It's been a while since we had a young Earth creationist thread on WF

Wow is that dumb.

Yes, the Sun has much greater influence on the climate than global warming. And if you are satisfied to live in any climate dominated by the Sun, you are welcome to go live on Mars or Venus without a space suit. For the rest of us little flecks of dust, this tiny fragile atmosphere matters.

 

No, the rebuttal is "No, NASA has not said anything of the kind."

 

It does occur in the earlier gospels, in the very first lines of Matthew and of Mark, in fact, and again several times in Mt; and it's all over the earliest letters, which are older than any of the four gospels.

 

Moses was utterly fictional. The Jews were never enslaved in Egypt, which essentially eliminates massive elements of the story. It’s possible that they cribbed the idea from the myth of Horus.

Jesus, if he existed, was almost certainly a composite of various religious figures from the time.

 

The "global cooling" thing was never a prediction. It was, as I recall, the press taking one article out of context and blowing it up into a Thing.

 

Yeah, a lot of the early Christian stuff seems to be retellings of earlier stories, like Horus and some of the Babylonian mythology.

 

Why do you think that?

 

You might be thinking of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, for whom that is almost certainly true -- different tribal leaders retconned into a dynastic sequence of generations when they later merged into a greater political unit.

As for Moses, the difficulty is that there is so little of his biography that is not a simplification of longer political processes that it becomes difficult to explain what we mean exactly when we say that the man did or did not exist. But there are two major hints in the text that some individual man intended by that name did actually exist: because the authors of Exodus are trying to make apologies for him. They tell a (myth-adapted) tale about his being adopted by the Egyptians in order to make a feudal Egyptian leader palatable to the Israelites; and they take great pains to explain why the murder he committed at court was necessary and innocent, really, believe us, and he had totally decided to go with Israel and leave the country before he had to flee as a capital criminal, again, believe us.

 

But there's a meme on the internet. There wouldn't be a meme on the internet if it wasn't true.

 

Because there’s no documentation outside of the NT that describes a figure like Jesus during the period of time he’s supposed to have lived. You go a little before and you have a figure who matches elements of the story, but not all of them. You go a little bit after and you have someone who matches up with different elements.

 

We actually have the historical records of when the Books of Moses were “discovered.” A priest, some 500 years after the books had been written ran into the throne room of the king with a copy of the books and began to read aloud from them. This was after the Babylonian captivity and none of the pre-Babylonian records of the Jews mention anything about Moses or many of the other things in the Pentateuch.

 

To be honest I tend to view pretty much any religious, legendary or historical figure for whom we have limited or no hard data as being to some degree fiction or folklore until good reason is presented to do otherwise.

We have contemporary fictional characters people increasingly already believe are real (Ronald McDonald, Sherlock Holmes), characters who were real but whose legends have outgrown the truth (Owain Glyndŵr), figures likely based on composites of real life characters and archetypes whose stories have become embellished beyond recognition (Robin Hood, King Arthur), figures who represent perceptions of tribal or ethnic groupings seen through successive cultural lenses (Merlin), fictional or religious characters finding their roots in other fictional characters and folklore (Odin/Gandalf/Santa Claus, Satan/Pan/Cernunnos/Brân/Herne/<insert European Horned God analogue>).

I find it's simply better to hedge bets until hard facts are established, which usually they aren't given the nature of the subject matter.

 

This is different from the version I'm familiar with. Can you point out the records you're referring to?

 

I'm not sure I understand you correctly here. There are quite a few written documents that refer to Jesus that were not included in the Bible, from religious reports later abandoned to Roman administrative and historiographical writings. In addition, the NT is a very heterogeneous collection of sources that discuss Jesus' life (among other things); you would expect most of the better sources to have been included in that collection. That doesn't make them all the same source.

 

Not at the moment as I’m bouncing around in a car on an hours long journey and searching for such info on my phone is a bit impractical. If, however, you snag a copy of Bible Myths and Their Parallels in Other Religions by TW Doane and do a text search for Moses, you’ll find the specifics of who, when, and where. Current scholarship still backs up the information as far as I know.

 

I’m not aware of any Roman records which have verifiable accounts that could be ascribed as to referencing Jesus that haven’t been shown to be forgeries.

 

Thank you. Chapter VI of the book talks about the exodus from Egypt, and gives several different sources that name a priest called Moses as the leader of the Egyptians (though in all of those versions cited here, it's the Israelites that are infected by a plague, and Egyptians are driving them out because of this rather than begrudgingly allowing them to leave). However, the only story of which the athor says that it was written down only 500 years later and should not be believed is the one about Pharaoh charging after the Israelites into the Red Sea.

 

The most-quoted are probably the several passages in Josephus, do you consider that a forgery?

 

Perception of the time was somewhat of an issue. I remember my 6th grade teacher and science book making the statement they were guessing we would run out of oil around a decade later or something like that. It might have been somewhat true based on fuel economy, known oil deposits, and the increase in worldwide demand and the rise in people with cars. All of those things have changed over time, including the discovery of massive new oil sources and the increase in technology to get at what was once impossible to retrieve oil in shale and deep under the ocean.

Of course, this was also the sort of science given to elementary students. I remember pissing off one of my teachers who claimed you would never travel as far as light would in a second in your entire life. I pointed out that my mother's car had flipped 100k miles and that was not her first car and I was sure that was a false statement. She did not like that, but if you look at history she grew up at a time when traveling 180,000 miles in a lifetime was probably not done by most people.

My dad bought his first computer with a 20 mb hard drive and was told he would never need more than that. Claming science did not see the future in the past neglects the advancement in mankind and the reality that science can learn and adapt. The reality is that with the adjustments of technology and knowledge science today has a much better idea of the damage we are doing back then.

All I can say to Marso is if you don't like the science in regards to CO2 may I suggest sucking on your car's tailpipe. You would do us all a lot of good by darwining yourself.

 

Have you read them? They are record scratchingly different than any of his other writings and I don’t know of any credible scholar who believes them to be authentic. Additionally, Josephus is quite clearly unreliable when it comes to describing historical events which he witnessed. He gets caught trying to slip out of Masada shortly after the Romans are spotted on their way. Josephus claims that he was only going to a different city to get help. Problem with that line is that the city had already fallen to the Romans (and he knew this). Then the city fathers put him charge of the defenses. (Why would you put a coward in charge of the defenses?) In the end, he and one other soldier are the only members of the garrison who survive. The others having all drawn lots to slit one another’s throats. If you believe that....

 

There’s a section you must have missed because it names the priest who claimed to have found the Pentateuch and goes on to describe the impossibility of him being able to read the text easily due to the changes in the language over time (had it been some 500 years between when it was written and then). There’s a Wikipedia entry on that priest which essentially matches up with what Doane says about him.

 

Bart Ehrmann has several good books on the subject, but, in a nutshell, here's how he says historians (that is, mainstream scholars of near-Eastern history) tackle the problem of establishing Jesus' (or any other figure's) historicity.

The first principle historians apply is multiple attestation. That is, are their several independent sources that indicate a figure's existence or facts about their life?

You might think not. You know that the NT is a theologically motivated book.

But you can't view the NT as a single source, because it was not composed that way. It is a collection of documents written over many years. And there are several unique sources within it (that is, sources that show no evidence of coming from another source).

You may, for instance, be familiar with the (nearly ironclad IMHO) theory that the Books of Luke and Matthew are adaptations and expansions of the Book of Mark. Each quotes Mark often verbatim, and each adds new material to the story.

So, Mark is a source, because we have no earlier document that can be seen as precursor. The Books of Luke and Matthew IN THEIR ENTIRETY are not sources, but their unique material--called L and M--definitely come from different origins, and so are unique sources.

In addition, Luke and Matthew quote a collection of sayings of Jesus, a source we call Q.

Then there's the Gospel of John which is a completely new story, not deriving from earlier Gospels.

And there are the genuine letters of Paul, which give us our earliest look at early Christianity. These letters contain accounts of meeting people who knew Jesus personally.

So, Mark, M, L, Q, John, and the genuine Pauline Epistles are independent sources for Jesus' existence. They are near-contemporaneous with him and come from different traditions.

So, Jesus is attested by multiple independent sources.

Another concept historians apply is the criterion of dissimilarity. Simply put: are the elements of the account consistent with what we know of the time they are alleged to occur?

And, yes, much of the material about Jesus passes this. Pontius Pilate, for instance, has been established as an historical figure. Many of Jesus' sayings are captured in Aramaic; you can your probably bet your bottom dollar that Jesus really did say something very much like "My father, my father, why have you foresaken me?" while he was being crucified.

(The flip side is true as well: Jesus makes a pun when speaking to Nichodemus that only works in Greek, not in the Aramaic two 1st Century Jews would be speaking to each other. Almost certainly, these are not Jesus' words.)

So, do they have any material we can believe on face value? A little.

Historians use the criterion of embarrassment to evaluate the material. Simply put: assuming the author's agenda, it's unlikely an author would make something up that goes against that agenda, so anything counter to their agenda is more likely to be true.

A couple of big ones: Jesus' baptism by John the Baptist and his crucifixion by the Romans. If you were making up the Jesus story to get converts to Christianity, you wouldn't make up these claims. His baptism tends to subordinate Jesus to John, and his crucifixion is a very ignoble end to a person you're invited to worship. Presumably, these things were too well-known and established to deny.

Jesus passes all these criteria, so he's as well established historically as someone in the ancient world can be.

The miracles and such are another matter, but Jesus was a very real person to a high degree of certainty.

 

Ehrman actually undercuts a number of his own arguments for Jesus being a real person quite often. One example is that Ehrman viewed the Gospels as being accounts that reflected actual events to a large degree and researched his subject via that lens. Imagine his surprise when he discovered (years after he’d started publishing his various works) that some of the things described in the NT couldn’t have happened. For example, Jesus being buried in a tomb, as Roman law dictated that if you were crucified you couldn’t be buried.

Had he started with the premise that essentially nothing in Gospels were true, he wouldn’t have made that mistake.

Another example is he’ll happily point to sections in the Gospels which were clearly put in by forgers to make people believe that the text was by Paul (or whomever), but he won’t explain how those things which are similar in nature that says are proof of that Jesus are real can be believed.

Dr. Robert M Price has laid out a number of arguments against there being an actual Jesus that are at least as credible as Ehrman’s.

 

His origin story was basically cribbed from Sargon of Akkad.

The Sumerian king, not the YouTube douchebag.

 

Everyone knows the universe was created last Thursday.

 

Scientist: "life on earth is millions of years old, the planet itself far older, and we have tons of evidence."
Traditionalist Christians: "Nonsense! 6,000 years TOPS!"

Scientists: "there's no such thing as a strict binary in nature, including human sexual and gender identity."
Traditionalist Christians: "Who do liberals always reject SCIENCE???"

 

And all of the parts come on Tuesday.

 

Oh great, so the creation of the earth is going to be delayed by christmas deliveries. That figures.