Unbelievers at church? GASP!!

[Biochemist]

Graverobbers? A missing body does not make a God anyhow. BTW, Jimmy Hoffa's body is missing too. Is he God?

C1ay- you are a smart interlocutor, so I would like to make a stepwise case here.

 

I would like to make clear my intent. My intent is not to attempt to convert you, or anyone on this site. (I mention this because someone suggested that recently).

 

My core intent to suggest that it is reasonable to suggest that Christ's resurrection is plausible. I do not think for a minute that I can convince even a substantial minority of this forum that it happened. But a number of participants have suggsted that the evidence in support of Jesus' very existence was absent. This is just plainly not the case. Ergo, my only intent is to suggest that the resurrection is plausible on the evidence. This is perhaps the way you were describing your current take on the Big Bang above.

 

I have already asserted:

 

1) the evidence for Jesus' existence is strong

 

Now I will assert:

 

2) that the evidence that He left his tomb is strong.

 

Subsequently, I will assert:

 

3) that the evidence for that resurrection is reasonable.

 

You might note that I will concede at the outset that the proof case for the resurrection is not as strong as the proof case for the empty tomb. They are certainly related, but the number of witnesses to Jesus after His resurrection is only about 500. Ergo, the historical veracity through contemporaneous records is necesarily thinner.

 

It is wholly a different statement to suggest that we can prove Jesus was God. My only intent in this argument is to establish a that a reasonable, rational person could view the evidence that Christ rose as credible. My personal view is that it is. I have never taken the resurrection as an element of faith. Personally, I don't think anyone should, but that is just my opinion.

 

Perhaps a more critical point is that believing Christ rose does not make someone a Christian. This is a discussion of history. Either He did or He didn't. The spiritual implications of this discussion are (I think) beyond the bounds of this forum.

 

I will start a new thread on this.

[C1ay]

Moved to "Resurrection" thread...

[lindagarrette]

I do not consider thinking dangerous, and I do not take Christ's existence, the activity of the apostles, or the relevant historical record by faith. This post is intended to focus on a reasoned evidenciary discussion. I am not talking about faith in anything.

 

That would be a different thread.

Well, I keep pointing you to documentation about the lack of evidence but you keep returning to the same old tired arguments so I have to assume you are not reading them. Meanwhile, you haven't cited any evidence that is not directly based on the Bible, which is based on itself.

[Freethinker]

Yes ladies and gentleman, those of you that ahve been around here for a while and seen this tired approach before, we are at it again. Along comes the Christer once more making unsupportable claims of factual support. Then along comes someone that asks for, not the 20,000 claimed proofs, but JUST ONE verifyable one.

 

And as we have seen every time before, they can't even find ONE they can stand behind. So they attack instead. They try to shift the blame to the person that merely asked for ONE PROOF, rather than admit their inability to provide that ONE PROOF.

Well given the most recent rant, I would probably pick hostile and add crass.

Like I said "TIRED" is more accurate. Tired of Christers showing up with unsupportable claims to proof and failing to actually follow thru with them. Then falling back to attacks, obfuscation and Argument Fallacies.

I did. Frankly, I found most of the content to be a little bit idle, although you occasionally make a valid point. Your style is to switch to hostile attack when your position is weak,

attacks (ad hominems)

I think the number is actuallly closer to 25,000 documents

even repetition of the same fallacy I exposed last time. EWE BIG NUMBERS! 5,000 more this time.

 

Yet you can not come up with ONE that is valid! What a joke!

Since you confirmed that you are aware of Josephus, you confirmed you have one already.

Yep obfuscation. Where is the confusion? Do i admit knowing about Josephus? Sure. What year was he born? Interesting that you would use that as some form of PROOF that I was wrong! That we do not know EXACTLY what year is on his Birth Certificate becomes the issue? OBFUSCATION! Never mind that there is no agreement on when the year ZERO was, that we can not fix an EXACT date around it becomes no suprise. However since we CAN show that his birth was 30+ years AFTER the claimed Jesus birth PROVES he could not be a CONTEMPORARY EYEWITNESS.

 

But somehow this FACT escapes your ability to reason. You still want to claim he wrote first hand knowledge of the events.

 

So besides his NOT BEING ALIVE to have seen it, what value is his writings as proof?

 

Well one mention of a Jesus involves a Sea Captain, actually Pirate is more accurate, that lived at the same time Josephus did. So suddenly a Pirate that lived around two decades after the fact becomes proof for the biblical Jesus the Christ! Oh ya, no stretch there.

 

Or the other Jesus he writes about, son of Sofia. Ops wrong mother, wrong time period, and the guy was a POLITICAL RABLEROSER that tried to ROB Josephus. Yep sounds like a god to me!

 

Then there is the section which is rejected out of hand by virtually every scholar. It fails every test for authentification used. It is out of context with surrounding materials, does not flow with surrounding details. It does not follow Josephus's writing style. It uses information that did not exist at the time and includes it as factual, indicating being written at a later time when this new info WAS current. It is not mentioned in other texts till hundreds of years later, even though his other stuff is referenced earlier. Indicating it not existing till that later date. SUDDENLY some 300 years later a NEW paragraph appears in already existing texts that did not previously have it.

 

But I do not make unsupported claims. You claim Josephus is "widely studied by scholars of many stripes: Christian, Jewish and secular....the consensus among textual critics is that Josephus did reference Christ,"

 

Yet the OFFICAL "Catholic Encyclopedia" says otherwise. "Attempts have been made to refute the objections brought against this passage both for internal and external reasons, " But then the Catholics do not represent more than the MAJORITY of the Christian church. What would they know?

 

Or from another source "We have only three Greek manuscripts of this section of Josephus, all from the 11th century. These phrases, added rather clumsily, appear to be rather obvious additions even to the modern reader in English." (Department of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina)

 

So unless you can show us how a guy born AFTER THE FACT can be an eyewitness, we are back to square one..

 

Oh yes, your other failures

There certainly is plenty of bona-fide eyewitness documentation as well, but the vast majority of that comes from Christian sources.

Ya we know, 25,000 of them. But not one you can actually show us! Or maybe this is the typical "I'd provide them but you won't beleive them anyway!" squirm?

I just assumed that Freethinker would discount that out of hand (again, as a postulate) so I have not surfaced that argument yet, except for Luke.

Ah yes. I'd prove to you that 2+2=5, but you wouldn't understand.

 

And then we move onto the Argument Fallacy of Circular Logic. Here we see the attempt to prove the bible by using the bible as proof of itself, to prove itself as proof of itself being proved...... Of course it's god's word it says so itself! hahahah, ya got to love it!

[Biochemist]

Well, I keep pointing you to documentation about the lack of evidence but you keep returning to the same old tired arguments so I have to assume you are not reading them.

I responded directly to your last post where you referenced Price. Could you respond to my explicit question in post 46?

[Freethinker]

I do not take Christ's existence, the activity of the apostles, or the relevant historical record by faith. This post is intended to focus on a reasoned evidenciary discussion. I am not talking about faith in anything.

Interesting. At what point are you actually going to contribute some "reasoned evidenciary" proof

[Freethinker]

Your requirements for proof are un-realistically stringent. By those standards, many historical figures would not fit the bill of "reality," like Caesar or Genghis Khan. Come now, be fair.

Ya just because people of the time wrote about such vastly more critical details as the weather and crops. why would one expect them to bother with such minor happenings as all 2 yr old males being slaughtered, or the earth stopping, or a temple being torn in half, or a guy bringing people back to life in front of them, of coming back to life himself. It was far to "un-realistically stringent" to expect such minor happenings to be documented! Let's be fair here. It's not like we are talking about some god that became man or such! It's not like there are any indepedent authors that wrote about Caesar or Khan! :)

[Freethinker]

Yep. The fact that a man named Jesus lived or not is usually not a dicersion worth arguing over. I tend to let them have that point so that we can get down to the testable proof that he was God. In reality all I usually get is just another diversion from the main point though.

I figure we should start with whether he existed before we discuss what he was or was not. What color a nonexisting flower is, is pretty irrelevant .

 

And they are much better prepared to discuss the details of the myth, than actually support it's exstence. But they all fail miserably when they try to actually prove he existed in the first place.

 

But they, as Linda points out, never have the honesty to admit it once they have failed.

[Freethinker]

We have an odd problem in confirming contemporary corroborators of Jesus.

We have no problem at all. NONE EXIST! Your failure to provide ANY proves it.

Overall, the new testament Biblical texts (and many other texts from first century authors) are highly investigated and highly corroborated

Ya like the Slaughter of the Innocents. Highly corroborated by ... er ... well... NO ONE! The supposed Census, Highly corroborated by ... er ... well... NO ONE! Jesus of Nazareth! Problem being Nazareth did not exist as a city at that time! OPS! Our ole buddy Josephus mentions 45 cities around Galilee, no Nazareth, The Talmud mentions 63 Galilean towns, yet knows nothing of Nazareth.

 

Oh ya that is an incredible level of corroboration! 100% FAILURE!

C1ay- The first "proof case" I would suggest that we follow to support that Jesus was who He said He was is to confirm that the tomb was actually empty, and the body was missing. The academic proof case for that is pretty strong, and the implications of the empty tomb are large.

OK, so a non-specific cave lacking a non-existant person's non-existant body is proof of what again?

[Freethinker]

My core intent to suggest that it is reasonable to suggest that Christ's resurrection is plausible.

So failing to prove actual existence and unable to be honest enough to admit it, you want to move to other fallacies! How Christian of you!

[Freethinker]

And when do you propose to share this reasonable scientific evidence? Thus far I have not seen anything I would consider credible evidence for resurrection.

He is playing the red herring game. If he only responds to people that ignore his failure to reply to others he came pretend to actually be having an honest discussion. As long as he can drag the discussion away from his failure to prove the intial point, he can pretend it is reasonable to discuss another point. And when he fails in that one, out comes the old smelly fish again!

 

Typical Christian.

[Biochemist]

Yes ladies and gentleman, those of you that ahve been around here for a while and seen this tired approach before, we are at it again.

FrT- You are a smart guy. Please tell us which type of fallacious refutation this is.

Then along comes someone that asks for, not the 20,000 claimed proofs, but JUST ONE verifyable one.

I do believe you can read, so I don't understand this. I offered Josephus and Luke, and contended they are both well supported. Given your circumlocutive style, I would suggest that we develop a defense for each of these in separate threads if you are interested. I think it might sequester your wanderings and let the readers more easily see that you are not responding to the questions posed. And again, you did not respond to my point about the VOLUME of reference, which is highly indicative of credibility. And thesse are not "proofs". They are contemporaneous texts to the lives of Jesus and the eyewitnesses.

And as we have seen every time before, they can't even find ONE they can stand behind.So they attack instead.

Let's take a vote to identify who is attacking. I don't believe I have claimed that your point of view is "irrational". You have often claimed that theists are.

They try to shift the blame to the person that merely asked for ONE PROOF, rather than admit their inability to provide that ONE PROOF.

Au contraire. I am merely trying to keep you on point. And it is quite a piece of work.

Do I admit knowing about Josephus? Sure. What year was he born? Interesting that you would use that as some form of PROOF that I was wrong!

I merely responded in kind. It looked as if you offered the birthdate of Josephus as an element of credibility in your discussion. My correction of your birthdate assertion was the same.

However since we CAN show that his birth was 30+ years AFTER the claimed Jesus birth PROVES he could not be a CONTEMPORARY EYEWITNESS.

Josephus was a credible first century non-Christian historian. He was a contemporary to eye witnesses of Jesus, and corroborates many elements of writings among Christians. It is rational to note that many contemporaries of Jesus became believers. This can be viewed as an element of Jesus' credibility, but also surfaces the problem that those same writers are biased. We address this issue by finding the rarer non-Christian source documents among the 20,000+ first century documents to corroborate the others.

Or the other Jesus he writes about, son of Sofia. Ops wrong mother, wrong time period....

Jesus was not an uncommon name.

Then there is the section which is rejected out of hand by virtually every scholar. It fails every test for authentification used. It is out of context with surrounding materials, does not flow with surrounding details. It does not follow Josephus's writing style. It uses information that did not exist at the time and includes it as factual, indicating being written at a later time when this new info WAS current.

True. That is why I mentioned this above. But the corroborated text mentions Jesus.

Yet the OFFICAL "Catholic Encyclopedia" says otherwise. "Attempts have been made to refute the objections brought against this passage both for internal and external reasons, " But then the Catholics do not represent more than the MAJORITY of the Christian church. What would they know?

I don't understand your point here, but pulling a quote from a source:

from:http://www.hypotyposeis.org/weblog/2004/08/josephus-testimonium-flavianum-and.html

Josephus, the Testimonium Flavianum, and Eusebius

 

The Testimonium Flavianum is and has been one of the most important non-Christian testimonies to the life of Jesus. It is now found in the 18th book of Jewish Antiquities, a history of the Jews written by Flavius Josephus in Rome around 93. Unfortunately, the received text of the Testimonium contains portions, which I have marked in double brackets, that seem very unlikely in their current form to have been written by Josephus:

 

AJ 18.63 About this time was Jesus, a wise man, [[if indeed it is necessary to call him a man]]. For he was a doer of wonderful deeds and a teacher of people who accept the truth with pleasure. He won over many Jews and many of the Greeks. [[This was the Christ.]] 64 And, after Pilate had comdemned him to a cross upon an accusation by the principal men among us, those who first loved him did not cease. [[For he appeared to them again having life the third day, as the divine prophets had related these things and a myriad other marvels about him.]] Yet the tribe of the Christians, named after him, has not disappeared even to this day.

 

Josephus had been captured in the Jewish War and became a supporter of the Flavian Emperor Vespasian after interpreting the prophesied Messiah to be him, which contradicts the sentiments expressed in this passage as written. Even though the parts in double brackets thus seem unlikely to have been written by Josephus, some of the other parts, on the other hand, do seem to reflect Josephus's style (those I emphasized). The most typical way of accounting for this state of affairs, exemplified (but not originated) by John P. Meier's treatment in his Marginal Jew (1991), is to identify the bracketed portions as later Christian interpolations of a genuine Josephan core.

 

Although still widely accepted, this typical treatment of the Testimonium has, in my view, successfully been called into question by Ken Olson's article "Eusebius and the Testimonium Flavianum," CBQ 61 (1999): 305-322. Olson rightly points out that a flaw in Meier's argumentation from style did not take into account the style of the earliest secure witness to the Testimonium: the church historian Eusebius, writing in the early 300s. When Eusebius's style is considered, several more of the sentences that were ascribed to Josephus under Meier's approach look a lot like Eusebius's language. Most telling for me is the periphrastic "doer of wonderful deeds" and a "myriad marvels."

 

Based on my experience with Eusebius, his style, and how he handles his quotations, I agreed, in my blog article of October 20, 2003 with Olson that the received text of the Testimonium has been worked over by Eusebius and that he may have identified the interpolator, but I still wasn't convinced that Eusebius had composed the entirety of the Testimonium, as opposed to working over a pre-existing and less pro-Christian version of it. In support, I had mentioned a form of the Testimonium preserved in Arabic by the 10th century Agapius that lacks the apparently Eusebianized portions (translation from Pines via Kirby):

This is a small section of a much longer academic discussion on credibilty of Josephus' references to Jesus through textual criticism. I apologize but some of the formatting in this excerpt was lost in the cut-and-paste. I suggest that further critique of Josephus be carried in a separate thread if you are interested.

[Tormod]

It is rational to note that many contemporaries of Jesus became believers.

 

It is also rational to note that most did not.

[C1ay]

I don't understand your point here, but pulling a quote from a source: This is a small section of a much longer academic discussion on credibilty of Josephus' references to Jesus through textual criticism. .

 

You are using the blog of some unknown on the web as scientific evidence? This strikes me as hearsay based on hearsay.

[Freethinker]

FrT- You are a smart guy.

C1ay- you are a smart interlocutor,

OK, so you are a Dale Carnegie graduate. I've been in sales for a very long time. Blowing smoke does not impress me.

Please tell us which type of fallacious refutation this is.

I personally refer to it as "When in Rome..."

I do believe you can read, so I don't understand this. I offered Josephus and Luke, and contended they are both well supported.

If you CAN read, then perhaps you SHOULD have read post #55 in which I laid out extensive details proving why Josephus (yes he is the BEST evidence Christers can offer and HE fails completely) is bogus.

 

But let's bring up the NUMBER ONE REASON Josephus can not be used as a CONTEMPORARY EYEWITNESS to the existence of the biblical Jesus.

 

JOSEPHUS WAS NOT ALIVE AT THE TIME!

 

Is this confusing? That in order to BE an "EYEWITNESS" you have to have had EYES at the time? And a BODY, a BRAIN. HAVE BEEN BORN! Why do you find this so confusing EYEWITNESSES SEE something happen. If you were not alive at the time, you COULD NOT SEE IT HAPPEN! D'uh!

Given your circumlocutive style, I would suggest that we develop a defense for each of these in separate threads if you are interested.

I see, we should all use your approach of when failing to support a claim, start a new thread and pretend you DID prove it anyway!

 

Nah, why not just stay here and see if you either can actually support the claims you make or have the integrety to admit you can't. Is this really such a difficult concept for you? Is either supplying proof for a claim or admitting error outside of your stream of consciousness?

And again, you did not respond to my point about the VOLUME of reference,

OK, let's look at TWENTY THOUSAND REFERENCES. WOW BIG NUMBERS! Interesting that if you have TWENTY THOUSAND REFERENCES and ONE (Josephus) is not working out, you are left with NINETEEN THOUSAND NINE HUNDRED NINETY NINE more to choose from. Yet all you can do is beat the poor ole dead horse Josephus one.

 

What else did you want to cover about your VOLUME?

which is highly indicative of credibility.

So # of reference texts show level of credibility. And 20,000 is a big number so it helps prove the biblical Jesus. And since there are TENS OF MILLIONS of Superman Comics, he is perhaps 500 times more credible than the biblical Jesus?

I am merely trying to keep you on point.

Fine, lets stay on point!

 

Provide ONE valid verifyable contemporary eyewitness report which confirms the existence of the biblical Jesus the Christ.

 

Now will YOU stay on point?

[Tormod]

Uh oh, our RA is back. :o

[infamous]

Uh oh, our RA is back. :o

 

With the usual vengeance.