Correct. You'd think an omnipotent god communicating the most important truth ever to his creation could do it in a way that is beyond reproach. We don't have Jesus writing stuff. We don't have his contemporaries writing stuff. We don't have any meaningful outside corroboration of anything in the Bible. It's not only a terrible medium for an omnipotent god to choose but he did it absolutely poorly. The most important message ever shouldn't be passed down through invisible trees of connectivity and written years after his sons death. An omnipotent gif would know how this would be seen in the future and not communicate such an important truth in such a dodgy way.

Stay focused! You were saying incorrect things about new testament authorship and using really bad analogies to support it.

Neat. Once again you offer nothing. Nothing to support whatever argument you have and no tangible criticism to anything I've offered. I'd think you could do better with the omnipotent god of the universe on your side.

Honestly big mad atheist coming here to spout ignorance to all us rubes is a bit played out. Low energy prodding is really about the right effort : reward. Brandolini's law doesn't allow for much better.

Zobel said:

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Honestly big mad atheist coming here to spout ignorance to all us rubes is a bit played out. Low energy prodding is really about the right effort : reward. Brandolini's law doesn't allow for much better.

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Neat. What I think is played out is Christian's who don't address arguments and try and maintain their moat by simply dismissing people as uninformed atheists. If an omnipotent god is on your side it shouldn't be hard to defeat anything I've said.

Sorry I'm not here to defeat anything or have arguments. Your original statement about the timing of writing about Jesus was incorrect and is outside of scholarly consensus about the writings of the NT. The whole childish taunting thing really doesn't inspire confidence this is going to be a good discussion. You get what you give.

Cheers!

Zobel said:

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Sorry I'm not here to defeat anything or have arguments. Your original statement about the timing of writing about Jesus was incorrect and is outside of scholarly consensus about the writings of the NT. The whole childish taunting thing really doesn't inspire confidence this is going to be a good discussion. You get what you give.

Cheers!

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Lol what?!?! Everything I said is entirely in the scholarly consensus. I do agree that your childish taunting snd complete lack of engagement to anything I've said indicates there is no discussion possible between you and I. You have made it abundantly clear you have nothing to offer.

Lurking a long time before finally joining TA. Lurking even longer before posting on THIS board.

Whose wedding did Jesus attend in Cana when he turned the water to wine?

An L of an Ag said:

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Lurking a long time before finally joining TA. Lurking even longer before posting on THIS board.

Whose wedding did Jesus attend in Cana when he turned the water to wine?

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That's a good question, and not one scripture reveals. The wine is representative of the beginning of Jesus' ministry and a parallel to Moses turning water into blood. It reveals a power Jesus has and the nature of his ministry, as well as his reluctance to use it/show his power directly to those around him. The reaction to the wine and note 'you have saved the best wine for last' is my favorite part of the story.

It's often the case in the New Testament that what is not told (particularly historical details) is fun to speculate/ponder yet doesn't have any theological significance in itself. Jesus revealing himself, and how those around him perceived him, is fun to read among the gospel authors.

What dates are you assuming for the Gospels? Where do you assume they were written? And to whom?

Authorship and source criticism are far more complicated than is generally assumed.

Consensus seems to be 70ADish to 110ADish. Not sure where or to whom. Seems they could draw off of an earlier Q text.

ifeelold said:

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Zobel said:

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Honestly big mad atheist coming here to spout ignorance to all us rubes is a bit played out. Low energy prodding is really about the right effort : reward. Brandolini's law doesn't allow for much better.

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Neat. What I think is played out is Christian's who don't address arguments and try and maintain their moat by simply dismissing people as uninformed atheists. If an omnipotent god is on your side it shouldn't be hard to defeat anything I've said.

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Where do I sign up to get a moat??

70 is about right for Mark, although I think it was written between 66 and 70 which is a minority view. Most liberal scholars put it at 70 or after. It doesn't, however, mention his childhood. It was likely written somewhere in Syrio-Palestine to a Gentile audience.

Matthew and Luke are usually dated around 90 but the range here is much larger and 90 is typically a "sweet spot" of sorts. There is certainly a literary relationship between the two suggesting a shared source, "Q", which is older and apparently is a written account of "Jesus sayings". Q is unknown to Mark. John is its own thing. They also likely use a source(s) the other Gospel does not. Despite the shared source, they don't seem to be aware of each other although it is possible that later editors to these texts take the other into account due to problems with specific verses to fit with the two-source hypothesis (Q). The sources here are interesting as they are significantly older and far closer in time and proximity to Jesus. The same can be said for "proto-Mark", the early source(s) for Mark's Gospel. However, we only have literary evidence of their existence within the Gospels. No document had ever been found.

This doesn't mention the oral history in which even these earlier written sources rely. Modern people typically have a low opinion of the reliability of oral sources, but given that most common people were illiterate (or mostly illiterate) and that written texts were generally unavailable and expensive, oral history was their main method of passing down information. And Jesus was a common prophet of the "little tradition" rather than a court prophet of the "royal tradition" employed by the temple. So these oral sources would be the only ones available as a prophet to the common and the poor and opposed by the official and the rich. Those in oral cultures, as opposed to print cultures like our own, have far greater capacity to recall information and disseminate it to others accurately, a skill, sadly, that we have mostly lost. Modern scholarship now has a higher level of confidence in oral sources than we did in the past as a result of our better understanding of oral vs print cultures.

All this to say that I don't think your multiple degrees of Kevin Bacon reference is very useful to the Gospels. Whether or not you take the traditional view or the liberal critical view, the connection with what is written and the life/teachings of Jesus is closer than you seem to be suggesting.

However, I agree that the stories of Jesus's childhood in the Gospels aren't historically reliable. But I don't think that modern historical concerns matter all that much to the writers, readers, or listeners of the day.

...phew. Got carried away there. Apologies.

I agree with everything you said.

Finished a book the other day about a WWII POW published for the first time in 2019. By the standard of ifeelold that's unreliable and should probably be treated as fiction.

That's totally the same thing.

"Pretty much nothing was written about Jesus until long after he was dead and those who did write about him were about 64 degrees of Kevin bacon away from Jesus."

Turns out "a long time" is 15-80 years (from probable dating of St Paul's epistles to what you accept as a later dating of the gospels).

Can you explain the difference based on these statements between, say, the writing of St Luke roughly 60 years after the events it describes and Stephen Ambrose writing of Band of Brothers at roughly the same interval?

I have no idea what book you read but WW2 and POWs and POW camps have been heavily documented from many sources for decades. There likely are still some alive today who experienced that though that generation is dying out. They have children living who have heard their stories and many wrote about their experiences in various forms. We have official records from various govts about these things. So there are a vast array of places to get information and check information on the subject.

The gospels were in some form passed down from word of mouths or previous texts. What we have came decades after Jesus lived. Some things can be corroborated but it's harder this far out. I don't doubt a teacher named Jesus existed and was killed by the Roman's. I highly doubt the references about his childhood which are few and further removed from the texts we have. The nativity story simply doesn't make sense. There doesn't seem to be a good fit for a census at the time and the idea that everyone would travel to their ancestral home would be economically debilitating for the entire region and defeat the entire purpose of a census. That's a giant red flag that this part of the telling has been made up. The motivation seems to be to get Jesus, well known to be a Nazarene,
to be born in Bethlehem to fulfill the prophecy I think made by micah.

Were the apostles illiterate? You're paling around with the Son of God, hearing his message, learning from him but you choose not to write anything down? It only took 70-110 years after the fact to write it down? It's one thing to talk about events that happened, it's a totally different thing to quote someone word for word so many years after the fact. If the Bible is the literal word of God and each word matters tremendously, why were the apostles so haphazard with their documentation? Seems both terribly selfish and dangerous for them not to.

And let's not get started on the usurpation of Jesus' ministry with today's. The constant need to build churches and build ministries in such a manner goes contrary to Jesus' actions. The fella was a carpenter, he could have built a church, he could have had folks come to him, accept donations, make lots of money saving folks, build more churches, etc. He did not. Why in the world have we then chosen to go down this path which is in complete contradiction to Jesus' own teachings?

We got it wrong.

Hold on. You're changing your tune here quite a bit. You said that "pretty much nothing was written about Jesus until long after he was dead". Two things jump out - one is "pretty much nothing" and the second is "long after".

The first bit is unknowable. We don't know what was and wasn't written down, because we only have what has been preserved. History in the first century is pretty dodgy from the best of sources. We only have around half of Tacitus' Annals, for example. Even works that we have really good manuscript tradition on, like the memoirs of Julius Caesar, are filled with corruptions and lacunae.

But "long after" is just a crap claim. Using Annals again, this covered the period from 14-68 AD and was written around AD 115. Yet no historian would disqualify the work because it was written "long after" the period. If you're going to talk about "long after" then the question is how long the work that we have was separated from the events. In this case we can reliable date multiple works within living memory of the events. If the Gospels are written too "long after" the events they describe, then surely Tacitus' Annals is as well.

You have no idea what records we may have preserved - official or otherwise - two millennia after the POW camps. It would equally foolish to discount "No Surrender" - a book which claims to rely on witness testimony - because it was written 85 years after the events it describes for that reason alone. Just like it would be foolish to discount the Gospel according to St Luke which makes much he same claims for the same reason.

What "vast array of places" can you point to to check information on any subject from the first century AD? What you're doing here is constructing an argument from silence in order to disqualify historical documents we actually have. What's more the manuscript tradition that we have from the NT are of a quality and quantity far surpassing anything in classical antiquity. Again referring to Annals, the earliest manuscript we have is from around 1000 AD, and the work comes down to only two manuscripts - some portions only one!

If you want to add new qualifiers other than your original statement of time and purported degrees of separation from the subject (how many degrees of separation are there between Maj Winters and Stephen Ambrose? Why should I care? ) that's fine. But the original claims were crap, and the statement was worthy of derisive dismissal. Colbert was appropriate.

You're making a kind of category error, partly just by projecting your concept of history and record onto the past, partly by being seemingly unaware of the prevalence of oral tradition in the time and culture.

For the latter bit, the culture surrounding first century Judaism was at least partially an oral one. Portions of the religious tradition were probably exclusively transmitted orally. If you take later Rabbinic claims at face value - which they maintain today - there was a continuous oral tradition of things which not only were not written down but were forbidden to be written down. But these oral traditions were no less authoritative than the written ones. We can see this in the New Testament where trained Pharisees such as St Stephen or St Paul freely refer to oral traditions without qualification, and seem to expect their audiences to accept them as authoritative.

People also interacted with texts in a really different way. Writing something down was an expensive proposition, which is why the act of doing so was a kind of enshrinement or monument to the importance of the thing. The word for "scripture" in Greek literally just means things written. The implication being something along the lines of things important enough to be written. At the same time, it was normal for people to memorize huge amounts of scripture. Memorization of the entire Psalter was common. So common that church canons actually technically still require a bishop to have it memorized. Young Jewish males who were being formally trained would have the Torah memorized by age twelve. St Paul almost certainly had the entirety of the Torah and Psalter memorized, probably even the entire OT as we know it. St John Chrysostom is said to have had the entire OT memorized. But this isn't limited to religious studies - many ancient sources talk about the importance of memorization and mnemonic devices for memorization. It's just a completely different framework.

In a culture where oral memory is shared, this sharing is in community as well. So repeated stories are shared by the community collectively, and by individuals specifically, in a public way. Just like if fifteen people have a song memorized and someone sings the wrong word others can correct them, so oral societies can self-regulate for a high degree of sophistication and accuracy. But the focus is very different than how we handle modern history. We know that human memories can become "archival" memories of events, and cann be incredibly stable and repeatable. We as a literate society in a long tradition of literacy tend to over-emphasize the accuracy and stability of writing, and underappreciate the same in oral tradition (fascinating article here on this).

As for direct quotes... these just weren't common in classical history. They weren't a thing, and they weren't expected. Historical records of famous speeches are something like post-facto expanded footnotes. If you heard a speech, and a historian asked you, the historian would take your account and use rhetoric to recreate what might have been said. This is almost certainly what St Luke has done in his gospel. While this may move away from the idea of a direct quote, there's no reason at all it has to move away from what was communicated. If certain teachings were often repeated, and the gospels are full of them to the point that some are echoed by St Paul nearly word for word, there's no reason these teachings wouldn't be faithfully remembered. We still do this "my teacher used to always say..." The gospels depict Jesus with a fairly consistent and repeated message, summarized as "repent for the kingdom of heaven is at hand." The Sermon on the Mount or other discourses are probably amplified recreations of things Jesus might have said on any given day, and probably contain things he did say. But again, this is normal for how history was done. They had a different focus, intent, and expectation in their writing that we do.

What seems haphazard to you would probably have been seen by the Apostles and their congregations as combination of unnecessary and useless. It isn't coincidental that the gospels began to be written right after the Apostles generation begins to age out.

There's a really good book that talks about a lot of this by Richard Bauckham called Jesus and the Eyewitnesses.

There isn't some hard rule on these things. The more extraordinary the claim the more deserving of skepticism. I believe a Jesus walked the earth and preached and was killed by the Romans. I'm doubtful of his miracles. Mohammed existed. He surely didn't fly to Mecca on a flying horse. Alexander the Great existed. His dad wasn't Zeus.

I have an example why I highly doubt Jesus early years as it creates a nonsensical census and there is obvious motive to get him to Bethlehem to fulfill a prophecy. The argument isn't one of silence. In the gospels you have multiple different resurrection stories with different characters and events. One even has a mob of zombies raise up at the same time as Jesus. The Roman's were meticulous at documenting things and we have several historians writing about the area at the time and no mention of such an extraordinary even as a massive group of people being raised from the dead. Part of that is an argument of internal inconsistency and part argument from silence.

You seem to think Tacitus annals are simply accepted at face value but that's simply not the case. Historical texts are evaluated with many things in mind. Perspective, purpose, time and place in relation to events, internal consistency, when the text speaks on things we can corroborate is it accurate.

One unique thing the Bible has going against it is that it supposed to be the work of an omnipotent being. If such a being existed they could have clearly documented this in an airtight was without breaking a sweat. Instead we get conflicting accounts in the gospels and an utterly nonsensical census that never happened. It's hard to accept ab omnipotent being would allow such silly mistakes.

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The Roman's were meticulous at documenting things and we have several historians writing about the area at the time and no mention of such an extraordinary even as a massive group of people being raised from the dead.

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Oh really? Name them.

PS literally argument from silence.

Pliny the elder and josephus come to mind. It's been a while since I was into that stuff. Josephus seems to have mentioned jesus existing but it is hard to say as the document was later manipulated

PS I literally noted in my previous post that part was an argument from silence. I also offered other arguments but you don't see interested in actually engaging with anything I have taken time to write. If you're just going to troll then I'll happily leave you the last word.

What have we learned so far?

"long time" is "within 40-70 years"
"64 degrees" is "something I made up but won't even attempt to substantiate"
"several" is "two" (we have more authors than that in the NT on the other side, making even the argument from silence a bizarre claim indeed) ((also wanted to note that I'm not sure anything Pliny the Elder wrote about Judaea counts as anything close to history. what work were you thinking of?))

Argument from silence is a logical fallacy. Why would anyone intentionally make a fallacious argument and expect that to be taken seriously? You literally contradicted yourself in the same post "the argument isn't one of silence...and part argument from silence" when you were making some vague point about internal inconsistency. I honestly don't think you could be more ironic if you tried. Differences in accounts aren't prima facie inconsistent, by the way - so add another thing you lobbed out lazily but didn't support.

Which is kind of the point to begin with. You came into this thread with a bombastic, hyperbolic claim that was ridiculous. You haven't defended it at all, instead just adding more and more crap on top - like suggesting that the existence of God is somehow dependent on the tightness of someone's forum argument, for example.

When you actually have to qualify what you said, you don't. You've never acknowledged that within living memory is not "a long time" even by modern historical standards; even if it was arbitrarily deemed such, it's irrelevant because the length of time between events has on bearings on the veracity of the account. You didn't even bother to defend your 64 degrees claim. All you did was add additional requirements - oh, the documentation doesn't meet my standard, oh there needs to be other corroborating documentation, oh it has to make sense based on what I know, oh I don't find it convincing, oh many other sources don't say anything about it, etc ad nauseam.

You should start by saying "yeah what I originally wrote was over the top" and I'll agree it was fake news. Then maybe you can have an actual conversation.

That is a long time.
64 degrees was quite obviously an exaggeration
Two that I could recall off the top of my head. Josephus, Pliny the ender, Philo, Justus, Plutarch, Seneca the elder and Seneca the younger, Damis of nineveh.

"An argument from silence may apply to a document only if the author was expected to have the information"
It's not the strongest argument for sure but the idea that the son of God was running around doing insane miracles, then gets killed and resurrects with a horde of zombies seems like something pretty incredible to have been left out of everything we have found. That is fine if you don't find that convincing.

If you read the 4 gospels you will see they all have completely different resurrection stories. Here is a link with some various issues with consistency in the bible. https://theblogofdimi.com/striking-contradictions-bible-evangelists/

Do you have any thoughts on the census making no sense having people travel to their ancestral home? It's literally not how any census in history has ever been done. It would defeat the entire purpose of the census. It would be economically devastating to everyone in the area. Where is one's ancestral home anyway? Where your parents lived? Where their parents lived? how many generations do you go back? It doesn't make any sense. There is zero chance a census like that occurred. Why would they put that in there? Because Jesus of Nazareth needed to be put in bethlehem for his birth to fulfill prophesy.

Ok, that's a long time. So we shouldn't accept anything in history if it wasn't written within 50 years.

You do you.

Ofcourse that not even remotely what has been said. Perhaps you should go back and read what I've said.

My friend your original complaint was distance in time and degrees of separation. All of this other handwaving came after when you got called on it. Til we get to square one, the rest is noise.

My first comment was not a comprehensive list of every reason we should not trust the writings about Jesus birth or the gospels in general. I'm not sure why you expected that to be the case.

I agree. It was more like a list of no reasons.

This is one thread where I agree with you throughout the past couple pages. LOL.

Atheist troll is just throwing stuff at the dart board now trying to justify his genius insights.

This thread has some middle school 'Just watched Zeitgiest on Ebaumsworld and Jesus is the Sun God Ra' vibes.

Glad I could give you all a common foil so you could share a moment of unity in between bickering about whose is Christianing right.

I enjoyed the opportunity to put some thoughts out there.

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However, I agree that the stories of Jesus's childhood in the Gospels aren't historically reliable. But I don't think that modern historical concerns matter all that much to the writers, readers, or listeners of the day.

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The nativity narratives are some of the most difficult parts of the NT to reconcile with known history, and with each other as they are totally different stories. And they are so obviously incongrous it would make sense for the early church to not be bothered by the differences if it was less important. And It's not uncommon for ancient peoples in many different eras to have very different expectations or thoughts on the importance of the actual historicity of a story rather than on the message. But generally, I've found Christians put great importance on the historicity of the gospels, even ones who acknowledge a lack of historicity of much of genesis or exodus where similarly the historical concerns are far from our modern understanding (those two are different I know).

Why do you think the early church was not concerned or less concerned with historicity? I'm not denying I'm just curious. If we look at luke's narrative, though virtually none of the text carries a historians writing style even of the day (which would be difficult copying so much of mark and Q) he does use a historians opening paragraph, seeming to try and justify his independent historicity and the validity of what is written as actual history.