I am making no comment on the people of India. I was only answering your thought that God must be unfair if there are so many people here who do not believe him despite years of missionary work. For whatever reason they choose not to believe even though the opportunity to do so has been given to them is not God's fault, nor is his judgment unfair.
The argument that the Gospels were not written by the people they are named for is not founded. First, Matthew is dated between 50 and 60 A.D. a mere twenty years or so after Jesus lived.( This is based upon chapter 24:2 that mentions the fall of Jerusalem as a future event which took place in 70 A.D.). Matthew would have been known at the time to have been a tax collector who would not have been well liked by the Jewish population. There would not have been any additional credibility to include his name for a fake writer.It would have been much better for a fake writer to add the name Peter or Paul. Second, the other "Gospels" that did not become part of the canon were obviously written by others and were much later than the four that were included. Third, there is no question that Luke wrote Acts. In the beginning of Acts he mentions his other book written to the same person. Finally, the historian Papias wrote in A.D. 125 that John wrote his Gospel and the historian Irenaeus wrote in A.D. 180 the following:
"Matthew published his own Gospel among the Hebrews in their own tongue, when Peter and Paul were preaching the Gospel in Rome and founding the church there. After their departure, Mark, the disciple and interpreter of Peter, himself handed down to us his writing the substance of Peter's preaching. Luke, the follower of Paul, set down in a book, the Gospel preached by his teacher. Then John, the disciple of the Lord, who also leaned on his breast, himself produced his Gospel while he was living at Ephesus in Asia"
It is clear that the people of their day knew that those whose names were attached to the Gospels were the authors. The idea that they may not be is a new one.
You are not correct to assume that Biblical scholars have discounted what Josephus and Tacitus wrote about Jesus. In fact Tacitus wrote "Christus, from whom the name had its origin, suffered the extreme penalty during the reign of Tiberius at the hands of one of our procurators, Pontius Pilatus..." Beyond this Jesus is mentioned by other early historians such as the Talmud, Pliny the Younger and others as a true historical figure.
The thought that because the Gospels were written decades after Jesus lived they could not have been accurate is not in keeping with other biographies of ancient people. For example, the first biography of Alexander the Great was written 400 years after his death. By comparison the Gospels were much, much , closer to the actual events. And they were written by people who were eyewitnesses or who interviewed eyewitnesses.
You misinterpret the question about other stories of mythology and how they relate to Jesus. What I was saying is that although these beings were in folklore before Jesus, did they have the specific attributes that Jesus had before he was written about or were attributes added to them in response to his existence? And is this proven by documents written before Jesus? Also, do not go on generalities about these beings and tie them to Jesus. Make sure the comparisons are detailed enough to warrant discussion.
The idea that Peter or Paul were not insane is not for me to prove. If you want to discount what they wrote as being the ideas from insane people, that would be for you to prove. But I will say that there is no evidence in the remainder of their lives that they were insane.
The idea that they died for what they knew to be true is said to defeat the thought that they made something up and than stuck to that lie until they died. Jim Jones is no comparison.He may have died for what he believed to be true, but do you think that he died for what he knew was a lie?
In various arguments you all have said that these men were either frauds, insane, dillusional but in good faith, or believed something to be an act they saw when they really didn't see it. What evidence do you have for any of these ideas? They are all just theories on ways to discount what these men wrote, but there is no evidence for any of them. The mountain of evidence is that these men wrote what they did because they knew it to be the truth and then went to their deaths because of it.
Joseph, your thought that the reasoning is circular is not correct. If Jesus did not exist, the skeptics back then would not have had to say they walked the sea of Galilee with him and he healed no one. They would simply say he never existed. The evidence shows otherwise.
As for "facts", what do you think the notion that Jesus was crucified by Pontious Pilot is? The name of his executioner is named. That fact could have easilty been refuted if it wasn't true.
