If you knew what Judaism TAUGHT and the standard Jews were supposed to uphold – even in the first century – you would not imagine that Jesus’ compassion for the poor was anything BUT Jewish. That is one reason he was so hard on the Pharisees, whose personal practice had fallen away from the teachings of the faith.
I have always seen the transition of taking the body of Jesus off the cross and guards at the tomb as the weakest link in the Resurrection story. There is a real possibility that some of Jesus’ friends (e.g. Joseph of Arimathea a member of the Sanhedrin and Nicodemus and some of the Roman officers who Jesus healed) could have bribed or arranged for a theft of the body or substituted the body with one of the other dead bodies executed. I wish there was more written history in this area.
Which is a heresy.
'Because there are always willing believers. In India, there was the “miracle” the the statue of a deity drinking milk. That was shown to be a hoax, but I can’t remember exactly how at the moment. People refuse to believe that it was a hoax, regardless of how much evidence to show that it was.
First of all, the Bible is inerrant.
OK, but were the people responsible for the hoax willing to be tortured to death to perpetuate it? All of them? That would be the analogy.
Umm… no it’s not. Not only are there numerous historical and factual errors in the Bible, but the Bible contradicts itself numerous times as well.
It’s not about what God–if there is one–could or could not do, but rather that the doctrine of the Trinity violates the Torah’s teaching about the unity of God.
CCC107
God can do whatever He wants to. His ways are not your ways.
BUT if you believe He was God, His teachings came from within. Something to ponder.
This is because feeble minds like our and theirs just SOMEHOW CANNOT wrap our minds around the idea that we believe in ONE GOD, three persons. Unexplanable, but not polytheistic.
One thing we know from history is that Roman soldiers *REALLY *knew what they were doing when it came to killng people. If they had botched it, they would have taken up residence in the tomb Jesus left behind, with no possibility of comiing out.
Almost nothing. There are a few references, but most of them seem to be derivative of Christian accounts. The primary exception would be a passage in Josephus, but that one is *so *strong that most people think it was inserted by Christians, or at least doctored to make it stronger.
Well, you shouldn’t go by “accusations,” you should go by evidence. The Council of Nicea (I think this is what you are talking about) did not suddenly invent the idea that Jesus was divine. Christians had believed this long before. The Council of Nicea dealt with just *how *Jesus is divine and how this can be reconciled with our belief that there is one God.
There are places where that seems to have occurred. For instance, 1 Tim. 3:16 says in many manuscripts “God was manifest in the flesh.” But in the oldest manuscripts it says “he who was manifest in the flesh.” (Of course, these older manuscripts are themselves not the originals, so it’s possible that the majority reading is correct–but most scholars don’t think so.) However, the fact that we do have so many manuscripts with so many different readings makes it highly unlikely that *all *our manuscripts derive from some version that was tampered with. In other words, we can be quite confident–probably more confident than with any other ancient text–that where all the manuscripts agree (and that is the case most of the time) we really are dealing with the original version. For instance, all manuscripts of John 1:1 read “the Word was God.” All manuscripts record that Jesus said (John 8:52), “Before Abraham came to be, I am.” There is no rational reason to doubt that the original manuscript of John included these readings. Mind you, that original manuscript may have dated from the very end of the first century (we have a papyrus fragment of John from about 120, and presumably the text had been circulating for a while by then).
Something called Christianity would no doubt continue to exist, at least for a while, but it would be radically different from what we call Christianity now. However, it’s unlikely that any argument or evidence will ever be produced that is strong enough to destroy Christian faith on a matter of such importance. Unlikely, not impossible.
And Buddah was that source?
What we can say that in matters of faith, not necessarily history, the bible is inerrant.
Romans did not crucify Romans. We don’t know what happened to any of the guards; whether they were punished, fled, reported back or what. The very reason there were guards was the fear on the part of the Jewish leaders that someone would steal His body, so a stealthy bribery would have been unlikely.
Karl Popper wasn’t a libertarian in the colloqial meaning of the world.
From the Open Society and Its Enemies.