Why are the BIBLE and Christianity ALWAYS Under Attack?!

Tacitus was one of the greatest of Roman historians. His Histories and Annals are considered to be valid history by scholars. Tacitus wrote several other things about stuff that happened before he was born. Does this mean historians should not consider him a valid source? Well, only according to your logic. The fact that Tacitus was born 20 so years after Christ does nothing to invalidate what he wrote. It's likely that Tacitus relied on other sources, and oral tradition.

 

How many surviving records are there of any non-Roman/Greek non-king or non-Gerneral?

P,S. Why can't I use our flag?

 

1) A book cannot be proof of its own claims. Period. Outside empirical evidence is necessary.

2) The entire Constantine argument is an argument from authority. Tamerlane ruled an empire far larger than Rome and he believed in Islam. Does that mean that Islam is true?

3) Arbitrary dating systems are just that, arbitrary. The fact that CHRISTIANS used the supposed (but completely wrong) death date of Christ as their arbitrary start point means exactly nothing. Muslims use the escape to Medina as their start point, does that mean that the Quran is true?

 

Tacitus also didn't confirm that Jesus existed. He only stated that Christians existed and recounted what they believed. He did not in any way say that what they believed was correct.

 

It's time to take the persecution test, are you ready?

1) Can you go to church without being heckled?
2) Are people of your faith regularly killed in your community?
3) Do you have to hide your beliefs everywhere you go for fear of your life?

If your answers are, 1) Yes, 2) No, and 3) No; then you...are not being attacked or persecuted. Seriously, people disagree and just because some people either disagree with or don't like Christianity does not mean "the Bible is being attacked".

 

Well, how can you appricieate something that you dont believe in? I think its a good book of tall tales misperceived by men who were conviced that the natural working of the universe were somehow divinley inspired.

 

Tacitus says nothing about what Christians believed. He only wrote what he believed to be true. True, he doesn't say Jesus, but uses his messianic title of Christ. He mentions that this Christ wa put to death under the reign of Tiberius by Pontius Pilate. This places the crucifixion in a pretty specific historical context, and one that is consistent with what's in the gospels.

I really don't know where people get this idea that Pilate is only saying what Christians believe.

 

Well, it sure is nice to know I'm not being persecuted. There is a difference though between being persecuted and someone attacking someone else's faith. There is a difference between courteous and being downright rude.

 

There are no records or writings of this jesus while he was supposedly alive. What Tacitus wrote is called HEARSAY. If jesus was put on trial based on all the writings you and the rest of the myth fearing crowd keep bringing up, the case would be tossed because its all hearsay.

 

No, it's not hearsay. It's history. Historians acknowledge this. From this I can gather that you are no historian. I bet if records did exist that where around when Jesus was alive you would still call it "hearsay." Tacitus may of relied on older sources. It was not all that uncommon for history to be written long after events happened.

Also, it didn't have to be written at the time of Jesus, but merely written by someone who lived at the time of Jesus such as the Gospels.

 

Hearsay

You are entitled to your own opinion, but you are NOT entitled to your own definitions.

Both Tacitus and Josephus was born after jesus supposedly was executed. That makes their writings hearsay. Their writings would NOT be allowed into a court of law because they would be dismisses as hearsay.

If there are records of jesus while he was supposedly alive, produce them. Simple really. It defies logic that a man who could heal the sick, walk on water, turn water into wine, etc. would not be noticed by the Romans.

And speaking of the gospels....why did it take 20-30 years to write them after this supposed execution? 20 years is more than enough time to come up with a myth.

None of this passes the sniff test, not matter who bad YOU want it too.

 

Historians acknowledge that there may have been a man such as Jesus, but they do not acknowledge the supernatural aspects about him. There is no historical proof that Jesus performed miracles or was supernatural in anyway. There are plenty of stories, yes, but there are many others of all types of men from all types of cultures and religions who claim divine powers or divine inspiration.

 

Oh look! Some history:

Many of these quotes deals with what Tacitus had to say about Christians at around 64 AD. They were a group "hated for their abominations."

 

I should also mention that Tacitus, while he does provide with a sketch of some basic features of Jesus' reputation around the time he is writing (somewhere around 100), he also describes the miracles of a certain emperor Vespasian. In this passage, he claims that multiple witnesses saw Vespasian heal a blind and a lame man; are we to take this as unquestionably true? Of course not, the probable option, in this case, is that this was either an invention for the imperial reputation or a rumor gone out of control. Either way, whatever the report is based on, it is probably not a miracle.

 

back in them days, bathing made a person a new.

Some call it baptism

But could you imagine walking thru jerusalem with a bic lighter in the 1st century?

 

There is certainly "rudeness" related to religion as opposed to civil discussion and that is more evident on the internet where things are basically impersonal but it plays both ways. Christians have routinely condemned athiests and agnositics as well as condemning Muslims and members of other religions and have been quite rude in doing so. The point would be that civil discussion is acceptable while simply being rude is not.

There are justifiable issues related to the Bible and the life of Jesus that establish questionability. When "Christianity" originated it was a very small Jewish religious cult group. Had it not been for the expansionism to where non-Jews were included, well after the death of Jesus, it would have slowly disappeared at all religious cult groups tend to do. It was the "marketing" of Christianity to non-Jews that established it as a religion as opposed to a small Jewish cult.

There are questions related to why there isn't a single written statement by Jesus. Was Jesus illiterate and unable to write. Even a "shopping list" written by Jesus would have been a valuable document preserved by his early followers. Was "God" illiterate is a serious question for scholars. Every book in the New Testament was written decades after the death of Jesus with several being written by a man that never even knew Jesus when he was alive. There are no contemporary writings from outside sources even acknowledging the existance of Jesus from when he was alive. If he was important then we would assume that someone would have written about him while he was alive but that never happened. Josephus was the first historian to write about Jesus and his writings were based upon what Christians told him many decades after Jesus died.

We can also address the evolution of religions in general from prior religions. Christianity was predomintately based upon the Hebrew religion with the addtional adoption some Greek mythology related to the "virgin birth" where God impregnates a mortal woman. Jesus, based upon the common religious beliefs of the time, was a demigod similiar to Hercules. Additionally the inclusion of the God Hades in Revelation was taken almost directly from Greek mythology. When we look at the Hebrew texts in the Old Testament we read stories that were first written the the Epic of Gilgamesh several centuries earlier.

All of this leads many to believe that Christianity was invented by mankind just as all other religions are created by mankind. There have been many thousands of religions historically and all of them claimed to be the only valid religion and condemned all others as being false and created by mankind. There is nothing special about Christianity when compared to the other thousands of religions that have existed. If thousands of other religions are a fraud created by men to control the people then there is nothing special about Christianity that would set it apart from these other religions.

This is not an attack and I've made every attempt to not be rude in presenting some facts. If people want to believe that Christianity is the only true religion then they are welcome to do so but I do ask, in fact I demand, that they don't attempt to force their religious beliefs upon me. I don't care what they believe so long as they don't, through their actions, attempt to force their religions beliefs on me.

 

Oh look, none of it came from when jesus was supposedly alive.

 

What is more bazaar is that Jesus didn't leave any written documents. Not a single word of what Jesus actual said is recorded anywhere. I best we have paraphased statements from those written many years after his death. With the fallibility of people where 40% of statements made by actual eye witnesses to an event are false we can only assume limited accuracy as to what Jesus might have said.

 

Before general literacy memories were hugely better. Much of our early literature survived for centuries without being written down, and it's still possible to make a shot at dating it by the vocabulary and grammar. What's more, we have no reason to suppose that Paul's - and some of the other - Epistles weren't written down at the time stated, and Paul certainly overlapped Jesus's lifetime.

 

Very true, especially since both Luke (4:16-20) and John(John 8:6) confirmed jc could read and write.

 

The literacy rate was quite high in Roman times.

There is some truth to the claim that people that did not learn to read will generally have better memories, but the people that wrote early scripture were obviously literate.. and so were the folks that made later copies and edits.

The fact that we have numerous contradictory stories, and stories that are lacking geographical and historical validity, shows that "someone's memory" was incorrect.

Which is fact and which is fiction we just do not know.

Paul never knew Jesus and this shows by the contradictions between Pauls message and the teachings of Jesus given in James and Matthew. Paul does not seem to have heard of any of Teachings of Jesus in Matt.

Then we have the contradictory accounts of Paul's vision which shows that much of the Pauline was not by the hand of Paul. (Im talking here the Pauline writing that is thought to be of Paul and not the Pauline scripture that is known not to be of Paul)

 

that is true, If one asked you what jesus' last words were, what would you say?

http://answers.yahoo.com/question/in...3125055AAKGzxF

Jesus' last words
Matt.27:46,50: "And about the ninth hour Jesus cried with a loud voice, saying, "Eli, eli, lama sabachthani?" that is to say, "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?" ...Jesus, when he cried again with a loud voice, yielded up the ghost."

Luke23:46: "And when Jesus had cried with a loud voice, he said, "Father, unto thy hands I commend my spirit:" and having said thus, he gave up the ghost."

John19:30: "When Jesus therefore had received the vinegar, he said, "It is finished:" and he bowed his head, and gave up the ghost."

 

Stories were certainly handed down from generation to generation but there is no evidence that memories were any better 2000 years ago than they are today. The stories were paraphrased just as they would be today. I'm sure that many today could tell the story of Noah, for instance, but few would be able to cite it verbatim from any translation of the Bible. We must also acknowledge that there is a huge difference between someone listening to a person say something and them having the same "quotation" repeated over and over again. We are far more likely to paraphrase what someone has said as opposed to quoting them accurately.

Even the New Testament acknowledges that Paul never knew Jesus when he was alive. Did he meet Jesus after the crusifiction or was he having a hullicination from wheat rust that was quite common at the time? We don't know and even today there is no actual evidence of anyone meeting someone after the person died. It could simply be a story fabricated which is far more likely than actually meeting someone after they died. What we can assume is that everything Paul wrote was either something he heard secondhand or made up. That is a logical assumption. Even the story of the virgin birth makes no sense and Joseph would have been in violation of Hebrew religious beliefs by not consumating the marriage. Jesus could not have claimed he was born of a virgin as he would have had no knowledge related to it so who came up with this idea and where did they get it? The most logical answer is that it was adopted from Greek and Roman mythology.

We even have a serious problem with beliefs related to the Bible. For centuries it was believed that Moses wrote the Books of Moses but today we know that is not true. We know from liguists that several different authors wrote those books. The belief was wrong and even Hebrew and Christian scholars now agree that Moses did not write the Books of Moses. Christians today make claims about the Old Testament that Hebrew scholars say simply aren't true. The Jews never believed that the Torah was a divine text but many Christians belief it is.

There remains the enigma that Jesus never wrote anything down when he was alive. Was he illiterate remains a serious question but it would be hard to conceive of a person claming they're god to be illiterate. We have an analogy with Socrates who never wrote anything down but it is believed he was illiterate. Wisdom does not necessarily require the ability to read and write but a "god" being illiterate is a completely different matter.

Personally I don't believe that Jesus ever claimed to be the son of God. I think this was fabricated by his followers after his death. That is logical and fits with what we know about many religions historically. Jesus probably did exist as a person and was unquestionable a great philosopher based upon what we know about him. The religion was a fabrication just as all other religions were a fabrication. That is, of course, my personal opinion and if others want to believe that Jesus was God then that's fine as long as those remain their personal beliefs and they don't attempt to force them on me under the laws of the United States. Unfortunately for the United States there are some fundamentalist Christians that believe they have a mandate from God to impose Christian theocratic beliefs upon the American People. Many Republican politicans are pandering to these extremists and that is harmful to America.

 

The Church spread fast over many areas, and different stories came up in different areas for people to remember. Literacy in Latin and Greek was high, yes. In Aramaic, I doubt. Paul comes first, like it or lump it. Don't understand your last sentence. I think that the problems come out of the struggle between various new religions to take over the Empire, all of which tended to borrow from one another, or at least got confused by the vast numbers who were sick to death of the classical pagan filth.

 

The facts wouldn't have been known to most believers, who were influenced by Jewish prophecy and other stuff. I agree with you about the 'Son of God' thing. I think that the chances that either Socrates of Jesus was illiterate are zero - they just weren't into our texual obsessions (other that in Jesus's case, the prophetic stuff). I think that Jesus probably wasn't dead: clearly something big happened, and the Roman citizen Paul (Romans believing even politicians could become gods) gave an explanation that made sense to the people of that time. Doesn't now,obviously.