CHRISTIAN BIBLICAL ERRANCY DEBATE

V: Which of those myths did you used to believe Loren? How many of them, and which one's are possibly strawmen presentations? Which ones are actually myths and which oneshave basis in fact? If we accept they are all valid myths, what conclusions are justified?

Personally Loren, I tend to agree with all of them. But it is obvious you and I are still at the opposite ends of the spectrum concerning what can be made out of it.

V: Oh I didn't see the link. I just read the ten list. Hey and on second though I disagree with the idea that Jesus is a myth. I don't think it is rediculous for people to consider that possibility though. Why shouldn't they?

Let's skim over the link.

Finally, the Roman Civil War could not have proceeded as it did if Caesar had not
physically crossed the Rubicon with his army into Italy and captured Rome. Yet the only
thing necessary to explain the rise of Christianity is a belief —

V: By the same logic we can say the only way the Jewish believers came to be regarded as traitors by the general Jewish populous during the Jewish revolts, is if the Jewish followers of Jesus actually obeyed the instruction of Jesus to abandon the city and flee to the mountains. Indirect as it is, it suggest a highly motivated response to something actual. So already the authors suggestion that nothing is necessary to explain, but belief, is unravelling itself. We have Jewish historical circumstances that suggest a cult leader instructed his followers to abandon any defence of the nation.

Also having listened to Jewish lectures in the Temple and Synagogue in Nashville, it was striking to me that there was no quesiton in their mind concerning the existence of Jesus. One of their main questions was since they acknowledge Jesus as a Jew, on whether they personally are ready to re-accept Jesus into the community of the Jews, considering they hold him personally responsible for the Jewish catastrophies. Are these people also so uninformed that they too have succumbed to a myth since for them Jesus directly impacted them as a nation in their minds?

I think the picture is a bit larger than the authors little paradigm.

“In fact, when we compare all five points, we see that in four of the five proofs of
an event's historicity, the resurrection has no evidence at all, and in the one proof
that it does have, it has not the best, but the very worst kind of evidence — a
handful of biased, uncritical, unscholarly, unknown, second-hand witnesses.
Indeed, you really have to look hard to find another event that is in a worse
condition than this as far as evidence goes.“

V; This is the fallacy of the impossible standard, wherein the author dismisses out of hand the testimonies and traditions of the common people's accounts of their recollections of eyewitnesses testimonies, simply because they are not qualified historians. This is utter nonsense. I'm not a qualified historian either. In fact the percentage of people testifying about Jesus being qualified historians would be practically below one point. Yet the remaining ninty nine percentage of testomonials being dismissed is rediculous. Courst of law themselves don't demand such criteria from witnesses. Nonsense!

Vatic : Personally Loren, I tend to agree with all of them. But it is obvious you and I are still at the opposite ends of the spectrum concerning what can be made out of it.

CBB : David Fitzgerald makes the effort to go into great detail where and why the New Testament is fatally flawed. I admire anyone who makes this kind of effort because his work makes the Holy Bible easier to understand for the rest of us.

There are a few things that you and I can agree on though. You and I are in agreement about this :

Vatic 06-18-10 : You and I both know the Bible is a train wreck.

CBB : Indeed.

V: Motives is another issue Loren. The point remains that Fiztgerald is making mistake after mistake and his writing so far appears as sophistry to me.

CBB : What are your motives?

CBB : And my motive is to show that the Holy Bible cannot be trusted. I appreciate your help.

Myth No. 1: The idea that Jesus was a myth is ridiculous!

David Fitzgerald : Most people have never heard of the ancient Greek mythographer Euhemerus; and so many might be surprised to find that they are Euhemerists on the subject of Jesus.

CBB : Euhemerus was a 4th century Greek mythographer at the court of Cassander, the king of Macedon. The main reason we remember him today is because he treated mythological accounts as way of explaining actual historical events. There is a name for this procedure : Euhemerism.

Why is this of any interest to us today? Because early Christians used the euhemerist argument to support their own argument that pagan mythology was only a collection of fables invented by humans. But when the same argument was used by early skeptics, the Christians were quick to claim that their Jesus was a whole different story. Of course this is a case of special pleading. Please note that the term "Diabolical Mimicry" is a Christian invention, and it has to be one of the more pathetic apologist attempts on record.

The idea that Jesus Christ is a myth is hardly ridiculous. It is possible that there was a human itinerant preacher of that name in the 1st century. That he did the things attributed to him in the New Testament is an impossibility. The utterly preposterous stories we read in the Gospels are pure mythmaking.

Burton Mack, Who Wrote The New Testament? : "We do not usually think of mythmaking as the achievement of a moment or the work of a single writer no matter how brilliant. But in Mark's case we have an obvious fiction, masterly composed by someone who had to be doing his work at a desk as any author would. It was Mark's fiction that soon became the accepted story of the way to imagine Jesus appearing in the world." page 154

John Dominic Crossan : "It is not morally acceptable to say directly and openly that our story is truth but yours is myth; ours is history but yours is a lie. It is even less morally acceptable to say that indirectly and covertly by manufacturing defensive or protective strategies that apply only to one's own story." The Birth of Christianity, 1998, pg 28 - 29

CBB : Christians are liars out of necessity. Look at the plate they have been handed.

V: Well there goes the temporary spike in thoughtful discourse and we're back to polemics. Nothing here worth responding to..

CBB : You have no qualms about calling people names when it suits you. Calling everyone "ignorant" in this forum who does not agree with you is not exactly the best way to win friends and influence people.

Fitz: Why is this of any interest to us today? Because early Christians used the euhemerist argument to support their own argument that pagan mythology was only a collection of fables invented by humans. But when the same argument was used by early skeptics, the Christians were quick to claim that their Jesus was a whole different story. Of course this is a case of special pleading.

V: It is only special pleading when in fact all things ar equal and there is a plea for exception. The author incorrectly assume that Myth and Jesus accounts are equal, and makes no exception for any other possibility. His charge of special pleading is therefore based in his bais to simply not believe the accounts of Jesus, which in fact are true and fully deserve not being associated with myth, a possibility the author refuses to entertain, but instead resorts to charges of special pleading.

In a nutshell, it's just bias talking.

Fitz: The idea that Jesus Christ is a myth is hardly ridiculous. It is possible that there was a human itinerant preacher of that name in the 1st century. That he did the things attributed to him in the New Testament is an impossibility. The utterly preposterous stories we read in the Gospels are pure mythmaking.

V: Here we have a blatant example of the fallacy of one sidedness. The author has no idea what the actual basis of acceptance of the accounts actually are or the reasons the people hold to them. Being unable to relate to what he doesn't understand, and ignorant to refute them directly, he simply rambles on his bias with loaded words. And this is supposed to be the best?

Mack: Burton Mack, Who Wrote The New Testament? : "We do not usually think of mythmaking as the achievement of a moment or the work of a single writer no matter how brilliant. But in Mark's case we have an obvious fiction, masterly composed by someone who had to be doing his work at a desk as any author would. It was Mark's fiction that soon became the accepted story of the way to imagine Jesus appearing in the world."

V: More fallacy of one sidedness... In the art of controversy the mere presense of this statement would be seen as the act of posturing as if the arguement has just been decisively won, when in fact no conclusion has yet been justified. It is shameless posing in an attempt to appear victorious.

Crossan : "It is not morally acceptable to say directly and openly that our story is truth but yours is myth; ours is history but yours is a lie. It is even less morally acceptable to say that indirectly and covertly by manufacturing defensive or protective strategies that apply only to one's own story."

V: Oh by that logic it is immoral for anyone to say Christianity is wrong and Science is right, and any thinking to support ones side of the story is just being sneeky and immoral. Pure nonsense!

Where do you find these rubes Loren? This is a classic case of the fallacy of appealing to misleading authorities. Mostly they are misleading because they are baised instead of actually thinking. They present nothing short of biased clever sophistry.

Vatic : Where do you find these rubes Loren?

CBB : In your spare time you might want to investigate "Jesus Mysteries" HERE I have been a member for more than 10 years.

"JesusMysteries is a forum for historical discussion. Was Jesus an historical person, a mythical figure, a fictional character, a theological construction, or some combination of these? How does this help our understanding of Christian origins through 451 CE?"

Devin: WOW, this is such a rational discussion. One sane person and one insane person. Hmmm, which is which? What I find funny is the irony of one of them who points his finger and calls the other special pleading, fallacy one one sidedness, and bialsed clever sophistry.

What is obvious so missed by one of these two is that what is being used now to critically look at Christianity was used by the same types milienia ago to discredit past religions. "This is the fallacy of the impossible standard, wherein the author dismisses out of hand the testimonies and traditions of the common people's accounts of their recollections of eyewitnesses testimonies, simply because they are not qualified historians. This is utter nonsense." The irony drips so much from this one statement I need a boat to stay above it. This statement applies to EVERY religion in the history of Man. Thus then Thor is a REAL person etc. Jesus is not history. He is claimed to be and those who were critical of it get character assassinated. In the past killed. Special pleading is saying Christianity is unique because it has testimonies but then act like no other religion had these. Special pleading is speaking to us and acting like some authority because one has delusions of blue faces and thus sees themselves as self righteous idiots to lord over us when in fact those of old religions claimed to see delusions as well thus were no less "qualified" to tell us the same. ;o)

As I said before there is NO REAL critical analysis of Christianity in the mainstream press and it is not because what was said in the original post is bias it is because most of the readers ARE THE ONES WHO ARE BIAS. The fallacy is NOT this information but the false notion that Christianity = Love and the only way to love is through religion and that if we expose Christianity for fraudulance (word?) then what will the Masses swallow as lies down their throats over Gay Rights, Universal Health Care, the false notion that the Rich will look after those less fortunate so strip labor laws etc away because some invisible dude will look out over the poor, etc.

Tom Clancy wrote about contemporary times with fictional events and people but if we open a phone book we can find a Jack Ryan. We as well can find those places in his novels that actually exist. Could we create a cult with this and in a 1000 years have a world worshiping Jack Ryan? Will we have people who full heartedly believe any criticism of Jack Ryan being a fictional character as bias? Sure, they will even swear to you believers existed at X time so therefore Jack is real.

We could move on to any other mythmaking character such as King Author or Robin Hood. Who is the real character if any of either? Could it be one person? Or could it be several people from different eras? Or could it be no real person at all?

The real fallacy is holding on to the false notion that Jesus was a real person and that is Jesus of the Christian bible solely on the false premise that it is the only way to love and that if one does not believe Jesus to be a real person that one cannot love etc. It is one of the greatest weapons Christians use on people who are weak minded and at a low point in their lives.

Religion is simply a part of human cultural evolution.

Malcolm: What are the odds?

CBB 08-13-10 : Screw the Original manuscripts. We do not have them. Are there errors in the Holy Bible that we have today?

HELPU: YES There are a couple of copyist errors in the OT

CBB : Is the New Testament error free?

HELPU: NOne the im aware of.


CBB : This particular Blog should be seen as sent by God for the express benefit of Helpu and other Fundie Christians like him. Not only does David Fitzgerald point out a few dozen errors in the New Testament, he explains them in excruciating detail. I am only too happy to help with the process, and as this Blog winds along I intend to do just that.

Making our beloved members aware of the fatal flaws in the Holy Bible is fun, it is easy, and it is entertaining. The Holy Bible is a train wreck that cannot be trusted. Of that, I am certain.

Jerome: Nice work Loren.

Vatic : Where do you find these rubes Loren? This is a classic case of the fallacy of appealing to misleading authorities. Mostly they are misleading because they are baised instead of actually thinking. They present nothing short of biased clever sophistry.

CBB : Christians have been misleading people for 2,000 years. Where is your outrage about that? I must have missed your massive information dump on that score.

The author of TEN BEAUTIFUL LIES ABOUT JESUS goes into great detail using scripture from the New Testament to show exactly how we have been mislead by these charlatans. Why are you not addressing these scriptural problems? Why do you always prefer to talk about yourself instead of Bible errors in this forum?

You whine about the way you are treated in CBED, but the nice people in Christian forums treat you much worse, don't they? I am sure that they laugh their ass off when you try to convince them you are a prophet sent from God to straighten them out. How is that working for you lately?

CBB : Christians have been misleading people for 2,000 years. Where is your outrage about that? I must have missed your massive information dump on that score.

Lois: It is the will of God that millions of people get misled and wind up in hell. More room in heaven for Vatic.

V: I don't last long in Fundy Forums. I get kicked out of them and am usually considered the devil incarnate.

Lois, I want you to know I typed in Pinky in replying to Loren, but I thought better of it and so deleted it. Loren doesn't compare well to Pinky and I thought it might be taken for an insult. I like those nocturnal little mice guys. Brain is amazing in his capabilities and he almost succeeds most of the time.

CBB : I toss a lot of punches, so it stands to reason that I should be able to take a shot on the chin once in a while without wetting myself.

One of the reasons you get clipped so often in CBED is because you put your neck under the guillotine with such regularity.

CBB : A few quotes from authors I read are in order at this point :

Burton Mack on the book of Acts :"The achievement of this fiction, a fiction so well done that it has been read as factual history for nearly two thousand years (Cameron 1994), is marked by great erudition and extremely clever design. .... That is great writing. It is also marvelous fiction. The author could not have been present at the events he describes, except of course, in the sense of being fully preoccupied with the history he was imagining. It is very important to see that this author was not violating normal conventions of historiography when he invented the history of the apostolic church." pages 230-231

Burton Mack on the Gospel of Mark :"As for the story of Jesus' crucifixion and resurrection, Mark took the basic ideas from the Christ myth but dared to imagine how the crucifixion and resurrection of the Christ might have looked if played out as a historical event in Jerusalem, something the Christ myth resisted. Thus Mark's story is best understood as a studied combination of Jesus traditions with the Christ myth. The combination enhanced Jesus' importance as a historical figure by casting him as the son of God or the Christ and by working out an elaborate plot to link his fate to the history of Mark's community. We may therefore call Mark's gospel a myth of origin for the Markan community. It was imagined in order to understand how history could have gone the way it had and the Jesus movement still be right about its loyalties and views." page 152

"We do not usually think of mythmaking as the achievement of a moment or the work of a single writer no matter how brilliant. But in Mark's case we have an obvious fiction, masterly composed by someone who had to be doing his work at a desk as any author would. It was Mark's fiction that soon became the accepted story of the way to imagine Jesus appearing in the world." page 154

Burton Mack on the Gospel of Luke : Luke's fiction was possible because he was an accomplished scholar and poet, but also because he and his readers were far removed from the time and places about which he wrote. Who Wrote The New Testament? page 171

John Dominic Crossan : I do not think, after two hundred years of experimentation, that there is any way acceptable in public discourse or scholarly debate, by which you can go directly into the great mound of the Jesus tradition and separate out the historical Jesus layer from all later strata.

Bishop John Shellby Spong, Liberating The Gospels, page 178 : "Yet I do not think that there is one word in the Johannine text that Jesus actually came close to saying."

Robert M. Price : The Gospel story itself is pure legend. What can we say of a supposed historical figure whose life story conforms virtually in every detail to the Mythic Hero Archetype, with nothing, no "secular" or mundane information, left over?

Dr. Eberhard Nestle : Learned men, so called Correctors were, following the church meeting at Nicea 325 AD, selected by the church authorities to scrutinize the sacred texts and rewrite them in order to correct their meaning in accordance with the views which the church had just sanctioned. —Dr. Eberhard Nestle, translated from his Einf~hrung in die Textkritik des griechischen Testaments.

Hermann Detering : Christianity in its origin was nothing else than a Jewish-Messianic movement ... the figure of Jesus had never existed, but represented a symbolization and personification of thoughts that could only make full headway in the second century. A Gnostic messianic community later appeared alongside the Jewish-Christian messianic community. In the period between 70 and 135 CE the two groups opposed one another with bitter animosity.

Gerald Massey : Whether considered as the God made human, or as man made divine, this character never existed as a person.

Earl Doherty : The Gospel story, with its figure of Jesus of Nazareth, cannot be found before the Gospels. In Christian writings earlier than Mark, including almost all of the New Testament epistles, as well as in many writings from the second century, the object of Christian faith is never spoken of as a human man who had recently lived, taught, performed miracles, suffered and died at the hands of human authorities, or rose from a tomb outside Jerusalem. There is no sign in the epistles of Mary or Joseph, Judas or John the Baptist, no birth story, teaching or appointment of apostles by Jesus, no mention of holy places or sites of Jesus’ career, not even the hill of Calvary or the empty tomb. This silence is so pervasive and so perplexing that attempted explanations for it have proven inadequate.

Richard Carrier : Earl Doherty's theory is simply superior in almost every way in dealing with all the facts as we have them. However, it is not overwhelmingly superior, and that leaves a lot of uncertainty. For all his efforts, Jesus might have existed after all. But until a better historicist theory is advanced, I have to conclude it is at least somewhat more probable that Jesus didn't exist than that he did. I say this even despite myself, as I have long been an opponent of ahistoricity.

Albert Schweitzer : There is nothing more negative than the result of the critical study of the life of Jesus. The Jesus of Nazareth who came forward publicly as the Messiah, who preached the Kingdom of God, who founded the Kingdom of Heaven upon earth, and died to give his work its final consecration, never had any existence. He is a figure designed by rationalism, endowed with life by liberalism, and clothed by modern theology in an historical garb

David Noel Freedman : When it comes to the historical question about the Gospels, I adopt a mediating position-- that is, these are religious records, close to the sources, but they are not in accordance with modern historiographic requirements or professional standards.

Rudolf Bultmann : So unreliable were the Gospel accounts that "we can now know almost nothing concerning the life and personality of Jesus."

Paul Q. Beeching : The Synoptic Gospels employ techniques that we today associate with fiction.

Robert W. Funk : As a historian I do not know for certain that Jesus really existed, that he is anything more than the figment of some overactive imaginations....In my view, there is nothing about Jesus of Nazareth that we can know beyond any possible doubt. In the mortal life we have there are only probabilities.

CBB : I did not arrive at my opinions concerning a historical Jesus (or lack thereof) in a vacuum. I have read a great deal from all of these men and many, many others. All of these authors strongly suggest that a historical Jesus cannot be found. That the most famous and most powerful human being the Earth has ever known has no historical record, is an irony that is simply too sweet.

Malcolm: If Jesus had existed and all the gospels stories about him true, then there would most definitely be something in history or archaeology. There is nothing.

Loren's list is only the tip of the iceberg and what an enormous iceberg it is. The seeker looking for evidence for a real Jesus would freeze to death, the trail being so cold.

Even Empress Helena in the 4th century could find nothing. When we look back 300 years, we have no problem at all in finding the most insignificant people who ever lived. Just think the beginnng of the 18th century. It is little more than yesterday and the smallest events can be found in the greatest detail. It is inconceivable that someone who was supposed to have rocked the Middle eastern world, would leave no trace at all in even one century. There were many writers who would have felt compelled to tell the story. But they didn't. Nothing was written other than an odd hearsay comment noted by the odd Roman such as Plyiny or Tacitus taking the local soap box orator literally.

Nazareth is a great giveaway. Not only because it didn't exist - see http://www.jesusneverexisted.com/nazareth.html - at the time, but Sepphoris did, and the lack of any mention of this capital city of Galilee rings every alarm bell in the Universe.

Lois: Eclipses do not, cannot, never have, and never will, last 3 hours. Besides, it is easy enough for astronomers to calculate when and where eclipses would have occurred back then, and I'm pretty sure none occurred within that time frame within that region. Loren can correct me if I'm wrong.

CBB : A person would go broke betting against Lois on Bible issues.

"The longest total solar eclipse during the 8,000-year period from 3000 BCE to 5000 CE will occur on July 16, 2186, when totality will last 7 min 29 seconds." HERE

CBB : Again and again, the New Testament is as full of crap as a Christmas goose, and it cannot be trusted.

CBB : A person would go broke betting against Lois on Bible issues.

"The longest total solar eclipse during the 8,000-year period from 3000 BCE to 5000 CE will occur on July 16, 2186, when totality will last 7 min 29 seconds." HERE

V: I didn't suggest I personally think an eclipse took place. I suggested those present might have regarded the gloominess as weather, or maybe an eclipse, or some other mundane thing. Is a dark day history making? I don't think so. As for me, all I see is that when Jesus was crucified, it became dark.

Vatic : The testimony of Jesus comes from those directly involved and those are the thing these insideres percieved and told us which give Jesus their significance at all.

CBB : Please name one of these people who was directly involved. You cannot do that because there is no record. That is the point we are attempting to beat into your thick skull. The New Testament accounts are fictional.

Wiki link: "The longest total solar eclipse during the 8,000-year period from 3000 BCE to 5000 CE will occur on July 16, 2186, when totality will last 7 min 29 seconds." HERE

Lois: Thanks, Loren. I just learned that an eclipse chaser is called an umbraphile. :o)

Vatic: Let's face the reality of historians, None of them would have noticed anything about a Jew getting crucified or see it as historically significant.

Lois: But they might have noticed a bunch of dead people coming out of their graves, walking around, and witnessing to people all over the place. They might have heard about that and at least gone to investigate. And finding out that it was true (as the Bible assures us it is), they would have written about it somewhere. Even if a historian didn't, surely someone, somewhere, would have actually witnessed this happening.

"Hey, that's Uncle Saul! We buried that bastard four months ago!"

"Well, he's back, and he keeps yammering about some dude named Yeshua."

Why didn't God cover all bases by making sure these events were thoroughly witnessed AND RECORDED by multiple sources? Is this really beyond his ability?

Devin: Anyone figure out who the insane one is yet? Hey Vatic, I talked with god the other day and he says you are full of poop. I love it, "if a person just hates what stands for ..." Again I love that. That is the old BS line of don't let your pride get in the way, Jesus died for you, what have you done for Jesus, god is the only way to love, etc.

Lois was being sarcastic Vatic yet you answered it like only the insane could. Oops, I let the cat out of the bag.

One has to love special pleading ... wait, no they don't.

Lois: God wants you to have FAITH. If you had EVIDENCE, then you wouldn't need faith anymore. Evidence and faith are mutually exclusive.

V: Are you still saying that? I thought we had made clear the distinction between the doctrinal definition of faith, with is evidence based, and Websters definition which by contrast, insist faith is substanceless adherance to something. Why do we never get beyond rehashing the same tedious repetitive misconceptions Lois? Let's get on the same page so that we can really comunicate, Okay?

It's not that the evidence isn't there. It's that it is sparingly sent to people in forms like it has been sent to me. For others evidences such as they testify to, it has a built in skeptic trap. In other cases the evidence must involved complicated investigation, time and energy consuming research in order to establish the corroboration of the evidence, so why would a skeptic make that effort? God is just not making it easy, even though for me, I've had a life full of spectacular evidence, which has in its very nature, a skeptic filtering aspect built right in again! I find it frustrating even though I know God must have a reason and doesn't feel much inclination to change his modus operandi based on my frustration with it.

And yes Lois, I acknowledge the God has a PR problem as far as skeptics are concerned. From my point of view, God is very intent on making the club very exclusive, despite all the groundwork that went into his establishment of the faith, even such as sending Jesus Christ to take our punishments for us. So why is reaping in the fields God hasn't sown such a daunting task if not for God's own handicapping of the task? This is a reality I'm dealing with Lois and my frustration is not some abstraction to me, nor would having my real frustrations be treated flippantly be appreciated.

By my nature I have persistence and tenacity, and frankly I don't know when to give up. So the puzzle of sharing the faith is a continual fascination of which I've meditated on more than most puzzles and mysteries in order to solve or even make headway. I hold the skeptic less responsible for his skepticism than I hold God responsible for withholding himself from skeptics and rufusing to give his servants adequate tools to work with except in rare and occassional instances in which God backs up a servant in a moment of imparted persuasion for the recipients benefit.

Lois, I live and breath with the optimism of the capacity of Human redemption for each and every individual. But you know something Lois? I live in utter dread that God is going to cull the vast majority of humanity despite His saying he is not willing any should be lost, but all come to repentance. Where then are the tools of persuasions by which the wayward can be directed to repentance unto the acceptance of God? When I hear the words that Jesus is supposed to have said, that wide is the gate that leads to destruction and many there be that go there, and how few find the narrow path, it fills me with dread, as well as a sense of futility, based not in the failing of my outreach to people, but the very idea that I reach out while God withdraws people from my hand of concerns toward them by handicapping the task. I am being asked to make bricks without straw.

Some of the men I see God gave the tools too, such as the prophet Elijah, I also see that God decided it had to be all dramatic with showdowns wherin both the prophet and the adversaries all took a beating. What is the point of that? Why must a good intent be punished in the process? Do the tools of persuasion have to be born in contrived scenarios of suffering?

Sometimes I have thought outwardly for God to hear, "This is your program and your game. Play it the way you like, I can't do anything but observe anyway". But then I feel love for people and I can't help myself from reaching out yet again, and again and again.. It's such a pointless frustration, yet not a pointless intention by any measure.

Do you know Lois, why I am unhumanly patient with people? It is because I've had many years and so much practice at not having instant results, with many people. Each moment of patience has a background of a thousand disappointments to prepare for yet another without frustration and a level of love that doesn't quinch despite the dashed hopes for a person. Compound that with the prospect of dealing with people who purposefully try to be stupid and unproductive by various attitude and behavior problems such as going back to old mistakes that have been explained comprehensively and should be understood in communing, but now is being brought back up as if it is a valid point for the purpose of posturing and not being serious or thoughful. Such vacuous, immature and thoughtless regression is an insult to the very meaning of the existence of this most kind and noble soul, who already has his own struggles to deal with the lack of backing he gets from his master, despite his master being so intimately involved with him personally. But what would you care or consider or have conscience toward that would provoke yourself to refrain from playing games? I suppose I should expect you will always go back to handy cliche's like faith is baseless belief, simply because of a shameless oportunism to seize a pose to inconveniance, labor and frustrate the conversation.

MYTH No. 4: Eyewitnesses wrote the Gospels

CBB : We have do not know who wrote the 4 Gospels. We do not know where they were written. We do not know when they were written.

The best we can do is estimate these things, though authorship does not even merit a guess because we have no idea about that. We do know that all 4 Gospels were written many decades after Jesus was dead, and decades after the Apostle Paul was dead. And we know that Mark was the 1st of the Gospels because the others copied Mark liberally.

Matthew copies 90% of Mark and Luke copied 50% of Mark. There are 661 verses in the Gospel of Mark, and Matthew copied 607 of them. Luke copied 360 verses of Mark. If that is not bad enough, and it is damn bad, Luke also copied from Matthew, and even from Flavius Josephus. Luke deliberately quote-mined the work of Josephus so he could insert historical details in order to give his Gospel the appearance looking historical. By the way, Josephus wrote "Antiquities of the Jews" about 93-94 CE, so Luke had to be composed some time after that. Luke fabricated history, but Luke did not record history. Does it make sense for an eyewitness to copy material from another source? Obviously not !!!

And THAT is why Burton Mack is so scathing about the work of Luke and the Book of Acts : ( Both are from the same unknown author )

Burton Mack on the Gospel of Luke : Luke's fiction was possible because he was an accomplished scholar and poet, but also because he and his readers were far removed from the time and places about which he wrote. Who Wrote The New Testament? page 171

Forever after Christians would think of Luke, not as a story teller, but as a historian or even as a reporter of historic events. They would always think that Luke knew something they did not know. Only those who turn to search the scriptures, trying to find the place where the messiah had to die, would ever wonder how Luke had managed such a marvelous fiction. Perhaps it was because he and his readers wanted to imagine the past that way. Who Wrote The New Testament? page 173

Burton Mack on the book of Acts : "The achievement of this fiction, a fiction so well done that it has been read as factual history for nearly two thousand years (Cameron 1994), is marked by great erudition and extremely clever design. .... That is great writing. It is also marvelous fiction. The author could not have been present at the events he describes, except of course, in the sense of being fully preoccupied with the history he was imagining. It is very important to see that this author was not violating normal conventions of historiography when he invented the history of the apostolic church." pages 230-231

CBB : The Gospel of John was written in the 2nd century. Eyewitness of Jesus? You have got to be joking !!!

V: It's not that the evidence isn't there. It's that it is sparingly sent to people in forms like it has been sent to me.

CBB : And there we have it, ladies and gentlemen. Vatic is special. I am not special. Isn't this just special? :>)

CBB : Well said, Rob. I completely agree with you.

Please do me a favor and read the last few messages in this Blog : HERE

Lois and I would both greatly appreciate your insight. Please respond in that Blog. I have business to attend to this afternoon, but I look forward to seeing what you think this evening.

Lois: I had to copy and paste it into my web browser. It is a PDF file. Here you go, try this: http://www.nazarethmyth.info/Fitzgerald2010HM.pdf

Lois: By the way, you will need the Adobe Reader in order to view PDF files. You can download it for free right here if you don't have it.

CBB : There is something in TEN BEAUTIFUL LIES ABOUT JESUS : HOW THE MYTHS CHRISTIANS TELL ABOUT JESUS CHRIST SUGGEST JESUS NEVER EXISTED AT ALL, by David Fitzgerald that all the members of our forum need to be made aware of :

David Fitzgerald : "There is nothing in the New Testament that was really written by anyone who claimed to personally know Jesus."

CBB : This begs the question : WHY? I submit that Jesus is a fictional character developed over time by people of a different place and a different era. That explains the errors in the New Testament regarding geography, law, tradition, time, places, etc.......

A second question of my own is of equal importance : Why are so many forgeries found in the New Testament?

The second question is easier to answer. The New Testament is filled with forgeries because there is nothing in the New Testament that was really written by anyone who claimed to personally know Jesus, so unknown authors attempted to fill in the blanks. And there is no such thing as the Holy Spirit, so the Holy Spirit was of no help at all.

These reasons alone are ample evidence for skeptics to reject the New Testament as sheer nonsense. Why anyone with any understanding of the compilation of the New Testament can accept any of this as the Word Of God is perplexing to rational people. I reject all of it as any thinking person would do if handed any other text with as many blatant errors.

That we still have Fundie Christians in this forum proclaiming that the Holy Bible is without any errors is childish. Finding a fact in the New Testament is like going on a bleeping snipe hunt.

David Fitzgerald : There comes a point when it no longer makes sense to give Jesus the benefit of a doubt. Even if we make allowances for legendary accretion, pious fraud, the criteria of embarrassment, doctrinal disputes, scribal errors and faults in translation, there are simply too many problems to the default position that assumes there simply had to be a historical individual (or more than one!) at the center of Christianity.

CBB : Indeed.

Brian: Basically, its whether or not I agree with the ethics promoted in each story. I can sympathize with stories of a man challenging traditional cruelty and hypocrisy in his own culture, who faces criticism from fundis who insist that their customs are infallible. But the stories making this character into a god-man who does not share humanity with the rest of us, and who demands blind obedience to himself as the new infallible authority, that part just teaches "thou shalt obey higher minds." I think these different story lines were written by totally different people, with totally different agendas.

Brian: This part just boggles my mind. How we get the doctrine of original sin from the quotes attributed to Jesus is beyond me. And the story says that Jesus rather vehemently opposed the doctrine of sacrifice for sin, even to the point of vandalizing the temple where sacrifices were performed. Looks to me like he insisted on forgiveness rather than sacrifice, and pointedly argued that people can forgive each other without offering sacrifices through the priesthood. Which has to do with why the priests (according to the story) hated him. How Jesus then turns into the ultimate human sacrifice for sin is a twist to the story which reverses its meaning. It's a reversal of message that conveniently justifies a new professional priesthood to mediate forgiveness through ritual sacrifice.

Lois: Christians NEED Jesus to be a real, historical person who died for their sins. etc.......

Brian : This part just boggles my mind. How we get the doctrine of original sin from the quotes attributed to Jesus is beyond me. etc.....

CBB : And this is one of many reasons I have opted out of the Christian belief system. I strongly suspect you have done the same, Brian. Or perhaps you never bothered to join Christianity in the first place.

At any rate, Christian dogma does not do well under intense scrutiny. It has all the earmarks of being man-made rather than God-made. This is of no consequence for the gullible, of course.

No, I didn't notice His Excellency Reverend Peter has joined us again. This is only my 5th post since last time. I only wish we had some real and true Christians for him to deal with. I'll try to look around and say hi, but I am still not doing all that well. I keep falling asleep.

Alan: No, I didn't notice His Excellency Reverend Peter has joined us again. This is only my 5th post since last time. I only wish we had some real and true Christians for him to deal with. I'll try to look around and say hi, but I am still not doing all that well. I keep falling asleep.

Lois: Alan, have you been tested for fibromyalgia?

CBB : Don't hold your breath. We are still waiting for the first one to show up here.

Lois: And we are waiting for any of them to tell us exactly what a "true Christian" is, and to name a few so that we have some idea what to expect. This prompts them to start mumbling about following Jesus' teachings and being born again and only God knows who is true and who is false and yada yada yada.

Malcolm: No it is not the same, Brian. The one thing we know about the Jesus Myth is that it was not a new story. It had been doing the rounds for thousands of years and with the very same name at that time- even now it is the same in Gaelic as it was in Ancient Egypt - IOSA. It was all the same story from the miraculous birth, but through a virgin goddess, all the same miracles, the same stories, such as the temple rage. Just research it for yourself and you will see how foolish it is to say that a living Jesus may not be a myth.

The other sages you mention are varied. Socrates for a start was definitely no myth and by including his name you pour doubt on the rest of your statement. However, you include another Christ - namely Christ-Na whose name only changed recently to Krishna. Again we have much the same story as the Jesus myth and again it is far older than the gospel fairy tale.

Moses was another bad pick. Dozens of Egyptian Kings added this name in their cartouches. However we do have a load of evidence pointing to Akhenaten. Just examine The Copper Scroll and see how his name is there and in a scroll found among all the other scrolls at Qumran. The scroll itself is Egyptian metal and it lists items using Egyptian weights and measures. It describes a city which could only be Akhenaten. Both the name of this king and his city were erased from memory in Egypt by subsequent kings upon pain of death, so no you have to ask yourself how it was known in Qumran more than one thousand years after his death.

Malcolm: An interesting name - "Jewish historian Yoseph bar
Mattatyahu, better known to us as Flavius Josephus."

Sounds like Matthew OR 'Ma'at W' (Egyptian for Truths and Justices).

Malcolm: Thank you, Loren. There is so much in just these ten points. And this is only the beginning. I would like to see some kind of trial where the whole of Christianity is prosecuted as a lie which has enslaved the Western World in a terrible cruel manner, for nigh on 1,800 years.

The Prosecution's case would go for months until all the evidence against this faith was put before a jury - not Christians, but learned men from every other faith.

In fact I think that it will come to this, if the Vatican lasts another two decades.

Myth 10 is so very easily shown to be false. Archaeologists have given us the evidence that the Greek World - which was very much a part of early Christianity - still had thriving Temples devoted to Aphrodite (Diana) and Adonis, well into the 6th century CE. Had Christianity been such an overnight success, those temples would have been destroyed by so many Christians in the first two centuries. But they weren't. These temples not only spread throughout Asia Minor, but were thriving right through the countries of North Africa that bordered the Mediterranean.

I haven't voted, yet, as a simple reading through so much material has to be given a lot of consideration and even personal research.

Brian: But dogmas like original sin, ecclesiastical infallibility, trinitarian doctine, etc. are obviously add-ons of later centuries. And of course the original version of Mark had no virgin birth, no resurrection scene, no great commission. All that was slipped in later. I'd reject these add-ons as contrary to earlier gospel stories rather than define them as the fundamentals of Christianity.

Brian: All that was slipped in later. I'd reject these add-ons as contrary to earlier gospel stories rather than define them as the fundamentals of Christianity.

Lois: Unfortunately, most Christians DO take them as foundational doctrines of their religion, and not just the Fundamentalists. They can find verses to support these doctrines, although of course they must do a lot of mental acrobatics to make it all fit together. If the "original" gospel manuscripts ever are found, Christians will be mighty surprised at what they DON'T say. You'd think they'd be wondering already why the phrase "original sin" is nowhere to be found in all the Bible. Isn't that rather strange, considering how important it is to their whole belief system? But their pastors discourage them from asking such questions.

Brian: Wasn't that the part they added onto Mark in later editions, along with the appearances of Jesus after death that they tacked on to make the book's ending seem more supernatural?

Brian : The fundis say you are a traitor, and the critics of Christianity assume that if you see anything good in it, then you must be one of the fanatics.

CBB : Rather than defining you, I have been patiently waiting for you to define yourself. You are not too keen about doing that, are you Brian? I seriously doubt that any member of this forum knows if you are a Christian or not.

Revelation : 3:15 I know thy works, that thou art neither cold nor hot: I would thou wert cold or hot. 16 So then because thou art lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I will spue thee out of my mouth.

Brian: I figure we all have a right to judge for ourselves what's helpful or stupid in any book, legend, or teacher. Is that hypocritical, or just natural?
Usually you can tell the moral agenda of a story, and get a pretty good idea who that agenda serves. Some of the things attributed to Jesus (especially the Gospel of John) serve the masters of ancient society, teaching people to obey a superhuman authority. Other things, like "Why can't you decide for yourselves what is right?" and all those angry attacks on the hypocrisy of established religious leaders, seem sufficiently insulting to the powers that were to earn a prompt death sentence.
As for what I am, I'm a dude who ties to think about things, and doesn't find any labels to enthusiastically wear. I figure we oughta speak for ourselves, and not presume to speak for either a divine being or a whole society. Maybe that's a cop-out, or maybe it's just honest.

CBB : I am a half-assed atheist, therefore I am an agnostic. :>)

CBB : Rather than defining you, I have been patiently waiting for you to define yourself. You are not too keen about doing that, are you Brian? I seriously doubt that any member of this forum knows if you are a Christian or not.

V: What do you mean he isn't defining himself? It pretty obvious Brian is a coffee diner variety Idealists visionary philosopher. His philosophical traits tend to mirror that very noble British enlightenment, instead of that awful materialist rationalistic French enlightenment stuff. Brian doesn't like to be pigeon holed because that is not only prejudicial, but misrepresentative of the totality of his beingness which is slowly but surely manifesting itself in an unending process. Besides being true to himself and who he is, Brian's other highest priority is the values he holds and lives by. There is no point in relegating himself to the confines of a label, since everything he holds too can be talked about in an objective and intellectual manner, quite apart from sticking them on him like a post a note. Such issues should stand and fall on their own merits, not on the basis of Brian's personhood, which just clouds the objective consideration of the matters at hand.

Brian's reasoning tends to see the bigger picture and deals with the specifics in context of their situation within the big picture. Just read his messages and this is definitely how he approaches things.

Another person who doesn't like being labeled is Denise, who avoids most diligently. Denise, and Brian and myself are all of the same fabric of Idealistic persons. Sometimes when I talk to Denise and read her messages, the impression on me is that it feels like she is disagreeing with me and I start to respond, until I realize she is meaning all the very same things I mean, but is just saying them in her own unique verbose way.

I surmise that Brian has grown out a religious culture and considers any prior involvement or contact with that culture as a certain growth level of the person he was at that period in his life. It is not who he is now nor does he want to own or be owned by a past. Brian is testing ideas in their essence in the crucible of his mind and values and still growing and maturing toward the ultimate ideal of himself. This is why he focuses on just the important thoughts and puts them in the scales.

So there you have it Loren. It is up to you and all of us to not label Brian, but to assist in the journey of being, contributing what we can to the man that he is. If we offer what can be Incorporated, he will incorporate it, and likewise other stuff will be rejected. So in a sense we have the opportunity to contribute to the defining of who Brian is. Brian is Gandolph from Lord of the Rings. Though he lives for centuries, he is still growing as a being. Brian would need a thousand ages to be who he really is, and then it would still be by then, undefinable.

"The difference between what the most and the least learned people know is inexpressibly trivial in relation to that which is unknown." ~ Albert Einstein

Rob: "The difference between what the most and the least learned people know is inexpressibly trivial in relation to that which is unknown." ~ Albert Einstein

I so agree. Check out this web page:
http://matt.might.net/articles/phd-school-in-pictures/

Vatic : Brian is Gandolph from Lord of the Rings.

Brian: This insistence on a label bugs me

V: Brian, we understand that is not really who you are and that it couldn't possibly represent your totality. People use analogous illustration as part of our way of speaking abstract ideas in compact ways. Labeling to say this is the actual being of a person is kind of small. But using a comparisin is not a statemnt of your being in that sense. I know labeling or pigeon holing can lead to problems. But let's not get to nervous about it.

Brian: In the old Middle East, people had to be in one tribe or else another, and there your loyalties had to lie. If you were a Jew who worshiped Marduk, you were a traitor to be killed. In the Middle East, Israelis and Palestinians arn't allowed to get married, cause loving the enemy is treason.

V: And your perception of it is that it was somehow compulsory? Listen Brian, you and I may neither one have much psychological need for a tribal identification to help define who we are. But we are 1 percenters in that respect, and virtually all the rest of humanity DESIRES to belong to some group, tribe, nation or any other collective.

Brian: But in modern secular society there's no shame in belonging to no religion, and even less shame in seeing some good in most of them.

V: You may be right with some qualifications. But you know that you are certainly going against the grain of the inate psychological needs of the vast majority of humanity. Everyone does NOT desire or need the same things. Everyone is not a a quest for self realization and individuality, nor would they ever want to be. They respect collectives and want to be a part of them.

Brian: You know, psychoanalysis of strangers over the internet has definite limitations.

Malcolm: Unfortunately that is not what happens in the Christian World. Children are groomed and brainwashed even in the Cradle with Jesus lullabies. They are not allowed to form their own opinions. The Catholics have always known this, hence their demands on families.

Malcolm : The result is that people like Sky, EE, (possibly Brian?),Vatic, and Delphina (Jesus calls a Storm - thread) are emerging. They do not know where they are. So they their minds invent something new - sometimes a vision, but more often something that they just cannot define, so they refer to it as 'The Master', or 'The Truth'. When asked to explain, they cannot, and then we see the weirdest wrigglings and wranglings that ever were wrought. Eventually we are told that we just couldn't understand what they are seeing and what they know, because the are much more knowledgeable than we are.

CBB : Yes, it is delightful entertainment.

MYTH No. 7: Archeology confirms the Gospels

David Fitzgerald : Physical archeology is no kinder to Christian claims. It is telling that so many places associated with Jesus have never been positively located because no one seems to agree just where they were supposed to have been, so we have competing sites for the Garden of Gethsemane, Golgotha, Jesus’ tomb, etc. In fact, a number of them (Arimathea, Emmaus, Cana, etc.) are only ever mentioned in the Gospels.

Though Jews like Isaiah (9:1) derided the region as “Galilee of the Gentiles,” in the Gospels it is already filled with synagogues and Pharisees (about 40 years too early, since they didn’t arrived until after the destruction of Jerusalem in the year 70), and the major cities of the region like Sephoris and Tiberius are meticulously and thoroughly ignored - because they are Gentile.

One incongruous fact about Jesus’ travels is often overlooked. Why does an inordinate amount of his adventures involve travel at sea? As Dennis MacDonald has demonstrated, it is one of many indications that Greek epics like Homer's Iliad and Odyssey inspired Mark. It is natural that stories set in the Greek isles would involve a great deal of sea-going – but such nautical episodes seem very out of place if you try to graft them onto a rural Palestinian setting as Mark did. Where do you place maritime adventures in landlocked Galilee? Mark solved it by inventing a brand new body of water, the Sea of Galilee. MacDonald reveals a surprising fact: no one ever referred to this small river-fed lake, just 7 miles long and 4 miles wide, as a “sea” before Mark did.

Even Luke consistently corrected Mark, calling it by its real name and proper term: Lake Chinnereth. This tiny fishing hole seems like an unlikely stand-in for the ferocious sea where Jesus and the disciples have to battle life-threatening storms and powerful waves - a fact recognized even in ancient times, as we learn from the third-century pagan intellectual Porphyry discussing the problems of Mark 6:45-52:

“Experts in the truth about these places (in Galilee) report that there is no sea there, though they do refer to a small, river-fed lake at the foot of the mountain in Galilee near the city Tiberias, a lake easily traversed in small canoes in no more than two hours and insufficiently capacious for waves or storms. So Mark greatly exaggerates the truth when he ludicrously composes this fiction of a nine-hour journey and Jesus striding upon (the water) on the tenth (the tenth hour, “the fourth watch of the night”) to find his disciples sailing on the pond. Then he calls it (a sea), not merely a sea but one beset by storms, dreadfully wild, and terrifyingly agitated by the heaving of the waves, so that from these details he could represent Christ as performing a great sign, namely, calming a mighty and violent storm and rescuing his scarcely endangered disciples from the deep and open sea.” (Porphyry, Contra Christianos, fragment 55 trans. by MacDonald)

CBB : And on and on and on this fiction grows............When we are reading the Gospels and Acts, we are not reading a historical account of anything. We are reading fiction. These events never took place. Many of these places never existed. Many of these people never existed. I am becoming more convinced every day that Jesus himself never existed as anything but the lead character in a series of fictional accounts dreamed up long after all facts were evaporated from the time and places where these stories were said to originate from. Even the city of Nazareth did not exist in the early 1st century !!! Good grief !!!

Encyclopedia Biblica : “It is very doubtful whether the beautiful mountain village of Nazareth was really the dwelling-place of Jesus.”

James Randi : “The facts are that no demonstrable evidence dating either to the time of Jesus or to earlier Hellenistic times has been found at Nazareth. It is a late Roman-Byzantine village, not a mythical settlement at the turn of the era. As author René Salm says: That question has already been answered, and answered convincingly."

CBB : There is no archaeological evidence for a city named Nazareth existing in the early 1st century. This is the damning evidence that the Nazareth described in the New Testament is a myth, and Jesus Of Nazareth is also a myth. We may as well be reading The Wizard Of Oz and trying to defend the historical city named Oz and the old man behind the curtain. Christians have been had, but only because they are intellectually lazy and inherently gullible. I am neither.

Jerome: LOL Brian. You are smart and slow to anger. Good qualities to have. We are all trying to figure out whether there is something that needs to be figured out in life.

Brian: This book describes excavations in the current Nazareth village of Galilee, which shows a tiny village occupied the spot in the first century:

Excavating Jesus: Beneath the Stones, Behind the Texts
by John Dominic Crossan

This book is a real model for cross-disciplinary work. Crossan and Reed bring state-of-the-art archaeology and textual research together into a unified picture. They don't just try to link stories with physical remains; instead they flesh out the whole environment of first-century Palestine--as well as we can currently do. They pore over the levels of both strata and of written accounts--for Nazareth, Capernaum, Caesarea Martima, Sepphorus, Masada, Qumram, Jerusalem, and other towns utterly destroyed in the revolts against Rome, such as Gamla. The realities on the ground are grim, in terms of life-expectancy, poverty, force-backed injustice, and the terrible consequences of resistance. The "layering" of physical remains and of texts is complicated, and sometimes confusing to a non-expert like me. But the authors want to challenge readers, and maybe that's a good thing. Slowly a clearer picture emerges of the pressures and realities ancient people faced. The picture is not pretty, but it give us fresh appreciation for the hardships, the horrors, and the meaning of these people's lives.

Of course they didn't find Jesus' name listed in the first century Yellow Pages, or another hunk of the true cross. The archaelogists do find remains of a man crucified in Roman times, but that was pretty damn common.

Really, does any realistic person expect to find evidence of a Middle Eastern peasant from 2,000 years ago? I mean, we could also demonstrate there's NO evidence for any of those legendary characters like Zoroaster, Homer, Mahavira, Mithra, Isis, Lao Tzu, Buddha, Sinbad the Sailor, Kwan Yin, King Arthur, or Robin Hood. I don't see that this conclusively proves that these stories have no basis in any ancient events, or that the stories are therefore lies, or that this proves they have no cultural value.

Fitzgerald: MacDonald reveals a surprising fact: no one ever referred to this small river-fed lake, just 7 miles long and 4 miles wide, as a “sea” before Mark did.

Even Luke consistently corrected Mark, calling it by its real name and proper term: Lake Chinnereth.

Lois: Oh, wait till we tell Delphina about that! She'll just tell us to stop talking "foolishness" and to quit asking stupid questions about the Bible. (This is my prediction, but I won't take bets on it because it would be such an easy win for me.)

Brian: What's crazy is to insist on keeping EVERYTHING from the past (like the ancient Middle East), or to insist on chucking EVERYTHING from the past, and going for something that's supposedly totally new.

Lois: I have elected to chuck roughly 98% of everything from the Bible. Other than a some decent proverbs and a few nice moral tales here and there, I find it a boring mishmash of ancient myths and fables that have no relevance to anyone or anything. Many Bible stories were adapted from much older Egyptian myths and changed almost beyond recognition, their meanings forgotten by the desert-dwelling rubes who later wrote them down.

Kan: If a historical rabbi were pounding the dusty streets of the region, spreading his message, it seems unbelievable that any chronicle, however poor, would omit a mention of this town.

Lois: It seems unbelievable that some teacher would claim to have this great message from God and yet not bother going to the busiest of cities to promote it. Maybe people in the big cities were more educated and less gullible, so less likely to believe his primitive semi-Jewish nonsense.

Brian: I have no idea what details to expect from a late first-century writer, spinning out a tale after it had been changed with every oral re-telling over four to six decades, during or following a war which almost wiped Palestine off the map.

Brian: I have no way to evaluate whether Reed or Salm have better archaeological evidence on that. I don't know.

Brian: I have no way to evaluate whether Reed or Salm have better archaeological evidence on that. I don't know.

CBB : You do not know because you have not taken the time and effort to investigate. I have taken the time, and I have made the effort. Salm systematically shows the errors made by Reed, Crossan, Strange, Bagatti, etc.

Some are simple math errors that an 8th grader can understand easily. Some are cases of obvious misidentification. It is fascinating stuff that I have followed in the Jesus Mysteries forum, and of course I have read from all of the authors mentioned above and more.

Christians are fighting a rear guard war at the moment.

Malcolm: Especially when it was the only town anywhere near the supposed birthplace. Just a 45 minute walk, where he would have had to go almost every day for provisions. I doubt that a carpenter would have been self-sufficient. But Sepphoris was more. It was the Capital City of Galilee.

CBB : Doesn't it seem odd that Josephus actually lived in Japha, which is only 1 1/2 miles SW of Nazareth, but he never bothers to mention that Jesus lived in Nazareth? As a matter of fact, Josephus never mentions Nazareth either. Really !!! HERE

Josephus : "And when I had thus done, I went and abode at Japha." JOSEPHUS' WRITINGS - LIFE OF FLAVIUS

CBB : Josephus lived 37 CE – 100 CE, and he lived a part of his life less than 2 miles from Nazareth, so he surely was aware of Jesus and all of the fantastic stories about him. Right? Wrong !!! We have nothing from Josephus about any of these miraculous deeds of the Son of God. It just does not make any sense. It is as though Jesus did not ever live in Nazareth because Josephus never mentions Nazareth at all. The only thing we have from Josephus that mentions Jesus is a forgery that Christians have buggered up so badly that even Christian Bible scholars have no faith in its authenticity.

Think about it.........The historian Josephus lived within 30 minutes of Nazareth at walking speed, but he does not record anything about a man who was dead for 3 days after being crucified and came back to life. He knows nothing about a man who lived next door that was born from a virgin. He knows nothing about a man who lived next door that was able to walk on water. He knows nothing about a man who lived next door that was able to bring a man back to life who had been dead for 4 days. etc..etc... etc...

This is just too much to be asked to believe. The evidence, and the complete lack of evidence, strongly suggests that The New Testament is fiction from start to finish. There is no archaeological evidence to suggest that the city of Nazareth in the early 1st century existed at all. The glorious tales of Jesus Christ and his exploits are also fictional accounts that were invented by the unknown authors of the Gospels and Acts.


"Scholars believe there were approximately 15,000 to 20,000 inhabitants during the time of Christ." HERE

CBB : This is just crazy !!! Christian scholars may be proclaiming this huge number, but no archeologist will back this up at all. It is depressing to me to see Christian lie out their ass. Even Jonathan Reed admits that the figure could not have been more than a few hundred, and maybe much less. But he is just guessing himself. Here is what I mean by that :

An Interview with Jonathan L. Reedby John D. Spalding HERE

Spalding : "No archaeological evidence of Jesus' first-century followers has ever been found. What does that tell us?"

Reed : "Most of Jesus' early followers were lower-class people who were considered unimportant by the political and literary elite. Christians flew under the radar, staying under the surface until the end of the second century, when they emerged as people with a visual and a literary culture.

It also suggests that most of Jesus' earliest followers were Jewish and didn't use images. So even if they believed in Jesus as the Messiah, they wouldn't represent that belief in a pictorial way recognizable to us. When we examine a first-century synagogue today, we can't tell if it's a place that Jesus' followers would have attended or not."

CBB : Please note that Reed does not dispute the assertion by Spalding that no 1st century evidence has ever been found at Nazareth. It has not been found because it has never existed. Nazareth did not exist in the early 1st century. Get used to it.

"Obliged to admit a dearth of suitable evidence of habitation, none the less, Bagatti was able conclude that 1st century AD Nazareth had been 'a small agricultural village settled by a few dozen families.' "

Lois: Hardly enough to support a synagogue.

CBB : Indeed, and hardly a city either, despite the lies we read in the New Testament.

Matthew 2:23 And he came and dwelt in a city called Nazareth: that it might be fulfilled which was spoken by the prophets, He shall be called a Nazarene.

Luke 2:4 And Joseph also went up from Galilee, out of the city of Nazareth, into Judaea, unto the city of David, which is called Bethlehem; (because he was of the house and lineage of David:)

CBB : City? Give me a bleeping break !!!

David Fitzgerald : According to the Gospels, Jesus was buried in the tomb owned by one of his followers, Joseph of Arimathea (though they disagree on exactly who he was). Mark calls him “a respected member of the council” (15:43), forgetting that he had also said the council’s condemnation of Jesus had been unanimous. But where is Arimathea? The Bible mentions Arimathea exactly four times – when the four Gospels introduce Joseph
of Arimathea. (Matt 27:57; Mark 15:43; Luke 23:50; John 19:38). Apart from this, there is no record of Arimathea anywhere; not in the Bible, not in Jewish, Greek or Roman records, or anywhere else. The first time any record of it appears anywhere outside the Gospels is in the fourth century gazetteer The Onomasticon, written by – surprise! - our reliable old friend Bishop Eusebius. None of these facts are very encouraging to would-be Arimathea hunters.

With absolutely no information to go on except that Arimathea was “a Jewish city” (Luke 23:50), no one can honestly say with any kind of confidence that they know where Arimathea was – or more importantly, if it ever even really existed. But this hasn’t stopped some from claiming to have located the fabled Arimathea.

And so suspicion lingers that Mark simply made the whole place up. He certainly seems to have made up Joseph of Arimathea. Price notes: “Like Judas, Joseph of Arimathea is a fictional character who grows in the telling.

CBB : At every turn when we focus sharply on the text of the New Testament, we find that it does not stand up to scrutiny. This is exactly the opposite of what we would expect from the Word Of God if the Holy Spirit really had a hand in the compilation of this work.

Where is Arimathea? No one knows. Who was Joseph of Arimathea? No one knows, because he was injected into the plot for a single purpose and then he fades into the background. Though it is very interesting that "Mark calls him “a respected member of the council” (15:43), forgetting that he had also said the council’s condemnation of Jesus had been unanimous."

Mark 15:43 Joseph of Arimathaea, an honourable counsellor, which also waited for the kingdom of God, came, and went in boldly unto Pilate, and craved the body of Jesus.

Burton Mack on the Gospel of Mark : "The usual approach to Mark's so-called passion narrative has been to regard it as a historical account of what really happened, but then to fret about features of it that are difficult to accept. The list of improbable features is quite long and includes such things as the trial by night, which would have been illegal; the basis for the charge of blasphemy, which is very unclear if not completely trumped up; the failure of the witnesses to agree, which would have called for a mistrial; the right of the Sanhedrin to charge with death, a sanction that they probably did not have at the time; the insinuation of crucifixion taking place on Passover, which would have been an outrage; Jesus' anticipation of his death as a covenant sacrifice, which might be all right for a bacchic god, but hardly for the historical Jesus; the disciples falling asleep in the midst of it all; Pilate's having Jesus executed as the "king of the Jews" without a good reason to consider him so; the high priests (in the plural!) joining in the mocking; and so on. The better approach is to recognize the whole story as Mark's fiction written forty years after Jesus' time in the wake of the Roman-Jewish war. If we first read Josephus' account of the war, we can see that Mark's retrospective on Jesus in Jerusalem would not have sounded a bit far-fetched." Who Wrote The New Testament? page 158

CBB : When we read the New Testament, we are reading fiction, but we are not reading a historical account of anything. There is not a word in any book of the New Testament that records anything Jesus actually said because none of the unknown authors ever head a word from Jesus, and none of these unknown authors ever saw Jesus in person. Christians have been sold a bill of goods.

Malcolm: It proves nothing, Vatic. You are falling in to the same old pit as the Jews of todays Israel - i.e. ignoring the fact that Israel was once Lower Egypt. When they migrated, they did what migrants the whole world over do. - They named their new localities with the same names as the old. Australia is packed full of names of British towns and cities.

The important thing here is that we do know that 1 Samuel is set in Lower Egypt. I have shown all of this evidence before and if you have not been studying it, then it is to be expected that you present such errors.

Any name preceded by the God name Ra, shows that it has an Egyptian origin.

The argument for Joseph of Arimathea being Josephus is a million times better than your Hunter's proposal.

Malcolm: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crucifixion .... Josephus wrote - "I saw many captives crucified, and remembered three of them as my former acquaintance. I was very sorry at this in my mind, and went with tears in my eyes to Titus, and told him of them; so he immediately commanded them to be taken down, and to have the greatest care taken of them, in order to their recovery; yet two of them died under the physician's hands, while the third recovered."[34] Josephus gives no details of the method or duration of the crucifixion of his three friends before their reprieve."

Just compare this with the account in Matthew 27:57/58.

The Josephus account is the only one like it recorded anywhere. It has to be the same event, and that Josephus was in other ancient texts said to be Josephus Bar Mathias.

MYTH No. 8: Paul and the Epistles corroborate the Gospels

David Fitzgerald : "What about Paul and the other New Testament writers? Paul is responsible for most of the NT epistles, though many if not the majority of Bible scholars now think that he only wrote 7 of the 13 letters attributed to him, and even his genuine letters have interpolations.

As Earl Doherty points out, in speech after speech in the book of Acts, Christian apostles start with the man Jesus, recalling his miracles and teachings, and declaring their faith in him. But when early Christian writers like Paul speak of their "Christ Jesus", they sound as if they are describing a mythological figure - not a flesh and blood human being. Paul never talks about Jesus’ death, the Lord’s Supper, or any of the events of Christ’s life as though they actually happened to a real man from Galilee who lived on Earth just a few years before. Paul vehemently denies that he has received his knowledge from any man. He has learned of the Son through revelation and scripture. Paul and most of the other epistles came first, and the Gospels and Acts came later; the only scriptures they knew were the Jewish scriptures."

Galatians 1:11 But I certify you, brethren, that the gospel which was preached of me is not after man. 12 For I neither received it of man, neither was I taught it, but by the revelation of Jesus Christ.

1 Corinthians 15:3 For I delivered unto you first of all that which I also received, how that Christ died for our sins according to the scriptures;

CBB : Hello !!! What Old Testament scripture is Paul talking about? There are no Old Testament scriptures about some Christ who died for the sins of anyone. Paul knows nothing about an Earthly Jesus of Nazareth.

Look through the letters of the Apostle Paul and attempt to answer these questions :

1.) When was Jesus born?

2.) Where was Jesus born?

3.) Who were the parents of Jesus?

4.) Where did Jesus live?

5.) When did Jesus die?

6.) Where did Jesus die?

7.) Who killed Jesus?

The answers cannot be found prior to the Gospels because Jesus of Nazareth had yet to be invented. Why? Because there is nothing in the New Testament that was really written by anyone who
claimed to personally know Jesus, that's why.

Bart Ehrman writes in the conclusion of the book, "Jesus, Interrupted" : "Doctrines such as the divinity of Jesus and Heaven and Hell are not based on anything Jesus or his earlier followers said. At least 19 of the 27 books in the New Testament are forgeries. Believing the Bible is infallible is not a condition for being a Christian."

CBB : See what I mean?

CBB : We have all been brainwashed into thinking of Jesus the Christ through the lens of the Gospel accounts, and so we unconsciously read the historical Jesus of Nazareth back into the Epistles of Paul. The very earliest Christians did not have the Gospel accounts. The only material they had were the Epistles and the Old Testament, and they had a very different idea about Jesus than we have today.

The Jesus Christ of Paul was a spiritual being. The Epistles are a sun baked desert with nothing to grasp of Jesus the man. The Gospels are the oasis everyone wanted, and that is what the Gospel writers gave them, even though they had to resort to fiction in order to fill that void. It should be a bright red flag that the Gospels are all written so late and by people who witnessed nothing Jesus ever said or did, but Christians are remarkably gullible and they seldom ask questions. And they assuredly do not ask the RIGHT questions. We are here to fill that void in CBED.

It takes a great deal of self discipline to read the Epistles as though you are reading them for the very first time in your life, and read them as though you know absolutely nothing from the Gospels or any modern secular material. The results are astounding. It is a great challenge, but the results are quite illuminating.

Have any of our members actually attempted this? If so, I would like to hear your conclusions.

Brian: Reed and Crossan say the evidence of ancient Nazareth is of a few huts, with no building which could have possibly served as a communal synagogue. They say the story of a synagogue in Jesus' village was almost certainly invented by writers around 50 years later, who had no idea what Jesus' actual home village may have been like. I'd say they latched onto "Nazareth" simply to fit with a saying in the Old Testament about some "Nazarene"

Still, it's normal in ancient history that some hero draws a growing body of myths and folktales, which accumulate like layers around some core event, and often recast the story for a message utterly different from earlier versions of the tale. It's the same with Confucius being slowly transformed into a prophet of domination, who reportedly taught only unilateral obedience to superiors by inferiors.

Jerome: Brian keeps his wits about him well.

Vatic: "The Onomasticon of Eusebius and Jerome identifies it with Ramathaim-Zophim in the hill-country of Ephraim (1 Samuel 11), which is Ramah the birthplace and burial-place of Samuel (1 Samuel 1:19; 1 Samuel 25:1), and places it near Timnah on the borders of Judah and Dan. G. A. Smith thinks it may be the modern Beit Rima, a village on an eminence 2 miles North of Timnah. Others incline to Ramallah, 8 miles North of Jerusalem and 3 miles from Bethel (Matthew 27:57 Mark 15:43 Luke 23:51 John 19:38)."

Lois: On what evidence do they base these assumptions, Vatic? Do you know? Can you point out Arimathea on a map, and prove that it was, indeed, a real place?

Malcolm: The Josephus account is the only one like it recorded anywhere. It has to be the same event, and that Josephus was in other ancient texts said to be Josephus Bar Mathias.

Lois: It makes sense that "Bar Mathias" became corrupted to "Arimathea" by a confused translator at some point--or was perhaps deliberately changed to hide the real origin of the story. Until Vatic can find some ancient references to this mysterious place and point it out on a map for us, Arimathea can be assumed to be about as real as the Seven Cities of Gold.

"Obliged to admit a dearth of suitable evidence of habitation, none the less, Bagatti was able conclude that 1st century AD Nazareth had been 'a small agricultural village settled by a few dozen families.' "

Kan: Anatevka had a syngogue in a sad state of disrepair. Of course, _Fiddler on the Roof_ was fiction (mumble, mumble).

CBB : I figured you would pop up with that one, Malcolm. Thanks. :>)

Jerome: LOL. Occassionally I have to reel myself back in and start over. There is a Ninja Sensei who ends his lessons with "Your humble servant". He explained once that he did this as a constant reminder to himself that he should be humble towards others and not at all to be pretentious.

I think this it is good to Jap slap my ego every now and then and remind myself that I am not all that and a bag of chips. Just another bozo trying to find my way like everyone else.

Patience...

MYTH No. 9: Christianity began with Jesus and his apostles

David Fitzgerald :" Acts portrays the early church as a happy little band of believers gathered around Jesus’ family and disciples in Jerusalem. Nothing in that scenario jibes with reality. Paul and our other earliest Christian witnesses show that right out of the gate, completely divergent forms of Christianity were already established and spread far and wide before Jesus was supposed to have even picked up his cross. Even before Paul is converted, there are already Christian communities as far away as Damascus in Syria and Antioch in Asia Minor, and even Rome itself, even though tradition still maintains that Paul founded them. His letter to the Romans makes it perfectly clear that the church there had already been in existence for many years, and that he had never been there." (Rom. 1:13,15; 15:20-23)

CBB : Paul did not start a Christ cult. Paul joined one of many, many already existing Christ cults. But these groups were not all talking about the same Christ, and they most certainly were not all talking about Jesus of Nazareth. That fictional character had yet to be invented.

The Apostle Paul : Romans 1:15 So, as much as in me is, I am ready to preach the gospel to you that are at Rome also.

CBB : Here we see that the Church had already been established in Rome for years !!! And all of this without Paul ever being there.

Mark : 9:38 And John answered him, saying, Master, we saw one casting out devils in thy name, and he followeth not us: and we forbad him, because he followeth not us.

CBB : Even as late as Mark, people were casting out demons in the name of Christ, but it was a different Christ than Jesus Christ. Why? Because in the early 1st century Christ cults were a dime a dozen. It was the rage.

Robert M. Price : “The cherished image of a single early church untainted by heresy, with everyone of one heart and soul worshipping one Christ, and eventually producing a harmonious canon of scripture speaking a single Gospel with a single voice – is a myth. In every case, an earlier diversity has been unsuccessfully hidden away behind a screen of history as the finally dominant faction wished it had been.”

CBB : We speak of Jesus Christ today as Jesus THE Christ, but Jesus was only one of many Christs who littered the landscape in many diverse Christ cults that already existed when the Apostle Paul arrived on the scene. I hashed this out with Mens_sana long ago in CBED-MSN :



CBB 11-15-2005 : Indeed, Paul knew about the Christ myth, but I cannot find any evidence to suggest he knew anything about the carnal man. .

mens_sana: Tch, tch. Paul knew absolutely nada about any "Christ myth." He had a vision of Christ and to him it was a real appearance, nothing "mythical" about it. And he knew enough about the real Jesus that he was able to associate his vision with that person.

CBB : That is not correct. I am confident you have a copy of Who Wrote The New Testament?, by Burton Mack plopped around somewhere within reach. Please turn to page 79, and look at the title of the subject matter for the next 9 pages so I do not have to go to the trouble of typing out a few paragraphs about THE CHRIST MYTH.

mens_sana Message : My apology. I got confused about which Christ myth you were speaking of. Burton Mack is, quite legitimately, able to characterize the movement that Paul joined as the "Christ Myth."

Kan: I'll gladly trade our bunch down here for your liberals "up there."

Brian: Traditionally, I don't think the Japanese went in for bitch-slapping people. They usually just cut their heads off

r: Did Jesus Die?

N: Eventually, but not as the Gospels describe.

Jerome:

To Jap Slap someone, is to slap them when they are not aware of the incomming slap. (I.E Sneak attack) Comes from when the Japanese bombed Pearl Habor in sneak attack fashion.
"When Alex wasnt looking I Jap slapped him right in the back of the head"

N: AKA sucker punch.

For an example of early division, Luke edited the record of early Christianity for a more pro-Roman, anti-Jewish slant. Where Paul had written that he fled the city of Damascus due to hostility from the Nabataean ruler Aretas (II Corinthians 11:32–33), Luke changed the story to claim that Paul fled to escape murderous anti-Christian Jews (Acts (9:23–25).

http://www.blueletterbible.org/tools/printerFriendly.cfm?b=Isa&c=45&t=lxx&x=6&y=7

45:1 οὕτως λέγει κύριος ὁ θεὸς τῷ _χριστῷ_ μου Κύρῳ οὗ ἐκράτησα τῆς δεξιᾶς ἐπακοῦσαι ἔμπροσθεν αὐτοῦ ἔθνη καὶ ἰσχὺν βασιλέων διαρρήξω ἀνοίξω ἔμπροσθεν αὐτοῦ θύρας καὶ πόλεις οὐ συγκλεισθήσονται

Original Hebrew: 45:1
כֹּה־אָמַר יְהוָה לִמְשִׁיחֹו לְכֹורֶשׁ אֲשֶׁר־הֶחֱזַקְתִּי בִֽימִינֹו לְרַד־לְפָנָיו גֹּויִם וּמָתְנֵי מְלָכִים אֲפַתֵּחַ לִפְתֹּחַ לְפָנָיו דְּלָתַיִם וּשְׁעָרִים לֹא יִסָּגֵֽרוּ׃

http://www.blueletterbible.org/Bible.cfm?b=Isa&c=45&t=NKJV#vrsn/1

Kan: From the various translations on the link given above, I can't find anything translated as "Ĥristoi/Christ," although I see your emphasized Greek letters quite clearly. Do we have some sort of multi-generational, universal conspiracy here among translators?

CBB : Please remember that Mark was the 1st Gospel, and the others copied from Mark. There were is no eyewitness testimony from anyone. Even Mark is not writing a history of anything, but he is revealing another pagan mystery religion. This is exactly what people in this era expected, and that is what Mark gave them. And Mark was hardly being coy about it either.

Mark 4:11 And he said unto them, Unto you it is given to know the mystery of the kingdom of God: but unto them that are without, all these things are done in parables: 12 That seeing they may see, and not perceive; and hearing they may hear, and not understand; lest at any time they should be converted, and their sins should be forgiven them.

CBB : If Christians would take the time and effort to read about the ancient mystery cults, they would understand that Christianity is just another mystery cult that became literalized inadvertently by people that did not understand what they were doing. I am sure of that by reading Mark 4:12 above. Mark obviously did not think that most people would or should understand the parable he was writing, and he did not think most should or would have their sins forgiven. Mark desired an insider's boy's club. He would be appalled at what as happened today. The sacred mystery of Mark has been bastardized.

POCM HERE : "The theology of the mysteries was a sacred secret. No one could write and circulate handbooks of mystery practice and theology. No one writing a book of history or biography could describe any details of mystery practice and theology. And they meant it. Ancient writers mention the mysteries a lot, but with the one exception below from Herodotus, they always pull back from disclosing sacred secrets. As we've seen they occasionally hint, or say outright, that the mysteries bring salvation, but beyond that the basic rituals and theologies of ancient mystery religions are gone. Lost.

Which makes it impossible to line up Christian ritual and theology with ritual and theology of the other mysteries. Does Christianity look like a mystery? Yes. Did the early Christians say Christianity was a mystery? Yes. Can we prove the theologies and rituals line up? Nope, we can't. Very tantalizing."


"With regard to the mysteries... I know them, but I shall not mention them, except so far as may be done without impiety." [Herodotus, The Persian War, 2.171 (c 440 BC)]

Jerome: Ridge has some interesting vids about the mysteries Loren. They are at his web site I think. He posted a link in one of my newer threads here..

CBB : Then Brian will be interested in POCM HERE if he has not already aware of it.

Brian: I don't think it was put together with any unified plan at all. Each "book" had a life of it's own, with differently edited versions appearing here and there, and different people shifting or preserving things for their own purposes. etc...........

CBB : Have you seen a copy of The Pre-Nicene New Testament, by Robert M. Price? This is a far better New Testament if you want to know what people in the early Christian era were reading. This is definetly one of my favorite books.

HERE

Malcolm: Yet, elsewhere in the Histories, Herodotus does go into detail in describing religious rites, e.g. when he tells us about the festival of Dionysus - here is a small extract which follows a description of the sacrifices:

"In other ways the Egyptian method of celebrating the festival of Dionysus is much the same as the Greek, except that the Egyptians have no choric dance. Instead of the phallus they have puppets about eighteen inches high; the genitals of these figures are made almost as big as the rest of their bodies, and they are pulled up and down by strings as the women carry them round the villages. Flutes lead the procession, and the women as they follow sing a hymn to Dionysus. There is some sort of religious explanation for the size of the genitals and the fact they are the only part of the puppet's body which is made to move. .......

.....The names of nearly all the gods came to Greece from Egypt. I know from the enquiries I have made that they came from abroad, and it seems most likely that it was from Egypt, for the names of all the gods have been known in Egypt from the beginning of time, with the exception (as I have already said) of Poseidon and the Dioscuri - and also of Hera, Themis, the Graces, and the Nereids.

I have the authority of the Egyptians themselves for this.....

.....These practices, then, and others which I will speak of later, were borrowed by the Greeks from Egypt.....

.....Anyone will know what I mean if he is familiar with the mysteries of the Cabiri - rites which the men of Samothrace learned from the Pelasgians who lived in that island before they moved to Africa, and communicated the mysteries to the Athenians."

Already read the entire document. I will agree on many of his points. I've already read some of his references when I wrote about this two years ago and did my own research on the matter and pilgrimage to the holy city of Jerusalem.

All I can say is, Christianity is a Mystery Religion. And like all mystery religions, one would never understand it if we apply rationality and historicity to it based on the rule-sets of those two modes of thinking. The Gnostics, the Cathars, the Druids, the Catholic knights, the Rosicrucians, the Templars, the Order of the Golden Cross, the Freemasons, the Illuminati, the Vatican...they all knew the secrets behind it. If you desire to understand it, then look for its true meaning in its esoteric side, never on its exoteric version, and it would suddenly make sense to you like playing Poker.

As Jesus says in the Gospel of Thomas (http://www.gnosis.org/naghamm/gthlamb.html), the secret sayings which the living Jesus spoke and which Didymos Judas Thomas wrote down and was never accepted into the canon but was a primary gospel of the Gnostics, and some of these sayings were also mentioned by Mark and Luke:

"Let him who seeks continue seeking until he finds. When he finds, he will become troubled. When he becomes troubled, he will be astonished, and he will rule over the All."

The Vedas has something similar to that. The Egyptians too. And even the Buddha and Lao Tse. Notice that it doesn't say rule over all...but rule over The All. Find what that means and you will know what the Holy Grail really is about.

Malcolm: The Secrets behind Christianity, ridge, is that it is all false and is just a rehash of stories plagiarised from earlier relgions, mainly Egyptian which belief was in a Spiritual Jesus - Same Name - Iosa, Same miracles, Same Annunciation, Conception, Birth and Adoration. The latter can still be read in at least two Egyptian Temples. They had a Holy Trinity and the tomb of King Twt shows him as all three including Jesus with the Holy Spirit or Ka carrying an Ankh - a Cross.

There is no mystery about this at all. This is the real truth.

There isn't one shred of evidence for a real living Jesus and we can tell from the Epistles that Paul knew nothing of a living Jesus - only the same spiritual Jesus who had been worshipped for thousands of years.

This is a forum that is ready to accept any truth that can be backed up by evidence.

If you are looking for mysteries, then you would be better to turn to the Greek Oracles.

The numbers we use now is a concept of the Hindus and the mystic Arabs, passed-on via spiritual doctrines, but we hardly question it. Neither do we care if the Hindu gods were true, all we know is that Numbers work for us...

Shouldn't we do the same with the meat of these mysteries?

As I understand those passages, correlated with other Gnostic gospels, is that every human born into this reality has a specific purpose and path, primarily motivated by his/her emotions and intents. And as that individual expands and navigates this reality, there will be times when he wouldn't be fulfilling the desires and wishes of his parents and their own cultural traditions. In most cases, simply to fulfill that expansion, there will be a clash between the younger generations and the older generations. Such is why every generation turns the theme upside-down. Review history and you will notice how we all arrived to our ways of life now. There will never be agreement between the older ones and the new ones. Such is the nature of change. Everything evolves.

Regarding the mysteries, all schools of thought, sciences, religions, and disciplines are models of reality. Most are not complete or fundamental. You experience reality –then translate that experience into a model. Know it or not –you have one –Most likely based on cultural beliefs. Your notion of reality, my notion of reality, scientific and religious notions of reality all represent reality models. If you are a scientist, you get to call your beliefs assumptions. We describe our models with 1) the logic of interaction (math), 2) metaphors and symbols (strings, or higher self, chakras), 3) slogans (“you get what you need and deserve” or “God is love”, “we are all one”). Don’t confuse the math or interaction logic; or the metaphors; or the slogans used to describe reality, with reality. All our conceptualizations are models.

But the greatest mystery is that Reality itself is not "real" as we think and define the term. “Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one.” –Albert Einstein

Physical reality is an illusion and does not exist independently –it is a mental construct. The relationship between physical reality and consciousness is fundamental but still unknown. Consciousness is somehow at the root of reality. Reality is neither objective nor deterministic –it is statistical –based on probability. Reality/mass exists only as probability until a measurement is made. And that same measurement is reinterpreted again subjectively based on your own understanding and existing mental archetypes.

The mystery is that there in no objective , deterministic reality. Reality is statistical and subjective – the appearance of objectivity is only an approximation. Consciousness, at the core of our reality, is subjective –an individual experience. Consciousness is fundamentally personal.

The mystery is that there is a unifying force to all of it, labeled in many ways as universal consciousness, God, the divine, the aether, collective consciousness, the Matrix, Time, the fifth dimension, Macro Reality, The All, the ultimate, Brahma, Samadhi, the Ohm, 7th heaven, Cloud 9, or what other term we may use to describe it.

The last mystery is that you are part of it. And The All is within you.

Ridge : Physical reality is an illusion and does not exist independently –it is a mental construct.

CBB : If you watched someone shoot a pistol through the skull of your wife or friend, you might have a different view of that. But this is not a Blog on existential nihilism, so I would appreciate it if our members would deal with the matter in message #1 of this Blog. Thanks.

CBB : But this is not a Blog on existential nihilism, so I would appreciate it if our members would deal with the matter in message #1 of this Blog. Thanks.

RevAlan just started a Blog you might find interesting Ridge :

The 2010 Update of "Zeitgeist: The Movie" HERE

Yes, I have watched that video five times already while I was researching these subjects and posted the same in my blog...I think a year ago or so.

It seems we're all in the same stream of consciousness here.

CBB : Have you seen a copy of The Pre-Nicene New Testament, by Robert M. Price? This is a far better New Testament if you want to know what people in the early Christian era were reading. This is definetly one of my favorite books.

Brian: Nope, never read it, just commentaries on various of the books he lists.

CBB : Price is a pretty amazing guy. The Pre-Nicene New Testament is definitely one of my go to books.



Ridge : Yes, I have watched that video five times already while I was researching these subjects and posted the same in my blog...I think a year ago or so.

It seems we're all in the same stream of consciousness here.

CBB : Good for you. That is more times than I have seen the whole thing, though I have delved into parts of it over and over. D.M. Murdock, aka Acharya S, has written a great companion guide for Zeitgeist. It was my pleasure to help her with some of the astronomical aspects.

COMPANION SOURCE GUIDE http://zeitgeistmovie.com/Zeitgeist,%20The%20Movie-%20Companion%20Guide%20PDF.pdf

Brian: Not to mention the notion that none of the stars discovered by the Hubble telescope existed until I thought em up.
I mean, we make our life psychologically, but we don't make the universe physically. Basically, that's the difference between the realms of religion and science.

Kan: Thanks for the update on the movie _Zeitgeist_, CBB. Acharya has a great aid in you, in your background in astronomy.

CBB : But this is not a Blog on existential nihilism, so I would appreciate it if our members would deal with the matter in message #1 of this Blog. Thanks.

Kan; I think ridge is more enamored by solipsism than anything else. I'm familiar with the spooky "reality" of quantum physics and the mysteries of how sensory data gets processed by our brains to create our personal reality. On the macroscopic level, though, QM doesn't influence what we see very much, and the creature who perceives real things clearly has a distinct survival advantage over those that can't.

ridge:
Physical reality is an illusion and does not exist independently –it is a mental construct.

Kan: Anyone with decent vision can look up and see the moon. If the mental construct known as the moon is shared by all seeing people on earth, it is no longer an illusion; it is a physical reality that exists independently and even when clouds obscure it and it disappears from our sight.


ridge: What is reality? And relative to what? Because there is an infinity of realities happening that we are totally unaware of. We are only aware of those that we have limited ourselves to be aware of and are comfortable with. Petty mundane human concerns.

Kan: Just because our concerns and consciousness are limited doesn't mean there is no collective reality out there which is equally valid for every human on the planet.

Brian: This is the same for any book of folklore or history. The authors of stories or histories have their own viewpoints, loyalties, and agendas. They don't generally say directly who they are and what interests they represent. You have to figure out where they are coming from, where they are biased, or where their writing complements other views of other writers. It's like reading a book of ancient European history, and trying to distinguish legends, rumors, bias, spin, critical thought, or observations with supporting evidence. To just say "you can't trust it" is like simply saying "all politicians are liars," and having no strategy to distinguish degrees of truth or falsehood.

Relative to the human perception they are visible as dots of light.

But in real time, I hardly think they're still there and still appears as what we perceive them to be, considering it takes billions of light years for their light to arrive in our field of vision, the actual star may no longer be there.

The sun, for example, may suddenly collapse in the middle of broad daylight and we would only know about its disappearance after 8 minutes. So never trust your senses.

Exactly. The rendering of reality by the mind and the appearance of reality it projects is a cognitive model of Physical Reality, but is not at all physical itself, it merely represents a model for the observer to experience through the interface of the body.

Physical reality as is measured by non-human machines is so different from what it appears to us. To a dog, as well, or a cat, this reality we navigate is so far different. Same to a snake or what other animal. Our physical senses perceive selected data from the external world (based on archetypes) and send encoded electrical signals to the brain where our neurons are stimulated. The stimulation of neurons starts the rendering process inside the physical brain. The brain must take this sensory stimuli and render the result into a mental canvas. As David Bohm calls it, reality only happens in the theater of our minds.

Suffice to say, no one sees physical reality. We just see the end result of the mind's rendering of sensory data and how this information is projected onto our own mental canvas.

CBB : Thanks, Lois. I can always count on you to get the cart out of the ditch and back onto the road. :>)

Kan: To add one small detail to what Lois has said, it seems to me that anyone curing sick people and raising dead people is something that the Roman authorities would _immediately_ take an interest in. I can imagine a tetrarch remarking to his buddy, "You know, this fellow is said to have some tremendous power. I'd better verify all this for myself. After all, I might be able to use this guy against my enemies. And if I don't snatch him up and get him over here immediately, some enemy of mine might seize him and use him against ME."
Is that missing wheel back on the cart?

Kan: To add one small detail to what Lois has said, it seems to me that anyone curing sick people and raising dead people is something that the Roman authorities would _immediately_ take an interest in.

Lois: Indeed, they would, and so would historians. You think a guy like Josephus wouldn't have heard about Wonder Boy healing the sick, raising the dead, causing the blind to see, walking on water, and turning vats of water into the best wine anyone had tasted?? Hell, once the Romans heard about that last one, they'd be lining up at his door! Even Herod might have offered him a job as his own personal wine-maker.

Vatic : Where do you find these rubes Loren? This is a classic case of the fallacy of appealing to misleading authorities. Mostly they are misleading because they are baised instead of actually thinking. They present nothing short of biased clever sophistry.

CBB : Your assertion has now been throughly undermined. Aren't you embarrassed? :>)

Brian: I see nothing surprising in a village rabbi going un-noted by contemporary authorities, especially in a period before Palestine was almost destroyed (twice) by the Roman army.

CBB : No one would find that surprising, but the Jesus Of Nazareth we read about in the Gospels and Acts was not that person, was he? And not by a very long shot. When we read the New Testament we are asked to believe that Jesus Of Nazareth was at a minimum the Son Of God, and in places we are asked to believe that Jesus Of Nazareth was God incarnate. That is asking a lot, huh?.

There is no such thing as "proof" when we are talking about history. Proof is better left to mathematics. All we have is evidence and lack of evidence. We then have to decide what is credible evidence. The preponderance of the evidence is that we are reading a fictional account when we read the New Testament stories of Jesus Of Nazareth. The miraculous stories alone torpedo these fairy tales. That is the point of this Blog, and all I ask is that our members read all of the material here and then draw their own conclusions. I appreciate your efforts in doing that, Brian. Thanks.

Jerome: LOL...well you did a better job at that than I would at astronomy.

Lois: The gospel author, Matthew, says Jesus was born in the reign of Herod. Herod died in 4 BC.

The gospel author, Luke, claims Jesus was born in the reign of Augustus Caesar, when Cyrenius was governor of Syria. Cyrenius became governor in 6 AD--TEN YEARS after Herod had died!

Now, I can understand the writers getting a few minor details wrong here and there, but this is no minor detail, like was the cloak red or purple. There is a ten-year gap that can only be explained in one of two ways: Either Mary had the longest pregnancy in history, or else two different writers made up two different stories.

To add insult to injury, Luke claims there was a census when Jesus was born. No such census is recorded to have been conducted by Augustus, by ANY first-century source at all. Again from the PDF file linked in CBB's original post:

"Luke (2:1-4) claims Jesus was born in the year of a universal tax census under Augustus Caesar, while Cyrenius (a.k.a. Quirinius) was governor of Syria, But Roman records show the first such universal census didn’t occur until decades after this, during the reign of the emperor Vespasian in 74 CE. On top of that, Luke’s census is rather suspiciously convenient and looks more like a clever plot device than a genuine historical fact."

The author needed a plot device, some way to get Jesus into Bethlehem so that he could appear to fulfill the prophecy of Micah 5:2: [NIV] But you, Bethlehem Ephrathah,
though you are small among the clans of Judah,
out of you will come for me
one who will be ruler over Israel,
whose origins are from of old,
from ancient times. "

Brian: Are we trying to argue that it's impossible to separate the add-ons from the more original material as Mack tried to do?

Jerome: There is nothing there Brian. If you take all the errors and contradictions out of the Bible there is still nothing there. In simplest form it is a story about a God, A Mangod, and some Hebrews. No one has ever seen this God.

Wake up and smell the coffee.

The Bible has no real answers to the Big Questions.

Lois: I suppose, if you take away all the impossible miracles, the contradictions, the various errors in geography, and so on, you would be left with a very few "core sayings" that have some relevance to real life--for example,
"Honor your parents," "Do not commit adultery," and "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you." (Masochists need not apply.) But these are basic tenets of behavior that can be found everywhere, in almost every culture. That last one has several variations and has been around since long before Jesus' time. Laws against murder, stealing, adultery, bearing false witness, and the like, have likewise existed for many thousands of years in cultures all over the world, many of them far removed from the primitive desert tribes of the ancient Middle East. So how, exactly, can these "core sayings" in any way be attributed to one man from First Century Jerusalem? Dozens of preachers probably went around expounding on such things. To say that they are somehow unique to one man at one particular time in history is to ignore reality.

Brian: What's with the insistence on ethnic purity? I'm concerned with the moral agenda of folklore, not with proving that any ethnic group "owns" wisdom literature. In the early Christian lit. we have passages and quotes applied to Jesus that reflect a dominator moral agenda, where God is portrayed as a king in the sky, who demands blind obedience to his "appointed" ministers on earth. And then on the other hand, we have stories and sayings with a basically opposite moral agenda, concerned with the quality of partnership between people. In the second sort of lit., we have God pictured as the ultimate parent, and all people as equal children, as in the story of the Prodigal Son. We have Jesus called "rabbi" rather than "Lord," and Jesus referring to God as "our father" rather than to himself as a superhuman deity. We have a morality, not of blind obedience to superiors, but of compassion for equals, as in the tale of the Good Samaritan or the legend of the woman taken in adultery. These things arn't unique in world history, but they represent a kind of tradition that I respect.

I think the stories and sayings concerned with "partnership" are the original ones, basically as Burton Mack identified the content of the Q source. And I think that over time, people trying to control the movement introduced element after element, to transform the story into a justification for various vested interests. They made a reformist rabbi for equality, who repeated much of what Amos or Rabbi Hillel the Elder said, into a superhuman deity demanding obedience or death. I think Mack, Crossan, Spong, Borg, and others have done a lot to show that the things fundamentalists stress are added on elements, and the fundamentalists are just the kind of religious fanatics which the older gospel stories show Jesus furiously attacking as utter hypocrites. Just as in Islam, the fanatical legalists don't own their civilization. They are corrupters of it, of the kind Bart Ehrman showed tampering with the texts to make them fit a dominator theology, or the kind al-Bukhari showed to be forgers, attributing sayings to Muhammad at will in order to justify advantages to themselves.

Brian : I think Mack, Crossan, Spong, Borg, and others have done a lot to show that the things fundamentalists stress are added on elements, and the fundamentalists are just the kind of religious fanatics which the older gospel stories show Jesus furiously attacking as utter hypocrites.

CBB : You are now officially at odds with virtually all of the Christian members of this forum.

Vatic : Where do you find these rubes Loren? This is a classic case of the fallacy of appealing to misleading authorities. Mostly they are misleading because they are baised instead of actually thinking. They present nothing short of biased clever sophistry.

CBB : See what I mean, Brian? You make the rational skeptics look pretty clever though. :>)

Vatic : In other words this information can't be incorporated because a crazy man is saying it.

CBB : No one is saying that you are crazy, though you obviously have a delicate condition.

Now then, for the 1 millionth time, this is a debate forum about the errors in the Holy Bible. I realize that you do not care about the Holy Bible, and that you have already stated that you would feel better if it did not exist at all. But since it does exist, and because it is the focus of this forum, do you think you can muster a conversation about that, instead of always leading us into your world of hallucinations?

There is quite a lengthy list of actual Bible problems listed in this Blog, but you are not comfortable talking about any of them are you?

Brian: Arn't we citing the same sources for opposite ends?

CBB : No.

Brian : I think the best biblical scholars are slowly separating the earliest versions of Christianity from the later forgeries, and what they are learning discredits the dominator fundamentalists.

CBB : I agree with you.

Brian : You seem to argue that the whole effort is a waste of time, we should accept that fundamentalists define what Christianity is, and take their later corruptions of the tradition as proof that there's no wheat to separate from the chaff.

CBB : I have never argued that. The Fundies are a merely very vocal minority, and they generally tend to be not particularly well read. As far as wheat in the New Testament goes, let's just say it is hardly a bumper crop.

Malcolm: Such as Luke 14:26 demanding the hatred of one's one mothers and fathers, and Matthew 10:34/36 which more or less tell us that Peace is not the order of the day but to carry a sword - an offensive weapon which will have you put in prison if you are caught with one on the street in Australia.

hahahaha

Brian: I mean this--
Lois: Laws against murder, stealing, adultery, bearing false witness, and the like, have likewise existed for many thousands of years in cultures all over the world, many of them far removed from the primitive desert tribes of the ancient Middle East. So how, exactly, can these "core sayings" in any way be attributed to one man from First Century Jerusalem? Dozens of preachers probably went around expounding on such things. To say that they are somehow unique to one man at one particular time in history is to ignore reality.

Brian: Your comment seems to assume that the validity of moral protests recorded in the Bible depends on some "claim" to their uniqueness as moral property of a certain religious or ethnic group.

Brian: So what in the legends of Jesus would you say is worth saving from fundamentalism? Or do you feel that fundamentalism IS Christianity, and progressive critics like Crossan, Borg, etc should get out?

It's true Jesus is an ephemeral figure. He appears, says a few provocative things, and is promptly killed. So much goes unsaid that followers of all stripes fill in the blanks any way they want. But the figure basically fits with a Jewish protest or counter-culture tradition going back at least to Amos. The protests quoted were clearly seen as heretical to established religious leaders, and as treason to established political rulers. Later, that idealistic moral protest for equality and compassion would be turned on it's head, and made to serve an agenda for blind obedience to "God appointed" superiors.

I think different kinds of religious people differ partly because they ask completely different questions. Followers of traditional authoritarian religion think the question of life is "Which master should I obey?" Other people are asking totally different things, like "How good can our relationships get?"

Brian: I believe that quote attributed to me is from Mr. Ridge.

Jerome: My fault. I haven't been awake long enough to see clearly.

Brian: So what in the legends of Jesus would you say is worth saving from fundamentalism? Or do you feel that fundamentalism IS Christianity, and progressive critics like Crossan, Borg, etc should get out?

CBB : I do not see that the legends about Jesus in the New Testament are of much value at all. There is virtually nothing that is reliable about the man, and he is merely a sock puppet for the unknown authors. I have said over and over that Fundies are a minor but very vocal part of Christianity and that the Bible scholars like Crossan, Mack, Carrier, Doherty, Detering, Price, Spong, etc are providing better and more reliable information. I only wish more people would read their material. That is why I started this Blog.

Jerome : Brian you have a tendancy to draw a broad social principle out of a narrow fact scenario in your thinking.

CBB : I agree. Come a bit closer to the campfire, Brian.

Ridge: But don't you get it?!

Jerome: I do actually. The Gnostics are big on the religious experience. And Gnostics are correct. American Christianity has historically failed to provide that to people. I remember this point being made on a Gnostic lecture tape I listened to a couple of years ago. The point was made that in Africa Christianity was experienced more than the boring drivel that is passed out to the pew warmers in American Churches.

American Christians are starving for the religious experience.

Someone has a religious experience. They can't reproduce it for others. They tell others about it but that is not the same experience. Then the whole thing gets reduced to a bunch of boring do's and don'ts about how to live. Which is not thrilling. Nor does it transfer to the pew warmers what the original founder of the religion claimed to have experienced.

However....as you have aptly pointed out....if religion is taken literally it turns to mud. CBED exists to make that clear to Fundies who are being suffocated in relgion. I agree with most of the observations you make Ridge. I really do understand your points.

People want experience. Ecstatic. Traumatic. Dramatic. Sexy. Dangerous. Comic. Bliss. Whatever...
That is why we are here... to experience life. What is the Universe doing? Creating. Destroying. Trauma Drama! LOL.

I do "get it". I have "quasi mystical" non sexual experiences all the time. I study Shaolin Kung Fu . It is exciting and challenging and mysterious and theatre and practical all at the same time. I am constantly being asked to master something new, beautiful, powerful, and difficult to do. My mind is constantly challenged.My body is being torn down and repaired almost daily. It is the dance that life is.

But no one gets seriously hurt. Fundamentalism hurts people.

Brian: Both of us see the Bible as a collection of ancient legends and biased accounts of ancient history. So why don't we talk about it in that way, regardless of if other people make ridiculous claims about it's inerrancy? The writing there offers a window into how various ancient people thought or disagreed about their world. To call it all lies is like calling a collection of Native American folklore a pack of lies.

In collections of historic writing, the presence of conflicting views is a good thing. It shows a certain lack of censorship, and offers clues to the kinds of bias behind different speakers. Why should we agree with fundamentalists and insist that this traditional literature of our civilization is supposed to express only one version of events? Why should we agree with them that if the collection of stories has conflicting accounts and different interpretations of events, then the whole collection must be worthless?

True.

Humans are inclined to believe big lies.

As Adolf Hitler puts it, "All this was inspired by the principle--which is quite true within itself--that in the big lie there is always a certain force of credibility; because the broad masses of a nation are always more easily corrupted in the deeper strata of their emotional nature than consciously or voluntarily; and thus in the primitive simplicity of their minds they more readily fall victims to the big lie than the small lie, since they themselves often tell small lies in little matters but would be ashamed to resort to large-scale falsehoods. It would never come into their heads to fabricate colossal untruths, and they would not believe that others could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously. Even though the facts which prove this to be so may be brought clearly to their minds, they will still doubt and waver and will continue to think that there may be some other explanation. For the grossly impudent lie always leaves traces behind it, even after it has been nailed down, a fact which is known to all expert liars in this world and to all who conspire together in the art of lying."

And a lie that is told again and again becomes Truth. Such is modern religions now. Noble lies we dare not question, notwithstanding that its claims are blatantly contrary to facts because they were passed-on to us with an air of historicity and factuality. But ancient religions were slightly different. They made the lies more active, more engaging. They retold the saga of the mythos actively like Harry Potter 1 to 7 or Lord of the Rings 1 to 3. But they never viewed it scientifically. They knew it was mythic in nature, an active myth. They were very aware of that, which is why you don't hear valid historians taking these things seriously as if they were actual events. Everybody was aware of their mythic romanticized nature.

But authorities noticed their value and the divine right it gave them to control people, so they converted the myths into something historical. That's the privilege of the winners, they control how history should be told. And that's where we now find ourselves in. We inherited all these stuff believing they were as they were handed down to us.

Brian: Both of us see the Bible as a collection of ancient legends and biased accounts of ancient history. So why don't we talk about it in that way, regardless of if other people make ridiculous claims about it's inerrancy?

CBB : Because this is Christian Biblical Errancy Debate, that's why. The forum was started in order to show the errors, forgeries, contradiction,and fables in the Holy Bible. I realize that many people do not want to acknowledge that these errors exist, and others who recognize their existence prefer to talk about something else. So we allow a little chit-chat in CBED about other stuff in order to oil the machinery and keep things running smoothly. But please remember, THE PRIMARY GOAL IN THIS FORUM IS TO DISCUSS BIBLE ERRORS.



Brian : The importance of a story is mainly it's capacity to provoke debate, and the important debate is over the stories' meaning more than over their factuality.

CBB : I addressed your point earlier in this very Blog, but you either missed it or ignored it :

CBB 08-25-10 : Your last couple of messages seem reasonable to me, Brian. There are some things reported in the New Testament about Jesus that defy logic and just do not make sense. We will never know exactly what happened, but we can be reasonably sure that some of the reported events could not possibly have happened, so I am content to continually peel away at the onion to see if it really has a core. I strongly suspect that Jesus is a fictional character invented after the fact, but even if this man did exist in the early 1st century, he was certainly incapable of fulfilling the many promises his keepers inserted into his mouth. And he was most certainly no God, huh?

So even if I accept Jesus on your terms historically, Christianity is shown to be a false cult that cannot deliver the goods. Salvation is a carrot at the end of a very long and expensive stick, and Heaven and Hell have no significance anymore for anyone. The only beneficiary in all of this is the institution we call the Church, and it has come out of this very nicely for the last 20 centuries. I suggest that this is a middleman which can be dispensed with summarily, and with no regret.

hahaha

Apart from fundamentalism and eschatology, another new quirky branch of modern religions arose: Apologetics. It is an absurd branch of religion because it is concerned with proving the "truth" of the unprovable. All these things arose because we lost the essence of retelling the mythos for our times. We got stuck with the old stories, and since civilizations already moved-on, it was difficult to bridge the ancient with our modern paradigms, so it gave rise to atheism, apostacy and disbelief. So, we had to create Apologetics, as a defense and as a way of adding credibility to what is now being held as lies.

Religion is an intuitive experience. That was how religion was originally conceptualized in the east...as a mystical experience that spoke to every individual much like poetry does. It wouldn't make any sense at all whatsoever if you analyze it, like analyzing why you're dancing and what music is. They are metaphors for the human condition and our thirst for experiencing something orgasmic, something mystical, peak experience or intoxicating. When religion was imported to the West and its original story-makers died, fundamentalism arose, because we stopped writing and treated the scriptures like history or like any physical science. We stopped expanding the theme of the game.

And since the audience now have become critical, it was necessary to address that with an exact simulacrum of provenance. That's what Apologetics is for.

CBB : I do not see that the legends about Jesus in the New Testament are of much value at all. There is virtually nothing that is reliable about the man, and he is merely a sock puppet for the unknown authors. I have said over and over that Fundies are a minor but very vocal part of Christianity and that the Bible scholars like Crossan, Mack, Carrier, Doherty, Detering, Price, Spong, etc are providing better and more reliable information. I only wish more people would read their material. That is why I started this Blog.

Kan: The fundies are a vocal part of Christianity but their numbers are uncomfortably high to suit me. I would not call them a minority, in fact. That word suggests a dearth of numbers. Less than fifty percent? I can't even say that with certainty. Not in the United States, at any rate.

Jerome:
But no one [in Sholin] gets seriously hurt. Fundamentalism hurts people.

Kan: And that's my position: fundamentalism hurts people. I am a humanist and I don't like to see people get seriously hurt, even if they're attracted by the danger or the excitement of something. Consider me a member of the advocacy group for consumer protection from dangerous ideas, if you have to stick a label on me. I don't want anyone to drink the cyanide-flavored Kool Aid.

CBB: The forum was started in order to show the errors, forgeries, contradiction,and fables in the Holy Bible. I realize that many people do not want to acknowledge that these errors exist, and others who recognize their existence prefer to talk about something else. So we allow a little chit-chat in CBED about other stuff in order to oil the machinery and keep things running smoothly. But please remember, THE PRIMARY GOAL IN THIS FORUM IS TO DISCUSS BIBLE ERRORS.

Kan: Yep, that's why; that's the goal. And discussing Bible errors tends to take the wind out of the fundamentalists' sails. And that's fine with me.

Kan: The fundies are a vocal part of Christianity but their numbers are uncomfortably high to suit me. I would not call them a minority, in fact. That word suggests a dearth of numbers. Less than fifty percent? I can't even say that with certainty. Not in the United States, at any rate.

CBB : I was speaking in terms of a world wide percentage among Christians. Let me do a little research, and I will get back with you on this. After looking in my files, I was surprised to see that I do not have a Blog on Fundementalist Christians.

Brian: Sounds to me that if people want to look critically at the Bible in hopes of separating wheat from chaff, you consider it off topic. Sounds like only the chaff should be discussed, and finding anything good is out of bounds.

Brian: So what do you consider the big lies in the Bible?

Jerome: A sentient being god existing seperate from you. And the notion that you are worthless. These are damnable lies.

That that is the only metaphor or model of reality. And that all human beings must subject themselves to such under peril of eternal damnation. And that only few people dressed in funny costumes hold the keys to these "mysteries" and the destinies of mankind and that we are incapable of being good and moral apart from it.

Brian: Don't those lies appear as doctrines in the pronouncements of later church councils and "fathers"? When we read any statement in the Old Testament, are we imposing a later Christian fundamentalist assumption onto it, such as "You must believe this character is speaking God's eternal will or else you will roast in the Christian hell forever"? By saying this I'm not insisting the Bible is free from truth-twisting prejudice. It's just that we also have prejudice, and tend to read anachronisms into old books. For example, Hebrew history had no concept of Hell and Heaven until around 200 CE. And where does it say in the Bible that church leaders are infallible?

On almost any subject, there are voices in the Bible arguing pro and con. Can women be religious leaders? Some say yes, some insist no. Does God support slavery? Are people called to freedom, or called to give it up because they are prone to sin? Should people be equal, or must they obey their superiors? Is mixing with people of other cultures ungodly pollution? Or is treating them like brothers and sisters the real thing? Is religion eternally unchangeable, or must it be reformed to eliminate cruelties of the past? Is the dream for all people to honor each other, or is it for all to obey one master? In each case, we are reading ancient arguments over what is good and beautiful. And in reading the different protagonists, we are the one's who presume which voice is "orthodox."

Brian: I thought I already did.

In the Old Testament, some voices like Joshua and Nehemiah insist that only one ethnic group is favored by God, that all their own traditions are God's way, and the ways of all other people are evil. Other voices like Amos oppose ethnic prejudice. I get to choose which argument I agree with, and which I think is stupid. The racists arn't exactly lying, in that they really believe in their own superiority, but I think they are idiots.

In the New Testament, some voices treat Jesus as the good rabbi, who rejects hypocrisy and really treats others as his equals. Other voices claim he is a god demanding blind, exclusive obedience, or else torture for eternity. Again I get to choose which story I like. But in this case, I regard the people who turned Jesus from a reformist Jew into an omnipotent dictator in the sky, as seriously liars.

Brian: Yes, and most of the 613 "laws" in the five books of Moses have long been regarded as irrelevant to Judaism. I don't see claims that the Jewish priesthood is infallible. And many prophets like Isaiah and Jesus are shown lambasting the priesthood for it's failings, and utterly rejecting the old biblical rules about sacrifice for sin. The notion of inherited spiritual authority has been in and out of favor, mostly out. Arn't we just reading later church council decisions about clerical or scriptural infallibility onto these stories?

Not really. What I'm asking is, what's with the whole priesthood thing? Why would a being who created the stars and the universe need an intermediary, like call-center agents or a special-action group to communicate to his/her own creations? And what's with the whole business of rituals?

I don't know of any priest now who could personally claim that there ever was an actual divination, invocation, evocation, conjuration, manifestation, or anything supernatural coming out of these rituals. We don't hear of any fire from the sky happening now, do we?

At least there are some claims of supernatural manifestations among other religions i.e. Wiccan and spiritualists, even if their claims are doubtful.

The ritual was designed with a specific intent, that is to satisfy the spiritual or emotional needs of the practitioners, particularly to invoke God or a deity or what other being from another dimension or to cause an effect to the material world using the concept of sympathy and correspondence. The old testament alludes to this specifically. The aroma of the burnt sacrifices were supposed to have an effect to Yahweh. And that concept is not even original to the Hebrews. You will find that among the Greeks, the Romans, the Hindus, the Animists, the Wiccans, the Aztecs, the Voodoos etc.

Now, I wouldn't consider that as a lie but a possibility if they can only show me a shred of evidence that such practice has any effect at all, whatsoever.

Brian: The thing is, we tend to read prejudice into other people. If Jesus is quoted saying something decent, we assume that he and all followers took this as a claim that he was completely original, and nobody else had that decency.

Lois: You would be surprised at the number of Christians who do believe this. When we point out that other religions and cultures came up with these notions ages before Christianity was invented, they will dismiss it as somehow being the work of Yahweh, because other people couldn't possibly have come up "Thou shalt not kill" all by themselves. Other religions are works of the devil, of course. Sure, they may have a few nice things to say, but they really worship Satan, or demons, or the works of man, or whatever else they can think of.

Brian: So what do you consider the big lies in the Bible?

Lois: One of the worst lies is the notion that some human beings are better than others just because they happen to worship a particular deity. This can be found all through the Bible. The Hebrews were God's chosen people, meaning that other tribes, nations, and cultures were not. The Hebrews (later, the Israelites and Jews) got all the promises of land, wealth, fertility, and victory in war; other peoples existed solely to become the slaves and subjects of Israel. In the New Testament, we see Christians thinking that THEY are specially chosen by God, while everyone who doesn't worship him is doomed to an unpleasant fate that in some way involves fire.

I don't discount the practice immediately because there are so many parallels to it in various cultures--cultures that don't even know that other religions exist, so there must be "something" into this conjuration ritual thing.

I'm not very hasty to pronounce magic as mumbo-jumbo, considering that the sciences we have now is just as magical relative to people who lived 1,000 years ago. Tesla's discoveries were all magical. Quantum entanglement is magical. Information technology is magical. High power radio frequency transmitter devices that could turn the ionosphere into plasma is magical. What other magic should I be surprised about? I wouldn't even be surprised that in the next 200 years (or earlier) we would be able to teleport already considering we have already proven the phenomena as plausible at the quantum level.

Brian : To my mind, the church's changing of a protester against priestly sacrifice (who was probably killed for attacking and vandalizing the Temple to protest against it) into a pre-Mosaic-style human sacrifice to God, is close to the greatest obscenity in the book.

CBB : This begs the question, what is worse?

Malcolm: He most certainly was, Ridge. Haven't you even looked at any of the evidence? Archaeology has found nothing in what is now Israel because he was an Egyptian King. The idiots are so religiously confined in their thinking that they refuse to look at the obvious.

This is an excellent example of how religious lies are preventing people from learning the truthy.

It doesn't matter what the Torah says. These later books were designed to hide the truth of what really happened.

They were written some 6 to 8 centuries AFTER the events.

When you look at the evidence though you will find that some kernels of real history are still there. There is a good reason for this. When the Jewish books were written, the scribes could still look at Egyptian Texts and even the Temples and Palaces of the Kings.

Malcolm: Ridge, here are the pages you need to read on King Solomon.

KING SOLOMON PART ONE - THE QUARRY MEN

KING SOLOMON PART TWO - CONCUBINES AND WIVES

KING SOLOMON PART THREE - THE PALACE

KING SOLOMON PART FOUR - REIGN, ADMINISTRATION, CHARIOTRY,RELIGION

KING SOLOMON PART FIVE - CITY, SONGS, WISDOM

KING SOLOMON PART SIX - FAMILY, ANCESTRY AND REIGN

KING SOLOMON PART SEVEN - THE TEMPLE

KING SOLOMON PART EIGHT - WEALTH, MINES, CITY

KING SOLOMON PART NINE - PUNISHMENT, HEBREW, MENELEK

Don't just read them - Check them. You can check most for yourself - for example the Marriage commemoration 'medal' or 'scarab' is on net pages, as are the scale maps of Solomon's palace at Malqata, Luxor. You only need to copy the map and adjust the size until the scale is 4 centimetres - then it is easy to check measurements placing a ruler across your monitor.

Malcolm: The Ancients were always plagiarising stories. Homer obviously pinched the story of the Wooden Horse from King David III's campaign when he besieged the city of Joppa. But he left baskets containing soldiers at the gates of Joppa. The people took them to be gifts, and opened the gates, whereupon the soldiers jumped out, and the army reappeared. This is all in an Egyptian Papyrus - it is described in a Nat Geo magazine.

Brian: Revelation is worse. Why have that silly "good news" of forgiveness when a global orgy of blood vengeance is so much more exciting?

Ridge: Very well. If we will pursue this historical theory, then it appears to me that the entire Torah and its development to Nevi'im until Ketuvim were products of exiled Egyptians wanting to rebuild their spurned monotheistic solar cult in the Hebrew culture.

Malcolm: That is very much the case from all I have looked into. But they also picked up so many legends from the Sumerians while they were in Babylon. In fact much of Genesis appears to have come from that source, and now we can see Isaiah 45:1 as having its source in the Persian Cylinder.

1 Samuel 4 to 6, clearly places Israel in Egypt centred around Bethshemesh - Heliopolis and for instance 'the great stone of Abel' in the field of Joshua the Bethshemite, tells us exactly what period this comes from. Bethshemesh is confirmed as an Egyptian city in Jeremiah. Only a King of Egypt could own or have a field to his name. So this has to be DJOSER - 3rd Dynasty Egyptian King. We then have confirmation that Djoser is the origin of Joshua, by looking at the later Joshua - the Son of Nun (Egyptian God of the Heavenly Deep). The Bible tells us that he was a General who knocked down city walls and he succeeded Akhenaten. Officially Ymn Twt Ankh, Smenkhare and Ay followed Akhenaten, but these names like Akhenaten's have been erased by Horemheb. The latter seems to be the next established king recognised by all Egypt. And, his throne name was DJOSER Heprew Setepenre. And he was a General, And he did knock down the city walls of Akhetaten which may have been seen spiritually as The Living God Yah (YahWeh) - IAH RE KA (Jericho).

CBB: Simon Magus was quite a character and was able to levitate.

Jerome: Ask me about this again in 18 months.

Malcolm: That is what the religious would like you to believe, Ridge. But it is nonsense. The Semite people ruled Egypt from at least the 3rd Dynasty - we can tell from the god names they used that early. They are there all the way through. Besides, we know for a fact that Israel was Lower Egypt, from at least the same time. Have you read my thread on "Israel in Egypt" yet?

Egyptians did invade Ireland. Not only are there dolichocephalous remains in Ireland wearing Egyptian faience jewellery, but it is in Irish legend which tells us that Ireland was once invaded and conquered by the Tuath (Egyptian Duat) Dedanaan (Egyptian Tatanen), and then more legends which describe the blood feud between brothers Brian and Iuchabar (Abel) with Kian (Cain). Both were Egyptian Kings.

Just look at the names of Egyptian Kings - Joshua, Jacob, Salitis, Abel, Cain, Joseph, David, Solomon, Nahos (Nahor), Abram (Abraham). There are far too many for there not be a connection. There are more, but they need some explanation.

We even find Re Beke (Rebecca) as the name of a princess who was the daughter or grand-daughter of Ymn Htp III (Solomon).

Finkelstein tells us very plainly in his The Bible Unearthed that there is nothing in what is now Israel. You couldn't possibly have such grand Temples and Palaces and not have any trace whatsoever left. Yet when we look in Luxor, Karnak and Malqata, we get ruins which match perfectly. Even the gold found at Akhetaten matches the amount of gold listed in one of the columns of the Copper Scroll - which is on Egyptian copper from the Rameses II period, and uses Egyptian weights and measures.

There are tons and tons of evidence - just work through it before you jump to conclusions - and don't get sidetracked by the religious and their ridiculous ideas.

Jerome: What I want to know is this...if everyone could agree on the history of man in the world would we know anything about any gods?

I mean think about it.

If I could go to the first man and say " Is there a God?"

He would say " I don't know". And then he would ask me for a quarter to buy a beer.

I am sure of that.

I see this guy all the time.

hahaha

But we are talking here a of a direct commandment from "God." Doesn't it bother anyone that this god is attracted to the redolence and phenomena of blood and death? He seems to feed off the energy of low vibrational emotions like fear, guilt, agony, spasm and aggression of a dying mammal...like other more ancient gods. At the moment of death by sacrifice a form of adrenaline surges through the body and accumulates at the base of the brain and is, apparently, most potent in children and young animals.

He first exhibits this characteristic when he favors Abel's sacrifice over Cain. Then he instructs Noah to build him an altar for this very purpose, "After Noah got off of the ark, he made an altar unto the LORD and took of every clean beast and fowl and offered burnt offerings on the altar. The LORD smelled a sweet savour and the LORD said in His heart..."

Then we move on to its more sinister side, human sacrifice: The king of Moab gives his firstborn son and heir as a whole burnt offering (olah, as used of the Temple sacrifice) (2 Kings 3:27), then the sacrifice of Jephthah's daughter in Judges 11. And we all know about the attempted sacrifice of Isaac by Abraham.

I suspect, these were not isolated incidences but was the original sacrificial style, which is why we have passages in Jeremiah condemning the same. Gehenna and Tophet are places where these gruesome human sacrifices were done.

We can trace this practice all the way to Ireland when some of the Israelites migrated there during the diaspora. In Dr. Thornas Moore's, History of Ireland (p. 40), relates:

"That most common of all Celtic monuments, the Cromlech is to be found not only in most parts of Europe, but also in Asia,' including Palestine. 'Not less ancient and general among the Celtic nations, was the circle of upright stones, with either an altar or tall pillar in the centre, and, like its prototype at Gilgal [ancient Israel], serving sometimes as a temple of worship, sometimes as a place of national council or inauguration ... The rough, unhewn stone... used in their circular temples by the Druids, was the true, orthodox observance of the divine command delivered to Noah, 'If thou wilt make me an altar of stone, thou shalt not build it of hewn stone'(Ex. 20:25) Dr Beauford, in Druidism Revived says, 'It is remarkable that all the ancient altars found in Ireland, and now distinguished by the name of Cromlechs or sloping stones, were originally called Bothal, or the House of God, and they seem to be of the same species as those mentioned in the Book of Genesis, called by the Hebrews, Bethel, which has the same signification as the Irish Bothal' The Bible (Judg. 9:6; 2 Ki. 1 1: 1 4; 2 Chr. 23:13) indicates that Hebrew kings were crowned either standing upon or next to a pillar of stone. 'The practice of seating the new king upon a stone, at his initiation, was the practice in many of the countries of Europe ... The monarchs of Sweden sat upon a stone placed in the centre of twelve lesser ones, and in a similar kind of circle the Kings of Denmark were crowned.'(Moore, ibid., p. 42)

The book, Identity of the Religious Druidical and Hebrew, adds, 'Circular temples ... abound in England and other parts of Europe. The most ancient account of them is to be found in the book of Exodus (24.4), "And Moses ... builded an altar under the hill and twelve pillars according to the twelve tribes." (p. 15)'. In Europe, Stonehenge, Avebury, and many other early Celtic sites were designed in a circular pattern.

Groves were also features of both Hebrew and Celtic worship. The Bible tells us that Abraham 'called on the everlasting God' (Gen. 13:4) from a grove planted by his own hand. Gideon worshiped God under an oak tree. (Judg. 6:19-24)

There are many other examples, however, of customs linking the Celtic Druids specifically with Israel. English historian, Williain Borlase, in his Antiquities Of Cornwall (1754) presented many pages of such evidence: Druids worshipped but one God and allowed no graven images, identical to the Hebrews, and in contradistinction with almost all other ancient religions.

Consecration was by sprinkling with blood, as in the Old Testament Hebrew worship. Druid priests were clothed in white, similar to the Hebrew priest's white ephod; sacrificial victims were bled to death, and the blood was collected in basins which served to sprinkle the altars; bulls were sacrificed, and the image of a bull (the heraldic sign of the Hebrew tribe of Ephraim) was carried into war.'While they performed their horrid rites of human sacrifice, the drums and trumpets sounded without intermission, that the cries of the miserable victims might not be heard.' (Compare Jer. 7:31-32, the Hebrew/Phoenician place of human sacrifice was called Tophet, meaning 'the drum'). They prayed with uplifted, hands, examined entrails for necromancy, and held the oak in veneration. The Druids used the magic wand in imitation of Moses' rod, poured libations, sacrificed upon the tops of rocks, investigated truth by lots, anointed rock pillars with oil, and marked out boundaries with stones. (pp. 104-132, 161) In these and so many other distinctive ways, the religious customs of the Celts and Hebrews bear an unmistakable resemblance!