How do you know for sure jesus did the things he did and really existed?

[pianodwarf]

will pray for you and hopefully my fellow Christians here will to to help rectify this.

I appreciate your sympathies. It's a tough economy these days. Fortunately, I have a rather unusual skillset that's in fairly high demand (I work in desktop support and am certified on both Windows and OS X, an extremely rare combination) so getting attention from recruiters isn't too hard.

Even so, though... ugh.

 

[childeye]

It is because truth is a property of language. In order to say something that is true, you have to say something first.

I could not say the wind blows, yet the wind will blow. I could say it does not blow yet it blows. How do my words determine Truth? I do believe you are using a subjective definition of the word true, as in speaking truth while I am talking about a Truth that exists that we might define knowledge and ignorance by. Like 1+1=2. It is true because it is true not because I said it is true. Do you believe in such Truth?

If I am a sexual masochist who wants you to do certain things to me, for example, it does not follow that I should do them to you. Nevertheless, it is a good guideline most of the time, which is why so many of the world's religions, including all the major ones that began before Jesus was born, mention it in one way or another.

Nonetheless you take into account that if you were me you might not want to have that done to you even as you have surmised.

Absolutely I do -- in fact, according to the ethical system to which I largely adhere (the one developed by Schopenhauer), compassion is the most fundamental characteristic of ethics. It may interest you to know, by the way, that unlike most atheist philosophers, Schopenhauer did not sneer at Christianity. Quite the contrary, he expressed great admiration for many of the precepts that Jesus espoused.

If you feel compassion and empathy then you know the Spirit of God. Of course I am not surprised at Schopenhauer. Never do I meet someone who disagrees with the Christ unless they misunderstand his words. More likely they despise those who say they are christians and blaspheme his name.

 

[pianodwarf]

if there were no humans left or any intellegence would the truth of the law of physics cease to exist?

Which law?

 

[jasoncran]

Which law?

all. physics dont depend on man nor does the universe need us to uphold what happens. that is your biggest problem. you didnt state only morality. you said any truth by your statement.

science doesnt deal in absolutes but it does operate within confined laws of order or it wouldnt work at all. ie we can observe laws of nature that govern things and determine their effects.

 

[pianodwarf]

I could not say the wind blows, yet the wind will blow. I could say it does not blow yet it blows. How do my words determine Truth?

Perhaps you misunderstand me. Your words do not "determine" truth... rather, truth is a property of language. In this case, your first statement would be true, and the second statement would be false. However, if there were no sentient beings, there would be no language at all, and thus nothing to which to ascribe the properties of truth or falsehood.

Nonetheless you take into account that if you were me you might not want to have that done to you even as you have surmised.

Yes, I understand that. On the other hand, I've lost count of how many times someone has "done unto me" what they thought they would have wanted, and instead caused me great pain. I would be very surprised if you could not say the same, unless perhaps you are very young, or you're a hermit, or something.

If you feel compassion and empathy then you know the Spirit of God.

No. My sense of compassion and empathy comes from a completely different source, specifically, a metaphorical acceptance of Schopenhauer's metaphysic. (Which, being atheistic, cannot have anything to do with deities.)

Never do I meet someone who disagrees with the Christ unless they misunderstand his words.

We in skeptical circles like to call this "having the magic decoder ring". If we point out that Christ said you cannot be his disciple unless you hate your family and even your own life, for example, Christians who are uncomfortable with that concept (which would probably be most of them) always try to explain it away.

More likely they despise those who say they are christians and blaspheme his name.

Well, I don't know whether that's more likely or not, but it certainly isn't unheard of. I had a roommate once who was an extremely fundamentalist Christian -- Biblical inerrantist, thought that only Christians could be saved, believed in literal eternal hellfire, the whole thing. During the time that I was rooming with him, he had a girlfriend with whom he was sexually active and with whom he was getting very serious, to the point of considering marriage. He knew that she wanted children and he didn't, but he knew that if he told her that, she'd leave him. So instead of telling her the truth about his having had a vasectomy, he lied to her and kept telling her he had a "low sperm count". Our other roommate, also Christian, kept challenging him on this, and he kept brushing it off, saying simply, "She doesn't need to know."

While I will readily admit that there wasn't much chance of my becoming a Christian in any event, his behavior in this regard drove me ever more firmly away from the faith. I like to think that I have a pretty strong ethical standard, and I did not want to become the kind of man who thought that it was just fine and dandy to lie to a prospective spouse about something as important as having had a vasectomy.

 

[pianodwarf]

all. physics dont depend on man nor does the universe need us to uphold what happens. that is your biggest problem.

It would be, if that was what I had actually said. It isn't.

you didnt state only morality. you said any truth by your statement.

Yes. Truth is a property of language, or, more specifically, the relationship between language and the object of the speaker's intentionality. "E=mc2" is true because the language that we have developed says it is. Similarly, "E=mc3" is false for the same reason. However, "E=mc2" can only be true or false within the context of the language that we have created to talk about it. Had our language developed differently, the reverse might well be the case.

I can understand your view. You are saying that Earth is still the third planet out from the Sun, whether anyone is there to say so or not. It's a view that I used to hold, myself, and that I actually still find myself leaning toward because it certainly seems counterintuitive. However, "Earth", "third", "planet", "out" and "Sun" are all human concepts to describe the world around us as we perceive it. Without human concepts, truth or falsity isn't a matter of "right or wrong", it's simply irrelevant.

To greatly exaggerate the point: "Left-handed unicorns are more prone to sneezing rainbows out of their earlobes if they have kidney problems." Is this sentence true or false? Neither. It is a sentence that has no external referent, so truth or falsity doesn't apply. The reverse is also the case: truth or falsity is irrelevant to external referents that are not being described by language.

With that, I'm afraid I need to sign off for the evening... as I said, lots of pressing matters, and while I greatly enjoy these discussions, I have to figure out how to keep a roof over my head. Will get back to everyone as quickly as time permits... Best regards.

 

[jasoncran]

It would be, if that was what I had actually said. It isn't.



Yes. Truth is a property of language, or, more specifically, the relationship between language and the object of the speaker's intentionality. "E=mc2" is true because the language that we have developed says it is. Similarly, "E=mc3" is false for the same reason. However, "E=mc2" can only be true or false within the context of the language that we have created to talk about it. Had our language developed differently, the reverse might well be the case.

I can understand your view. You are saying that Earth is still the third planet out from the Sun, whether anyone is there to say so or not. It's a view that I used to hold, myself, and that I actually still find myself leaning toward because it certainly seems counterintuitive. However, "Earth", "third", "planet", "out" and "Sun" are all human concepts to describe the world around us as we perceive it. Without human concepts, truth or falsity isn't a matter of "right or wrong", it's simply irrelevant.

To greatly exaggerate the point: "Left-handed unicorns are more prone to sneezing rainbows out of their earlobes if they have kidney problems." Is this sentence true or false? Neither. It is a sentence that has no external referent, so truth or falsity doesn't apply. The reverse is also the case: truth or falsity is irrelevant to external referents that are not being described by language.

With that, I'm afraid I need to sign off for the evening... as I said, lots of pressing matters, and while I greatly enjoy these discussions, I have to figure out how to keep a roof over my head. Will get back to everyone as quickly as time permits... Best regards.

ok

so if you die by the time this message is sent to you, does that it make unitelligable? yes we name them but someone order them. that is what you are saying that we seem to make the universe to appear to have laws and order, it has to as we wouldnt be hear to talk about it.

 

[pianodwarf]

I said:

How is this known or perceived to be known? Please be specific.

Hi, WIP, thank you for your patience. Life, as I said, is rather "interesting" for me right now. Anyway...


First, a correction: my statement that “there are indications within the text itself that it was written by someone who had never even visited the area†actually pertains to Mark, not Matthew. I apologize for the error. (Unlike most of the atheists in the activist circles in which I participate, I have not yet read the Bible in full, nor memorized as many important elements of it as I need to. I’m working on it.) Now that I’ve cleared that up:

To address what we know about Matthew and how we know it, we need to start with what we know about Mark and how we know it (for reasons that I will explain when we get into Matthew). Giving this a proper treatment would require a book, or more likely, quite a few books, so please excuse me for dealing with it in only a summary fashion.

First, Randel Helms, in Who Wrote the Gospels?, writes, "Anyone approaching Jerusalem from Jericho would come first to Bethany and then Bethphage, not the reverse. This (Mark 11:1 — pianodwarf) is one of several passages showing that Mark knew little about Palestine; we must assume, Dennis Nineham argues, that 'Mark did not know the relative positions of these two villages on the Jericho road’. Indeed, Mark knew so little about the area that he described Jesus going from Tyrian territory 'by way of Sidon to the Sea of Galilee through the territory of the Ten Towns' (Mark 7:31); this is similar to saying that one goes from London to Paris by way of Edinburgh and Rome. The simplist solution, says Nineham, is that 'the evangelist was not directly acquainted with Palestine’.†And it follows, of course, that if he was not directly acquainted with the territory, he could not have been an eyewitness.

Regarding the dating of Mark, we have this, from Irenaeus (an early bishop of the church): “After [Peter and Paul died], Mark, the disciple and interpreter of Peter, did also hand down to us in writing what had been preached by Peter.†In other words, Mark was written after the deaths of both Peter and Paul. Peter and Paul both died c.67, which leads most modern-day scholars to place Mark somewhere between 65-80, with most pretty much settled on about the year 70. There are other reasons to accept this range as well, such as what Robert Funk points out in The Five Gospels: "The sayings in Mark 13:9-13 all reflect detailed knowledge of events that took place - or ideas that were current - after Jesus' death: trials and persecutions of Jesus' followers, the call to preach the gospel to all nations, advice to offer spontaneous testimony, and the prediction that families would turn against one another are features of later Christian existence, not of events in Galilee or Jerusalem during Jesus' lifetime.â€

So regarding Mark, we know that it was not written by an eyewitness; at best, it was written by someone who was reporting what was told to him by someone claiming to be an eyewitness (although even that is disputed; prevailing bible scholarship holds that the author is unknown). We also know that it was written at least 35 years after the events that it purports to be a record of. How is this pertinent to what we know about Matthew?

You are no doubt well aware that there’s a fair amount of material duplicated in various areas throughout the three Synoptic Gospels. There are two primary schools of thought on gospel authorship. The one that currently holds favor is the “Two-Source Hypothesisâ€, while the minority viewpoint is Farrer-Goulder hypothesis. They both hold, however, that Mark was a source document for Matthew (and not, for example, the other way around), and there is almost no dissension from this view amongst Bible scholars.

It therefore follows that, since Mark was written no earlier than the year 65 and more likely around the year 70, Matthew obviously must have been written later than that. So when *was* it written? This is, unfortunately, a rather tough nut to crack, but there are a few things that help narrow it down at least a bit. Matthew 22:7, for example, appears — and I use that word deliberately — to be a description of the destruction of the temple, which took place in the year 70. And for reasons that I confess are not clear to me, scholars generally hold that Matthew would not have been written any sooner than a decade or so after Mark was written. At the other end of the scale, Irenaeus mentions the gospel in a letter he wrote in the year 110, and we can safely assume that he hadn’t read that gospel just a month or so prior to writing that letter. For these reasons and others, scholars are generally agreed that Matthew was written somewhere between 80 and 100.

Finally, to get to the “meat†of what you were asking about: Matthew’s authorship; specifically, how we know it was not written by the Apostle Matthew.

The only historical documents we have speaking to the authorship of Matthew are from Papias and Iranaeus, both of whom say that it was written in Hebrew by the Apostle Matthew. However, the earliest copies of Matthew are actually written in Greek, and the style in which Matthew is written gives no indication that it was translated from Hebrew or any other language. It is unlikely that both Papias and Iranaeus would have gotten the author right and the language wrong. Furthermore, over half of the material appearing in Matthew is copied from its predecessor, Mark, and it is not reasonable to assume that an eyewitness would have had any reason to rely so heavily (or indeed at all) on another source document. Eyewitnesses write about what they saw, not what other people saw. There are other indications as well, such as the fact that Matthew is written in the third person. Eyewitnesses ordinarily write in the first person (a problem that also exists with Mark, as it happens). And Matthew doesn't even claim that it is an eyewitness account. (Nor does Mark, for that matter.) All of the indications are that Matthew is essentially a “revised and enlarged edition†of Mark, as it were.

All of this means that Matthew is, at best, an anonymous person talking about another anonymous person talking about what a third anonymous person said that he saw, all of it uncorroborated. This is why skeptics are generally unwilling to accept Matthew, and Mark, as historically reliable documents.

 

[Pard]

Uh... All academic atheists acknowledge that Jesus existed. This question is as silly as asking "Did Darwin exist?"

 

[francisdesales]

Regarding the dating of Mark, we have this, from Irenaeus (an early bishop of the church): “After [Peter and Paul died], Mark, the disciple and interpreter of Peter, did also hand down to us in writing what had been preached by Peter.†In other words, Mark was written after the deaths of both Peter and Paul.

My friend, where exactly did you find the brackets that you provide above in the actual text??? Really. Let me quote you what Irenaeus actually writes without your added commentary...

After their departure, Mark, the disciple and interpreter of Peter, did also hand down to us in writing what had been preached by Peter. Irenaeus, Against Heresies, Book III, Chapter 1:1

Or...

Wherefore also Mark, the interpreter and follower of Peter, does thus commence his Gospel narrative: "The beginning of the Gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God; as it is written in the prophets, Behold, I send My messenger before Thy face, which shall prepare Thy way. Book III, Chapter 10:5

The Fragment of Papias also does not mention that Mark wrote the Gospel AFTER Peter died, but that he compiled it from his memories from Peter.

a tradition regarding Mark who wrote the Gospel, which he [Papias] has given in the following words]: And the presbyter said this. Mark having become the interpreter of Peter, wrote down accurately whatsoever he remembered. It was not, however, in exact order that he related the sayings or deeds of Christ. For he neither heard the Lord nor accompanied Him. Fragment of Papias, VI (10)

Nothing about "after Peter and Paul died"!!!

I could not find your added citation. Of course, it is begging the question, is it not? Presume that Mark wrote the Gospel after Peter died, then date the Gospel to 67 OR LATER and call it the first Gospel, because it is shorter. But we really do not know whether Peter was dead when Mark wrote his Gospel. We know his source comes from Peter, as Irenaeus makes clear, and he seems pretty certain that it is from a reliable source. But the two certainly could have been separated by their ministries (one in Egypt, the other in Rome?) and Mark wrote out of concern for the Egyptians who wanted a written testimony of the story of their Lord and Savior.

Thus, the dating you use is all based upon presumption that Mark wrote it after Peter died - which is purely speculation without any real cause - unless you are aware of another citation that I am not...

So regarding Mark, we know that it was not written by an eyewitness; at best, it was written by someone who was reporting what was told to him by someone claiming to be an eyewitness (although even that is disputed; prevailing bible scholarship holds that the author is unknown). We also know that it was written at least 35 years after the events that it purports to be a record of. How is this pertinent to what we know about Matthew?

And again, we are back to Alexander the Great, are we not???

Even IF 35 years later was correct (pure speculation, see above), it is based upon eyewitness accounts of something that WOULD BE REMEMBERED, don't you think? IF Jesus raised somoene from the dead and was Himself seen after dying, alive, don't you think Peter et al would REMEMBER the most incredible thing ever witnessed for the rest of their lives??? Time is not a factor on such things. People remember such transformative experiences. I remember Marine Corp bootcamp from 30 years ago... I am not surprised that Peter would remember the Transfiguration, IF it happened 35 years after Mark recounted it IN WRITING...

You are no doubt well aware that there’s a fair amount of material duplicated in various areas throughout the three Synoptic Gospels. There are two primary schools of thought on gospel authorship. The one that currently holds favor is the “Two-Source Hypothesisâ€, while the minority viewpoint is Farrer-Goulder hypothesis. They both hold, however, that Mark was a source document for Matthew (and not, for example, the other way around), and there is almost no dissension from this view amongst Bible scholars.

It therefore follows that, since Mark was written no earlier than the year 65 and more likely around the year 70, Matthew obviously must have been written later than that. So when *was* it written? This is, unfortunately, a rather tough nut to crack, but there are a few things that help narrow it down at least a bit. Matthew 22:7, for example, appears — and I use that word deliberately — to be a description of the destruction of the temple, which took place in the year 70. And for reasons that I confess are not clear to me, scholars generally hold that Matthew would not have been written any sooner than a decade or so after Mark was written. At the other end of the scale, Irenaeus mentions the gospel in a letter he wrote in the year 110, and we can safely assume that he hadn’t read that gospel just a month or so prior to writing that letter. For these reasons and others, scholars are generally agreed that Matthew was written somewhere between 80 and 100.

"It therefore follows" based upon begging the question and ignoring the earliest witnesses of which came first.

The problem with this presumption by these "scholars" is that it is based upon the theory of "evolution", in that shorter, less in-depth writings must be dated earlier while longer versions of the Gospel must be copies of the shorter compilation. This is an interesting theory, but this is not universally accepted, not by the original Church Fathers or people of today, such as Carmignac, who disagree with the "commonly presumed Mark first because it is shorter" pattern. Who knows who copied from whom?

It is very difficult to establish who copied from whom it these cases when they are relatively contemporary, nor can we automatically accept that "shorter must be first". In addition, we must not simply toss out the window the early Church's oral tradition of Matthew-first because it doesn't mesh with "Mark is shorter so it must be first". And even with this said, virtually all of these scholars agree that there was an oral tradition that developed and that a written source predated the Greek Gospels (as Irenaeus and Papias note...) Ancient tradition and history attributes "Mark" to Peter who related his experiences to "Mark".

You mention from another author that Mark was not even familiar with the landscape of Palestine. Very well - wouldn't it make sense that such a person would indeed SHORTEN the material and only present the necessities? At any rate, the Synoptic problem is not entirely solved so that we can, without doubt, claim that Mark was first, and then use that to date Matthew (based upon perhaps a false assumption).

I would suggest reading "The Birth of the Synoptics" by Jean Carmignac, a short, 100 page book, that convincingly proves that the Gospels were redacted much earlier than claimed by some "scholars", much closer to the events they claim to have witnessed.

Regards

 

[Chris]

Uh... All academic atheists acknowledge that Jesus existed. This question is as silly as asking "Did Darwin exist?"

ok a school kid declared to me "If jesus actually existed" mid sentence, last week. ask a lot of people and heaps would say he didn't. thats the response I get of quite a few people. If we get that response we should have answers I suppose.

 

[WIP]

I said:



And WIP asked:



Hi, WIP, thank you for your patience. Life, as I said, is rather "interesting" for me right now. Anyway...


First, a correction: my statement that “there are indications within the text itself that it was written by someone who had never even visited the area†actually pertains to Mark, not Matthew. I apologize for the error. (Unlike most of the atheists in the activist circles in which I participate, I have not yet read the Bible in full, nor memorized as many important elements of it as I need to. I’m working on it.) Now that I’ve cleared that up:

To address what we know about Matthew and how we know it, we need to start with what we know about Mark and how we know it (for reasons that I will explain when we get into Matthew). Giving this a proper treatment would require a book, or more likely, quite a few books, so please excuse me for dealing with it in only a summary fashion.

First, Randel Helms, in Who Wrote the Gospels?, writes, "Anyone approaching Jerusalem from Jericho would come first to Bethany and then Bethphage, not the reverse. This (Mark 11:1 — pianodwarf) is one of several passages showing that Mark knew little about Palestine; we must assume, Dennis Nineham argues, that 'Mark did not know the relative positions of these two villages on the Jericho road’. Indeed, Mark knew so little about the area that he described Jesus going from Tyrian territory 'by way of Sidon to the Sea of Galilee through the territory of the Ten Towns' (Mark 7:31); this is similar to saying that one goes from London to Paris by way of Edinburgh and Rome. The simplist solution, says Nineham, is that 'the evangelist was not directly acquainted with Palestine’.†And it follows, of course, that if he was not directly acquainted with the territory, he could not have been an eyewitness.

Regarding the dating of Mark, we have this, from Irenaeus (an early bishop of the church): “After [Peter and Paul died], Mark, the disciple and interpreter of Peter, did also hand down to us in writing what had been preached by Peter.†In other words, Mark was written after the deaths of both Peter and Paul. Peter and Paul both died c.67, which leads most modern-day scholars to place Mark somewhere between 65-80, with most pretty much settled on about the year 70. There are other reasons to accept this range as well, such as what Robert Funk points out in The Five Gospels: "The sayings in Mark 13:9-13 all reflect detailed knowledge of events that took place - or ideas that were current - after Jesus' death: trials and persecutions of Jesus' followers, the call to preach the gospel to all nations, advice to offer spontaneous testimony, and the prediction that families would turn against one another are features of later Christian existence, not of events in Galilee or Jerusalem during Jesus' lifetime.â€

So regarding Mark, we know that it was not written by an eyewitness; at best, it was written by someone who was reporting what was told to him by someone claiming to be an eyewitness (although even that is disputed; prevailing bible scholarship holds that the author is unknown). We also know that it was written at least 35 years after the events that it purports to be a record of. How is this pertinent to what we know about Matthew?

You are no doubt well aware that there’s a fair amount of material duplicated in various areas throughout the three Synoptic Gospels. There are two primary schools of thought on gospel authorship. The one that currently holds favor is the “Two-Source Hypothesisâ€, while the minority viewpoint is Farrer-Goulder hypothesis. They both hold, however, that Mark was a source document for Matthew (and not, for example, the other way around), and there is almost no dissension from this view amongst Bible scholars.

It therefore follows that, since Mark was written no earlier than the year 65 and more likely around the year 70, Matthew obviously must have been written later than that. So when *was* it written? This is, unfortunately, a rather tough nut to crack, but there are a few things that help narrow it down at least a bit. Matthew 22:7, for example, appears — and I use that word deliberately — to be a description of the destruction of the temple, which took place in the year 70. And for reasons that I confess are not clear to me, scholars generally hold that Matthew would not have been written any sooner than a decade or so after Mark was written. At the other end of the scale, Irenaeus mentions the gospel in a letter he wrote in the year 110, and we can safely assume that he hadn’t read that gospel just a month or so prior to writing that letter. For these reasons and others, scholars are generally agreed that Matthew was written somewhere between 80 and 100.

Finally, to get to the “meat†of what you were asking about: Matthew’s authorship; specifically, how we know it was not written by the Apostle Matthew.

The only historical documents we have speaking to the authorship of Matthew are from Papias and Iranaeus, both of whom say that it was written in Hebrew by the Apostle Matthew. However, the earliest copies of Matthew are actually written in Greek, and the style in which Matthew is written gives no indication that it was translated from Hebrew or any other language. It is unlikely that both Papias and Iranaeus would have gotten the author right and the language wrong. Furthermore, over half of the material appearing in Matthew is copied from its predecessor, Mark, and it is not reasonable to assume that an eyewitness would have had any reason to rely so heavily (or indeed at all) on another source document. Eyewitnesses write about what they saw, not what other people saw. There are other indications as well, such as the fact that Matthew is written in the third person. Eyewitnesses ordinarily write in the first person (a problem that also exists with Mark, as it happens). And Matthew doesn't even claim that it is an eyewitness account. (Nor does Mark, for that matter.) All of the indications are that Matthew is essentially a “revised and enlarged edition†of Mark, as it were.

All of this means that Matthew is, at best, an anonymous person talking about another anonymous person talking about what a third anonymous person said that he saw, all of it uncorroborated. This is why skeptics are generally unwilling to accept Matthew, and Mark, as historically reliable documents.

Thank you for taking the time to put together what seems like a well thought out and detailed answer. I am no scholar or historian but the gist of my question was answered.

With the exception of the route taken from Jericho to Jerusalem, your response is entirely based upon the written evidence of others. I'd also like to suggest that the route taken doesn't have to be direct. Using one document to dispel another is no more valid that hear-say.

That's the point of my question. Why do we often find it easier to put our faith in all these other documents than to put our faith in the documents of the Holy Bible?

My faith is in the Holy Bible. I believe it to be true, accurate, and divinely inspired by God himself. The recorded events are from the past and impossible for anyone to refute with absolute certainty and so I have no reason to change my beliefs. We can formulate theories based on other written or recorded evidence but that too is no more valid. The strongest evidence we have for the validity of the Bible is its endurance. People were and are continually willing to lay their lives on the line to stand by those writings and beliefs. If they were not true, Christianity would have died into oblivion long ago.

 

[pianodwarf]

{Extended analysis of dissenting viewpoint}

Hello, Francis, thank you for your response.

My source for most of what I wrote was the Wikipedia articles on the gospels and the web site Early Christian Writings: New Testament, Apocrypha, Gnostics, Church Fathers . I am already aware of most of what you said here. Yes, there are other possible explanations for (for example) why Mark got the geography of the area wrong; some people even claim that he actually didn't get it wrong and try to back up that viewpoint as well. I was simply explaining the majority viewpoint, explaining why it is the majority viewpoint, and saying that it is the one that I hold as well.

The analogy to Alexander the Great doesn't work for me. First, there is quite a bit more evidence of his existence than there is for Jesus... indeed, even though he lived and died several centuries before Jesus, we even know Alexander's birth dates and death dates down to one day either way, whereas we're not even sure of the years of Jesus' birth and death.

Also, the claims about Jesus are rather more audacious. Alexander the Great was said to be a great military leader, which is not a far-fetched claim. The case with Jesus, however, is different. Setting aside the authorship of the gospels just for the moment, we have claims he made that can be tested today. He said, for example, that anyone who believed in him would have powers equaling and even exceeding his own, which does not appear to be the case.

 

[pianodwarf]

Uh... All academic atheists acknowledge that Jesus existed. This question is as silly as asking "Did Darwin exist?"

There are a few in academia who question whether Jesus existed, but most do not. The question of whether he existed, however, is separate from the question of whether the gospels are historically accurate.

 

[pianodwarf]

Thank you for taking the time to put together what seems like a well thought out and detailed answer. I am no scholar or historian but the gist of my question was answered.

I'm not a historian or bible scholar, either, but I do the best I can.

That's the point of my question. Why do we often find it easier to put our faith in all these other documents than to put our faith in the documents of the Holy Bible?

As the saying goes, "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof." For example, consider if I were to say each of the following things to you:

1) "I can bench press fifty pounds." You shrug and think nothing of it. For an adult male who's reasonably fit (which I am), bench pressing fifty pounds is very easy.

2) "I can bench press 150 pounds." You admire my prowess, but probably still take me at my word. Some skeptics might want to see it before they'll believe it, but if they watch me actually do it, they'll be satisfied.

3) "I can bench press 500 pounds." Now you're skeptical, especially because I'm of average build and obviously not a weightlifter. You'll want to see me actually do it before believing me, and you'll likely also want to examine the equipment for hidden hydraulic lifts or the like before you're satisfied.

4) "I can bench press 2,000 pounds." At this point, you automatically assume that my statement is false. If it occurs to you to Google it, for example, you'll learn that the current world record is 1,075 pounds, and there's no way you're going to buy that a guy like me is able to nearly double it. Even if you see me do it and can't find the equipment rigged in any way, you're going to assume that there's some other form of trickery going on that you're not finding. The only way there's even a chance you'll believe me is if I do it under carefully controlled conditions, with various types of experts monitoring everything, and even then, you're probably going to be skeptical, at best.

While it is true that one cannot state, with certainty, that the deeds attributed to Jesus in the gospels never occurred, they are claims far more extraordinary than merely bench-pressing 2,000 pounds, and for the skeptic, the burden of proof is accordingly much higher. The alternative path is the one you choose, which is to take it on faith. Skeptics regard taking anything on faith as unwise, and indeed, most skeptics (including me) aren't even capable of it.

 

[pianodwarf]

Thank you all for talking with me. I'm going to need to leave for the next several days -- I have to start packing for my move (which is taking place on July 15th) and I also have approximately one billion résumés I need to send out, so I need to focus on all of that for a while. I'll try to return this coming Saturday. I just don't want anyone here to think that I'm ignoring you or anything like that.

Best regards, P

 

[francisdesales]

My source for most of what I wrote was the Wikipedia articles on the gospels and the web site Early Christian Writings: New Testament, Apocrypha, Gnostics, Church Fathers . I am already aware of most of what you said here. Yes, there are other possible explanations for (for example) why Mark got the geography of the area wrong; some people even claim that he actually didn't get it wrong and try to back up that viewpoint as well. I was simply explaining the majority viewpoint, explaining why it is the majority viewpoint, and saying that it is the one that I hold as well.

As you may know, history and science are often fraught with the poison called "conservatism". This is the idea that new theories that contradict the "accepted norm" have a very difficult time gaining traction in their respective acedemia community. Take the theory of evolution. Without arguing whether it is a law or not, truth or not, it represents the best theory of how species develop for the majority. This becomes the accepted norm in the field. However, when other scientists present alternative theories, these scientists are chastised by their respective community. They are purposely put aside and their theories are hardly given consideration. They are literally attacked in the press and within their community. If entrenched long enough, conservatism becomes akin to an accepted belief held so firmly as to vie with a religious fanaticism. Or if evolution is too near and dear to your heart, consider how Copernicus' heliocentric theory was first accepted by the conservative scientific community.

It is the nature of the "beast" that old theories remain in place, even when they have readily identifiable holes in their presentation. People do not WANT to "reinvent the wheel". They are comfortable with "Mark was first written of the Gospels, and in Greek, and thus, must be dated to post 67, following Peter's death". Even when men 100 years removed write that Matthew wrote a Hebrew Gospel, (perhaps they even READ IT!) "scholars" contest that simple historical fact because it ruins their dependence upon the Mark - Matthew order.

If it is acknowleged that Mark was previously written in Hebrew, there is no difficulty in saying that Matthew was also written in Hebrew, accepting the ancient sources. And there is strong evidence that Mark was indeed first written with a Semitic origin. This, coupled with the idea of Q pushes the dating of Mark back quite a bit, accepting that the Greek version we have is a redacted version probably not written by an original Apostle. However, strong philosphical hurddles remain for this idea to gain traction - it is against the "accepted norm"...

And soi the earth must remain flat because it is "accepted norm".

What does all of this mean? That the majority isn't necessarily correct and that they do have a vested interest in maintaining the status quo on this subject. One must examine the evidence for themselves and decide whether the "majority" is indeed correct in their dating... I have presented some ideas for you to consider.

The analogy to Alexander the Great doesn't work for me.

Yours is based upon a philosphical BELIEF, not an historical one.

It follows that, historically speaking, if you accept the details of the life of Alexander based upon the witness of men writing from sources that we no longer possess 300-500 years after the fact, then, if one is unbiased, they must also accept the biography of Jesus of Nazareth, AT THE VERY LEAST, that Jesus existed. Quite frankly, there is no historical evidence to DENY his existence, as we have historical narratives written by contemporaries who COULD HAVE been challenged. We have Jewish sources that question who Jesus was and who his father was (a centurion, vs the Christian version), but there is NO Jewish source that debates his existence, nor even his miracles, attributed to Satan, as the Christian bible verifies that refrain from hostile witnesses, the Pharisees.

Why didn't the Jews use the strategy of "Jesus never existed"? Because they KNEW that Jesus DID exist and such a tact never would have been accepted by anyone of the day.

The basis for "Jesus didn't exist" is based entirely on wishful thinking and philosophical a priori statements, not on any historical or scientific evidence.

Also, the claims about Jesus are rather more audacious.

Conquering the known world with some 50000 Greeks is not an audacious claim??? Defeating an army 10 times its size at Arbela at the place of Alexander's enemy's choosing is not an audacious claim???

As I said, HOSTILE Jewish sources do not contest Jesus' miracles. Hostile witnesses verify not only that he performed them, but that he obviously existed. Furthermore, there were people who could have easily REFUTED the existence of those events, if they were contemporary folllowers of this "prophet". We don't find anyone writing "I was there, and there was no miracle of the loaves. We brought our own food..." We don't find such conflicting stories in those early days when Christianity spread like wildfire.

Alexander the Great was said to be a great military leader, which is not a far-fetched claim. The case with Jesus, however, is different.

The question is whether Jesus existed. Not whether he rose from the dead or performed miracles.

You do not believe in the miracles, so the easiest way to not face that is to deny he even existed through silence from some contemporary Roman historians. In addition, you speak of his biographers being removed from Jesus "life" by 35 years!!! So how could anyone know anything about someone who lived 35 year ago??? I think I have answered both of your "historical" issues and point out that you have conducted special pleading against Jesus by not having the same historical "bar" set for both Alexander and Jesus. The very arguments you use vs Jesus you uphold, at a much more lax set of standards, for Alexander. Isn't this hypocritical?

My friend, this makes your disbelief in the area of philosophy, not history. Jesus existed, there is no doubt of that, even less doubt than Alexander existed.

Regards

 

[francisdesales]

I'm not a historian or bible scholar, either, but I do the best I can.



As the saying goes, "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof." For example, consider if I were to say each of the following things to you:

1) "I can bench press fifty pounds." You shrug and think nothing of it. For an adult male who's reasonably fit (which I am), bench pressing fifty pounds is very easy.

2) "I can bench press 150 pounds." You admire my prowess, but probably still take me at my word. Some skeptics might want to see it before they'll believe it, but if they watch me actually do it, they'll be satisfied.

3) "I can bench press 500 pounds." Now you're skeptical, especially because I'm of average build and obviously not a weightlifter. You'll want to see me actually do it before believing me, and you'll likely also want to examine the equipment for hidden hydraulic lifts or the like before you're satisfied.

4) "I can bench press 2,000 pounds." At this point, you automatically assume that my statement is false. If it occurs to you to Google it, for example, you'll learn that the current world record is 1,075 pounds, and there's no way you're going to buy that a guy like me is able to nearly double it. Even if you see me do it and can't find the equipment rigged in any way, you're going to assume that there's some other form of trickery going on that you're not finding. The only way there's even a chance you'll believe me is if I do it under carefully controlled conditions, with various types of experts monitoring everything, and even then, you're probably going to be skeptical, at best.

While it is true that one cannot state, with certainty, that the deeds attributed to Jesus in the gospels never occurred, they are claims far more extraordinary than merely bench-pressing 2,000 pounds, and for the skeptic, the burden of proof is accordingly much higher. The alternative path is the one you choose, which is to take it on faith. Skeptics regard taking anything on faith as unwise, and indeed, most skeptics (including me) aren't even capable of it.

This is an entirely spurious argument, since the discussion is about whether someone even EXISTED, not whether event "x" ever occured. If someone said "John Doe benched 2000 pounds", would you automatically think there was no such person as John Doe? Or would you think the claim itself is questionable and there may very well be a John Doe?

Regards

 

[Bob Carabbio]

"The deaths of the apostles is actually strong evidence that there is a power of darkness working in men to stop the Truth from being preached. It wasn't coincidence they all died for preaching the Gospel. There certainly is solid evidence that all men have an absolute by which they must reason and this is their image of god."

And all the folks who were "Witnesses" to the Book of Mormon were also killed for their testimony.

So much for "martyrs".

 

[WIP]

I'm not a historian or bible scholar, either, but I do the best I can.



As the saying goes, "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof." For example, consider if I were to say each of the following things to you:

1) "I can bench press fifty pounds." You shrug and think nothing of it. For an adult male who's reasonably fit (which I am), bench pressing fifty pounds is very easy.

2) "I can bench press 150 pounds." You admire my prowess, but probably still take me at my word. Some skeptics might want to see it before they'll believe it, but if they watch me actually do it, they'll be satisfied.

3) "I can bench press 500 pounds." Now you're skeptical, especially because I'm of average build and obviously not a weightlifter. You'll want to see me actually do it before believing me, and you'll likely also want to examine the equipment for hidden hydraulic lifts or the like before you're satisfied.

4) "I can bench press 2,000 pounds." At this point, you automatically assume that my statement is false. If it occurs to you to Google it, for example, you'll learn that the current world record is 1,075 pounds, and there's no way you're going to buy that a guy like me is able to nearly double it. Even if you see me do it and can't find the equipment rigged in any way, you're going to assume that there's some other form of trickery going on that you're not finding. The only way there's even a chance you'll believe me is if I do it under carefully controlled conditions, with various types of experts monitoring everything, and even then, you're probably going to be skeptical, at best.

While it is true that one cannot state, with certainty, that the deeds attributed to Jesus in the gospels never occurred, they are claims far more extraordinary than merely bench-pressing 2,000 pounds, and for the skeptic, the burden of proof is accordingly much higher. The alternative path is the one you choose, which is to take it on faith. Skeptics regard taking anything on faith as unwise, and indeed, most skeptics (including me) aren't even capable of it.

Understood. Faith in God and scripture is a difficult concept for most anyone. What I also realize by my own experience and in others I have witnessed is that once one becomes faithful, it's amazing how our lives are transformed and we then have about as much difficulty understanding those that don't have it.

I appreciate that you are open enough to at least talk about this topic without getting defensive or putting up barriers. I find chatting with you to be quite interesting and enlightening. Thank you.