That's not the issue. The issue is that Paul is quoted in Acts as using that phrase--Jesus of Nazareth. But Paul never uses it in any epistles. And that's hard to explain if that is how Jesus introduced himself to Paul, according to Paul. Just using Paul's letters, the prior probability that he was aware of the appellation Jesus of Nazareth is extremely low.Flann 5 wrote: There are slight differences in the accounts but Luke wasn't copying and pasting. Some claim a contradiction here,but it's in no way irreconcilable from what I've see from various scholars interpretations.
Well, Jesus was a common name so it's no surprise that Jesus identifies himself as Jesus of Nazareth to Paul. I don't see why Paul or the other apostles should use this term in speaking to Christian churches as Nazareth wasn't his name.
Peter and John are provably later writings than Paul and later than Mark and Matthew at the very least. By then, the Christian story had taken shape and there is no reason to wonder why they didn't mention this or that from the gospel story since it was all common knowledge among Christians by then. But Paul is a different matter. He wrote the first Christian writings--period. His omission of placing Jesus in any specific space-time locale is problematic because it opens up the issue of where then did Mark get his biographical information if not from Paul? He either made them up (the obvious choice and with a high prior probability) or there is a large swath of Christian history that is entirely missing (not so obvious and with a very low prior probability).So you don't find Peter or John saying Nazareth in their letters either. In Acts it's occasionally used in preaching to identify him in that way to crowds of Jews, but that's a standard Jewish way of distinguishing Jesus from others of the same name.
Ermm...no. In Acts, Jesus had already ascended to heaven so this was what? Forty days after his death? Then the disciples returned to Jerusalem which took a day. Then they went to an upper chamber where they were staying and Peter then breaks the news that Judas had died. He bought a field with the money he was given for betraying Jesus and then fell "headlong" into it somehow and his bowels gushed out of his body. The first problem is how did Judas fall "headlong" from a branch he had hung himself from? That means he fell head first which is incredibly unlikely if hanging by the neck. But the bigger problem, how could this be news 40 days after Jesus's death unless his body was hanging there that long before the rope broke or the branch snapped? Not hardly. Obviously, the writer was unaware that Matthew had already killed Judas off and instead had Judas walking around on his newly purchased land sometime after the death of Jesus and tripped and fell head first down into a some kind ravine or something and split open. There is no reason for Peter to break this news after the ascension of Jesus because they all would have known about it far earlier than that.I don't see where you get Judas dying after Jesus from, D.B. Matthew says that when he saw that Jesus was condemned he went out and hanged himself.
The hanged versus bowels gushed out is a standard of 'infidels' supposed contradiction. He hanged himself and the branch may have broken and there you get his falling headlong and his bowels gushing out.
[quoteI haven't checked if the Greek word means bowels in the sense that we understand it but I don't see a necessary contradiction in any case.[/quote]
Then you're not thinking about it very clearly.
I did you a great disfavor. I actually took a look at your link. Here is what it says:You never seem to consult any commentators on these things who have studied the political and historical background to these events.
There is no contradiction here. http://www.biblehub.com/commentaries/2_ ... /11-32.htm
Kept the city ... - Luke Act 9:24 says that they watched the gates day and night to kill him. This was probably the Jews. Meantime the ethnarch guarded the city, to prevent his escape. The Jews would have killed him at once; the ethnarch wished to apprehend him and bring him to trial. In either case Paul had much to fear, and he, therefore, embraced the only way of escape.
This is completely made up! Neither Acts nor 2 Corinthians describes anything like this!! You can't take two totally separate accounts and mush them together and hope they fit. The prior probability for this is low. You can use the account from Acts, which has a higher prior probability or the one from 2 Corinthians which has yet a higher prior probability. But if you mash them together to create a whole new fictional account not supported by either original account, you destroy your prior probability. You have to go with Paul's own account in 2 Corinthians. The man should know who he was fleeing from, for crying out loud. That means Acts is inaccurate if not an outright lie.
From the Jewish Virtual LibrarySame thing. The high priests were Sadducees who also condemned Jesus,and they had the authority throughout Judea to do this and give Paul this authority to arrest them. They had the same attitude as Paul at that time towards Christianity. In fact in Acts it also says the letters were from the chief priests, which suggests it wasn't just decided by the high priest alone.
http://www.biblehub.com/commentaries/acts/9-2.htm
The Pharisees
The most important of the three were the Pharisees because they are the spiritual fathers of modern Judaism. Their main distinguishing characteristic was a belief in an Oral Law that God gave to Moses at Sinai along with the Torah. The Torah, or Written Law, was akin to the U.S. Constitution in the sense that it set down a series of laws that were open to interpretation. The Pharisees believed that God also gave Moses the knowledge of what these laws meant and how they should be applied. This oral tradition was codified and written down roughly three centuries later in what is known as the Talmud.
The Pharisees also maintained that an after-life existed and that God punished the wicked and rewarded the righteous in the world to come. They also believed in a messiah who would herald an era of world peace.
Pharisees were in a sense blue-collar Jews who adhered to the tenets developed after the destruction of the Temple; that is, such things as individual prayer and assembly in synagogues.
The Sadducees
The Sadducees were elitists who wanted to maintain the priestly caste, but they were also liberal in their willingness to incorporate Hellenism into their lives, something the Pharisees opposed. The Sadducees rejected the idea of the Oral Law and insisted on a literal interpretation of the Written Law; consequently, they did not believe in an after life, since it is not mentioned in the Torah. The main focus of Sadducee life was rituals associated with the Temple.
The Sadducees disappeared around 70 A.D., after the destruction of the Second Temple. None of the writings of the Sadducees has survived, so the little we know about them comes from their Pharisaic opponents.
These two "parties" served in the Great Sanhedrin, a kind of Jewish Supreme Court made up of 71 members whose responsibility was to interpret civil and religious laws.
http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jso ... senes.html
Now you want to run it by me again how Paul, a Pharisee, was doing the bidding of priests who opposed him and he them?? Was he a mercenary? If so, he would have been disowned by the Pharisees who would have found nothing particularly objectionable about the Christians.
Name one other person involved in the persecution. Show me anywhere in the NT that "lesser waves of persecution" continued. We've already covered Paul's flight from Damascus and he himself does not in any way, shape or form pin it on the Jews. Paul appears to be the ONLY "persecuter" of Christians. Even worse, how long did this persecution last? A week, a month, six months, a year, five years? We don't know. Acts is so badly written, it doesn't give us any way to determine this. Just one more reason it can't be used as a history.Paul was the main persecuter and zealot so when he stopped of course it died down, but Acts is speaking relatively. There are examples of lesser waves of persecution and Paul's own hounding out of Damascus is an example of this.
But, you see, we know nothing about this first trip to Damascus. Galatians is the second epistle that Paul wrote chronologically speaking. Paul could have went there on some completely unrelated business. The return trip to Damascus was the one that Acts recounts and which Paul recounts in 2 Corinthians. Acts says he went straight to Damascus but he says he went first to Arabia. Now one of them is wrong. Let's puzzle this out. Paul must be wrong because how could the man himself know where he went when someone who never knew him says he went somewhere else?? That's the standard of evidence you're using! Clearly, Paul should know where he went and clearly the author of Acts is an idiot. Moreover, Paul never talks about anything that Acts described that happened on the road to Damascus (in three contradictory versions). Nothing about a brilliant light, nothing about being blinded, nothing about anyone in Damascus giving him further instruction. Face it, none of that stuff happened and it's obvious that Paul knew nothing of it.You just don't read Galatians right. Paul says there that he did not go to Jerusalem from Arabia but returned to Damascus.
http://www.biblehub.com/galatians/1-17.htm
I think liberal Christian scholars are even bigger idiots.You seem to think that conservative Christian scholars are complete idiots
Oh, I know all too well how they study these things--badly.but you just don't bother to see how they study these things,including the relevant history and social, political and religious customs of the time.
Okay and that means what?The thing is though that the primary source here is Herodotus and he does not say Zalmoxis died at all.
I do? That's news to me.Now if you want to claim that it was believed that he did die and rise again you have to provide a primary source showing this, and one that predates Christianity.
I don't care if there is or not. The prior probability is still high and that's all I care about.You won't do that though because there is none,
I have a source that says what you dispute is not true. That gives me prior probability. The source is credible. So that ups the prior probability. Does Herodotus deny that Zalmoxis is a dying/rising god? No. So does he hurt my prior probability? Nope. Not a bit. Even if he did, it wouldn't necessarily hurt it but his silence on the matter really means nothing.and you and Carrier are stuck with Herodotus. If you can produce this primary source then do it. Herodotus reads as it does,and it doesn't read death and resurrection to anyone looking at it objectively.
You have proved nothing. That Carrier could be wrong about something? Sure. He could be. But you sure as hell haven't found it.I gave just two examples here of Carrier's poor methods and scholarship,one for which the link failed, but you knew what was in Herodotus anyway. Like I said there are loads of problems with Carrier's work and thesis,and I've addressed many of them in my posts on this thread.