Wordswordsman writes:
Your simple denials of fact are pitiful and worth nothing. Respected archeologists, historians alike have and are verifying not only Jesus but much of the Bible, a fact denied by few scholars.
More like a fact unknown to anyone except fundamentalists. This sounds a lot like that other Creationism claim, "Did you know that more and more scientists are rejecting evolution and accepting Creationism as the better model?"
Can you prove Charles Darwin lived? PROOF. Not some website cut and paste. Do you have a witness that knew him, saw him, that can prove his claim?
There is far more evidence of Charles Darwin than there is of Jesus. Of course, that isn't really a fair comparison since Darwin lived very recently. He's buried in Westminster Abbey, I suppose you could dig up his bones if you could get the picks and shovels past the guards.
A more fair comparison would be with John the Baptist, who is featured far, far, far more prominently in contemporary accounts than is Jesus. In other words, Jesus gets barely any mention at all, and questionable and/or second-hand mention at that, while John the Baptist is written about all over the place.
John says:
There are a very few references to a man named Jesus. Most of those references are questionable and none of them are detailed enough to justify the claim that they are "evidencing the same Jesus the Bible describes"
You reply:
There are many.
There are few. Josephus (2), Tacitus (1), Suetonius (1), Thallus (1). They are so few we could quote them all in full in a short post. See this link that John posted on another thread:
Scott Oser Hojfaq » Internet Infidels
There are professionals in those fields who are in fact qualified to make that judgment. Few of them are so ignorant as to deny the evidences.
And few are so incompetent as to claim evidence that doesn't exist.
I doubt any Jew of the day was willing to contradict what the masses saw, touched, believed. Skeptics had to wait until all the original witnesses were dead.
I don't know about that, but that's certainly what the gospel writers did.
I think God used him to get in a word. Can you prove He didn't?
The traditional scholarly approach is to accept those ideas that have supporting evidence. Lack of countervailing evidence cannot be construed as supportive for the simple reason that most ridiculous notions lack countervailing evidence. Find evidence that there aren't ethereal invisible elephants living in your refrigerator. I could claim that Jesus had a black mole on his left shoulder blade - prove that he didn't.
The Bible, however, enjoys the support of many scholarly Jewish, Christian, other religious, and entirely secular archeologists and other scientists digging up and studying actual verifying relics in Bible lands that testify to the veracity of the Bible.
I'm not sure you understand what is being claimed about the Bible. We're not saying it's a work of complete fiction. We're only saying that it contains some fact, some fiction, and some that we can't verify either way at this time. I don't know John's background, but he doesn't sound ignorant of Biblical issues. I read about Biblical archaeology all the time, and subscribe to Biblical Archaeological Review, so I'm constantly learning about all the recent discoveries. That the original Jericho has been identified and excavated lends no support whatsoever to the claim that, for example, Jesus was crucified, died, and was risen on the 3rd day.
MOST scholars, even the most secular of them, agree on the harmony of the books of the Bible, though not necessarily the meaning of the contents.
Most scholars are aware of the differences. The three synoptics are generally congruent but contain many substantial differences. Just check any synopsis, which places the three texts side-by-side in columns. Then there's John, which is totally unlike the other three and has a different chronology, for instance, of the last supper.
Many just won't believe those words, many do. Your conclusion is lonely, baseless, pure opinion. Almost any search on the subject will turn up statements that verify what most scholars believe about that. What are you so afraid of? You put forth an agorophobic air about it.
Unless you only visit Christian bookstores, you can find plenty of books in any large bookstore that discuss the incongruencies of the Bible specifically and Christianity in general. Taking a look at my bookshelf I see that I've got around 30 titles myself. Oh, and 7 Bibles, but unfortunately I don't think any inerrant ones.
--Percy