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All these cultures knew each other and there are many cross influences. You're going to have to range further afield.

Or, that the passage doesn't refer to Jesus, which is what scholars of Isaiah believe. Isa 53 is from the hand of Second Isaiah, and the Servant there is generally held to be Israel itself, as I...

Greenleaf was ignorant of historical scholarship, even of his day. He certainly didn't understand the depth and complexity of today's analysis.



Hint: there's no punctuation in Greek, and...

The narratives ARE false, mainstream scholars have basically abandoned them as such, although of course they all believe that there is a historical kernel under them. Only conservatives hold to this...

He also died about 150 years ago. Believe it or not, historical methodology has advanced since then.

Vance, read what you wrote. Attacks, insults, and calls for submission. For far too many Christians, the conversation runs.

NONCHRISTIAN: I don't believe in your God. I see how his followers...

Hello Layman. It's good to interact with you. I was actually referring to a poster's comments above and wasn't really making a serious argument. I think Luke works hard to give his work the...

The list of Legates of Syria is known, and Qurinius does not appear on it twice. The information as the Greek of Luke is usually read cannot be harmonized with what is known. There was no empire wide...

You're quite a comedy, 33. First you claim my comments are unsupported, then when I provide support, you claim all I do is rely on sources. But I suppose when one is unfamiliar with the debates, and...

Utter nonsense. There is no situation in which self-interest runs smack in the face of morality.

Vorkosigan

The evil stems from following God's will. It stops when people give up God, Marx, the State, Allah, and other authority beliefs that rationalize evil and seek power and control over others, and think...

I was in Sri Lanka last year. Christians have always been obnoxious there since the arrival of European colonialism (burning the Buddha Tooth, building a Christian Church right next to the Temple of...

Thanks. It's pretty standard apologetic approach, foundationally, but France does not give us any way to sort the fact from the fiction. In other words, worth little. The last paragraph shows, I...

LOL. You can check out many different works, but I recommend Bowersock's Fiction as History for starters. A wonderful book. Then I suggest you read one of the collection of Hellenistic fiction, such...

Incorrect, as there was much admiration for Hitler on the US right and among fundamentalists. It was the Left that opposed him from the beginning. Hitler's racism is echoed in modern American...

You mean the conservative historian Paul Johnson? Did he mention that The Will to Power had been screwed up by Nietzsche's sister, who worshipped Hitler? That Nietschze hated German anti-Semitism?...

Actually, I have no position on the Kennedy assassination. I was talking about RT France, whom a poster above cited. Your satire has pretty much run its course. I'm sure it played well to the...

You're wrong there, Jaltus, for my wife is a Buddhist and my son a Christian (goes to Christian school). The world I envision is one where everyone can progress in the direction they want to, and no...

That's cute, but my second question wasn't answered. What methodology did France use to come to his historical conclusions?

Vorkosigan

The President and Mrs. Grant.

I'm glad that you can list conservative scholars, driven by confessional stances, regard the gospels as sound historical documents, but the rest of the world has a more sensitive, and sensible view...

Actually, the modern American Right-wing Evangelical movement is closely connected to the old eugenics movement. For the Pioneer Fund, one of the most important modern eugenics funding organizations,...

An idea widely supported across the social and political spectrum, until killed by scientific biology in the 20s and 30s. Hitler got his racist ideas from the Volkist ideology of the 1700s and 1800s,...

I think this article and thread are important. Evangelical Christianity's unwillingness to live with other beliefs and belief stances is on display crystal clear here, and its ultimate goals, to...

The irony is that the vast majority of those who do not accept the evidence in the Bible as a historical witness to the Resurrection are themselves Christians. Barna.org pointed out a couple of years...

Stopped by to see how things were. It's deja vu all over again.

It's a pretty bad article, and it has been dissected at length here and elsewhere. Why did you guys repost it?



Actually, ancient Hellenistic fiction frequently involved real people in exactly...

Layman, I have replied to Goodacre's article more extensively here.

I have deleted the irrelevant personal attacks and red herrings that have plagued previous posts in this thread.



I am a little confused here. If you already knew that there was a middle...

I don't know how things are from where you are posting, but in my universe life is known on only one planet, and 99.999999% of the volume of the universe consists of vaccuum which cannot support life.

Adams' grasp of history is a bit off....although I have noted that posters here tend to create fantasy history, since it is of course easier to simply make it up rather than study it. The Islamic...

Cites, please, of liberals of almost every stripe who argue that terrorists can be placated. I can think of a large number of liberals who want terrorism crushed, and wish Bush would get about doing...

Come, come. How many atheists have converted due to PasWag or the TAG? They are worthless and easy to refute. They have no effect on atheists, except to induce laughter and scorn.

Let's see. Whether Jesus ever claimed to be God is debateable; whether that is blasphemy is debateable (blasphemy consisted of pronouncing the name of God, not claiming to be him or his messiah);...

What we know of Pilate comes from his enemies. But he can't have been too incompetent, or he wouldn't have lasted 10 years in a very difficult post. It is significant that during his tenure Judea was...

There are no "standard tests of plausibility." All of these are subjective in nature, as numerous exegetes have pointed out. See the discussion in part 2 of Porter's The Criteria for Historicity in...

Good luck! I think I'll stay with Markan priority. Outside of a few conservatives committed against it according to their religious dictates, the rest of the New Testament world works off that. I...

What's to refute? Graham supplies no evidence or argument to support his assertions. When he or someone else does, then we'll be happy to refute him. In the meantime, I'll have my gods on rye, with...

This got me thinking the other night. The lottery machine does favor a selected outcome: those outcomes falling into the range specified by the lotto officials. The reality is that said range is...

The issue of whether Palestinians have watchdog groups is irrelevant. Sharon is a proven liar many times over; his peace offers are empty, and his claims about settlements are lies. That is the key...

Layman, please read what I wrote. Paul presented his experiences in terms drawn from the OT. That's a Christian fictionalization of his experiences. To understand what actually happened, we then need...

My site will not be up for a while yet. I am still in the information gathering phase. .

It is because it follows what we mean by "control" that you should be highly suspicious of it. Most of this analysis looks like folk psychological thinking (have you read Lakoff and Johnson's...

We're not obligated to define positions we don't hold. I happen to be, like all Christians, a subjectivist and relativist. The difference is that I haven't, unlike Christians, decided to use rhetoric...

Layman, in the case of Paul you can argue there is an outside vector. But that simply confirms my point: because Paul's account of his life is overlain with Christian fictionalization off the OT, you...

Yes, there is middle ground you are missing. If an event is portrayed entirely in OT parallels, how do you which parts of it are history, or even what happened? The history has been removed and...

Yes, that's the basic problem. Since people are neither customsbots nor legalbots, it is difficult to tell just how "impossible" the Sanhedrin trial would have been. Still, there are some basic...

Both sides are thugs. It's not really possible to declare one right and the other wrong. The Israelis are masters at manipulating foreign media, and have an entrenched Jewish community in the US that...

Probably because the number of people who apply critical thinking to Christianity and reject it is far, far, higher than the opposite case. Naturally there are more cheerleaders for the former than...

How would that help? Logic is built into everyone; it is part of the cognitive equipment humans have evolved to help them deal with other humans. Crouch does not short-circuit people's logic...