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Ch. 6: The Prior Probability (On the Historicity of Jesus by Richard Carrier)

#143: Jan. - Mar. 2016 (Non-Fiction)
JohanRonnblom
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Re: Ch. 6: The Prior Probability (On the Historicity of Jesus by Richard Carrier)

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Flann 5 wrote: Hi Johan. Well you upfront acknowledge that a lot of your presentation on the origin of Christianity is speculation, so it's not really evidence based which is what historians would generally be looking for.
This is not really correct. There is nothing wrong at all with speculation, in fact it is a necessary starting point to formulate a hypothesis. Then, we test the hypothesis. I'm not nearly done with that, but that does not mean my hypotheses are not evidence based. They are just not yet examined with the necessary rigour. I want to be honest about that, so I state it clearly.
Flann 5 wrote: What historical evidence do you have for this Jewish proto-Christian sect who have a belief in a heavenly teacher Jesus/Joshua?
Again, the letters of Paul. My use of Jesus/Josua is there because we know that Paul acknowledged that the Jewish, Jerusalem-based part of the sect preceded him. Now 'Jesus' is just the Greek form of the Hebrew Josua, so in the oldest tradition we know of, he would have been known as Josua.
Flann 5 wrote: But this Joshua is clearly an earthly not celestial high priest who receives a crown from named returnees from the Babylonian captivity.
It would be absurd to posit a parallel sub-lunar world with another Babylon and doppelganger returnees from a parallel celestial captivity. The branch prophesied is not Joshua but one who is to come.
That is standard reading of old testament 'prophecy': finding some passage, usually dealing with some (supposedly) historic event, and then reinterpreting it as prophecy. I'm agnostic regarding Carrier's theory on this matter but your objection seems invalid. I don't know how they came up with their Josua, but I can see in Paul's letters that they did.
Flann 5 wrote: Can you provide a single example of a Jewish religious group of the time who did not expect the messiah to come to earth and Israel, but to Carrier's sub-lunar world?
Can you provide a single example of a Jewish religious group of the time who did not expect the messiah to come to Earth and Israel and succeed, but instead to fail and get executed? So you see, your objection cuts both ways. The beliefs of the proto-Christian sect were in some ways traditional, in some ways novel. We already know that. A sub-lunarly failed messiah is hardly more novel than an Earthly failed messiah. Moreover, there are several examples outside Judaism, but which were nevertheless familiar, such as Osiris, where we have such executions in a non-Earthly realm. This is no stranger than the Christians borrowing Santa Claus from the pagans, you take an idea (someone rides across the sky to give yuletide presents to the children) and reshape it to fit your religion. Because it seems to have some deeper meaning to you (but of course those people didn't quite get it) or just because it is popular and you have to cater to the masses.
Flann 5 wrote: The obvious question is how could Paul a zealous persecuter of Christianity have suddenly changed his mind and converted to that which he despised and considered a threat to true Judaism and it's traditions. How do you explain this?
I have absolutely no idea, there are far too many possibilities. Maybe he lied, he never was a persecutor of Christians, he just made this up to make his conversion story seem more impressive/appealing. Maybe he did, and he then had a powerful religious experience and converted. This does in no way contradict him also being a skilled power player who knew how to manipulate people for his own agenda. Maybe he had a falling out with the people who paid him to persecute the sect, and switched sides. Who knows.
Flann 5 wrote: But in fact it was not a bed of roses for Paul or the other Christian leaders since Paul had many conflicts and was executed by Nero,James the brother of John was beheaded by Herod, James the brother of Jesus was executed by the Jewish high priest, and John was deported and exiled to the isle of Patmos.
It's hard to see this as L Ron Hubbard style stuff.
None of this is likely to be true, but leading a sect is a high risk/high reward type of gambit so even if it was true, it does not change the equation.
Flann 5 wrote: As for esoteric stuff there is often a misconception I think about what Paul means when he talks about mysteries. He says that they are now revealed and pretty much spells out what they are for all to see in his letters.
I agree that Paul's letters are chiefly esoteric. He is mostly talking to the enlightened few. But there is no doubt from his texts that he is stressing the need to use an exoteric version when preaching for the new converts.

Flann 5 wrote: Because if his human nature was inherently sinful he would inevitably sin and since Paul says that the wages of sin is death he would only be receiving the penalty for his own sins in dying. He could not make atonement for the sins of others which is the central teaching of Paul's gospel.
I did not say that human nature is inherently sinful, but that the flesh is. That is a paradox for Paul, because Jesus needs to be fully human, which means he needs to have flesh, and he also needs to be free from sin. Death and resurrection was Paul's solution to this problem, presumably a solution he had acquired from the proto-Christian sect as he joined it. I do not agree that atonement for the sins of others is the central teaching of Paul's gospel, I believe that is a retrofitted reinterpretation in order to confirm beliefs that were formed later.
Flann 5 wrote: Paul doesn't say Jesus was crucified by Satan in heaven. Some interpret I Corinthians about the rulers of this age in this way. Archons means rulers and can be human or spiritual rulers. There is a specific Greek word for demons which is used elsewhere in the N.T. which Paul could have used if he wanted to say this.
I agree that this word itself does not give us any final answer. However, if he really believed Jesus was recently crucified by some specific ruler, i.e. Pilate, it is quite remarkable that he never says so. Assigning blame in such a general sense strongly points to an otherworldly perpetrator.
Flann 5 wrote: He says that if the rulers of this age had known the wisdom of God they would not have crucified the Lord of Glory. The demons certainly knew he was the Lord of glory, but this would not be so obvious to the human rulers since he came incarnate.
Why do you believe they 'certainly' knew this? That seems like a very strange assumption.
Flann 5 wrote: You would need to provide evidence that this was so. According to some Christian accounts many Christians managed to flee Jerusalem in recognition of Christ's prophecy that when they would see Jerusalem surrounded by armies they should get out,and apparently many did.
That is an absurd claim and there is no evidence for it. I don't need evidence that this did not happen, those claiming it did happen need evidence. All I'm saying is that according to Paul's letters the central power of the proto-Christian sect was in Jerusalem, and then this power disappears from history, at a time where Jerusalem was completely disrupted by the Roman-Jewish wars. It is reasonable to assume these events are related.
Flann 5 wrote: Some anti-Semitism does emerge in the second century. I don't think the gospels are anti-Semitic. The O.T. and N.T. books are almost exclusively written by Jews and Jesus was a Jew. Paul in Romans chs 9 to 11 does not evince anti Semitism but to the contrary. Indeed the gospel was to be preached to the Jews first.
I agree Paul was most likely not antisemitic. There is of course 1 Thessalonians 2:14-16: "For ye, brethren, became imitators of the churches of God which are in Judaea in Christ Jesus: for ye also suffered the same things of your own countrymen, even as they did of the Jews; who both killed the Lord Jesus and the prophets, and drove out us, and pleased not God, and are contrary to all men; forbidding us to speak to the Gentiles that they may be saved; to fill up their sins always: but the wrath is come upon them to the uttermost."

But this is widely believed to be a later forgery, and I agree. It is not consistent with the bulk of Paul's writings. You may say 2nd century (I assume John), I think we can't exculpate Matthew so easily. I think the most likely explanation for this shift is again found in the Roman-Jewish wars. Sometimes, the supposed persecution of Christians is offered, but why were the Christians persecuted? Most likely, because they were perceived to be Jews, who were not popular at the time.
Flann 5 wrote: He talks about improbabilities and what real people would do etc. He's not very observant of real human behaviour in my opinion
I can't see that you're offering any arguments for your position, so I'm not exactly convinced. From my perspective, it is rather historicists who tend to completely disregard the human side to people in the biblical stories.
Flann 5 wrote: It depends on your wordview whether you take miraculous accounts seriously or not.
Certainly. For me, miraculous stories are the most certain indications we can find that an account is either fraudulent, mistaken or allegorical. It does not get any more final than that.
Flann 5 wrote: Also the physical resurrection of the body was antithetical to pagan and Greek thought and would not have appealed to them whether on earth or in some other world.
That is an absurd claim, considering half the Greek pantheon were resurrected (after having been eaten by Cronus), and the number of Greek heroes who were said to have been resurrected. Asclepius, Achilles, Castor and Heracles are just some. The Greek typically did not have a concept of resurrecting someone in a way that did not include the body.
Flann 5 wrote: Carrier and Doherty are not so hasty to cry interpolation or forgery when it comes to the book of Hebrews as they see it as an important plank for their sub-lunar Jesus thesis
But N.T. scholars think it was written before the destruction of the temple as it speaks of it and the sacrificial system as still operating and the Hebrew recipients of the letter were suffering persecution with the temptation to revert to Orthodox Judaism as a way out.
Not sure why you are talking about interpolation or forgery here, or what is your point with the above statement. Hebrews is very interesting, it may offer us a view into the pre-Gospel esoteric beliefs.
Flann 5 wrote: But it's Hebrews pre-eminently that elucidates the superiority of Christ's sacrifice and this while the temple was still operating under the Levitical system.
The sacrifices too had to consist of lambs and other animals without blemish typifying the purity necessary and there is no suggestion that Christ had to be crucified to deal with any problem relating to his human nature being defective in purity. Hebrews says he was tempted yet without sin.
I disagree, I think the view of the crucifixion in Hebrews is markedly different from the interpretation in the Gospels and beyond. I'm not suggesting Paul (or the author of Hebrews) believed Jesus had to be killed to cleanse him from his own sins, I'm saying he had to be killed in order to be cleansed from his flesh, from the very possibility of temptation. This are subtle differences, but important.
Flann 5 wrote: As a matter of interest where do you get the idea of a parallel sub-lunar world populated by humans,cats,dogs plants etc? It's certainly no part of mainstream Judaism or Christianity and their canons of books. Carrier tends to trawl through pseudepigraphical and apocryphal writings for a lot of his stuff.
Are you saying such writings don't exist, or are forgeries, or what? I really don't understand why you seem to think it has to occur in the canon. The proto-Christian sect was not orthodox, as you just illustrated with your reference to Hebrews.
Flann 5 wrote: He talks about fake gospels and letters but then uses obviously fake stuff for many of his arguments. Fakes of course imply that something authentic is being faked.
I'm not really sure here by what you mean with either 'authentic' or 'faked'. You seem to have a rather different idea of these concepts.

That something is authentic means that it is written by whoever is considered to have written it, at the time it is considered to be written. If the author is unknown (eg Hebrews) it can still be authentic in date, at least. If parts of it were unauthentic (or 'fake') that would mean it had been subsequently edited during a later era, importing statements that don't belong there. Paul's supposed antisemitism is a great example of this.

Whether something is in some canon or not is completely unrelated to it being authentic. There is inauthentic canon, authentic canon, inauthentic apocrypha, authentic apocrypha.
Flann 5 wrote: I also don't see that Paul was enthusiatic for syncretizing pagan religions with Christianity. How anyone could actually read Paul's letters and think this, is baffling. Likewise the early Christians under threat and infliction of torture and death,refused to worship the image of Caesar as god, so historically speaking there is a lot of nonsense being peddled about pagan syncretism and early Christianity.
Nobody ever talks about syncretizing, it is just done. Being open to syncretism does not in any way mean being open to whatever idea someone is trying to force you to adopt. It just means borrowing stuff that you like. It could be Santa Claus or the resurrection of Jesus. It is also not necessarily a conscious act, but once someone has heard of an idea or concept, they are more likely to think of it, to believe they found it in scripture, to have visions of it, etc.
Flann 5 wrote: I don't see that Acts is somehow a different genre to Luke's gospel but it transitions pretty seamlessly and reads to me like a clear continuation from the gospel narrative continuing the account from Christ's resurrection and ascension to the outworking of their commission by him to preach the gospel beginning at Jerusalem and Judea and eventually to the Gentiles. Or that Acts fits Carrier's travesty of it.
While the Gospels are religious fables, Acts seems more like a hagiography of legends told by warring factions, each trying to gain legitimacy by claiming their favourite martyr suffered even more than your favourite martyr, so there!
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Re: Ch. 6: The Prior Probability (On the Historicity of Jesus by Richard Carrier)

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JohanRonnblom wrote:

Flann 5 wrote:
But this Joshua is clearly an earthly not celestial high priest who receives a crown from named returnees from the Babylonian captivity.
It would be absurd to posit a parallel sub-lunar world with another Babylon and doppelganger returnees from a parallel celestial captivity. The branch prophesied is not Joshua but one who is to come.



That is standard reading of old testament 'prophecy': finding some passage, usually dealing with some (supposedly) historic event, and then reinterpreting it as prophecy. I'm agnostic regarding Carrier's theory on this matter but your objection seems invalid. I don't know how they came up with their Josua, but I can see in Paul's letters that they did.
The fact of the matter is that Carrier is plainly wrong in claiming that this Joshua the high priest was a celestial forerunner to his 'hallucinated' Jesus.
Not all prophecy is dealing with a supposed or otherwise historic event. Isaiah ch 53 has no historic event of it's time corresponding to it yet it's one of the clearest and longest prophetic passages concerning the suffering servant of the Lord who would make atonement for sins.
In fact you seem to hold a very similar view to Carrier whatever you make of his argument on this point where he is clearly wrong.
JohanRonnblom wrote:

Flann 5 wrote:
Can you provide a single example of a Jewish religious group of the time who did not expect the messiah to come to earth and Israel, but to Carrier's sub-lunar world?



Can you provide a single example of a Jewish religious group of the time who did not expect the messiah to come to Earth and Israel and succeed, but instead to fail and get executed? So you see, your objection cuts both ways. The beliefs of the proto-Christian sect were in some ways traditional, in some ways novel. We already know that. A sub-lunarly failed messiah is hardly more novel than an Earthly failed messiah. Moreover, there are several examples outside Judaism, but which were nevertheless familiar, such as Osiris, where we have such executions in a non-Earthly realm.
Certainly there is a dual strand of messianic prophecy which Christians understand putting it simply. to refer to two comings of the messiah that is in humiliation first and then in power and glory.
The Jews of the time seem to have focused on the latter and even Jesus disciples had to be taught that he was not about to inaugurate an earthly kingdom at that time.
My point was that the messiah was certainly expected to come to earth and Israel. Now I won't be holding my breath waiting for you to provide that O.T. prophecy of the messiah coming to sub-lunar land to redeem humanity or Israel.
To even say he was a failed messiah shows your lack of understanding of passages like Isaiah 53. Even Carrier is astute enough to recognize these as actual messianic prophecies though of course he doesn't believe there was a real historical Jesus who fulfilled them.

If you say they believed in a heavenly messenger just where do you think this heavenly messenger was crucified? You tried to dismiss my reference from Ephesians which is obviously saying that since Christ ascended far above all heavens he must first have descended to earth. You make much of the word "into" the lower parts of the earth. However you read it and some think it refers to his burial the clear point is that he ascended back from the earth and must have been on earth.
JohanRonnblom wrote:

Flann 5 wrote:
The obvious question is how could Paul a zealous persecuter of Christianity have suddenly changed his mind and converted to that which he despised and considered a threat to true Judaism and it's traditions. How do you explain this?



I have absolutely no idea, there are far too many possibilities. Maybe he lied, he never was a persecutor of Christians, he just made this up to make his conversion story seem more impressive/appealing. Maybe he did, and he then had a powerful religious experience and converted. This does in no way contradict him also being a skilled power player who knew how to manipulate people for his own agenda. Maybe he had a falling out with the people who paid him to persecute the sect, and switched sides. Who knows.
Maybe this maybe,maybe that. You have no historical anchor for any of your ideas. You can just speculate away and get nowhere.
JohanRonnblom wrote:Flann 5 wrote:
But in fact it was not a bed of roses for Paul or the other Christian leaders since Paul had many conflicts and was executed by Nero,James the brother of John was beheaded by Herod, James the brother of Jesus was executed by the Jewish high priest, and John was deported and exiled to the isle of Patmos.
It's hard to see this as L Ron Hubbard style stuff.



None of this is likely to be true, but leading a sect is a high risk/high reward type of gambit so even if it was true, it does not change the equation.
Right, so nothing any Christians might have said or written about the death of Paul or Peter should be believed and I'm sure Richard Carrier will help you out with the execution of James the brother of Jesus who is called Christ, in Josephus' account.
And yes Christians do confirm this too but obviously when Paul talks about James the brother of the Lord he doesn't really mean biological brother and those mysterious guys who wrote the gospels just chucked in a few other named brothers and sisters of Jesus including James,to make it look convincing.
I should have known, we're in the world of Christ mythicism and of course conspiracy theories. You can talk all you like about the new Christians being fed "milk" but the gospels plainly teach an earthly historical Jesus and if in fact this was not the case they were actually being lied to.

You think you can dismiss Tacitus on Christ and Pilate because he wasn't contemporaneous with Christ but wrote circa 115 A.D. But Carrier who actually is an historian knows you can't do history that way. So he resorts to that suspiciously overused get out of jail card of mythicists of crying interpolation like a parrot,whenever the texts contradict the theory and he has no other contrived 'answer' such as his 'explanation' of what is meant by "James the brother of the Lord" in Galatians.
JohanRonnblom wrote:I agree that Paul's letters are chiefly esoteric. He is mostly talking to the enlightened few. But there is no doubt from his texts that he is stressing the need to use an exoteric version when preaching for the new converts.
So what exactly was Paul's esoteric teaching Johan?
JohanRonnblom wrote:

Flann 5 wrote:
Because if his human nature was inherently sinful he would inevitably sin and since Paul says that the wages of sin is death he would only be receiving the penalty for his own sins in dying. He could not make atonement for the sins of others which is the central teaching of Paul's gospel.



I did not say that human nature is inherently sinful, but that the flesh is. That is a paradox for Paul, because Jesus needs to be fully human, which means he needs to have flesh, and he also needs to be free from sin. Death and resurrection was Paul's solution to this problem, presumably a solution he had acquired from the proto-Christian sect as he joined it. I do not agree that atonement for the sins of others is the central teaching of Paul's gospel, I believe that is a retrofitted reinterpretation in order to confirm beliefs that were formed later.
You could have fooled me that the atonement was not the central teaching of Paul but then I can only see that large mass of exoteric stuff that repeatedly says this. You see it's impossible to convince any mythicist who holds the exoteric/esoteric theory because nothing you can point to written by Paul or any other N.T. writer ever means what it obviously does mean!

By the way do you have any evidence for your retrofitted reinterpretation theory (whatever it is) or should I just take your word for this? And actually since Jesus was the divine son of God he did not have a sinful nature and neither does Paul teach that the human body is intrinsically sinful,that's more like gnosticism.

There is no textual dispute about Romans and I don't think we need anyone to retrofit some interpretation for us to understand what he makes plain about the gospel in it,which is self evident in the text itself.
JohanRonnblom wrote:Flann 5 wrote:
Paul doesn't say Jesus was crucified by Satan in heaven. Some interpret I Corinthians about the rulers of this age in this way. Archons means rulers and can be human or spiritual rulers. There is a specific Greek word for demons which is used elsewhere in the N.T. which Paul could have used if he wanted to say this.



I agree that this word itself does not give us any final answer. However, if he really believed Jesus was recently crucified by some specific ruler, i.e. Pilate, it is quite remarkable that he never says so. Assigning blame in such a general sense strongly points to an otherworldly perpetrator.
No, you've just completely ignored my whole point that Paul is contrasting human wisdom with divine wisdom. The whole context is pointing to the failure of human wisdom climaxing in human rulers crucifying the Lord of glory.
Acts of course shows this applied by the apostles to Herod, Pilate and human rulers from the prophetic Psalm 2. Carrier of course thinks he has completely ruled out the gospels and Acts as myth and fiction.
In reality they are like children who randomly chuck out half the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle and then think their myopic interpretation is definitely best, even when it results in cosmic sperm banks and sub-lunar lunacy.

You never did explain where you got your parallel world of men,women,dogs,donkeys,vineyards and wheatfields from. Where did the early believers in your "heavenly messenger" think this was located?

And what is Paul talking about in Romans 9 when he says first in verse 3 that the Israelites are his kinsmen "according to the flesh" and then in verse 5 says that Christ came from Israel "according to the flesh" using precisely the same phrase? And incidentally in verse 33 Paul also quotes the same prophecy as Peter, of God laying in Zion a stone of stumbling and rock of offence.

http://biblehub.com/nasb/romans/9.htm Or what did the writer of Hebrews mean when he wrote, " For it is evident that our Lord was descended from Judah,a tribe as to which Moses spoke nothing concerning priests"? Hebrews 7:14.

Now coincidentally in Matthew ch 21 the author writes of the stone that was laid in Zion also,where Jesus applies this to himself and to the religious rulers as the builders who rejected this divinely laid stone,in an encounter in the temple. Verse 42. http://biblehub.com/nasb/matthew/21.htm

And luckily the gospel writer was also able to find a messianic prophecy about Israel's king coming to the daughter of Zion riding on a donkey and bringing salvation. Just where exactly do you think that the prophet thought he would be riding this donkey? Verse 5.

Can you explain how the early believers in your heavenly messenger thought that their messiah came to be of the seed of David "according to the flesh" and from the tribe of Judah without actually being born on earth from their physical lineage?
JohanRonnblom wrote:

Flann 5 wrote:
He says that if the rulers of this age had known the wisdom of God they would not have crucified the Lord of Glory. The demons certainly knew he was the Lord of glory, but this would not be so obvious to the human rulers since he came incarnate.



Why do you believe they 'certainly' knew this? That seems like a very strange assumption.
Of course you don't believe in supernatural spiritual beings, however within the biblical framework they are much better equipped than humans to have supernatural knowledge of such things, and in fact the gospels tell us they recognized who he was.
JohanRonnblom wrote:

Flann 5 wrote:
He talks about improbabilities and what real people would do etc. He's not very observant of real human behaviour in my opinion



I can't see that you're offering any arguments for your position, so I'm not exactly convinced. From my perspective, it is rather historicists who tend to completely disregard the human side to people in the biblical stories.
JohanRonnblom wrote:Certainly. For me, miraculous stories are the most certain indications we can find that an account is either fraudulent, mistaken or allegorical. It does not get any more final than that.
Like Carrier you are starting from a position of philosophical naturalism. It has nothing to do with human psychology or behaviour but if there are miracles, apriori it must be myth or fiction or allegory. Carrier makes sweeping generalisations and talks about magical this and magical that with smug assurance that he is far too wise to even entertain any notion of there being an actual God who ever does anything.
Many of his criticisms are childish and don't even deserve refutation. Same old infidels playbook.
JohanRonnblom wrote:Flann 5 wrote:
Also the physical resurrection of the body was antithetical to pagan and Greek thought and would not have appealed to them whether on earth or in some other world.



That is an absurd claim, considering half the Greek pantheon were resurrected (after having been eaten by Cronus), and the number of Greek heroes who were said to have been resurrected. Asclepius, Achilles, Castor and Heracles are just some. The Greek typically did not have a concept of resurrecting someone in a way that did not include the body.
That doesn't seem to be the scholarly view on the whole pagan dying and rising gods issue. Mostly cyclical vegetative representations. Nothing really to do with God dying once for human sins redemptively and rising again. To put Osiris alongside Christ is pure farce. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=duufMN7KV94
http://www.evidenceunseen.com/christ/wa ... gan-myths/
JohanRonnblom wrote:Flann 5 wrote:
I also don't see that Paul was enthusiatic for syncretizing pagan religions with Christianity. How anyone could actually read Paul's letters and think this, is baffling. Likewise the early Christians under threat and infliction of torture and death,refused to worship the image of Caesar as god, so historically speaking there is a lot of nonsense being peddled about pagan syncretism and early Christianity.



Nobody ever talks about syncretizing, it is just done. Being open to syncretism does not in any way mean being open to whatever idea someone is trying to force you to adopt. It just means borrowing stuff that you like. It could be Santa Claus or the resurrection of Jesus. It is also not necessarily a conscious act, but once someone has heard of an idea or concept, they are more likely to think of it, to believe they found it in scripture, to have visions of it, etc.
It should be obvious if you read Romans ch.1 or in I Corinthians 12 where Paul says that what the pagans sacrifice they sacrifice to demons,that Paul did not like pagan religions. In fact I shouldn't even have to debate this point. If you can't see by just reading his letters that he was very much against pagan religions then there's really nothing more I can say on this.

The idea that he would assimilate paganism is just nuts. The early Christians could easily have worshiped the image of Caesar as God if they were so effortlessly just adopting pagan practices.
Last edited by Flann 5 on Thu Oct 27, 2016 12:43 pm, edited 8 times in total.
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Re: Ch. 6: The Prior Probability (On the Historicity of Jesus by Richard Carrier)

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Flann 5 wrote:That doesn't seem to be the scholarly view on the whole pagan dying and rising gods issue. Mostly cyclical vegetative representations. Nothing really to do with God dying once for human sins redemptively and rising again. To put Osiris alongside Christ is pure farce."
Rather than citing cartoon crap from your hero JP Holding, who has absolute zero credibility (or relevant credentials) ever consider citing actual scholars - you might try it sometime:

"Here's a video clip of modern Egyptologist Dr. Bojana Mojsov admitting parallels between Osiris &/or Horus with Jesus. And, at 5:30 you'll see a stone carving of Isis as she hovers over Osiris in the form of a bird to receive the divine seed (notice there's no 'member') of Osiris. Mojsov then says, "It's a miraculous birth of the savior child.""




"The miraculous birth of Jesus could be viewed as analogous to that of Horus, whom Isis conceived posthumously from Osiris, and Mary was closely connected with Isis by many other shared characteristics."
- Renowned Egyptologist Dr. Erik Hornung

"...it is not improbable that even early Christian texts were influenced by ideas and images from the New Kingdom religious books."
- Renowned Egyptologist Dr. Erik Hornung

"The influence of Egyptian religion on posterity is mainly felt through Christianity and its antecedents."
- Egyptologist, Dr. Siegfried Morenz, director of the Institute of Egyptology at the University of Leipzig

"In this picture we have the Annunciation, the Conception, the Birth, and the Adoration, as described in the First and Second Chapters of Luke's Gospel; and as we have historical assurance that the chapters in Matthew's Gospel which contain the Miraculous Birth of Jesus are an after addition not in the earliest manuscripts, it seems probable that these two poetical chapters in Luke may also be unhistorical, and be borrowed from the Egyptian accounts of the miraculous birth of their kings."
- Dr. Samuel C. Sharpe, highly respected Egyptologist and translator of the Bible

"The Pyramid Texts speak of "the great virgin" (Hwn.t wr.t) three times 682c, 728a, 2002a"

"In a text in the Abydos Temple of Seti I, Isis herself declares: "I am the great virgin"

- Christ in Egypt, page 152

Pyramid Texts are 4,400 years old

"Isis came to be worshipped as the Primordial Virgin and their child as the Savior of the World."

- Egyptologist, Dr. Bojana Mojsov, page xii "Osiris Death and Afterlife of a God"

Rebuttal to Dr. Chris Forbes concerning 'Zeitgeist, Part 1'

Here's what non-biased scholars say about Jesus:

"The only definite account of his life and teachings is contained in the four Gospels of the New Testament, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. All other historical records of the time are silent about him. The brief mentions of Jesus in the writings of Josephus, Tacitus and Suetonius have been generally regarded as not genuine and as Christian interpolations; in Jewish writings there is no report about Jesus that has historical value. Some scholars have even gone so far as to hold that the entire Jesus story is a myth."

- The Universal Jewish Encyclopedia

"...Christian scholars over the centuries have admitted that ... "there are parallels between the Mysteries and Christianity"1 and that "the miracle stories of the Gospels do in fact parallel literary forms found in pagan and Jewish miracle stories," 2 "...According to Form Criticism the Gospels are more like folklore and myth than historical fact."3

1. Metzger, HLS, 8.
2. Meier, II, 536.
3. Geisler, CA, 320.

- Who Was Jesus? 259


The Truth about Judeo-Christianity
http://www.freethoughtnation.com/forums ... 665#p16665

Rabbi: Did Jesus actually exist?
http://freethoughtnation.com/rabbi-did- ... lly-exist/

Bart Ehrman: Gospels not written by eyewitnesses, no Jesus in historical record
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lyi15_npTj8

Josephus’s Testimonium Flavianum Examined Linguistically: Greek Analysis Demonstrates the Passage a Forgery In Toto
https://www.academia.edu/10463098/Josep ... ry_In_Toto



"And when we say also that the Word, who is the first-birth of God, was produced without sexual union, and that He, Jesus Christ, our Teacher, was crucified and died, and rose again, and ascended into heaven, we propound nothing different from what you [Pagans] believe regarding those whom you esteem sons of Jupiter. For you know how many sons your esteemed writers ascribed to Jupiter: Mercury, the interpreting word and teacher of all; Æsculapius, who, though he was a great physician, was struck by a thunderbolt, and so ascended to heaven; and Bacchus too, after he had been torn limb from limb; and Hercules, when he had committed himself to the flames to escape his toils; and the sons of Leda, and Dioscuri; and Perseus, son of Danae; and Bellerophon, who, though sprung from mortals, rose to heaven on the horse Pegasus. For what shall I say of Ariadne, and those who, like her, have been declared to be set among the stars? And what of the emperors who die among yourselves, whom you deem worthy of deification, and in whose behalf you produce some one who swears he has seen the burning Caesar rise to heaven from the funeral pyre?......."

- Justin Martyr, The First Apology, XXI
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Re: Ch. 6: The Prior Probability (On the Historicity of Jesus by Richard Carrier)

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FTL99 wrote:Flann 5 wrote:
That doesn't seem to be the scholarly view on the whole pagan dying and rising gods issue. Mostly cyclical vegetative representations. Nothing really to do with God dying once for human sins redemptively and rising again. To put Osiris alongside Christ is pure farce."




Rather than citing cartoon crap from your hero JP Holding, who has absolute zero credibility (or relevant credentials) ever consider citing actual scholars - you might try it sometime:

"Here's a video clip of modern Egyptologist Dr. Bojana Mojsov admitting parallels between Osiris &/or Horus with Jesus. And, at 5:30 you'll see a stone carving of Isis as she hovers over Osiris in the form of a bird to receive the divine seed (notice there's no 'member') of Osiris. Mojsov then says, "It's a miraculous birth of the savior child.""
Flann 5 wrote:http://www.evidenceunseen.com/christ/wa ... gan-myths/
Well FTL, If you read the article I linked you would see that scholars are cited and that was the whole point of the article. Mythicism and Astro-theology is certainly not well supported if barely at all in scholarship.
Even I can see obvious fallacies in the video you linked. Since Jesus was not born on December 25th it's pointless referencing what the Catholic church introduced much later.
Osiris did not die to atone for sins or to save anyone but according to the myth was just murdered by suffocation in a casket by Seth. Certainly not crucifixion. He was not resurrected on the third day but there's a whole saga of tooing and froing on the Nile by Isis which reads like it took months before she gathered up the bits and pieces of Osiris.

He didn't have twelve disciples,Jesus didn't marry his sister and so on. You can call his casketed body being thrown in the Nile a baptism but that's an abuse of language. If you want to call the conception of Horus by Isis virginal you can do that too, but I don't think it's an accurate description based on the account in the myth,to say the least. The claim of resurrection is dubious too as he went to the world of the dead and didn't return to the land of the living.

This stuff has been debunked over and over. http://www.academia.edu/2580620/Spirit_ ... Zeitgeist_
The author here is an atheist and skeptic and while I disagree with many of his comments relating to the origins of Christianity, he critiques the more extreme ideas disseminated through the internet relating to conspiracy theories and suchlike.
FTL99 wrote:Here's what non-biased scholars say about Jesus:

"The only definite account of his life and teachings is contained in the four Gospels of the New Testament, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. All other historical records of the time are silent about him. The brief mentions of Jesus in the writings of Josephus, Tacitus and Suetonius have been generally regarded as not genuine and as Christian interpolations; in Jewish writings there is no report about Jesus that has historical value. Some scholars have even gone so far as to hold that the entire Jesus story is a myth."

- The Universal Jewish Encyclopedia
No,the scholarly consensus is that there is a partial interpolation in Josephus' first reference but the rest is an authentic reference to Jesus. His second reference is considered authentic and so is Tacitus' reference. Anyone can just google this to find out what the scholarly consensus is. And it's also considered by scholars that Paul's reference to James the brother of the Lord in Galatians is authentic also, to take one example.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_Jesus
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Re: Ch. 6: The Prior Probability (On the Historicity of Jesus by Richard Carrier)

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Flann 5 wrote:Well FTL, If you read the article I linked you would see that scholars are cited and that was the whole point of the article. Mythicism and Astro-theology is certainly not well supported if barely at all in scholarship ...
LOL, yeah I read the article and it mostly cites Christians who admittedly know nothing about the case for mythicism and are really out to shore up their faith and euphoria at all costs - even if it means being dishonest. It's the same misinformation found at JP Holdings tektonics. Jesus would be ashamed. It is nothing less than suppression by omission. Mythicism and the Ph.D.: A Brief History
"The Mythicist case has been rebutted? Really? When did that happen? The arguments of the Mythicist camp have never been refuted - they have only been steadfastly ignored." "...As for this tiresome business about there being "no scholar" or "no serious scholar" who advocates the Christ Myth theory: Isn't it obvious that scholarly communities are defined by certain axioms in which grad students are trained, and that they will lose standing in those communities if they depart from those axioms? The existence of an historical Jesus is currently one of those. That should surprise no one, especially with the rightward lurch of the Society for Biblical Literature in recent years. It simply does not matter how many scholars hold a certain opinion"

- Dr. Robert Price, Biblical Scholar with two Ph.D's
Sin Bearer and Redeemer

"Another title that could be applied to Osiris is “sin bearer,” because upon his death he “adopted the burden of the sins of the dead.”10 As McClintock and Strong say:

"Osiris seems to have been finally revived, and to have become the judge of…Hades, presiding at the final judgment of souls in the hall of the two Truths, with the forty-two demons who presided over the capital sins, and awarding to the soul its final destiny.11 As also revealed in BD 125, the deceased is to be judged in the Hall of the Two Truths, by declaring he has avoided various sins. Regarding BD 125 and the notion of sin in the Egyptian religion, Morenz remarks: The statements of innocence in Chapter 125 of the Book of the Dead, which at first sight seem to show that Egyptians had no sense of sin, in fact demonstrate the opposite, if one interprets them correctly.1

"As we have seen, much else in the Book of the Dead exists in order to purify the Osiris, such as is expressed at BD 30B, which essentially opens the sacred text: “The vindicated Osiris Ani is straightforward, he has no sin, there is no accusation against him before us…”2 If the deceased were found unworthy, he could be sent back to earth as a pig, whereas those whose sins were redeemable would take part in the Resurrection. Indeed, in the Coffin Texts appears a suggestion of the miracle of Jesus driving the demons into the swine and killing them (Mt 8:32; Mk 5:13; Lk 8:33), in a spell (CT Sp. 440) entitled, “Spell for Driving off Pigs.”3

These various concepts are not overt in the Jewish religion, but they do thus rank as salient within the Egyptian religion, and it is likely from there that Christianity got them, rather than from Judaism. In the sense that the deceased counted on Osiris’s resurrection to produce his own immortality, it could be said that Osiris died for the sins of mankind. Moreover, it is Horus who introduces the deceased to Osiris in the Judgment Hall or Hall of the Two Truths and who pleads on the Osiris’s behalf for atonement of his sins:

“Horus further transferred to the benefit of the deceased the various good offices which he had himself performed in behalf of his father, and more especially those ceremonial rites which were called the ‘Assistances of Osiris.’”4 Horus could thus be called “the Redeemer.”

- Christ in Egypt, page 313
"...Osiris is doubly resurrected as his son Horus, too, and he, too, is eventually raised from the dead by Isis. He is pictured as spanning the dome of heaven, his arms stretched out in a cruciform pattern. As such, he seems to represent the common Platonic astronomical symbol of the sun’s path crossing the earth’s ecliptic. Likewise, the Acts of John remembers that the real cross of Jesus is not some piece of wood, as fools think, but rather the celestial “Cross of Light.” Acharya S. ventures that “the creators of the Christ myth did not simply take an already formed story, scratch out the name Osiris or Horus, and replace it with Jesus” (p. 25). But I am pretty much ready to go the whole way and suggest that Jesus is simply Osiris going under a new name, Jesus,” Savior,” hitherto an epithet, but made into a name on Jewish soil. Are there allied mythemes (details, really) that look borrowed from the cults of Attis, Dionysus, etc.? Sure; remember we are talking about a heavily syncretistic context. Hadian remarked on how Jewish and Christian leaders in Egypt mixed their worship with that of Sarapis (=Osiris)."

- Christ in Egypt, Reviewed by Dr. Robert Price, a biblical scholar with two Ph.D's
http://www.robertmprice.mindvendor.com/ ... _egypt.htm
Dying and Rising Gods
http://www.freethoughtnation.com/forums ... =16&t=2354

Horus and the Twelve (12)
http://www.freethoughtnation.com/forums ... 659#p19659
Image

"Horus enthroned before the Twelve, Seventh Hour of the Amduat" (Erik Hornung, The Ancient Egyptian Books of the Afterlife, 48)
LOL, Christians love to cite Dr. Mettinger but I guess they never actually read his book because he proves them wrong:

Dr. Trygge N.D. Mettinger
http://www.freethoughtnation.com/forums ... 379#p14379

Article cites Dr. Mettinger
http://www.stellarhousepublishing.com/e ... ction.html

A Brief History of Jesus's Winter Solstice Birthday
http://www.freethoughtnation.com/forums ... 108#p22108

Website by a Christian
http://dec25th.info


LOL, just more of the same old lies by the anti-Zeitgeist part 1 crowd. That link by Nathan Dickey is a joke and has been debunked to the point of utter embarrassment and anybody who cites it should be embarrassed and lose credibility:

http://www.freethoughtnation.com/forums ... 614#p29614

Typical for Christian fundamentalists to omit quotes from highly respected scholars proving them wrong with valid primary sources and try to pivot away and spin it in a Trumpian fashion. I'm really sorry Flan 5 but, you lost this argument before you ever started. There does not exist any credible evidence for Jesus; the earliest Christians could never provide valid evidence and nothing has changed since then. You are working hard to hold up a house of cards. Thanks to the internet Christians cannot get away with revisionism any more.
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Re: Ch. 6: The Prior Probability (On the Historicity of Jesus by Richard Carrier)

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FTL99 wrote:

Flann 5 wrote:
Well FTL, If you read the article I linked you would see that scholars are cited and that was the whole point of the article. Mythicism and Astro-theology is certainly not well supported if barely at all in scholarship ...



LOL, yeah I read the article and it mostly cites Christians who admittedly know nothing about the case for mythicism and are really out to shore up their faith and euphoria at all costs - even if it means being dishonest. It's the same misinformation found at JP Holdings tektonics. Jesus would be ashamed. It is nothing less than suppression by omission. Mythicism and the Ph.D.: A Brief History
O.k F.TL, Who are the scholars with Ph.D's in the relevant fields who support astro-theology? Zeitgeist has been thoroughly refuted and I don't know how you can stand over the many false claims of parallels made in that movie.

If you say that Seth's trick or treat in getting Osiris into the casket and sealing it with molten lead is crucifixion, I don't know who you think you are kidding. Or that Attis castrating himself is crucifixion then I doubt that any sober pathologist would agree with that forensically, or just on the basis of plain common sense. There are a lot of these kinds of absurd 'parallels' in the movie.
FTL99 wrote: LOL, Christians love to cite Dr. Mettinger but I guess they never actually read his book because he proves them wrong:
Right, and here's one quote from Mettinger; " There is as far I am aware,no prima facie evidence that the death and resurrection of Jesus is a mythological construct,drawing on myths and rites of the dying and rising gods of the surrounding world."

So even Mettinger doesn't agree with your position not to mention the many other scholars who reject it.

You referenced an article quoting Mettinger on Attis. But what he said was "Since the time of Damacius (6th cent. A.D) Attis seems to have been believed to die and return."
But that's postdating Christianity by centuries. You have no primary sources predating Christianity for his returning from the dead. In fact there is no suggestion of this from such earlier sources and in one account he is turned into a pine tree. Is that a bodily resurrection?

I know Dorothy Murdock unfortunately died last Christmas and you probably feel you should defend her views. In reality this whole astrotheology and copycat theory is false, and is an attempt to undermine Christianity on completely bogus grounds.

You can't defend the indefensible. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=knNjbWKwz8E

You provided a link from a Christian trying to make a case for a December 25th birthdate for Christ. It's simply impossible from available data to give any precise date of birth for Jesus. Assumptions which may be false have to be made. It doesn't appear from early church Fathers comments that any month or date had been agreed on or celebrated in the 2nd century A.D.
Besides the gospel account is imprecise saying that "After those days" Elizabeth conceived. So it has to be assumed for a December date that this was Zachariah's second stint of temple sevice and "after those days" is too imprecise to get an exact date of conception.
And durations of pregnancies can not be determined precisely either. This would be true both for Elizabeth and Mary. On balance I think that the evidence does not favour December for the month of Jesus' birth.
http://www.messianicfellowship.50webs.c ... irth1.html
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Re: Ch. 6: The Prior Probability (On the Historicity of Jesus by Richard Carrier)

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Thanks for proving my point again Flann 5:

"Typical for Christian fundamentalists to omit quotes from highly respected scholars proving them wrong with valid primary sources and try to pivot away and spin it in a Trumpian fashion. I'm really sorry Flan 5 but, you lost this argument before you ever started. There does not exist any credible evidence for Jesus; the earliest Christians could never provide valid evidence and nothing has changed since then. You are working hard to hold up a house of cards. Thanks to the internet Christians cannot get away with revisionism any more."

Flann 5, you consistently omit or refuse to deal with facts provided by highly respected scholars discussing ancient primary sources that prove you wrong and pivot away to something else to avoid ever dealing with the facts and then you toss more spaghetti on the wall hoping something, anything will stick. You merely prove that you are only here with an agenda to shore up your Christian faith & euphoria at all costs - even if it means being dishonest. Jesus would be ashamed of you. You also depend on Christian apologists as sources, which also proves my point - you've got absolutely NOTHING so you desperately grasp for straws that you already know are false because it has been proven to you endlessly but, you can't accept it because your biases and bigotry mean far more to you than being accurate or honest. Your responses here and elsewhere demonstrate that you've never read links provided and you ignore primary sources that prove you wrong. All you have to offer is Christian revisionism and that's partly why you fail so miserably.
Flann 5 wrote:O.k F.TL, Who are the scholars with Ph.D's in the relevant fields who support astro-theology? Zeitgeist has been thoroughly refuted and I don't know how you can stand over the many false claims of parallels made in that movie.
You would already know had you read a single link already provided. Zeitgeist has not been refuted - only in your biased, bigoted Christian dreams:

Primary sources and scholar commentary on them support Zeitgeist Part 1:

ZG1 Sourcebook (transcript, sources, citations & images)

Primary Sources & Scholars cited in the ZG1 Sourcebook

No, Zeitgeist has not been refuted!

Zeitgeist Part 1 & the Supportive Evidence

Rebuttal to Dr. Chris Forbes concerning 'Zeitgeist, Part 1'
"This book is a slightly revised version of my doctoral dissertation entitled “Solar Worship in the Biblical World” which was submitted to the Graduate School of Yale University in the Spring of 1989. As may be judged from the title of that work, I had at one time planned to cover more territory than sun worship in ancient Israel, but found the material pertaining to ancient Israel so vast that I never got beyond it."

- Rev. Dr. J. Glen Taylor, "Yahweh and the Sun: Biblical and Archaeological Evidence for Sun Worship in Ancient Israel" (1993)
"At Stonehenge in England and Carnac in France, in Egypt and Yucatan, across the whole face of the earth are found mysterious ruins of ancient monuments, monuments with astronomical significance. These relics of other times are as accessible as the American Midwest and as remote as the jungles of Guatemala. Some of them were built according to celestial alignments; others were actually precision astronomical observatories ... Careful observation of the celestial rhythms was compellingly important to early peoples, and their expertise, in some respects, was not equaled in Europe until three thousand years later."

- Dr. Edwin Krupp, astronomer and director at Griffith Park Observatory in Los Angeles
"I find it undeniable that many of the epic heroes and ancient patriarchs and matriarchs of the Old Testament were personified stars, planets, and constellations." "I find myself in full agreement with Acharya S/D.M. Murdock"

- Dr. Robert Price, Biblical Scholar with two Ph.D's
Earl Doherty defers to Acharya for the subject of astrotheology:
"A heavenly location for the actions of the savior gods, including the death of Christ, would also have been influenced by most religions' ultimate derivation from astrotheology, as in the worship of the sun and moon. For this dimension of more remote Christian roots, see the books of Acharya S"
- Earl Doherty, Jesus: Neither God Nor Man, (2009) page 153
"Your scholarship is relentless! ...the research conducted by D.M. Murdock concerning the myth of Jesus Christ is certainly both valuable and worthy of consideration."
- Dr. Ken Feder, Professor of Archaeology
"...In recent months or over the last year or so I have interviewed Frank Zindler and Richard Carrier and David Fitzgerald and Robert Price all on the issue of mythicism ... when I spoke to these people I asked for their expertise collectively and what I got, especially from Fitzgerald and Robert Price, was that we should be speaking to tonights guest D.M. Murdock,author of 'Did Moses Exist? The Myth of the Israelite Lawgiver'."
- Aron Ra, The Ra Men podcast EP10 - Did Moses Exist? with D.M. Murdock
Re: Mettinger:

LOL, your selected quote-mine does not exist in his book, "The Riddle of Resurrection" where he actually addresses the issue. Once again, you would've been wise to read the link with comments from folks who actually read the book instead of parroting false info from other Xian apologists off the net who also have never read Dr. Mettinger's book:
"Indeed, from the outset of this book, The Riddle of Resurrection, theologian Dr. Trygge N.D. Mettinger makes it clear that he disagrees with the notion of tossing away the thesis that pre-Christian gods of old died and were resurrected, and he suggests that the field has been overpowered by Christians attempting to establish the "reality" and "superiority" of their own cult.

"On the front cover page of Mettinger's book, we find the synopsis of his thesis:

"From the 1930s through the rest of the century, a consensus has developed to the effect that the "dying and rising gods" died but did not return or rise to live again. The present work--which is the first monograph on the whole issue subsequent to the studies by Frazer and Baudissin--is a detail critique of that position. It is based on a fresh perusal of all the relevant source material from the ancient Near East, Egypt, and the perusal of all the relevant source material from the ancient Near East, Egypt, and the Graeco-Roman world and profits from new finds of great importance.... The author concludes that Dumuzi, Baal, and Melqart were dying and rising gods already in pre-Christian times and that Adonis and Esmun may well have been so too. Osiris dies and rises but remains all the time in the Netherworld ..." ... and becomes resurrected on earth through his son Horus.

http://www.freethoughtnation.com/forums ... 379#p14379
No Flann 5, I do not feel I need to defend her views as the primary sources, scholar commentary on them and a mountain of evidence that actually exists does that, I am just sick and tired of dishonest delusion peddlers spreading information they KNOW is false but do it anyway out of biases and bigotry to uphold a lie based on a house of cards. The lengths that Christians will go to be sooo delusional about these issues is, well ... not very "Christian" at all.

Added edit: Here I was reminded of this quote:
"I contend we are both atheists, I just believe in one fewer god than you do. When you understand why you dismiss all the other possible gods, you will understand why I dismiss yours."

- Historian, Sir Stephen Henry Roberts (1901-71)
Flann 5 wrote:You can't defend the indefensible
LOL, then why do you attempt to do it so often? You just cited more known biased, bigoted Christian apologists extremists with zero relevant credentials or even training. They have been debunked repeatedly to the point of utter embarrassment and you lose all credibility for even citing them as they have been caught being dishonest many times: http://www.freethoughtnation.com/forums ... 612#p23612
Flann 5 wrote:In reality this whole astrotheology and copycat theory is false, and is an attempt to undermine Christianity on completely bogus grounds
LOL, yeah good luck with that Christian revisionism.

Star Worship of the Ancient Israelites

Jesus Christ, Sun of Righteousness




December 25th:
"In fact, early Jewish sources suggest that the sheep around Bethlehem were outside year-round. So you can see, December 25th fits both tradition and the biblical narrative well. There is no sound objection to it ... And December 25th has been the frontrunner for eighteen centuries. Without more evidence, there seems no good reason to change the celebration date now."

- The Birth of Jesus Christ by Dr. Daniel B. Wallace, professor of New Testament Studies

"Those who attempt to claim that "Shepherds were not in the fields during December" in Luke 2:8 should lose all credibility for spreading such misinformation based in utter ignorance as Jews who've lived in or around the area of Bethlehem have always known that is laughably false because Bethlehem has a pretty mild winter and only gets about 3 snow days per year, so, just more lies with an agenda and those who attempt to use that argument should be ashamed and lose all credibility. That argument must be completely abandoned by those who chose to maintain any credibility."

http://www.freethoughtnation.com/forums ... 108#p22108
December 25th is the traditional date CHOSEN BY THE EARLY CHRISTIANS THEMSELVES and Christianity has no plans on changing it, so, it's just more evidence that Jesus is just another mythical Sun God character. So, don't get into the habit of blaming everybody else for Jesus's December 25th birthday at Christmas when it was the early Christians themselves who chose that date based on pre-xian Paganism with a several thousand year history behind it. Christians could've chosen from any of the 365 days of the year but, they chose Dec 25th. The early Christians believed that the CONCEPTION of both the sun and Jesus was March 25th putting their birthdays at December 25th or the winter solstice - those who try to claim Jesus was born in spring get confused between conception and birth.

If you don't like the Dec 25th date then, you'll need to take it up with the early Christians who chose that date themselves, which is still the date used to this very day - Christians too often forget that fact when attempting to argue the issue (shakes head with amazement)

A History of Christmas
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Re: Ch. 6: The Prior Probability (On the Historicity of Jesus by Richard Carrier)

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Flann 5 wrote: The fact of the matter is that Carrier is plainly wrong in claiming that this Joshua the high priest was a celestial forerunner to his 'hallucinated' Jesus.
Maybe, but you have not presented any sort of intelligible argument that this is so. Just asserting that it is wrong is not very convincing, and in fact further discussion may be pointless if this is how you intend to 'debate'. Also, I have not defended that position anyway so even if you could make such an argument, it would be completely irrelevant to our discussion.
Flann 5 wrote: Certainly there is a dual strand of messianic prophecy which Christians understand
Now you are confusing modern religious beliefs with what proto-Christians believed 2000 years ago. Yes, modern Christians believe a lot of wacky and rarely interesting things. That is not relevant in this discussion.
Flann 5 wrote: To even say he was a failed messiah shows your lack of understanding
No, your objection shows your fundamental lack of understanding. There is massive scholarly agreement that the idea of a crucified Jesus did not reflect extant Jewish expectations of the Messiah.

Modern Christian reinterpretations are irrelevant. We are talking about the beliefs 2000 years ago. Not today.
Flann 5 wrote: If you say they believed in a heavenly messenger just where do you think this heavenly messenger was crucified?
In the heavens. For your information, 'heaven' is called that way because in ancient times, people believed it was actually in heaven. Today, religious folks tend to see 'heaven' as some sort of parallel dimension, something that has no place in the physical world. That is a modern concept, that has developed as we have gradually discovered that heaven is in fact not filled with demons, angels and gods. But in the era we are discussing, that is what people believed.
Flann 5 wrote: You tried to dismiss my reference from Ephesians which is obviously saying that since Christ ascended far above all heavens he must first have descended to earth.
No, you wrote something that was not what that passage states, but what you have imagined that it says because you want it to say that. There is very little scholarly support for your interpretation. I would recommend that you read some of the commentaries here.
Flann 5 wrote: Maybe this maybe,maybe that. You have no historical anchor for any of your ideas. You can just speculate away and get nowhere.
What complete nonsense. I say that I do not know the answer to one specific question, and now you say that because of this, I know nothing? Either you are illiterate or extremely dishonest. Perhaps desperately trying to convince yourself you don't have to listen to my arguments?

I don't know why Paul converted, just like you don't know exactly why the mailman arrived today at that specific time (or did not arrive). Some things we cannot know, simply because we have no facts and there are too many eminently plausible explanations for us to choose and guess. Then we just have to say: we don't know this. I know this is deeply frustrating to the religious mind, which simply cannot stand admitting that there are things they don't know.
Flann 5 wrote:I'm sure Richard Carrier will help you out with the execution of James the brother of Jesus who is called Christ, in Josephus' account.
I recommend you just read the text. With 'christ' in it, the gist is:
Ananus the high priest had James, brother of Jesus Christ, executed for no good reason. The Jewish elite complained to the procurator Albinus who removed Ananus and replaced him with Jesus, son of Damneus.

This makes absolutely no sense. If you remove the 'christ' remark, it makes perfect sense: Jesus, son of Damneus, was made high priest because his brother was one of those who had been unlawfully killed by Ananus. Add to that, we already know the document was tampered with, and that it makes absolutely no sense for Josephus to refer to 'christ' without explaining who that is.
Flann 5 wrote: And yes Christians do confirm this too but obviously when Paul talks about James the brother of the Lord he doesn't really mean biological brother and those mysterious guys who wrote the gospels just chucked in a few other named brothers and sisters of Jesus including James,to make it look convincing.
Just curious, what do you believe about the following passages:
Philippians 1:14: "...most of the brethren in the Lord, being confident through my bonds, are more abundantly bold to speak the word of God without fear"
1 Corinthians 9:5: "Have we no right to lead about a wife that is a believer, even as the rest of the apostles, and the brethren of the Lord"

Are these also about biological brothers of Jesus? Really a lot of brothers he had. And, even just consider the word 'Lord'. In the Gospels, when Jesus' family is addressed, they are always described in relation to "Jesus", not "the Lord". The latter alone should point us strongly toward the possibility that we are talking about a religious brotherhood, not a physical one. Paul's use of the same phrase in other letters settles it for me. Not that it would be impossible that Paul talked about a biological brother at some point - but we simply have no reason to believe that he did, over the interpretation that he is talking about (another) spiritual brother.
Flann 5 wrote: the gospels plainly teach an earthly historical Jesus and if in fact this was not the case they were actually being lied to.
Who are 'they'? The Gospel authors? Then, if they are (trying to) tell the truth, how do you explain why they never even discuss why they are writing so much stuff that is completely contradicted by the earlier Gospels? I think, that it is you who is advancing a conspiracy theory. Because for the Gospels to be intended as history, that is what is required: the Gospel writers and the early church must all have conspired to spread stories about Jesus that they knew were untrue.
Flann 5 wrote: You think you can dismiss Tacitus on Christ and Pilate because he wasn't contemporaneous with Christ but wrote circa 115 A.D.
Nope, but because he does not inform us of his source, it is at least as probable that the source was someone who related the Gospels, as that it was some other source, unknown to us. So it does not add anything.
Flann 5 wrote: So what exactly was Paul's esoteric teaching Johan?
We have already discussed this, no point in repeating if you're not interested in reading what I write.
Flann 5 wrote: You could have fooled me that the atonement was not the central teaching of Paul but then I can only see that large mass of exoteric stuff that repeatedly says this.
We have very little exoteric material from Paul, but the fact is that he is not discussing atonement much, if at all. Only through the reinterpretation during thousands of years of theology have some phrases been squared with what modern Christians believe.

The proper method for approaching all of this stuff is to wipe your mind free from anything you think you 'know' about Christianity and read the letters of Paul as though they were written by an ancient Chinese follower of Laozi. What does Paul actually write? What he does not write, we cannot fill in with what we know that modern Christians believe.
Flann 5 wrote: No, you've just completely ignored my whole point that Paul is contrasting human wisdom with divine wisdom. The whole context is pointing to the failure of human wisdom climaxing in human rulers crucifying the Lord of glory.
There is absolutely nothing about 'human' wisdom in this passage. This is circular reasoning on your part: you decide that the 'context' is specifically 'human' wisdom, even though the text never mentions it, and then from there you try to conclude that it must be human rulers crucifying Jesus. But there is no such context until you invent it.
Flann 5 wrote: even when it results in cosmic sperm banks and sub-lunar lunacy.
Oh, unlike the totally reasonable burning bushes, talking invisible sky daddies and zombies filling the streets of Jerusalem?

Really, we are talking about religious beliefs. To say some particular religious belief is 'lunacy' just because it happens not to be your own belief, that is simply bigotry.

Not sure where you get cosmic sperm banks from, but it reminds a little of the belief in Mazdaism that Zoroaster's sperm is preserved for some future use. The Mazdaists were a very significant inspiration for the Jews during the time of the Babylonian captivity (maybe they even contributed the idea of monotheism) so who knows, maybe there is something like that in Christianity too, though I am not familiar with it.
Flann 5 wrote: You never did explain where you got your parallel world of men,women,dogs,donkeys,vineyards and wheatfields from. Where did the early believers in your "heavenly messenger" think this was located?
It's not mine and it is not my fault that you are uneducated. Wikipedia is usually a good starting point.
Flann 5 wrote: And what is Paul talking about in Romans 9 when he says first in verse 3 that the Israelites are his kinsmen "according to the flesh" and then in verse 5 says that Christ came from Israel "according to the flesh" using precisely the same phrase? And incidentally in verse 33 Paul also quotes the same prophecy as Peter, of God laying in Zion a stone of stumbling and rock of offence.

http://biblehub.com/nasb/romans/9.htm Or what did the writer of Hebrews mean when he wrote, " For it is evident that our Lord was descended from Judah,a tribe as to which Moses spoke nothing concerning priests"? Hebrews 7:14.
If there is an argument there, I must have missed it. Yes, Paul believed that Jesus was of Jewish descent. He had to be in order to fulfil prophecy. Now, if God wants to create his son a Jew, he has the power to do so. It does not have to make much sense. Not much of the other stuff does anyway.
Flann 5 wrote: Can you explain how the early believers in your heavenly messenger thought that their messiah came to be of the seed of David "according to the flesh" and from the tribe of Judah without actually being born on earth from their physical lineage?
Probably the same way they believed that Jesus travelled into the Earth and ascended into the heavens. God did it!
Flann 5 wrote: to even entertain any notion of there being an actual God who ever does anything.
Of course you could be a six-headed dragon who just married my mother. It's possible. However, life is limited and we have to choose what possibilities we want to spend time considering.
Flann 5 wrote: That doesn't seem to be the scholarly view on the whole pagan dying and rising gods issue. Mostly cyclical vegetative representations. Nothing really to do with God dying once for human sins redemptively and rising again.
Now you are moving the goal posts, I never said any of them died for human sins. We were talking about resurrection. You said it didn't happen in Greek legends. I showed that you were completely wrong because it happened all over in Greek legends. Deal with it.
Flann 5 wrote: It should be obvious if you read Romans ch.1 or in I Corinthians 12 where Paul says that what the pagans sacrifice they sacrifice to demons,that Paul did not like pagan religions.
Of course he did not like them. You don't have to like someone to steal their stuff. Usually it's quite the opposite. Anyway, if you're completely unable to get with the idea that the Christians borrowed anything, even if not the specific idea of resurrection, then really you are so close-minded and plainly uneducated on the subject that there is no hope. There is massive evidence that they did.
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Re: Ch. 6: The Prior Probability (On the Historicity of Jesus by Richard Carrier)

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While Johan discovers the utter futility of arguing with Flann, I would like to take this opportunity to turn you on to an excellent book you may already be familiar with. Some of you may already own it. I've owned my copy for a number of years. It's called The Other Bible compiled and edited by Willis Barnstone. It will be a great help to you while reading the works of Carrier, Price, Doherty or any others of that persuasion as it contains little known early Christian, Gnostic and Jewish works which the scholars frequently refer to.

For example, in the beginning of Carrier's book, he talks about The Ascension of Isaiah as an example of Jesus as a celestial being being executed in the sub-lunar realm. The Other Bible has a version of The Ascension of Isaiah. Over 700 pages long, the book is divided into 10 sections: creation myths, histories and narratives, gospels, infancy gospels, acts, apocalypses, diverse Gnostics texts, Manichean and Mandean Gnostic texts, mystical documents.

Lots of your favorite early and proto-Christian works--The Book of the Secrets of Enoch, The Secret Book of John, The Hypostasis of the Archons, The Gospel of Philip, The Second Treatise of the Great Seth, Creation of the World and Alien Man, Kabbalah, The War of the Sons of Light and the Sons of Darkness, The Psalm of Solomon, The Odes of Solomon, The Gospel of Thomas, The Hymn of the Pearl, The Gospel of the Ebionites, The Secret Gospel of Mark, The Gospel of Nicodemus, The Protovangelium of James, The Acts of Peter, The Sibylline Oracles, The Apocalypse of Paul, Simon Magus, Valentinus and the Valentinian System of Ptolemaeus, Marcion, Carpocrates, the Zohar, etc. etc. etc. That was just a small sampling of the works contained in this book so just because I didn't mention it don't assume it isn't in there.

The one thing you get from reading these works is the feeling that how could the standard Christian story be true when you have all these incredibly diverse works about Jesus which bear little to no resemblance to one another. Where could such fantastical stories have come from if this was a creature of history? Who erased the biographical details and replaced them with elements of myth or sheer mysticism and why? If the so-called real Jesus didn't meet their needs or beliefs, why hang onto him?

The only plausible answer would be because the idea of him being historical was just one of the many diverse beliefs these early and proto-Christians had and likely came along rather late in the development of Christianity. We know it gained ascendancy through force or there would have been no reason for the Nag Hammadi Library to exist. No one hides a trove of books out in the middle of the desert for no reason. Obviously, they hid it to save it from destruction. Who were the destroyers? When you look at the types of books in the Nag Hammadi collection, you can't help but see it contains nothing remotely akin to what appears in the bible. It is a collection of beliefs and lore that the Church would have condemned outright. This appears to have happened in the 3rd century, by which time, the Church had consolidated its power and gotten its Jesus story down to a repeatable fable. Anything that interfered with that had to go.

We are very fortunate to have The Other Bible with us today. Were it not for people hiding these works, we would have little fill its pages. Now not all these works were hidden away. Some just weren't accepted as canonical but the churches or communities that had them, hung onto them. But there was not much of an effort to collect and tabulate such books. One imagines a huge Church library housing these materials and keeping them on file but no such thing existed. So it is remarkable that we still have a lot of these works and that only makes you wonder how much we must have lost. There had to be a lot more lost than saved. And I get the feeling that if certain types of Christians get their way today, books like The Other Bible might yet disappear from print.

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Funny but here is the cover that appears on my edition which was put out by HarperSanFrancisco. Nowadays, it appears that it's put out by Edgar Cayce Books. A good way to discourage scholarly interest in a work is to put Edgar Cayce's name on it and I have to wonder if this was intentional.
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Re: Ch. 6: The Prior Probability (On the Historicity of Jesus by Richard Carrier)

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JohanRonnblom wrote:

Flann 5 wrote:
The fact of the matter is that Carrier is plainly wrong in claiming that this Joshua the high priest was a celestial forerunner to his 'hallucinated' Jesus.



Maybe, but you have not presented any sort of intelligible argument that this is so. Just asserting that it is wrong is not very convincing, and in fact further discussion may be pointless if this is how you intend to 'debate'. Also, I have not defended that position anyway so even if you could make such an argument, it would be completely irrelevant to our discussion.
I didn't just assert that Carrier was wrong Johan. I made the intelligible argument that Joshua the son of Jehozadak the high priest is quite obviously human,earthly, Jerusalem based,and historically presented as Israel's high priest. He could not be Philo's celestial angelic being as Carrier imagines.

http://biblehub.com/nasb/zechariah/6.htm I have no problem with the branch being seen as a messianic future figure but he can not be that Joshua the high priest.
You just present the Christian's belief in a messiah called Jesus as a brute fact, so you can provide no good reason why this should have been taken to be a preexistent celestial messenger who was called Jesus. In short, you can provide no source that is precedent for your lower celestial Jesus, which might explain why they would have believed in such a person called Jesus, as being your heavenly messenger.
JohanRonnblom wrote:
Flann 5 wrote:
Certainly there is a dual strand of messianic prophecy which Christians understand



Now you are confusing modern religious beliefs with what proto-Christians believed 2000 years ago. Yes, modern Christians believe a lot of wacky and rarely interesting things. That is not relevant in this discussion.
Not at all, this is found in the writings of the early Christians in the gospels and letters. In the gospel Jesus asks Cleopas and his companion; "Ought not the Christ to have suffered all these things" and he goes through the Law,Psalms and Prophets with them showing this. Many of Jesus' parables also present this concept too of his leaving and returning again at a future time. Paul,Hebrews and practically all the N.T. includes this concept of a first and second coming so it's not some modern invention.
JohanRonnblom wrote:
Flann 5 wrote:
To even say he was a failed messiah shows your lack of understanding



No, your objection shows your fundamental lack of understanding. There is massive scholarly agreement that the idea of a crucified Jesus did not reflect extant Jewish expectations of the Messiah.

Modern Christian reinterpretations are irrelevant. We are talking about the beliefs 2000 years ago. Not today.
I agree that the expectation at the time was of a messiah who would come to Earth to reign righteously in Israel and deliver his people and that this was construed by many in a political sense.
But as I said, Jesus himself taught his disciples that his first coming was not to do this, and indeed there are messianic passages of the suffering servant of the Lord as in Isaiah 53, and elsewhere in the O.T.
These are not modern reinterpretations but are from the gospels and the N.T. of that time, and I see neither expectation at that time, or prophecy for a messiah coming to some lower celestial sphere to do anything.





Both can be found in the O.T.
JohanRonnblom wrote:For your information, 'heaven' is called that way because in ancient times, people believed it was actually in heaven. Today, religious folks tend to see 'heaven' as some sort of parallel dimension, something that has no place in the physical world. That is a modern concept, that has developed as we have gradually discovered that heaven is in fact not filled with demons, angels and gods. But in the era we are discussing, that is what people believed.
But actually their own writings show that their own understanding was that God is eternal and pre-exists the material creation. Genesis' opening words state as much.
There are many examples and for instance the writer of Hebrews quotes the O.T. book of Psalms to say; " He (God) also says," In the beginning Lord,you laid the foundations of the earth and the heavens are the work of your hands."
Pagan concepts are often taken as biblical concepts and I find references to pseudepigraphical writings taken as the standard understanding of the prophets themselves to be unjustified.
The firmament in Genesis is better translated as the expanse and some translations do in fact translate it that way. If it was the pagan dome it would make no sense in Genesis to say that the birds fly in their solid domed 'firmament'.
JohanRonnblom wrote: I say that I do not know the answer to one specific question, and now you say that because of this, I know nothing? Either you are illiterate or extremely dishonest. Perhaps desperately trying to convince yourself you don't have to listen to my arguments?

I don't know why Paul converted, just like you don't know exactly why the mailman arrived today at that specific time (or did not arrive). Some things we cannot know, simply because we have no facts and there are too many eminently plausible explanations for us to choose and guess. Then we just have to say: we don't know this. I know this is deeply frustrating to the religious mind, which simply cannot stand admitting that there are things they don't know.
There is a radical skepticism that is unjustified and if applied, history could never actually be discovered at all. There are good psychological and historical reasons for Paul to be considered a man of honesty and integrity. Despite your skepticism there is plenty of evidence that there was no selfish gain for Paul, but rather rejection and persecution was guaranteed, in abandoning a promising carreer in Judaism for Christianity.

There is plenty we don't know about history but there are things we can know too.
I do know why the mailman arrived and does so pretty much at the same time every day. That's his job and he has a schedule. I wouldn't know why he might not arrive some day,and maybe would or would not subsequently find this out.
I don't have to know everything,but some things are more important than others in terms of what I might need to know.
JohanRonnblom wrote:Flann 5 wrote:
I'm sure Richard Carrier will help you out with the execution of James the brother of Jesus who is called Christ, in Josephus' account.



I recommend you just read the text. With 'christ' in it, the gist is:
Ananus the high priest had James, brother of Jesus Christ, executed for no good reason. The Jewish elite complained to the procurator Albinus who removed Ananus and replaced him with Jesus, son of Damneus.

This makes absolutely no sense. If you remove the 'christ' remark, it makes perfect sense: Jesus, son of Damneus, was made high priest because his brother was one of those who had been unlawfully killed by Ananus. Add to that, we already know the document was tampered with, and that it makes absolutely no sense for Josephus to refer to 'christ' without explaining who that is.
You are simply dismissing Christian sources of information like Acts,Paul and Hebrews all of which show the reality of the hostility from the religious rulers first towards Christ then the apostles,Paul as a self described former persecuter and Hebrews as written to Hebrew Christians suffering persecution.

James was a leader in the Jerusalem church and a prime target and Ananus whose father condemned Christ took advantage of the delay in the transition between Roman procurators to vent his hostility.
Tim O' Neill provides a good if rather savage critique of Carrier's acccidental interpolation theory which you could google. There are good reasons it reads better as "the brother of Jesus who was called Christ". And actually the scholarly consensus view is that it is authentic.

http://www.bede.org.uk/jesusmyth.htm You can also find a good article on this site on Josephus and Christ.
JohanRonnblom wrote:

Flann 5 wrote:
And yes Christians do confirm this too but obviously when Paul talks about James the brother of the Lord he doesn't really mean biological brother and those mysterious guys who wrote the gospels just chucked in a few other named brothers and sisters of Jesus including James,to make it look convincing.



Just curious, what do you believe about the following passages:
Philippians 1:14: "...most of the brethren in the Lord, being confident through my bonds, are more abundantly bold to speak the word of God without fear"
1 Corinthians 9:5: "Have we no right to lead about a wife that is a believer, even as the rest of the apostles, and the brethren of the Lord"

Are these also about biological brothers of Jesus? Really a lot of brothers he had. And, even just consider the word 'Lord'. In the Gospels, when Jesus' family is addressed, they are always described in relation to "Jesus", not "the Lord". The latter alone should point us strongly toward the possibility that we are talking about a religious brotherhood, not a physical one. Paul's use of the same phrase in other letters settles it for me. Not that it would be impossible that Paul talked about a biological brother at some point - but we simply have no reason to believe that he did, over the interpretation that he is talking about (another) spiritual brother.
The expression characteristically used for all believers as brothers of Jesus is brothers in the Lord. The problem in Galatians is that Paul says he saw none of the apostles except Peter and James the brother of the Lord. There was a James the brother of John though I'm not sure if he was still alive at that time.
It's rather odd to single out James in this way and since we have an account in the gospels of biological brothers like James and Jude and Josephus' account and another similar account in early Christian tradition it seems the evidence strongly favours a biological brother in Galatians.
Why not say "none of the apostles except Peter the brother of the Lord?"

In 1 Corinthians Paul is contrasting himself with the apostles and the brothers of the Lord as him being unmarried and also working manually as well as doing pastoral work. Most commentators think the brothers of the Lord here refers to James and Jude who were prominent in the church and wrote N.T. letters also.
Paul is not just saying that Peter and the other apostles have the right but that they actually do have wives, or his argument would make no sense.

To take the brothers of the Lord in 1 Corinthians as all male Christians would imply that they were all married unlike Paul, and that would obviously not be the case.
The astrotheologists take Peter,John and the apostles to be invented allegorical personifications of signs of the zodiac, but this is palpable nonsense in the light of passages like these where they are unquestionably real historical people. But I'm done with debating that foolish theory.
JohanRonnblom wrote:Flann 5 wrote:
the gospels plainly teach an earthly historical Jesus and if in fact this was not the case they were actually being lied to.



Who are 'they'? The Gospel authors? Then, if they are (trying to) tell the truth, how do you explain why they never even discuss why they are writing so much stuff that is completely contradicted by the earlier Gospels? I think, that it is you who is advancing a conspiracy theory. Because for the Gospels to be intended as history, that is what is required: the Gospel writers and the early church must all have conspired to spread stories about Jesus that they knew were untrue.
I'm not sure what you mean here by the earlier gospels. Do you mean that the gospels contradict each other? There are plenty of alleged contradictions which Chistians have responded to for centuries. We don't have a guaranteed correct answer for everything but a considerable number have been well answered if skeptics take the trouble to look up those responses. There are a few difficult ones but possible solutions have been suggested for these.

Luke's prologue is very clear and anyone reading it would certainly understand it as being the intention of the author to convey historical biographical information.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kbhGAWXhdM0 Historical evidence for the Christian faith
JohanRonnblom wrote:Flann 5 wrote:
You think you can dismiss Tacitus on Christ and Pilate because he wasn't contemporaneous with Christ but wrote circa 115 A.D.



Nope, but because he does not inform us of his source, it is at least as probable that the source was someone who related the Gospels, as that it was some other source, unknown to us. So it does not add anything.
He doesn't say what his source is but he has a very critical view of Christians and it's unlikely he would just take their word for it. Tacitus has the reputation of being perhaps the best ancient historian and is on record as not just relying on hearsay but checking things carefully. He was a Roman senator and would have had access to any relevant official documents that may have been available. And again the overwhelming majority of scholars think this passage is authentic.
JohanRonnblom wrote:Flann 5 wrote:
So what exactly was Paul's esoteric teaching Johan?



We have already discussed this, no point in repeating if you're not interested in reading what I write.
What you said was that these writings were allegory. Allegories of what and what is the point of these allegories?
JohanRonnblom wrote:Flann 5 wrote:
You could have fooled me that the atonement was not the central teaching of Paul but then I can only see that large mass of exoteric stuff that repeatedly says this.



We have very little exoteric material from Paul, but the fact is that he is not discussing atonement much, if at all. Only through the reinterpretation during thousands of years of theology have some phrases been squared with what modern Christians believe.
JohanRonnblom wrote:Flann 5 wrote:
No, you've just completely ignored my whole point that Paul is contrasting human wisdom with divine wisdom. The whole context is pointing to the failure of human wisdom climaxing in human rulers crucifying the Lord of glory.



There is absolutely nothing about 'human' wisdom in this passage. This is circular reasoning on your part: you decide that the 'context' is specifically 'human' wisdom, even though the text never mentions it, and then from there you try to conclude that it must be human rulers crucifying Jesus. But there is no such context until you invent it.
I completely disagree on this. Romans and Galatians are both dealing with justification by faith. Paul explains that Christ was set forth as a propitiatory sacrifice through faith in his blood. The atonement is the basis of justification by faith not law or works which is the contrast.

My response on their being nothing about human wisdom in the passage is that the whole train of thought leading up to it and even coming after it is all about human wisdom contrasted with divine wisdom.
Paul determined to know nothing among them but Christ crucified because this is the power of God to save. And again atonement is central here and later he says that "Christ died for our sins,acccording to the sciptures." It is foolishness to the wise Greeks but is the very essence of the wisdom of God.
As far as I'm concerned simply reading the chapters is sufficient to make my point about context here.

http://biblehub.com/nasb/1_corinthians/1.htm and http://biblehub.com/nasb/1_corinthians/2.htm
JohanRonnblom wrote:

Flann 5 wrote:
even when it results in cosmic sperm banks and sub-lunar lunacy.



Oh, unlike the totally reasonable burning bushes, talking invisible sky daddies and zombies filling the streets of Jerusalem?

Really, we are talking about religious beliefs. To say some particular religious belief is 'lunacy' just because it happens not to be your own belief, that is simply bigotry.

Not sure where you get cosmic sperm banks from, but it reminds a little of the belief in Mazdaism that Zoroaster's sperm is preserved for some future use. The Mazdaists were a very significant inspiration for the Jews during the time of the Babylonian captivity (maybe they even contributed the idea of monotheism) so who knows, maybe there is something like that in Christianity too, though I am not familiar with it.
Carrier knows that Doherty's Judaic nature argument doesn't work,so he attempts to take an O.T. passage about the messiah coming from the seed of David to mean sperm of David and thinks that this was somehow thought to be stored somewhere in the sub-lunar zone until the time arrived.

He fails badly exegetically here. http://www.historical-jesus.info/70.html I don't agree with every point this guy makes but he's mostly right on exegetical points I think.
I don't know anything about Mazdaism. But again the Jews suffered devastating destruction,death and captivity directly related to their pagan idolatry and rebellion in the teeth of the prophets dire warnings. It's psychologically improbable that they would then blithely adopt Babylonian and Persian pagan ideas and practices while suffering this chastening experience.
JohanRonnblom wrote:Flann 5 wrote:
And what is Paul talking about in Romans 9 when he says first in verse 3 that the Israelites are his kinsmen "according to the flesh" and then in verse 5 says that Christ came from Israel "according to the flesh" using precisely the same phrase? And incidentally in verse 33 Paul also quotes the same prophecy as Peter, of God laying in Zion a stone of stumbling and rock of offence.

http://biblehub.com/nasb/romans/9.htm Or what did the writer of Hebrews mean when he wrote, " For it is evident that our Lord was descended from Judah,a tribe as to which Moses spoke nothing concerning priests"? Hebrews 7:14.



If there is an argument there, I must have missed it. Yes, Paul believed that Jesus was of Jewish descent. He had to be in order to fulfil prophecy. Now, if God wants to create his son a Jew, he has the power to do so. It does not have to make much sense. Not much of the other stuff does anyway.
This is like Doherty's argument but it's not really engaging with the texts meaningfully.
The argument in Hebrews is to Hebrew Christians. He says that Moses spoke nothing pertaining to priesthood of those belonging to the tribe of Judah but that's it's evident as he says, that our Lord came from the tribe of Judah. This is important for Hebrew Christians and more so in a situation where they are suffering duress and tempted to revert to Levitical Judaism.

A God did it argument for Jesus being of the tribe of Judah wouldn't wash with those Jews, and that's not what he's saying anyway. In fact he is appealing to the fact that they know he was of tribe of Judah by saying "it is evident that our Lord came from the tribe of Judah." It wouldn't be evident at all if he was just telling them that God transformed Jesus in the sublunar zone and he magically made him of the physical tribe and lineage of Judah.

http://www.bede.org.uk/price3.htm

Paul said that he himself was of the tribe of Benjamin. There is a common cultural currency of meaning to language and it's rather strange to simply abandon normative meanings, and especially when it's to support a dubious private theory which no one had noticed for millennia, til Doherty came along.
JohanRonnblom wrote:Flann 5 wrote:
It should be obvious if you read Romans ch.1 or in I Corinthians 12 where Paul says that what the pagans sacrifice they sacrifice to demons,that Paul did not like pagan religions.



Of course he did not like them. You don't have to like someone to steal their stuff. Usually it's quite the opposite. Anyway, if you're completely unable to get with the idea that the Christians borrowed anything, even if not the specific idea of resurrection, then really you are so close-minded and plainly uneducated on the subject that there is no hope. There is massive evidence that they did.
That's a strange theory and it's incoherent. As I said even Mettinger who is in a minority in accepting the pagan dying and rising gods idea, says there is no prima facie evidence that Christianity was constructed by borrowing from pagan religions.
I don't doubt that the church over the centuries did borrow pagan ideas and practices but that's not the same as the religious and cultural environment of the Jews in Israel at the time of it's foundation.

I notice D.B. is promoting a book about gnostic,esoteric and pseudepigraphical writings which promise the inside story. A strange brew. Mostly postdating the Christian gospels and N.T. Obviously the Ascension of Isaiah is pseudepigraphical and the guy was just making stuff up, but this is the kind of stuff mythicists build their ideas on.
The secret gospel of Mark turned out to be a modern fraud but most of this stuff is fraud too, as the apostle Philip for example couldn't have written a gospel centuries after he had died.

That's one of the reasons why the Christian church rejected this stuff and excluded it from the canon.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HlwV_gW5v4 Bad link. Type in youtube box. Craig Evans, Fabricating Jesus
Last edited by Flann 5 on Sun Oct 30, 2016 10:57 pm, edited 11 times in total.
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