Comments on: XFiles Friday: In search of a historical Jesus

By: VorJack

VorJack — Sun, 13 Jul 2008 12:22:08 +0000

Given the number of sources we have that talks about the deification of the emperors, I wonder if the pair accept that Julius Ceaser is a god? The original JC! Perhaps they accept that Augustus was actually conceived of Apollo in the form of a giant white snake, as the official roman histories record? Maybe they’ll get all theistic rationalist on us, “Really, the mutant snake just happened to be crawling after a really big mouse when it passed over Augustus’ mother and …”

By: Steven Carr

Steven Carr — Sat, 12 Jul 2008 20:41:15 +0000

Are Geisler and Turek claiming there is a real possibility that there had been no Emperor in Rome and that later people fabricated the existence of an Emperor?

But we know for a fact that Christians fabricated stories about Jesus.

By: galloway

galloway — Sat, 12 Jul 2008 16:42:09 +0000

” By contrast, over the same 150 years, there are nine non-Christian sources who mention Tiberius Caesar, the Roman emperor at the time of Jesus. So discounting all the Christian sources, Jesus is actually mentioned by one more source than the Roman emperor. ”

Shouldn’t the standards for deification be higher than for just simple history?

By: jim

jim — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 21:58:30 +0000

Shouldn’t the existence of all the apocryphal literature that even Christians reject as being authentic, blast to smithereens the idea that ancient Christians weren’t willing to embellish, invent, and lie about the records?

By: VorJack

VorJack — Fri, 11 Jul 2008 10:56:39 +0000

What these quotes show is that there was a first century Christian movement – a fact which no one questions. The quotes from Tacitus, Mara Bar-Serapion, Lucian and Pliny only refer to Christians and what they were claiming, not to any personal historical knowledge. As for Josephus, my favorite rebuttal is to point out that the Christian fathers like Origen, who read and wrote on Josephus, somehow never mentioned his little confession of faith and concluded that the man was staunchly Jewish. The quote must have been added in the fourth century.

Mentioning the anti-christian polemicist Celsus and the Talmud takes gall (gee, I guess it’s lucky that the Christians didn’t burn ALL the copies of the Talmud.) These are counter-narratives spun by the Jews and other opponents of Christianity. The goal was to undercut Christian narratives by showing Jesus as a charlatan – sort of like Simon Magus in Acts. We know from one of the letters of the church fathers that some Jews were saying that Jesus’s body had been moved by the gardener so that his followers wouldn’t trample his cabbages. The stupid disciples found the body gone and assumed that he had been taken up to heaven in classic greco-roman fashion.

And the church’s response to this slander? “You’ll regret saying this when Jesus comes back.” Which shows you all the evidence that the church was able muster in its defense.

This is where I lose respect for apologists. It’s long been accepted by scholars that there are no non-biblical references of the life of Jesus. It takes a level of desperation to keep circulating and padding this list.