"1. There was insufficient time for legendary influences to expunge the historical facts. The interval of time between the events themselves and recording of them in the gospels is too short to have allowed the memory of what had or had not actually happened to be erased.

2. The gospels are not analogous to folk tales or contemporary "urban legends." Tales like those of Paul Bunyan and Pecos Bill or contemporary urban legends like the "vanishing hitchhiker" rarely concern actual historical individuals and are thus not analogous to the gospel narratives.

3. The Jewish transmission of sacred traditions was highly developed and reliable. In an oral culture like that of first century Palestine the ability to memorize and retain large tracts of oral tradition was a highly prized and highly developed skill. From the earliest age children in the home, elementary school, and the synagogue were taught to memorize faithfully sacred tradition. The disciples would have exercised similar care with the teachings of Jesus.

4. There were significant restraints on the embellishment of traditions about Jesus, such as the presence of eyewitnesses and the apostles’ supervision. Since those who had seen and heard Jesus continued to live and the tradition about Jesus remained under the supervision of the apostles, these factors would act as a natural check on tendencies to elaborate the facts in a direction contrary to that preserved by those who had known Jesus.

5. The Gospel writers have a proven track record of historical reliability."

I wanted to move this to this thread because I was getting questions on it.








"The resurrection of Jesus. It seems to me that there are four established facts which constitute inductive evidence for the resurrection of Jesus:

Fact #1: After his crucifixion, Jesus was buried by Joseph of Arimathea in the tomb. This fact is highly significant because it means that the location of Jesus’s tomb was known to Jew and Christian alike. In that case it becomes inexplicable how belief in his resurrection could arise and flourish in the face of a tomb containing his corpse. According to the late John A. T. Robinson of Cambridge University, the honorable burial of Jesus is one of "the earliest and best-attested facts about Jesus."{15}

Fact #2: On the Sunday morning following the crucifixion, the tomb of Jesus was found empty by a group of his women followers. According to Jakob Kremer, an Austrian specialist on the resurrection, "By far most exegetes hold firmly to the reliability of the biblical statements concerning the empty tomb."{16} As D. H. van Daalen points out, "It is extremely difficult to object to the empty tomb on historical grounds; those who deny it do so on the basis of theological or philosophical assumptions."{17}

Fact #3: On multiple occasions and under various circumstances, different individuals and groups of people experienced appearances of Jesus alive from the dead. This is a fact that is almost universally acknowledged among New Testament scholars today. Even Gert Lüdemann, perhaps the most prominent current critic of the resurrection, admits, "It may be taken as historically certain that Peter and the disciples had experiences after Jesus’s death in which Jesus appeared to them as the risen Christ."{18}

Finally, fact #4: The original disciples believed that Jesus was risen from the dead despite their having every reason not to. Despite having every predisposition to the contrary, it is an undeniable fact of history that the original disciples believed in, proclaimed, and were willing to go to their deaths for the fact of Jesus’s resurrection. C. F. D. Moule of Cambridge University concludes that we have here a belief which nothing in terms of prior historical influences can account for--apart from the resurrection itself.{19}

Any responsible historian, then, who seeks to give an account of the matter, must deal with these four independently established facts: the honorable burial of Jesus, the discovery of his empty tomb, his appearances alive after his death, and the very origin of the disciples’ belief in his resurrection and, hence, of Christianity itself. I want to emphasize that these four facts represent, not the conclusions of conservative scholars, nor have I quoted conservative scholars, but represent rather the majority view of New Testament scholarship today. The question is: how do you best explain these facts?"

"Now this puts the sceptical critic in a somewhat desperate situation. For example, some time ago I had a debate with a professor at the University of California, Irvine, on the historicity of the resurrection of Jesus. He had written his doctoral dissertation on the subject and was thoroughly familiar with the evidence. He could not deny the facts of Jesus’s honorable burial, his empty tomb, his post-mortem appearances, and the origin of the disciples’ belief in his resurrection. Therefore, his only recourse was to come up with some alternative explanation of these facts. And so he argued that Jesus had an unknown identical twin brother who was separated from him at birth, came back to Jerusalem just at the time of the crucifixion, stole Jesus’s body out of the grave, and presented himself to the disciples, who mistakenly inferred that Jesus was risen from the dead! Now I won’t go into how I went about refuting his theory, but I think that this theory is instructive because it shows to what desperate lengths skepticism must go in order to deny the historicity of the resurrection of Jesus. In fact, the evidence is so powerful that one of today’s leading Jewish theologians Pinchas Lapide has declared himself convinced on the basis of the evidence that the God of Israel raised Jesus from the dead!"

I just want to get this information out there, just to see what people think.

Inductive evidence is questionable.

First of all the NEW testimate was written by the Catholic Church and rewritten several times over the course of the years. It is reasonable to assume by preponderance of the writings to believe a MAN named Jesus of Nazareth did indeed live and die. The Scripture according to Judas paints a different and wholly unaccepted picture of Jesus that is unflattering to the views of Modern Christians. the idea of Jesus being sexually involved with a prostitute drives them insane because it makes out Jesus to not be pure when his love for her as described by Judas was pure love.

Pure savior vs. a man who tried to embody pure love? Which version won out?

A lot of the bible was written in metaphor let like any fundamentalist people want things simple and to the point and they take the bible literally. So much emphasis has been placed on the bible that it has become a dogmatized mess.

Just in this one question I have eaten a lot of Christian's,
Do you believe in ten commandments or two?
Jesus their savior gave them two commandments and yet they can't seem to understand that those two commandments carry all of the weight of the ten. Jesus himself said that we are all children of God.

Ultimately the point is not whether Jesus existed or whether he was some Deity or not. The point is Jesus tried to teach love and what has been done with that teaching. If anything Jesus Christ is one of the worst monsters in history based on the MILLIONS of people who died in his name!

I seriously doubt Jesus is going to come back and if he does you can bet I am going to challenge his claims very hard. Also remember Jesus said beware of false Shepherds.
I doubt if Jesus was a man of good conscious he would appreciate people trying to justify his existence more than trying to live the life of love and respect for others. He wanted to teach though example but the church chose subjugation and ignorance.

I think a lot more will open to you when you look past Jesus and see what he was trying to teach rather than to put your faith in him. The point he was trying to make was we need to have faith in ourselves. Not a savior figure.

The Catholic church did not write the Bible.

Jesus was either Lord, liar, or lunatic, there is no room for good moral teacher. He claimed to be God. If you dont believe Christ was who he claimed to be, liar and lunatic are your only two option.

"Each of the Gospels narrates the ministry of Jesus of Nazareth. The traditional author is listed after each entry. Modern scholarship differs on precisely by whom, when, or in what original form the various gospels were written.
The Gospel of Matthew, traditionally ascribed to the Apostle Matthew, son of Alphaeus.
The Gospel of Mark, traditionally ascribed to Mark the Evangelist, who wrote down the recollections of the Apostle Simon Peter.
The Gospel of Luke, traditionally ascribed to Luke, a physician and companion of the Apostle Paul.
The Gospel of John, traditionally ascribed to the Apostle John, son of Zebedee
The first three are commonly classified as the Synoptic Gospels. They contain very similar accounts of events in Jesus' life. The Gospel of John stands apart for its unique records of several miracles and sayings of Jesus, not found in the other three."
------------------------------------------------


"The ability of any scholar to do effective textual criticism depends on two factors. First, how many existing copies are there to examine and compare? Are there two copies, ten, a hundred? The more copies there are, the easier it is to make meaningful comparisons. Second, how close in time are the oldest existing documents to the original?

If the numbers are few and the time gap is wide, the original is harder to reconstruct with confidence. However, if there are many copies and the oldest existing copies are reasonably close in time to the original, the textual critic can be more confident he's pinpointed the exact wording of the autograph.

To get an idea of the significance of the New Testament manuscript evidence, note for a moment the record for non-biblical texts. These are secular texts from antiquity that have been reconstructed with a high degree of certainty based on the available textual evidence.

The important First Century document The Jewish War, by Jewish aristocrat and historian Josephus, survives in only nine complete manuscripts dating from the 5th Century--four centuries after they were written.[3] Tacitus' Annals of Imperial Rome is one of the chief historical sources for the Roman world of New Testament times, yet, surprisingly, it survives in partial form in only two manuscripts dating from the Middle Ages.[4] Thucydides' History survives in eight copies. There are 10 copies of Caesar's Gallic Wars, eight copies of Herodotus' History, and seven copies of Plato, all dated over a millennium from the original. Homer's Iliad has the most impressive manuscript evidence for any secular work with 647 existing copies.[5]

Bruce's comments put the discussion in perspective: "No classical scholar would listen to an argument that the authenticity of Herodotus or Thucydides is in doubt because the earliest manuscripts of their works which are of any use to us are over 1300 years later than the originals."[6]

For most documents of antiquity only a handful of manuscripts exist, some facing a time gap of 800-2000 years or more. Yet scholars are confident of reconstructing the originals with some significant degree of accuracy. In fact, virtually all of our knowledge of ancient history depends on documents like these.


The Biblical Manuscript Evidence

By comparison with secular texts, the manuscript evidence for the New Testament is stunning. The most recent count (1980) shows 5,366 separate Greek manuscripts represented by early fragments, uncial codices (manuscripts in capital Greek letters bound together in book form), and minuscules (small Greek letters in cursive style)![7]

Among the nearly 3,000 minuscule fragments are 34 complete New Testaments dating from the 9th to the 15th Centuries.[8]

Uncial manuscripts provide virtually complete codices (multiple books of the New Testament bound together into one volume) back to the 4th Century, though some are a bit younger. Codex Sinaiticus, purchased by the British government from the Soviet government at Christmas, 1933, for £100,000,[9] is dated c. 340.[10] The nearly complete Codex Vaticanus is the oldest uncial, dated c. 325-350.[11] Codex Alexandrinus contains the whole Old Testament and a nearly complete New Testament and dates from the late 4th Century to the early 5th Century.

The most fascinating evidence comes from the fragments (as opposed to the codices). The Chester Beatty Papyri contains most of the New Testament and is dated mid-3rd Century.[12] The Bodmer Papyri II collection, whose discovery was announced in 1956, includes the first fourteen chapters of the Gospel of John and much of the last seven chapters. It dates from A.D. 200 or earlier.[13]

The most amazing find of all, however, is a small portion of John 18:31-33, discovered in Egypt known as the John Rylands Papyri. Barely three inches square, it represents the earliest known copy of any part of the New Testament. The papyri is dated on paleographical grounds at around A.D. 117-138 (though it may even be earlier),[14] showing that the Gospel of John was circulated as far away as Egypt within 30 years of its composition.

Keep in mind that most of the papyri are fragmentary. Only about 50 manuscripts contain the entire New Testament, though most of the other manuscripts contain the four Gospels. Even so, the manuscript textual evidence is exceedingly rich, especially when compared to other works of antiquity."

This is a falsehood that is perpetuated by truly ignorant Christian Evangelists.

There is plenty of room for Jesus to have been a good moral teacher who denounced the ways of the Old Testament.

The falsehood in your statement stems from being unable to think outside of the box.

If Jesus was indeed God, and the Bible was indeed the inspired word of God then clearly the gospels could be trusted to be true.

However, the moment we consided that Jesus was just a mortal man then the truth of the gospels flies right out the window!

First off, for Jesus to have claimed to be God would be perfectly natural for a pantheist. This is what Pantheism teaches so if Jesus was a pantheist then he would naturally believe that he and God are one in the same.

According to the Bible Jesus also taught that we too are Gods. In fact, he even dreged that up from the Old Testamant so that he could give it some clout.

In any case, you've got it all wrong.

You keep saying, "Jesus said this, and Jesus said that".

But according to the Bible Jesus never said anything directly. All we have in the Bible is hearsay from people who were trying to convince us that Jesus was God.

So why should we believe that they wouldn't twist his words to fit their agenda?

Nope!

There is plenty of room for Jesus to have been a mortal teacher who was used as a dead marionette doll after he was crucified for saying things that did NOT support the Old Testament!

So it's quite possible to believe that Jesus was a perfectly sane moral teacher who was abused after his death by having words shoved in to his mouth that never came out of his mouth.

In fact, there are actually quite a few people who believe that Jesus never even existed at all.

The bottom line is that there is not one word from Jesus in the Bible. Not a single solitary word written by Jesus.

Your claim that either Jesus was telling the truth or he was a raving lunatic is based on the totally erroneous idea that the scriptures are a verbatim account of precisely what the man said in any case.

But if Jesus wasn't God, then there is absolutely no reason to believe that the gospels are a valid verbatim account of what he might have actually said.

C. S. Lewis takes the same stance that you hold here (in fact, you probably got this idea from him, or from the Chrisitian community as a whole).

But it's false logic because that whole conclusion is based on the idea that the gospels are the "word of God" no matter what!

But therein lies the folly!

If Jesus wasn't God, then why should anyone trust the gospels to be a verbatim account of what Jesus actually stood for?

Clearly it's filled with demagoguery.

You've been blinded by the presumption that the Bible is the verbatim truth no matter what!

But there's no reason to believe that it's the verbatim truth if it is a false religion!

I believe that it's a false religion.

It was clearly created by men to control the masses and make them feel guilty to obey and worship the authority of the Church!

The men who wrote the Bible used Jesus!

Jesus was a victim!

It's clear that he was not the son of the God of Abraham. He totally disagreed with the ways of the Old Testament.

Jesus was used and now Christians are worshiping the men who absused Jesus.

I'll never understand why people think that God would be affilated with such an obviously hateful and bigoted religion.

There is nothing good about that religion.

"This doesn’t mean that there aren’t sources outside the Bible which refer to Jesus. There are. He’s referred to in pagan, Jewish, and Christian writings outside the New Testament. The Jewish historian Josephus is especially interesting. In the pages of his works you can read about New Testament people like the high priests Annas and Caiaphas, the Roman governor Pontius Pilate, King Herod, John the Baptist, even Jesus himself and his brother James. There have also been interesting archaeological discoveries as well bearing on the gospels. For example, in 1961 the first archaeological evidence concerning Pilate was unearthed in the town of Caesarea; it was an inscription of a dedication bearing Pilate’s name and title. Even more recently, in 1990 the actual tomb of Caiaphas, the high priest who presided over Jesus’s trial, was discovered south of Jerusalem. Indeed, the tomb beneath the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem is in all probability the tomb in which Jesus himself was laid by Joseph of Arimathea following the crucifixion. According to Luke Johnson, a New Testament scholar at Emory University,

Even the most critical historian can confidently assert that a Jew named Jesus worked as a teacher and wonder-worker in Palestine during the reign of Tiberius, was executed by crucifixion under the prefect Pontius Pilate and continued to have followers after his death."




The conclusion is based on the 4 facts.


Jesus thoutht he was God.
"A man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral teacher. He would either be a lunatic--on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg--or else he would be the Devil of Hell. You must make your choice. Either this man was and is the Son of God: or else a madman or something worse. You can shut him up for a fool, you can spit at him and kill him as a demon; or you can fall at his feet and call him Lord and God. But let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us."


Do you know who said this.

"Inasmuch as many have undertaken to compile a narrative of the things which have been accomplished among us, just as they were delivered to us by those who from the beginning were eyewitnesses and ministers of the word, it seemed good to me also, having followed all things closely for some time past, to write an orderly account for you, most excellent Theophilus, that you may know the truth concerning the things of which you have been informed."

"Paul's letter to the Corinthians is dated by Christians and skeptics alike at around AD 54 or 58, but Paul must have received the creed before he could have recorded it in his letter. In fact, Paul tells us that he gave this Gospel to them earlier. Christians and skeptics alike agree Paul visited Corinthians and gave them the Gospel orally about AD 51.
Paul tells us that about 3 years after his conversion, he went to Jerusalem and saw Peter and James (Galatians 1:18-19). It's likely that Paul received the creed while in Jerusalem. If Christ was crucified in AD 30, then Paul would have been converted a short while later (perhaps 33-35, though more likely as early as 31 and no later than 33), placing his tript o Jerusalem around 36-38. Obviously Paul would have spoken with the two apostles about the Gospel, an assumption which is strengthened by the specific mention of meeting with Peter, James and the Gospel 14 years after his first journey (Galatians 2). So Paul likely received the creed no later than AD 38 directly from the apostles.
It's possible that Paul receied the creed even earlier, perhaps while in Damascus 3 years earlier than his trip to Jerusalem. However, as mentioned above, the creed contains a number of items which indicate Semitic origin, making Jerusalem a more likely location."


1 Corinthians 15:3
3For what I received I passed on to you as of first importance[a]: that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, 4that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day according to the Scriptures, 5and that he appeared to Peter, and then to the Twelve. 6After that, he appeared to more than five hundred of the brothers at the same time, most of whom are still living, though some have fallen asleep. 7Then he appeared to James, then to all the apostles, 8and last of all he appeared to me also, as to one abnormally born.

This creed dates earlier than Mark.

When analyzed the gospels conform to the data that the longer a story exists the more fanciful it gets.

This is total garbage.

Jesus was missing from the age of 12 until he was 30. He most likely left the area, and being a man who was interested in spirituality and civil rights he most likely traveled to the far east (probably India) where everyone, even in those days knew that there were WISE MEN.

Even the Bible itself speaks about WISE MEN coming from the far east when Jesus was born.

Jesus most likely learned of Mysticism and the FACT that all is one.

That philosophy says that WE ARE GOD.

And based on what the Bible has to say Jesus spoke in terms that were very compatible with this.

When Jesus said that "Before Abraham was I AM", he wasn't claiming to be the SON of the God of Abraham!

Clearly!

He was either claiming to be the God of Abraham in the flesh, or MORE LIKELY he was attempting to express the pantheistic point of view that we have always existed.

WE are SPIRIT. And therefore WE have always existed. That's PANTHEISM!

I take that particular referrence to mean that Jesus was actually trying to say that he existed as spirit even BEFORE the fictitious God of Abraham was invented!

He clearly wasn't attempting to claim to be the SON of the God of Abraham by claiming that he existed even BEFORE the God of Abraham came into the picture!

So even according to the Bible Jesus did NOT claim to be the Son of the God of Abraham.

Jesus always said things along the lines that He and the Father as the same. If you know the Father you know Jesus.

That's PANTHEISM!

All is one!

Jesus also supposedly said that "Ye are Gods".

Well, there you go! All are children of God, including Jesus! That's how pantheism works. We are all part of the Great Spirit.

Jesus couldn't very well come right out and say, "Hey ignore your old religion and convert to Buddhism".

That would have gone over like a lead balloon.

If he was going to make an impact he had to try to teach the pantheistic philosophy in ways that could be understood within the context of the current religion.

Was he a lunatic? Perhaps so!

Anyone who tries to help a bunch of morons who are using a false God as an excuse to stone each other to death has to be someone nuts!

I woudln't have done it personally. I just would have stayed in India and let those morons kill each other off!

Jesus was a humanitarian and he tried to save his people from a religion that was having them do horrific things!

There's NO WAY he could have been the son of the God of Abraham.

Besides if you want to talk about a LUNATIC consider the following:

The God of Abraham demands that his people murder heathens!

And a heathen is defined as anyone who disagrees with the words of the God of Abraham.

So now this God of Abraham is going to send his son into this MOB that HE CREATED and commanded them to kill heathens, and then he's going to have his son completely DENOUNCE everything that he had commanded these people to do?

In order for the Biblical story to be true God HIMSELF would need to be a LUNATIC!

So there you go.]

If you don't like lunatics then you don't like the God of Abraham because according to the Bible he's the biggest lunatic around.