If this is the best theological reasoning proponents of Jesus's historicity have to offer...

[BurtWorm]

then I really do not understand how even the most up-to-date theology (let alone the position that Jesus is based on a historic figure) can be taken seriously by anyone who values reason and clear expression.

Below is http://www.slate.com/id/2132974/entry/2132989/">part of a "debate" among three scholars on the historicity of the Christian Nativity story that appeared on Slate.com in December 2005. I found it by following a link from a piece by one of the debaters, Larry Hurtado, about the meaning of the resurrection that appeared on Slate.com last weekend. The author of the following is not, in fact, a Christian. He's Alan Segal, professor of Religion at Barnard College, Columbia University, who occupies the Ingeborg Rennert Chair for the Study of Judaism; so could be wrong about the criteria New Testament scholars use to draw clues about the historic Jesus from the gospel text and other early Christian sources? Well, not according to John S. Koppelborg, who was the third party to the Nativity "debate," and who asserted that the three "debaters" were actually mostly in agreement.

Take a look at Segal's summary of the criteria in question (I've emphasized the portion that deals specifically with the criteria--and what I think is the heart of Segal's argument):

New Testament scholars who wanted to show that Jesus was a historical figure have developed over the last century criteria for judging the historical reliability of a source, like the New Testament, which was entirely written by believers. One criterion is that the story has to have a context in Judaism, as Jesus was born and died a Jew. Another criterion is that multiple sources in the early New Testament must attest to the story. But the most important arrow in the scholarly quiver has been and remains "the criterion of dissimilarity." The criterion sets a high standard: For scholars to arrive at an undoubted fact about the life of Jesus, they must eliminate as possibly biased everything that is in the interest of the early church to tell us. Conversely, for a fact about Jesus to be deemed historical, it must not be in the interest of the church to report it. It must be, in effect, an embarrassment for the early church. Thus, the criterion of dissimilarity is sometimes called the criterion of embarrassment.

Now, this is deliberately a very hard test. Many things that Jesus is reported to have said or done will be eliminated by this criterion. A number of authentic actions and sayings of Jesus will be among them, because we cannot demonstrate them to be free of the bias of the early church. Virtually everything from the Christmas story disappears, except perhaps that Joseph and Mary were not yet officially married. In rabbinic law, a properly contracted engagement might be considered a marriage, so Jesus was not illegitimate according to Jewish law. But we cannot be sure that rabbinic law was in effect in Nazareth before Jesus was born. And Greeks, who had different marriage laws, would have treated the story differently.

I have often heard fellow scholars exclaim in frustration that the criterion of dissimilarity yields such meager results that no one could ever write Jesus' biography based upon it. But that isn't the criterion's purpose. It was designed to help sift through the Gospels for indisputable facts so that scholars could be sure that the stories are, at least in part, historical. It seems to me, as a Jew and so as an outsider, that the criterion also has developed a secondary important function: It cautions Christians of different denominations about getting overconfident about their particular beliefs. Almost all Christians see their own beliefs as grounded in the authentic New Testament facts; the criterion suggests that very few facts are actually undisputable.

For all the rigor of the standard it sets, the criterion demonstrates that Jesus existed. Here are some facts in the Gospels that embarrassed the early church: Jesus was baptized by John (a great theological problem). He preached the end of the world (which did not come). He opposed the Temple in some way (and this opposition led directly to his death). He was crucified (a disreputable way to die). The inscription on the cross was "Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews" (the church never preached this title for Jesus and shortly lost interest in converting Jews). No one actually saw him arise (though evidently his disciples almost immediately felt that he had). Ironically, it's the embarrassing nature of these facts that assures us of their authenticity. The exalted figure of Jesus as a heavenly redeemer and the Lord of the Hebrew Bible, on the other hand, was the response of Jesus' closest disciples to the events of Easter morning. These are tenets of faith, not claims that can be demonstrated historically.

From my perspective, this is the equivalent of saying, "Anything the early church reported about Jesus that was embarrassing to the early church must be based on fact, or it would not have been included in the narrative." Is that not a patently absurd criterion for determining historic fact? How do we know what the early church considered embarrassing? Why would they find John the Baptist's baptism of Jesus embarrassing but not the laughable assertion that Jesus's parents were a virgin and the Lord God Almighty?

I would appreciate it if any Christians reading this--or proponents of the historical basis of Jesus, regardless of their religious beliefs--would comment on this passage. Is it accurate? Is this really how your side "determines" the true nature of the historical Jesus?

[patrice]

1. ?

not an expert.

So, you're opposed to the hypothesis that there was someone named Jesus who was the basis for the stories in the New Testament?

[BurtWorm]

2. I'm opposed to people arguing he was based on a historic figure

with nothing to back them up but truisms like "everyone knows he existed" (the most common evasion of the question) or bizarre notions like this "criterion of dissimilarity."

PS: To state it more positively, my position, based on the failure of historicists to come up with anything more philosophically satisfying to further their arguments than what I cited in my original post, is that the historicist position, whether held by a Christian or a non-Christian, is necessarily a faith-based position.

In other words, you can be an atheist (I've argued with many of them) and still have faith that Jesus is based on a real historic figure. I have yet to come upon anyone whose belief in Jesus as a historic figure is based on anything but blind faith.

[patrice]

4. Everything I've ever read about the Jesus Seminar says they

decided that there was little, but not no, historical evidence that someone like him existed. What historical evidence there is says there was someone who was a grassroots leader, who was betrayed by some of those who knew him, and he was probably executed. They say he could have been buried where he was supposed to have been buried. And then there is plenty of evidence that folks talked and then began to write about him some 20 years after he died and some of that stuff became the Bible. They say there is no concrete evidence that he said, or did, the things he is said to have said and done. And, though activities of that sort are known to have been characteristic of such figures, there is no historical evidence that any of said activities were miraculous.

To me, it doesn't matter whether the man Jesus existed or not. It doesn't matter whether he rose from the dead, nor whether he did miracles. It also doesn't matter to me whether teapots can fly. That does not prevent me from enjoying the real pleasures of tea and teapots.

[drmeow]

5. I believe that there is some

evidence that Mary and Joseph did exist and that they had a child who was born when the Roman's were conducting a census and people had to go back to where they were from. This did not happen in Dec (the date came from the Pagans) and Mary and Joseph apparently had other children already before Jesus was born. I also believe that there is some evidence that there was, at the time of Jesus' birth, an unusually bright star in the sky - probably whichever planet gets closest to earth was really close that year) but, again, it wasn't anywhere near December - more like the Spring.

I personally believe that there was a historical Jewish figure Jesus who had a cult following and was put to death by the Romans. Everything beyond that (that he was the son of God, that he rose from the dead, etc) requires blind faith.

[patrice]

6. Yep. Those are some of the probable facts the Jesus Seminar identified. nt

[BurtWorm]

8. Where is that evidence you're talking about?

It's not in some storehouse somewhere, is it? You don't have to answer that, because I know it isn't or we'd all know it was.

No, the "evidence," such as it is, is all to be found in the gospels, which were not written until many more than 20 years after the alleged events they described. They aren't quoted in the Fathers' writings until well after the start of the second century. They were, therefore, not likely to have been written by eyewitnesses (even assuming there were eyewitnesses). Scholars say they were "probably" written by amanuenses of eyewitnesses--but they have no positive evidence to back them up. Anyone interested in the question of who the historic Jesus was, or IF he was, is utterly dependent on the shadowy figures who cobbled the early texts together--not Matthew, Luke, Mark and John but the mysterious persons who wrote the gospels in their names in the late 1st or early 2nd centuries. (Set aside Paul, who was clearly not an eyewitness to those alleged events and didn't start writing his epistles until sometime after 70 AD).

So again, I have to say that all those favorite "facts" about Jesus that have become common since the Enlightenment first shook faith to the core--that he was a rebel, a rabbi, a philosopher--are all really nothing more than faithful guesses based on ideas of who Jesus *probably* was. Rarely does anyone ask the more fundamental question: did Jesus *have* to exist? Couldn't he be mythological? Wouldn't that explain him much better--more logically, more efficiently, more economically--than supposing he is based on a real figure?

More and more of us are asking those questions and deciding that the answer to the last one is, yes.

[drmeow]

9. I'm not a historical scholar

but - the Romans DID keep records, believe it or not. There are records of a huge census at the time when Jesus supposedly was born. There are records of Crucifixions. Language did, after all, exist at that time.

As for the star - that was a study by astronomers/physicists.

I'm not about to go track down the peer reviewed journal articles published on these findings - try Google scholar.

[BurtWorm]

11. Here's a conservative Christian scholar, if you will, on the census

Read to the end and you'll see that "difficult problems" the author cites to the historical accuracy of the Gospel of Luke are answered with a lot of "probablies" and arguments based on "probable" similarities with examples distant in geography and/or time (i.e., a reference to a Roman census taken in 104 AD in which people were allegedly ordered to return to the cities they came from).

This is the best the historicists have to offer. It's all they have to offer.



http://www.johnankerberg.com/Articles/editors-choice/EC1205W3C.htm

For those who believe that the Gospels are accurate historical records of Jesus’ life, one of the most difficult problems in the New Testament is the census mentioned in Luke 2:1-2:

Now it came about in those days that a decree went out from Caesar Augustus that a census be taken of all the inhabited earth. This was the first census taken while Quirinius was governor of Syria. And all were proceeding to register for the census, everyone to his own city. And Joseph also went up from Galilee, from the city of Nazareth to Judea, to the city of David which is called Bethlehem, because he was of the house and family of David, in order to register along with Mary, who was engaged to him and was with child.

So, Luke tells us Augustus took a census before Jesus was born and this was the reason Joseph took Mary to Bethlehem. However, critics say there are five reasons why Luke’s account is historically incorrect.

1. There is no known evidence of an Empire-wide census in the reign of Augustus. If it occurred, wouldn’t it be mentioned by one or another of the ancient historians who recorded this period?

2. Josephus records a lot about Herod but does not mention a Roman census in Palestine.

3. Quirinius was not appointed governor of Syria and Judea until A.D. 6, many years after Jesus was born.

4. In a Roman census, Joseph would not have been required to travel to Bethlehem and he would not have been required to take Mary with him.

5. A Roman census could not have been carried out in Herod’s kingdom while Herod was still alive.

In light of these facts, did Luke make vast historical errors in his chronology of events?

[More Than A Feeling]

13. 70 AD for the earliest of Paul's writings?

I was under the impression that the first of his extant writings, 1 Corinthians, was from the early 50s. Do you have a source or a justification for picking 70 A.D.?

[BurtWorm]

15. I may be confusing Paul's dates with the dates for the earliest gospel

now that you mention it. Thanks.

[patrice]

14. Re that question, and with my personal caveat against deification/blasphemy:

Reasoning by analogy here . . . Answer me this, if you will please:

What is this, 5 ?

[BurtWorm]

16. I don't understand your post.

I'm sorry. Can you rephrase what you're asking? What is what? What is 5 referring to?

[patrice]

20. I'm constructing an analogy for asking questions about things like the Bible.

This is something that we ALL do ALL of the time; it begins with the question (conscious or otherwise) "What is this?" and I'm trying to illustrate a certain point more simply by using/substituting "5" for "the Bible" (or, hypothetically, any other phenomenon). Think of it as a thought experiment:

What is this, 5 ?

[cyborg_jim]

31. S(S(S(S(S(Z)))))

[Donald Ian Rankin]

47. Christianity must have been founded, therefore "Jesus" existed, for some value of "Jesus".

"Jesus" is the word English-speaking Christians refer to the founder of their religion by. Pretty much no-one claims that it was actually his name - "Yeshua" is the one I see put forwards most often.

Christianity must have *had* a founder, so the question "did Jesus exist" is fairly meaningless; a much better question is "how much of what is said about Jesus is true".

"His" name may or may not really have been Jesus or Yeshua; "He" may or may not have lived at the time, in the place, stated; each of the stories about "him" may or may not be true; and, of course, "he" may or may not have been the Messiah.

But, because Jesus is defined by having founded Christianity, an event we know took place, the pronoun above must, by definition, refer to someone who existed..

[trotsky]

57. Couldn't Paul be said to have founded Christianity?

I'm trying to see how your logic couldn't be equally valid to say that since Scientology exists, then Xenu must have existed because he/she/it founded it.

[drmeow]

3. Some things I can address (former Catholic)

I think he is using this definition of embarrass: to place in doubt, perplexity, or difficulties, to hamper the movement of, hinder, impede.

The only portions of the bible which scholars can comfortably accept as true are those which do not necessarily advance the Christian mythology - the "best interest" of the church is to get people to believe what they say. If a statement in the bible does not advance the Christian mythology, the assumption is that the statement is not biased and is more likely to be factual. Therefore because the statement does not advance the Christian ideology, it must hinder said advancement, hence the embarrassment.

"Why would they find John the Baptist's baptism of Jesus embarrassing" - Jews are not baptized, only Christians are baptized. How could Christ (the basis of Christianity) have been baptized by a Jew? This is a contradiction and does not advance the mythology of the Church that Jesus died to relieve us of original sin and baptism is the symbolic removal of that sin from newborns.

"He preached the end of the world (which did not come)." - if he was a prophet and what he preached did not come true, he must not have been a very good prophet ... again, hindering the religious acceptance of Jesus as a prophet.

"He opposed the Temple in some way (and this opposition led directly to his death)." - he opposed organized religion which, by definition, hinders organized religion.

I don't have the energy to continue but I hope this clarifies things.

Oh, except one more thing - the Virgin birth thing appears to be a co-opting of the pagan view of the Goddess as crone, mother, and virgin and the running with the stags and mating of the consort (horned God) with the Virgin aspect of the Goddess.

[struggle4progress]

7. The method has an ancient pedigree as a legal argument in favor of certain testimony:

there is reason to give some credence to a person who, appearing as a witness in case, knowingly testifies to his/her own embarrassment

As a purely hypothetical example, consider two people involved in an auto accident on a street corner late at night, with a witness whose car was not involved in the accident. On cross-examination of the witness

Q. In which were you driving Mr?
A. I was not driving. I was sitting in my parked car
Q. Oh? And why you were parked on that corner at 2AM?
A. I was waiting for a prostitute I had hired

Of course, the exchange does not prove that Mr is lying, but it is reasonable to take into account the fact that to give such testimony would embarrass most people

If you do not count the embarrassments of the gospels as evidence of historical authenticity, then a literary question immediately begs for an answer: Exactly how do these embarrassments serve the purpose of the text? That question may be interesting regardless of one's theological predispositions

[BurtWorm]

17. How does John's Baptism of Jesus serve the text?

I think it's more important to address the question of why this scene is allegedly embarrassing. It's clear how it serves the purpose of the narrative: it reinforces Jesus's specialness, his otherness, John's professed unworthiness to be baptising him when the roles should really be reversed. This episode sets in motion the adult portion of Jesus's "life"--the drama at the core of the story, in which the son of God marches inexorably to his preordained fate.

Why is this scene embarrassing? Because some Christian sects don't baptise? Because Jews don't baptise?

[struggle4progress]

24. There are multiple embarrassments, many of a similar nature, some of which cannot possibly

have escaped your attention

But in answer to your question, suppose one were to encounter in the modern US, a group of people who say something like the following:

I'm one of X's followers. You've heard of X: he's that homeless guy that was framed and sent to the electric chair trial about ten years ago. X is a great teacher! I always learn so much by talking to him. You remember "Shoes", right? For a really long time, he lived off the land somewhere out past the city dump, and he used to warned everybody who came out there to clean up their act. The government finally killed "Shoes" for telling the truth. Well, even "Shoes" recognized X as the right person to follow

The embarrassments of this seem obvious enough

[John Gauger]

27. Yes, but if it serves some other purpose,

like explaining away an embarrassing inconsistency, then we can see why it may be included despite its less-than-flattering nature.

"Why haven't I ever heard of X?"

"He didn't live around here. He was a vagabond. You don't know the name of every vagabond on the streets, do you?"

Saying that Jesus was homeless quite nicely covers up the problem of the lack of evidence that Jesus ever lived in the area, or anywhere else for that matter. He never lived anywhere, he never owned any land, and he never paid any taxes. That's why there's no record.

And perhaps the point of including "Shoes" is not because he lends credibility to the beliefs that he holds. Maybe the focus in the story of "Shoes" is not on "Shoes" but on "X." Maybe "X" worked one of his many miracles for "Shoes." Our boy "X" cares even about a crazy like old "Shoes" (who is also conveniently a vagabond,) so of course he cares about you.

It is not inconceivable that these stories be fabricated, so therefore the simple fact that they are embarrassing is not definitive proof of their veracity. It may lend some credibility to the claims, but it can not be taken as airtight. If you are willing to accept the negative consequences of the claims, that just makes them all the more believable, because people, without thinking about the stories too deeply, will say "it must be true because if they made it up it would be flattering."

[struggle4progress]

29. We'll just go around in pointless circle because we're not even really discussing the same subject:

The difficulties, associated with any effort to obtain reliable historical information from these religious texts, has long been known, even by theologians: so interest in these texts arises for other reasons


"Argument from embarrassment" is a very old legal principle; it might even be a useful tool in philology; but in my view it is unlikely to extract useful historical information from the texts. In that respect, I probably agree with much of what you have just written, though I would nuance it differently -- an exercise I think not worth the effort because I do not think it would shed any useful light

Instead, I would push in the following direction: the embarrassments of the texts are plain, and the embarrassments of the story itself were already plain even before the gospels had been written. Whether one regards the stories as fiction or not, the plain embarrassments clearly affect the meaning of the stories

[John Gauger]

33. Wow.

Can I just say that I'm really impressed by what you just did? Most posters in R/T, including myself, would have dove right in to that pointless circle. Further, I must agree with you that we're not talking about the same thing, though I didn't realize it before you pointed it out.

[On the Road]

10. The Criterion of Embarrassment is Extremely Powerful

in discussing individual sayings, but I've never heard it used as the sole argument for Jesus' existence.

The best way we know Jesus existed is that he had relatives who existed and were part of a movement that believed in him as a human messiah with natural parents. The emperor Domitian even had Jesus' grandnephews brought in for questioning as sons of David and potential revolutionaries. The book attributed to Jesus' brother (which the criterion of embarrassment is very useful in analyzing) states "you have killed the righteous one; he did not resist you." That is not a statement describing a mythical being, but an accusation of murder.

Strangely enough, Jesus-as-myth people like Earl Dougherty tend to use Paul, who is probably the least reliable and the least neutral historical source on interpreting Jesus. It is true that Paul seems to discuss "Christ Jesus" as more of a heavenly than an earthly figure. Paul, however, was at odds with Jesus' blood relatives and was eventually (by his own account) universally rejected as a heretic.

In fact, Earl Dougherty plays on the passage in Hebrews where the author (probably Paul) writes "if he (Jesus) HAD been on earth", while ignoring another passage in the same book concerning "during his days on earth, he offered up loud prayers and supplications."

It is startling how good a case can be made for Jesus being purely a mythological being. However, I have yet to see a mythic Jesus person move beyond that to show how a false belief in an earthly Jesus could have arisen so quickly among so many disparate groups in that environment. Of all the strange views people have taken of Jesus, the one that his human life is based only on stories is one that is distinctly modern.

[BurtWorm]

23. You state with certainty that those were Jesus's grandnephews

but from what I've been reading about that tale, it's yet another one in which each element has to be taken with a lump of salt. The early church history is loaded with legends, most of which seem to me to have been devised to give the church an appearance of history (a grounding in reality) and significance that it didn't actually have.

How quickly did the Mormon church or the Unification church arise? Or Islam? Or Cargo cults? Or scientology?

The idea that Jesus's life is based only on stories is itself based on the fact that Jesus's "life" as related in the Gospels is completely improbable--or, let's be frank, impossible. Everything he says or does seems to be meant to prove that he is the culmination of Messianic prohecy--his every act and deed is footnoted to be cross-referenced with specific prophecies. The gospel Jesus is a supernatural being, a legend, a myth. What other real person from that age comes across as such a cipher in all the stories about him? I, at least, don't get much sense of a real person inside those portraits, which makes me doubt the reailty of a person *behind* them. That person's life, if there was one, seems to me to be totally lost behind a thick smokescreen of myth-making.

Modern Christians are aware of these difficulties, but they try to surmount them, not with hard evidence, but with logic tricks and criteria based on court-room tactics. That's really the very best they have. And the burden of proof is on them, not on us skeptics. If we were to apply Occam's razor to the problem, historicism would have been lopped off and left in the dust long ago. But the basis of Christianity--the very essence of it since Nicaea at least--is faith, not just in Jesus's godhood, but in his humanity as well. We won't be getting a totally honest appraisal of Jesus's true nature in the public arena until the lopsided stakes in this debate are levelled quite a bit more.

[trotsky]

43. ...

Of all the strange views people have taken of Jesus, the one that his human life is based only on stories is one that is distinctly modern.

That may have something to do with the fact that before modern times, if you had brought up such a suggestion, you'd be roasted. Literally.

[On the Road]

44. Quite the Contrary

For at least 300 years, people would be more likely roasted alive for confessing a belief in Jesus.

There was much public criticism and mockery of the Christian religion in the 1st-3rd centuries, both from the Jews and Romans. Some of them, like the Tolodoth Ieschu, place Jesus in the previous century and disagree about details like the number of disciples. Some people took the view that Jesus appeared to those around him to be human but was in actuality a spirit. But to my knowledge, no source ever denied that a person named Jesus existed on earth. That is what is difficult to explain.

[Meshuga]

45. Toledoth Yeshu was written somewhere between the 9th and 10th century.

It is a medieval work.

And Jews were roasted for saying less than kind things about Jesus. There is a lot that had been deleted from Jewish literature for the sake of self preservation.

And while some believe that there is a connection between the Talmudic Yeshu, there seems to be a scholarly consensus dismissing it as a reliable source for the historical Jesus.

Here is a nice analysis by Gil Student:

http://talmud.faithweb.com/articles/jesusnarr.html

But it is interesting and it should be noted that the name Yeshu (written with the letters yod shin vav) can be an acronym for "yemach shemo vezikhro" which means something like "may his name be blotted out from memory".

But again, the Talmud is not a reliable source in favor of a historical Jesus. It can only be a record of hostility, assuming that it is actually referring to the Jesus who is worshipped by Christians.

As far as no source ever denying that a person named Jesus existed on earth, that makes sense since there has always been an assumption that a historical figure existed in the same way that there was always an assumption, for example, that the Torah was at least written by Moses. But the latter was the case until enlightenment.

[On the Road]

46. The Talmud and Other Early Jewish Sources May Not be Accurate

in discussing Jesus. However, competing sects and religions are a useful source on ancient religions. The positions of Christians may be mocked or distorted, but it relects the controversies of the time. I am not aware of any time that anyone in the first three centuries ever made the claim, or referred to another group who made the claim, that Jesus never walked on earth. In fact, almost every possibility OTHER than this is represented.

In the case of Moses, one knows when he first became a legendary figure, but the earliest records are centuries after he is supposed to have lived.

In Jesus' case, you have writings from his contemporaries like Paul who by their own account had dealings with Jesus' relatives and referred to him as a person "on earth." The epistle that Dougherty is fond of quoting to show that Jesus only existed in heaven actually argues the opposite.

[Meshuga]

48. The Talmud may not even be discussing Jesus in the first place

Let alone be accurate about Jesus. I tend to agree with Gil Student's analysis that the "blasphemies" of Jesus and Mary in the Talmud is not referring to them at all. I would agree that the Toledoth Yeshu obviously refers to Jesus but that is a later work from medieval times. The Yeshu mention in the Talmud is just another hopeful piece in order to connect the dots in favor of a theory.

And when exactly did Moses first become a mythical figure with people believing that there was never a Moses? What do you mean by centuries after he supposedly lived?

I am not using Dougherty's argument or "thesis" but I don't think Paul referring to Jesus as a person on earth means that it is proof of Jesus as a historical figure. And who are Jesus' "relatives"? One could question the word "brother" as referring to a sibling, in case you are referring to the "James brother of Jesus".

The case for a historical Jesus has to be made in order to support contrived stories (i.e., the need for an ethical teacher to exist in order to justify his following today or the "Da Vinci Code" type of theories or the Jesus tomb) and assumed to exist by people who don't want to rock the boat. While I think it is valid to use the pieces of the puzzle to support the theories for a historical Jesus, I am also totally in favor of the rejection of the historical figure using the same pieces and I think that would be an interesting road to take that should not be attacked or get the eager parties trying to debuk it.

[On the Road]

53. Well If You Don't Accept a Contemporary

writing to other contemporaries about a person as evidence that that person existed, you're engaging in wishful thinking.

Yes, certainly I was referring to James as Jesus' brother. He is described from a number of sources including what is probably an original reference in Josephus. It is not a matter of being able to "question" something. It is a matter of being able to provide a reason that "brother" does not have its normal meaning. I have never seen a reason other than the desire to make it so.

[Meshuga]

54. The authenticity of any mention of Jesus by Josephus is likely is questionable

Including the James passage.

You see, I believe the wishful thinking and cherry-picking come from every direction. The cherry-picking is convenient in order to support contrived stories like the need for an ethical teacher to exist in order to justify Jesus' following today, to support the "Da Vinci Code" type of theories, to support the tomb of Jesus, etc.

[On the Road]

55. If You Are Going to Make a Compelling Argument Like This

It would be more convincing to set some standards for how you believe one should go about weighing evidence for something like this, and showing how it applies to the docments. Otherwise it's just aggressive ignorance.

The references in Josephus and Paul are not bad pieces of evidence by themselves, but collectively it's a more imposing task. There are dozens of sources and hundreds of documents available in the first couple of centuries.

None of them are indisputably authentic (the closest are probably a few epistles of Paul), but collectively they are an imposing witness. And despite the bitter rivalries and broad range of beliefs, all of the authors seem to have regarded Jesus as having been on earth. Not even the gnostics thought he was always confined to the third heaven.

[Meshuga]

56. I am not making a compelling argument for anything

I am merely stating that with the value of the evidence one could connect the dots close enough to make a case for a historical Jesus and at the same time one can explore the idea that a historical Jesus never existed.

Like I said previously, the wishful thinking (cherry-picking) comes from EVERY directions. The person trying to prove one of the Jesus theories will put the puzzle together to fit his/her needs. The same could be applied to the camp that has interest in proving Jesus never existed.

Just because I am questioning the generalities put forth in this sub thread, in order to create the context for a historical Jesus, it doesn't mean I reject possibility that Jesus existed.

Now, even if one say that Josephus mention of James might be authentic there is a huge possibility that a Christian scribe inserted the titles to create the connection. In other words, I think it is bad evidence unless there is need for evidence to support a theory. Together, the evidence are nothing but dot connection to support the theory.

And I fail to see how different groups claiming Jesus as being on earth can be used as evidence that there was a historical Jesus. Unless we add the questionable glue to the mix in order to support the theory.

Questioning the evidence and how it is put together is important and it hardly "aggressive ignorance".

[jjray7]

58. talmud and Jesus

Thanks for the Talmud - Jesus link. Best summary of the topic I have seen. Very informative. The point I took from the material at the linked page was that, even if we accept the words written in the Talmud at face value, the dates do not match up for Panthera to be Jesus.

[aquart]

12. If you want to know what happened with Jesus...

Pay attention to what happened after the deaths of Elvis Presley, and Princess Diana.

The process of deification takes on a life of its own. But it's much harder to complete in our current era of explicit documentation.

[BurtWorm]

18. Compare Jesus fact fuzziness with Elvis and Diana

Elvis and Diana: Hard evidence that they existed includes millions of eyewitnesses, including members of the media who have reproductions of their images and voices on millions of miles of tape and film. Other primary source material--their writings, their recordings, eyewitnesses writings and recordings about experiences with them--in similar abundance.


Jesus:


Now I will admit that believers in historical Jesus have a lot more to be embarrassed about than believers in historical Elvis and Diana. According to the criterion of embarrassment, does that mean historical Jesus is more probable than historical Elvis or Diana?

[patrice]

21. Could it be that given the amount of empirical evidence of Elvis and Diana,

we don't need to resort to the criterion of embarassment in order to ascertain: 1. Did they exist? 2. What/Who were they? - and that, due to the paucity of primary data, one arrives at the criterion of embarassment ONLY by the process of elimination of other more empirical criteria?

[HamdenRice]

19. I spent several years visiting villages in rural South Africa gathering oral history

During that time, I also went hundreds of times to the government archives in Pretoria to cross reference what people were telling me.

The events I was interested in had occurred 40 to 70 years earlier.

While I sometimes found bias, I never once talked to anyone who simply made stuff up, especially not the existence of a popular leader (of which there were several).

From my own personal experience, oral histories written down 20 to 40 years after the fact are likely to be extremely reliable.

One of my mentors, Charles van Onselen, wrote a 600 page biography of a single African sharecropper entitled, "The Seed is Mine: The Life of Kas Maine a South African Sharecropper, 1894-1985." It was based almost entirely on oral history checked against written records. Van Onselen realized that Kas was a treasury of memory shortly after he first met him: Kas was telling him about the per bushel price of corn some 50 years earlier. When van Onselen checked the written record, Kas was exactly right.

Yet, as the first page of the book points out, "This is a biography of a man who, if one went by the official record alone, never was." The only written record of Kas's existence was that he received a five shilling fine in 1931 for not having a dog license.

The idea that dozens or hundreds of people would conspire to create the existence of an imaginary leader and then write down that myth is itself absurdly difficult to swallow.

[patrice]

22. Your line of inquiry is very interesting, but I don't think that the OP is saying

"... dozens or hundreds of people would conspire to create the existence ...". The coincidence of things does not necessarily prove conspiracy. As C.G. Jung and Sir J.G. Frazer (The Golden Bough) both illustrated, there's quite a bit of similarity in the cognitive tendencies by means of which we apprehend (somewhat imperfectly, I might add) the phenomenal world.

[John Gauger]

28. That's all anecdotal.

You have said it yourself: there is only one piece of documentary evidence that the man existed. The rest is all word of mouth. Van Onselen could very well have fabricated any one, or all of the details of that man's life. He even, with a bit of skill and daring, could have fabricated the documentary evidence, as it is pretty sparse. Or, he could have taken the name and fabricated all the other details, meaning that for all intents and purposes, the man the book was about never existed. Without an official record, the anecdotal stories are meaningless. When those people are dead, the only record of that man's existence will be the official record, and you would be hard pressed to prove his existence, let alone any outlandish claims about him.


My friends and I were playing around with a video camera today, and we found that memories of events that happened even five minutes ago were generally inaccurate. Does this mean anything? No, because, while it is contrary to your points, it is anecdotal.

Your personal experiences are not scientific. They are also anecdotal. Even though you lived those experiences, you cannot prove to us that they happened. Not without evidence. Even assuming that your experiences are real (which in a debate we cannot do,) what do they prove? That memories are perfect, and that all second-claims about the memories of others are accurate? That nobody makes anything up, ever, for any reason?

When you say that these memories jived with the official record, you are talking about memories of events that actually happened. Even supposing that memories of events that actually happened are generally accurate, that means little or nothing if the events in question aren't documented. By bringing up that point as evidence of the veracity of an event, you are already assuming that the events are true. If the events are fabricated, that fact has no bearing because they are not even memories, they are fabrications.

On your last point, I firstly don't think it would be so outlandish if they each had a compelling interest in doing so as well as the means, and secondly I don't think anybody here is making that claim.

[HamdenRice]

30. Not it isn't. It's called historical methodology.

It's taught in all the best history departments around the world as a way to recover histories of people who don't leave written records. To call Van Onselen's work anecdotal is borderline insane. He spent 10 years working on the book and interviewed hundreds of people, matching their recollections against each other, and against the written records in government archives.

Obviously Kas Maine existed. Half of the small core of advanced graduate research students who worked with van Onselen interviewed Kas at one time or another, and there are hundreds of photos and thousands of hours of recorded conversations deposited with the University of Witwatersrand.

As for my research, I was fortunate to find that between 1910 and 1940 there were dozens of court cases about the issues I was studying, and hundreds of rural Africans were brought to court to testify and their testimonies were translated and transcribed into English and Afrikaans. There were also Christian missionaries who wrote memoranda about their long experiences in these areas and government bureaucrats who wrote about what was happening. The facts adduced in those written testimonies and memoranda closely matched the facts that certain elderly people told me in my tape recorded interviews, which meant that I had a very high degree of confidence in the facts my informants told me that were not covered in the court cases.

That's called historical methodology.

That's how we write histories of non-literate societies around the world. You may think that this methodology doesn't meet your standards, but the historians who wrote the Oxford History of South Africa and the Cambridge History of Africa, as well as many historians of rural America and Europe disagree with you. On this point, I'll have to go with the Oxford and Cambridge folks.

The main documentary evidence of the historicity of Jesus is the synoptic gospels. Atheist fundamentalists often dismiss the gospels because they are "in the Bible" and are "the gospels," without realizing that at the time they were written, there was no Christian Bible or gospels -- they were simply written records of oral memory of events of a few years prior. Because they agree on certain non-supernatural factual assertions, the overwhelming majority of historians of antiquity agree that there was an historical Jesus.

[Igel]

25. There are a number of heuristics to help navigate the

sea of ambiguity and uncertainty that medievalists run into.

This is certainly one of them: Few are going to say things that would seem to thwart their purpose.

Textual critics have a sort of parallel hypothesis: In the choice of two alternative readings (say, in different mss. of a single text), choose the harder readings. People will "correct" texts to what they think make more sense; they're unlikely to "correct" it to what they'd think is gibberish. Errors creep in, to be sure; but a fair number of "difficult" readings have turned out to be good. Words that weren't attested elsewhere, screwball grammatical constructions, or sentences that really do mean what people found it difficult to believe they meant.

Both the "embarrassment" and the "harder reading" business also work in fields *other* than NT studies.

Note that these don't provide the upper limits on what you know, however. Having shown that a text reliably reports a number of embarrassing facts makes it more likely that it also reliably reports facts that are also self-serving, or at least that those bits weren't added later. Same for difficult readings: If you get difficult readings in a text, it's more likely to be old and not a forgery (with some notable exceptions: The "Lay of Igor's Host", an apparently Old Russian text, is almost certainly a forgery, one composed by a scholar who knew enough to introduce difficult readings not so much in the interests of textual misdirection, but for "flavor"--all authentic texts had screwy passages, so his fake text had to have screwy, authentically scewy, passages).

As for proving Jesus' existence ... there's not really much proof. He didn't merit much documentation, it seems.

[John Gauger]

26. You are quite right.

"Anything the early church reported about Jesus that was embarrassing to the early church must be based on fact, or it would not have been included in the narrative."

That is exactly the statement they are making, and it does not follow. It is true that any complimentary claims are suspect because they are complimentary, it is not true that any embarrassing claims are accurate as a result.

I can't comment on why Jesus's baptism would be embarrassing. Why can't he be baptized? It was a very popular ritual at the time. What's embarrassing about being baptized? (I mean, I'm embarrassed I was baptized, but I'm an atheist, and I'm resentful that my parents would put me in such a risible situation. But why is it embarrassing for Jesus?) I know why the virgin birth is not embarrassing, though. That claim was very common at the time for mystical and holy figures. While many enlightened types thought such claims were pure bunk, unless I'm mistaken a good deal of people believed that stuff at that time.

[crawfish]

38. Jesus' baptism...

was an embarrassments to early Christian scholars, because it creates a distorted master/follower view that puts John above Jesus. However, that is not the case historically. In that time, there were many levels of schooling; and only a rabbi who had completed the highest levels of schooling AND been approved by two of the high-level rabbis could interpret the law. John the Baptist was obviously such a rabbi; and since, according to the text, he was aware of who Jesus was and what his ministry was, the baptism was his method of bestowing such approval.

Thus, early Jews would have understood his baptism in an entirely different way.

[Meshuga]

32. The criteria is there to help with the "belief" that there was a historical Jesus

not as proof that there was indeed a historical Jesus. It is just another dot (just like the "oral tradition" argument) to connect closely in favor of the desire to have a real man behind the mystical figure. But like Segal said, "We have no evidence of Abraham's life or Moses' or of the Exodus either. We have good evidence that the Hanukkah miracle of the cruze of oil that burned for eight days never happened and that the story in the Book of Maccabees is told in an extremely tendentious way... I would no more recommend that we stop celebrating Christmas than I would recommend that we stop celebrating Purim or Hanukkah or Passover..." and I think that applies to different areas of Christian religion as well.

There is no need for a historical Jesus for Christianity to exist so there is no need for the defensiveness when some of us question his existence as a person in history.

[HamdenRice]

34. Except that the overwhelming majority of historians of that era

have concluded that there was an historical Jesus. It's not defensiveness; it's defending being part of the reality based community; and it's not a "belief" in the religious sense, but an historical conclusion based on the evidence.

The very small faction that believes that there was no historical Jesus happens to be the fringe:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jesus_myth_hypothesis#cite_note-Burridge-2

"There are those who argue that Jesus is a figment of the Church’s imagination, that there never was a Jesus at all. I have to say that I do not know any respectable critical scholar who says that any more.” Burridge, R & Gould, G, Jesus Now and Then, Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2004, p.34.

"The historian Michael Grant, writing in 1977, states that, "To sum up, modern critical methods fail to support the Christ myth theory. It has 'again and again been answered and annihilated by first rank scholars.' In recent years, 'no serious scholar has ventured to postulate the non historicity of Jesus' or at any rate very few, and they have not succeeded in disposing of the much stronger, indeed very abundant, evidence to the contrary." - Michael Grant, Jesus: An Historian's Review of the Gospels (Scribner, 1977, 1995). The quotes 'again and again been answered and annihilated by first rank scholars' and 'no serious scholar has ventured to postulate the non historicity of Jesus' come from Roderic Dunkerley, Beyond the Gospels (Whitefairs Press, 1957), p. 12.

[BurtWorm]

35. I am not arguing that Jesus is a figment of imagination. I am arguing that he is myth.

Historicists can't offer actual evidence of Jesus's basis in reality. They can only offer the agreement of each other.

[HamdenRice]

36. One can only argue "no evidence" if one dismisses the gospels

But that's a circular argument: Anything that mentions the historical Jesus is excluded because it mentions Jesus.

The gospels were not "the gospels" when they were written. They were written accounts that were later adopted by the church as canonical texts.

They are the primary evidence of the historicity of Jesus because they are the written record by a literate group of recent events. Moreover, texts that have been shown to have been written by different writers agree on certain facts.

You may dismiss the "historicists" but that's dismissing consensus reality. If you polled university based scholars of the epoch, the number who accept the historicity of a Jesus figure would be around 99%, if not 99.9%.

You could make the same claim about who is prime minister of the United Kingdom. I "believe" it is Gordon Brown. If you assert that the prime minister of Great Britain is the Dalai Lama, I suppose you could then assert that all those who "believe" it is Gordon Brown are merely agreeing with each other.

Duh!

Purveyors of the pure myth theory are a fringe not represented in peer reviewed scholarly circles. As the Wiki article mentions, the pure mythers exist primarily in internet circles.

[Meshuga]

37. One can also say that

They can be written accounts showing evidence of a mystical figure called Jesus. But this mystical figures could be based on one historical figure or two historical figures or none.

It is important to mention that there is bias in scholarship and there is also an unwillingness to rock the boat.

But "mythers" bring an interesting argument to the table. Bullshit or not, it is an interesting theory. The eagerness to attack them and to disqualify them is a result from this bias which I do not condemn since it is understandable. But it is something important to look at without the bias and the interest of debunking it.

In the end, this is a field where dot connecting is necessary in order to believe that a specific theory is true. There is no proof or any explicit evidence to prove anything.

I could agree that probably there was a historical figure behind the Jesus in the Gospels. But, in my opinion, this criterion of embarrassment is pretty lame.

[HamdenRice]

40. I'll agree with you on one thing

If the criterion of embarassment were the only criteria being used to judge the factuality of a text, I would agree that it is, by itself, lame. My understanding is, however, that it is used to judge which of two texts is more likely to be true. I don't think it can be used to judge the authenticity of a text by itself. But the historicity question doesn't rely on the criterion of embarassment; it relies on the existence of the historical figure in several texts.

I'm perplexed by the idea you posit that there is "no explicit evidence to prove anything." While the evidence isn't 100% conclusive (almost nothing about antiquity is), the gospels are considered by most experts to be evidence, because they were transcribed before they were "the gospels".

[BurtWorm]

41. I do dismiss the Gospels as works of history.

They're clearly works of fiction. They tell stories no one could possibly have been witness to. And they're full of historical inaccuracies and inconsistencies from one text to the next.

Is the Odyssey a history? Is the Aenid? The Bhagavad Gita? The Gospels are on par with those books. They're myths. They were in competition with each other and the apocrypha from the start to become the church's canonical texts. That was their raison d'etre.

Who are the scholars who get peer-reviewed in the field of New Testament Scholarship, by the way? Don't they tend to be Christians?

Let us look at the criticisms of the mythicist case mainstream and traditional scholars have made, according to the Wikipedia article you cited:

Specific Criticisms

The points below highlight some criticisms of various arguments for an ahistorical Jesus <followed by my criticisms of the criticisms in angle brackets>.

* Michael Grant does not see the similarities between Christianity and pagan religions to be significant. Grant states that "Judaism was a milieu to which doctrines of the deaths and rebirths, of mythical gods seemed so entirely foreign that the emergence of such a fabrication from its midst is very hard to credit."<61>

<Grant's criticism, if this is accurate, ignores entirely the argument of Freke and Gandy, for example, that Hellenized Jews outside of Palestine considered pagan religion to be more advanced and sophisticated than Judaism. Paganism was considered the religion of intellectuals and philosophers in the Mediterranean world. To argue that Judaism wouldn't have provided good soil for the fruition of the Christ myth may be true; but why couldn't the Christ myth have arisen among cultured Jews living among cultured pagans, the kinds of Jews who read their Torah in Greek rather than Hebrew? The sourcebook for the new testament, after all, seems to have been The Septuagint, no?>



* R.T. France states that Christianity was actively opposed by both the Roman Empire and the Jewish authorities, and would have been utterly discredited if Jesus had been shown as a non-historical figure. He argues that there is evidence in Pliny, Josephus and other sources of the Roman and Jewish approaches at the time, and none of them involved this suggestion.<21>

<According to Charles Freeman, in "The Closing of the Western Mind," pagan Rome was much more tolerant toward Christianity as a whole than Christians were toward paganism--or toward heretical Christianity, for that matter. One of the earliest controversies in Christianity concerned the question of whether Jesus was a man (the Arianists, you might recall, claimed he wasn't; they lost the battle). This controversy is usually presented as one over how much of Jesus's essence was identical with God's. The Arians tried to make the case that Jesus was 100% God--i.e., purely supernatural, and that his acts on earth were, like the acts of the Greek gods, symbolic illusions only--not real in the way a human's acts are real, but only appearing to be real. Contemplate for a moment the wonder of the faithful of a religion arguing over whether their alleged founder's alleged life was actual or just an illusion. Even then, the faithful had to duke it out over whether or not Jesus was actually a part of history or only seemed to be. I won't comment on the sources France mentions because their weakness and reliability as witnesses to Jesus's supposed life is very well known.>



* In response to Jesus-myth proponents who argue the lack of early non-Christian sources, or question their authenticity, R. T. France counters that "even the great histories of Tacitus have survived in only two manuscripts, which together contain scarcely half of what he is believed to have written, the rest is lost" and that the life of Jesus, from a Roman point of view, was not a major event.<21>


<An admission that there isn't much evidence for Jesus to be found in the historic record is not a very strong argument in favor of his historicity or against his mythological nature.>



* R.T France disagrees with the notion that the Apostle Paul did not speak of Jesus as a physical being. He argues that arguments from silence are unreliable and that there are several references to historical facts about Jesus's life in Paul's letters, such as Romans 1:3 <21>.



<Romans 1:3 is a reference to Jesus's being allegedly from the house of David "according to the flesh." But this is not evidence of reference to a life of Jesus. This makes more sense as a reference to the Jewish myth of the Messiah, who is supposed to be from the line of David according to scripture, and to the Christian myth in the making even as Paul was writing, in which the central figure is a man-god, half spirit, half "flesh.">

[HamdenRice]

42. I certainly agree that the Gospels are not "works of history"

but that shows that you are not familiar with historical methodology or the terms used in historiography.

The gospels are "historical sources," or pieces of evidence, not works of history.

For example, if a professional historian (or even a talented amateur) writes a monograph or book entitled "A History of the Civil War," that would be a "work of history." But if I find in some family's papers, a diary written by the wife of a confederate soldier, that would be a source or evidence that could be used to create a work of history. Combined with other primary and secondary sources, that diary could be used to write a work of history.

The gospels fall into the latter category. From our modern perspective, they are sources or evidence. Sometimes, while doing local or rural history, one comes across an individual's idiosyncratic "history" of his or her community. It purports to be a work of history, but we would take it to be a source or evidence instead, because it lacks objectivity and doesn't use sound methodology. Similarly, the gospels purport to be works of history, but we take them to be primary sources or evidence, to be used with other evidence or sources to make judgements about what did and did not take place.

Obviously the gospels make supernatural claims as well as factual claims. But so do most historical sources written more than a few centuries ago. If you look at the primary royal sources in England recounting the defeat of the Spanish Armada, most of them recount the mundane, factual events, but add that "Almighty God" raised a wind that destroyed the Spanish fleet. That doesn't mean that we dismiss all those royal sources as unusable. The same is true of the gospels as sources.

Most of what you wrote under "specific criticisms" is non-responsive to the issue. But the paragraph about Tacitus is instructive and you seem to be misunderstanding what R.T. France is saying. He is saying that the gospels are not very different from other sources from antiquity -- yet we continue to try to write of antiquity. They are fragmentary and have been copied many times with insertions added. It's the job of the professional historian to compare the many versions to figure out what the earliest and therefore most reliable are. Same with the gospels. The historicity of Jesus is based on, among other things, close analysis the synoptic gospels, not the entire New Testament.

As for bias, which keeps coming up, I find it a strange argument. I imagine that many historians of antiquity are nominal Christians, but many aren't. Recognizing the historicity of Jesus is not entirely correlated with Christian faith, however, and much of the work that accepts this idea are secular historians in history departments, not theologians.

More broadly, however, that's like arguing that the vast majority of histories of the any aspects or regions of the United States are unreliably "biased" because the overwhelming number of people who wrote them are Americans.

The only "bias" you are likely to find in the peer reviewed university sector that accepts the historicity of Jesus is a bias toward methodology, facts, and the consensus of the "reality based community," rather than a fundamentalist atheist driven desire for the theory of historicity not to be true.

[crawfish]

39. That's actually a fairly good method

Bart Ehrman is another non-religious scholar who supports such criteria.

From a purely secular standpoint, I think it's HIGHLY unlikely that Jesus never existed as a person. There is more documentation of his life with copies existing closer to that life than nearly every other historical person from that time or before. Not to mention, the leaders of the early group purported to be followers of his and, based on that belief, gave their lives to imprisonment, torture and execution.

The "safe bet", even without faith, would be to assume that Jesus DID exist and did have a following.

[hunter]

49. Oh my God. It's a story, it's a tradition, it's a faith.

EVERYTHING about human beings is a story. Our stories are what we ARE.

E=mc² is a story in physics.

2H₂ + O₂ --> 2H₂O is a story chemistry.

The history of the United States I was taught in Grades K-12 was a rotten myth of a story.

'Let there be light' is a story.

You see, there was this guy who was wandering around promoting this radical religious interpretation. Some other people claimed he was the son of God. The Romans executed him because he was getting the locals all stirred up.

That story seems straightforward to me, and much more likey than random crazies shooting two Kennedys, a King, and Blessed Saint Ronnie of the Wretched Republicans.

Whenever somebody points me to a story, especially a story claiming to have some purpose or moral, I judge it by the purposes claimed for it. There are stories of science. If I get pointed to a story of science and it turns out to be a story about, let's say, "Intelligent Design," I am rightfully (and perhaps righteously!) indignant. If somebody says they've found a good television news source and it turns out to be Fox News, well again, I'm pissed. If I go to some movie advertised as a light comedy and it turns out to be some dreary and violent tragedy with a real downer of an ending, well fuck that. But Joel Osteen says Jesus Loves Me! Woohoo! Or did He suffer and suffer and suffer and suffer....and suffer and suffer.....and (one last gasp here) die for me, as Mel Gibson did his very darned best to explain.

Your father loves you, WHACK!, your father loves you WHACK!, your father loves you WHACK! Um yeah, I get it Mel, growing up with a whack Right Wing Catholic dad must have truly sucked.

The processing power and bandwidth of our brains is small. The size of the universe is immense. There isn't a snowflake's chance of dancing on the sun that we could understand it, and to pursue such an understanding is delusional. We have to decide for ourselves, each and every one of us, what we find beautiful, and what brings us joy. Some people will enjoy science, some people will enjoy singing. I can't say science has any more sensibility to it than singing.

I take great comfort in the consistencies of science, in the "scientific method." It gains me a greater appreciation of the complexity of this universe. I would rather be part of a branching tree of life unbroken for billions of years, and not simply a creature made of dirt a mere 6,000 years ago set upon a deadly stage to be judged by an invisible audience, as I pointlessly examine the painted fossils in the ground and the painted stars in the sky.

Smaller things bring me pleasure too. I like to go to Mass on Sunday. It is an island of predictability in my chaotic life. Peace be with you. Don't be mean. Doesn't bother me to argue with the Church either, or stiff them in the collection plate. Yep, I do support gay marriage, and when are we going to see some women Priests around here? My atitude towards my nation is much the same, and of the two institutions, the USA and the Catholic Church, the USA is currently the most dangerous, and unlike the Church I have no say in how they spend the money I hand over to them. The Bishop can appeal all he wants to, but don't piss off the IRS, our government needs your money to kill and torture people in the name of "democracy."

Whew.

I also like to write programs in PHP and Ruby. Computers are stupid. They consistently follow the instructions you write, even when the instructions are silly. People rarely do.

puts 'What is your name?'
name = gets.chomp
puts 'Did you go to Mass today?'
reply = gets.chomp.downcase
if reply == 'no'
  puts 'You are a sensible fellow, ' + name + '.'
else
  puts 'You are an odd duck, ' + name + '.'
end


How's that for a story?

[and-justice-for-all]

50. It can only be taken on faith...

all religion, because there is little to no facts or evidence to support its claims.

[hunter]

51. It can only "be taken on faith" that our lives have any meaning at all.

That's where we all start, with the ridiculous assertion that we are any more important than grains of sand on an unknown beach.

It could be that the universe is teaming with intelligent forms of life (whatever intelligence might be) who see nothing special here on earth. Yep, RNA/DNA life forms, check, hey look, those insects are sort of cool, oh well, time to move on...

[and-justice-for-all]

52. Correct...

Instead if facing the facts regarding life, people seem to want to bury their heads in the sand with a self enforced delusion that others exploit and take them for all they are worth.

In the Ocean called the Universe, we are insignificant, are we unique? yes, I think so. I think this because to me, life is like the game of Boggle. You know that game with the 12 dice with letters on them and on all sides in a box that you have to shake up periodically and form words from those letters on top. To me, that is how life in the Universe works, all the same material is there but every time it is shaken something different comes from it, in this case different words.

So every galaxy and every planet in that galaxy is a Boggle game, it has all the elements to form life, but not in the same way we have seen it here on Earth. Oh yes, it is out there, be it Intelligent or basic, but it is there and evolution is there are well because life never remains the same.