'If Jesus didn't exist....the Pharisees and their religious descendants, the rabbis of the Mishnah and Talmud, never made that argument' I didn't either. I find it remarkable that there is so little mention of jesus in secular history. Nothing at all contemporary to his life. Why didn't he write something himself? Josephus wrote, and so no one argues if he existed or not. It was paul, an outsider who got the christian ball rolling, not the 11 apostles.
The essenian apocalypticism is remarkably close to that in the nt. Were they linked? Where the essens resided was considered 'the wilderness'. Jesus spent a month 'in the wilderness'. Hmmmm
The talmud claims jesus was fathered by a roman soldier. If he was half roman and paul was a roman agent, then as baigent and leigh claim, christianity could have been a weapon devised against the jews of the time. Interesting that 300 years later, christianity became the roman state religion.
If Jesus didn't exist, that would have been an excellent argument to make for those who wished to snuff Christianity out from the beginning.
With his kind of reasoning, one could offer up “evidence” for the occurrence of any event whatsoever. For example, if a writer in 1840 had claimed that the twelve apostles and the Mormon leader Joseph Smith walked together about the land working miracles, someone using Acc’s logic could quickly come up with evidence that these things actually happened: They could argue that the fact that there’s no record of anyone in 1840 ever saying that these events did not happen, this shows that they knew that they DID happen, otherwise they would have said something!
Ridiculous, right? This just shows you the extent to which apologists will go—even to the point of severe embarrassment—to defend their beliefs. It's no wonder that Acc wrote,
I will have no more to say on this
because things would only get worse for him.
Joseph F. Alward "Skeptical Views of Christianity and the Bible"
"The essenian apocalypticism is remarkably close to that in the nt. Were they linked? Where the essens resided was considered 'the wilderness'. Jesus spent a month 'in the wilderness'. Hmmmm"
I read a book recently by B.E. Thiering called the cumran origins of the christian church or some such thing and in it she made a case that to my mind was very appealing. In this book she claimed that not only was the wilderness a place there but so was bethlehem, capernaum, gallile etc... The interesting thing though was that according to her theory the scripture's was written by the pesharists in a way that gave it two dimensions. The first level would be for the uneducated and the higher level for those who knew how to interpret the scripture. For example she claimed that loaves and bread were people and so when the story is applied with that in mind it takes on another dimension and gone is the miracle side of it. The same with stories like when Jesus cured the leper, it's got two levels as well one where jesus performs a miracle and one where Jesus simply reinstates a man who is considered unclean by some standard hence a leper but no miracle. Things like wineyards and figtrees were institutions within judaism so when a figtree was planted in the wineyard according to this theory it was a merger between the two. The most interesting thing I thought was her theory of Jesus never actually dying on the cross but rather he survived. The way it was done was by administring some poison that made him appear dead and so he got taken down early and tended to. Also after the crucifiction Jesus rose to the office of the Word and as such plays a huge part in Acts where every time it speaks of the word the word is alive and well although by this stage he was being carried around. All this meant that they could preach a ressurection but only those who were familiar with the pesharist way of writing understood what really took place while others more ignorant put faith in a supernatural event. Anyway I liked the book and thought it to be more than just interesting.
Well, Joe, I wasn't going to make any more comments on this until you made your snide ad-hominem post. But since you did, this is just for the record: I am secure in my faith, so things will not get worse for me. Truth is, I have read better anti-Jesus stuff than you put out, and that didn't faze me, either. We operate on two different wave lengths. And I have no more use for yours than you have for mine. But I do insist on mine for me, just as you insist on yours for you.
As I said, to each his own, and my own is and will remain the way of faith.
I decided to attack your argument and to highlight its silliness not because I had any expectation that I would be able to transform your beliefs, but so that others who beliefs are not as strongly rooted in mindless acceptance might see what they might become once they embrace inerrancy. One of my goals on this forum is to expose more reasonable-minded Christians to the kind of preposterous defenses one most resort to once one decides to believe that the Bible is the literal truth. What happened to you in the current argument--they wouldn't want to happen to them; that's my hope, anyway.
So, you're wrong; I do have a use for your beliefs--just not the kind of use you might have hoped. You and other inerrantists who attempt to defend your illogical beliefs with "logical" argument in a public forum are one of the more effective weapons skeptics can use to debunk biblical inerrancy.
Thank you.
Joseph F. Alward "Skeptical Views of Christianity and the Bible"
