You're language has been edited Thumper, keep in mind the rules of the Board or you'll find yourself relegated to the Iowa Underground.
"Good luck recruiting these eyewitnesses to the stand."
First you try to poison the well by calling my statements BS, and then you stoop to
Ignoratio Elenchi, irrelevant conclusion. Of course those eyewitnesses can't be brought to the stand, neither can the witnesses to Genghis Khan or the other historical persons/events I brought up. But the words written can be used and are direct evidence in spite of your objections. I'll set forth some reasonable arguments to prove my point and rebut your assertions.
BTW, do me a favor Thumper, I won't attack you personally or make ascerbic comments about your reasoning if you don't make such baldly useless off-hand comments such as those you began this post with.
"It is widely argued that the gospel accounts were written anonymously, and not by the "eyewitnesses" they are attributed to."
Widely argued? By whom? Individuals who have a background in Biblical studies? Scholarly experts with no particular axe to grind?
A better question to these woefully uninformed skeptics, are they willing to put up or shut up when it comes to verification of authorship if applied equally to ancient secular documents whose authenticity and authorship aren't questioned, but are "anonymous" in the same sense that they contend the Gospels are?
Do some research that reaches beyond your obvious antagonism. At least understand how historians establish their authentication process and discover how the Gospels have been verified as accurate through:
A few questions for you:
If the Gospels are, as you contend, anonymously written, why isn't there a variation of the titles that would have naturally occurred. It's preposterous to think that in such a relatively primitive society that the Gospels floated around for 60 years, people following the teachings contained and then transmitting them verbally to their offspring, and then,
voila, someone assigned authorship to them. To top it off the sudden authorship would have required that the entire church that existed in the Roman Empire agree with the assignation. That's an important point since that's why the apocryphal gospels weren't included in the Canon.
Would it be reasonable for the newly emerging Christian community to honor the writings unless they attributed the authorship to someone that they recognized as
knowing what they were writing about? Suffer persecution and physical harm for something they didn't consider as "fact" from a reliable source?
There's absolutely no reason to date any of the Gospels later than 70 AD except in the case of John and more recent research shows that John's Gospel may bear a date of 50-55.
"And how many times are you going to trot out that tired reference to Josephus? The Testimonium Flavium is viewed as an outright forgery even by most conservative of scholars."
Again, no matter how much bovine exrement you declare it to be or insist that "most conservative Scholars" consider the "tired" reference to Josephus to be a forgery doesn't make you right.
Here's
site right back at you. Even if a concession is made regarding the "Christian" language that your author insists disqualifies it as an historically accurate writing, neither you nor the author have proven individually or by consenus, that it's a forgery. Even if you remove the "Christian"
language, it still stands as an historical and accurate document as Hounded says.
"Archaeologiical refinement: Endlessly unearthing such treasures as the Shroud of Turin and the Holy Lance."
Nice try at deflecting but I don't know any Christians who view the Shroud of Turin or the Holy Lance as integral to their faith.
"Historical refinement: Continued development of arguments to defend the dearth of historical evidence for the Slaughter of the Innocents. See also the Josephus forgery above."
Quote from your site reference:
"There is no historical evidence to even suggest, let alone prove, that Herod ever slaughtered the children of Bethlehem. Neither Roman nor Jewish records contain any mention of such an event; indeed, even the rest of the New Testament is silent on the topic. As Lippard notes, historians such as Flavius Josephus carefully recorded Herod's abuses; how could such a gross miscarriage of justice go unnoticed by them? This becomes even more preposterous when we note that this was a time of political unrest among the Jews, and such an event would surely have touched off a rebellion. Yet no such revolt is recorded anywhere.
Aside from being arguments from silence, Berry's paragraph, and Lippard's note, are replete with misconceptions....The site's author.
I really don't think you want to use Holding as an ally in your punitive attacks on Christianity.
"Linguistic refinement: Finding ways to tone down the language of a wrathful god who would massacre 42 children for taunting a bald man."
Since you have already directed me to Holding's site, here's his
commentary on the "children" taunting the prophet.
This post was edited on 3/7 12:24 AM by Dave Wyattif(GetAdminCookie() != 0) {document.write(' (Revisions[/URL])');}