Oldest Known Fragment of the New Testament Found

Well, that could well have been Jesus since he can respawn as many times as he wants.

There's evidence of zombies, talking flammable shrubbery and spontaneous human-to-sodium-chloride conversions?

Proof?

While you're digging for it, ponder this: If you were sick, would you take a drug that there was no evidence for it being effective, or would you take a drug for which there was overwhelming evidence of it being effective? I'm going for the latter, you, apparently, the former.

I'm also going to have nothing to do with a god who accepts human sacrifice as an offering for victory in battle.

That's Judges 11:30-40.

I can't stand the Klingons.

Except for target practice.

Which is not evidence of presence, either, which it would need to be in order to back up your silly-ass folklore. All that saying is, is a too-cute-by-half example of a burden of proof fallacy, ya dimwitted dipshit.

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Plenty of evidence of the Roman Empire, Roman citizens, Jews, Jerusalem, Herod, and so forth.

All the Oort Cloud has is it provides a mathematical solution to the problem of long period comets.

There's also plenty of evidence of the American revolution, does that make the movie The Patriot true? Lots of evidence of New York City, does that make King Kong true? How about Jacob's Ladder? We know there's a Vietnam, that the US military experimented on soldiers during the war, and that people died during the war, so did that movie happen?

We've got evidence that Plato existed, does that mean Atlantis was real as well? Plato did write about it after all. Where's the Egyptian accounts of the plagues? The parting of the Sea of Reeds? You'd think that they'd talk about such things, if they'd have happened.

We also know that King's Cross Station, Surrey and Andorra exist, which I guess means there's plenty of evidence for Harry Potter.

IIRC, The Patriot, King Kong, and Jacob's Ladder none of these make claims of being true accounts of real events

As for the Egyptians, would you want to admit you got your ass kicked by a bunch of slaves (or that their god was the real one and yours were fake)

All gods are fake, you dimwit dipshit.

Jesus (like Robin Hood) was a combination of several real-life figures. Just like almost every fictional character
in literature is based on true shit - shit that was done by different people. Everyone does cool shit. But no one person
does enough cool shit to make a good story. But if we pool good stories from several people, we can combine them to
make one really kick-ass story. It's all about story telling and the human concepts of imagination, optimism, hope, etc.
We have been doing this since we came down from the trees and walked upright.
Christianity/Judaism/ Islam/etc. are just a flash in the pan compared to the full timeline of humanity.

All of those films were made to be as realistic as possible. Jacob's Ladder even concluded with a message describing the medical "experiments" performed on soldiers during the war.

The ancients had a different concept of what constituted "truth" than what we do. To them, you could make up a story about a person, and so long as it matched what you thought the character of that person was, it was considered to be "true."

So, you're going to tell me, that not only did the Egyptians not make any mention of a plague which wiped out only the first born, but they went so far as to erase all history of the Jews as have ever being slaves in the country? And no one bothered to mention that suddenly a number of things of considerable value disappeared from the kingdom?

Why not simply lie and say, "Yeah, they killed our kids and stole our shit, but we kicked their asses so completely that none of them survived!"?

Or to keep things more simple, how can you trust a book which says rabbits chew their cud?

Or thinks that the smallest seed belongs to mustard?

Guess what, its not the mustard seed, its the orchid seed!

Something else to think about: 60% of the food consumed today comes from crops which originated in the Americas. Sixty percent. Yet Israel is called "the Promised Land." WTF? You're God, for some reason, you've decided to make one group of humans your "Chosen People," and do you put those people in a place which has massive amounts of food crops of varieties completely unknown to the folks who've been oppressing your people? No. You send them on a trip of 40 years, that should normally take less than two months, to a place that doesn't have the widest variety of food possible. Why would you do such a thing?

"The ancients had a different concept of what constituted "truth" than what we do. To them, you could make up a story about a person, and so long as it matched what you thought the character of that person was, it was considered to be "true.""

So Hollywood existed since ancient times? Now it's all starting to make sense!

Much better metaphor. Fan canon (or shorted to fanon) are those idea that don't exist anywhere in the actual canon, but one fan makes the idea so popular that it sticks.

Just like the leather pants Draco Malfoy sports in every slash fic encounter he has with Harry.

They keep pushing back the date on when they are going to publish this. It was first found in 2012, then they said they'd release it in 2013, 2015, and now 2017.

I'd say there's 95% chance that there is something wrong with their assessment of the age/origin of the papyrus, and 5% chance that there is something REALLY juicy in the text.

According to the Bible the 40 year trip was punishment for the Jews turning against God and worshiping other gods after he saved them from the Egyptians and provided plenty of food for them.

Good thing they brought plenty of canned foods, otherwise they'd have been starving after the first week.

In the real world, 40 years was a more-than-full lifespan for everyone who wasn't the idle rich at the time. To your typical peasant type, saying something happened 40 years ago and across the desert was like saying today that something happened a million years ago on a different planet, in effect saying "a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away." It was a way of telling people not to worry their pretty little heads about the fact that no one remembered or had any evidence of the exodus from Egypt. It's the same reason that Jesus's death was placed 40 years or so before the earliest writings about him, in a location distant from where the stories were put to papyrus; it made sure that no one could personally counter the fictional story being told.

Actually not true. IIRC, the average lifespan even thousands of years ago once a person reached adulthood was in the early 60s. The 30 and 40 year lifespans of yore were due to high infant mortality averaged in.

At any rate one of the punishments for the Jews was that none of them who were adults when they fled Egypt (except Joshua and Caleb) were to enter the promised land. Not even Aaron or Moses.

The writings about Jesus start in 40 to 50 AD. AD doesn't mean "after death".

A lot of the Jews gave up and just went home early, since it's only about three days walk from Sinai's Red Sea shores to Israel, or from really anywhere in Sinai. They would make excuses like "I will be right there Moses, but first I need to check on my son-in-law's rental properties" and poof, they were gone.

You mean while Moses was up on the mount getting them the rules telling them to not worship other gods? God couldn't have given them that kind of message before they left Egypt? And if you're following a cloud of smoke by day and a pillar of fire by night, wouldn't you kind of already have proof of God?

But, let's go back to this one simple point: You've got a claimed population of 2.5 million people wandering around the desert for 40 years and there's nothing in the archaeological record to back this up. Nothing. To be blunt, that's impossible. If they're wandering in an area that's small enough to be traversed in a few weeks (presumably going around in circles) for 40 years, there's going to be massive amounts of evidence. Bodies, remains of animals, broken items, cloth fragments, things people lost, and more. Think of this, if the Jews kept to the tradition of not having a fire on the Sabbath, and thus only built a fire 6 days out of the week during their 40 years of wandering, with just 250,000 campfires being made on those six nights, that's over 5 million camp fires being built during their wanderings. We should have traces of them, but we don't.

Finally, estimates are that if you had two million people walking from Egypt and looping around the desert, they'd form a line 150 miles long, if they marched 10 abreast. The head of the line would constantly be getting tangled up in the tail, and giving orders to stop and start would be difficult, because by the time the tail of the line got the message to start, the head of the line would be stopping for the day.

Personally I think the contemporaneous letters are likely to offer much more insight into culture as it was then, and are therefore far more valuable.

The number forty turns up a lot in the bible. IIRC, that's because "forty" is ancient shorthand for "a lot." It's not a sharply defined number.

It, like the numbers 3 and 7 appear in a number of different religions in all parts of the globe. Three and seven have astronomical origins (three is tied to the moon, while seven is the number of planets the ancients knew about). Forty is twice the number of fingers and toes a person has, and would make a good "really big number" in a society where math was understood by few, if any.

And would it kill God to put a fucking can opener in the box?

If it did kill God, you could wrap up the New Testament right then and there instead of waiting another millenium or so. Who needs a cross if Jesus can die for your sardines?

For people who mostly used fingers to count, the concept of 40 would have been difficult.

Where does the bible claim 2.5 million people made the Exodus from Egypt?