Reddit mentions: The best new testament bible study books

The question of why Jesus took on our human nature, and having thus taken upon himself mortality, himself perished, can be answered far more convincingly with reference to a shocking and spectacular passage in 2 Peter:

>His divine power has granted to us all things that pertain to life and godliness, through the knowledge of him who called us to his own glory and excellence, by which he has granted to us his precious and very great promises, that through these you may escape from the corruption that is in the world because of passion, and become partakers of the divine nature.

(emphasis obviously mine)

The relevant questions are: if God became human, what does that mean about being human? If God died, what does that mean about death? Otherwise stated: Did God's becoming incarnate and dying accomplish something that could not have been accomplished through any other means?

The answer is clearly yes, and is best understood against the context of an "escape from the corruption that is in the world" that involves humans becoming "partakers of the divine nature." Christianity proposes that God loves the world and prescribes a role for human beings within it, but that we are prevented from accomplishing our role because of the effects of sin. Human beings are meant to reflect the eternal, everlasting, incorrupt image of the God-who-is-love into the world—this is God's whole plan for creation—but we fail in this task by separating ourselves from God with acts that run counter to love. The inevitable consequence of anti-loving actions (that is, of sins) is death because sins divorce us from the loving God, who is life itself.

God, however, remains faithful to his creation and is committed to having humans accomplish their role of reflecting his image within it, despite the fact that creation is, because of sin, beset with the corruption of death. To rescue his plan for the world, God enters the world himself. Jesus' becoming incarnate and dying reverses the corruption of the world and gets God's plan for creation back on track for the following reasons:

Jesus himself accomplishes the task appointed to human beings when they were incapable of doing it themselves. Human beings are charged with reflecting God's image into the world but cannot because of sin and its effect of death. God's solution to this dilemma is to reflect his own image into the world by becoming human himself, and though God thereby fulfills humanity's prescribed task on his own, it is God's becoming human that restores the rest of humanity's ability to do our job. Two things ought here to be considered.

The first thing to be addressed is the corruption in the created order that is manifested in death. Sin leads to death, but God considers death to be a gross deviation from how things ought to be. He desires life, but is not capable of preventing people from sinning (and therefore from dying), because he has pledged to respect free will so that human beings might freely love and so reflect the divine image of love. God's solution is to therefore enter death himself and reverse it. If God, who is life itself, dies, then death can no longer be what it once was—life itself enters into death, and so if one latches onto God through faith and follows him into death, death opens up into new life. To repeat: Life itself enters into death, and thus if you cling to life, if you follow God's commandments and are united with him in love, even in death you remain alive and "escape from the corruption that is in the world." You enter heaven first, but at the end of days will be restored to bodily life so that you can accomplish forever the task of reflecting God's image into what will be a renewed creation. In this way the corruption in the created order is reversed.

The second thing to consider is an alteration in our nature effected through God's becoming incarnate. If God becomes human, then there is a permanent link between humanity and divinity such that humanity can be said to be divine. We appropriate divinity into ourselves by becoming like the God-man, Jesus. What characterizes Jesus is faithfulness born of love: God, faithful to his beloved creation and his beloved Israel, comes to earth in the person of Jesus the Messiah to accomplish his plan for creation and to fulfill the promises he made to Israel's patriarchs. If therefore we are united with Jesus by imitating his faithfulness-in-love, we become "partakers of the divine nature" ourselves and accomplish the task that was originally assigned to us.

What matters is not paying a debt or achieving a legalistic conception of justice. No, as Paul says, what matters is new creation (cf. Galatians 6:15). The original creation is subject to decay and death because of sin. Jesus, by becoming human and dying, reverses the corruption and institutes a new creation in a way that is faithful to God's original plan for his beloved creation and to the promises made to Israel, his beloved servant. I am sure you have heard the verse from John's gospel, "God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life." This is what it means: God loves the world and did not give up on the world, nor on the role of humans within it; he sends Jesus, his only begotten son, directly into the corrupted creation precisely to restore it and manifest God's sovereign presence within it, fulfilling the role appointed to humanity and reversing the corruption of death; and he gives us the chance to participate in this new, everlasting creation by uniting ourselves to Jesus through an imitation of his loving faithfulness.

For purposes of citation, the bulk of this comment's theological argument is taken from N. T. Wright's Paul and the Faithfulness of God, a monumental achievement in biblical scholarship.

It's interesting to me because when I talk to people and how they come to their faith, it's all kinds of different stuff that actually ends up being the "straw that breaks the camels back." Why don't I tell you what convinces me and then give you some recommendations in various directions.

Now, I was raised a Christian. That's important because I'm not sure that I would be a Christian now if I wasn't raised as one. I make that admission not because I think it's a weakness to my case, but because I want you to understand that I understand the difficulty in believing something like this seemingly ridiculous story.

Many of my friends, very few of whom are Christians, actually call me the "most open-minded person" they know or at least one of the most. One of my best friends (an agnostic Jewish girl) says that I would make a terrific atheist if it weren't for that whole "believing in God thing."

Though I have always identified as a Christian, I did go through a time when I decided to weigh the evidence.

I'll consider any evidence and look for its flaws. I like science, but I don't like the double standard that exists between science and faith. In the opinion of many atheists, if ANYTHING appears to be incompatible with their perception of faith, it's automatically proved incorrect and any effort of a person of faith to answer why it may not be incompatible is met with deaf ears. Conversely, if ANYTHING appears to be incompatible with science, that's "fascinating!" or "interesting!" or "a great opportunity to arrive at a greater truth."

With that being said, I think there are quite a few things that we (as a society) take for granted that may or may not be true. For example, we all believe that the earth revolves around the sun and not the other way around. But the reason we arrived at that conclusion was not because it was the only possible answer, but because it was the simplest answer. (By the way, I believe that the earth revolves around the sun, this is just an example). Another example is gravity. It behaves so steadily that we even label it with a gravitational constant. But we know it does funky things at the quantum level and at the cosmological level (like near the event horizon of a black hole). We have no idea why.

This thinking brought me to the realization that I might not understand nearly as much as I thought I did. It felt lacking and EVERYTHING felt like faith at that time. Because of that, I decided that I would look for internal consistencies or inconsistencies in the Bible. The one that really stood out to me was Noah's flood. I had always heard that there was varying evidence for or against a global flood, but the vast majority of the arguments didn't seem to be asking the right questions. IF there WAS a global flood, it would certainly be an unprecedented event-- something that we had never observed in our time... so how would we know what to look for? The Bible itself records that water came up out of the earth-- that's not indicative of most floods.

But even that wasn't the most interesting part of that story to me. The Bible is actually a very valuable historical resource. Archaeologists rely on many of its dates and locations to find out more about sites in the middle east. That's why the flood account is so fascinating to me. No one believes that the flood account was written down for HUNDREDS of years after it is supposed to have happened. Yet, according to that account people before the flood were living for hundreds of years (up to 969). Then, for seemingly no reason, the author of the account picks the flood as the dividing point where lives are considerably shortened. I have yet to hear a good explanation for why someone over 1000 years later, yet still over 3000 years ago, would randomly decide to put that kind of change in there. Because of that, I thought, "Hm, maybe the earth drastically changed at that point." I can't prove that, just so you know. It's just an interesting thought that I had.

Now, beyond all that, I look at the historical record of the gospels and the few hundred years of church tradition immediately after that. The thing that always stands out to me there is that, regardless of the evidence of Jesus' resurrection, we do have pretty reliable reasons to believe that prominent apostles chose to die rather than go back on their claims that Christ raised from the dead. I just couldn't wrap my head around why 12 prominent guys, plus Paul, would choose to die for something they would have known to be a lie. I could understand people today who died for blind faith, but this isn't blind faith. It's not cultish (doesn't fit the psychology). It doesn't appear to be hallucinatory (doesn't fit the current medical understanding). The only thing that I could think is that it was either an incredibly elaborate lie that hundreds of people were willing to die for, or it was the truth.

When you take that into consideration with the actual gospel accounts of the resurrection, things get really interesting. I think a lot of people read those accounts (or, trust people who have read them) without considering that they may have actually happened exactly as recorded. They're certainly not written as ridiculous accounts of mad men. They don't protect the reputations of those surrounding the events. If the gospels claimed Jesus had made a roast beef sandwich rather than resurrecting, I'd bet that most people would arrive at the conclusion that they actually happened.

That's just a few reasons in addition to the ideas that resurrection was not exactly smiled upon in that culture, that the church had to survive persecution from the very beginning that the odds of Christianity actually taking hold was so unlikely it might as well have been impossible, etc. etc. As I said, none of these thoughts are exactly original.

Now as to why you should believe, I don't know what it would take to convince you. If you're wondering why I believe in Christianity over a multitude of religions, it's actually extremely original (yes, even in light of the Horus myth). No other surviving system says, "Humanity is despicable, wicked, and evil. There is literally nothing you can do to save yourselves." Yet Christianity is viewed primarily as a religion of hope and redemption. And it has convinced millions of people.

As for your comment about "superstitious goat herders" the book I like best to explain that these guys and their accounts are actually a lot more reliable than they seem is Richard Bauckham's Jesus and the Eyewitnesses. It's not perfect, but it's very very thought provoking and fairly readable.

As I alluded to a number of times, I think most people tend to just treat the stories in the Bible as "impossible" without actually reading them and considering them. To a point, I don't blame them. It does seem unbelievable. But some really rational and reasonable people have looked at the evidence and come to the conclusion that it might not be as totally crazy as they once thought. Will it convince you? I don't know, I pray that it would, but ultimately that's up to you. If there's ever any question you have, I encourage you to come to me with it. I do this kind of thing a lot, speaking of which, here's another conversation I had with some other people on this subreddit. That conversation even caused /u/superwinner, a pretty frequent regular on this part of the site (this very thread, no less), to say, "Thats it, I'm friending the shit out of you." That's pretty much my crowning achievement on this subreddit.

I have much compassion for other members of this human race regardless of religious stance, and the same goes for you. I'm quite pleased that you seem willing to at least engage me on this issue and I thank you for doing it so honestly and respectfully. I hope that you find my response at least considerate and worth YOUR consideration. One final thought though-- it's not going to be ME or anything I say that convinces you one way or another. It'll be your own decision, perhaps in tandem with God, perhaps not (depending on what you choose). Either way, feel free to always consider me as a resource, even if you don't end up believing and you just want to understand why a Christian might believe something-- like why they choose one God over all the others. Good question, OP.

You're throwing a bunch of stuff out there that I don't have the time to respond to at the moment. I'm about to go the gym then I'm going on a weekend trip. I'll just respond to your points quickly.

1. It isn’t a God of the gaps argument. A God of the gaps argument is one that makes a gratuitous inference to God. Again, think the ancient pagans who used the gods to explain various natural phenomena they didn’t understand.
   
   This is completely different from the reasoning of the ancient Greeks (i.e. Aristotle), who using reason and observing reality, came to the conclusion of a prime mover; or Aquinas, who came to believe in the existence of pure actuality. Arguments from necessity, first cause, design, morality, etc -- all start from what we do know and conclude that God is the best explanation for certain features of the universe we observe.
   
   Take the Kalam Cosmological argument for example. The theist does not say “I don‘t know what caused the universe to exist so God did it”. Instead, he reasons about what it means to be a cause of the universe (i.e. spaceless, timeless, immaterial, uncaused and powerful) and arrives at the conclusion that a being like God is the best answer.
   
   
2. I'm telling you that we have very good reason to believe that the gospels are authentic and reliable accounts of Jesus' life. The internal and external evidence strongly point to the gospels being written by Mark, Matthew, Luke and John. For example, all manuscripts we possess correctly attribute these books to them. The writings of the Church fathers, Christian leaders who lived (mostly) in the generation succeeding the Apostles, are also unanimous about their authorship. Furthermore, the gospels also satisfy multiple criteria of historical authenticity such as early multiple attestation, dissimilarity, embarrassment, historical congruence and semitisms. Now, if the gospels are authentic and reliable accounts of Jesus' life then personally, that's game, set and match. The testimonies of Mark, Matthew, Luke and John strongly point towards a Christian conclusion and alternative naturalistic explanations fail to provide a reasonable, compelling and complete explanation of the events. If you want to go further and seriously look into this for yourself, I recommend reading N.T. Wright's magisterial study The Resurrection of the Son of God.
   
   
3. They are still contingent beings within the universe. Again, totally different.
   
   
4. The success of Epicurus' argument rests on God not having good reasons for allowing evil to exist. If God doesn't have good reasons for allowing evil to exist, then this argument disproves God's existence as all-powerful, all-knowing and all-good. However, if God does have good reasons for allowing evil to exist then that argument fails because it would show that God and the existence of evil are not logically contradictory.
   
   Anyway, I believe that God allows evil to exist in order to preserve our free will. Although free will makes good possible -- love, honesty, courage, selflessness and compassion, it also makes evil possible because it can be misused. In the end, in order to make good possible, trade-offs had to be made.
   
   As C.S. Lewis said on the subject:
   
   >“God created things which had free will. That means creatures which can go wrong or right. Some people think they can imagine a creature which was free but had no possibility of going wrong, but I can't. If a thing is free to be good it's also free to be bad. And free will is what has made evil possible. Why, then, did God give them free will? Because free will, though it makes evil possible, is also the only thing that makes possible any love or goodness or joy worth having. A world of automata of creatures that worked like machines- would hardly be worth creating.
   
   
5. Why is there a necessity for God? Gosh, I don't even know where to begin. I'll broaden that question to why I believe in God though and give you a quick answer. Let's just say that given the way things are in our universe and looking back at our history, I cannot not see a God behind it all.
   
   
6. The same holds for the Christian God? Substantiate that claim, explain it in detail.
   
   I'd also want you to explain why/account for Christianity has considerable drawing power -- why so many atheists have and continue to convert to Christianity due to the weight of the evidence, be it philosophical, scientific or historical. Here's a quick laundry list of serious atheist intellectuals who converted to Christianity C.S. Lewis, G.K. Chesteron, Alasdair Macintyre, Thomas Merton, Malcolm Muggeridge, Mortimer Adler, Edward Feser and Leah Libresco.
   
   I also wonder why Anthony Flew, the world's most influential atheist in the 20th century, converted to deism in 2004. Particularly, I wonder why he came to believe in the God of Aristotle, a God that possesses the attributes of immutability, immateriality, omnipotence, omniscience, oneness or indivisibility, perfect goodness and necessary existence. I also wonder why he also ended up developing a great respect for the Christian religion saying:
   
   >I think that the Christian religion is the one religion that most clearly deserves to be honoured and respected whether or not its claim to be a divine revelation is true. There is nothing like the combination of a charismatic figure like Jesus and a first-class intellectual like St. Paul…If you’re wanting Omnipotence to set up a religion, this is the one to beat (There is a God: How the World's Most Notorious Atheist Changed his Mind, 185-186).
   
   and on the Resurrection...
   
   >The evidence for the resurrection is better than for claimed miracles in any other religion. It's outstandingly different in quality and quantity (Flew Interview with Gary Habermas, 2004).
   
   Enlighten me.

>Also, that doesn't explain why the other Gospels include it because there would have been people to illustrate the Resurrection account.

I agree that you've made a salient point, but I think we can resolve this by examining the facts a little bit more closely.

First, we can take a hint by looking at the scholarly datings for the synoptic^1 Gospels: late 50s-late 70s for Mark, early 60s-100 for Matthew, early 60s-110 for Luke (see my original reply above for citations). The vast majority of scholars agree that Mark is earliest. Many agree that Matthew was written after Mark, and then Luke was written after Matthew. If we approximate Mark to AD 65-70, and posit that (for instance) Matthew came about a decade later and Luke about another decade after that, then the reason why Matthew/Luke include the resurrection information becomes clear. That is: the witnesses to the resurrection, who were alive to orally "fill in the blanks" while Mark was being disseminated, were beginning to die off due to passage of time. Therefore, collecting the resurrection testimony and putting it in written form would have felt like an imminent and important task to the authors of Matthew and Luke.

Second, the above hypothesis fits well into what we already know about Matthew and Luke's use of Mark as a source (more than 90% of Mark's Gospel is used in Matthew, and more than 50% of Mark's Gospel is used in Luke).^2 If one of the primary goals of Matthew/Luke's authors was to expand Mark's Gospel to create a fuller written account including the resurrection testimony, then it only makes sense that they'd cite Mark rather extensively in the process of doing so.^3

---

Footnotes and Citations

1. I'm leaving John out of this line of thought purposefully, as I believe there is strong evidence that the author of John was, in fact, the apostle John, who himself was an eyewitness (to Jesus' ministry, as well as to His crucifixion and resurrection). An excellent resource on this topic is Jesus and the Eyewitnesses by Richard J. Bauckham (see especially, chapters 14-17 for a discussion of John as an eyewitness; however, the whole book goes into substantial detail on the general topic of eyewitness evidence for Jesus). Here's a link to the Amazon listing if you want to purchase it.
   
   
2. Encyclopedia Britannica, "Gospel According to Mark"
   
   
3. This doesn't mean that Mark was their only source of genuine information, of course. Luke, for example, begins his Gospel by explicitly referencing multiple lines of attestation: "Inasmuch as many have undertaken to compile a narrative of the things that have been accomplished among us, just as those who from the beginning were eyewitnesses and ministers of the word have delivered them to us, it seemed good to me also, having followed all things closely for some time past, to write an orderly account for you, most excellent Theophilus, that you may have certainty concerning the things you have been taught." (Luke 1:1-4)
   
   ---
   
   Anyway, thanks for the interesting discussion! God bless you my friend, and may the peace of Christ be with you. :)

There’s a lot of good responses here already but I wanted to offer some resources and ideas that have helped me.
First of all, despite what the new atheists say, you don’t need faith to believe in God, which is why there are so many deists in academia. The weight of the scientific evidence alone is enough to conclude that there must be some kind of intelligence behind reality. This includes the fine-tuning argument, a variation of which convinced Antony Flew, a life long atheist academic and strong critic of religion to change his mind about God and embrace deism, and quantum mechanics, which doesn’t prove God’s existence but rather undermines materialist assumptions about the fundamental nature of reality. These findings have convinced others in the scientific community such as lifelong atheist, Richard Conn Henry, a professor of theoretical physics at MIT to embrace deism.
So just based on what’s happening with physics, it’s reasonable to believe that there’s some kind of intelligence behind reality. However, this in no way proves the existence of the God of the Bible.
To support the Christian view of God you can look at the evidence for the reliability of New Testament accounts. This is where faith comes in. You have to decide whether or not you believe that Jesus actually rose from the dead. Obviously, there isn’t a scientific way to definitively prove whether or not an historical event happened. But if you want support for the idea that miracles happen and are relatively common, even today, I’d recommend Craig S Keeners magisterial 2 volume work “Miracles” which details hundreds of modern day miracle accounts.

Other reading:
The Divine Conspiracy by Dallas Willard who was a professor of philosophy for many years at USC, helped me to understand my faith at a deeper level, which has helped immensely. It turns out it’s much easier to believe in something when it actually makes sense to you.

On Guard by William Lane Craig explains many of the logical proofs that other commenters have offered here, which are great but can be really difficult to understand without spending a good amount of time with them.

Atheist Delusions by David Bentley Hart: Hart is a leading Orthodox theologian and philosopher who spends a lot of time talking about the logical incoherence of materialism. All his stuff is great but it’s difficult.

This is just a small sample of what’s out there in terms of apologetics but it’s a start. There’s enough that you could spend your entire life reading compelling arguments for the God’s existence. However, the most effective way to strengthen your faith, in my opinion, is to see how effective the teachings of Jesus are for yourself, to ACTUALLY DO what he says and see how it transforms your life first hand. This is how you make your faith unshakable. Nothing beats personal experience.

>You claim that your god interacts with the physical world in response to prayers and according to his "plan" to influence people and events and yet have never shown any proof of the truth of such a claim nor have you even advanced a theory on how such an external supernatural action would occur outside of physical laws.

There are those who may say they have proof in the experiencing the miracles or answered prayers themselves, but I do not believe I'll be able to provide you with "proof" that God interacts with the world. What would that proof look like anyway?

>On top of that, you claim that wine and bread literally transforms into blood and body of Christ. Not allegorically, not metaphorically, literally. This claim is easily disprovable and hurts your credibility. As well, the claim that blessings, confession, sacraments, adoration or any of these ceremonies has a basis in reality is absurd and has zero evidence to back it up.

Yes, I do believe that at the words of consecration from the priest, the bread and wine literally, substantially, truly become the body and blood of Christ.

The claim is easily disprovable in what way? Do you want to take the bread and wine and examine it? We assert that even under a microscope, the bread and wine will still look like bread and wine.

The doctrine of the Real Presence states that Jesus is present under the appearances of bread and wine. So any testing would still reveal that bread and wine are still present.

Even Jesus' own followers left him after hearing him say that we must eat his flesh and drink his blood, it is not surprising that those not of the faith would scoff at it. It is a scandalous claim indeed.

>Spirital as it pertains to biological as well as life-after-death. You say a lot about what the afterlife is like and what the parameters for attaining it are without any basis of proof aside from stories from ancient illiterate shepherds who had no idea how reality worked. You have zero actual knowledge of souls, sins, resurrection, afterlife, etc. and yet you make many claims about them and call these claims "truth".

This depends on what you mean by "knowledge." Are you suggesting that the only way of attaining knowledge of something is to prove it scientifically?

This proof you are seeking is nothing something we've ever claimed that we've had. These things you mention (sins, resurrection, afterlife, etc.) are things we believe de fide divina et ecclesiastica (of divine and ecclesiastical faith).

As far as the soul, I think there is room for discussion about the evidence of the soul. Intentionality comes to mind.

Also, you said that our basis for proof comes from:
> "stories from ancient illiterate shephards who had no idea how reality worked

This is a genetic fallacy

And to suggest they "had no idea how reality worked" is an absurd claim.

>Again, you say this and yet your church makes many claims about knowing precisely this. Belief is irrelevant, evidence is relevant. You can believe what your books say all you want. Even if everyone on Earth believed something that was untrue, say that the Earth was flat (coughthebiblecough), it doesn't make it true.

Belief is not irrelevant and knowledge of something being true is not solely contingent upon seeing scientific proof of it.

For example, you rightly believe that there are other minds apart from yourself. But it is impossible to prove this scientifically. Does it make the belief unwarranted? No, it is a properly basic belief.

Also, the bible does not attempt to tell us how the material world actually is. It's not a science book. There is nothing in the bible that says the earth is flat. What you would most likely refer to is where, in the Bible, it means the "four corners of the earth."

>I have enough evidence to reject it in favour of the null hypothesis for reality with a little help from Occam. The null hypothesis would be that there is no unseen, spiritual world and the only world that exists is what we can detect with our own senses and scientific measurement. Since we have seen exactly zero evidence that contradicts this or supports a magical spiritual world, the only possible conclusion is that magic doesn't exist.

You're starting point is that the only "proof" you'll accept is scientific. The entities in question are not empirical, thus the scientific method is of no use for determining the reality of the after life.

So if your criteria for determining the reality of the after life is that it must meet the standard of scientific proof, you're making an assumption that that's the only proof that is acceptable.

If there is intentionality, a will, I think it's compelling evidence of something "other wordly" that has power over the material world. When I move my leg, I willed my leg to move. This is a good starting point for understanding the spiritual as it related to the biological.

>They aren't credible to anyone unless you already accept their truth a priori. They're about as credible as Homer's Odyssey or any other story devised by man.

Do not treat the Bible as one single book, first off.

Secondly, if you treat the New Testament, especially the Gospel accounts, as you would any other historical document, you may find the historical reliability of the gospel accounts on the resurrection of Christ are quite compelling. See here for quick reference.

For a more in depth look, see here.


>In sum, you use the word "truth" in reference to your claims, yet there can be no truth without evidence.

Are you talking about scientific evidence? Because if you are, then this is simply not true.

You can arrive at truth without scientific in many things, in fact, you have to. Take for example mathematical truths. You cannot prove these with science because science must presuppose them.

You can arrive at logical truths without scientific evidence. You can also know things are true, such as someone is beautiful, without scientific evidence.

If you like philosophy, check out the Summa Theologiae. For shorter intros to Thomism, check out Ed Feser's Aquinas or his more polemical The Last Superstition.

Essentially, Christianity is based on the historical event of the resurrection, which really convinced me. [These] (https://www.youtube.com/user/InspiringPhilosophy) videos offer a short introduction, but [this] (https://www.amazon.com/Resurrection-Jesus-New-Historiographical-Approach/dp/0830827196) book is a great book just from a historical, non-faith based viewpoint.

If you don't have a hardy, solid Catholic Bible check out the [Didache Bible] (https://www.amazon.com/Didache-Bible-James-Socias/dp/1939231140/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1494110408&sr=1-1&keywords=didache+bible)

If you don't have a kindle, you should get one. There are tons of fantastic book collections under $5, including patristics, Chesterton, Aquinas, and more.

Book recommendations:

Mere Christianity, CS Lewis (Almost-Catholic Anglican)

The Abolition of Man, CS Lewis

Orthodoxy by GK Chesterton (Catholic)

The Orthodox Way, Kallistos Ware (Orthodox; especially useful if you are interested in Eastern/Byzantine Catholicism)

The Lamb's Supper by Scott Hahn

Jesus of Nazareth by Josef Cardinal Ratzinger (AKA Pope Benedict XVI)

On Being Catholic by Thomas Howard

Life of Christ by Fulton Sheen

Confessions of St. Augustine by St. Augustine

Introduction to the Devout Life by St. Francis de Sales

Frankly anything by Scott Hahn, Brant Pitre, Robert Barron, GK Chesterton, or CS Lewis.

Even more [here] (http://brandonvogt.com/best-catholic-books-of-all-time/).

Protestantism is easily discerned to be false (Jesus started One Church in 33 AD, not thousands in 1517), but The Fathers Know Best, Catholicism and Fundamentalism, and The Protestant's Dilemma by Devin Rose ought to do it.


I'm an ex-agnostic too, so DM me if you need any advice.


>As my username suggests, I’m searching for truth and I know that the scientific method is an exceptionally good method of doing that. Especially in the fields of basic science, medicine, and engineering it is extremely effective at sorting out all the bullshit and pseudoscience that is out there.

Fantastic! Catholicism believes that truth is truth and that all truth leads us to Christ. The founder of genetics was a Monk, for example, and the discoverer of the Big Bang theory was a Priest. Check out the pontifical academy of the sciences.




Oh! I almost forgot! You'll love Bishop Barron. [Here] (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1zMf_8hkCdc) is him commenting on David Bently Hart's book, which you read, and [here] (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CtcKV65-9uY) is one of my favorite videos from him.

His Catholicism film is brilliant, as well as his books Vibrant Paradoxes, Exploring Catholic Theology, and Catholicism: Journey to the Heart of Faith

1. God loves you unconditionally and gives more grace than we could ever deserve.
   
2. You aren't alone. I felt this exact way when I found out I was attracted to guys when I first started college.
   
3. Don't give into pressure to choose one side or the other right away or even soon. This is a process of learning and growth and it probably sucks right now, but lean into the tension. Coming out / being 100% confident of your sexuality really soon is something that is, in my opinion, overhyped. Take your time.
   
4. I don't know how much research you have done yet, but I would recuse yourself from your currently held position and take a stance of neutrality. It's important as a Christian to figure out why you believe what you believe. This can be hard to do, but see what the Side A (Affirming) crowd's arguments and experiences are. Take notes. Understand why they genuinely believe that they are not acting against God. See how and why they counter their opponents' arguments. Once you have fully done that (and by fully I mean take your time and do it for a few months), then look up the non-affirming (Side B, Y, and X) positions and do the same. Even if this doesn't help you come to a conclusion right away, this still is a healthy practice of understanding the why behind the what.
   
5. This process of testing the foundations of your beliefs is/should probably extend to issues beyond LGBT inclusion in the church. One main pillar behind any LGBT/church argument is a stance on if Scripture is inerrant or not / what does it mean for something to be "inspired by God" / Should we hold to the same values as people 2,000 years ago (we've already expanded / moved on some from that)?
   
6. Remember to take breaks from this. Be diligent, but don't let this pursuit of the truth consume you.
   
7. Find non-judgmental friends who won't try to preach at you and can support you in your time of discernment and beyond.
   
   If you would like to PM me and ask more questions, I'm always happy to help people who were where I was 4 years ago.
   
   ​
   
   Here are a few good Affirming (A) resources to start out with:
   
   Torn: Rescuing the Gospel from the Gays-VS-Christians Debate by Justin Lee (A)
   
   God and the Gay Christian: The Biblical Case in Support of Same-Sex Relationships by Matthew Vines (A)
   
   Modern Kinship by David and Constantino Khalaf (A)
   
   Blue Babies Pink by Brett Trapp / B.T. Harmann (A)
   
   Bible, Gender, Sexuality: Reframing the Church's Debate on Same-Sex Relationships by James Brownson (A)
   
   Sex and the Single Savior: Gender and Sexuality in Biblical Interpretation by Dale Martin (A)
   
   Risking Grace, Loving Our Gay Family and Friends Like Jesus by Dave Jackson (A)
   
   ​
   
   I'm compiling a list of other good resources / bad ones (from all perspectives, not just ones I disagree with), so let me know if you're looking for something more specific.

I bought the Jefferson Bible about two months ago. I went for the nicer "Smithsonian Edition". So worth it. Each page is a high resolution scan of Jefferson's handwritten notes, and annotations. And you can see how Jefferson literally cut paragraphs and sentences out form the King James bible and pasted it into his own "bible".

Example of the differences between the traditional King James Version, and Jefferson's Bible: The Story of Finding Young Jesus in the Market Preaching to the to the old Scholars.

KJV/NIV Version: The story goes that Joseph and Mary left the city of Bethleham, and realize they left Jesus behind (people in those days travelled in caravans and kids were running around everywhere I guess). So they travel back to the city and search for young Jesus. They find him in the Temple preaching to the old Scholars, who were blown away by Jesus's teachings. Mary goes up to young Jesus and says, "why'd you leave us? Don't you know how worried we were?". Young Jesus famously responds: "Why were you searching for me?" he asked. "Didn't you know I had to be in my Father's house?"

Jefferson's Version: Same as above...Mary goes into the Temple, finds young Jesus talking to the old Scholars of the city, who all seem blown away by how smart Jesus is. . Mary goes "don't you know you worried us?" ...No response from Jesus. Jefferson cut out the God-like sounding "Don't you know you were in my Father's house?", but left the fact that Jesus was in fact found in the the Temple and that the old smart guys were blown away by the intellect of Young Jesus.

The Jefferson Bible is fascinating. I recommend everyone get a copy if they have the slightest interest/background in Catholicism/Christianity.

Btw, Jefferson didn't call it his "Bible". He called it "The Morals of Jesus Christ".

Fun trivia fact: Jefferson thought Paul the Apostle was a quack.

Source: I'm more or less an Atheist, and think Jesus was an insanely smart prodigy for his time who was very wise and said peaceful nice things that made good/common sense. I believe all the miracles/magic were added to the Bible by later people to make it seem more inspiring and awesome. All that stuff is bullshit. (I heard Jefferson thought that too, so I bought his compiled book, aka: The Jefferson Bible.)

EDIT: The version I bought: http://www.amazon.com/Jefferson-Bible-Smithsonian-Morals-Nazareth/dp/158834312X/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1449859239&sr=8-2&keywords=jefferson+bible

There is also a Kindle Version that is super cheap (99 cents I think). Pretty sure you can just google it and find PDF versions.

I highly recommend Marcus Borg's Reading the Bible Again for the First Time: Taking the Bible Seriously but not Literally. This is a fantastic place to begin to understand the way that those of us who do not read the Bible literally approach the text.

Another good help for you might be Timothy Bael's Biblical Literacy: The Essential Bible Stories Everyone Needs to Know. It is very 101, but fantastic for someone who has never really read their Bible. You'll find Bael's introductory chapters helpful in getting your head around what the text is and how it ought to be understood in a very general sense. Then, Bael goes on to introduce you to individual biblical stories, book by book, raising questions and pointing out ways in which each story has influenced our culture. Note that Bael raises questions, he doesn't often offer answers. That is sort of the point. It's your job to wrestle with the text--he just helps you ask questions you might not have thought of.

> If you view the more fantastic stories such as the creation as a metaphor, why can't all of it be metaphorical? How do you choose what's literal and what isn't?

It would really depend on the individual story, book, letter, or poem you're talking about. The Bible isn't a "book" in the sense that we usually think of books. The Bible is a library of many different forms of literature, written for different purposes, by different people, in different cultures, and to different audiences. All of these factors weigh in on how you understand the text.

There are further questions about what the Bible even is in a theological sense, and then how the Bible ought to be used and interpreted in Christian communities. As far as this goes, I greatly value what N.T. Wright has to offer in Scripture and the Authority of God: How to Read the Bible Today and what Dale Martin has to offer in the opening chapter of Sex and the Single Savior: Gender and Sexuality in the Bible. I'm honestly not sure if either of those last two books would be remotely helpful for you.

I definitely, definitely recommend the first two though, if you can afford it.

No. On the contrary, I think it can be shown that theism is rationally obligatory; that is, that we deny the existence of God on pain of irrationality.

To avoid the conclusion of the Modal Cosmological Argument an atheist must deny the Principle of Sufficient Reason: He must hold to the principle that a physical object can exist without a sufficient reason for its existence. Schopenhauer aptly dubbed this a commission of, "the taxicab fallacy." The reason is as follows: Ordinarily, the atheist agrees that things have sufficient causes and explanations: headaches, global warming, diamonds, teapots, lightning. Indeed, the Principle of Sufficient Reason is a lynchpin of rational thought for theist and atheist alike. But when the atheist is asked to follow the principle through to its ultimate logical consequence (i.e., the universe) he attempts to dismiss it like a hired hack—and not because it is rational to do so but because he doesn’t like where it is taking him.

As we move through the rest of the arguments the cost of atheism continues to rise. Faced with the Kalam Cosmological Argument, an atheist must deny the precept of Parmenides that ex nihilo nihil fit; in other words, he must believe that physical objects can pop into existence uncaused out of metaphysical nothingness. To avoid the theistic implications of cosmological fine tuning, he must (in an extravagant defiance of the principle of parsimony) postulate the existence of infinitely many unobservable universes. To explain the origin of life, he must believe that it self-assembled by chance in the prebiotic soup of the early Earth when on every reasonable calculation this is prohibitively improbable. To reconcile his atheism with the essential properties of human mental states, he must deny those properties—including free will and, with it, the rational content of his own denial. He must, finally, deny moral objectivity since morality, on his metaphysic, arises from evolutionary processes in the service of reproductive fitness. This has the absurd and unpalatable consequence that to first principles of moral reasoning (say, It is always wrong to bayonet babies for sport) he cannot give his unqualified assent. And when it is pointed out to him that his belief that, "Beliefs that arise from evolutionary processes serve reproductive fitness and cannot be trusted," is itself a belief that arose from evolutionary processes and so, ex hypothesi, cannot be trusted, he has no reply.

The entailments of atheism are counterexperiential and absurd. Atheism cannot be rationally affirmed.

On the face of it agnosticism would seem to be a very reasonable position to take. What could be more prudent than suspending judgement in matters about which absolute certainty is impossible?

Note, however, that to be agnostic is to hold that, possibly, atheism is true. And since to affirm atheism is to affirm that all its entailments obtain, to hold to agnosticism is to affirm that, possibly, all the entailments of atheism obtain: It is possible that physical objects can exist without a sufficient reason for their existence; it is possible that physical objects can pop into existence out of nothingness uncaused—and so on. Clearly: If it is absurd to believe that married bachelors actually exist then it is just as absurd to believe that married bachelors possibly exist. Atheism and agnosticism cannot therefore be rationally affirmed and so it follows that theism is rationally obligatory.

Against all this the list of objections you cite have no force whatsoever.

>We would see many religions claiming absolute truth that are incompatible with each other, all with fervent and devout believers claiming all others are misled
>
>Vastly different moral codes among religions, cultures, and nations. And time periods. And...this is what we observe.

Yes. But see posts 20 to 23 here

>Prayers would not be answered aside from what chance would allow. And...this is what we observe.

This is a bare claim made without support.

>Miracles would be locked away in the past and would cease to happen in modern times, when the population is more educated and has recording devices. And...this is what we observe.

Recommended reading. Plot spoiler: This massive tome is an encyclopaedia of well-evidenced modern miracles.

>No religion would have compelling evidence outside of their own holy books (or confirmation bias). And...this is what we observe.

Pish posh.

>Believers would commit the same atrocities as everyone else. And...this is what we observe.

If you are saying that some purportedly-religious people act immorally that is a very insignificant claim. If you are saying that the religious life does not overall conduce to the production and pursuit of virtue that is a more interesting but very controversial claim in great need of support. But even granting it, how does this prove there is no God? Man has free will.

>Believers would not live any more or less privileged lives; misfortune or good luck would befall everyone regardless of their inner beliefs

God is not a fairy god mother. He is concerned with his creatures obtaining higher order goods, not material comfort.

>Faiths would continue to splinter into more and more sects, and argue over interpretations of minutiae instead of consolidating

This is a subtype of the problem of hiddenness which theists have coherently addressed.

>Supposed miracles would be unfalsifiable or proven to be hoaxes or simply natural occurrences

Miracles are unfalsifiable? This is rubbish. The Resurrection could have been falsified if the corpse of Jesus had been produced.

>New belief systems and/or cults would appear and sometimes gain large followings despite seeming ridiculous to everyone else (ie. Scientology)

See the above link on divine hiddenness.

>Religions would often need apologists or lies to keep their followers, and that wouldn't always work. And...this is what we observe.

I came to Christian Theism through Natural Theology. I think that on the total evidence it is far more probable than not that there is a God and that he met us face-to-face in the person of Jesus Christ. You are implying here that natural theology has no force.

Well, sure. Anyone can claim anything about the state of a philosophical field but if you actually do the heavy lifting and lay out your case you would get both my attention and my respect. Will you do it or will you tentatively withdraw your insinuation as unsubstantiated? There is no third option—at least, not one that avoids intellectual dishonour.

>Religious beliefs would often demonstrably contrast with observed reality

On the contrary, see my opening remarks.

>Greater access to information would correlate with growing non-religious populations

Google some stats. The vast majority of people in the vast majority of times and places have been theists. Today religiosity is, if anything, growing.

Hey, I know this is late, but if you're still watching this post, I have a couple books for you. I have no idea what you mean by "middleweight-heavy," so I'll just list a few I use and teach from. I'm working on my M.Div. at a Southern Baptist Seminary, so you know I'm not a Ph.D. or an expert.

1. Gordon Fee. He has a couple good books, How to Read the Bible Book by Book and How to Read the Bible for All It's Worth. These books give a great overview of the hermeneutics of the Bible, and while I recommend them as a great way to get a little deeper, definitely aren't for the faint of heart.
   
   
2. Introduction to Biblical Interpretation by Klein, Bloomberg, and Hubbard. This is one of our Intro to Hermeneutics texts at Midwestern Baptist Seminary.
   
   
3. Grasping God's Word by Duvall and Hays. Our other Intro to Hermeneutics text. Gives you lots of examples and practice that I love and use this method when I'm preaching or teaching on a text.
   
   And two I'm not as familiar with, but should be interesting for you:
   
   
4. The Plainly Revealed Word of God? A book written specifically about Baptist hermeneutics. It says that it was mostly English Baptists, but had input from the US and Eastern Europe.
   
   
5. How to Read the Bible Like a Seminary Professor by Mark Yarbrough of DTS. I haven't read this one, so I have no idea what level it would be at, but thought you might be interested because of the DTS connection.
   
   To be honest, I haven't read Traina, and am not sure what sorts of things you've been getting from DTS, so I hope this is helpful. And if not, maybe it will be for someone clicking here to see what books people recommend.

I think some of the biggest shortcomings in your point of view revolve around your [apparently exclusive] reliance on skeptical sources, who for their part are only recycling 19th century objections to the Christian faith. And all you're doing, rather than base your objections on solid argument, are to assert the usual litany of Skeptic talking points.

You object:

>Do you go to church and ever hear your pastor question whether Jesus was God or was separate? Is that an open question in church?

No, never.

Yes, certain things have indeed been defined as dogmas and as doctrines of the faith. There are issues of theology, Christology, etc. that were once open issues--issues about which faithful Catholics could disagree without injury either to their own faith or to the faith of their neighbors. But when the time comes that certain truths of the faith are questioned in such a way as to deny other (and more central) established truths, the Church, for the protection of those under her care, takes it upon herself to set more definite boundaries to the areas open to legitimate speculation. But his has only been done a select handful of times in the 2,000 year history of the Church, and only with regard to a relatively few subjects--as stated above.

The divinity and nature and person of Christ (Christology) is a particular area that's been the subject of more careful definition due to the centrality of the subject. It would be odd, wouldn't it, for any coherent society to leave the most important and central tenants of its institution up to the private interpretation of just whoever thinks they have a horse in the race, wouldn't it? For example, we have laws that protect the personal, private property of our citizens, but we don't leave the definition of private property up to the interpretation of the citizens, do we?

>Does anybody question whether the miracles were miracles or were either delusions or exaggerations? Does anyone question why no contemporary corroborating sources confirm a 'Slaughter of the Innocents'? Is the church as flexible as you assume? Is it really open to actual open debate as you want to characterize it?

Yes, yes, yes, and yes.

Here are two (rather long) reference points if you're interested (video):

>The Shocking Truth about Christian Orthodoxy - John Behr

>Richard Dawkins Interview with Father George Coyne

You go on:

>Have you heard of the book 'The Homeric Epics and the Gospel of Luke'? It's written by Dennis MacDonald. I have the book, but there's a video series by 'TruthSurge' that the first part of it goes over many of MacDonalds parallels between them. Pretty convincing.

I'm sure it is pretty convincing if you don't have anything at all to counter with, just like I'm sure the Young Earth Creationist point of view would be convincing if that's the only side you looked at. But have you done very much reading or watching on the contra side of the pro-skeptical debate on this subject?

Have you heard of this book (or perhaps you've already read it):

>Jesus and the Eyewitnesses: The Gospels as Eyewitness Testimony by Richard Bauckham

Here's a link to a very interesting talk where Richard Bauckham suggests that there really is very good internal evidence that Mark was writing "Peter's gospel", as it were:

>Mark's Geography and the origin of Mark's Gospel with Professor Richard Bauckham

I would also recommend this talk (if you don't plan on reading his book, that is):

The Gospels as Historical Biography - Richard Bauckham, PhD

...as a counter to the resource you referenced above.

Finally, (of the available [free] online resources) here is a dialogue Bauckham had with a skeptic on the radio show "Unbelievable?":

"Jesus and the Eyewitnesses" - Richard Bauckham vs. James Crossley

>a pillar of Christian justification is belief in the prophecies... prophecies the Jews say Jesus never fulfilled, prophecies Christians interpreted as pointing to Jesus even though his name is never mentioned and a dozen other reasons that interpretation can't absolutely point to him. And, if any prophecy can have multiple "truths" how can it be said to be real prophecy at all and not something as trite as a fortune cookie or an astrological forecast?

I don't think that's the way Biblical prophecy is supposed to function, though.

First of all, the Messiah, when he comes, must have a name. Is there a name the Jews say the Messiah is supposed to have?

The most recent major contender to the Jewish Messianic throne was Bar Kokhba, whose name (translated as "the Son of the Star") was taken (taken, mind you--it was not his given name) from a prophecy in Numbers 24:17:

a star shall come forth out of Jacob,
and a scepter shall rise out of Israel;
it shall crush the forehead of Moab,
and break down all the sons of Sheth.

But his given name, apparently, was Simon. And it was a prominent Rabbi (Rabbi Akiva) who gave him the appellation "Son of the Star".

So why should it be surprising if the name "Jesus" never appears in the Messianic prophecies. Supposing that it should is to mistake prophecy for fortune-telling. And I think that's exactly what you're doing.

The prophecy in Isaiah tells us that Messiah will be called, among other things:

Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God,
Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.

And, in fact, the name Jesus means "A savior; a deliverer".

>Let's do a little test and see how "objective" you are on the data sets. When my grandmother died, if I went to the grave site and her body was missing, do you think I would wonder where it is and ask the undertaker or do you think my first inclination should be to assume God took her bodily to Heaven?

You would wonder what happened to the body. You would definitely not assume she was "raised from the dead" (I'm not sure where you're getting this "took her bodily to Heaven" language, but anyway...) You would assume that someone had come and taken the body.

JUST LIKE THE DISCIPLES DID!!! The disciples were as incredulous as you would be.

So what convinced them otherwise?

As even Bart Ehrman argues, the disciples belief that Jesus had bodily appeared to them--their belief that Jesus had risen from the dead based on the evidence (so it appeared to them) of his post-resurrection appearances--is a fact of history.

If you believed your grandmother appeared to you bodily, that she ate with you, talked with you, gave you convincing proofs that she wasn't a figment of your imagination, might you begin to wonder if she had really risen from the dead? Or perhaps that she was never dead in the first place (the so-called "swoon theory")?

But if you had seen her being brutally beaten, tortured, spread apart, nailed to a tree and stabbed through the side, all over a few hours--if you had seen her being bled and tortured to death and then finally die either before or because a lance was thrust into her heart--do you think "she wasn't really dead" would still be a sensible position for you to take?

Only, I would suspect, if you're already committed to the belief that dead people don't stop being dead after twenty-four or forty-eight hours of being dead. If you're committed to that belief than any explanation, as long as it doesn't include that, would be "sensible", I guess.

>His body came up missing and this is solid proof of a resurrection?

No, the "solid proof" of the resurrection--what convinced the disciples (who may have been "simple fishermen" but they weren't stupid--was what they believed were Jesus' post-resurrection appearances combined with the missing body (the empty tomb). The missing body alone didn't convince anyone or even lead anyone to speculate that Jesus had been raised from the dead.

>The first-written Gospel was Mark ... This was the first one written.

What is your evidence for that belief? I would submit that there isn't any. None of the available external evidence, including historical testimony, or the existence of available manuscripts, points to the Gospel of Mark as being the first one written. The internal evidence is the conjecture of men in the 19th century, and Occam's Razer would normally require that hypothesis to be dismissed as it multiplies postulates beyond what is necessary, and conjures up missing source documents that have never been attested anywhere (and certainly have never been found).

So what makes you so certain that Mark's Gospel was the first one written?

>Why do 500+ see a man float up into Heaven but not a single one of them or any of their friends or any of their family members write a single thing about it?

I think you're misunderstanding what Paul wrote about this.

As to your other list of "why's", I don't know. They might be good questions. They might not be. They might call into question the Christian witness, or they may not.

But I think you expect a lot more writing from this period to have survived to the present than you have any good, rational reason to. Even if everyone from Philo to the 5,000 wrote extensively about Jesus, how much of that do you think would reasonably have survived to the present--or even to the time of Constantine?

You assume a permanence to written records you have no right to expect. What do you base this expectation on, anyway?

Good discussion, but if you're not really willing to investigate the pro side of this argument I would say we're finished. Thanks

Yea I'm in the same boat, not a scholar but I've educated myself through Bart Erhman and Mike Licona. Ill go through your list with the knowledge I have.
>As already pointed out by /u/AdultSoccer, none of the gospel authors name themselves in the text.

This is not "evidence to the contrary" as you said, but only absent evidence.
>•The Gospel of Mark is heavily borrowed from in Luke. The author of Luke-Acts makes note of John Mark in Acts 12:25, but does not identify him as the author of the Gospel of Mark.
•The Gospel of Matthew borrows even more from the Gospel of Mark than Luke. Yet, according to tradition, the disciple Matthew is an eyewitness, whereas John Mark is recording what he has learned from Peter.

Yes, the gospel writings most likely used each other as sources, but that does not discredit who they are or there story on that basis alone. For example, if you were going to write a biography of your mom, in order to get an accurate portrait of your mom, could you not ask your siblings, her friends, her relatives, etc., what she was like, to have a more complete portrayal?
>•Mark 7:31 states Jesus went from Tyre through Sidon, to the Sea of Galilee, and finally into the re. . .

I appreciate the map! But Jesus was not in a race or anything, and, if I had to guess, chose that route to show himself to as many people as possible.
>•John Mark was Jewish, yet the author of the Gospel. . .

for the Malachi prophecy, the writer only mentions Isiah, but then quotes both Malachi and Isaiah. It should be noted, though, that both Malachi and Isaiah were referring to the same event, and Isaiah would be the "greater" of the two prophets. As far as contributing the ten commandments to Moses, I'm sure you know the story. God gave Moses the commandments, and Moses then gave them to his people. The verse you gave reads, "For Moses said. . ." and Moses did indeed say these things. As far as Joseph buying the shroud on the Sabbath, the writer was just saying what happened. Yes, that would be against the law, but Jesus also worked on the Sabbath for the Kingdom of God. It appears that work for the kingdom of God on the Sabbath was acceptable, but I'm no scholar here.


I would also like to say that Plutarch's biographies don't have his named attached to them either, similarly as to the gospel's biographies of Jesus. So it is not atypical that the "by: ____" does not appear. No one denies Plutarch wrote his though. I see you called into question Papias's attributions. For Mark; Papias says, "no intention of providing an ordered arrangement of the logia of the Lord" meaning that the accuracy of sequence of events was not taken into account. Yes, Mark begins with John the Baptist preparing the way, and ends with Jesus's death, but the order of his parables and teachings, according to Papias, may not be in a chronological order. Mark just goes from one parable to the next, many times. For Matthew writing in Hebrew according to Papias; We dont have any of the original manuscripts so we dont know what the original language was. I dont see why Papias would care to lie about this, so I would say that the original language as probably Hebrew.
I appreciate your comments though!


Also, Papias was the first, but Justin the martyr also cites Mark around 150 CE. For the other gospels, all the early church fathers had one voice in who wrote the gospels, and no one else was challenging this. So the only evidence available points to their traditional authorship. The church father were not always accurate though, so, again, we cannot say with 100% certainty, but this is history 2000 years ago, and, relative to other events of the era, the available evidence is pretty good.

Lastly, if something like this is holding you back from believing (that is, "academically, we dont know who, for certain, wrote the gospels"), know that nearly 100% of new testament scholars will admit that there are at least 2 different independent sources in the gospels, and the majority of scholars say there are 4-5 independent sources. So, if you are weighing the evidence for Jesus's resurrection, know that, regardless of who wrote what, there are still several eyewitness accounts as to what happen. Check out Licona's book on this, which has over 700 pages and 2000 footnotes. He has also debated Erhman several times, you can find it on youtube

I was about to jump on historicity, too! It has given my faith an incredible shot in the arm. You say you've read Craig, but have you delved into the expanding literature around not just the historicity of Jesus but the history of the Resurrection? Some starting places:

http://www.reasonablefaith.org/the-evidence-for-jesus

http://www.garyhabermas.com/articles/crj_explainingaway/crj_explainingaway.htm

Also been turned on to this book:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0830827196/ref=s9_simh_gw_p14_d7_i1?pf_rd_m=ATVPDKIKX0DER&pf_rd_s=center-5&pf_rd_r=15R8W1HZ5115VTJ676JA&pf_rd_t=101&pf_rd_p=1688200422&pf_rd_i=507846

NT Wright is always brought up, though I haven't checked him out yet. Another favorite, for me, is Luke Timothy Johnson's Real Jesus, an excoriation of the Jesus Seminar, but also his Living Jesus, a blueprint of his model for faith. Timothy Keller's Reason for God is also good, and he's a pastor, too.

Listen to what I'm saying if you will. There's very good evidence not just that Jesus lived, not just that he was who he said he was, but that he really did rise from the dead! Something causes this movement, this early church. Something explains this behavior, this literature, this evidence - it is one of the tightest narratives in the ancient world, and the more modern distance we have from it the more easy it is to disbelieve it but it's no less true, no less strong as an argument from history. And if it's true, or even plausible, it doesn't matter how strong your faith is because it's true independent of your belief!

But... having said all that, may I also recommend that you make a friend you can trust to share your burden? We here at reddit certainly can, but you sure could also use an actual in the flesh beer buddy over this stuff, someone you can be yourself with. Be great if it was a fellow pastor but it doesn't have to be.

I had an inexplicable experience of grace eight years ago, an experience that turned my life around completely. I was 15 then, and I really consider my life to have begun at that moment—absolutely nothing that happened afterward could have been possible without it.

On an intellectual level, I am convinced that Catholicism presents the truth. I have studied the faith extensively, and the more I study—the more theological works I read, the more lectures I attend and listen to, the more I delve into the richness of the Catholic intellectual tradition—the more I fall in love with the faith, a faith centered around the self-revelation of God in Jesus Christ and preserved faithfully by the successors of the Apostles. And though I think Catholicism makes the most sense philosophically or from a Chestertonian sense of aligning best with our natural intuition about the world, ultimately I am willing to stake everything on the resurrection. I encourage people to read The Resurrection of the Son of God by historian and New Testament scholar N. T. Wright, or to watch this lecture summarizing the book's contents. In short: the basic historical facts which justify the inference to the Resurrection are all established by critical historical scholarship, and, in an attempt to explain the emergence of those historical events, the 'Resurrection hypothesis' has, by far, the greatest explanatory power. That alone is enough.

Many have given proofs for God (Edward Feser's Aquinas and Five Proofs for the Existence of God are very good on that front), but in terms of knowing that Christianity is true, there are a few main ways that folks do it. While proving God is deductive, so you only would need one proof to succeed, the Christian faith cannot be proven deductively but would need induction, so more than one proof is good.

1. Scripture can be seen as self authenticating. There are certain parts of the Bible that every scholar, whether religious or atheist, would acknowledge was written by Saint Paul, who met eyewitnesses to Jesus and who said he had a vision of Him. If you read his first letter to the Corinthians or his one to the Galatians, I think it's hard to come from reading them and not to think that he dealt with something very real. He believed that those around him and he himself had experienced something absolutely miraculous, and reading his writings, we have no reason to doubt him as a witness.
   
2. If you want more technical proofs for the Resurrection of Jesus, you can look at academic ones like Mike Licona's The Resurrection of Jesus, or NT Wright's The Resurrection of the Son of God, or the more popular The Case for Christ.
   
3. The Catholic Church fulfills prophecies. I don't have time to go into this too much, but in the Old Testament they talk about a man who would be born in Bethlehem (Micah) who would suffer and be vindicated (Isaiah), then have a kingdom that would go around the world established by God (Daniel) while bringing knowledge of the God of Judaism to all the nations. Such claims at the time would have been ridiculous because Israel was a tiny little nation, so the fact that it came true is quite impressive. I could go more into this if you want.
   
4. There are many miracles that still happen today by Christians: https://www.amazon.com/Miracles-Credibility-New-Testament-Accounts/dp/0801039525/ref=sr_1_6?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1527787634&sr=1-6&keywords=miracles Here is a book that gives a good analysis, and here's a medical article from Oxford talking about them: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3854941/
   
   These proofs are not deductive, so there is some level of uncertainty, but taken together, I think it gives a very good case.

I'm sceptical that the facts are as you say, or that we could justly draw the conclusion you do from them. Isn't it much too bold to say that 100% of miracle claims have been proven false? I don't have the inclination to get into a case-by-case examination of individual putative miracles, but consider the class of miracles that is easiest to prove by sainthood standards: an unexplained and permanent recovery from illness. I think it will be enough to mention a supposed natural explanation which I'm sure we've both heard invoked by sceptics in such cases many times: "spontaneous remission."

To me, this amounts to saying there is a natural explanation, which is that there is no natural explanation. In these cases, I don't think there are non-question-begging grounds for ruling out a miracle as an explanation, and if a miracle is the only viable explanation that can't be ruled out, it is reasonable to think it is the correct explanation. Maybe that's a case of shoving God into a gap and further scientific progress will provide alternative explanations for many present-day "miracles," but you can't exactly beat believers over the head with hoped-for future scientific discoveries.

Even if all miracles we had investigated were truly confirmed bogus, it would be rash to draw a conclusion that miracles are impossible. (You might object that you really are open to the possibility if "exceptionally good evidence" is presented, but I think it amounts to the same thing considering the lack of clarity about what exceptionally good evidence would be—something Richard Dawkins, for example, frankly owned up to in a conversation with George Cardinal Pell when he said that if a 900-foot Jesus showed up and announced "I exist," he would not believe.) We could only that we hadn't found any examples yet, just like astronomers hadn't identified any black holes until the 1970s. The Transportation Security Administration has screened millions of air passengers hoping to find terrorists, and hasn't made a single terrorism-related arrest, but we would not reason validly if we concluded that there were no terrorists, or that a higher standard of evidence should be required for terrorism than for other crimes.

As for the particular claim of the Resurrection, I see no reason why it should have to stand or fall together with all other miraculous and mythical stories. Granted, it's a valid criticism if the evidence for the Resurrection amounts to nothing and a totally arbitrary choice is being made to believe one outlandish, unproven claim and reject the others. However, the best Christian apologists (I have in mind writers like Michael Licona, William Lane Craig, and N. T. Wright) lay out detailed cases for why the Resurrection is the best inference that can be made from the historical evidence (and this kind of reasoning isn't just the province of a scholarly elite, it's filtered down to the general Christian public through more popular apologetics works like The Case for Christ and Reasonable Faith). The onus is on other religious communities to make a comparable case for their own miracle claims; if there is none, then even if you think the Christian case isn't enough, you can't say a double standard is being applied.

Minimally, if the effect of prayrer is unverifiable, it would be wrong to say it universally fails (I don't know if you said that but someone did). Prayrer isn't deliberately unfalsifiable, I suppose the nature of prayrer and testing scientifically if prayrer 'works' is . . not really a matter of science, even though I can imagine certain kinds of scientific tests to observe if certain prayrers 'work', and even the term 'work' is difficult to use because of the nature of prayrer. So maybe it would be better to say a significantly better methodology would need to be employed.

If God didn't heal 100 out of 100 amputees, the most you could say based on that experiment is that God said no, 100 out of 100 times. . and then you are assuming there is a God in the first place, and God could have morally sufficient reasons for saying no 100 times.

In regards to the nature of answered prayrer, it is not true theologically speaking that all answered prayrer must happen supernaturally. So answered prayrer could come in the form of a friend meeting a need, and I completely grant that that makes the conversation in regards to science and prayrer even more confusing, which I think supports my point regarding the general untestability of the effects of prayrer in a certain sense.

We live amongst brilliant people so I think something could be done, but the experiments im aware of are either too simple or are based on a superficial understanding of prayrer.

Not that you need to read it, but theirs an incredible book by Craig Keener called Miracles that has significant crossover into the conversation we're having here, more in the region of things like exotic medical ailments being undone. Very well documented. Conclusions aside, it is good work. And its nice to hear what you have to say, too, so I appreciate your conversing :)

I. Sure, some forms of theism are coherent (Christianity is not one of those forms, for what it's worth; the Problem of Natural Evil and Euthyphro's Dilemma being a couple of big problems), but not all coherent ideas are true representations of the world; any introductory course in logic will demonstrate that.

II. The cosmological argument is a deductive argument. Deductive arguments are only as strong as their premises. The premises of the cosmological argument are not known to be true. Therefore, the cosmological argument should not be considered true. If you think you know a specific formulation of the cosmological argument that has true premises, please present it. I'm fully confident I can explain how we know such premises are not true.

III. There is no doubt that the teleological argument has strong persuasive force, but that's a very different thing than "being real evidence" or "something that should have strong persuasive force." I explain apparent cosmological fine-tuning as an entirely anthropic effect: if the constants were different, we wouldn't be here to observe them, therefore we observe them as they are.

IV. This statement is just false on its face. Lawrence Krauss has a whole book about the potential ex nihilo mechanisms (plural!) for the creation of the universe that are entirely consistent with the known laws of physics. (Note that the idea of God is not consistent with the known laws of physics, since he, by definition, supersedes them.)

V. This is just a worse version of argument III. Naturalistic evolution has far, far more explanatory power than theism. To name my favorite examples: the human blind spot is inexplicable from the standpoint of top-down design, but it makes perfect sense in the context of evolution; likewise, the path of the mammalian nerves for the tongue traveling below the heart makes no sense from the standpoint of top-down design, but it makes perfect sense in the context of evolution. Evolution routinely makes predictions that are tested to be true, whether it means predicting where fossils with specific characteristics will be found or how fruit fly mating behavior changes after populations have been separated and exposed to different environments for 30+ generations. It's worth emphasizing that it is totally normal to look at the complexity of the world and assume that it must have a designer...but it's also totally normal to think that electrons aren't waves. Intuition isn't a reliable way to discern truth. We must not be seduced by comfortable patterns of thought. We must think more carefully. When we think more carefully, it turns out that evolution is true and evolution requires no god.

VI. There are two points here: 1) the universe follows rules, and 2) humans can understand those rules. Point (1) is easily answered with the anthropic argument: rules are required for complex organization, humans are an example of complex organization, therefore humans can only exist in a physical reality that is governed by rules. Point (2) might not even be true. Wigner's argument is fun and interesting, but it's actually wrong! Mathematics are not able to describe the fundamental behavior of the physical world. As far as we know, Quantum Field Theory is the best possible representation of the fundamental physical world, and it is known to be an approximation, because, mathematically, it leads to an infinite regress. For a more concrete example, there is no analytic solution for the orbital path of the earth around the sun! (This is because it is subject to the gravitational attraction of more than one other object; its solution is calculated numerically, i.e. by sophisticated guess-and-check.)

VII. This is just baldly false. I recommend Dan Dennett's "Consciousness Explained" and Stanislas Dehaene's "Consciousness and the Brain" for a coherent model of a materialist mind and a wealth of evidence in support of the materialist mind.

VIII. First of all, the idea that morality comes from god runs into the Problem of Natural Evil and Euthyphro's Dilemma pretty hard. And the convergence of all cultures to universal ideas of right and wrong (murder is bad, stealing is bad, etc.) are rather easily explained by anthropology and evolutionary psychology. Anthropology and evolutionary psychology also predict that there would be cultural divergence on more subtle moral questions (like the Trolley Problem, for example)...and there is! I think that makes those theories better explanations for moral sentiments than theism.

IX. I'm a secular Buddhist. Through meditation, I transcend the mundane even though I deny the existence of any deity. Also, given the diversity of religious experience, it's insane to suggest that religious experience argues for the existence of the God of Catholicism.

X. Oh, boy. I'm trying to think of the best way to persuade you of all the problems with your argument, here. So, here's an exercise for you: take the argument you have written in the linked posts and reformat them into a sequence of syllogisms. Having done that, highlight each premise that is not a conclusion of a previous syllogism. Notice the large number of highlighted premises and ask yourself for each, "What is the proof for this premise?" I am confident that you will find the answer is almost always, "There is no proof for this premise."

XI. "...three days after his death, and against every predisposition to the contrary, individuals and groups had experiences that completely convinced them that they had met a physically resurrected Jesus." There is literally no evidence for this at all (keeping in mind that Christian sacred texts are not evidence for the same reason that Hindu sacred texts are not evidence). Hell, Richard Carrier's "On the Historicity of Christ" even has a strong argument that Jesus didn't exist! (I don't agree with the conclusion of the argument, though I found his methods and the evidence he gathered along the way to be worthy of consideration.)

-----

I don't think that I can dissuade you of your belief. But, I do hope to explain to you why, even if you find your arguments intuitively appealing, they do not conclusively demonstrate that your belief is true.

There are so many awesome texts out there!
I'm really partial to the character of Enoch, and the more weird, apocalyptic sorts of books. I'll throw a few of those out there for your perusing pleasure.
I'm using two Wiki links to give a general overview of the two texts I'll talk about, but please


The Book of Enoch, or First Enoch - this book is regarded as canon by Christians in Ethiopia/Eritrea, but not by other churches. I think it is particularly interesting because Enoch is taken around on a grand tour of the cosmos: he sees the world, up into the heavens, and even down to Sheol. It's pretty cool to read how people reckoned the cosmos worked back then. There are weird visions of angels, a few parables and even an astronomical calendar text thrown into the mix.


Slavonic Enoch, or, Second Enoch is unrelated to First Enoch (i.e., different author, very different date and region) but contains a lot of the same sort of stories about good old Enoch. There's also some stuff about Melchizedek, whom you probably recognize since it seems you're interested in Gnostic stuff. (the Wiki link for this one isn't as strong as the first- please check out more sources for better analysis of the text)


More information on the books of Enoch:

Jewishencyclopedia.com

Detailed analysis by Andri Orlov


If you are looking for more fun Gnostic stuff to peruse, and haven't checked out Apocalyptic/Gnostic scholar Elaine Pagels yet, you're missing out:
Youtube Discussion about the Book of Revelation
I'd definitely check out her books on the Origin of Satan and Revelations

Thanks!

>I have never tried in the Greek.

You should! It's quite rewarding.

As for what I'm using. I thankfully was a step ahead, as I'd studied Classical Attic when I was in college. That was awhile ago, but the alphabet and basic grammar was still floating around my memory. Vocabulary was and is my biggest shortcoming.

To refresh my grammar (and help me with changes in the language from Athens ca. 600 BC to the 1st century Roman Empire), I bought this textbook: Reading Koine Greek by Rodney Decker. It's an introductory one, so I was able to blow through the early lessons quickly enough, while focusing mainly on vocabulary. He structures his vocab lists based on word frequency in the New Testament and Septuagint, meaning you learn more common words first, which in turn helps to quickly build reading comprehension. It also focuses on the grammar of that time period and specifically early Christian writing (with reading exercises mostly from the NT, but occasionally the Septuagint or something like the Apostolic Fathers).

Once I was ready for some more advanced references, I picked up Greek Grammar Beyond the Basics, which is a more general reference book (focused on the NT) recommended by Prof. Decker. I also splurged, thanks to some spare cash, and bought myself the BDAG, an incredibly thorough dictionary of Biblical Greek. The amount of scholarship in that one book is nothing short of mind-boggling. It has an incredible number of references to both the New Testament and tons of other contemporary usage, as well as citing to journal articles about certain words, the works. Oh yeah, I also got a dual-language (Greek and English) edition of the Apostolic Fathers somewhere along the line, although I haven't read it much yet.

So that's where I am. As I said, it's slow going for now since my vocabulary is still pretty bad, but it's improving. And I find that learning by seeing things in context is much better for me than just trying to do flashcards or something (although I may supplement with those).

I have two more books on the way: Metzger's Textual Commentary (where he talks about the decisions that went into which reading they chose in the UBS edition of the NT), and the most recent edition of his The Text of the New Testament (as updated by Bart Ehrman), which is an introduction to NT textual criticism and a kind of summary of various scholarly research on the subject.

So yeah, it's quite an undertaking!

>I honestly have never gone to far into the source material for all this, so I can't offer much help up there if your question is regarding source material.

Thanks, but I have. ;-) If you'd like a primer, wikipedia has a decent intro for the NT, but the OT info is kind of lacking. You can click around the sidebar on the right all day and learn a lot though if you're interested.

The short version is our NT is pretty good but still has some open questions, but the OT, while probably pretty good in a few books, is horrible on many others, and we're fairly sure we often don't really know what the original source was. Of course, many scholars think there wasn't really a single original source at all, that it was compiled and redacted over the course of many years.

For the NT, this is an excellent intro to the field. There's not one standout good book for the OT that I know of, but that's partly because of the difficulties of the text and partly because I've studied the NT much more. ;-) The Septuagint (which the NT writers used)and the Masoretic text are in many of their books quite different in length and content, while being still different from the Dead Sea Scrolls which is sometimes closer to the Samaritan Pentateuch. We have few OT manuscripts, and they're all fairly modern, and we've lost touch with the originals so much that trying to pull them out from history is difficult.

If you want good bible study tools, I highly recommend Accordance if you have a Mac, or Logos if you don't. They co$t though. Blue Letter Bible is quite good for being free. If you're serious, you'll eventially want to learn at least basic biblical Greek though, as the greek tenses are different from ours and contain a lot of the useful information.

Hi OP, thanks for the insightful post. You did a lot of collecting of good Bible verses to make the point.

Essentially, your argument is a reductio ad absurdem taking the form: "If X, then Y. Not Y. Therefore not X."

1. If the world is full of magic (as the world seems to be described in the Bible), then there will be verifiable, creditable magic to be present in history and in modern times.
   
2. But there isn't verifiable creditable magic in history and modern times.
   
3. Therefore, the world is not how it is described by the Bible -- a world full of magic.
   
   I think you well supported the first premise. And the conclusion follows from the two premises.
   
   The place to look is your second premise. The second premise you simply stated. You said that history and modern times are not replete with miracles (except ones that are "discredited").
   
   If I challenged the second premise, asserting that anyone who cares to investigate miracle claims (from Christians or any other group) will discover that the observable world is indeed full of them, what would you say?
   
   I'd venture that some people (and just wait for the comments!) will mock me. But let's ignore them.
   
   

• Some people will say that many miracle claims have been discredited. That's true! But many historical claims have been discredited, and that doesn't discredit all of history, only those claims. Many historical claims, and many miracle claims, have been credited and verified.
  
  
• Some people will say "Where's the evidence? Prove it to me." To that I say, four things: first, I'd say beware of sealioning. It's not my job to prove to flat-earthers that the earth is round. It's not my job to prove to materialists that reality is material and formal. If you don't know how things stand, or who to trust, that's on you. But if the question is sincere, perhaps start with Craig Keener's book, Miracles (https://www.amazon.com/Miracles-Credibility-New-Testament-Accounts/dp/0801039525) Thirdly, "proof" is completed when the proof has been given. Persuasion is not the same as proof. I can prove things to my five year old son that will not persuade him because he is being unreasonable. So you have to persuade yourself; the proof is out there.
  
  Fourthly, and relatedly, the problem with doubting a thing's existence is that doubt disincentivizes the search for evidence. If I don't believe in sea creatures, I am not likely to go swimming in the ocean looking to "prove" to myself that the ocean is indeed empty.
  
  All that to say, the evidence and proof are plain to most people and readily available unless you are (a) already so sure that you're right that you only mock and dismiss those who could potentially offer you evidence and (b) don't go out of the way to seek the uncomfortable truth about our world.
  
  I believe in science, have a Ph.D., and have personally experienced miracles and know people who perform miracles with some regularity. So, despite skepticism of some particular claims, I credit many of the Biblical stories, historical stories, and modern stories. I don't think that I am weird in this way. Disbelief in the supernatural is a minority report, globally. Most scientifically educated Americans believe in the supernatural. About 50 percent of working scientists are religious and believe in a god or higher power (footnote: http://www.pewforum.org/2009/11/05/scientists-and-belief/)
  
  So there is nothing particularly wild or mysterious about the phenomena you describe as "magic." I've seen it personally, and hundreds of people I know have experienced it personally. So, when I consider the evidence impartially (including verifiable eye-witness accounts), I'd say your second premise needs revisiting.
  
  But like I said, I appreciated the post, and enjoy thinking these things through.
  
  I'd appreciate non-mocking thoughtful responses as well.
  
  Cheers!
  
  Edit: added footnote to verify claim that a slight majority of scientists believe in a god or higher power (51%) according to Pew.

>new source that disputes the existence of Jesus.

There are no sources which dispute the existence of Moses or Romulus but that doesn't mean we should start accepting them as real historical figures.

>Jesus and other similarly or worse attested characters like Hannibal and Alexander the Great.

Alexander is way better attested than Jesus, we even have more evidence of Pontius Pilate than Historical Jesus.

>no respected expert in the field believe in it.

There are several, most prominent ones are Robert M. Price who holds double doctorate in NT studies and Thomas L Broody who's also a biblical scholar.

>Neither Koresh or Jim Jones had a large following

At its peak Peoples temple had a following in upward of 20,000 so i don't think its a right comparison but yeah Koresh or Marshal Applewhite kinda fits the bill.

>but is more rickety than any of them. It doesn't explain why or how. There are no sources supporting it.

I suggest you read some works on Christ Myth theory because all those point were covered by many authors, here's a good introductory article and as for books, Richard Carrier's On the historicity of Jesus is pretty comprehensive and there's also The Christ Myth by Arthur Drews which you can download freely.

> what if I'm wrong about everything? It's a lot to consider

Yes, it is, but you need to recognize there are no definitive answers either way. The Age of Reason is a good introduction to Deism and a book I highly recommend you read if you're interested in Deism, it deals with a lot of the questions you have asked.

> why does Jesus have to be divine to be worshipped/followed?

This is often an idea synonymous with Christian Deists, that Christ did a lot of good in the world and this is reason enough to follow him and his moral teachings, he doesn't have to be divine. Read the Jefferson Bible It focuses on Christ's humanity, his morals, and all the good he did in the world, without all the supernatural passages.


> fear/guilt over dismissing his divinity......... Oh, God left AFTER Jesus (A close friend proposed this belief.)

Jesus being 'God in the flesh' causes numerous problems for Deism, most notably because it is a claim that God interacted with people in the world and revealed himself to mankind in the form of Christ.

However, when you say God no longer intervened AFTER Christ, you still have numerous problems to contend with when you try to fit those beliefs into Deism:

• If you know Christ is God, you are making the claim that you know God, you know God's characteristics, and you know who He is.
  
• You're believing in revelation; so you're no longer looking to nature and your own reasoning for your beliefs.
  
• The idea of the Holy Spirit especially causes lots problems to Deism, because if you believe in the HS as the 3rd person of the trinity, then you do have God/HS interacting and intervening in the world and swaying people towards belief. You cannot then argue that God does not intervene.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  

Yes, I do believe it is a possible to behave in a way which is contradictory to God's morality, but to believe that one is behaving in accordance with God's morality. So, what, then shall we do? It boils down to this: Truth either exists or it doesn't (I believe it does). I believe Christianity is true, and it is quite possible that I am right. Looking at the evidence (cross-referencing, continuity in text, prophecy (read Isaiah 53)) it seems most plausible. Theism is more logical than atheism to me. Christianity is more logical than any other religion. It stands apart in that God saved humanity.

If my beliefs are determined by my geography, then clearly you are an atheist because of where you were born/lived. I believe China now has the largest Christian population in the world. Why?

I'm not here to convert you to anything either. I'm here to share the truth as I know (believe) it. I don't gain points by "converting" just like you don't for "deconverting" me, which I do not think you're trying to do.

http://www.amazon.com/Jesus-Eyewitnesses-Gospels-Eyewitness-Testimony/dp/0802863906/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1331922895&sr=1-1

Honestly, I'll buy this book for you, if you will read it. If you won't read it, that's fine. Please don't have me buy it for you and cast it aside though. That wouldn't be nice.

What does Richard Carrier believe happened?

We have over 5000 Greek manuscripts from the new testament. Why so many if this was mythological? Clearly, some things were meant to be historical accounts with the way that they were described.

Which historians see the gnostic gospels as fully relevant?

Specifically, what is highly embellished, made up or recycled?

The story of Jesus? Water into wine, resurrection, walking on water? Nope.

Do I think it's silly and frankly stupid to pin a historical theory of nonexistence purely on the lack of primary sources? Yep. Do I get into a tiff with people here on /r/exmormon about this every couple months or so? Yep. Is Zeitgeist a terrible movie because it sounds smart and well-founded but is nothing better than the crap usually found on the "History" Channel? Yep. Is the Jesus Myth Hypothesis (no historical individual known as Jesus of Nazareth existed and the Christ mythos that built up was fully imported from traditions outside of Christianity) a real historical theory with serious historians behind it? Yes. Is it currently a minority theory? Yes.

For those who want to talk about this realistically, please get your information from more than YouTube videos or popular documentaries. The issue of where the Christ mythos came from has been debated for centuries and is still unresolved, but there are accepted ways of doing historical research that have arisen in the past few hundred years because they work. Simply parroting somebody who says "There's no mention of Jesus in contemporary records, ergo no historical existence" isn't going to get you very far when talking to real historians of any stripe.

This book is a collection of essays by some of the current leading experts on this issue and includes an essay from one of the few respected historians who promotes the Jesus Myth Hypothesis, Dr. Robert Price, and defends it far more ably than what you usually find floating around on the Internet.

Also, Dr. Bart Ehrman, who is pretty much the biblical studies equivalent of Grant Palmer (ie, while he's a respected researcher and authority, his best skill is in distilling existing research for popular consumption) has recently released his own rebuttal to much of the Jesus Myth arguments.

For me personally, the reason I feel that Jesus of Nazareth was a real individual comes from a careful analysis of early Christian works (the Gospels and the genuine Epistles of Paul, especially Galatians) using them against each other to discern where they have overlap that they would probably have rather not had (usually called the Criterion of Embarrassment). There are many such tools used by historians in biblical and other non-religious historical studies to try and determine facts from biased historical sources through contextual analysis and such secondary research.

Let me put it another way: how many of us feel that every single prophet in the Old Testament, including the folk heroes of Elijah and Elisha, were similarly non-existent? David? Solomon? Do you think that a real box was carried around by ancient Jews and was placed in their temple at Jerusalem? Do you think there was a temple at Jerusalem before some Jews returned from Babylon? A tent that it was patterned on located at Shiloh? Could you describe it's size and layout? Because there's no proof for any of these items at all (well, the Babylonians prided themselves on destroying Jerusalem with its temple, but that's the only external mention of it), and I think most of us would probably be very comfortable with the idea that some actual historical figures and things existed (probably vastly different in real life from how they were remembered). Why should Jesus (a figure with far less time from when his own followers felt he lived and when they started writing their own stories about him) be any different?

Actually, testing your faith as an outsider is necessary for being able to determine its objective truth and hardly "a waste." For instance, suppose you were raised as a Catholic, baptized as an infant. Ask yourself, how do other reasonable people first become believers, or insiders, if from the outside they can't understand Christianity? Which comes first, faith or understanding? If, as a nonbelieving outsider, someone cannot understand the Christian faith, then how does God expect them to reasonably come to faith in the first place? How do you get from being an outsider to being an insider as a rational, thinking, skeptical adult? If you were raised Catholic from childhood then you know that as children we had not yet developed critical thinking faculties to question what our parents told us. We didn't know any better. Isn't it unfair to bring up a child in that environment? How many Catholic parents have adequately questioned their own faith and investigated its truth content before raising their children Catholic?

How many Catholics would accept Catholicism if it were forced upon them when they were 18 years old? Wouldn't we have asked some questions about what our parents told us? If someone came along and tried presenting you a brand new religious paradigm, for example, Scientology or Mormonism, at your age you would, as an outsider, take a critical, skeptical stance against accepting those views. At some point along the line, as we become adults, we need to critically examine what we were taught as children. Doubt and skepticism are learned virtues and as we learn to question, we become thinking adults. But strangely most people don't seem to question their religious faiths which seem too obvious and have become too ingrained in us, usually because they are a part of the culture we live in. Not only that, your faith has ingrained in you a fear of Hell if you deviate from it (of course there is no evidence for the existence of heaven or hell, either), although if you do deviate from it, you can always return later.

Given the abundance of religions around the globe, the probability that the one you happened to have been brought up in is true is highly unlikely. Basically all religions teach that they are the one true religion. At best, only one can be true, as you pointed out earlier. At worst, they are all false. The only rational way to test one's culturally adopted religious faith is from the perspective of an outsider, a nonbeliever, with the same level of reasonable skepticism that a believer already uses when examining the other religious faiths he or she rejects. If you can do that and show how Catholicism is still objectively true, then Catholicism is the one true religion, and all nonbelievers could rationally convert. The problem is that there is just no evidence to support its truth. Again, Richard Carrier's Proving History and its companion On the Historicity of Jesus are the most comprehensive scholarly treatments on the existence of Jesus. Carrier has done a lot of scholarship on the early history of the church and the facts do not hold up the way that the Catholic church would make you think they do. Not to mention that "God's true church" has been involved in some nasty terrible acts throughout history and held some embarrassingly mistaken views about reality, and it is not the paragon of moral virtue that an institution with divine inspiration would exhibit. I would challenge you to question your faith as an outsider. Read those books by Richard Carrier, for instance. Read The Outsider Test For Faith by John Loftus and question your faith as an outsider would. And if you still hold to Catholicism as the one true religion, then you have not lost anything. But if you are convinced by reasonable, skeptical arguments that Catholicism is mistaken at bare minimum or at most totally false, then you have gained a truer perspective on reality.

No reason to be rude, dude.

> Stories aren't evidence.

Of course they are. Every day in courts all over this country, attorneys call witnesses to the stand to tell their stories, and those are counted as evidence. I direct you to http://www.justia.com/trials-litigation/docs/caci/200/202.html:

"Evidence can come in many forms. It can be testimony about what someone saw or heard or smelled. It can be an exhibit admitted into evidence. It can be someone’s opinion.

"Direct evidence can prove a fact by itself. For example, if a witness testifies she saw a jet plane flying across the sky, that testimony is direct evidence that a plane flew across the sky. Some evidence proves a fact indirectly. For example, a witness testifies that he saw only the white trail that jet planes often leave. This indirect evidence is sometimes referred to as 'circumstantial evidence.' In either instance, the witness’s testimony is evidence that a jet plane flew across the sky.

"As far as the law is concerned, it makes no difference whether evidence is direct or indirect. You may choose to believe or disbelieve either kind. Whether it is direct or indirect, you should give every piece of evidence whatever weight you think it deserves."

> Well then present a single piece, just one piece of verifiable evidence that miracles or demonic possessions occur.

Craig Keener of Asbury Theological Seminary has a recent two-volume work, "Miracles", that deals with the biblical miracles (volume 1) and post-biblical accounts (volume 2), collecting and evaluating many accounts up to the present day. A quick google will turn up plenty of reviews, videos, interviews, articles, debates with Keener on the topic.

http://www.amazon.com/Miracles-Credibility-Testament-Accounts-Volume/dp/0801039525

> occultists have zero magical powers

There are plenty of evidences out there of the legitimacy of these things. You obviously, like everyone else, choose what you will believe, and you live by faith in what you deem to be evidence vs. hearsay.

> where did their magic come from?

Spiritual forces of the occult. I don't think it has disappeared from the earth at all.

> If you are going to attempt to claim that the stories of exodus are history

There are a number of evidences for the Israel exodus from Egypt. If you would like to discuss them, I'd be glad to.

And, btw, there weren't millions of them. Realistic numbers from the biblical account put the population of the Israelites at about 25,000.

> Or reading. Maybe I read.

Well, I'll take that as an insult. The implication is that I don't. Hm. A bit of prejudice on your part.

> Is it faith to not believe something that has no other backing?

I define faith as an assumption of truth based on the evidence (and faith is always based on evidence) that makes it reasonable to make that assumption. When I go to sit in a chair, I can't be 100% sure that it will hold me (chairs occasionally do break). But I've sat in this chair 100 times, my eyes tell me it looks the same, and so I plant my rear in it, believing and assuming it will hold me. It's the same when I turn the key to start my car (I have faith it will start), going to the store (I have faith it's still there), or thousands of other things in daily life. It's what the author of Hebrews claims in Heb. 11.1: "Now faith is being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see." There is a certainty based on evidence, though because it is not seen it is subject to faith, just like the store in my previous example. A blind person cannot distinguish color, but color is a real thing, and its reality is unaffected by whether or not the blind person is able to appreciate them.

Christianity is based in evidences, not blind beliefs. That's why it's historical, and not philoso-theological like Hinduism, Buddhism, and even Islam. The earth is here as evidence of a creator. The existence of the Jews as a people group is evidence of God's work in history. The evidence of Jesus as a historical figure and in his death and resurrection is presented in affirmation of his deity. Faith in the Christian definition is distinctly evidentially based, and not just an "out there" kind of "well, you just hafta believe."

I'll add this: There are certainly different kinds of existence. The existence of the chair behind you is very different from the existence of memories, or the thoughts in your brain. Your car in the driveway exists in a different way than, say, time does. Physics cannot and does not cover the whole of reality; it's only a slice of it. I said faith is an assumption of truth based on evidence that makes it reasonable to make that assumption. If your friend tells you they bought you a ticket to a concert, you'd get in the car (by faith) and go with them, because you have all kinds of evidences (your relationship with them, their tone of voice, their body language, etc.) that make it reasonable for you to believe what they are telling you. I find the same dynamics and realities in my relationship with God.

>you imbecile

I can already tell this is going to be fun.

>Jesus has literally ZERO contemporary historical data.

That's not what you asked for. You asked for peer-reviewed arguments for the historical existence of Jesus, of which I said there are thousands, and to which I said you'd have a much more difficult time finding the opposite--- peer reviewed articles and books arguing that Jesus was entirely a myth.

>I’ll wait for those libraries of sources you have.

Where do you want to start?

Probably the best place for you to start is with Bart Ehrman, a leading scholar of on the development of Christianity, and he's also a popular skeptic speaker and writer. In addition to publishing he's written popular books about how many of the books of the Bible were forgeries, and how the belief that Jesus was divine developed in early Christianity, he also wrote an entire book laying out the widely accepted case that Jesus was likely a real historical person, written directly to skeptical lay people like yourself.

If you want a great introduction to the scholarly debate about the historical Jesus, you could start here or here. I also think Dale Allison's work is great critical look at some of the issues at work in the debate. There are lots of historical reconstructions of Jesus' life. Some of the more popular ones like Marcus Borg and John Dominic Crossan tend to sell books to liberal Christian audiences, so I've always thought E.P. Sanders treatment was perferable. I'll spare you the links to scholars who identify as orthodox Christians, like Luke Timothy Johnson or N.T. Wright. It sounded like you specifically wanted more scholarly sources and not popular books, so you could just look at the scholarly journal dedicated to the study of the historical Jesus. Or the Jesus Seminar. Or either of the following Introductions to the New Testament textbooks which are used in secular universities throughout the english speaking world:

Introduction to the New Testament by Mark Allen Powell

Introduction to the New Testament by Bart Ehrman

These are the ones I'm personally most familiar with. There are tons more like Geza Vermes and Amy Jill Levine I haven't read and I'm not as familiar with.

But I'm not telling you anything you wouldn't learn in any basic 101 intro to New Testament Class. The academic consensus is that regardless of what you think about him as a religious figure, it is extremely likely that there was a first century Jew named Jesus who started a faith movement that led to him being crucified. Why do scholars think this? Because by the time Paul started writing his letters 20 years later there was a growing, spreading religious movement that worship a crucified Jew named Jesus as their messiah, and given critical analysis of the texts produced by this movement, some of which are now in the New Testament, there really doesn't exist a coherent argument for the development of this movement that doesn't include the existence of a first century Jew named Jesus who was crucified.

> Ok maybe the source isn't the best but that's not the only one.

Carrier says that it pretty much is. At the end of that review to which I linked, he laments that no one has replicated Grave's work.

But I'm happy to be convinced otherwise.

>So what are your reasons for Christianity not having ties with pagans?

This isn't how arguments work. The one making a claim provides the evidence.

But I won't deny that some pagan concepts influenced how the New Testament authors wrote. For example, Paul's use of ἱλαστήριον in Romans 3:25 almost certainly has some overtones imported from pagan Greek thought. But that's a far cry from Grave's suggestion, popular among the New Atheists today, that the whole notion of the crucified and risen Jesus is a myth taken wholesale from pagan thought.

I'll repeat my exhortation that I edited into my comment above: studying how the New Testament and early Christianity related to its own historical context is a laudable goal that I would commend to anyone willing to put in the effort, and there are good resources out there to help. Go to the scholars who are well regarded in their field, and avoid sensational, popular-level works. Ehrman's undergraduate-level textbook is a good start. For the more ambitious student, N. T. Wright's The New Testament and the People of God contains quite a bit on the historical context of early Christianity in the Greco-Roman and Second Temple Jewish worlds; it appears on many a grad school syllabus.

ME First the above quote is out of context. It is common apologist argument that is cherry picked. I can go through and show the real facts of every one of those "proofs". Whether you are a believer or not evolution is a solidified fact, one that even that catholic church is is agreement with. I can deal with almost any religious stuff but the denial of scientific fact, proven theories, I cannot abide by. That article is full of misinformation and misconstruing of documentation and facts. If you want to believe in god that is fine, but don't pretend to know science and biology when over the past 150 years more and more evidence has come to light proving the theory of evolution. And don't say "it's just a theory" when a theory in the scientific discord is of the highest caliber of proofs so to say. Whatever you wanna believe is fine, but proven fact denial is ignorant.
15 hrs · Like

ME I'll even give you a compromise, god used evolution to create the world we live in. It is a proven concept and you can see it in action if you would like sources. It is a well researched, conclusive theory that explains all the life that has occurred on this planet, including you and me, and the evidence for it grows and grows all the time.
14 hrs · Like

DBAG , that RawStory "Did Jesus Exist?" article is ridiculous propaganda peddled out to credulous suckers. It doesn't speak well for their case that the "scholar" they hang their hat on- David Fitzgerald- isn't a scholar at all, but a self-publis...See More

Did Jesus Exist?
One may well choose to resonate with the concerns of our post-modern despisers of established religion. But...
HUFFINGTONPOST.COM
12 hrs · Like · 1

DBAG http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wlp63Lxrxi0

The Extra Biblical Evidence for the Historicity of Jesus Christ.
Documentary: Evidence for the historical existence of...
YOUTUBE.COM
12 hrs · Like · 2

ME Religion is ridiculous propaganda peddled out to credulous suckers. Was there a hippy running around at the time pissing people off? Maybe, but all the supernatural bullshit did not happen. So it doesn't matter either way.
2 hrs · Like

ME Either way this was about evolution, which if you don't think makes sense you aren't worth bothering with anyway. The Jesus thing is whatever, evolution is facts. End of story.
2 hrs · Like

DBAG Actually, this did start out as a discussion about Jesus. And your assertion that "all the supernatural bullshit did not happen" has not been demonstrated to be true.
2 hrs · Like

ME Demonstrate me some supernatural stuff then.
2 hrs · Like

DBAG Well YOU asserted that the supernatural stuff didn't happen, so the burden of proof is properly on you to prove it DIDN'T happen, but in fact there is a pretty solid historiographical case for the Resurrection.

http://www.amazon.com/The-Resurrection.../dp/0830827196

The Resurrection of Jesus: A New Historiographical Approach
The question of the historicity of Jesus' resurrection has...
AMAZON.COM
2 hrs · Like · 1

ME Your reasoning is wrong, I have nothing to prove to you. I am done with this conversation, it is boring me and is the same apologetic garbage. Talking snakes, resurrection, people turning to salt, whatever makes you sleep better at night. If you wanna believe in a genocidal egotistical maniac that wipes whole races of people out for no reason, lets people starve and die every day for no reason, and wants you to be ashamed of what you are on your basic human level then good for you. I will live my fulfilling life without the necessity to believe in fairy tales.Good day sir.
1 hr · Edited · Like

DBAG So basically, your mind has been closed from the beginning, and you're unwilling to consider any evidence that might challenge your pre-formed conclusion, since that would involve opening yourself up to possibilities you've already decided were wrong before the discussion began. Do I have that right? Great "rational", "evidence-based" reasoning, bro!
1 hr · Like

ME I have done more reading on this stuff and grew up a staunch believer, I know what they have to say and I keep up with it bro. I've read my bible cover to cover, I've read all these apologist arguments, circular reasoning. everything. I keep up with it. And my conclusion still comes to hogwash. Like I said before :
Joshua Hege's photo.
1 hr · Like

DBAG You obviously know jack-shit about what you're talking about if you uncritically believe an internet puff piece hawking a book by a vanity-press kook, and are completely oblivious to the historical consensus on Jesus. Like most atheists promulgating the Christ-myth garbage on the internet, you've never read a single book on the subject (Whenever I encounter an atheist posing as an expert on the historicity of Jesus, the question "Name a single book you've read on the subject" always stops them dead in their tracks,) and I'm guessing you've cobbled together your information from things you saw in facebook graphics and YouTube videos. Basically, you make a mockery of the evidence-based worldviews you claim to have. Not everything you read on the internet is true, bro. Read a book for once in your life, something that actually gives sources for its claims, it won't kill you!
1 hr · Like · 1

ME No Meek Messiah: Michael Paulkovich, there's a book I read. I read consistently. I never said he didn't exist, I said it is unlikely, and very unlikely he existed as he is portrayed today. As for your typical rude Christian attitude when someone questions your beliefs, loving as it may be, go fuck yourself. I'm done arguing with you.
1 hr · Like

DBAG Ah yes, "No Meek Messiah", published on that prestigious "Spillix, LLC" imprint. As I said, if a vanity press publication by an author with ZERO academic qualifications is the first and only book you've read on the subject, you obviously chose a book that you felt was going to reinforce your pre-formed judgements on the matter. You're starting with your conclusion, and then choosing your evidence to fit your conclusion. Basically, you're doing exactly what atheists always accuse Christians of doing.

Look, I get it. You're an atheist. You like pretending you're smart. It's kinda your thing. You like looking haughtily down on the views of the great masses and clucking "herp derp fairy tales derp derp santa claus herp derp." Unfortunately, as with all edumacated-by-teh-intarwebz atheists, there's really no substance behind the superior posturing.

Well you've run into at least one guy here you can't bullshit. You know it too— if you were really pleased with your performance, you wouldn't keep responding to my posts after saying you're done.

All I'm asking is that you proceed with a little more humility. You're an atheist!?! Hey, more power to you! Here's the cookie you've always wanted! You believe it's "unlikely" Jesus existed!?! Well you have as much right to your opinion as the people who think it's "unlikely" we landed on the moon, or it's "unlikely" 6 million Jews died in the Holocaust! We're all special flowers, unique in our own way! Just realize that there are people VASTLY more knowledgable and intelligent than you who have arrived at different conclusions than you have, that you're dealing with a 2000-year-old intellectual tradition you can't even begin to grapple with, and that if you go posing as an expert on the interwebz, you're bound to get checked by people who ACTUALLY know what they're talking about.

>start with one lie that, if true, is sufficient, but then pepper in like two or three other things that are progressively less relevant

Bingo. And it's also the mark of a truly stupid liar, because each successive addition to the excuse chain brings down the mathematical probability that the core statement is true.

(Disclaimer: considering that I'm almost 40 but I only learned about this last year from this excellent book by Richard Carrier I think it's fair to say I'm a pretty dumb motherfucker myself, but I'll try to make sense.)

Take any statement A. You don't know whether it's true or not, but you can assign it a probability of being true. Let's say that the probability is 0.5 (50%) - a coin toss is worth your best guess at this point.

Then, imagine that there are more statements like that, let's call them B, C, and D. Again, you know nothing about the truth behind them, either, but you can again estimate that each of them has a 0.5 probability of being true.

Now, take three people:

Person 1 tells you "A".

Person 2 tells you "A and B".

Person 3 tells you "A, B, C, and also D, believe me, believe me".

At this point you still don't know anything about any of those four statements, but you can calculate the probability for each person of being full of shit.

Person 1 only claimed one statement, A, so the likelihood he's full of shit is 0.5 (50%).

Person 2 went further and claimed A and B. The probability that both are true is 0.5 x 0.5 = 0.25.

Person 3 is the bigliest guy with the best words, believe me. The probability of his four-part statement chain is 0.5 x 0.5 x 0.5 x 0.5 = 0.0625 - that's 6.25%.

Because person 3 is a fucking moron he went and stacked multiple statements on top of one another, thereby bringing his full-of-shitness from a 50% likelihood to a whopping 93.75%. Just like that, what a fucking clown.

PS: You can of course have different probabilities for each statement, and they can differ from one another, too. But by definition if you don't know the truth for sure then it logically follows none of the statements can ever achieve a probability of 1. The conclusion is that every additional statement will always reduce the overall likelihood.

> Redditepsilon, 2 day old account. While a very young account is usually indicative of some sort of got'ca or make-a-claim hit and run account - Redditepsilon, your post history provides some evidence that you will actually discuss/debate against your topic post, so some short answers (mostly copy and paste from previous debates) to these common claims.

> If we look at the background historical data on the resurrection of Jesus, which is the empty tomb,

Let's look at what is arguably the most important narrative related to Jesus in Christianity, the Resurrection narratives. Ignoring the completely inaccurate portrayal of the Roman trial law and procedures in the Trial of Jesus, and the historically unsupportable removal of the body of the decessed Jesus from the crufix and tomb burial - which presumes that the body was actually placed in the tomb (link - warning a HUGH wall of text), let's look at the consistency and accuracy of the various canon Gospel narratives related to the resurrection. The much studied, and selected, Gospel canon narratives, canon selected by learned men who had both (1) strong motivation to select narratives that supported their worldview and confirmation bias and (2) demonstrated rejection of dogma/narratives that did not fit their self-selected criteria, results in a series of Resurrection narratives that are highly non-internally consistent.

• Comparison Chart: Biblical Accounts of the Resurrection
  
• A Table Comparing the Contents of the Resurrection Narratives in each of the Four Gospels
  
  Before the Christian Apologist kicks in and claims that these narratives are all essentially the same (somehow), consider the narratives from the claim that there is a truth position in Christianity/Yahweh's existence that results from the argument of internal consistency and historical fact. Given the widely different versions of the Resurrection narrative, for what is arguably the most important and essential event/tenet of Christianity, the argument from internal consistency of it's own historical fact fails to be credible.
  
  > the post-mortem apparances of Jesus to different people and groups of people
  
  Besides the claim of the apostles that they saw Jesus post-resurrection, who were these other people?
  
  > the origin of the disciples faith that Jesus rose from the dead
  
  But speaking of the appearance of post-resurrection Jesus - Jesus purposefully provided empirical physical, and falsifiable, evidence that he (Jesus) was alive and in natural physical human body form (Doubting Thomas, John 20:24-29) following the Resurrection. 1. Why does Jesus fail to provide such evidence now? and 2. In light of the actions of Jesus, why is Religious Faith considered such a virtue?
  
  > the willingness of Jesus' disciples to go to their deaths for that faith
  
  Fallacy of argumentum ad martyrium (argument from martyrdom). While the argument from martyrdom, an appeal to emotion, produces an emotional response, the act of martyrdom/suicide in no way provides, or supports, a truth position against the belief that is used to support the label of martyr. People voluntarily die for all sorts of beliefs that have no truth value.
  
  For a detailed assessment see: March to Martyrdom! (Down the Yellow Brick Road…)
  
  > is that a convincing evidence on a balance of probability, that Jesus was raised from the dead?
  
  No. The claim/assertions of resurrection is, at best, highly questionable.
  
  > And doesn't that suggest he was raised by God from the dead?
  
  Again no.
  
  > it's almost certain he [Jesus] existed.
  
  Did Jesus the man exist as depicted in the New Testament of the Bible?
  
  Given the contradictions internally within in the narratives and the contradictions in events/dates between the narratives and events/dates presented in contemporary histories, I would say that it is unlikely that, presuming existence of a historical figure, the depiction of Jesus the man in the Gospels is accurate.
  
  I will concede that there was a man, a Jewish man, that acted as a Rabbi, and that preached a form of divergent Judaism, and that lived around 4 BCE'ish till around 29 BCE'ish (when this man is said to have died). I concede that a historical Jesus existed, where Jesus is the name given to the archetype of the person upon which the Jesus narrative in the New Testament is based. Yĕhōšuă‘, Joshua, Jesus, יְהוֹשֻׁעַ, was not an uncommon name within the Hebrew community and may represent the actual name of this archetypal person. This Jesus character is also attributed with what can arguably be described as a lite version of the morality of Buddhism, and this Jesus was a decent, though with a rather shallow philosophy, fellow. This Jesus was also atypical of the contemporary Jews as he was in his 30's and had not married.
  
  The Divine narrative attributed to the Jesus character, however, is a different issue.
  
  If you are interested in a mythist position concerning the historical Jesus, check out:
  
  
• On the Historicity of Jesus: Why We Might Have Reason for Doubt by Richard Carrier
  
  Summary: The assumption that Jesus existed as a historical person has occasionally been questioned in the course of the last hundred years or so, but any doubts that have been raised have usually been put to rest in favor of imagining a blend of the historical, the mythical and the theological in the surviving records of Jesus. Carrier re-examines the whole question and finds compelling reasons to suspect the more daring assumption is correct. He lays out extensive research on the evidence for Jesus and the origins of Christianity and poses the key questions that must now be answered if the historicity of Jesus is to survive as a dominant paradigm. Carrier contrasts the most credible reconstruction of a historical Jesus with the most credible theory of Christian origins if a historical Jesus did not exist. Such a theory would posit that the Jesus figure was originally conceived of as a celestial being known only through private revelations and hidden messages in scripture; then stories placing this being in earth history were crafted to communicate the claims of the gospel allegorically; such stories eventually came to be believed or promoted in the struggle for control of the Christian churches that survived the tribulations of the first century. Carrier finds the latter theory more credible than has been previously imagined. He explains why it offers a better explanation for all the disparate evidence surviving from the first two centuries of the Christian era. He argues that we need a more careful and robust theory of cultural syncretism between Jewish theology and politics of the second-temple period and the most popular features of pagan religion and philosophy of the time. For anyone intent on defending a historical Jesus, this is the book to challenge.
  
  OP, if you wish to have a more indepth discussion/debate, a suggestion... Pick just one claim/assertion, start a new topic (here in /r/debateanatheist or /r/DebateReligion), present your claim and supporting argument/position, and then defend that claim and argument. When you post as many claims as you did in this topic post (and presented without actual credible evidence or supporting argument), the length of a full and detailed response becomes silly.
  
  ----
  
  EDIT: Going back to the empty tomb argument....
  
  OP, here are some previous discussions concerning the claims made around the empty tomb that came up in /r/AcademicBiblical.
  
  /r/AcademicBiblical is a fairly active subreddit that discusses early Judaism and Christianity—with a focus on Biblical texts, but also related noncanonical literature (1 Enoch, the Dead Sea Scrolls, etc.)—in a scholarly context. A highly recommended subreddit for all those interested in studies of Judaism and Christianity.

Eh. I’m sure this is pointless, but I did my undergrad in church history. The ‘overwhelming scholarship’ you reference just doesn’t exist. If anything, scholarship is overwhelming in the OTHER direction.

Just, take the canonization of the Bible for example. In THE MOST general of terms, a cannon was somewhat agreed upon about 250 years after the birth of Christ, and would go through a progressive series of additions, subtractions, and revisions until the 16th century!

One of the criteria for canonization was authorial integrity, that the book was written by who it claimed to be written by. What’s known as pseudepigraphy, or writing in another authors name pretending to be that person, was INCREDIBLY common in the ancient world. Modern scholars agree that Paul wrote 8 of the 13 books attributed to him. The other 5 are very questionable.

This is a good history of the subject: https://brill.com/view/title/13087

Bart D. Ehrman’s work is a good place to start reading, as far as general scholarly consensus is concerned: The New Testament: A Historical Introduction to the Early Christian Writings https://www.amazon.com/dp/019020382X/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_i_pd5dBb4EWCZRH

Be warned: you WILL find a lot of blogs and word press websites that refute these texts and authors with a scholarly front. You will not find serious, peer reviewed refutations of these authors or ideas.

So that raises an interesting question, doesn’t it? Isn’t all scripture God breathed? Did God lie when he said Paul wrote the books he didn’t?

Also, yes, scholars very much agree that the Bible, as a whole and in parts, is a continuity NIGHTMARE.

>Wikipedia does not seem to agree with your authoritative stance on these issues.

When wikipedia becomes the goto for scholarship, let me know.

>Why wouldn't you mention this evidence, or give the sources about it?

Because the evidence is in entire books that you have to read through in order to understand it. Look into the authorship of the gospels and the research that various scholars have done... a lot of it is available online, I am sure, but I am not interested in doing the research for you. There are all sorts of things in the gospels that raise huge red flags as to who actually wrote them, like geographical errors, the fact that Jesus and his disciples spoke aramaic and not greek, errors in jewish custom, etc.

>Many first hand accounts are not written in the first person, and many first hand account include parts that the author was not present, but was informed about later. You are jumping to conclusion in the extreme.

I'm jumping to conclusions? You have a piece of writing that is completely anonymous. It doesn't claim to be an eye witness account. It has numerous scenes that could not have been witnessed by anyone, and numerous other scenes that when considered together make it obvious that no one person could have been the source. That doesn't even take into account the other research I am talking about. Even based on just this, the most obvious conclusion is that it was not written by an eye witness. There is literally no evidence that points to that conclusion. Yet you say I am the one jumping to conclusions? Right.

>A few, but one of the main reasons many weren't added, was because they doubted the authorship. It's good to know that they were vetting out the letters for authenticity, even in the very early church, wasn't it?

Actually there were dozens. And the way they determined if something was authentic was basically whether the writings matched their current beliefs or not. For example, at the council of Nicea, any gospels that portrayed Jesus as being more divine than human were left out. It wasn't about determining which document had the most credibility. They didn't have forensic investigatory methods to determine that stuff. It was almost exclusively about whether the document was heretic or not. The only reason that the gospels even have the names they do is because Papias gave them those names to make them more credible (things were seen as more credible if they had an apostle's name on it... such was the state of their credibility checks). The claim at that time was that Mark was a follower of Peter, not Jesus, and that he was not an eyewitness. Iraneus was the first to suggest that more than one gospel should be followed... before him, it would have been very unusual to follow the teachings of more than one.

>To say that the apostle John did not write John, simply because it was not written in the first person, and he probably didn't see absolutely everything he wrote about personally, is ludicrous.

I'm sorry, but we know with almost absolute certainty that none of the disciples wrote John. The vast majority of modern scholars believe (and teach in schools all across the world) that John was written later having been passed orally to different communities.

Here is a book by Christian scholar Richard Bauckham that tries to make the case that the gospels are based on eye witness testimony.

http://www.amazon.com/Jesus-Eyewitnesses-Gospels-Eyewitness-Testimony/dp/0802863906/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1295405950&sr=8-3

In fact, he only asserts that a single one of the Gospels was written direct by an eyewitness: the Gospel of John. However, he does not think he was a disciple, but instead just an unnamed follower. Credibility kind of goes out the window when you've narrowed it down to "an unnamed follower." As I said, he doesn't actually argue that the other three gospels are based on first or even second hand eye witness testimony, and he admits that most scholars won't agree with his view on John.

I can assure you that this is taught in seminaries around the world, and is accepted by scholars all over the world, christian or not.

> Why, Christianity as opposed to atheism or other religions?

Hey man, I can't help you much with the questions about the specifics of creation and the role death plays in it, that has never bothered me a lot and I came to Christianity already believing that evolution is true. But I can help you with this question, I hope.

If you really want to find out you will have to do your own research on Christianity and other religions and on atheism and make up your mind. That said I think the historical evidence for the resurrection of Jesus is very strong. I'd encourage you, if you have the time and money, to read the following two books: The Jesus Legend by Boyd & Eddy, and The Resurrection of Jesus by Licona. Both are very thorough and scholarly, the first dealing with the reliability of the gospels in general and the latter dealing with Jesus' resurrection in particular.

If you want a well grounded faith, you need to have a solid foundation. So many people believe in Jesus because they think the Bible is inerrant and when they discover that it isn't so, their faith quickly falls away. When our faith depends on the inerrancy of the Bible, our faith depends on our ability to resolve any and all of the apparent (and real) contradictions, both internal to the Bible and between Bible and external reality (like with young earth creationism and science). When we come across a contradiction that we can't resolve, our faith then will quickly come crashing down.

It should be the other way around: Jesus should be our foundation, and because Jesus is God and He held Scripture in high regard, we should have a healthy respect for Scripture as well. Perhaps then we won't tie ourselves in knots in trying to come up with tortured interpretations whenever the house of cards of inerrancy threatens to come crashing down. Look to Jesus when something in Scripture doesn't make sense; Jesus is the full revelation of God, the clearest picture (or icon if you like) of God that we will ever get in this earthly life.

>If you want me to take the evidence seriously, this is the only way.

Baloney, it isn't the only way to take evidence - one simply critically exams the evidence - that the way to accept or reject evidence. But let's play your game.

Bruce Metzger was probably the most renowned NT textual critic in the last 100 year.

While the UBS5 or NA28 gives the conclusions of the textual committee that decided on the precise reading for each passage of the Greek New Testament, Metzger's A Textual Commentary of the NT gives the reasoning for each of these variant passages.

Here is Metzger's conclusion:

By comparison with the New Testament, most other books from the ancient world are not nearly so well authenticated. The well-known New Testament scholar Bruce Metzger estimated that the Mahabharata of Hinduism is copied with only about 90 percent accuracy and Homer's Iliad with about 95 percent. By comparison, he estimated the New Testament is about 99.5 percent accurate. So the New Testament text can be reconstructed with over 99 percent accuracy. And, what is more, 100 percent of the message of the New Testament has been preserved in its manuscripts! [B. M. Metzger, "Recent Trends In The Textual Criticism Of The Iliad And The Mahabharata", Chapters In The History Of New Testament Textual Criticism, 1963, E. J. Brill: Leiden, pp. 142-154.]

Now of course you will reject Metzger since he is a Christian. But curiously Metzger also wrote The Text of the New Testament: Its Transmission, Corruption, and Restoration with famed athiest/agnostic and Biblical critic Bart Erhman.

Ehrman and Metzger state in that book that we can have a high degree of confidence that we can reconstruct the original text of the New Testament, the text that is in the Bibles we use, because of the abundance of textual evidence we have to compare. The variations are largely minor and don’t obscure our ability to construct an accurate text. The 4th edition of this work was published in 2005 – the same year Ehrman published Misquoting Jesus, which relies on the same body of information and offers no new or different evidence to state the opposite conclusion.

Here is what Erhman said in a footnote in his book Misquoting Jesus: Bruce Metzger is one of the great scholars of modern times, and I dedicated the book to him because he was both my inspiration for going into textual criticism and the person who trained me in the field. I have nothing but respect and admiration for him. And even though we may disagree on important religious questions – he is a firmly committed Christian and I am not – we are in complete agreement on a number of very important historical and textual questions. If he and I were put in a room and asked to hammer out a consensus statement on what we think the original text of the New Testament probably looked like, there would be very few points of disagreement – maybe one or two dozen places out of many thousands. The position I argue for in ‘Misquoting Jesus’ does not actually stand at odds with Prof. Metzger’s position that the essential Christian beliefs are not affected by textual variants in the manuscript tradition of the New Testament.

So now we have, in addition to a Christian expert that says the Biblical text is 99.5% accurate we have an atheist/agnostic expert who agrees.

Note: to review the many errors in Erhman's book Misquoting Jesus see here

>I don't, but the possibility is there due to their organizational ties. You don't think it's in their best interest to skew evidence to further their narrative?

Can we level this same criticism at you? That you will "skew evidence to further their narrative"?

How does one even have a conversation if one assume s that their interlocutor is so biased that it interferes with their rationality?

It seems the best we can do is assume that we are all being as unbiased as we can and the critically examine the evidence and arguments.

You want me to list every source I used for seven years? I don't think I can do that. I'll hit a few high points, though. First, note I am a Christian, but I don't believe in a lot of the OT (Adam & Eve, Noah's Ark, etc.) and some of the NT (Revelation, immunity to snake venom, etc.). My research ultimately led me to believe that Jesus existed, character as depicted, and that the resurrection happened. I believe in evolution, a ~14 billion year old universe, entropy, and pretty much everything else science finds.

/r/Christianity is an excellent source of information. Somebody will always have a reference to link you to. The first thing I did on this journey was to read the Bible and look up every single thing that sounded off to me. That alone took over a year or so.

Mike Licona's book on the resurrection is my favorite by far.

Several books and other info from www.biologos.org are very helpful. Belief in an Age of Reason, The Language of God, and The Reason for God are at the top for me.

These are just the Christian ones. As I said, I also looked into atheist publications and some stuff on the other top religions (mostly online sources like Wiki). It took years, though. I started out as an atheist and ultimately converted.

Aside from the very important Yale course which you found, you'll have to acquire and read books, like Kugel's How to Read the Bible or Ehrman's The New Testament: A Historical Introduction to the Early Christian Writings, many of which you can find in local libraries.

There are also a few nice online resources. It's down at the moment, but when it comes back up, check out COJS which has a nice collection of introductory material and beyond for many of the major eras.

The important thing is to continue to learn, grow and get more of a feel for the very vast amount that you need to know if you want to fully understand the context and development of Judaism, Christianity and the world from which they came. If it drives you, intellectually speaking, you'll find that to be very rewarding as you continue to challenge the notions you've held in the past to gain a more nuanced understanding of your own beliefs and what you feel to be true.

Elements of Exegesis the guy is a moderate evangelical, but the ideas here are pretty good.

How to read the Bible for all its worth by Fee and Stuart Great intro to reading the different genres of scripture. Two evangelical scholars.

Invitation to Biblical Interpretation Written by two heavy hitting scholars, it's a big book with a ton of info on how to interpret all parts of scripture.

Grasping God's Word Probably a good place to start as it is a workbook/textbook rolled into one. You get a lot of great info with tons of exercises.

Hello!

Just because there is no evidence that any religion has it right doesn't mean there is no God.

1. But it is a least feasible that the universe has a self-sufficient cause in itself, but even then there could still be god. Of course, he's not the kind of God you pray to for a new bike, or even pray to forgiveness for stealing a bike. God would be more like an epiphenomenon of the universe or maybe something that undergirds causation if you think one state of affairs is insufficient to bring about another state of affairs.
   
   
2. Ummm, I study brains and humans are pretty fucking special
   
   
3. Living things are made of the exact same stuff non-living things are. In fact, if you made a non-living thing that could take in chemicals, synthesize molecules, incorporate those molecules into it's own body and excrete waste products, I would call that a living thing.
   
   I urge you to not completely discard your Christianity. Jesus became a myth creature only later, there was a real jesus who did actually say some profound stuff. So i'd recommend you look at what practices and teachings you had during your Christianity and maintain some of them, but for different reasons than formally. Oh and if you are intellectually curious as to what Jesus actually said and actually believed I'd recommend The Gospel of Jesus, which has an interesting take, Jesus: Apocalyptic Prophet of the New Millennium, which is more historically rigorous, and the Five Gospels: What did Jesus really say?, which is a good reference book on the historicity of individual biblical Jesus quotes
   
   Oh and ---> Christian Deism

Get yourself a copy of Grasping God's Word by Duvall and Hayes. There are plenty of good books on how to exegete the Bible but frankly this is the best I have ever read for a relative beginner. You don't need to know Greek or Hebrew, but down the line as you get into it, if you wanted there are things like Strongs guides, Interlinears, Eclectic Texts like the Nestle-Aland 28th edition. And some free computer programs. Biblos.com is a free resource with more material than most people will ever need... I go there a lot when I need to reference the Masoretic text. But they have commentaries and other resources as well.

IMO, MacCulloch's book is quite a commitment, and, I suppose, it would depend on what time frame you are seeking the history of. If you are looking for an in-depth history of the biblical era, this isn't the book for you - only the first few chapters are devoted to anything pre-Jesus, and the life and times of Jesus get another few dozen pages. Perhaps I'm biased as post-biblical era Christianity doesn't interest me, but I view it as more a book of theology rather than history. Make sure you explore the table of contents to make sure you know what you are getting into.

If you are not seeking something devotional, I recommend these Yale Religious Studies courses every chance I get. They will give you the background you need to tackle more specialized books in areas of interest.

If you are looking for books, I'd recommend Kugel's How to Read the Bible or Coogan's Intro for Old Testament, and Ehrman is the standard academic introduction to New Testament.

"History of Christianity" is a pretty broad topic. If there is something specific that interests you, I'll try to come up with more recommendations.

Thanks for your nice message.

These arguments made a big difference in my life and if they make a difference in someone else’s life (or at the very least challenged them to give serious consideration to the evidence of natural theology) I am very happy to hear it.

I understand your reservations about the argument from desire. I think I mention in my discussion of it that it has only moderate force but has an important place in the cumulative case.

I would highly recommend some further reading because my posts are all capsule versions of arguments that are presented and defended with much greater rigour in my sources. If you only ever read two books on this subject let them be The Existence of God by Richard Swinburne and The Resurrection of the Son of God by N. T. Wright. If you have an iPad or Kindle both are obtainable in a matter of seconds online.

And regarding your question, I recommend this video: The whole thing or from around 6:00 if you’re short on time. In short: Aquinas suggested that wealth and poverty can each be either a blessing or a curse. Much more would need to be said to give a satisfactory answer but I think that is a good starting point. And of course if third world poverty is something that could be ended if first world countries were totally committed to ending it, then ultimately it is a consequence of moral evil.

All the best :)

> Hey there everyone, I’m just wondering how do we know that the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John were written by eye witnesses or people that had access to eye witnesses? Any help is appreciated and God bless!

1. On a scholarly level, check out the book Jesus and the Eyewitnesses: The Gospels as Eyewitness Testimony (2nd edition) by Richard Bauckham (PhD, University of Cambridge). However this is a very long academic tome, but it's extremely erudite.
   
   
2. On a popular but still intelligent level, a much shorter and more recently published book that has tons of information (including your question) packed into a short space is Can We Trust the Gospels? by Peter Williams (PhD, University of Cambridge). It's a great introduction for someone new to this topic.

You can look at religion (in my example religious text) from an academic lens (ex:Bart D. Ehrman’s textbook on the New Testament) where using historical fragments of manuscript you can see what portions were likely edited or added later. You factor in writing styles and other variables and evaluate it as a historical text that changes over time (and why those changes occur). This evaluation let’s you see that say some authors may have influenced the writing of other later writers who may have added elements they thought weren’t sufficiently elaborated (ex: resurrection) which then led to later editors adding that to the earlier authors so they all were in agreement. It can actually be really interesting to look at the text in this way.

Within Catholicism, the Jesuits are particularly interested in science / academia which has sometimes created theological debate where they push / publish something at odds with a historically held position. They’ve actually contributed to several areas of science (ex: experimental physics in the 17th century), but someone with more background would need to speak more to this.

Comparing a class I had in primary school (the equivalent of 6th grade) to later classes outside of school in the US there were notable differences. The first emphasized ethics and pulled in history and science as tools to help explain and answer “why is this the case” or “how does this work” questions while the second was more “this is what is true and anything that conflicts must not be true” which threw out a lot of history / science that didn’t agree (ex: evolution).

It’s the difference between allowing scientific knowledge to influence your beliefs so that you see evolution as an even greater and more powerful miracle than a simple creation as is vs. ignoring science and seeing evolution as fiction because it wasn’t in the book.

The heavily upvoted assertions in this thread simply tell us what we want to hear. Hence there are so few requests for citations and sources for these statements.

For those genuinely interested in reading research from both sides (rather than simply the flavour of the month sensation 'the real Jesus is this' author), why not check out a source such as NT Wright's 'The Resurrection of the Son of God', a 700 page work by a man who is arguably one of the best historical researchers and lexicographers of the period and its surrounding times.

Surely either people are genuinely interested in an issue, or they're merely genuinely interested in having their own preferences confirmed.

Wonder if the downmods will flow in...sometimes it seems the wonderful Redditors who I've enjoyed good honest discussion with are being replaced with diggbots who simply downmod anything that disagrees with their own view. Reddiquette people...this contributes to the discussion by offering a well-researched alternative viewpoint.

N.T. Wright is generally considered to be the current expert on Paul.

A really great and short book, adapted from a lecture series: Paul in Fresh Perspective.

An exhaustive 1700 page monster: Paul and the Faithfulness of God. I'm working through this one now. It's very informative and a good read, but it really does engage with pretty much every academic writer of any substance from the past hundred years, so sometimes it feels like you're listening in on the middle of a conversation. The earlier books in this series, particularly The New Testament and the People of God (which is volume 1, and has much of the background material) covers the political and religious situation during the Second Temple period. It has a lot of great discussion about the Pharisees (a very complex group of people) and their opponents, Roman and Greek stuff, and so on.

>our religion, ie: for Judaism

I was under the impression that you didn't believe the Torah. Do you?

>Put up or shut up.

I'm not sure how you would like me to, but I'll list some resources below. If you would rather delve into it by having a strict dialogue between the two of us, that's cool too. I may not be able to respond quickly every time, depending on how this carries forth, but I'll do what I can. As you mentioned, your soul is "at stake and all that."

Gary Habermas and N.T. Wright are the top two resurrection scholars. Michael Licona is also a leading scholar on the resurrection debate. Philosophers such as Richard Swinburne and Antony Flew have even shown their faces on the scene as well.

Books

• The Case for the Resurrection of Jesus by Gary Habermas & Michael Licona
  
• The Resurrection of Jesus: A New Historiographical Approach by Michael Licona
  
• The Resurrection of God Incarnate by Richard Swinburne
  
• The Resurrection of the Son of God by N.T. Wright
  
• The Resurrection Factor by Josh McDowell
  
• The Son Rises: Historical Evidence for the Resurrection of Jesus by William Lane Craig
  
  Presentations
  
  
• Gary Habermas - "The Resurrection Argument That Changed a Generation of Scholars"
  
  
• William Lane Craig - "Did Jesus Rise From the Dead?"
  
  
• William Lane Craig - "The Evidence for Jesus's Resurrection."
  
  
• N.T. Wright - "The Resurrection"
  
  
• N.T. Wright - "Did Jesus Really Rise from the Dead?"
  
  
• Michael Licona - "Historical Evidence for the Resurrection of Jesus"
  
  
• Michael Licona - "Evidence for the Resurrection"
  
  
• Doug Powell - "Did Jesus Rise from the Dead?"
  
  Debates
  
  Gary Habermas, William Lane Craig, and Michael Licona are the most frequent debaters on the Christian side, and Bart Ehrman and Richard Carrier are the most frequent debaters on the non-Christian side. Habermas, Craig, and/or Licona have debated the following (possibly) recognizable names on this issue: Bart Ehrman, Richard Carrier, Antony Flew, John Shelby Spong, Gerd Ludemann, Shabir Ally, Arif Ahmed, John Dominic Crossan, Robert M. Price, and Dan Barker.
  
  YouTube is great for finding those debates. There are also, of course, dialogues in book form.
  
  >if you don't like my tone
  
  I'm actually enjoying your tone, haha

>Well as a Christian if you don't think it's a lake of fire he throws people in, you're wrong.

You're claiming that the Eastern Orthodox Churches (and Oriental Orthodox maybe?) aren't Christian? That's a bold statement, Cotton.

Besides that, Revelation is about the persecution that the author's readers were going through. A pretty accessible book on that would be Revelations: Visions, Prophecy, and Politics in the Book of Revelation by Elaine Pagels. Even if you don't accept that view, apocalypses and visions are known to use metaphors and allegories.

Now, in regards to other ideas of the "fate of the damned", there's multiple words that are used: Gehenna, Hades, Sheol and one instance of Tartarus (in Petrine letters). Gehenna is a literal physical place of burning, Hades is the Greek underworld and Sheol was just your grave, nothing else (later it picked up a connotation of an afterlife "realm" where all souls went after death). Once we understand that, it's not too hard to see that they're all being used as metaphor - this shouldn't surprise you because Jesus is presented as using that literary device as well as parables throughout his life. Understood as such, it's quite easy to see that the wicked/damned/whatever experience a sense of lostness, burning (like desire but the opposite?) Etc. In this case, they could be in the same "realm" as the sanctified, but experience it differently.

But that also neglects what the Greek (in the New Testament) actually says about those descriptions. For instance, the words for "eternal punishment" could be (and most likey should be) translated as "ages/age of discipline". So not only is it not "forever", it's a discipline not a punishment. And I'm perfectly inline with early Christian thinkers on this. Here's an Academic Book and a more accessible book outlining people throughout history with that interpretation. I have PDFs of the academic books, if you want to read them. A good translation with all this is mind would be this one by David Bentley Hart.

Once again, even knowing all of the above and still believing what you said , you haven't explained how people get there. Rejecting God? How could one do that? People can only reject an "idea of God". But, your view on this "lake of fire" is just one big misunderstanding.

>their "loving" God.

Just a nitpick: God is not "loving". To say God is loving is to say that there is a metaphysical order (Love) above God, which is absurd. God "is" Love, in the sense that to be "loving" one participates in the Divine.

Any typos and weird phrasings are because I'm typing on mobile at work.

Here are a few of my favorite theologians, Bible scholars, and books

For Biblical exegesis

Inductive Bible Study by Robert Traina and David Bauer

For Systematic Theology

Classic Christianity: A Systematic Theology by Thomas C. Oden (Almost anything by Oden is good really)

For Pauline Studies

Paul and the Faithfulness of God by NT Wright

The Theology of Paul by James D. G. Dunn


For Cultural Background in New Testament

Craig S. Keener (his commentary on John's Gospel is phenomenal, as is the IVP Background commentary by him)

Ben Witherington III (his commentaries are generally good)

For Christian ethics

Moral Vision of the New Testament by Richard B. Hays

For Old Testament

Walter Brueggeman (pretty much anything by this guy)

Terrence Fretheim (I especially like his commentary on Exodus)

Sandra Richter (Epic of Eden, a good primer on ancient Israelite and Canaanite culture and how it shaped the OT)

Philosophy of Religion

Soren Kierkegaard (my absolute favorite philosopher, I especially recommend Fear and Trembling)

Thomas Aquinas

St. Augustine

Alvin Plantiga (I personally dislike Plantiga's philosophy, but he's become a big name in philosophy of Religion so not someone to be ignorant of)

William Hasker

William Abraham

Omnipotence and other Theological Mistakes by Charles Hartshorne (I'm not a process theologian, but this book in particular is highly important in modern theology, definitely worth a read)


Edit:
If you wanted a broad, general sweep of theology, I'd recommend The Modern Theologians by David F. Ford. It's a good overview of various theological movements since the start of the 20th century and covers theology from many different perspectives.

You've given me a few things to research and ponder, so thank you!

For now, I'll just respond to your final questions:

> What is "agnostic"?

I would think that being agnostic on a particular question is simply neither confirming nor denying its validity. e.g. I can neither confirm nor deny the miracle claims of the Quran and Book of Mormon (along with many of the biblical miracles).

> how do you distinguish between an a priori presumption vs a conclusion?

An a priori presumption would be a decision about findings which restricts (or, perhaps, affirms) validity of certain hypotheses, despite the evidence. e.g. a Fundamentalist may have the a priori presumption that biblical miracles actually happened in history, and any evidence contrary to that assumption will be problematic to the fundamentalist. On the flip side, a secular materialist exegete may have the a priori assumption that miracles cannot happen in history, and thus any evidence to the contrary will be problematic. I don't think either of these presumptions are healthy for an unbiased view.

That said, the study of history may not be able to positively confirm a miracle hypothesis, due to the necessary constraints of such research. But there has been some work done which may suggest that historical research can positively corroborate miracle claims (e.g. Craig Keener's work). I wouldn't want to over step my competency, so I'll have to remain agnostic on that point.

Its my view that the historian must work under the constraints they're given: i.e. if a miracle did happen in history, they may not necessarily be able to positively affirm that truth. If it did not, then they can deny it's validity if they have sufficient evidence. If they are unable to deny the historicity of a miracle claim with sufficient evidence, then they ought to remain agnostic (simply allowing the validity of the miracle to remain on the conceptual table with other possible hypotheses), rather than denying its validity because of a priori presuppositions.

You're not telling the full story. There are several very very good reasons to believe that Mark's ending as we have it today is a scribal addition, and not faithful to the original author's gospel.

In addition, even very conservative scholars agree with this sentiment, including the popular pop-apologist William Lane Craig and JP Moreland. Also, renowned conservative Greek Scholar Bruce Metzger writes a detailed section of his book devoted to this question. I would recommend picking up this book if you'd truly like to know more about what drives these scholars' beliefs. I'd like to avoid repeating their sentiments in a lengthy post here.

Ok.

Tell me about your childhood situation:

parents marital situation

financial situation

siblings

location(s)

Elaborate as much as you feel comfortable

EDIT:

yeah, you are an very conservative mormon, and somehow you think you didn't suffer childhood trauma. Okaaaaayyyyyyy.......

You do realize that parents long-term, consistently lying to their children is broadly accepted, and has been for a long time, as significantly traumatic to a child, right?

https://www.google.com/search?q=parents+lying+to+children+considered+trauma

and do some reading on something called NPD

https://www.amazon.com/Generation-Americans-Confident-Assertive-Entitled/dp/1476755566

https://www.amazon.com/Why-Always-About-You-Narcissism/dp/0743214285

https://www.amazon.com/Wizard-Oz-Other-Narcissists-Relationship/dp/0972072837

Instead of bottle-ing up your misgivings about devoting your entire life orientation around a gigantic lie your parents forced on you, you might try being honest with yourself and doing some actual research about the topic. Here's a good place to start if/when you summon up enough courage and honesty to do so:

https://www.amazon.com/Historicity-Jesus-Might-Reason-Doubt/dp/1909697494

Obviously you're intelligent enough analytically to already realize that Mormonism is complete and total bullshit, yet you can't seem to accept it and move on. The problem seems to be you can't accept that your parents subverted your life for their own desires. Again, you'll find reading about NPD's effects on children very enlightening. I'll take a wild guess that there are some addiction and avoidant issues you need to address as well.

Here's a good start:

http://www.psychiatrictimes.com/special-reports/new-insights-narcissistic-personality-disorder/page/0/1

Ronningstam, Harvard U., and is considered one of the, if not the, best researchers in the world on NPD. Hopefully that measures up to your grandiose personal standards of quality research.

Btw, ADHD is one of the biggest garbage can diagnoses in modern medicine. Can't focus consistently DOES NOT automatically = ADHD. It's just as worthless a standalone dx as "irritable bowel syndrome". Amazingly, nearly every person with a personality disorder and/or significant addiction could also qualify for an ADHD diagnosis, if their other issues were not taken into consideration (DSM, flawed as it is, actually qualifies this in hierarchical diagnostic criteria, but I'm sure you already knew that from your super extensive personal research into ALL of psychology, psychiatry, and brain science, not just some reading about ADHD, right?).

Case studies are FULL of examples of zombie-fied children of religious-version narcissistic parents. You can plenty of case study books available for purchase online.

Good luck!

> I implore people to simply read their Bibles without any aids.

While I think there tends to be a great deal of atheism in this forum, I agree it can be enlightening to simply read the Bible - particularly as it applies to a comparison with what the WTBS presents as biblical truth. And, for those who might want to pursue such a course, I've been working through the following title as an alternative to the standard KJV or NIV:

http://www.amazon.com/The-New-Testament-Richmond-Lattimore/dp/0865475245

While Lattimore has significant credibility as a translator, I've found reading the Bible (or at least the New Testament in this case) without the intrusion of chapter and verse to be particularly useful. There is less a tendency to be captured by the writing as clause and sub-clause as you might with a legal document and more an opportunity to follow the writing as it was originally presented; the epistles were just epistles after all.

I've noticed a number of instances where this approach has shifted my understanding of what was intended and, by contrast, how fractured our view of the biblical narrative becomes when we simply verse hop as the favoured study approach of the Witnesses.

There's lots, on all different levels. So it depends what you're looking for and what questions are important to you. You might consider:

• Reason for God by Timothy Keller - from Amazon.
  
  If you want to understand the philosophical arguments for God you could try:
  
  
• Reasonable faith or the book with the same name, which sets out some pretty standard arguments.
  
  
• Stand to Reason
  
  
• Unbelievable is a podcast where it's pretty evenly debated.
  
  Specifically on Jesus, you might try,
  
  
• The case for the resurrection of Jesus
  
  
• The resurrection of the Son of God
  
  And one last one which I haven't read, but I hear is good
  
  
• Jesus and the Eyewitnesses
  
  But honestly, simply reading the Bible, praying and earnestly seeking is the best start.

Remsburg, that's funny. Hey, at least you've read up the topic, that's better than most do. Granted, you've constructed a straw-man, as if any credible scholars accept the gospel narratives as truth. But that's awesome, there's hope for you yet.

Regardless of your ideological stance I do recommend this book:
http://www.amazon.com/The-New-Testament-Historical-Introduction/dp/0199757534

And if you don't like it you can always put it in your diaper.

> Christianity is not an evidence-based religion. It's like all other religions, which is faith-based.

While I agree that faith is a necessary component of Christianity, you seem to assert here that faith and evidence are mutually exclusive. I think this is a false dichotomy akin to the oft-repeated "science versus religion" debate topic of the last century.

Faith alone does not a Christian make. True faith always makes itself known (always "discovers itself" in the words of Edwards) in the life of the believer. In other words, faith produces evidence that demonstrates its efficacy. A love for God, a hatred for one's sin, and a spirit that strives to obey God's commands are some examples of this evidence that is apparent not only to the believer but to surrounding people. I certainly see this in my own life.

But this is not to say that one's faith cannot be bolstered by external evidence. In this category we have arguments for the existence of God and the historicity of the events described in the New Testament documents. Chief among these is the resurrection, which Paul identifies as the linchpin of the entire Christian faith.

> The resurrection of Jesus is not historical at all. The historicity of Jesus ends with his crucifixion.

As /u/RighteousDude has already pointed out, we "prove" facts of history not in a binary sense, but with degrees of confidence. Another way to put this is that given the body of evidence (documents, oral testimony, artifacts, and so on), we seek the explanation that can account for all the evidence and do so far better than any competing explanation.

The resurrection should be treated no differently. Given the evidence, virtually all scholars (to include skeptics) agree that 1) Jesus of Nazareth died in Jerusalem by crucifixion, 2) his disciples were transformed from cowards into men who boldly claimed that they saw Jesus after his death and who went on to become martyrs, 3) James (the brother of Jesus and a skeptic) was converted in the same manner, 4) Saul of Tarsus (initially an enemy of Christianity) was converted in the same manner, and 5) the tomb was discovered empty. There are many more facts that can be extracted from the available evidence, but these five are perhaps the most critical, and as mentioned, nearly everyone who studies this subject agrees on them.

So given these facts, what is the best explanation? Many have been proposed over the years, such as ideas that the someone stole the body, or that the disciples fabricated the story, or that Jesus never actually died, or that the disciples hallucinated, or even that this entire story is fiction. But each of these ideas completely fails to account for the whole body of evidence in some way or another. The best explanation that accounts for all the evidence is simply that God raised Jesus from the dead, and that the disciples, James, and Saul were all eyewitnesses of the resurrected Jesus.

The case I've summarized above is drawn from the work of Gary Habermas, whose Historical Jesus is an approachable introduction to the life of Jesus that pays special attention to the extra-Biblical sources. If you're interested in a more thorough treatment, N. T. Wright's Resurrection of the Son of God_ is a great choice.

That's a nice theory, but it has no basis on fact, no evidence for it, and the oldest manuscripts do not contain any indication of any of those heresies.

In reality, the range of locations for the oldest manuscripts varies widely, while the range of locations for the older manuscripts centers in the Catholic church. Again - the only reason you might affirm Textus Receptus is if you are Catholic.

If you'd really like to dig in, the best book I've found on the subject of manuscripts is Bruce Metzger's The Text of the New Testament.

If you read the original intro for the KJV translation it gives one of the best defenses of using the best and oldest sources for material.

Lastly, there are no differences in primary or secondary doctrine between the TR and the Critical Texts (NA28 or UBS). The ESV and NASB still agree with the KJV about practically all doctrine.

1. Have I always been an atheist? No, I was raised in protestant christianity.
   
2. If you have not always been an atheist, what were you before and what changed your mind? First? Learning science and realizing that I could prove that the Bible is fallible through independent analysis of reality, rather than depending on what other fallible people told me was true in contradiction to what I can prove to be true. Second? Realizing that not only is the Bible fallible, but that it is massively self-contradictory ... which led to: Third? Discovering conclusively that the Bible is a hodge-podge of mythological tales that have been edited, redacted, and cobbled together numerous times over the last ~28-2900 years to serve the agenda of men ... which led to: Fourth? Discovering that christianity as it is known today didn't exist some 19-2000 years ago, and that what you currently practice has very little in common to what christians in the first century CE practiced and/or believed ... which led to: Fifth? Discovering with an almost perfect certainty that Jesus never existed as a human being, and that the people that lived in the early to middle of the first century CE never believed that he did ... Paul certainly didn't, and he wrote the first books that were later included in the new testament.
   
3. If today, Jesus Christ appeared to you directly and showed you that He exists, would you be willing to follow Him and His teachings for the duration of your life? Why or why not? Why say "Jesus Christ"? This is as likely as saying that the Easter Bunny, Santa Claus, the Ghost of Christmas Past, the Flying Spaghetti Monster, or Xenu might appear in front of me to demand the same thing, and just as ridiculous a hypothetical. So, let me ask you a much more pertinent question:
   
4. What would it take for you to reconsider your faith in christianity? I can reasonably prove that Jesus never existed and is a historicized mythological construct based upon first century mystery religions syncretized with messianic Judaism (read me). I can absolutely prove that the old testament was redacted multiple times based upon the political and religious views of the time of the redaction/edit (read me). I can absolutely prove that the creation myth of Judaism was based in Canaanite mythology and later was syncretized during the Babylonian captivity (i.e., it's bullshit) and that life evolved through natural processes (read me). I can point to thousands of contradictions, impossibilities, and outright lies in your "holy book" which undermine any claims made by any of the Abrahamic religions (which is a funny title, given the absolute certainty that Abraham never existed ... nor did Moses, or any number of other prominent figures in Judeo-Christian historical mythology). I can point to the faith of members of any other religion, note that it's no weaker than the faith you have in your own, and point out that faith alone in the face of reason proves nothing. I mean ... I could go on forever on this subject, but honestly: you're asking us what it would take for us to believe, when in reality the more important question is what it would take for you to stop believing a tall tale simply because someone told you it was true in the face of actual, verifiable reality.
   
   For my part, I'd believe that Santa Claus was real if I could objectively, scientifically, and reliably demonstrate such a claim. I'd believe that Vishnu, Horus, Odin, or Zeus were real for the same reasons. In fact, I can conjure up any number of fanciful scenarios in which strange, supernatural claims could be verified and "believed" by atheists, because that's how we operate: we believe in reality, however strange it may be. Just because such a fanciful scenario can be imagined, however, doesn't give that scenario any sort of validity. Your claims are as baseless as someone that wants me to believe they have an invisible and undetectable dragon in their garage that will burn my invisible and undetectable spirit FOR ETERNITY if I don't fork over 10% of my income and obey their every incomprehensible and often immoral edict. So put yourself in the position that you so "cleverly" thought you'd put us in: what would change your mind?
   
   Oh, wait ... you don't even want to question your "faith"? That's what I thought.
   
   edit: Watch this, pause, and reflect on your beliefs.

Those 3 paras are seriously cool, thanks for sharing!

I'd like to make people aware of what may end up being Carrier's most important work: On the Historicity of Jesus: Why We Might Have Reason for Doubt.

Carrier examines all the available historical evidence (much more than many of us think, yet much less than many apologists claim) and makes a very earnest, thorough effort to use (Bayesian) probability theory to estimate the likelihoods, respectively, that Jesus was a real existing dude or that Jesus was completely mythical.

Spoiler: Although he generously errs in favor of historicity in his estimates, in the end he considers the odds of a real historical Jesus no better than about 1 in 3. That's definitely not "disproving" Jesus, but it's a basis for giving the possibility of non-Jesus some serious thought. Sadly, we're unlikely to gain any more certainty than this, unless some surprising find of ancient documents is made.

Regardless, though, of whether someone follows Carrier's reasoning and math, this book is a real treasure trove of information: about historical sources, about pre-existing Pagan myths, about OT literary templates copied by the NT authors, about motifs from Homer and other old Greek literature that cropped up in the Bible, about Jewish beliefs in "a" Jesus or Messiah long before "the" Jesus, about the narrative structure of Acts and the Gospels (including the gaping plot holes)... and so on.

Carrier's forte is not just presenting this suff, it's all very thoroughly referenced and footnoted. On some pages, there's more footnotes than body text! Whatever his critics may accuse him of, it can't be a superficial treatment or a lack of authoritative sources. So there's a lot to learn, and it's all meticulously sourced. Even without worrying about whether Jesus existed or not, this is a treasure trove on state-of-the-art historic scholarship on Jesus and the NT, and doesn't suffer from the usual religious bias or heavy reliance on the authority of other religious scholars.

Recommended? Hell yeah. Belongs on the bookshelf of anyone considering himself an intellectually "serious" atheist.

----

Footnotes/disclaimers:

• No, I don't get a kickback. I don't even like Carrier any more since he took up with the "A+" gang of Social Justice Bullies. This isn't about hero worship, though, it's about scholarship.
  
  
• This pseudo-review is a bit hasty. I haven't finished the book yet - still on Chapter 11.

1. Yes.
   
   
2. Yes, because the majority of additional gospels to those that are canonical were found accidentally. Nag Hammadi, for example. Archaeologists aren't focusing in the ME because of Christianity. There are far more culturally rich communities/civilizations there. Christianity was a non-entity in the macro scale of events in the ME until Late Antiquity.
   
   
3. I don't think Julius Caesar is a fair example because he was a Roman senator from a very well establish family in a very literate part of the world during the height of Roman legal articulation. Consider for perhaps a better comparison the different stories involving other religious leaders like Buddha, or Krisha, or even Alexander the Great outside of Plutarch.
   
   The difference with Jesus is the motivation of the authors. Historical accuracy is a modern concern. These people were writing to forward the concerns of their particular communities. The world wasn't "global". Each gospel reflected the needs of the community that produced it, whether it's Gentile vs Jew, the proliferation of miracles, high vs low Christology, etc.
   
   I think you would find this one interesting: http://www.amazon.com/New-Testament-Historical-Introduction-Christian/dp/019020382X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1458179626&sr=8-1&keywords=the+early+christians+ehrman
   

Sure. If you want scholarly resources on the resurrection, then I would suggest The Resurrection of Jesus: A New Historiographical Approach by Licona. You can get it on Amazon for about $35 and it's a long read at 700+ pages.

https://www.amazon.com/Resurrection-Jesus-New-Historiographical-Approach/dp/0830827196/ref=sr_1_1?crid=3UCOAX5QZYQUY&keywords=the+resurrection+of+jesus+mike+licona&qid=1570211397&sprefix=the+resurrection+of+Jesus%2Caps%2C157&sr=8-1

Another good scholarly resource is The Case For the Resurrection of Jesus by Habermas and Licona. You can get it for about $13 dollars on Amazon.

https://www.amazon.com/Case-Resurrection-Jesus-Gary-Habermas/dp/0825427886/ref=pd_sbs_14_1/140-8576167-7556334?_encoding=UTF8&pd_rd_i=0825427886&pd_rd_r=decfba9d-109a-4324-99c9-ba4523d42796&pd_rd_w=TIA6v&pd_rd_wg=EeKYx&pf_rd_p=d66372fe-68a6-48a3-90ec-41d7f64212be&pf_rd_r=WW1HBRRY8K7JV6EPDW3P&psc=1&refRID=WW1HBRRY8K7JV6EPDW3P

I would also suggest getting a general overview of the New Testament. Bart Ehrman is probably the world's leading skeptical scholar of the New Testament. His book on the New Testament, The New Testament: A Historical Introduction to the New Testament Writings, is a great resource and can be bought on Amazon for around $6.

https://www.amazon.com/New-Testament-Historical-Introduction-Christian/dp/0195126394/ref=sr_1_6?keywords=introduction+to+new+testament+ehrman&qid=1570211027&sr=8-6

Other books that I would strongly recommend would be:

Early Christian Writings. A short read at 200 pages. A catalog of some of the earliest Christian writings outside the New Testament. You can get it for $3 on Amazon.

https://www.amazon.com/Early-Christian-Writings-Apostolic-Fathers/dp/0140444750/ref=sr_1_1?keywords=early+christian+writings&qid=1570212985&s=books&sr=1-1

The New Testament: Its Background, Growth and Content Bruce Metzger was one of the leading New Testament scholars of the 20th century. You can get it for $20.

https://www.amazon.com/New-Testament-Background-Growth-Content/dp/1426772491/ref=pd_sbs_14_5/140-8576167-7556334?_encoding=UTF8&pd_rd_i=1426772491&pd_rd_r=d83ca7e7-e9be-4da7-b3e8-3e5b6e143a27&pd_rd_w=AUNpT&pd_rd_wg=VLsLw&pf_rd_p=d66372fe-68a6-48a3-90ec-41d7f64212be&pf_rd_r=RESQKSAY5XYMKZ939JS7&psc=1&refRID=RESQKSAY5XYMKZ939JS7

The Fate of the Apostles, by McDowell. An in-depth study of how reliable the martyrdom accounts of the apostles are. A little bit pricey at $35-40.

https://www.amazon.com/Fate-Apostles-Sean-McDowell/dp/1138549134/ref=sr_1_1?crid=JBDB9MJMOVL8&keywords=the+fate+of+the+apostles&qid=1570212064&s=books&sprefix=the+fate+of+the+ap%2Cstripbooks%2C167&sr=1-1

Ecclesiastical History, by Eusebius, a 3rd century historian. Eusebius documents the history of Christianity from Jesus to about the 3rd century. You can get it for $10.

https://www.amazon.com/New-Testament-Background-Growth-Content/dp/1426772491/ref=pd_sbs_14_5/140-8576167-7556334?_encoding=UTF8&pd_rd_i=1426772491&pd_rd_r=d83ca7e7-e9be-4da7-b3e8-3e5b6e143a27&pd_rd_w=AUNpT&pd_rd_wg=VLsLw&pf_rd_p=d66372fe-68a6-48a3-90ec-41d7f64212be&pf_rd_r=RESQKSAY5XYMKZ939JS7&psc=1&refRID=RESQKSAY5XYMKZ939JS7

An old standard is St. Augustine's Confessions. A new one is N.T. Wright's The Resurrection of the Son of God.

I find both authors compelling for different reasons. I think Augustine is great at just writing about what it's like to be human. He knew what psychology was before it was invented, and it takes a great deal of honesty and self-reflection and humility to write about what goes on in your head, rather than what you wish went on in your head.

As for Wright, I really like The Resurrection of the Son of God because I think apologetics need to start with the cross.

Right away, a curious observer would find themselves wondering how, if this Theorem is the wonderful instrument of historical objectivity both Craig and Carrier claim it to be, two people can apply it and come to two completely contradictory historical conclusions.  Yet they both use Bayes Theorem to attempt to "prove" historical things.  Something does not make sense here.


Then if we turn to who doesn't use Bayes Theorem to analyse history we find this category includes ... pretty much every single historian on the planet.  Again, this should strike the objective observer as distinctly odd.  After all, if Bayes Theorem can genuinely be applied to determine the truth or otherwise of a historical event or proposition, it's exceedingly strange that thousands of historians all over the world are not applying this remarkable tool all the time.  Richard Carrier maintains that this is because every historian on earth, except him, is too ignorant and mathematically illiterate to understand the wonders of this remarkable tool and only he has been clever enough to realise that it can be applied to history.  Given that Thomas Bayes ' theorem was first published in 1763, our objective observer would be forgiven for finding it remarkable that no-one noticed that it could be used in this way until Richard Carrier, an unemployed blogger (and a person who isn't taken seriously by most scholars), came along.

​

There are two problems here when it comes to trying to apply Bayes Theorem to history: (i) Carrier and Craig need to treat questions of what happened in the past as the same species of uncertainty as what may happen in the future and (ii) historical questions are uncertain precisely because we don't have defined and certain data to feed into the equation.


Bayes Theorem only works in cases where we can apply known information.  So, in the example above, we know how often it rains in a year and we know when the weather forecast is and isn't correct.  So by inputing this meaningful data, we can get a meaningful result out the other end of the equation.


This is not the case with history.


Bayes Theorem's application depends entirely on how precisely the parameters and values of our theoretical reconstruction of a real world approximate reality.  With a historical question, Carrier is forced to think up probabilities for each parameter he put into the equation.  This is a purely subjective process - he determines how likely or unlikely a parameter in the question is and then decides what value to give that parameter.  So the result he gets at the end is purely a function of these subjective choices. 


In other words: garbage in/garbage out.


So it's not surprising that Carrier comes up with a result on the question of whether Jesus existed that conforms to his belief that Jesus didn't - he came up with the values that were inevitably going to come up with that result.  If someone who believed Jesus did exist did the same thing, the values they inputted would be different and they would come up with the opposite result.  This is why historians don't bother using Bayes Theorem.


So what exactly is Carrier doing by applying this Theorem in a way that it can't be applied?  Apart from being incompetent, he seems to be doing little more than putting a veneer of statistics over a subjective evaluation and pretending he's getting greater precision. 


Not surprisingly, despite his usual grandiose claims that his use of Bayes Theorem is some kind of revolution in historiography, his book Proving History: Bayes's Theorem and the Quest for the Historical Jesus (2012)   has pretty much sunk without trace and been generally ignored by historical Jesus scholars and historians alike.  His failure to convince anyone except a gaggle of historically clueless online atheist fanboys of his vast genius means that Carrier is most likely to remain what he is: an unemployed blogger and general nobody with a fringe thesis.

> Do you think Jesus was a real guy?

I recently read the books on this topic by Ehrman, Doherty, and Carrier.

I found Carrier's case for a Mythical Jesus to be compelling. I found Carrier to be annoying as a writer, but his book is scholarly and well documented.

Ehrman argues for a historical Jesus. His book was almost the opposite of Carrier's. His tone was friendly and approachable. He seemed calm and reassuring. I kind of wanted him to prove his case. But his arguments sucked.

Doherty dissected Ehrman's case paragraph by paragraph. (I read Carrier first, then Ehrman, then Doherty.) Doherty raised many of the concerns I noticed myself. Ehrman's arguments just didn't make sense. Never mind the history or the evidence — I'm no scholar — his arguments didn't make logical sense.

I wouldn't say it's proven either way. Given the scarcity of evidence, it may never be. That said, Carrier made a surprisingly strong case against a historical Jesus. If Ehrman's defense of Jesus is the best that academia can do, I'd say Jesus is pretty much dead.

But I would love to see a serious and scholarly attempt to refute Carrier's work. Ehrman's work didn't cut it.

The Text of the New Testament: Its Transmission, Corruption, and Restoration is a good read on this issue. In general I don't think Ehrman is a great historian, but this book is pretty good. it is not only informational, it is a fun read.
https://www.amazon.com/Text-New-Testament-Transmission-Restoration/dp/019516122X

Congrats on your mission call, and double congrats on going to Central America.

As far as understanding and following the New Testament, you really can't do better than getting a good study bible. In addition to the text of the scripture, you also get scholarly essays that introduce each book, as well as notes running parallel to the text that help clarify and contextualize the tricky parts, written by academics from a variety of faiths. Either of the following two are great:

The New Oxford Annotated Bible

The HarperCollins Study Bible

You might also check out the next book, which is a standard text in divinity schools.

The New Testament: A Historical Introduction to the Early Christian Writings

I don't know how much any of these are going to help you in 87 days, but I respect your ambition in trying to tackle the scriptures in such a short span.

If the historical Jesus is what they're after, Robert Price might be a good place to start. He has a podcast called "Bible Geek," and it shouldn't be too hard to find some of his debates on Youtube (which at least will give both sides; whether or not they're equally matched is up to the viewer I suppose). He gives a lot of fantastic counterpoints to the most common apologetic arguments on the authenticity of the gospels, and has a very good grasp of the subject (at least from what I, a non-expert, can tell).

On the same subject, I have heard great things about Richard Carrier's book "On the Historicity of Jesus", which is next on my list of books to read. Hope these help!

Christian deism doesn't recognize Jesus as the son of a god, nor as a man speaking the word or intent of a god. It's more about sharing the same values and culture as Christians. A god created the universe, but the god didn't share teachings with humans or interact with humans.

Thomas Jefferson is a good example. For his own reading, he meticulously edited the New Testament, cutting and pasting a new version that focused on the teachings of Jesus, with all of Jesus' miracles removed and most supernatural elements removed. In the end, you just have a book about a philosopher. It's known as the Jefferson Bible. You can buy one on Amazon.

I tend to view deists of that period as almost atheists, even though they would have opposed that notion. Many answers/theories/explanations they'd want about the origin of life and the universe simply didn't exist, and it was a foreign idea to think of these things naturally occurring, so they believed in a god as a necessity for understanding the most basic questions regarding life.

Dr. Craig Keener has a good book on this. He is a highly respected biblical scholar who has taught at several different seminaries of different traditions and is widely published. This is a large book, but it looks at both the biblical miracle accounts and historical accounts, including contemporary accounts. I think his second volume that he's currently working on will have more contemporary accounts, and I heard he is sharing all types of documentation from personal accounts throughout the world, lots from Africa but also Asia and the United States too.

Sorry for the late reply; been off reddit for a while.

http://www.amazon.com/Miracles-Credibility-Testament-Accounts-Volume/dp/0801039525

I have the Didache Bible. It's RSV-2CE. I've only had it about a month now, but I'm loving it so far.

The Didache Bible is great for study, but for just reading for the New Testament I like The Richmond Lattimore translation. It's very natural and reads more like a book. There are no distracting chapter or verse delineations and no commentary. It reads very naturally.

You wanted to be part of the intelligentsia, but throughout your philosophical journey, you always based your convictions only on authority and tradition instead of on evidence and arguments. Don't you realize that this is the epitome of anti – intellectualism?

It is correct that the New Atheists aren't the pinnacle of atheistic thought and didn't contribute many new ideas to the academic debate of atheism vs. theism or religion. But this was never their goal, and it is also unnecessary, since the academic debate is already over for many decades. If you want to know why the arguments for theism are all complete nonsense and not taken seriously anymore, why Christianity is wrong just about everything and why apologists like Craig are dishonest charlatans who make a living out of fooling people, your reading list shouldn't be New Atheists, but rather something like this:

Colin Howson – Objecting to God

George H. Smith – Atheism: The Case Against God

Graham Oppy – Arguing about Gods

Graham Oppy – The Best Argument Against God

Herman Philipse – God in the Age of Science

J. L. Mackie – The Miracle of Theism

J. L. Schellenberg – The Wisdom to Doubt

Jordan Sobel – Logic and Theism

Nicholas Everitt – The Non-Existence of God

Richard Gale – On the Nature and Existence of God

Robin Le Poidevin – Arguing for Atheism

Stewart Elliott Guthrie – Faces in the Clouds: A New Theory of Religion

Theodore Drange – Nonbelief & Evil



[Avigor Shinan – From Gods to God: How the Bible Debunked, Suppressed, or Changed Ancient Myths and Legends] (http://www.amazon.com/dp/0827609086)

Bart Ehrman – The New Testament: A Historical Introduction to the Early Christian Writings

Bart Ehrman – Jesus, Interrupted

Bart Ehrman – Misquoting Jesus

Burton L. Mack – Who Wrote the New Testament?

Helmut Koester – Ancient Christian Gospels

John Barton, John Muddiman – The Oxford Bible Commentary

John Dominic Crossan – Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography

Karen Armstrong – A History of God

Mark Smith – The Early History of God

Randel McCraw Helms – Who Wrote the Gospels?

Richard Elliott Friedman – Who Wrote the Bible?

Robert Bellah – Religion in Human Evolution: From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age

Robert Walter Funk – The Gospel of Jesus

I think the best rebuttal (which you already touched on in your comments) is that there Ancient Near East had no concept of loving, equal relationship between same-sex couples.

Early Christians (including those with Jewish backgrounds) were all extremely Hellenized but would have also viewed Greek society as "worldly" and something that they needed to separate themselves from. So, since their only exposure to homosexuality was between an older man and a young boy for the purpose of material gain or idolatry.

>Some scholars locate its origin in pool initiation ritual, particularly rites of passage on Crete, where it was associated with entrance into military life and the religion of Zeus.[[5]](https://6trtt to ⅝6/wiki/Pederasty_in_ancient_Greece#cite_note-5). The wiki has a lot of good info.

I'd also recommend [Sex and the Single Savior](https://www.amazon.com/Sex-Single-Savior-Sexuality-Interpretation/dp/0664230466
by Dale Martin), who is the professor of the Yale NT course.

I read the bible with the aid of a commentary (The New Jerome Biblical Commentary), and a Bible Dictionary (HarperCollins Bible Dictionary). It slowed the pace a bit, but I got a lot out of it. I also had some good intros to the New Testament (An Introduction to the New Testament by Raymond Brown and The New Testament: A Historical Introduction to the Early Christian Writings by Bart Ehrman).

Some other interesting study aids:

• Who Wrote the Bible? by Richard Friedman - for an overview on the Documentary Hypothesis of the Pentateuch.
  
  
• Misquoting Jesus by Bart Ehrman - goes over the difficulty of rebuilding the original words of the authors of the bible.
  
  Good Luck.

First of all, can I just say how much I love giving and receiving book recommendations? I was a religious studies major in college (and was even a T.A. in the World Religions class) so, this is right up my alley. So, I'm just going to take a seat in front of my book cases...

General:

1. A History of God by Karen Armstrong
   
   
2. The Great Transformation by Karen Armstrong
   
   
3. Myths: gods, heroes, and saviors by Leonard Biallas (highly recommended)
   
   
4. Natural History of Religion by David Hume
   
   
5. Beyond Tolerance by Gustav Niebuhr
   
   
6. Acts of Faith by Eboo Patel (very highly recommended, completely shaped my view on pluralism and interfaith dialogue)
   
   
7. The Evolution of God by Robert Wright
   
   Christianity:
   
   
8. Tales of the End by David L. Barr
   
   
9. The Historical Jesus by John Dominic Crossan
   
   
10. Jesus: A Revolutionary Biography by John Dominic Crossan
    
    
11. The Birth of Christianity by John Dominic Crossan
    
    
12. Who Wrote the New Testament? by Burton Mack
    
    
13. Jesus in America by Richard Wightman Fox
    
    
14. The Five Gospels by Robert Funk, Roy W. Hoover, and the Jesus Seminar (highly recommended)
    
    
15. Remedial Christianity by Paul Alan Laughlin
    
    Judaism:
    
    
16. The Jewish Mystical Tradition by Ben Zion Bokser
    
    
17. Who Wrote the Bible? by Richard Elliot Friedman
    
    Islam:
    
    
18. Muhammad by Karen Armstrong
    
    
19. No God but God by Reza Aslan
    
    
20. Approaching the Qur'an: The Early Revelations by Michael Sells
    
    Buddhism:
    
    
21. Buddha by Karen Armstrong
    
    
22. Entering the Stream ed. Samuel Bercholz & Sherab Chodzin Kohn
    
    
23. The Life of Milarepa translated by Lobsang P. Lhalungpa
    
    
24. Introduction to Tibetan Buddhism by John Powers
    
    
25. Zen Flesh, Zen Bones compiled by Paul Reps (a classic in Western approached to Buddhism)
    
    
26. Buddhist Thought by Paul Williams (if you're at all interested in Buddhist doctrine and philosophy, you would be doing yourself a disservice by not reading this book)
    
    Taoism:
    
    
27. The Essential Chuang Tzu trans. by Sam Hamill & J.P. Seaton
    
    Atheism:
    
    
28. Atheism by Julian Baggini
    
    
29. The Future of an Illusion by Sigmund Freud
    
    
30. Doubt: A History by Jennifer Michael Hecht
    
    
31. When Atheism Becomes Religion by Chris Hedges
    
    
32. Atheism: The Case Against God by George H. Smith

> Do you think a book written today, about someone living today [etc]

Yeah this makes me think you think there was an actual fellow named Jesus who preached in Judea about 2000 years ago. Which considering the evidence is very unlikely 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. The first two sources being the best scholarly work on the historicity of "Jesus" reviewing and coming to the conclusion that any positive belief is unwarranted. The other three giving a very detailed description of how the jesus story contains elements from various pagan mythologies popular around that time in the region of wider Judea, concluding that it is likely that the jesus story is a fictional account consisting of a Hebrew substrate overlain with pagan motives.

When you say "historicity," are you talking about whether or not Jesus existed or what the historical Jesus would have been like?

Bart Ehrman, an atheist, has a book on the former that pretty well represents the consensus of historians that Jesus did, in fact, exist.

I haven't read this, but this book looks like it might be a good intro to the historical Jesus. I don't know all of the scholars on this list, but the ones I do know are good, and it shows a spectrum.

I'm mostly on your side, but I'd like to oppose your recommendation of Ten Beautiful Lies.

Fitzgerald (of Ten beautiful lies, published as the book Nailed) is a poor representative of Jesus mythicism. He's no scholar, just an author hanging on the coat tails of real scholars, and some of the inaccuracies in his book show it.

Nailed was my first introduction to Jesus Mythicism and Fitzgerald's video about it is compellingly fun, but the material at the beginning about similarities (born on Dec 25, etc) between Jesus and other deities parallels Zeitgeist in being incorrect. I was sadly disappointed when I later discovered this.

Reputable names in the Jesus Myther field are: Earl Doherty, Robert Price, Thomas L. Thompson and Richard Carrier.

On the subject of Josephus and his Testimonium, I enjoyed what this guy had to say on the subject. He's arguing against well known "traditional" Bible historian Bart Ehrman, whose arguments for the historicity of Jesus often devolve into appeals to authority and chest thumping.

Personally, I think the guy to watch is Richard Carrier, whose recent book Proving History proposes using Bayes' Theorem to evaluate the validity of historical claims, and demonstrates that many of the methods used in "traditional" history, especially on the topic of Jesus, are inadequate. I'm looking forward to book 2 in this series, which specifically looks at the Jesus story.

You may enjoy Carrier's video talk, So…if Jesus Didn’t Exist, Where Did He Come from Then? , which summarizes his more important findings.

> Huh? Whole chunks of NT are questionable. Even entire chapters of Paul are questionable. The gospels are a complete mess.

Okay, and there's people much smarter than you or I who, after years of research, disagree with you. This shouldn't surprise you. Saying "Gospels are a complete mess" tells me you don't really know the other side very well. Probably still asking questions like "Well then who was at the tomb? One woman or three", yeah?

A great recent addition to this discussion is Bauckman's "Jesus and the Eye Witnesses" - https://www.amazon.com/Jesus-Eyewitnesses-Gospels-Eyewitness-Testimony/dp/0802863906

> They don't call it apologetics because there's a good solid foundation for Christian beliefs.

Lol, they call it apologetics because it's based on the Greek word "apologia". Nice try though.

I think the best thing to do here (especially if you enjoy reading) is to do some study into the good reasons why Christianity is believed to be correct. William Lane Craig's Reasonable Faith is one of the best, most cohesive defenses of the reasonability of the Christian faith I've ever read but there are plenty of other good sources too (Richard Swinburne's The Existence of God and The Coherence of Theism, J.P. Moreland and Bill Craig's Philosophical Foundations of a Christian Worldview, Paul Copan and Bill Craig's Come Let Us Reason, Craig Keener's Miracles: The Credibility of the New Testament Accounts, and Alvin Plantinga's Warranted Christian Belief just to name a few).

That's a lot of questions! I'll try to provide some answers, but obviously they will be brief and just starting points. I'll point you to resources/books that will answer your questions more exhaustively when I can, since some of your questions have been answered in many books.

First, I would expand a little bit on your definition of Sola Scriptura. It means that Scripture and Scripture alone is our final authority in the church. (Note: it is not the only authority. We value tradition, experience and reason as well, but they are not the final authority.)

>What is the historic evidence of Sola Scriptura?

Not sure what you mean by historic evidence, but I would take the writings of the early church fathers, where they would appeal to the Scriptures as final authority. It's very hard to answer such a broad question on a medium like this. Now, if you want an early church father explicitly defending this doctrine, then there is none, as far as I know. This is simply because it was not a doctrine that was fought over, hence not a lot of the early church fathers wrote explicitly on this. (This applies to heaps of other doctrines.)

>How do advocates of Sola Scriptura answer the charge of knowing the canon of Scripture while the canon not being listed (explicitly) in Scripture?

See Michael Kruger's book, Canon Revisited.

>Does the Bible say that it is sufficient to be the rule of Christian faith and practice? It seems that the verses: 1 Timothy 3:15, 2 Timothy 3:16–17, 2 Thessalonians 2:15 and many others seem to indicate that not only does Scripture not mention self sufficiency but rather as a practical guide, with Tradition being on equal par as an inspired pair with Scripture.

In these passages, why would you take the word "tradition" as how the Roman Catholic church would define it? I would read "tradition" as Paul's teaching as passed on to them, which is then enscripturated in the Bible. There's nothing in those passages that requires Tradition being on equal par with Scripture. It is only that if you have already assumed the meaning of the word "Tradition" as only how the RC church would define it.

>How do advocates of Sola Scriptura answer Cardinal Newman's argument against Sola Scriptura on the basis that pulling from some of the Pauline Epistles proves to much: "Now, a good part of the New Testament was not written in his boyhood: Some of the Catholic epistles were not written even when Paul wrote this, and none of the books of the New Testament were then placed on the canon of the Scripture books. He refers, then, to the scriptures of the Old Testament, and, if the argument from this passage proved anything, it would prove too much, viz., that the scriptures of the New Testament were not necessary for a rule of faith."

I'm not exactly sure what he means. If you would rephrase it, it would be helpful. But if I'm reading him correct, he seems to say that it's too much to base our doctrine of Sola Scriptura on the writings of Paul. Well, we don't just rely on Paul's writings to defend the doctrine. In fact, I would argue that if properly defended, Sola Scriptura can be defended from the whole Old Testament all the way to the New.

Penal Substitution
>If Christ's death was efficacious for the removal of the punishment of sin of human beings, being fully of God, why wouldn't everyone be saved?

Good question! That's why Calvinist do not believe that Christ death was efficacious for the removal of the punishment of all human beings, but only for the elect. This is the "L" (Limited Atonement) in TULIP, although I prefer the term "Particular/Definite Redemption". To sum that doctrine up - "Sufficient for all, efficient for the elect."

>Why should we think that it is even possible for Christ to take on moral responsibility for our current and past sins?

On the one hand, why is it up to us? We believe Scripture says so, and thus we believe it. On the other hand, you can point to the doctrine of union with Christ - we become one with Christ, or united with Christ when we believe in him. Because of that, he is able to take on moral responsibility for our sins. What is ours are his, and what is his is ours. It's like in a marriage. When you marry someone, everything that he/she has is yours, and everything that is yours is hers/his, and that include things like debt.

Justification by Faith
>What Biblical basis is there that it is only by faith we are justified?

Heaps. Romans 3:21ff, Romans 4 (where Abraham is used as an OT example), Ephesians 2:1-11, Galatians, etc. Now, just in case you don't know, the RC notion of justification is different from the Protestant doctrine of justification. So, before you go any further, I think it's best that you know that first.

>Does the act of believing, or baptism, show a correspondence of works and faith?

Not sure what you mean by this. Please elaborate.

>What is the historic evidence of Sola Fide?

See answer above on historic evidence of Sola Scriptura. It's there in the writings of the early church fathers, but it is not explicit, since it was not something the church fought over. The early church fought over other things (Trinity, Christology), and that's why you see their writings focusing so much on those things. Sola fide was really only seriously fought over during the Reformation, that's why there are numerous writings on this during that time. This doesn't mean that it's not there in the early church, it definitely is. But it is inchoate.

>You seem to lean quite heavily on Bayesian Methodology. If you're interested, I'd like to discuss this a little bit more. You seem to be willing to apply probabilities to historic events.

Here is an outline of Bayes Theorem and its relevance to Histoical analysis.

http://www.richardcarrier.info/CarrierDec08.pdf

I recommend anything Richard Carrier.

Here is a book with the methodology in action.

http://www.amazon.com/books/dp/1616145595

I probably suffer from some extreme confirmation bias as I was completely sold on this method before I ever heard of Richard Carrier. The New Testament was the first book in the canon that are started looking at using bayesian reasoning and it was a result of that analysis that I left Mormonism. I had stopped believing in Jesus before I began examining Mormon unique topics.

When I found Richard Carrier it was simply a validation on the way I aproached the question, he just did it way better than myself.

But I guess you can thank my BYU professors for my atheism. They sold me on statistics (although I was already taking statistics courses in highschool). Statistics has always been very intuitive for me. Learning it formally was such a delight.

If you are new to Bayes Theorem I would say start here. Best explanation I have found online for beginners.

http://yudkowsky.net/rational/bayes

There's no 'proof' as such, since we're dealing with history, not science. However, there is evidence which we can examine and weigh critically.

For one example of this evidence, the ascription of the authorship of the Gospels comes from an early tradition of the Church, for which our earliest evidence comes from Papias, writing a generation later, around 100AD. We do not have his work extant, but we have quotes of him from later writers.

Papias appears to have been aware of a tradition that Mark's Gospel was derived from Peter, who handed him a collection of his own sermons in Rome, just before he was martyred, and which Mark then put into order. Papias also relates a separate tradition that Matthew also used a similar source and put it together in Hebrew. What this actually means is debatable. Scholars believe it variously to mean that Matthew wrote his gospel originally in the Hebrew language, or translated it into Hebrew, presumably from Greek, or that this Hebrew way was not the Hebrew language, but just a different way of organising the material so as to appeal to a Jewish audience. (Or perhaps Papias is talking about a completely different Gospel, the mysterious "Gospel of the Hebrews".)

Whether this tradition was true, or merely a legend that had been associated with the scrolls after the fact is another question, which I can't provide an adequate analysis of here. For this, and for other evidence regarding the authorship and sources for the Gospels, I would recommend that you get hold of a copy of the superb Jesus and the Eyewitnesses, by Richard Bauckham which goes through all of the evidence in rich detail, and provides an unparalleled examination and overview of the argument.

The Resurrection of the Son of God by N.T. Wright is the best one, though keep in mind it is over 700 pages. It is highly respected and compelling, even among non-Christian, critical Bible scholars.

A completely separate argument (though more easily summarized) is Gary Habermas' "Minimal Fact" argument, where he argues using only historical facts agreed upon nearly unanimously by critical Bible scholars (including skeptics and secular historians.)

A more general book about the historical reliability of the Gospel narratives is Jesus and the Eyewitnesses by Richard Bauckham. Keep in mind this is also lengthy and academic in nature.

The best summary of these arguments I've come across is in chapters 7 and 13 of The Reason for God by Timothy Keller. This is the book that turned my faith around. He's also great at citations and includes a very helpful annotated bibliography.

TL;DR - Everyone should read The Reason for God by Tim Keller.

"Abiogenesis, or informally the origin of life, is the natural process by which life arises from non-living matter, such as simple organic compounds"

There are many studies in biogenetics showing that life has to precede life. But i won't go into that. It's non logical to assume so.

> If your deity interacts with the physical in any way there should be a way to detect it.

It definitely does so and there are many books on that issue. I recommend this

> You couldn't do so rationally. You know other people exist. The internet, computers. You know other people own devices capable of accessing the internet and that they typically use them for that purpose

Not necessarily. What if this is all a dream induced by highly advanced aliens? Or pehaps we're living in a matrix. Can you prove me that reality is exactly as we perceive it and this is not some constructed, fake reality? If we tackle all issue with the skepticism level that atheists enjoy to attack christianity, we'd never reach a point or truth.

Jesus Christ is a manufactured entity, made up by people who thought they were being inspired by god who were following other people who though they were being inspired by god, going back to at least 500 BC. Other good book.
People need to educate themselves on mythological literature. If you still want to believe in god, even a lot of believers are taking a second look at their mythological literature.

On 1 Corinthians 14.34-35, see this paper for a good start: "the hallmarks of interpolation are exemplified" in these two verses (inconsistent placement in the text, textual variations, atypical vocab for the author, disruptive to the otherwise natural flow of the text, and early awareness in manuscripts that something was "off" about the passage).

On the pastoral letters, see this book, chapter 24, by Ehrman. Despite some of the sensationalism of his popular level books, his academic books really are well received among scholars, and this book is representative of the cumulative efforts of the field, not just himself.

> Most scholars are reasonably convinced that all three Pastoral epistles were written by the same author. . . . was that [author] the apostle Paul? . . . we do find an inordinate number of non-Pauline words, most of which occur in later Christian writings. Sophisticated studies of the Greek text of these books have come up with with the following data: . . . 848 different words found in the Pastorals; of these, 306 occur nowhere else in the Pauline corpus of the New Testament . . . This means that over one-third of the vocabulary is not Pauline.

Of the vocabulary in common with Paul's authentic letters (faith, righteous, etc.), several are now used with very different definitions. There's more than just vocabulary and style, though, so I recommend reading the full chapter on the issue.

I'm not sure I agree with your definitions fully first off:

>Religious Faith asks you to, absent compelling evidence, believe in what it asserts to be factual statements regarding not just past events -but past events that would compromise the totality of compiled empirical data (I'm speaking about miracles).

Areas in italics probably should be removed from your definition. A staggering number of people in the past and today claim they have witnessed a miracle, so many that it seems to me like they can't all be explained away. Gary Habermas and Craig Keener do good work on trying to document these miracles, many happen in hospitals where there is documentation (see Miracles by Craig Keener) In fact 73% of doctors believe in the US believe in miracles, many of whom say they've seen them. 73% of Meidcal Doctors is a lot, more than enough to throw your "totality of compiled empirical data" claim into question.

So if you want to pedantically scrum over definitions I guess we can, though it seems a bit silly.

So I'm pretty familiar with the modern version of "Jesus mythicism", which is what you're talking about. I'll try to summarize without writing too long of an essay.

(For further reading, look into books or presentations by Richard Carrier, author of the peer-reviewed scholarly work On the Historicity of Jesus: Why We Might Have Reason for Doubt or David Fitzgerald, author of a much more approachable Nailed: Ten Christian Myths That Show Jesus Never Existed at All. Here is a 60 minute presentation of the theory laid out in Carrier's book.)

There are two major thrusts of this argument:

1. The purported "evidence" for Jesus' existence, when actually examined in detail, is severely lacking
   
2. There is another plausible explanation for the origins of Christianity and the New Testament books besides Jesus being a real person.
   
   Arguments around 1) have been around for a long time (although there are interesting recent developments), but 2) is where Richard Carrier, specifically, is making some significant contributions. Unfortunately, the publication of his work is very recent, and it is as-yet-unclear whether it will be broadly accepted.
   
   So with regard to the evidence, let's list a few and their problems:
   
   

• The NT gospels are highly mythologized, and can't be accepted as a reliable historical narrative (even the non-miraculous parts)
  
• The NT epistles were written years later, and up to half of Paul's letters are considered to be forgeries
  
• Paul's (authentic) epistles were some of the earliest NT books written, but Paul never even claims to have met a physical Jesus, just had a vision/spiritual encounter. In fact, Carrier claims that a proper interpretation of Paul's writing shows that he viewed Jesus as a celestial being
  
• There is nothing else contemporaneous. Literally nothing, nada, zip. Jewish records about Jesus stirring up trouble? Nope. Roman records about Jesus' trial and crucifixion? Nope.
  
  Aaaaand then we have like a huge gap before other documents start appearing. And most of these other sources are evidence of Christianity or Christians, not evidence of Jesus, per se. For example:
  
  
• Josephus is frequently mentioned, but both references in Josephus have been shown to be interpolations.
  
• Did the astronomer Thallus mention the darkness at Jesus' death? No, he did not.
  
  Getting a little long, so for part 2 (how did we get Christianity, then?), I'll mainly refer you to Carrier's Presentation. In short, Carrier thinks that the original conception of Jesus was of a celestial Jesus in the heavens, and he was later euhemerized (put into stories on earth), and then the latter stories became popular as the gospels, and the original stories/ideas were lost/discarded.
  
  Hope that makes sense.
  
  (Edit: replaced presentation link with a better quality video. Also, fixed links to Carrier's new blog.)

> IMO, statements like this could be used in a politically inappropriate manner.

Can you elaborate on what you mean by this? (Certainly, I see how it could be abused, but what are you suggesting practically? Many comments, even many biblical ones, are often applied inappropriately in a political setting, so I don't understand the point of your comment.)

> Also, there is a very interesting and well-informed earlier thread concerning this subject matter here.
>
> Furthermore, some may be interested in checking out Dale Allison's collection of essays entitled: Sex and the Single Savior: Gender and Sexuality in Biblical Interpretation.

Thank you for the referrals. Out of curiosity, though, did you mean them as a response to my comment or as general recommendations for all readers of the thread?

Cool! On evolution, Pete Enns' The Evolution of Adam. He takes very seriously the theological implications of evolution, and makes a strong case for Christianity's ability to not only accept it but gain new insights from it. For more of a textual look at Genesis and why a literal reading isn't the best one, John Walton's The Lost World of Genesis One.

On both the non-historicity and cruelty of parts of the OT, check out Thom Stark's The Human Faces of God. This was a huge problem for me in accepting Christianity, probably the biggest hurdle I had to cross, and Stark's book did more than anything else to help me wrestle with it.

On miracles, I'm going to point you at a longer book, but it's well worth a read if you're interested in a strong case. Michael Licona's The Resurrection of Jesus argues that the hypothesis that Jesus rose from the dead should not only be considered, it's actually the strongest one that's been proposed from a historical standpoint, as long as you're not ruling out the possibility that the universe might surprise you sometimes.

And this book I recommend to anybody even remotely intrigued by Christianity: The King Jesus Gospel. It's like seeing the story with entirely new eyes, and it knocks down a lot of really harmful misunderstandings of what the gospel's actually about.

I don't know of any great online sources that directly answer "did Jesus exist?", but if you are interested check out The New Testament by Ehrman. It is a great introduction to "historical Jesus" studies and the origins of the New Testament documents. Also check out this Open Yale course. They both explain the historical tools used to answer these kinds of questions.

> So, does Jesus specifically address homosexuality? No. Does he establish and apply Genesis 1-2 as normative and authoritative for human sexual and marital relationships? Yes. Does that passage have implications for homosexuality? Also yes.

IMO, statements like this could be used in a politically inappropriate manner.

Also, there is a very interesting and well-informed earlier thread concerning this subject matter here.

Furthermore, some may be interested in checking out Dale Allison's collection of essays entitled: Sex and the Single Savior: Gender and Sexuality in Biblical Interpretation.

I like the method presented in Michael Kruger's book Canon Revisited: Establishing the Origins and Authority of the New Testament Books. He calls it the self-authenticating method (by listening to some of what you mentioned you might have heard of it). It is essentially this: canonical books must meet four criteria – 1. Providntial Exposer 2. Divine Qualities 3. Corporate Reception and 4. Apostolic Origins.

There is a ton of nuance there, but I think that the method he presents is the best considering the alternatives. This method makes a case for Revelation as canon and perhaps Enoch as scripture (again, a lot of nuance, and in his book he talks about books that were Scripture but are not canon, such as Paul's lost letters).

Overall, the canon must be self auhthenticating, and a lot of methods we use to argue for canonical books rely on authority that rests outside of God and his Word. I highly suggest reading his book. If you want a free .mobi or .epub copy direct message me.

Sauces...Ah, can I just refer you to a book?

Jesus and the Eyewitnesses: The Gospels as Eyewitness Testimony by Richard Bauckham

Jesus was a very common name indeed. That's why you often see disambiguation when Jesus' name is referred to in conversation but not in narrative (because which other Jesus would they be talking about?):

> Matthew 21:6--The disciples went and did as Jesus had directed them.
>
> Matthew 21:11--And the crowds said, “This is the prophet Jesus, from Nazareth of Galilee.”
>
> Matthew 21:12--And Jesus entered the temple and drove out all who sold and bought in the temple, and he overturned the tables of the money-changers and the seats of those who sold pigeons.

And then a few chapters later:

> Matthew 26:64--Jesus said to him, “You have said so. But I tell you, from now on you will see the Son of Man seated at the right hand of Power and coming on the clouds of heaven.”
>
> Matthew 26:69--Now Peter was sitting outside in the courtyard. And a servant girl came up to him and said, “You also were with Jesus the Galilean.”
>
> Matthew 26:71--And when he went out to the entrance, another servant girl saw him, and she said to the bystanders, “This man was with Jesus of Nazareth.”
>
> Matthew 26:75--And Peter remembered the saying of Jesus, “Before the rooster crows, you will deny me three times.” And he went out and wept bitterly.

But that one is supposed to be easy, because Jesus was a fairly common name (6th most popular in Palestine among Jews). However, outside of Palestine, Jesus was not a common name at all. So would someone outside of Palestine 150 or so years later know to do this kind of disambiguation if they were making up this story? Possibly, but it's unlikely.

The name of John the Baptist is also disambiguated in John 14 in much the same way.

I mention this because if the Gospels are not eyewitness accounts, they use person names very convincingly. The apocryphal gospels, on the other hand, use names in very wacky ways, for example, the Gospel of Thomas's main character is a dude named Didymos Judas Thomas, which means Twin Judas Twin, and no one used names that way back then.

What's also interesting is that in the NT Gospels (early to mid 1st century, except for John which was written probably later 1st century), Jesus is called Jesus. In the Gospel of Philip (mid 2nd century), he's still called Jesus, but he is mostly referred to as "Christ". And then in the Gospels of Peter (late 2nd century) and Mary (late 2nd century), the name "Jesus" isn't even present. Instead you have mainly "Lord" and "Savior".

So yeah, someone in the 2nd century probably had no idea what were the common names in the 1st century among Jewish Palestinians. But the gospels, which were supposedly written so late, gets those kinds of names right. Without the internet.

The Canon of Scripture by F.F. Bruce. Can't go wrong with anything by F.F. Bruce imo hahah.

Metzger has a book on the subject that I haven't read yet but what to. He's one of the best scholars of the last 50 years.

Kruger is a prof at RTS so this is one that probably has a reformed bent to it. Haven't read this one yet either, but it is suppose to be good.

Honestly, it's not something I've put a lot of thought in to... His textbook on the New Testament is the one we used for our class, and it is actually a pretty good analysis of the history, structure, etc of the New Testament, but it isn't a theological text that attempts to confirm/deny the validity of Christianity.

Now, I'm assuming (but correct me if I'm wrong) that the "beliefs" you asked about are his beliefs that the Bible has been corrupted over time and is therefore unreliable as a theological text. And, by extension, if the Bible is unreliable, the things it says about God must be false. I think this is one of the big problems one runs in to when using Bible as the sole source of your faith, as many of our protestant brothers & sisters do. In Catholicism, we base our beliefs on not only what the Bible says, but on the teachings & traditions that have been passed down to us since apostolic times. Indeed, I'd say the we tend to give primacy to the teachings & traditions that are handed down over those put forth in the Bible, which is a good thing since books/passages in the Bible often have multiple interpretations (on a side note, that's why there are 20,000+ protestant denominations).

So, say that Mr. Ehrman was able to 100% prove that the Bible was corrupted and is entirely false -- impossible, but play along for sake of discussion. Would it cause some theological difficulties? Sure. But would it affect the teachings & traditions of Christianity? Not so much, unless the Bible was your sole source of theology (applies to many protestant denominations, not Catholicism).

I hope this makes sense. If not, feel free to ask for more info.

>There are processes that select for more complexity and rationality.

Again, processes require an agent to set up the initial process. That agent also must be very intelligent if the program goal is to select for complexity and rationality.

Also, an ordered process is not at all likely to arise within this universe. The reason being is that the 2nd Law of thermodynamics states that the universe is constantly becoming more and more disordered: http://www.livescience.com/50941-second-law-thermodynamics.html If such a process has arisen, then it needed an agent to help it.

My point is simple: Name something else, besides what you think of the brain, that uses itself; and that is not designed.

There really isn't anything else. Hammers need carpenters, skis need skiers, planes need pilots, and computer need users. The brain is a computer, and as a computer it requires a user.

We haven't even talked about DNA, which is somehow a code without a writer. How can a code not have a writer? Check out this recent study done with DNA at Harvard:
http://wyss.harvard.edu/viewpressrelease/93/writing-the-book-in-dna
Quote from the article:
"In another departure, the team rejected so-called "shotgun sequencing," which reassembles long DNA sequences by identifying overlaps in short strands. Instead, they took their cue from information technology, and encoded the book in 96-bit data blocks, each with a 19-bit address to guide reassembly. Including jpeg images and HTML formatting, the code for the book required 54,898 of these data blocks, each a unique DNA sequence. "We wanted to illustrate how the modern world is really full of zeroes and ones, not As through Zs alone," Kosuri said."

If the modern world is full of zeroes and ones, and DNA is a code capable of doing this experiment, then that code requires a super intelligent writer that exists outside the realm of the code (so outside the natural world) Same as a software designer exists outside the software.

>There's no evidence whatsoever anything like a supernatural realm exists, which is what my original post was searching for I believe.

Well, I just posted some evidence straight from Harvard.
I would also suggest checking out this book on documented modern miracles: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0801039525?creativeASIN=0801039525&linkCode=w00&linkId=ZT4A3RX5O2OMDWSA&ref_=as_sl_pc_tf_til&tag=roalll-20

Also, here's a link to my website: https://www.rocalternative.com/Testimonies.html

If we're going to go by empirical evidence here, then is it really logical to dismiss ALL testimonies of supernatural encounters? Especially when we are talking about millions of them that have happened over thousands of years? Not everyone can be insane or lying.

By the way, the number 2 isn't based at all in the natural world. It is not a material thing. Does this mean that the number 2 doesn't exist?

Btw, the reason I know all this stuff is because I used to be an atheist. It was because of all these things I've laid out, not to mention a few of my own supernatural encounters, that I was forced to change my mind about my former beliefs.

I've heard good things about Michael Kruger, you should check him out. You can try the OPC Q&A if you want a short treatment of the topic, to begin with. They answer a lot of questions like this one about canonicity, in that Q&A section.

Grace and peace.

No such thing as a dumb question! And that question specifically is an excellent question! IMO, always ask for the facts and arguments that another person has, rather than asking for their conclusions. That way you can calculate the conclusions yourself from the facts/arguments. IMO, half the stuff you'll google or find on reddit talks about conclusions and not data/arguments (e.g. "Jesus never existed". Okay, well reddituser, could you explain more why you think that?)

• Pretty decent Youtube Series series - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dsAZSz2Yb_8
  
• A thorough book on all of the possible evidence for Jesus ressurection - https://www.amazon.com/Resurrection-Jesus-New-Historiographical-Approach/dp/0830827196. I think this book IMO provided the strongest case for Xtianity. C.S. Lewis, Lee Strobel, and others were riddled with logical fallacies.
  
• http://www.talkorigins.org/faqs/comdesc/ vs answersingenesis.org if you are curious on evolution vs creationism
  
• http://wiki.ironchariots.org/ vs. carm.org
  
• I can PM you a a super disorganized list of some talking points I came up with right before I was about to talk to my uncle about quitting the worship team:
  
• Pascal's Wager for multiple religions - http://wp.production.patheos.com/blogs/friendlyatheist/files/im/aVSVQ.png
  
• Believers Brain by Michael Shermer
  
• If you look through my comment history you can find other books/sources.
  
  There's a lot to study. I recommend using Feynman's method for learning (https://mattyford.com/blog/2014/1/23/the-feynman-technique-model). Can speed up your learning by 4x.

> Therefore, I want to learn about the Bible; not what it says but rather how it was written, received (and translated), preserved, and most importantly: how we can be sure we know these things (how studying the Bible works).

Then you want to read this. There is a bibliography if you're interested in delving deeper into the textual criticism arena.

Also, these IVP dictionaries are a go-to for any reference topic you are curios about. You can get on Amazon for cheaper, FYI, but that link lists all the books in the series. There is a bibliography after each article for further study if needed.

One significant but controversial book on this topic is Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality: Gay People in Western Europe from the Beginning of the Christian Era to the Fourteenth Century by John Boswell.

I'd also recommend Dale Martin's book Sex and the Single Savior: Gender and Sexuality in Biblical Interpretation as well as his book The Corinthian Body (if you can get it), which is not only about homosexuality, but does discuss it and how it pertained to Paul's views on the subject.

One thing that should be understood is that the ancients did not think of sexuality in terms of fixed orientation. That is, they did not think in terms of "gay and straight," but much more along the lines of "tops and bottoms." Martin says in The Corinthian Body, that being a passive partner - being penetrated - made one more vulnerable to spiritual corruption. This was true for either male and female. Being a passive male partner in sex was seen as feminine, but not being the active, penetrative partner. However, Paul still thought it was risky to be the top because one could become corrupted by the passive partner, so that's why he wanted to limit sexual conduct as much as possible and restrict it to (at most) monogamous marriage.

The Greek terms in 1 Corinthians 6:9 (echoed in the Pseudo-Pauline 1 Timothy 1:10) which are commonly translated as referring to homosexuality are malakos and arsenokoites (pl. malakoi and arsenokoitai) are discussed at some length in an online article by Dale Martin here: Arsenokoités and Malakos: Meanings and Consequence: History of Condemnation in the Church

I think those terms most likely refer to pederasty and male prostitution, not to homosexual relationships in general but to exploitative sexual behavior. I did a paper once on the word aresnokoites and I tracked down every single extant attestation of he word from antiquity and I'm reasonably sure it refers to pederasty, whether mercenary or otherwise.

This is still an open question, though, so you should do your own reading.

84 cents on Amazon.

But the best deal is the $4.99 paperback. The perfect Christmas gift for all your rabid right wing Christian relatives and co-workers.

> Hard to have a grudge against something you don't think exists.
I see your point, but I would also say that if God does exist - this stance toward God is in itself a grudge.

>What makes you say everyone, even Christians, has a grudge against God? That sounds like an interesting idea even though I already disagree.

The short answer is that all have sinned/are sinners. It's hardwired in our very existence - that we are enemies of God and by nature objects of wrath. The longer answer would take some lengthy conversations about one's understanding about Christianity, and discussions about terms such as sin, salvation, grace, redemption, justification, sanctification.

> My point earlier was that admitting Jesus existed doesn't mean admitting any of those other things.

I agree with that - my answer above was that this is the easiest route to take. If Jesus doesn't exist, I don't have to worry about any of his claims, or examine any of his life.

> No one comes back from the dead, and no one ever will.

I'd highly recommend this book. It's long and dense - but Wright makes a compelling case for the historicity of the Resurrection. But your adamance in the impossibility of coming back from the dead I think is useful as well - Human beings know this to be true, which is what makes the Resurrection story a gamechanger.

Why is this downvoted? Serious, conservative scholars like Bauckham hold that John the Elder wrote much of the Johannine material, including Revelation. This is based on both internal as well as external evidence from church history.

Edit: a bit more content for those who want to know. First: John was one of the most common first names for 1st century Jews living in Israel. We should not at all be surprised that there are more than one John involved - on the contrary, it would be very strange if there was only one.

Eusebius, writing around the year 325, speaks of Papias, a man who lived in the first and second century, in Hierapolis near Ephesus in modern Turkey. Papias was a Christian and whenever other Christians came through Hierapolis from Ephesus, Papias would ask them..

>“What Andrew or Peter said, or Philip, or Thomas or James, or John or Matthew or any of the Lord’s disciples, and whatever Aristion and the elder John, the disciples of the Lord, were saying”

Papias wrote this in the 2nd century and Eusebius is quoting him. Papias talks about two Johns - one in the list of Apostles, and one he calls 'the elder John'. Bauckham considers these to be two different Johns: John the son of Zebedee (one of the Twelve) and John the Elder (another disciple, but not one of the twelve). Both apparently are eyewitnesses to the work of Christ.

The author of 1 John addresses his audience as 'little children' which is fitting for an elder. The author of 2 and 3 John identifies himself as 'the Elder', in the opening verses of these epistles. So it's not at all unlikely that the writer of the epistles (and possibly Revelation) is this elder John, not John the son of Zebedee.

The authorship of the Gospel of John is also never mentioned in the Bible, though the author does claim to be an eyewitness. Bauckham makes the case for 'the beloved disciple' (a Jerusalem based disciple of the Lord with familial ties to the highpriestly family) as the author, instead of the son of Zebedee.

Richard Bauckham, Jesus and the Eyewitnesses: The Gospels as Eyewitness Testimony
https://www.amazon.com/dp/0802874312/ref=cm_sw_em_r_mt_dp_U_wwLvDbGX3JG90

Kruger, on the other hand, doesn't seem to agree, though he isn't responding to Bauckham in this blog post: https://www.michaeljkruger.com/did-papias-know-the-apostle-john/

I love Micheal Kruger's books Canon revisited and The question of Canon. If you really want to dive into the subject D.A. Carson's The Enduring Authority of the Christian Scriptures is an amazing resource.

If you liked Dale Martin's class, you might also enjoy his book Sex and the Single Savior. It was interesting to me because both Dale and I are gay Christians. I thought he raised some interesting points.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0664230466/ref=mp_s_a_1_1?qid=1418422830&sr=8-1&pi=AC_SY200_QL40

Introduce her to the concept of reality starting with subjective perspective.

Introduce her to the Jefferson Bible - http://www.amazon.com/The-Jefferson-Bible-Morals-Nazareth/dp/1604591285

The philosophy of liberty (originally a flash animation but now found here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=muHg86Mys7I ) is a good starting point (a fundamental) for understanding humanist morality and rules of subjective perception.

Introduction to the concept of falsification is a dangerous but necessary thing - ultimately, falsification and collaboration are important methods by which subjective perception becomes objective observation.

I am sure that other Redditors could contribute to this in a much more creative way, but this is what I think of when this subject comes up.

This is only the New Testament, but you might be interested in the translation by Richard Lattimore. Lattimore was classics scholar who translated both the Iliad and Odyssey, many plays from Sophocles, et cetera. My understanding is that there is nothing either religious or irreligious about it. I believe the translation is meant to be a-religious: meaning, simply a faithful translation of the Koine Greek in which the New Testament was written.

Here is the Amazon link! Like I said, this is the best comprehensive New Testament text book I have come across in my study and research as a budding scholar of religion.

https://www.amazon.com/New-Testament-Historical-Introduction-Christian/dp/0199757534

I would recommend the work of Michael
Kruger like Canon Revisited or The Question of Canon.

Beyond that, a classic is Warfield's The Authority and Inspiration of the Bible. Maybe even Blomberg's The Historical Reliability of the Gospels.

Another potential good read for those interested:
Paul and the Faithfulness of God https://www.amazon.com/dp/0800626834/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_apa_4-wJAbN6F1NS6

I have not read it, but I have been told repeatedly that NT Wright’s The Resurrection of the Son of God is an excellent discussion of the historical evidence for the Resurrection. It’s 740 pages long, so I imagine that he gets into the questions you’re asking.

I might also suggest Fr. Robert Spitzer from the Magis Center who has a 26 page overview of scholarship on this issue on his site. He includes references to other works you might find interesting in his footnotes. Section IV of that article addresses another of NT Wright’s works, Jesus and the Victory of God which also speaks to the witness of the early Church.

Most of it came from classes and lectures. I don't have the class book list and sources anymore. I do hope you really, really like reading!

Forged writingss

Misquoting Jesus A well known book.

Introduction to the new testiment

The new testament: a historical intoduction

Revelation and the End of All Things Also a somewhat popular book

You can also do some Wikipedia reading on Gnosticism and other early Christen sects to get an idea of just how many groups their were and how differing their beliefs could be. Also look for things on the Q, M and L source.

Edit

You can likely find a number of online pod-casts (or whatever you call them) and lectures on these things.

I am not a historian so my access to books and memorized sources is very limited, I am a student and have been accused of reading serial boxes at least once when I accidentally quoted the wrong book name, It was too much fun to make the correction as no one had ever said that too me before and I felt special, like I had hit an academic milestone.

Also, Don't feel bad about asking for sources.

If anyone is interested in a great back and forth between a mythicist and a historicist, check out this debate between Richard Carrrier and Zeba Crook.

I think Crook ultimately comes out looking better, but they both make some good points.

Richard Carrier has published a peer reviewed book called "On the Historicity of Jesus: Why We Might Have Reason for Doubt".

Any decent textbook on the New Testament for a college course delves into this. https://www.amazon.com/New-Testament-Historical-Introduction-Christian/dp/019020382X is a good one.

Dale Martin has a cheaper one here: https://yalebooks.yale.edu/book/9780300180855/new-testament-history-and-literature He also has a good intro to the New Testament course available for free here: https://oyc.yale.edu/religious-studies/rlst-152

Definitely go ESV. The ESV has a nice readability while also being very accurate. I've checked the Greek several times (went to school for Theology/Greek), and I've so often been pleased with the results.

My recommendation for something fun/different has to go to Lattimore's translation of the NT.

Brant is outstanding. I was able to take his class one summer when he was just a young professor visiting Notre Dame (Indiana). One of the books we used in his class was "Jesus and the Eyewitnesses" by Richard Bauckham. Another outstanding book on this topic.

https://www.amazon.com/Jesus-Eyewitnesses-Gospels-Eyewitness-Testimony/dp/0802863906

I'm a little surprised that no one has recommended reading the Gospels yet. I'm an agnostic, but Jesus is still a phenomenally challenging and poetic thinker and teacher, and it's an essential work of literature and philosophy, especially if you take the time to separate the core of its message from its subsequent alterations. The Five Gospels, which is an ambitious—if controversial—attempt to pull the original teachings from the later material, would be a good place to start.

I tried reading Crosson's "Historical Jesus," but bogged down pretty quickly. That book is way over my head, so I'll have to find something more accessible.

edit: I have now added "Five Views" to my Amazon.com wishlist/shopping list. Interestingly, the top-rated review (admittedly biased) claims that very few scholars consider Jesus completely mythical.

The Historical Jesus: Five Views (Paperback)

http://www.amazon.com/Historical-Jesus-Five-Views/dp/0830838686/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1261598318&sr=1-2

>actually

probably*

That's the best we can do, since the evidence is suspiciously lacking and internally contradictory.

1
2
3 4
5 6

Happy Ēostre, and happy reading!

> Okay, and there's people much smarter than you or I who, after years of research, disagree with you. This shouldn't surprise you. Saying "Gospels are a complete mess" tells me you don't really know the other side very well. Probably still asking questions like "Well then who was at the tomb? One woman or three", yeah?

And there are a lot of smart people, smarter than you or I who say that the gospels have lots of historical problems for instance...

> A great recent addition to this discussion is Bauckman's "Jesus and the Eye Witnesses" - https://www.amazon.com/Jesus-Eyewitnesses-Gospels-Eyewitness-Testimony/dp/0802863906

There were no eye witnesses to Jesus. The gospels were written at least two generations after his death and the verification for the life of Jesus is pitiful. Meanwhile, some of the verifiable events (earthquake, eclipse, Harod's actions, etc.) are shown to have not occurred.

Anyway, good luck with your appeals to authority.

Try this. Paul reworked the Shema so that Jesus received a place of mention beside the Father. Also note how Paul sometimes treats them as interchangeable.

For non-biblical sources, N. T. Wright has put out a couple books on the subject: Jesus and the Victor of God is perhaps the most relevant, but his recent monster of a book Paul and the Faithfulness of God dedicates a portion of the book to Monotheism in Paul's thought. If you're into academic stuff you could give PatFoG a try, as it goes over historical research in the time as well. It's 1700 pages though.

The similarities of the crucifixion and resurrection to pagan stories are usually overstated.

Richard Carrier has one book out and another on the way addressing the issue from a more scholarly direction. Proving History is the first book. The second is due out in a few months if I remember correctly.

Robert M. Price also has a good work on the subject. The Christ-Myth Theory and Its Problems

Start with those two. They both have talks on YouTube about the historicity of the gospels. I wouldn't go so far as to say I'm utterly convinced, but they are pretty compelling. Carrier and Eherman have had a bit of a feud over the issue and again, Carrier seems to have the better argument.

http://www.amazon.com/books/dp/1616145595

Please have a look at Richard Carrier's great book that questions the historicity of Jesus. Richard is an athiest scholar who doesn't take it as granted that Jesus was a real person.

Two thoughts. First, if you are interested in a scholarly work that refutes Ehrman et al, here is one you can check out.

Second, "what is true"?

A painting [generally] isn't photorealistic. It has all sorts of things that aren't accurate in it. In some senses, it isn't "true." But the difference between it and reality also serve a function. Because of these differences, the artist is able to communicate a message. The artist didn't make something photorealistic because he wasn't trying to. Instead, he was trying to communicate something.

Ancient biographers approached their work in much the same way. They were completely uninterested in doing modern biography, where you lay aside all bias and present the facts in precise chronological order. They felt free to play around with details (especially of chronology and geography, and especially by mixing and matching different speeches) to present a picture that they thought most accurately painted the life, personality, and core teachings of their subject. In some ways they treated biography more like literature than journalism. So when you ask "what time precisely did Jesus die [or what order did he call the disciples, or did he clear the temple at the beginning or end of his ministry, etc...]" my answer is:

The Gospel authors weren't concerned with communicating that. So I'm not going to evaluate them the way I evaluate modern biography. I will evaluate whether or not they were accurate in the things they were trying to be accurate in. But those weren't details like chronology and geography.

Sort of indirectly related to SneerClub subjects, I hope that's ok. Apparently this guy Richard Carrier - of course not himself a New Testament specialist at all - tried to show that Jesus did not exist by waving the Bayes wand. Needless to say, it got rather bad reviews in professional journals. It seems a pretty astonishing example though of the belief that by applying Bayes' formula to any subject, you don't need to actually know anything about it...

That's a very tortured reading of just one of the stories of a post-resurrection appearance.

I was thinking about what you said about us deserving more proof. Frankly, I think we've got far more than we have any right to when compared to previous generations.

In Jesus' day, only a few thousand people saw him work a miracle. Only a thousand at most saw him after the resurrection. In all of human history, seeing the supernatural has been confined to a relative handful of people.

Today, though, every single person in the developed world has access to

• scientific proof the universe began at a finite moment in time
  
  
• solid evidence of intentional design in the fabric of the universe, our planet, and biology
  
  
• documented evidence of miracles
  
  
• documented evidence of a non-material aspect of humans, some would even say of life after death
  
  
• solid evidence that the gospels are trustworthy
  
  
• and evidence that whether the gospels are historically reliable or merely "religious stories", Jesus really did rise from the dead.
  
  No, we don't get to see Jesus in the flesh -- walking on water or otherwise -- but we've got more than any generation since his has had. Far more. And we're going to be held responsible for what we did with that privilege.