The Case Against the Historic Jesus Christ

[youkrst]

The bible says it

I want to believe it

Therefore it's true

And satan is a fallen angel, a conscious intelligent malevolent spiritual being.

The bible says it

I need to believe it

Therefore it's true

Evidence, who needs evidence, you aren't one of those deluded rational thinkers are you, it's probably satan blinding your mind, or God hardening your heart or maybe you are an apostate.

[DB Roy]

Rather than hash over the blatant falsity of the Testamonium, here are a couple of passages of Josephus that demonstrate who it who really supplied some of the details of the gospel biography. Someone once asked me that didn't this prove there was a historical Jesus even if several Jesuses were required? The problem is that Josephus is writing about men who lived after the times of Jesus. The first one was killed during the siege of Jerusalem in 70 and the second was someone Josephus himself pursued while governor or Galilee. There can be little doubt, though, the Christ biographers nicked off pieces of Josephus's writings in order to flesh out their story. It could only have been a deliberate deception. Published in 75, around the same time that Mark was written. Coincidence, no doubt. The Life of Josephus was written in the mid-90s. Too late to have had any influence on Mark but it does show how easily facts can resemble fictions and vice-versa. Just because someone back then was named Jesus and lived in Galilee and hung out with poor people and fishermen don't mean jack! Enjoy:

But, what is still more terrible, there was one Jesus, the son of Ananus, a plebeian and a husbandman, who, four years before the war began, and at a time when the city was in very great peace and prosperity, came to that feast whereon it is our custom for every one to make tabernacles to God in the temple, (23) began on a sudden to cry aloud, "A voice from the east, a voice from the west, a voice from the four winds, a voice against Jerusalem and the holy house, a voice against the bridegrooms and the brides, and a voice against this whole people!" This was his cry, as he went about by day and by night, in all the lanes of the city. However, certain of the most eminent among the populace had great indignation at this dire cry of his, and took up the man, and gave him a great number of severe stripes; yet did not he either say any thing for himself, or any thing peculiar to those that chastised him, but still went on with the same words which he cried before. Hereupon our rulers, supposing, as the case proved to be, that this was a sort of divine fury in the man, brought him to the Roman procurator, where he was whipped till his bones were laid bare; yet he did not make any supplication for himself, nor shed any tears, but turning his voice to the most lamentable tone possible, at every stroke of the whip his answer was, "Woe, woe to Jerusalem!" And when Albinus (for he was then our procurator) asked him, Who he was? and whence he came? and why he uttered such words? he made no manner of reply to what he said, but still did not leave off his melancholy ditty, till Albinus took him to be a madman, and dismissed him. Now, during all the time that passed before the war began, this man did not go near any of the citizens, nor was seen by them while he said so; but he every day uttered these lamentable words, as if it were his premeditated vow, "Woe, woe to Jerusalem!" Nor did he give ill words to any of those that beat him every day, nor good words to those that gave him food; but this was his reply to all men, and indeed no other than a melancholy presage of what was to come. This cry of his was the loudest at the festivals; and he continued this ditty for seven years and five months, without growing hoarse, or being tired therewith, until the very time that he saw his presage in earnest fulfilled in our siege, when it ceased; for as he was going round upon the wall, he cried out with his utmost force, "Woe, woe to the city again, and to the people, and to the holy house!" And just as he added at the last, "Woe, woe to myself also!" there came a stone out of one of the engines, and smote him, and killed him immediately; and as he was uttering the very same presages he gave up the ghost. --Josephus, The Wars of the Jews, Book IV, Chapter 5, verse 3

So Jesus the son of Sapphias, one of those whom we have already mentioned as the leader of a seditious tumult of mariners and poor people, prevented us, and took with him certain Galileans, and set the entire palace on fire, and thought he should get a great deal of money thereby, because he saw some of the roofs gilt with gold. They also plundered a great deal of the furniture, which was done without our approbation; for after we had discoursed with Capellus and the principal men of the city, we departed from Bethmaus, and went into the Upper Galilee. But Jesus and his party slew all the Greeks that were inhabitants of Tiberias, and as many others as were their enemies before the war began. --Josephus, The Life of Flavius Josephus

[youkrst]

spot on as always DB

i remember being gobsmacked when i learnt that Josephus had the story of the three crucified dudes one of whom survived.

Crucifixion of three men and the survival of one.

The only person known in history to survive a Roman crucifixion is a friend whom Josephus saves after intervening with the Roman commander. Three are taken down but only one survives.

Josephus, Life, 75, p. 20 of Whiston’s Translation

... as I [Joseph Bar Mathias] came back, 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.


The gospels have a mysterious Joseph of Arimathea appear and go to the Roman commander and ask for Jesus to be taken down from among the three crucified. Jesus lives and the other two presumably die.

Mark 15:42-46

When evening had come, and since it was the day of Preparation, that is, the day before the sabbath, {43} Joseph of Arimathea, a respected member of the council, who was also himself waiting expectantly for the kingdom of God, went boldly to Pilate and asked for the body of Jesus. {44} Then Pilate wondered if he were already dead; and summoning the centurion, he asked him whether he had been dead for some time. {45} When he learned from the centurion that he was dead, he granted the body to Joseph. {46} Then Joseph bought a linen cloth, and taking down the body, wrapped it in the linen cloth, and laid it in a tomb that had been hewn out of the rock. He then rolled a stone against the door of the tomb.

it just amazes me how people refuse to get it.

[Flann 5]

Why would they believe he rose from the dead,and why didn't the powerful and influential religious leaders just produce the dead body?

The same reason people committed mass suicide believing aliens were going to save them - because someone told them it was true.

You cannot use people's belief as evidence.

So Jesus was crucified publicly in Jerusalem and buried, and three days later it was claimed that he had appeared physically alive, and according to Paul many of his disciples saw him at different times.

The apostles began to preach this to the people in this same city of Jerusalem, indicting their religious leaders for demanding his death.
So who was the someone who told them that he had risen from the dead? And since naturally he couldn't have risen from the dead, it would be a simple matter to produce the dead body to falsify their preaching. Why didn't the Sanhedrin produce the body?

And it never occurred to anyone to check the tomb,right?

Oh and of course shortly afterwards they all committed mass suicide,and so Christianity grew and spread.

I don't think even you believe your own 'explanation' here, Interbane.

[Interbane]

I don't think even you believe your own 'explanation' here, Interbane.

As if my explanation is more fantastical than believing a person came back from the dead. The ridiculous things you have right under your nose, Flann.

First of all, you keep referring to what is written in the text as if it was testimony written at the precise moment things happened, without any embellishment or storytelling after the fact. We've been over this. We are going in circles, you're right.

You can't support the chain of custody, so stop appealing to the documents. You have to support the documents before you appeal to them. Your support is that you don't see how people would believe an event happened unless it actually happened. And the details of this event you're pulling from the documents. So, your support has gone full circle. Read this paragraph again if you I lost you.

Your argument is circular Flann. If it appears we're going in circles, we are. You keep appealing to things to support other things, then appealing to other things to support the first.

Can you not see this?

[DB Roy]

No, he does not see this. And he isn't going to see it no matter how often it is explained to him. He refuses to entertain the notion that maybe--just maybe--the story recounted in the gospels (as confused, contradictory and hodge-podge as it is) may not really have happened. The evidence presented to support the idea that the story is a fiction will not be examined any deeper than it takes to rail against it without sounding completely clueless. There is no attempt to understand it and when you want to know why he thinks that way, you get some apologist link because he can't explain it himself due to his lack of any true understanding of what he's railing against and he hopes this fellow can. We call that a smokescreen.

He lacks a rational thought in his head and so is able with a straight face to tell you that atheistic and ahistorical perspectives of Jesus and god are crazy and too fantastic to be believed while he indulges himself in what he thinks is a perfectly sane idea that the creator of the universe was born on earth as his own son so he could be murdered, rise from the dead and somehow in so doing pay for everyone's sins.

The more you try to engage him to think rationally for a moment, he descends into madness with OT prophecy in the NT which is so ridiculous that it disproves itself and is not worth arguing. It's all to baffle you with bullshit because you will NEVER get a straight answer out of him. It's against his very nature. So I quit talking to him. All debating him does is encourage him to continue his lunacy. Maybe he's a nice guy IRL but underneath it all, you see how utterly confused he is. But don't try to help him sort it out. Your efforts are not appreciated.

[youkrst]

Where is the kingdom Flann?

[Flann 5]

First of all, you keep referring to what is written in the text as if it was testimony written at the precise moment things happened, without any embellishment or storytelling after the fact. We've been over this. We are going in circles, you're right.

You can't support the chain of custody, so stop appealing to the documents. You have to support the documents before you appeal to them.

You are misrepresenting what I've said throughout this thread in relation to the history of early Christianity and about what was written when.
Ancient historians,N.T.scholars and textual critics don't see a "chain of custody" problem and believe a history of early Christianity can be determined by scholarly methods. That's a big subject, but you're no expert on it.

There is a dividing line in scholarship between those who are philosophical naturalists and those who are conservative Christian scholars,yet they do agree on many historical facts.

As if my explanation is more fantastical than believing a person came back from the dead. The ridiculous things you have right under your nose, Flann.

You're a philosophical naturalist Interbane. Like I said previously,Craig Keener has written a book on miracles in the present time. So I don't know how you can be so sure there are not miraculous events in answer to prayer.

I've given many reasons why Christianity is credible, and if God does exist then of course he could have raised Jesus from the dead.
It's been instructive and educational hearing and examining the arguments of the new atheist critics and those who claim reason and science as their foundations, in their rejection of theism and Christianity.

There's Dawkins who follows Krausse who says; "nothing isn't nothing anymore in science." I've even heard it said that "nothing is unstable!"
And Krausse like a fairground magician, pulls rabbits out of a hat while trying to conceal something up his sleeve.

They pour scorn on philosophy while propagating their own philosophy of reductionist materialism and scientism.

If nothing for origins is a problem,you can turn to the fantastical hypotheses of the string theorists who postulate an infinite number of other universes, where everything however absurd,is not only possible but guaranteed.

These Alice in Wonderland worlds are taken as real possibilities. One journalist described one of their conventions,as being like attending a party where everyone was high on hashish.

Then there's Sam Harris who says morality can be derived from scientific facts. This is nonsense of course as morality's source is not found in physics.
We shouldn't rely on gene splicers,rabbit cloners or those who experiment on real human embryos to determine the ethics of their actions. Science doesn't decide the ethics of Mengele's barbaric human experiments.

In reality Harris offers his personal favourite philosophy of ethics,which is reheated utilitarianism.

And then he tells us we don't actually make real moral choices anyway. No,we don't make free choices at all, and it's all an illusion which he can see in action by looking at brains with neuroscientists.

Everything is predetermined biochemically,and environmentally and it's just the luck of the draw that Sam Harris wasn't born Saddam Hussein.
Daniel Dennett thinks Darwinism is the great explanatory key to all things. The universal disinfectant of erroneous thought.

Dan thinks we have more freedom than Sam, except for those people infected with parasitic viruses of the mind which remain stubbornly immune to his universal disinfectant.

The real heretics are those who question the great doctrine of Darwin. If you think there might be a problem with a land based raccoon like creature gradually morphing into a whale,then you have a problem.
It could have been some other ancestral creature and it just depends where you look, but Darwin himself could easily imagine a "race of bears" morphing into an aquatic giant.

And then somewhere along the line of evolution consciousness "emerged" Just where the unconcious living things became conscious ones they don't say,or how it got there.

We know of course that abiogenesis doesn't happen and life comes from life. So we get a singularity against all known laws of physics or maybe aliens seeded life on earth.

The origin of the universe entails another singularity not consonant with the known laws of physics.

And yet this universe contains realities that are not reducible to physics. These include thoughts,dreams,imagined things,laws of nature and of logic and the informational content of genes which is not reducible to matter or energy.

Richard Carrier rushes in to refute fine tuning for life armed with Bayes theorem,and gets torn to shreds by cosmologist Luke Barnes on all counts.
Has anyone ever abused probability as much as Carrier? Probably not.

And so we find the advocates of reason and science attacking belief in God and Christianity,while utterly blind to the sheer nonsense of their own ideas.

These are the masters who see beneath the surface illusions under our noses and tell us all about it in their popular books.

Of course you will complain about my arguments from ignorance but as Ant shrewdly observed, you think your ignorance trumps mine.
It's more inference to the best explanation.

Thus says 'science and reason'.
Nature only looks designed,time doesn't really have a direction(ask Carrier),we don't make real choices and even our sense of self is just "a bunch of tricks in the brain".

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NZsFTjW7mvs

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nl3wx8DGLjc



Vanity of vanities,says the preacher, vanity of vanities!

[youkrst]

Flann, where is the kingdom?

where does Jesus say it is?

[Flann 5]

Flann, where is the kingdom?

where does Jesus say it is?

It's wherever the rule and authority of God is manifested. So Jesus said;"But if I drive out demons by the finger of God,then the kingdom of God has come upon you." Luke 11-20

It could be in human lives and relationships that are in obedience to God. In a word it's wherever God rules.