I can't believe it's not Vlad #fundie

I can't believe it's not Vlad #fundie religionethics.co.uk

Use of the word credible is unfortunate here Ippy because it's root Credo means belief.
Look. When ever Jesus is brought up Jesus is either a myth or an agglomeration of characters or a magician.
The gospels are always a work of fiction, or they were written after a supposed safe period of time to be taken seriously.....a period of time we can add not applied to any other histories. There is according to unbelievers no original idea or content, it does not add anything new which isn't already in religion, it is also berated for not being authentically jewish even though the Judaism in mind is post Christian rabbinic Judaism.
As well as that if we haven't covered most non believers Miracles never happen and when that is announced people who will happily bleat about the problem of induction remain mysteriously silent out of partiality for their atheist friends and if you can get one who hasn't bottled at the question of what would you do if you saw a resurrection they would probably say science will come up with a natural explanation.

Now yes all these amount cumulatively to a heavy duty bit of God Evading but they are you will note positive assertions but are never demonstrated beyond the assertion state and now there is a bit of a craze among he atheist colleagues to deny adherence to whichever point one wishes to argue!!!!!!

And then of course any philosophical approach is sneered at.

20 comments

old comment by Canadiest

"a period of time we can add not applied to any other histories."

Actually the reliability of the Bible is entirely called into question by the wealth of contemporary writings that are supportive of each other but not the Bible. It is those actually applied conditions that leave your books hopelessly mired in the plagiarized myth arena. The accusation that historians aren't being honest here is fundie damage control projection.

It happens that the oldest books of the Torah are only 2700 years old and are plagiarized from Babylonian and Sumerian works and ideas present for over thousands of years in other cultures. The newer shits even more trackable to area myths.

old comment by Nomen Nescio

that "safe period of time" can be remarkably short, before all possibility of proving the historical existence of a figure such as Jesus of Nazareth disappears.

witness John Frum. or rather don't, that being the whole problem... the Pacific Islands cargo cults' central figure, if he actually lived and worked as a real human being, would have pretty much have to have been active during the 1940's, 1930's at the earliest. the islands weren't all that isolated by the 1960's or so anymore; anthropologists would have been able to have face to face meetings with people who had actually met and spoken with the man.

yet we have no solid evidence either for or against his existence as a living, breathing human being, and accounts of him have already diverged enough to contradict one another, making him seem more and more like an invented, mythical character. perhaps he was. or perhaps he was a real person, and nobody thought to collect solid evidence of this before he was gone and tales started to diverge too much. by now we can merely say that we will never know for certain, and it's been less than eight decades; not even a human lifetime. how long after the supposed crucifixion were the supposed gospels supposedly recorded, again? by writers how far removed from the event, you say? the "safe period" is vanishingly small.

Jesus of Nazareth, if he actually lived, would certainly not have recognized the stories told about him even a century after his death, never mind the ones we call "scripture" today. especially given that so much of that "scripture" so very closely resembles the holy writ of religions long predating his supposed lifetime... suspiciously closely, even. given all this, not only can we never prove that there was or was not a historical Jesus, but it cannot possibly matter, since the stories told of the religious character are not told faithfully about any actual human being; the character has long ago entered the realm of mythology.

("John Frum", as a religious figure, was recorded as early as 1941, saith wikipedia --- but cargo cults as a religious movement date back to the late 1800's. so even John Frum was likely built on earlier examples, older myths. noone who, today, tries to convince me Jesus of Nazareth lived exactly as depicted in the NT gets any respect from me.)

old comment by Anon-e-moose

@Hasan Prishtina

http://www.exitmundi.nl/bible/web-content/jos_jericho.html

'The biblical invasion of Canaan is situated in the 13th century BC. And back then, Jericho didn’t have walls. In fact, Jericho had very little in those days; it didn't even have inhabitants. When the Israelites arrived, Jericho had been abandoned for at least 300 years.

Many Christian websites proudly point out that archaeologists indeed have dug up the remains of Jericho’s crumbled walls. And that’s true.

But what they don’t tell you, is that Jericho had many walls over time, built on top another. The last one caved in around 2,100 BC. That’s more than 800 years before the Israelites arrived! 800 Years, that's the time difference between us and the crusaders.'

They certainly didn't have sonic weapons in those days. Least of all anything that could cause structural disruption.

So it was Bronze Age goatfuckers blowing things out of all proportion!

Those stadiums during the World Cup in South Africa are still standing, eh fundies...?! [/Vuvuzelas] XP X3

old comment by Jamaican Castle

Maybe not sonic weapons, but it's not like it's unknown for freak earthquakes to topple masonry walls*. It wouldn't take much mythologizing for the invading general to basically say "I meant to do that" and take advantage.

* Unrelated story: When Attila the Hun first tried to sack Constantinople, he was repelled with the help of the city's two strong, well-built walls. While traveling east, he heard that an earthquake had leveled both walls and turned around. But when he arrived back at Constantinople they had repaired both walls and raised a third, just in case. (Most likely building the new one first in the event that repairs weren't done in time; it'd be easier to build on open ground than on rubble.)

old comment by Psycho Tits

"The Bible" is actually a collection of books - some were retellings of stories that started as oral tradition.

I expect the NT stories about how Israelites and Romans co-existed (and especially about their antagonism) were likely based in fact.

Other parts of the Bible preserve ancient poetry it would have been a shame to lose to time.

It's not the inerrant text many Christians think, but it does have value and can be an effective teaching tool - look at this story about how Cain killed his brother angry take the words of the god-character to heart. The lesson: "If you don't do something well the first time, learn from that mistake instead of blaming the person who suceeded ahead of you."

There are plenty of interesting moral questions in the Bible. A child, who learns different parts of the book according to his growing knowledge and understanding of the material (that he might appreciate the Bible for what it can teach even while questioning magical claims.

old comment by Hasan Prishtina

@ Anon-e-moose

There are a number of problems with your source. Firstly, one of the three sources it gives doesn't work, one comes from a controversial, even tendentious, author, and the other comes from a Christian poetry website which contains a few errors and is largely not about Jericho itself. Secondly, while mentioning the walls Kathleen Kenyon found were older, the article omits the ones she found from c.1550 BCE, claiming instead that Jericho was an "insignificant village - without walls." There were also walls built on many occasions in later periods; anyone with the slightest clue about the archeology of ancient cities would understand that. As Jamaican Castle points out, there are good reasons why walls fall down and are rebuilt; take a look at an archeological map of Troy, and you might understand that sonic weapons are not required. Thirdly, the article gives a pretty precise dating of the siege of Jericho. Just one century; and that relies on little more than speculation of exactly the kind that fundies do. In short, it's a date that would be very difficult to sustain unless you were the kind of person that thought Chick tracts were documentary.

As with other biblical stories, sometimes the enthusiasm to point out holes in the Bible, as with the question of there being two or seven of certain species on board the Ark, leads people to jump to conclusions that aren't there. It's disappointing to find that, on occasion, atheist websites can be as guilty of sleight of hand as Christian fundamentalist ones. That's one of the problems of not engaging with modern biblical scholarship; just debunking traditional beliefs about the Bible isn't enough and, as with the Ark problem, even asking someone with an understanding of traditional Jewish commentary would have saved more than one "debunking" website where I have seen this from making such an error. What's important is what's accurate, not whether it supports anyone's views, religious or not.