The Mystery of Jesus Christ. (Page 79)

ghostgeek: If somebody can prove who wrote each of the Gospels, now's as good a time as any to present the evidence they have. Show us what you've got instead of hiding behind the skirts of "Biblical Scholars" who disagree with each other all the time.

ghostgeek: Eusebius was a mate of Constantine the Great and was knocking around in the fourth century. Not exactly one of the earliest of the Church Fathers.

ghostgeek: Irenaeus of Lyon, born sometime in the early part of the second century. Why should we think he knew who wrote the Gospels when they were penned decades before he uttered his first cry?

ghostgeek: What does Paul tell us about Jesus? That he was crucified and reportedly seen after his death. That is the sum total that can honestly be said about this supposedly most influential man in history. Certainly doesn't strain anyone's brain cells, does it?

ghostgeek: The writers of the New Testament may have been contemporaries, but that doesn't mean they had to have known each other because the Roman Empire covered a lot of ground.

ghostgeek: Myths and legends are the basis of Christianity, something the witterings of Church Fathers and modern biblical scholars doesn't alter in the least.

Zanjan: The birth and early growth of Christianity was in Israel, not Rome.

Jesus never left the Holy Land (except briefly as a baby with His parents). A few Apostles traveled beyond its borders but not all of them. They occasionally returned until they were captured and put to death. The headquarters of Christianity remained in Judea for hundreds of years.

Paul's job was to ensure the spirit of the law was conveyed and understood. None of the first century Christians were historians. Even John; he recorded his personal adventures plus visions of the future...memoirs aren't history until after one has passed on.

ghostgeek: Who says the early growth of Christianity, whatever's meant by that term, was in Israel? Paul wrote in Greek and the four Gospels were also scribbled down in Greek. Sure suggests to me that Jews had little or no part in it.

ghostgeek: Anyway, the only real way to settle who got it going is to go back the first century AD and do some asking around. Sounds impossible, doesn't it, but maybe it isn't such a dream:

Prof Ronald Mallett thinks he has cracked time travel. The secret, he says, is in twisting the fabric of space-time with a ring of rotating lasers to make a loop of time that would allow you to travel backwards. It will take a lot more explaining and experiments, but after a half century of work, the 77-year-old astrophysicist has got that down pat.

His claim is not as ridiculous as it might seem. Entire academic departments, such as the Centre for Time at the University of Sydney, are dedicated to studying the possibility of time travel. Massachusetts Institute of Technology ( MIT ) is working on a “time-reversal machine” to detect dark matter. Of course there are still lots of physicists who believe time travel, or at least travelling to the past, is impossible, but it is not quite the sci-fi pipe dream it once was.

[ https://www.theguardian.com/science/2023/mar/01/back-to-the-father-the-scientist-who-lost-his-dad-and-resolved-to-travel-to-1955-to-save-him?utm_source=pocket-newtab-global-en-GB ]

Zanjan: The problem with time travel is it's a one way trip.

Remember when they sent up to space one of the identical twin brothers? After a year, Scott Kelly returned six minutes and 13 miliseconds younger than his brother, who had stayed on earth. Probably not what they had in mind for reverse time travel.

Zanjan: Ghost: "Who says the early growth of Christianity, whatever's meant by that term, was in Israel?"

By "growth", I meant both development and expansion. It began with John the Baptist, preparing a group of Jews to present to Jesus as a gift. These were His first committed students - all 12 of them plus a woman.
As they were being mentored, many other Jews listened to Jesus teach crowds in several places between Galilee to Jerusalem. Some Romans became Christians.

Eventually, the disciples felt knowledgeable enough to teach on their own and welcomed an unknown number of new believers into the fold - the newbies asked to be baptized to make it official, just as John had done.

What made Jesus weep is most of the Jewish community rejected Him - they were the first to know Him best but they allowed the clergy to pressure them. That would soon change - one can pull the wool over the eyes of the trusting for only so long.

During the crucifixion, many woke up and realized the clergy had lied to them. They immediately went out to teach the others. No numbers are given, I suppose because they were keeping it on the down low. Some were secretly Christian for awhile.

Forty days later, 5000 people became believers in just one day. We don't know the ratio of Jews to Gentiles but by that time, it didn't matter. The Christian community continued to be persecuted by the Jewish clergy. All this happened in the Holy Land.

By the time Christianity spread to Rome, it was a sizable community; there, the Jews had no influence; instead, the pagans persecuted them.

Zanjan: "Paul wrote in Greek and the four Gospels were also scribbled down in Greek."

We don't know what language Paul's letters were written in - no originals. He wrote to different places. He was born and raised in Tarsus so, Turkish would have been his mother (conversational) tongue; yet being from a devout Jewish family, Hebrew was his ethnic language.

The Mediterranean had been Hellenized so Greek was the common language among the tribes and nations. The scriptures weren't consigned to print until much later; it makes sense they'd be used by more people if the books were copied in the common language.

ghostgeek: Mmm, yes, so did Paul talk about John the Baptist in his epistles? Did he say that Jesus preached to crowds in Galilee? Did he even say that the Jewish community rejected Jesus? I may be mistaken here but I don't think so. And what's all this about the Jewish clergy persecuting the Christian community? Did Paul give us chapter and verse on this subject? Did Josephus? Again, I don't think so. In other words there seems no support whatsoever for what has now become Christian tradition.

ghostgeek: So what language were Paul's epistles written in? Maybe the following might suggest the likely answer:

In the next article in the same issue of Biblical Archaeological Review, the author, Pieter W. Van Der Horst, points out that no less than 1,600 Jewish epitaphs -- funerary inscriptions -- are extant from ancient Palestine dating from 300 B.C. to 500 A.D. The geographical spread of these inscriptions reveal that Jews were living all over the world at that time, especially the Roman period. In other words, when Jesus' brother James said in Acts 15, "Moses has been preached in every city for generations past and is read in the synagogues on every sabbath" (v.21), he was simply stating the truth. Peter, in his first sermon, enumerates a list of the countries from which Jews came to worship on that first Pentecost of the newly formed Christian Church (Acts 2:9-11).

Van Der Horst goes on:

"One of the most surprising facts about these funerary inscriptions is that most of them are IN GREEK -- approximately 70 percent; about 12 percent are in Latin; and only 18 percent are in Hebrew or Aramaic.

"These figures are even more instructive if we break them down between Palestine and the Diaspora. Naturally in Palestine we would expect more Hebrew and Aramaic and less Greek. This is true, but not to any great extent. Even in Palestine approximately TWO-THIRDS of these inscriptions are in GREEK.

"APPARENTLY FOR A GREAT PART OF THE JEWISH POPULATION THE DAILY LANGUAGE WAS GREEK, EVEN IN PALESTINE. This is impressive testimony to the impact of Hellenistic culture on Jews in their mother country, to say nothing of the Diaspora.

"In Jerusalem itself about 40 PERCENT of the Jewish inscriptions from the first century period (before 70 C.E.) ARE IN GREEK. We may assume that most Jewish Jerusalemites who saw the inscriptions in situ were able to read them" ("Jewish Funerary Inscriptions -- Most Are in Greek," Pieter W. Van Der Horst, BAR, Sept.-Oct.1992, p.48).

These are shocking statements to all who have believed, and taught, that the Jews as a whole were ignorant of Greek during the time of Christ! Obviously, Judea was not a "backwater" and "boorish" part of the Roman Empire, but a most sophisticated and cultivated part. In fact, the Jewish Temple was acknowledged to be the finest building structure throughout the whole Empire! The Jewish people, because of their widespread dispersion in the Empire, for business and commercial purposes, mainly, spoke Greek rather fluently -- and this knowledge and usage of Greek was also common throughout Judea, as this new "funerary inscription" evidence attests!

This really should not be surprising at all. The Greek influence in Judea had grown very significantly since the days of Alexander the Great, circa 330 B.C. By the time of Antiochus Epiphanes, circa 168-165 B.C., Hellenism had become very strong, and many of the high priests had become "Hellenists," leading to the Maccabean revolt. In successive generations, the Greek influence never abated, particularly among the business, commercial and priestly crowd. Many of the priests, being Sadducees, were greatly influenced by Greek culture and contact.

[ https://www.ntgreek.org/answers/nt_written_in_greek.htm ]

ghostgeek: Paul didn't spend his time in Palestine. He went from one Gentile community to another, so it would be logical to suppose that he wrote to them in the language that they spoke, i.e. Greek.

ghostgeek: And by the way, in which of the genuine epistles of Paul does he say he was born in Tarsus? Or is it only from Acts that this supposed nugget of information is gleaned?

Zanjan: “did Paul talk about John the Baptist in his epistles? Did he say that Jesus preached to crowds in Galilee?”

Paul’s job wasn’t to introduce the faith – the other Apostles did that. He primarily addresses the Christians. He was there to expound on the principles and reason of the law. That was His forte.

Re: persecution: “Did Paul give us chapter and verse on this subject?”

Why would he need to discuss what they already knew? Some didn’t know he was that person dispatched by the clergy so, he often confesses that.

Zanjan: "In which of the genuine epistles of Paul does he say he was born in Tarsus? "

What do you mean by "genuine epistles"? Who are you to decide the fake from the true?

Paul, himself, says this in 3 different places in Acts. Surely you're not thinking he didn't know where he was born?

ghostgeek: I spit on Acts! It's fabricated history of the lowest calibre. Now tell me where, in those epistles Biblical scholars judge to be from the man himself, he says where he was born.

ghostgeek: Paul's job was to lever money from tight-fisted hands and send as little as he possibly could to Jerusalem.

GeraldtheGnome: I have not seen any evidence that proves that even one of them ever existed. Zanjan also has got to stop repeating things that others mention on here. Anyway out of all of them the only one who I have seen anything about that shows that one of them possibly did exist is that of the one referred to as Paul on here. Despite religious bias and confirmation bias, not just by religious people, there is no certainty that he did exist and there really is nothing about him or by him, if he did exist, to even be considered from the first century, The Iron Age. It is most likely that everything that now makes up what is in The New Testament was indeed written in The Iron Age after the first century. It’s made up, it is nonsense. With a few exceptions of what is possibly true in The New Testament and the very rare sections of then existing people and places it really is just the last section of a fantasy book known as The Bible.

ghostgeek: Paul has things to say about James, the brother of Jesus, and so does Josephus. This suggests to me that all three lived.

GeraldtheGnome: Not everything that is claimed to be an autobiography is an autobiography by someone of a certain name. So anything claimed to be by someone is not always by who you think it is by. I did kind of repeat myself there. Evidence of something that is dated to after the first century is not evidence that proves that something was written in the century by an author who is referred to these days as Paul in English. There was no Jesus, therefore there was no brother of Jesus. So at best you have one author of which the name is not certain and Josephus never used anything like the words Jesus Christ died on a cross or that someone told him that anyone with a name like that died on a cross.

Think about what was really told by him because if I have to agree with you without proof that it is right then I might as well agree with everything unproven that Bob and Zeffur has presented to me as being true. So from what you told me without proof I have to agree as being true or I am wrong ? Suggests means possibly, it does not mean that even one of them ever existed. I still do not agree with a comma being in front of the word and at all. I get it though that there are two punctuation systems around, so technically every one of us are grammatically incorrect. The one very common in North America in particular is the one that you have used, it has far more commas than the kind that you do not use. That means that you are in a way right and that you in a way are wrong, so of course that applies to me and to everyone else as well.

GeraldtheGnome: Another thing. You, without proof, have come to the conclusion that the tales that you were written by Paul, you also used the word has. Has is a present tense word. That means that you accidentally claimed that he is alive right now. Yes, I know that I am a fussy bastard with this. Unless someone by the name Paul is about to speak to someone then someone by the name of Paul has nothing to say to anyone. Since the claimed Paul is supposed to have existed well over a thousand years ago there is no reason to believe that anyone by any name is still alive. Has anyone even got proof of anyone who lived to the age of 200 years ?

There is nothing that proves that Christ by any name had a brother that existed and that Christ by any name ever existed. Rumours made in the first century does not mean that there were written accounts by any claimed to have existed Paul, the rumoured accounts are not that there was a Jesus Christ. I hate the term ‘American Atheists’ because both words are not used in the broadest sense, nonetheless look at their site, use the words ‘Did Jesus exist ?’ while you are looking at it. Sure, a lot of names there are unfortunately the Modern English names of those are mentioned on there, it still doesn’t mean that the content on there is a load of crap though.

You should not have a religious like way of thinking about what you believe to be true about anything, an error by many people who are not religious is that without proof they think that because Christ or another is mentioned in any current Bible then that one in one way does exist. It’s religious bias without being religious and it’s confirmation bias because you found something that matches up with what you and at least someone else who has no proof still believes to be true.

Zanjan: Ghost: "I spit on Acts! "

Oh my, have you checked your Blood Sugar levels lately? You're not your usual sweet self.