reynoldbot
Jupiter
A paper-white mask of evil.
Posts: 790
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Post by reynoldbot on Feb 12, 2008 6:31:04 GMT -4
Gillianren and I are both perfect examples of people outside of christianity who are decidedly not "anti-christian" who are very interested in this debate. In fact the only person you have identified on this forum as "anti-christian" is wdmundt, who has not confirmed nor denied that stance.
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Jason
Pluto
May all your hits be crits
Posts: 5,579
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Post by Jason on Feb 12, 2008 12:07:22 GMT -4
Okay, I was absolutely wrong! Everyone will be interested in this debate, regardless of their religious persuasion! No doubt the forum will shortly crash from all the traffic as everyone checks in to see how this debate is going. I'm sure there will be hundreds of pages of arguments and counter-arguments tomorrow.
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Post by wdmundt on Feb 12, 2008 15:42:18 GMT -4
I've found that most people who have not examined the evidence tend to believe many of the stories of the New Testament to be true. It is only when one truly examines what is there that one can see what is not there. So people who are neither pro nor anti may very well be interested.
I was certainly surprised to discover that history failed to record Jesus. Others may feel the same.
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Post by wdmundt on Feb 12, 2008 15:43:59 GMT -4
Do you want a rundown of everything Paul says about Jesus? That could take some time. The question is: what does he say about Jesus the person. Not what is everything he said about Jesus.
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Jason
Pluto
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Posts: 5,579
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Post by Jason on Feb 12, 2008 16:01:23 GMT -4
I don't think "Jesus the person" and "Jesus Christ, the messiah and Son of God" are really seperable from each other in Paul's epistles. He wasn't trying to tell the story of Jesus, but to address the then-current problems of the various churches.
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Jason
Pluto
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Posts: 5,579
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Post by Jason on Feb 12, 2008 16:04:02 GMT -4
I was certainly surprised to discover that history failed to record Jesus. Others may feel the same. Or they might understand that more historical evidence exists for Jesus then we might expect for any other religious leader born 2,000 years ago in an obscure corner of the Roman Empire.
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Post by wdmundt on Feb 12, 2008 16:08:24 GMT -4
One can't say what the "various churches" knew or didn't know about the biography of Jesus at that time. So a claim that Paul is leaving out details already known by his audience is not supported by evidence.
Jesus a person and Jesus, Son of God could be two very different things.
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Jason
Pluto
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Post by Jason on Feb 12, 2008 16:13:37 GMT -4
The fact that Paul didn't bother to go into a long dissertion of who Jesus was and his personal history is the evidence that he thought his audience would be familiar with it already.
Now granted his various audiences may have had different perceptions of who Jesus was from what Paul did, but the fact that he didn't go into biographical tells us that Paul found it unnecessary to do so when addressing these congregations.
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Post by wdmundt on Feb 12, 2008 16:21:12 GMT -4
The fact that Paul didn't bother to go into a long dissertion of who Jesus was and his personal history is the evidence that he thought his audience would be familiar with it already. Now granted his various audiences may have had different perceptions of who Jesus was from what Paul did, but the fact that he didn't go into biographical tells us that Paul found it unnecessary to do so when addressing these congregations. Since biographical information about Jesus does not surface until much later, that claim is not supportable. We don't know what his audience knew about the person Jesus.
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Post by PhantomWolf on Feb 12, 2008 16:24:29 GMT -4
I was certainly surprised to discover that history failed to record Jesus. Others may feel the same. Here I have to ask why? I'm not at all surprised, in fact I'd be surprised if there were a lot of historians of the time that wrote about him because there shouldn't have been. If he'd been of noble birth and started his ministry in Rome then I'd agree, there should be a lot of evidence, but he didn't. He was a peasent and had a ministry that for most of the three year period never left the area about the Sea of Galilee, why should any comtemporay historians haven't known about him? The first most of them would have heard would have been when the spread of Christianity started to blossom in the main cultural ccentres, Athens, Antioch, Alexandra, Rome, Ephesus and so on. This is exactly what we see reflected in the histories, the early historians talking about the Christians appearing, because that is what they saw, they never saw Jesus himself because they simply weren't there. Put it in perspective with today. Would you hear anything about a guy in the middle of Botswana who was gathering 500-1,000 people to meetings and preaching to them? I doubt it and we have have way more in the form of media than existed 2,000 years ago. If you are unlikely to hear about it today, why are you so surprised that only a few people who were involved in the events actually kept records back then?
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Post by wdmundt on Feb 12, 2008 16:37:43 GMT -4
Considering how strongly I was criticized by others on this forum for making the claim in the first place and considering how strong the resistance was to the idea that there was no evidence, I don't think it is a stretch to say that many people seem to think there is historical evidence of the existence of Jesus. And if people think there is evidence, then it follows that they will be surprised to find out that there is not.
It's no so hard to understand, after all.
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Post by PhantomWolf on Feb 12, 2008 16:43:56 GMT -4
So you mean that you were surprised because you discovered your assumptions were wrong, not that you are surprised that it didn't happen and think that it's strange?
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Jason
Pluto
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Posts: 5,579
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Post by Jason on Feb 12, 2008 16:45:46 GMT -4
Since biographical information about Jesus does not surface until much later, that claim is not supportable. We don't know what his audience knew about the person Jesus. True, we don't really know what they knew. What we do know is that Paul thought it unnecessary to provide biographical information to his audiences. Instead he writes to his audience about Jesus being the Son of God, dying for them, and being crucified as if he expects them to already know what he's talking about.
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Jason
Pluto
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Posts: 5,579
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Post by Jason on Feb 12, 2008 16:48:08 GMT -4
Considering how strongly I was criticized by others on this forum for making the claim in the first place and considering how strong the resistance was to the idea that there was no evidence, I don't think it is a stretch to say that many people seem to think there is historical evidence of the existence of Jesus. And if people think there is evidence, then it follows that they will be surprised to find out that there is not. My argument with you was not that there is a great deal of secular evidence that you are ignoring (though you are incorrectly rejecting such secular evidence as there is) so much as that you find this lack of secular evidence to be so significant.
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Post by PhantomWolf on Feb 12, 2008 17:05:02 GMT -4
True, we don't really know what they knew. What we do know is that Paul thought it unnecessary to provide biographical information to his audiences. Instead he writes to his audience about Jesus being the Son of God, dying for them, and being crucified as if he expects them to already know what he's talking about. You need to remember that other than to the believers in Rome, all the people that Paul wrote to he had already been to and seen and spoken to personally. So the letters were to build on the foundations that he'd already laid during his time with them. As such he would expect them to know what he was talking about. It is also possible that there were original "gospels" floating about the early Christian community that could became source material for both Mark and Luke later on. The Author who identifies himself as Luke and wrote the Gospel of Luke and Acts of the Aposotles and says he was a companion of Paul, likely took much of his material from Paul's preaching, among other sources (Luke was both a doctor and historian), just as Mark appears to have used Peter as a source.
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