Apparently christianity is bullshit...

[P3nT4gR4m]

Colour me shocked 

What's the skinny on this Atwill dude?

[Cain]

-

[Junkenstein]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bible_conspiracy_theory

Best I can find that doesn't take you to one of his PR sites.

I'd bet that if you bothered to dig through the edit history, his books were added by him.

It looks like alex jones for atheists to me.

[GrannySmith]

Still, it would please me to see this confirmed

_{[Disclaimer: I am not against religious feelings, I am against organised religion. And that includes ALL of them.]}

[Faust]

He's got more citations on atheist forums than he has in academic publications or expertise in history.

When I read the phrase "atheist forums" I hear booing and hissing in the back of my head like an automatic reflex.

Didn't James Cameron claim he had discovered the tomb of Christ a few years back and that he had lived a long and healthy life and was married with three kids?

[Suu]

This guy is pretty bullshitty in the history and classics community. He's trying to create a ground shaker but has nothing to stand on. He barely did any research and is relying on the words of others to hold his argument up. Bad bad bad bad bad. Also, if this is correct, this would basically say that there were no proto-Christians following Christ's death during the 1st and 2nd Century, which is utterly false. Whether or not he was the Messiah, chances are there was a real man who said some real things that sparked a movement in Judaism. This much we know for sure, because it's well chronicled on the Roman side of history.

Once we can confirm a copy of the Census of Quirinius from AD 4, we should be able to put more pieces of the puzzle together. However, our largest issue at hand is determining if the Roman contemporaries that mentioned Jesus or Christ by name, namely the Jewish writer Josephus (who was in a client-patron relationship with the known and noted anti-Semitic Flavian emperors Vespasian, Titus (wrecked the temple in AD 70) and Domitian (total psychopath, my graduate school writing sample is on him)) and the senator Tacitus, are actually legitimate or if they were added in during the translation period. The majority of Latin texts were translated to Greek by the Orthodox Byzantines starting from about 550 to 1100, but they weren't known for their corruption of the Classics. They also held one of the largest libraries in Europe until the Ottoman sack of Constantinople in 1453, which was then brought in pieces to Western Europe. So if the books weren't already translated poorly by Catholic scholars prior, they may have been translated into the vulgate moving into the 16th and 17th Century, when the King James Bible was drafted, and half of what we know today is lost.

In short, this is a sticky situation for anyone to enter. Pretty much any tool can write, "JEEBUS IS A LIE!" and smear the walls with typical propaganda, or, as educated people, we can wait for true evidence to surface. With the discovery of a large cache of papyrii in Morocco and Ethiopia recently, we may be able to find more answers soon.

Did I go over the top again?

[P3nT4gR4m]

Did I go over the top again?

Not at all. Appreciated!

[Suu]

NP.

Shit like this has been coming up A LOT lately, because there's a good deal of atheists that want to prove a point. The problem is that they aren't historians, they're armchair librarians and archaeologists looking for conspiracy theories on the internet to build their argument, and it's killing them. I'm not saying this guy has no historian background, but the fact that he is willing to cite online forums over solid sources alone is a pretty shitty practice. My professors would have shot me.

[P3nT4gR4m]

Yeah, I figured it had to be bullshit, otherwise someone from the BBC would have interviewed the pope by now but it's a damn fine new tool in my christian-trolling toolkit, nonetheless.

Thanks to you I also have some more acid to throw in athiest's faces now, too.

All bases covered 

[Suu]

I also do parties.

[Bebek Sincap Ratatosk]

As far as I can tell, there may have been a Jesus. It seems very likely that much of the biblical Jesus is an amalgam of non-fiction and fiction, but we simply don't have any sort of irrefutable proof at this point. Its kind of like the whole question of if there was a King David, King Solomon or even a nation of Israel before the return from Babylon. There could have been, but it appears that the biblical account is, at the very least a mishmash of fiction and non-fiction.

Either way, it seems credible to say that the Jesus of the Bible is fiction... perhaps based on some real dude, perhaps not. However, for Christianity, the biblical Jesus must be 100% true. If he isn't the Son of God, if he didn't perform miracles, if he didn't die as a perfect sacrifice to cover the sins of man with his perfect blood... well then he was just some Jewish dude and the whole thing falls apart. Indeed, if Moses, Abraham, David, Solomon etc aren't 100% real, then things equally fall apart. The whole religion is based on an intricate connection between the Hebrew and Greek scriptures, where the type (the historical stuff) are prophetic models for the anti type (the fulfillment of those prophecies through Jesus).

For example, Moses was the mediator of the Law covenant between YHVH and the nation of Israel. This, in the Christian view, is a model for the later New Covenant between God and all People with Jesus as the mediator. If Moses never existed, if he never climbed Mt. Sinai etc. then the whole thing is rubbish.

If David never existed then Jesus cannot be genealogically proven to be of the Tribe of Judah and therefore legitimate heir to the throne. 

To dismantle conservative Christianity, it doesn't matter if Jesus was a physical dude... everything in the Bible MUST be true. For the more liberal interpretations... well hell, he could just have been a groovy philosopher or fiction (ala Plato) and they'd be fine.

[Dildo Argentino]

No, Suu, not over the top at all. Highly educational, thank you!

[P3nT4gR4m]

As far as I can tell, there may have been a Jesus.

This is where I stand, although what the fuck a spanish dude was doing in prehistoric judea is beyond me. I've yet to hear a convincing argument either supporting or refuting his existence. I did read of some interesting connections to egyptian astrology but the thing that throws me completely is all the magical powers / friendly zombie shit. I mean, if god created reality then did he really think it was such a crap system he had to throw it out for his avatar? It's kind of like playing GTA with the cheat codes on - his highscore is meaningless.

[Dildo Argentino]

The thing that throws me completely is all the magical powers / friendly zombie shit. I mean, if god created reality then did he really think it was such a crap system he had to throw it out for his avatar? It's kind of like playing GTA with the cheat codes on - his highscore is meaningless.

Solid gold, that.

[P3nT4gR4m]

If you like that, you might like the main hook I've been using to bait christians with for years. It's best applied at the "tipping point" where they're starting to really lose their shit at you.

The great big, glaringly obvious logical fallacy - "Jesus died for our sins"

Thing is, Jesus never actually died. Given that Jesus was just an avatar for god, who is all powerful and blessed with cheat-code superpowers including infinite lives cheat and seeing into the future hack

So god sent himself to earth, knowing he was going to get nailed. He basically committed consequence-free suicide (consequence-free in that he didn't actually die for real) in order to balance the books on humanities wickedness. Who's books? Oh, yeah, that's right - his own books. So all he really had to do was write it off in the ledger and save himself all that passive aggressive grandstanding. I mean, he'd already chucked the rulebook out the window when he did the walking on water gag or when he got everyone drunk at the H2O kegger party so why did he have to do something totally fucking meaningless to scrub the sins score?

In my experience there is no more effective way to get a christian to throw a punch at you.