Sorry for the late post folks, there was some serious singing to do today, at a church…never fear we went into the belly of beast and returned triumphant at the cost of the Sunday Disservice being late. Oh the things we do for our art. :) Enjoy.
Farming out the business of the Sunday Disservice can be trying at times as so much good material exists and is being freshly created here in the interwebs. This small snippit is from a commenter on Pharyngula and describes quite nicely the flaming hoops you have to jump through just to keep everyone’s favorite Zombie story consistent and clear.
1. There is no credible evidence that anyone named “Jesus” ever existed. The myths retold in the book called the “bible” were written decades to a century after the purported events by people who were not there (seriously, just look at Luke 1:1 for confirmation — he claims right there that he’s an historian, not an eyewitness). In addition, no contemporary historian seems to have noticed anything having to do with such a person. So, the evidence suggests that Jesus is nothing more than a mythological creature to start. (Hint: Josephus, Origen, and all the rest you’re going to quote were born quite a number of years after the alleged events.)
2. Any belief in the divinity of Jesus begins and ends with miracles. Without miracles, Jesus is just another nutjob who got whacked for mouthing off to the authorities. Only by virtue of miracles can the divinity of Jesus be claimed. Now, I’m not going to say that miracles are impossible — after all, they wouldn’t be miracles if they weren’t impossible.
Instead, I’m saying that the so-called miracles of the NT are stupid. The amount of power inherent in such acts is enormous — and yet, the god of everything who knows everything could not see fit to leave the slightest shred of proof behind that these “miracles” actually happened. What we do get is “the dog ate my homework” miracles.
* Where’s the wine? We drank it.
* Loaves and fishes? Eaten.
* The healed sick? Dead.
* Lazarus? Dead again. (Really? If I were a god and I raised someone from the dead, they would good and well stay un-dead.)
* The risen Jesus? Invisible in heaven.
Seriously, these are the stories that you MUST believe in order to credibly believe in the divinity of Jesus. And my 6-year-old could make up more-believable stories.
You don’t have a problem of faith – you have a problem of credibility.
bleatmop
Mystro
Dead Wild Roses 
2 comments
May 16, 2011 at 3:21 pm
D.I.D.
“1. There is no credible evidence that anyone named “Jesus” ever existed. The myths retold in the book called the “bible” were written decades to a century after the purported events by people who were not there (seriously, just look at Luke 1:1 for confirmation — he claims right there that he’s an historian, not an eyewitness). In addition, no contemporary historian seems to have noticed anything having to do with such a person. So, the evidence suggests that Jesus is nothing more than a mythological creature to start. (Hint: Josephus, Origen, and all the rest you’re going to quote were born quite a number of years after the alleged events.)”
I personally look at the entire Scripture not as false history but as distorted history. For starters, yes, I do believe that Jesus existed, but as for the Bible being a fantasy book I think you have confused how it has been twisted out of shape with it being totally false. To add weight to my rhetoric, the defence :) hereby presents two cases-in-point: the political monopoly of the Roman Catholic Church in the Middle Ages and the recent (1950’s) recovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls.
When the Catholic Church was effectively the government of Europe following the fall of the Western Roman Empire and before the growth of sovereign “national” monarchies, it became a political institution as much as it was a religious institution. One of the Islamic critiques of Christian doctrine is how the Church likely abused and altered the Scriptures to suit political ends, and with full control of both the content of the “original” sources and the exclusive right to interprit them – combined with the very human lust for power and stretched over a period greater than a thousand years – it is a statistical impossibility that the Scriptures remain unaltered. And if the Scriptures are altered, then of course there will be historical discreptancies.
To this I bring the Dead Sea Scrolls. Although the religious sect to which they belong is a source of debate among archeologists and historians, they have been carbon-dated to around the times of Christ and do contain a number of books of the Hebrew Bible among Aramaic and other ancient languages. One thing that has been derived from the Scrolls, and proof of what I have said above, is that there is a multitude of other biblical books that are not part of the modern versions of the Bible. So many pieces of the early Christian canon (and thus vital pieces of the historical puzzle) are likely missing.
Finally, where the Scriptures were not being misinterprited or eviserated they likely suffered from translational dislocations. As a fellow Canadian, I’m sure you know that there are some words, phrases, and expressions in the English language that simply have no literal equivalent in the French language, and vice-versa. In addition, the syntax and gramatical structure of the two languages are very different. When one translates things from one language into another, some things are inevitably lost or replaced in translation. Now, imagine how much has been “lost in translation” in Scriptures that have their origins in Greek, Coptic, Aramaic, Old Arabic, and Hebrew,(vastly different languages all) and has been translated in whole into each of those languages and then into Latin, and then into the Italian dialects, and then into German (Gutenburg), and then into Late-Middle English, French, Russian, Polish, Catalan, standard Spanish, Mandarin, et cetera.
If the details of Jesus’s life have been disrupted, airbrushed, or mistranslated, then it will appear from a historical point of view that he never existed. However, he could have very well existed albiet with a life-story significantly different then the one we are taught in Church.
In short, the Bible is not the entire Christian “history” nor can it have complete historical accuracy. But to claim to have “debunked” the whole Christian dogma based on the inherent contradictions in a Bible that has endured centuries of interpretation, translational loss, and political interference is quite simply throwing out the baby with the bathwater and a non-arguement.
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May 16, 2011 at 6:45 pm
The Arbourist
In short, the Bible is not the entire Christian “history” nor can it have complete historical accuracy. But to claim to have “debunked” the whole Christian dogma based on the inherent contradictions in a Bible that has endured centuries of interpretation, translational loss, and political interference is quite simply throwing out the baby with the bathwater and a non-arguement.
Your point is a very charitable account of why the bible in some incarnations looks and sounds crazy. I do agree that mis-translations, incomplete histories, and sectarian infighting have played a significant role in bringing us the bible product we see today.
One of the problems I do see, and what the author of the post identifies though, is that many of the claims in the bible are not very likely to have happened. Miracles and the like have their place in fiction, but should not be part of a dogma that claims to have the one true path to salvation, but only if you decide to turn off your critical faculties.
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