Did Jesus exist, Part II

I believe Robin's point was that any historian worth his salt checks his facts, and if there is any reasonable doubt he doesn't make a statement without qualifying it.

Yeah, Brian, but we were talking about Tacitus, not Josephus.

The sequence was:Your Message 15 answeredmy #14 which answeredmark24's #8 which quotedRobin's #5 about Tacitus, which was his answer tomark24's #3 about Tacitus which was his response to#1.This message has been edited by Faith, 01-10-2006 03:09 PM

Thank you. You are forgiven.

The Gospels ARE historical evidence. They were written within decades of the events they report. They were regarded as history by the early church.

These were not "little noted" events among Jesus' followers, who had grown in number quite a bit over those thirty years under the preaching of the apostles. It all began with the 120 closest followers gathered together in the upper room on the Day of Pentecost [Acts 2], fifty days after Jesus' resurrection, when the Holy Spirit fell upon them. The Spirit emboldened Peter to preach to the Jews who had gathered in Jerusalem for that holiday and on that one occasion three thousand believed. There seems to be some idea that the gospels were written in a sort of vacuum, by a single writer here and there, sometimes with the implication that there might have been a conspiracy of a few of them together, and that only the written documents had any influence in establishing the foundations of Christian belief. As if they could get away with it, as if there weren't hundreds of others to correct any errors they might make.If the New Testament accounts are to be trusted at all there were hundreds and then thousands of believers, and the church had grown to hundreds of thousands by the time Paul was executed in Rome, mostly Jews who had grown up hearing the Old Testament read every Saturday for their entire lives and took the practice of their religion very seriously. The fulfillment of OT prophecy had to be a big part of their belief that Jesus was indeed the promised Messiah -- and this figures strongly in the gospel of Matthew for this reason. The claims of Jesus had to be preached over and over and over again, to new audiences, and discussed over and over and over again by all the believers. The apostles would have been preaching all the time on the events of Jesus' life, probably in a lot more detail than came down to us in the written accounts, and in fact many other believers who had witnessed the events of Jesus' life would have been telling the events, to educate the new believers who hadn't known Him. In other words the rehearsing of the stories among the believers would have been a daily thing for those decades. It wasn't like some political event in our day, very big and engrossing at the time, but completely lost to memory for most of us after a very few years. The gospel was something to be lived, and Jesus Christ was preached as a living risen Savior who guided their lives every day as He continues to do. {abe: Opportunities for gross mistakes just don't occur in an environment where you have dozens of other witnesses to correct you and soon hundreds of people who have heard the gospels preached to compare the stories and correct you as well).So it appears that the New Testament documents were written when there was a need for them to be written. When the church got so big that they couldn't do it all by word of mouth, and the churches were spread out over the whole Greek and Roman world of the time, then there was a need for written material. Paul wrote his letters to shepherd the various churches he had founded, to whom he had originally preached, week in and week out for years in some cases, and the gospels were written by those who had intimate knowledge of the events of Jesus' ministry, to educate the growing churches in the life of Jesus.If you think dating really matters, I will do some research on it when I get the time.This message has been edited by Faith, 01-10-2006 04:52 PMThis message has been edited by Faith, 01-10-2006 05:02 PMThis message has been edited by Faith, 01-10-2006 05:04 PM

How about if they were written after 1900 by his wife or his closest friends or a member of his Cabinet?

Well but of course I absolutely deny that. Matthew, Mark and John knew him personally. And so did the writers of many of the Epistles, such as Peter, James and Jude.

The sarcasm in Message 70is rude, impertinent and off topic.Thank you for your attention.

I couldn't choose. I believe them all to be God's word. Prejudice of this sort is a rather common reason why people reject the Bible. Too bad, as such reports ARE evidence for the supernatural, so if you eliminate them up front you're just confirming yourself in the bias.I guess I'm not cut out for this kind of debate. To me nothing in the Bible is debatable, none of the arguments are anything but conjectural and based on prejudice and I guess I should just stay away from them.

"Everyone" except a few hundred thousand who happened to believe them true. Matthew, Mark, Luke, John and Peter recorded them. Four of these were immediate disciples of Jesus' and Luke was a follower though not an imediate disciple. The records of the governance of Judea may not have survived. Paul was writing for a different purpose. Certainly the stories of Jesus' life were told and told and told. And there is no scarcity of teaching on Jesus' ministry in Paul anyway. He teaches the Lord's Supper and quotes Jesus. And Paul along with the other disciples actually experienced and practiced the powers of healing and prophecy and the like as Jesus did.Matthew, Mark, John, Peter, James and Jude were there, as were many others they wrote about, who were still alive at the time of the writing and in a position to contradict it if necessary.They CLAIM to be eyewitnesses Percy. Are they such total liars that you can't trust anything they say? Then the whole thing is just plain evil. Is it your aim to prove it evil? My Bible dates it shortly after the gospel of Luke which they date at 58AD. Not for me they don't. The NT reads quite believably to my mind. I guess that's what your scholars say. Mine don't agree. The Fall of Jerusalem isn't even mentioned in the New Testament, which would be surprising if it was written after that event. More than comfortable. Some of them have a positive prejudice against the supernatural which would inspire them to seek a dating scheme that makes it least likely if they could find one. Late dating casts doubt on the integrity of the writings, so that would be in keeping with such a prejudice. Prejudice against the idea of fulfilled prophecy was actually confessed to as the motive for the late dating of the book of Daniel by one liberal scholar. Perhaps I can find a reference for that if you don't believe it. This isn't about the New Testament, but it does demonstrate the mentality some bring to Bible interpretation. Much more work than interest. Perhaps someone else will be interested. I trust the scholarship of the church. I consider all this questioning of these things to be essentially calling the writers liars and the believers idiots.This message has been edited by Faith, 01-10-2006 11:09 PM

Oh that old stuff about Jesus' supposed "lost years" has been kicked around for decades. There is no reason to believe Jesus spent any time outside the area the gospels mention. There is nothing of an eastern flavor in his teachings for one thing. He is a Jew through and through. Everything in his life has meaning in relation to the Old Testament.

Nonsense. As a human being he had to grow and learn just as we all do, but what he learned was the Old Testament. There isn't a shred of eastern thinking in Christianity. There were early cults that tried to meld it with the mystery religions or gnosticism but they were recognized as cults. Much of the early church was engaged in identifying the errors of these cults. Their teachings have nothing in common with the Old Testament pattern Jesus fulfilled.Much of Jesus' teaching is not original in the sense that it is consistent with the Old Testament religion, and He also teaches universal wisdoms found in other religions, such as the Golden Rule. But His uniqueness stands out utterly beyond those common things. He didn't merely teach Old Testament religion, he revealed its true meaning and he himself is its fulfillment.

Jesus was BOTH, both man and God. It is not easy to understand how this worked out in his earthly ministry but I haven't studied it closely enough myself. Certainly he was completely a man and everything that applies to human growth and learning applied to him, no matter how we are supposed to think of him as God through those years as well. "Although he was in the form of God he did not regard it as something to hold onto, but humbled himself and became a man..."

Not sure whether this deserves a mention or not, but this level of rude sarcastic one-liner rejoinder in Message 85 does seem to me to be at least borderline unacceptable. Since it makes for ill will it seems to me to be useful to nip such things in the bud.This message has been edited by Faith, 01-11-2006 09:38 AM