Reply #108: Well, well, well... [View All]

[BurtWorm]

The Tel Dan stele and the Mesha stele. Some scholars dispute the readings...

So the arguments *against* the authority of the steles as witnesses to the fact of King David's exisitence are *credible* enough that you would concede it's *not* "spurious" to cite a paucity of evidence to question the historic fact of David's existence. Check.

So what do you think the town was called in 25 CE if it was called "Nazareth" sixty years later?

Refute Humphreys' points if you can:

• Nazareth is not mentioned even once in the entire Old Testament. The Book of Joshua (19.10,16) – in what it claims is the process of settlement by the tribe of Zebulon in the area – records twelve towns and six villages and yet omits any 'Nazareth' from its list.

• The Talmud, although it names 63 Galilean towns, knows nothing of Nazareth, nor does early rabbinic literature.

• St Paul knows nothing of 'Nazareth'. Rabbi Solly's epistles (real and fake) mention Jesus 221 times, Nazareth not at all.

• No ancient historian or geographer mentions Nazareth. It is first noted at the beginning of the 4th century.


Any linguist can tell you that place-names are extraordinarily stable, surviving even foreign invasion and drastic changes in the local language.

You mean like New Amsterdam? Or Lutetia? Or Tenochtitlan? Or Babylon? Or Constantinople? Or Stalingrad? Or Edo?


The formula of institution in I Corinthians relies on it: "'This is my body...This cup is the new covenant in my blood'. . .For as often as you eat this bread and drink this cup, you proclaim the Lord's death until he comes."

From Paul's assertion that a piece of bread is flesh and a glass of wine blood we're supposed to assume he was talking about a real body and real blood? Isn't everything he is talking about here purely symbolic?

Paul's teaching about the resurrection of the dead depends utterly on a physically present Jesus: if Jesus did not physically die, and if he was not physically raised, then no one else can be/will be.

Do you think he might be talking about "spiritual death and rebirth"? Why does he not talk about Jesus's many miracles? His virgin mother? His betrayal by Judas? His Sermon on the Mount? His Davidian lineage? Any of the witnesses to Jesus's life? Is it because he didn't know about any of that? Or didn't think any of that was important?

You're getting into a really complicated nested conspiracy theory here. Paul concocted Jesus. Marcion concocted Paul. (And maybe Tertullian concocted Marcion. None of Marcion's own writings survive--how do we know he wasn't made up? Why does Humphreys have faith in his existence? Why do you believe in him? ) Seriously, at some point you fall into insurmountable difficulties with all the back-dating that kind of Chinese-box fantasizing entails, and that point comes fairly early in
the game.


First: No one said Paul "concocted" Jesus. Second: Humphreys, I believe, posits that "Paul" is a psuedonym, possibly for Marcion--not that Marcion "concocted" Paul. Third: The argument, which I don't fully understand as I haven't read the original papers (in translation from the Dutch or German High Critics who wrote them) but which from Humphreys's and a French writer Patrick Boistiers's summaries I gather, is that, if you strip the letters of clear interpolations added by later orthodox redactors, you find a core message in the most Pauline of the epistles that reflects Marcion's dual-God, "apparent" Christ theology. They started with the texts to see what was actually in them and to analyze, by textual comparison, *how* they were made, and, by their context in the contemporary literature, *when* they were made. They did not start with the "insurmountably difficult" (arguably) assumption that Paul is who the church has claimed he is.

Please don't strike a match around that straw man.

Take your own advice. It was you who made the assertion that Humphreys's claimed that "The supernatural nativity stories and heroic archetypes prove that Jesus was fictional." Humphreys, in summarizing the arguments of others, shows how elements of the Christ myth were long-preceded by myths from all over the Eastern Mediterranean and Middle East. While it may be true that some living persons' lives can seem mythic (and often were turned into myths in any case after their deaths), the elements we're talking about are strictly godly: a child of a god and a virgin grows up to perform superhuman feats, conquer death, and rise from the dead. Is there any human life you know of from personal experience that contains any of those elements? Or were you claiming Richard III was that kind of guy?


Because they didn't have a photograph? I wonder what else you would expect artists to do when they didn't have an actual likeness in front of them. We don't have contemporary portraits of any religious Jews from the time in question because Jewish law forbade "graven images."


So why would Greeks and Romans suddenly start making images of a "religious Jew," when virtually all of their art subjects until that time had been gods, heroes, aristocrats and emperors? I think it's because they thought of him as a god or hero (man-god). How about you?


Let me make myself a little more explicit, then. The similarity is not in whether one or both are familiar with Higher Criticism--though I suspect they're about equally ignorant--but about the fact that they're both con men preying on the gullible. They both lie, and they both want your money.

I may not be Christian, but I do believe in the principle of being careful not to judge. You've made a pretty outrageous claim there. Humphreys puts all his info on line for free. He sells his book for $25. Is anyone who sells a book a conman?