt and will not comfort into your argument that " If we had records they were lost" or " Palestine was a forsaken place in somewhere and irelevant for the empire." Just because i dont know that doesnt mean there wasnt a single one at that time . The God of the universe would sure have predestined someone to do that .He cant be that irrelevant
What man does miracles and is not relevant ? You see a guy in your town feeding hundreds by multiplying food and raising people from the dead and healing the sick. You dare to say you wouldnt have wrote none of it down? Why these historians wouldnt? We have other supernatural stuff from other historians at that time yet we dont have for that
Your point beign?
At least thats something your willing to let go because you too know the story has no basis
Just to be clear im not saying Jesus didnt exist.Jus tthat we dont have any source of it
It means you are talking out of your derriere. There are none. EP Sanders is a world-renowned scholar. Jesus and Judaism and Paul and Palestinian Judaism were seminal in the field. You should read the former. It is very good.
A lot of factors:
It would be hard for them to even notice Jesus in Jerusalem with hundred of thousands of people coming and going. Many a scholar has pointed out that the temple was so busy at this time his disturbance or cleansing would have scarcely been noticeable except to those directly around him.
I think all those people rising from the dead in Jerusalem is complete fiction as are some elements. Not having historical corroboration for the empty tomb is not the same as it having no basis in reality. It means a judgment of non liquet is necessary on historical grounds. Jesus appearing to his followers after his death doesnât require an empty tomb. If God wanted to raise a body eaten by âthe dogs beneath the crossâ he could have done so all the same.
You are mixing up issues. Jesusâs existence and everything in the Gospels being complete history are two different things. Or are you saying the Jesus in the Gospels, who said and did all they record in the manner they record didnât exist? I would agree since the Gospels combine history, theology, prophetic statements and were written the conventions of the time. Itâs not all historical. But I believe the Jesus of the Gospels is very much real. He is my Lord and Savior.
Vinnie
Didnt Jesus interacted with wealthy people though?
See as you said above the Gospels claim miracles yet you cant prove that .The gospels claim others thigns yet we cant prove them . And as you said they contain a mix of myth as well. The reason beign?
Why did the author needed to write about guards guarding a tomb and raising bodies if they didnt happen?
My point is nothing in the gospels can be proven.So why bother making a thread about if they are autographical or not?
I have not attempted to prove that so why are YOU bringing it up?
Because that is the way they were written in the convention of the times.
Nothing wrong with a dramatic retelling of a story in a narrative driven culture. In our culture it is considered lying to not report all facts exactly as they occurred but you shouldnât impose modern conceptions of history and reality on a text almost 2,000 years old that has a different genre. We have no idea the historical impetus for such statements and imagining there was none at all is just that, your imagination and nothing more. If Rome actually allowed burial its not hard to imagine they did so with caveats or these were imposed by any Jewish leaders instrumental in the execution of Jesus. We do not know the thoughts of any of the individuals around, what they knew, what they didnât, what they feared, what they expected and what they didnât. You are assuming way too much. I think a belief did develop that the disciples stole the body, possibly in the interim between Mark and Matthew, so he attempts to dispel that view. That doesnât undercut the underlying narrative from Mark even if Matthew was creative. But I donât know why Matthew wrote exactly what he did and neither do you. People in that culture passed on stories and they inevitably evolve over time.
This is an odd question considering I never said anything can be proven. I am a Christian and subscribe to the inspiration of scripture. When I made this thread I was asking other Christians who also subscribe to inspiration, how these things change our conception of it. It is perfectly legitimate for Christians to discuss specific models of Biblical inspiration with one another on a Christian message board. The real question is, why is an atheist, in this context, coming into this thread and attempting to blindly debunk the Biblical Christ with outlandish, Jesus-mythicist propaganda and patent nonsense? Did you just trade in one faith for another one? Next to nothing you wrote has anything to do with the topic in this thread. It is certainly not phrased that way. And you question why Matthew wrote what he did? Pot meet kettle.
Vinnie
If you think that God does not know the future, then it is understandable that you support the interpretation of ex eventu prophecies. I believe that God knows the future and Holy Spirit reveals matters about the future, so it is natural for me to believe that at least some of the accurate prophecies about the future were told before the events happened.
This is an example of how our basic assumptions affect our interpretations.
I do not know if all prophecies about the future were told before the events but I believe at least some were. This interpretation is a matter of faith, until someone finds archeological evidence showing when the texts were written. If someone finds convincing archeological evidence that the original text was written after the events, I am ready to change my interpretation.
As you write, there appear to be no extra-biblical evidence telling if there were one or more writers called Isaiah. I assume it is possible that one person wrote it all but it is also possible that there were more than one. We rely on interpretations of the text, so however we interpret the text, it is assumption (belief) rather than facts.
The same can be said about Torah. We have very little extra-biblical evidence of the matters told in Exodus, so our interpretations are mostly based on assumptions or educated guesses. Personally, I believe there was a leader called Moses and he wrote something. How much of the Torah originates from the texts written by Moses is another matter. Also details like the number of people in the group following Moses are open to interpretation. I assume that the group was not millions, which means that there has been a translation error or someone (editor?) exaggerated the numbers. If Moses wrote something, it was not written in modern Hebrew language so there is always a possibility that the current version of the text includes translation errors, or someone copying the text made mistakes or added something to the text. The early versions of the text were probably not considered to be sacred or infallible, so a somewhat liberal translation policy is possible.
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I once believed that the theologians writing academic books or articles in peer-reviewed journals were persons who really know what they write. I am not a theologian but the more I have read about the various interpretations, the more disappointed I have been. My background is in natural sciences and I was thinking that the same standards would be applied in other academic writing. Maybe modern theologians have better standards than the theologians of the past decades but much of what has been written is based on assumptions and educated guesses rather than facts. Typically, someone presents a hypothesis in a credible publication and thereafter, other writers treat the hypothesis as it would be a proven fact. 
There are no papyrus records from the delta area from before then.
Overall in the roman empire, probably something like that; Judea was likely higher, due to the emphasis on reading the scriptures, and probably more like 5-10%.
One likely candidate would be that the words for âthousandâ, âgroup of peopleâ, and âchieftanâ are all written as 'lp, hence one option that has been tried is if all of the âthousandsâ in the list are the numbers of family groups, one ends up with ~5,000 adult males, and thus ~20,000 total. Which happens to also be about the size of the documented population increase in the hill country of Palestine c. 1200 BC. An influx of people with somewhat different pottery and very few pigs.
were the citations for that (from a compilation book we have).
The evidence is within the book itself.
I came across a podcast on the, to put it not so piously, zombies in Matthew that you brought up. Give it a listen and see the quote from Joel Marcus below.
Matthew is drawing largely from the OT. Ezekiel 37:1-11 was a popular eschatological text in 2nd Temple Judaism. His prophecy about the valley of the dry bones form the basis of Matthewâs âzombiesâ.
In Did Matthew Believe His Myths Joel Marcus says there are three possibilities. The following is a quote where Matthew may very well believe what he wrote:
The third possibility is that, even though Matthew literarily invented the earthquakes, he also thought that they actually had occurred. In favor of this hypothesis is the observed behavior of human beings with regard to narra- tives they deem of great significance. As psychologists and sociologists have argued, people tend to believe what they want to believe92, and they tend to remember things and relate their memories in ways that conform to their own and their societyâs pre-existent narratives about the way the world works93. Just as any of us, in retelling a story that took place at an earlier period in our lives, may not be aware (until reminded by a spouse) that we are embellishing the narrative, so ancient Christian storytellers such as Mat- thew, in composing narratives about Jesus, may not have been aware that they were bending historical truth, shaping it to conform to their convic- tions or simply to create a better story. This is especially likely because storytellers, particularly when relating tales of central importance to them- selves and their audience, sometimes enter into an altered state of conscious- ness similar to a shamanic trance, in which internal, psychic impressions gain the force of reality95. For early Christian storytellers such as Matthew, therefore, the impulse to check, verify, and interrogate the evidence critically, which is so central to the historianâs craft, either may not have arisen or, if it did, may have been trumped by other factors.
In the case of the Matthean earthquakes specifically, the fact that Mat- thew was following the narrative logic embodied in his Markan source (e.g. the downward movement of divine power in the death scene), coupled with the conviction that he shared with Mark about Jesusâ life being an eschato- logical event and the fulfillment of Old Testament prophecy, may have helped to generate in him a belief in the reality of the miraculous signs he had created. This is especially likely because Matthew probably lived in a subculture that subscribed to miracles, scriptural prophecy, and Jesusâ messiahship, and this rootage in a credulous religious subculture would have provided positive reinforcement for his creative elaborations of Mark. As David Friedrich Strauss sums up the sort of unconscious thought-process that helped produce the stories of the Gospels: âSuch and such things are supposed to happen to the Messiah; Jesus was the Messiah; therefore such and such things happened to himâ
The idea that Matthew was just lying with this incident, even if he created it and added it to Mark himself is a vast oversimplification of the issue.
Vinnie
Even if you think God knows the future it is still reasonable and understandable to support the reality of ex eventu prophecies both inside and outside the Bible.
As long as the end result is deemed theology and not history I am fine with that. Bottom line is you still have no methodology for determining what is an actual prophecy and what is ex eventu in the BIble. 200 years with the specific name of a king is a huge stretch beyond typical prophecy in the Bible. Match that with other internal clues, the outlook of the text in various parts and the complete lack of any historical evidence for unified authorship, and the answer becomes obvious to me.
Archaeology has discredited the Biblical version and so have the many logistical (600,00 men!) problems.
Of course the numbers were way overblown if there was a core. I mean, do you really think Noah loved to be close to a thousand? Or ancient kings lists are accurate in their ages? The Bible doesnât overly concern itself with pure history.
I have a few systematic theology texts but I donât listen to theologians. They are usually guided by broken models of Biblical inspiration and their entire interpretive framework is bankrupt. I read historians and critical New Testament scholars. And I donât mean the apologists Lee Strobel pretended to interview as a skeptic.
Vinnie
@Vinnie, if youâre going to critique a view, you should at least first understand it and then represent it accurately. (I admit there is problem with the language of âautograph,â but you donât seem to understand the most common position.)
Yep, thatâs obvious. Maybe listening would help understanding.
Feel free to explain the most common position. And I asked probably a dozen times in my opening post what an autograph is. Feel free to explain.
âLet your conversation be always full of grace, seasoned with salt, so that you may know how to answer everyone.â -Colossians 4:6
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