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01/25/2008 02:23:42 PM · #1326 |
Originally posted by DrAchoo:
Originally posted by MrBradHeisler:
So saying that the general population at the time knows of Britney Spears/jesus christ, has no effect on how factual the information presented is, making the Britney Spears book and the bible completely circumstantial. |
Does this make all of history completely circumstantial? |
History is typically written by those who are victorious, one way or another. So most historical records, particularly if you only take it from one source, is liable to be pretty heavily biased. The further you go back in history, the more this distorting effect will occur, obviously. |
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01/30/2008 02:35:00 PM · #1327 |
Originally posted by MrBradHeisler:
Originally posted by DrAchoo:
Originally posted by MrBradHeisler:
So saying that the general population at the time knows of Britney Spears/jesus christ, has no effect on how factual the information presented is, making the Britney Spears book and the bible completely circumstantial. |
Does this make all of history completely circumstantial? |
History is not circumstantial. History cannot be circumstantial because history is exactly what happened in the past. However, the way history is recounted and recorded, that can be circumstantial. |
For those who may consider the recordings of the New Testament - fabricated history, and subsequently the resurection...I have attached 2 links for the following purposes:
A). present the martyrs as part of the discussion. B). If the Apostles knew the resurection to be false, why would they allow themselves to be killed for such a fallacy?
Lastly, historians like Tacitus recount some of the martyr events, during Nero's reign. I trust that none here deny that Nero actually persecuted early christians.
Martyrs
Martyrs and the historicity of the resurection
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01/30/2008 07:16:56 PM · #1328 |
Originally posted by Flash:
For those who may consider the recordings of the New Testament - fabricated history, and subsequently the resurection...I have attached 2 links for the following purposes:
A). present the martyrs as part of the discussion. B). If the Apostles knew the resurection to be false, why would they allow themselves to be killed for such a fallacy?
Lastly, historians like Tacitus recount some of the martyr events, during Nero's reign. I trust that none here deny that Nero actually persecuted early christians.
Martyrs
Martyrs and the historicity of the resurection |
Flash - you are still missing the point.
People are not denying *every* element of the NT as fiction - they are subjecting it to the same analysis as they would any other historical document and assessing the degree to which it is likely to be accurate.
The author in your second link unfortunately seems slghtly unhinged: he argues that it is a logical fallacy to consider the resurrection story from a naturalistic point of view (because resurrection is impossible) because the correct frame of reference is one in which the flesh of Jesus is infused with godliness. It is just mad - it is impossible to reason with arguments so obviously and hideously presented in the guise of logic, because if you cannot see the chasms in reasoning that are being leapt then it is unlikely that we could ever have a rational discussion.
I will try to set out this argument in simple terms:
Starting Point of Analysis: there is a report of a person being resurrected *but* resurrection is impossible
Conclusion 1: the person resurrected has done the impossible and is therefore a god
Conclusion 2: the report is inaccurate (whether intentional or not)
Given that there is a lot of historical evidence pointing to conclusion 2, and conclusion 2 does not require us to rewrite all the rule books about the physical aspects of the universe that we can observe, and that there is no other evidence for reaching the ultimate conclusion of godliness, it is highly peculiar to assume that conlusion 1 is the right conclusion.
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01/31/2008 01:06:57 AM · #1329 |
| There's also no reason to suggest that something may be true just because martyrs were willing to die for their beliefs. Otherwise, you could point to the Heaven's Gate Cult members as evidence of truth in their belief that the Hale-Bopp comet was their train to heaven. |
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01/31/2008 01:38:54 AM · #1330 |
Originally posted by MrBradHeisler:
History is not circumstantial. History cannot be circumstantial because history is exactly what happened in the past. However, the way history is recounted and recorded, that can be circumstantial. |
It would be lovely if this were true, but it is not. It's not even POSSIBLE for it to be true.
"History", by definition, involves the acts of observing and the passing on of information. For quite a long time now, it's basically been about observing and recording that information, first by means of the written word and, more recently, with video and audio recordings. Before writing became commonplace, we had "oral history" and many great, early works of literature are based on transforming that oral history into a written history. But of course they were written at a considerable remove from the actual events being "recorded", and how accurate they are is open to question.
The Bible falls into that category. One thing you can take for granted; there was an "oral history" of a man named Jesus of Nazareth, and He had enough impact on enough people that eventually the oral history became a recorded history, but at a considerable remove from His actual life, and recorded through the filters of many different people in different eras.
When thinking about "history" in the abstract, it's helpful to remember that we have a word for "the time before history": we call it "prehistory", we refer to "prehistorical times", and if you think about this you will realize that the very concept of "history" cannot exist without the fact of recording, or at least the passing-on of tales through generations.
It's a truism that "history is written by the victors". It's very important to remember that. There's almost no way to separate the facts from the distortions and the outright lies across any appreciable span of time. Heck, you can't even do it for last week a lot of the time. Take any half-dozen witnesses of any event and ask them to tell you what happened, and you will get six different versions of that event. Shuffle them all together, remove any elements that are inconsistent, and you'll be reasonably close to the "truth" most of the time, but not always.
So going back to "history" and "victors", those who end up on top after prolonged struggle are always at pains to cast their own role in the struggle in the best possible light. For example, for a long time the accepted "histories" of the classical world were the Roman versions, and the Romans had a distinctly different perspective on their actions than did the Greeks, whom they subjugated entirely, whose ancient religions they forcibly replaced with their own (Christianity), and who (despite that they contributed basically the entire bedrock or underpinnings of the political, moral, artistic, and intellectual strata of the Roman Empire and, eventually, Western Civilization) were for a long time denied any credit whatsoever for their manifold accomplishments.
Last year I edited a book, written by a native Greek scholar, giving the Greek version of the history of the Romans and the Greeks, and I assure you it has little in common with, say, Gibbon's version, the long-accepted, Western-culture, Anglicized version of classical history.
R.
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01/31/2008 05:00:50 AM · #1331 |
Originally posted by Bear_Music:
It's a truism that "history is written by the victors". It's very important to remember that. There's almost no way to separate the facts from the distortions and the outright lies across any appreciable span of time. Heck, you can't even do it for last week a lot of the time. Take any half-dozen witnesses of any event and ask them to tell you what happened, and you will get six different versions of that event. Shuffle them all together, remove any elements that are inconsistent, and you'll be reasonably close to the "truth" most of the time, but not always. |
This is a really interesting subject. I would go even further and say that there is a fundamental problem in recording events through the medium of language. To be useful, language compresses events to an extraordinary scale (on a scale of jpeg quality settings, it is nearer 1 than 100) relying on a host of tricks to do so. Those linguistic tricks are often heavily reliant on commonality of experience, often requiring proximity both in geographic location and era in time.
It is hard to ascribe the quality of “fact” to many types of historical event because it is almost never the case that the whole truth can be imparted through language. Taking the jpeg analogy further, the quality of the information it imparts depends on the quality of the encoder (the writer or speaker) and the decoder (the reader or listener) to extract meaning. In reality information is lost in the encoding and false information can be extracted in the decoding process. The more complicated the matter, the more information is lost (eg the state of someone’s mind is far more difficult to record than the fact that they travelled to [x]).
All this before you even get to Robert’s excellent point on victor’s history.
Originally posted by Bear_Music:
For example, for a long time the accepted "histories" of the classical world were the Roman versions, and the Romans had a distinctly different perspective on their actions than did the Greeks, whom they subjugated entirely, whose ancient religions they forcibly replaced with their own (Christianity), and who (despite that they contributed basically the entire bedrock or underpinnings of the political, moral, artistic, and intellectual strata of the Roman Empire and, eventually, Western Civilization) were for a long time denied any credit whatsoever for their manifold accomplishments.
Last year I edited a book, written by a native Greek scholar, giving the Greek version of the history of the Romans and the Greeks, and I assure you it has little in common with, say, Gibbon's version, the long-accepted, Western-culture, Anglicized version of classical history. |
This is interesting – but to raise an off-topic matter, I always understood from my studies in Ancient History and Latin that the Roman civilisation was underpinned by a willingness to adopt local cultures and religions into the Roman pantheon. In particular, the Greek gods substantially informed the later Roman mythology and the same stories and qualities are attributed to equivalent gods (Zeus/Jove, Poseidon/Neptune, Hermes/Mercury etc). This is given as one of the reasons for the degree of stability leading to the unprecedented pax romana. Christianity was only adopted in the 4C., five hundred years after the subjugation of the Greeks by the Roman empire.
Is this contradicted by your Greek version of history? I would be fascinated to know more.
Matthew
Message edited by author 2008-01-31 05:01:53.
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01/31/2008 09:54:36 AM · #1332 |
Originally posted by Matthew:
I will try to set out this argument in simple terms:
Starting Point of Analysis: there is a report of a person being resurrected *but* resurrection is impossible
Conclusion 1: the person resurrected has done the impossible and is therefore a god
Conclusion 2: the report is inaccurate (whether intentional or not)
Given that there is a lot of historical evidence pointing to conclusion 2, and conclusion 2 does not require us to rewrite all the rule books about the physical aspects of the universe that we can observe, and that there is no other evidence for reaching the ultimate conclusion of godliness, it is highly peculiar to assume that conlusion 1 is the right conclusion. |
Originally posted by scalvert:
There's also no reason to suggest that something may be true just because martyrs were willing to die for their beliefs. Otherwise, you could point to the Heaven's Gate Cult members as evidence of truth in their belief that the Hale-Bopp comet was their train to heaven. |
The reason for my posting the links is this;
Why would an "ordinary" man (as scalvert has repeatedly posted), one who may have even had a "common name", be able to convince 12 Apostles to steal his body, from under the watch of Roman Centurians (who would be put to death for allowing such an act), to perpetrate a false claim of resurection, then allow themsevles to be executed to keep the myth? As was argued in link 2, 1 of 2 groups had to have stolen/moved the body. Either his friends or his enemies. His enemies could have easily disproved the resurection claim by presenting the "unrisen" Christ. His friends would have recanted their claim, if they did not believe it to be true. Why would those who walked with Jesus, embrace their execution for what they knew was a lie?
It simply defies logic. And thus supports conclusion 1 rather than conclusion 2 of Matthew's post. |
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01/31/2008 11:05:12 AM · #1333 |
Originally posted by Flash:
Why would an "ordinary" man ...be able to convince 12 Apostles to steal his body, from under the watch of Roman Centurians... |
Flash, you take the premise that Jesus may very well have been a real person and then start right off the bat with an assumption that the story of resurrection must also be true. Evidence of a person's existence is NOT evidence that any ascribed event took place, especially when the story of that event isn't even consistent. |
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01/31/2008 11:27:53 AM · #1334 |
Originally posted by Flash:
Why would an "ordinary" man (as scalvert has repeatedly posted), one who may have even had a "common name", be able to convince 12 Apostles to steal his body, from under the watch of Roman Centurians (who would be put to death for allowing such an act), to perpetrate a false claim of resurection, then allow themsevles to be executed to keep the myth? |
As he said, you are begging the question, presupposing that everything you have read in the new testament is true at face value. And this is not the same thing as suggesting that everything in it is false. |
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01/31/2008 12:27:23 PM · #1335 |
Gentlemen (scalvert/Louis),
Neither of you has addressed the reasons why associates and followers would allow themselves to be executed for something they knew to be false. Either they were not executed as the 1st century historians reference and thus that is false as well, or they were executed. If they were executed as martyrs for espousing the resurection, then why would they go to their death for a (known to them) lie?
Please remember, I am not referencing the many believers through these last 2000 years that were put to death, but rather those specific Apostles that walked with Jesus, saw his crucifixtion, and then embraced a subsequent execution. Why would they endure that for a resurection that they knew to be false?
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01/31/2008 12:56:39 PM · #1336 |
Originally posted by Flash:
Neither of you has addressed the reasons why associates and followers would allow themselves to be executed for something they knew to be false. |
Heck, why would the guards accept a bribe to tell lies that would surely result in their own executions? Why would the disciples and close associates of Jesus be afraid to see him alive- a predicted resurrection they should have been eagerly expecting? You're missing the point. We really don't know that this story ever happened, and you're skipping right past "whether" and questioning "why." |
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01/31/2008 01:10:27 PM · #1337 |
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01/31/2008 01:17:33 PM · #1338 |
Originally posted by Matthew:
This is interesting – but to raise an off-topic matter, I always understood from my studies in Ancient History and Latin that the Roman civilisation was underpinned by a willingness to adopt local cultures and religions into the Roman pantheon. In particular, the Greek gods substantially informed the later Roman mythology and the same stories and qualities are attributed to equivalent gods (Zeus/Jove, Poseidon/Neptune, Hermes/Mercury etc). This is given as one of the reasons for the degree of stability leading to the unprecedented pax romana. Christianity was only adopted in the 4C., five hundred years after the subjugation of the Greeks by the Roman empire.
Is this contradicted by your Greek version of history? I would be fascinated to know more.
Matthew |
No, that's correct; and THEN the Romans adopted Christianity as the state religion and set about persecuting "pagans", among wehom they included the Greeks.
R.
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01/31/2008 01:39:27 PM · #1339 |
| This is such a fascinating thread - I'm so glad its still going. |
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01/31/2008 01:45:10 PM · #1340 |
Originally posted by Bear_Music:
No, that's correct; and THEN the Romans adopted Christianity as the state religion and set about persecuting "pagans", among wehom they included the Greeks.
R. |
I understand. The flip side to the persecution of the early Christians - the persecution of all the non-Christians.
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01/31/2008 01:49:24 PM · #1341 |
Originally posted by Matthew:
The flip side to the persecution of the early Christians - the persecution of all the non-Christians. |
Early equality! |
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01/31/2008 01:52:21 PM · #1342 |
Originally posted by Flash:
Gentlemen (scalvert/Louis),
Neither of you has addressed the reasons why associates and followers would allow themselves to be executed for something they knew to be false. Either they were not executed as the 1st century historians reference and thus that is false as well, or they were executed. If they were executed as martyrs for espousing the resurection, then why would they go to their death for a (known to them) lie?
...Why would they endure that for a resurection that they knew to be false? |
Every religion can claim hordes of people who have done crazy things in their name. There is better evidence for the accuracy of some such stories than others - for example, the Heavens Gate cultists killed themselves in living memory and the evidence of their deaths was televised - we can be quite sure that it happened (whereas the accuracy of the biblical stories is much harder to evidence convincingly).
But is this persuasive evidence that there really was a spaceship hiding behind a comet ready to collect their souls? The argument "why would they do that unless there really was a spaceship?" starts to sound a bit weak.
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01/31/2008 02:28:03 PM · #1343 |
| Matthew, all who profess to be Christians are not. They should not all be lumped together as if they are. Some are just following the ways of man. |
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01/31/2008 03:24:58 PM · #1344 |
Originally posted by David Ey:
Matthew, all who profess to be Christians are not. They should not all be lumped together as if they are. Some are just following the ways of man. |
And how would you separate them? What authority would you point to in order to make the distinction. Self professed Christians themselves cannot agree on which groups/individuals are "true" Christians and which are not. Although the "true" Christians are always suspiciously defined in ways that are identical to the "definer's" own beliefs, traits, and prejudices. |
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01/31/2008 03:26:45 PM · #1345 |
Originally posted by scalvert:
You're missing the point. |
No - it seems you are.
1. A Jesus taught and preached (you say he was just an ordinary man).
2. He had contemporary followers (aka the 12 Apostles)
3. A central theme of his teaching was his resurection
4. A claim by his followers was that he in fact did raise from the grave
5. These same claimants were executed as martyrs for this belief (and their executions were referenced by 1st century historians - Tacitus amongst others)
6. If this was merely a ruse by the Apostles and the body of Christ was secretly stolen to pretend that a resurection took place - when in fact it did not - then why die for that falsehood?
Why subject yourself to a cruel death for something you know to be false?
Would you die a cruel death for something you knew was a lie? Not believed was a lie. Not guessed might be a lie. But knew 100% was a lie as you were the one who stole the body to perpetuate the lie.
These were simple fishermen. Not Greek scholars. Simple fishermen. Yet they embraced an execution for proclaiming the resurection - an execution carried out in the recorded time of Nero. Must be a logical reason as to why they would submit to that? |
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01/31/2008 03:34:51 PM · #1346 |
Originally posted by Flash:
Originally posted by scalvert:
You're missing the point. |
No - it seems you are.
1. A Jesus taught and preached (you say he was just an ordinary man).
2. He had contemporary followers (aka the 12 Apostles)
3. A central theme of his teaching was his resurection
4. A claim by his followers was that he in fact did raise from the grave
5. These same claimants were executed as martyrs for this belief (and their executions were referenced by 1st century historians - Tacitus amongst others)
6. If this was merely a ruse by the Apostles and the body of Christ was secretly stolen to pretend that a resurection took place - when in fact it did not - then why die for that falsehood?
Why subject yourself to a cruel death for something you know to be false?
Would you die a cruel death for something you knew was a lie? Not believed was a lie. Not guessed might be a lie. But knew 100% was a lie as you were the one who stole the body to perpetuate the lie.
These were simple fishermen. Not Greek scholars. Simple fishermen. Yet they embraced an execution for proclaiming the resurection - an execution carried out in the recorded time of Nero. Must be a logical reason as to why they would submit to that? |
You really need to re-read what has gone on before. You are missing the point. One and two in your bullet points may be self-evident, the rest are not. You are assuming much in taking the relevant passages from the new testament at face value, then applying them against the arguments presented here. Read the link scalvert provided for just one alternative interpretation.
Message edited by author 2008-01-31 15:35:45. |
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01/31/2008 04:34:10 PM · #1347 |
| What Louis said. The earliest scripture supposedly available are the Epistles of Paul, who never actually met Jesus. We have zero evidence that any of these things actually happened except through the writings of people who couldn't possibly know the details of the events, direct quotes and private conversations they describe because they simply weren't present. The rationality of the characters described is a moot point when the description itself may not be accurate or even true. :-/ |
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01/31/2008 05:11:03 PM · #1348 |
scalvert - are you claiming that the Apostles were not executed? Are you challenging the account of Tacitus (and others) of the executions of the Apostles or other 1st century christians? Are you claiming that the accounts of Nero's persecution is myth?
If not, then please explain why any Apostle would embrace a cruel execution to perserve what he knew was a lie?
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01/31/2008 05:16:26 PM · #1349 |
Originally posted by Flash:
Are you claiming that the accounts of Nero's persecution is myth?
If not, then please explain why any Apostle would embrace a cruel execution to perserve what he knew was a lie? |
I'd like to know what the former could possibly have to do with the latter, to take just one glaring instance. |
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01/31/2008 10:23:05 PM · #1350 |
Originally posted by Flash:
scalvert - are you claiming that the Apostles were not executed? Are you challenging the account of Tacitus (and others) of the executions of the Apostles or other 1st century christians? Are you claiming that the accounts of Nero's persecution is myth?
If not, then please explain why any Apostle would embrace a cruel execution to perserve what he knew was a lie? |
Not wishing to offend Flash, but did you even bother to read the link that Scalvert provided for your edification.... This one
A quick perusal of the contents should enable you to comprehend that not all things are as clearly defined as you seem to suggest.
Ray |
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