You are really giving me an education in apologetic junk Flann. Ari starts off by a straight out ad hominem insinuating that the broadly attested Orthodox Historical Conspiracy to demolish Gnosticism is comparable to claims that the USA did not send a man to the moon. He next makes the entirely false insinuation that Acharya believes in ancient alien theories, seemingly for no other reason than because astrotheology fills him with emotional repugnance. Such a rhetorical flourish may play well in your fundamentalist pews but it is junk argument.Flann 5 wrote:Well Robert,your loyalty to Achary S is touching.Robert Tulip wrote: that JP Holding essay is worthless apologetic drivel. The MO is to identify any statement which can be twisted to achieve a polemical objective, while systematically ignoring the main context. If we ask Holding how the Gospels evolved, his hypothesis would be far less plausible than the two level mystery theory of Pagels, Freke and Gandy.
The article I linked in Ari's blog critiqueing her "The Christ Conspiracy" was an expose of factual errors in her book on which her conspiracy theory is built.
If you want to rebut the actual criticisms in that article,then do that.How were her statements "twisted"?
Ari continues to dig himself into his dogmatic hole by mocking Acharya’s critique of Christian propaganda about early martyrdoms. Perhaps Ari should read Candida Moss’ book, “The Myth of Persecution: How Early Christians Invented a Story of Martyrdom,” but I guess that would involve Ari letting the facts get in the way of his blind faith.
Here is a review of Moss http://www.salon.com/2013/02/24/the_myt ... ersecuted/
Ari's ‘review’ is nothing more than the effort of a fool sitting in a position of imagined institutional power who feels at liberty to mock analysis that destroys the foundations of his beliefs. His vacuous mockery continues with empty comparisons to The Da Vinci Code. His killer argument is that “Paul recounts the narrative of the last supper including the words of Jeuss”. Apart from the indifferent spelling of the name of his Lord and Saviour, Ari neglects the simple observation that what Paul calls “The Lord’s Supper” he claims to have “received from the Lord” despite never having met Jesus, and presenting what is more a ritualised ceremony of community than something plausibly conveyed from a man Jesus. Such texts are no proof whatsoever.
It is truly bizarre that nowhere does Paul ever say “as Jesus taught”. There is only one indirect allusion on divorce at 1Cor7:10, where Paul immediately disagrees with the alleged instruction from Jesus in the very next verse. Rather than taking counsel from the alleged kingly messiah, supposedly known to thousands but absent from history, Paul obtains all his revelation from his reading of the prophecies in the Old Testament. That is because Jesus was invented.
A pearler of the dark art of malicious distortion is Ari’s next gem where he presents a straight out lie, saying: “In this chapter she begins with the contention that their was no sort of Christian canon at all for 1000 years.” She actually says ““It took well over a thousand years to canonize the New Testament.” These two statements are completely different, but that is a matter of indifference to Ari. Acharya’s intent, in a somewhat ambiguous wording, was to point out that the Catholic Church did not settle its dogma on the canon until the 16th century. She did not, as Ari falsely asserts, say “their [sic] was no sort of canon”, but rather expressed in summary form the fact that within Catholicism debate about the canon continued for a long time.
What is happening here is that because Ari just can’t stand Acharya’s observation that Christianity is built upon lies, he has to lie himself, in a spirit of the very purest calumny.
All of Ari’s claims are completely tendentious, following the method I described from Holding in the comment quoted by Flann. Ari says “She turns to the Pauline epsitles (sic) claiming they "never discuss a historical background of Jesus...any person in the gospel account of the Passion" and "never quotes from Jesus’s purported sermons and speeches..." These should be uncontentious observations, except they incite fury from the pious. The need for Christians to clutch desperately at straws to justify their rebuttals of this simple historical point that Paul has no clear content about a real Jesus completely marks Christian scholarship as driven by faith rather than reason.
Ari then suggests fragment P52 containing parts of just five verses of John apparently proves that the four gospels existed in all their glory well before the third century, even though a paper in the Harvard Theological Review about this fragment concludes that “scholars of the New Testament have … abused papyrological evidence” and “the window of possible dates for P52 must include dates in the later second and early third centuries.” http://people.uncw.edu/zervosg/papyrolo ... misuse.pdf
The constant Modus Operandi here is that minor unclarity of wording is blown out of all proportion because Ari is a Christian apologist, happy to resort to entirely unscrupulous distortion to protect his flock from the historical truth.
With incompetent and sloppy logic, spelling and grasp of facts, Ari kicks an own-goal with a comment about why there are four gospels. Irenaeus gave the holy hand grenade of Antioch-type MPHG argument that the reason is there are “four corners of the world”. Ari seems to go into meltdown when Acharya notes the Masonic content of this bizarre argument. I would have thought that Ari’s apologetic interests would have been better served by not drawing attention to Irenaeus on the Four Gospels matter. Irenaeus said ““It is not possible that the Gospels can be either more or fewer in number than they are, For, there are four zones in the world . . . and four principle winds…Therefore, it is fitting that [the Church] has four pillars, breathing out immortality on every side . . .” (c. 180 AD). This is the first recorded reference to the four gospels, and it is highly esoteric and cosmic.
It seems that Flann is indifferent to evidence in citing such a worthless critique that is nearly undiluted polemic with almost no sensible content. What next? Acharya says there were many “additions and interpolations” to the Bible, and Ari-fever turns this into an alleged claim of “97% malicious interpolations”. He incompetently attributes the quote to Wheless, his arch demon, when Acharya cites a different author altogether, Charles Waite.
Ari shows himself incapable of understanding that just as one could say Captain Ahab said “Avast” without claiming Ahab was real, so too can Acharya cite Christ on bringing a sword without believing Jesus was real.
Next he defends the astonishingly naïve apologetic view that Josephus mentioned Jesus when this is among the most obvious frauds in all history. You really have to be wilfully blind to swallow this stuff. In more rank dishonesty, Ari turns Acharya’s comment that the Josephus references have “been dismissed by scholars” into the assertion she said “everyone agrees they are forgeries.” Ari just takes his readers for mugs when in the space of one paragraph he can so completely change his story just out of blind malevolent incompetence. Thanks Flann, great article.