Whether or not a Man Named Jesus Existed

[SkinWalker]

Okay, the people who wrote the Bible are not anonymous. They say who they are. Some even write about their own experiences.

 

While I agree that there are authors whom we're reasonably sure of their identity, most of the core texts within biblical mythology are by anonymous authors. The 'gospels,' the Pentateuch, etc.

 

You've never read the Bible, have you?

 

Yes. In depth.

 

Anyways, you tell me where in the Bible it contradicts itself. Tell me one place. Just one place. You can tell me more if you would like but I only need one.

 

Sure. One contradiction: In Matthew, a book written by an anonymous author (hint: the title isn't the author), Joseph's (the father of Jesus) is alleged to be Jacob. However, in Luke (another anonymous author), Joseph's father is supposed to be Heli. Who was Jacob's father?

 

Here is one example of how historically accurate the Bible is: Shechem, Bethel, Haran, and Gerar have all been excavated and proven to be in existence at Abraham's time.

 

"Proven to be" of the time of Abraham is a fallacious assumptions since Abraham is a myth and without evidence for existence. However, if we extrapolate that you mean the time at which Abraham is said to have lived, then we mean a period contemporary with Ur, the site of which is a tell in Iraq called el-Mukayyar and its peak occupancy was at around 2600 BCE.

 

Bethel, also known as Beiten, its occupation was at around 1240-1235 BCE.

 

Shechem, also known as Tell el-Balatah, was occupied from about 1900 - 100 BCE.

 

Gerar was first occupied at around 1300 BCE (if memory serves correct).

 

And Haran I've never heard of, but I'll take your word for it that it is real (or perhaps you mistyped).

 

None of these settlements are shown to have occupation levels during the 3rd millennium BCE, which is the period Abraham is alleged to have lived.

 

Even his home town of Ur has been discovered and excavated.

 

Ur has been excavated. No sign of Abraham, however. Indeed, there's more evidence for the historicity of the mythical figure Gilgamesh than Abraham!

 

What you're doing is committing a fallacy which presupposes that since place-names in biblical mythology really do exist, therefore biblical accounts of events are accurate. The problem is, many if not most of the place-names do not coincide with suggested timelines of biblical mythology. Indeed, the stories written in the Old Testament, particularly the Pentateuch, read as historicized fiction. In other words, the anonymous authors of the Pentateuch (that's the first five books of the OT, by the way) seemed eager to propagandize their legitimacy to the people. If anything, this is human nature and a common political practice still in use today.

 

An abundance of evidence surfaced to disprove the notion that Abraham's era was one of ignorance. Found were receipts for business transactions; temple hymns; others were mathematical tables with formulae for calculating square and cube roots as well as simpler sums. All these were strangely contemporary. According to Millar Burrows "...his name appears in Babylonia as a personal name in the very period to which be belongs." (What Mean These Stones?, p.259).

 

And yet none of this is relevant to demonstrating the veracity of biblical claims. Was there a point you were getting at? Perhaps, as an archaeologist, I can help you elucidate it.

 

Another: Forty-six times the Hittites are mentioned in the Bible (Joshua 3:10). No mention is made of them in secular history.

 

The Egyptians wrote extensively on the Hittites and the Battle of Qadesh. The writings can be found on temples at Abu Simbel and Medinet Habu. But then I'm not sure what you mean by "secular history." Very little information provided in biblical mythology is actually useful in reconstructing the Hittite Empire. Indeed, there is still some question as to whether the Hittites described in biblical mythology are actually the same culture we archaeologists have finally assigned the name "Hittite." I tend to think they probably are, after all, even the anonymous authors of the Old Testament would have been aware of an Empire this size and would naturally have incorporated them into their mythos.

 

And another: Jericho was excavated by Dr. John Garstang between 1930 and 1936. He found that the great wall was 12' think and the outer wall 12' thick both being thirty feet high, fell "down flat".

 

I'm always amazed at the ability of those with preconceived conclusions to seek only that data which are confirming, and ignoring or searching no further for data which are contradictory. The way science is done, my friend, is that the person with an hypothesis seeks first to falsify it. What you're doing is starting with a conclusion and seeking only to confirm it.

 

Garstang's excavations took place in the 1930s and the science of archaeology was still in its infancy. There was much still to be learned about stratigraphy, dating, and applying context.

 

Kathleen Kenyon came along in the 1950s and improved upon Garstang's work. She showed that the famed "walls of Jericho" were not of the period that the Israelite conquest is alleged to have occurred but of a much earlier period. Kenyon, being a Christian, reasoned that the anonymous authors of the Old Testament would easily have assigned the destruction of Jericho's walls by earthquake to be a divine intervention (Kenyon 1957: 262).

 

The double walls there were much older and likely for an entirely different purpose than fortification. Jericho is the lowest, permanently inhabited place in the Levant (if not the world) and, thus, prone to flooding (they were an agricultural settlement). The walls were double and probably designed to protect the settlement from the incursion of water. Indeed, the "wall of Jericho" is dated back to the Pre-Pottery Neolithic A (8300-7400 BCE) along with a stone tower designed for grain storage (probably the world's first grain silo) which would get that grain off the wet, flood prone ground.

 

"As to the main fact, then, there remains no doubt: the walls fell outwards so completely that the attackers would be able to clamber up land over their ruins into the city."

 

Unfortunately for biblical literalists who hold that biblical mythology is the inerrant word of a god, this doesn't work. The Israelite conquest would have occurred in the 13th century BCE. Jericho simply wasn't occupied at that time in the way the bible suggests. The walls that were there fell in the 15th century BCE and the site remained unoccupied until the 14th century BCE and then only by a poor, almost insignificant, settlement which was completely unfortified.

 

What likely happened was that there was an oral tradition that told the story of how the walls were toppled during an earthquake and Israelite propagandists hijacked and exploited it, fitting it into their own history for selfish purposes, adjusting the timeline accordingly. In other words, the anonymous authors of the Pentateuch were liars.

 

If you want some more, I can give you more. Just ask.

 

You decide. I'm an archaeologist and an anthropologist. I can do this all day.

 

Please, make sure to read everything I posted.

 

It would be better if it was actually coming from you and not Danny Vess. I recognize his words. Are you in the habit of plagiarizing the works of others? The least you can do is cite his essay, Is the Bible Historically Accurate? and give him credit where credit is due.

 

In the end, the best you've done is attempt to argue that because biblical authors were aware of the place-names in the Levant, and included these place-names in biblical mythology, that, therefore, biblical mythology is the divine word of a god.

 

This argumentation is flawed in many ways, not the least of which is that many of the place-names in biblical mythology simply do not match the chronology presented. Listing kings and names of cities is one thing. Many ancient texts do this. Implying that because these lists are accurate (assuming for a moment that they are), the magical and supernatural portions of the bible are also accurate is fallacious.

 

 

References

 

Albright, W.F. (1939). The Israelite Conquet of Canaan in the Light of Archaeology. Bulletin of the American Schools of Oriental Research, 74, 11-23.

 

Dever, William G. (2003). Who Where the Early Israelites and Where Did They Come From? Cambridge: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.

 

Finkelstein, Israel; Silbermann, Neil Asher (2002). The Bible Unearthed. New York: Simon & Schuster.

 

Finkelstein, Israel (1988). The archaeology of the Israelite Settlement. Jerusalem: 295-302.

 

Gonen, R. (1992). The Late Bronze Age. In The Archaeology of Ancient Israel, A. Ben-Tor (ed.). New Haven: Yale University Press.

 

Kenyon, Kathleen M. (1957). Digging Up Jericho. London: Ernest Benn Limited

[Arcesious]

Your posts never cease to be very educational, Skinwalker. This thread is turning out very interesting. I'm glad you take the time to debate like this, because; not only is the debate itself beneficial to those debating, but also to the observers like me; whom can learn a lot from it.

[SkinWalker]

Thanks for the kind words. I long ago realized that changing the mind of the person I'm arguing with is unlikely (although it has happened), those on the sidelines might find the information useful. That's why I try to include citations to actual journals and texts where appropriate, since I realize that these are helpful for the student looking for more information or putting together research papers on related topics.

[Darth Eclipse]

Thanks for the kind words. I long ago realized that changing the mind of the person I'm arguing with is unlikely (although it has happened), those on the sidelines might find the information useful. That's why I try to include citations to actual journals and texts where appropriate, since I realize that these are helpful for the student looking for more information or putting together research papers on related topics.

 

My beliefs will never change, and I highly doubt you guys are intelligent enough to change yours, therefore this topic and this forums is useless. Since this thread is useless I am wasting my valuable time, I am not going to post anything else in the senate chambers for a while. You guys need to find something to do with your lives besides argue about something useless to argue about here

[SkinWalker]

My beliefs will never change, and I highly doubt you guys are intelligent enough to change yours, therefore this topic and this forums is useless. Since this thread is useless I am wasting my valuable time, I am not going to post anything else in the senate chambers for a while. You guys need to find something to do with your lives besides argue about something useless to argue about here

 

Honestly, I'm sad to see you go. My "beliefs" are all provisional and subject to change, which I readily admit and announce. I need only sufficient evidence to revise them.

 

It is interesting, though hardly surprising that you so vehemently state your beliefs will never change. This suggests that you have a preconceived conclusion to which you are only interested in that data which are supportive and will ignore, out of hand, any information which contradicts, criticizes or even brings into question your indoctrinated beliefs.

 

I can appreciate the difficulty of applying critical thought to an issue you've so obviously spent years accepting without question, but not to do so betrays your own reluctance to even consider the positions of others.

 

You deem the thread and forum "useless" yet leave refutations of your post above untouched and without further rebuttal.

 

You entered the thread of your own free will and made baseless and unsupported assertions and claims. If you leave now, the only thing you've gained is helping me educate those that might be sitting the fence.

 

While I appreciate the assistance, I'd much rather engage in intelligent discourse on matters of the archaeological and anthropological history of the Levant as it relates to Jesus the alleged christ and the bible in general.

 

Thanks for you time all the same and should you choose to return, you are most welcome.

[Totenkopf]

Just like we know the Bible is fiction right? So Greek mythology, the Qur'an, every other book out there that can somehow be twisted into a religion is fiction. But when it comes to the Bible, "no, there is a possibility!" I think I said it before, what makes the Bible a special case?

 

 

Do we though? The problem w/using something like Potter as a comparison is that we know who the author is and that she doesn't claim anything extraordinary about the books, other than perhaps giving their audience an adventure. The Bible, whatever its faults, doesn't fall into that category. Only pointing out that you were making an apples/oranges comparison. If the Bible were as self-evidently fictional as you claim, Christianity would likely have folded long ago and probably have been replaced by something else. Not to mention Judaism. As I already asked, why are you so worked up over it? Especially since people in modern times (at least in the western countries) seem to be moving farther away from theism anyway.

[EnderWiggin]

I highly doubt you guys are intelligent enough to change yours, therefore this topic and this forums is useless.

 

Hmm, this isn't rude at all.

 

Just because you bit off a little more than you can chew whilst having this debate doesn't mean that anyone is less intelligent or that this is "useless".

 

I assure you, I have found use for it.

 

Well, bye bye then. It's too bad you're mad about losing one little logical skirmish (per se) especially considering it was seemingly not over yet.

 

_EW_

[Achilles]

My beliefs will never change, and I highly doubt you guys are intelligent enough to change yours

I'm struggling to understand the logic here.

 

Inability to change beliefs is indicative of a lack of intelligence...

But your beliefs will never change...

and your tone suggests that you believe that you are of superior intelligence.

 

Help me out here

[Rake]

Do we though? The problem w/using something like Potter as a comparison is that we know who the author is and that she doesn't claim anything extraordinary about the books, other than perhaps giving their audience an adventure. The Bible, whatever its faults, doesn't fall into that category. Only pointing out that you were making an apples/oranges comparison. If the Bible were as self-evidently fictional as you claim, Christianity would likely have folded long ago and probably have been replaced by something else. Not to mention Judaism. As I already asked, why are you so worked up over it? Especially since people in modern times (at least in the western countries) seem to be moving farther away from theism anyway.

 

Alright barring Potter, look at Greek mythology or the mythology of other religions. Mythology is created in order to benefit the maker, and clearly, people benefit from the Bible, just like the creators of some Greek myths. Why pick one myth to be the utmost truth and reject the rest? You ask why I'm so worked about it, I thought this was a debate thread, and so I'm trying to engage in it, and I'm glad that many in western nations are moving towards rationality and critical thought (although there is still a ways to go).

[Totenkopf]

Ok, it just didn't come across as detachment, hence the "worked up" expression.