Originally Posted by DW2:
“I think we're going around in circles and it's turning into you just repeating your arguments whilst I remind you of my responses to them. Therefore, this will be my last reply to you.”
i told you that a week ago..... im repeating my charges because you have not directly addressed them. its all side stepping and fudge.
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“In your previous posts you've confidently claimed that Jesus went unnoticed and that nobody at the time wrote about him. If you're now acknowledging that this confidence of yours is misplaced, as we simply don't know either way, then that's great - we are in agreement.”
no im not... twisting to discredit the charge... the fact is that jesus DID
apparently (just to make it grammatically correct) go unniticed as there are NO contemporary accounts of him, despite there being other such accounts.
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“What this does mean is that you can no more legitimately claim that there were no contemporary sources for Jesus than I can go around claiming that there are. All we can say is that this silence you talk of is found throughout ancient history and proves little either way.”
nonsense..... there are no known contemporary accounts of him that survive, therefore there either was non, because he didnt actually exist, or the testimonies from thousands who witnessed him have been mysteriously lost.
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“There is no such thing in history as an unbiased source - everybody has a motivation for writing something and everybody is tainted by their own prejudices.”
utter nonsense. how many historians do you know?... i know loads of amateur ones, and archeologists... they all examine the evidences they are presented with from an unbiased source. how else would they ever discover the truth?
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“Historians take into account the Christian bias in early Christian writings, just as they take into account the Jewish bias in Josephus or the imperial bias in Tacitus, but they don't just throw the sources out.”
this is why we go around in circles....this point has been addressed several times already.
not 1 credible historian , scholar, scientist, builds a case on biased evidence.
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“So how does this work? Take the Christmas story for example. We would expect the gospels writers to say Jesus was born in Bethlehem because there was an expectation at the time that this is where the Messiah would be born. Therefore, a historian might question this part of the story. But if you’re making it all up, why not just say Jesus came from Bethlehem? Why invent the rest of it? It’s as if the gospel writers had the incontrovertible fact that Jesus came from Nazareth (as he was commonly referred to as 'Jesus of Nazareth' rather than 'Jesus of Bethlehem') and therefore had to explain away this problem. The historian, therefore, might take into account the sources bias and cast doubt on the Bethlehem birth but accept the bit about Jesus coming from Nazareth as being historical as the Nazareth part is not something you'd expect the church to makeup. This is just one example of how a historian could accept one part of the New Testament and not another.”
agreed ..... but theres no hard evidence that jesus existed, let alone came from nazareth.
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“In other words, historians don't have a pile of infallible, unbiased and completely reliable sources that they get their information from and another pile they just dismiss.”
true.... but if they think there was a guy called jesus, do they think he was a normal preacher or the miracle worker.... see, you have dodged this question time and time again! and it is crucial to the validity of your religion.
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“The evidence has been presented to you - this is the same standard of evidence that historians have for many other people or events that took place in the past.”
no you havnt, youve offered opinion and excuses, not evidence, but unverifiable opinion.
and yet again you belittle jesus to that of a warrior, whos existence really doesnt matter. if DOES matter whether jesus existed or not.
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“It's as verifiable as any other ancient text. Either you have a problem with the whole of ancient history or you're own biases are causing you to treat early church history differently to other events from the period.”
belittling your religion again. see my last reply.
im not biased..... im simply adding up unbiased known facts.
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“So is all history - all historians can do is read the opinions of those who were around at the time and make a judgement.”
so which version of jesus do these historians who believe he existed do they believe existed? the embelished preacher man, or the magician son of god?...
keep dodging, keep ducking, keep ignoring... but THIS is the salient point... not so much whether jesus existed or not, but did the magical son of god exist. anything less negates the whole religion.
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“ nowhere has he said that the church has early texts that don't refer to Jesus - I think you must have imagined that. Seeing as you can't even spell his name correctly I can only conclude that you have got the wrong end of the stick here.”
that is simply not true....i posted the quote from him... he stated that the church has early 1st century accounts and non of them mention jesus.
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“There were lots of people alive in the first century that had messages they wanted to get across - we don't have lots of contemporary sources for any of them.”
and thats exactly what youd expect from very ordinary people... but yet again you are belittling jesus, who was supposed to be the messiah, the saviour, the preacher and miracle worker witnessed by thousands. you think that after all that, its reasonable to suggest all accounts were lost?... like ive already said, if thats the case then jesus failed to get the most important message of all time across to man
or he never existed.
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“Historians and archeologist could come up with a long list of texts and artefacts they'd love to find however rather than living in such a dreamworld they work with what they've got.”
..... and what theyve got is nothing. no unbiased accounts, no contemporary accounts, of this magician, this messiah, the bloke whos job it was to spread the message of salvation.
believers can bluster and spit, it very uncomfortable reading because you cannot face this fact at all.. clutching at straws, using biased accounts created years later, when all the time the fact is that he might never have existed.