Why do people still believe in Jesus and Christianity?

Cypress said:
I accept your tacit admission that the profound historical importance of Jesus ultimately depended on the outcome of events involving Saint Paul and Constantine, decades and centuries after his crucifixion
Click to expand...

then you are dumber than I thought.......you have my actual admission that God would have brought it about in a different way if he hadn't chosen to do it the way he did......
 
anatta said:
well Buddhists have the Pali cannon -which were also a rewrite/compendium of Buddhas suttas.
They were passed down by oral tradition as well

does that diminish their worth? Sorry I'm not following the point here
Click to expand...

The discussion was about any mention of Jesus in official Roman documents.
 
Cypress said:
Literate in the sense of being able to read and write. Jesus was born to peasant parents in a one horse town in a provincial backwater. He undoubtedly spoke Aramaic, but there is basically a zero chance he went to school and learned how to write. The NT explicitly points out that some of his peasant disciples from Galilee were Aramaic speaking illiterates, which would have been the standard, universal expectation for peasants from Gallile.

I think there is a reason the NT was written in Greek by highly literate people of the Hellenistic world. None of the illiterate Aramaic speaking followers of Jesus could write anything down in Aramaic. If they could, we should have had a NT written in Aramaic
Click to expand...

Hebrew? He was presumably a regular attender, and shows all the signs of connection with progressive groups who would need to have known the Scriptures very well.
 
Dutch Uncle said:
Why does that make a difference? The great cycle of life. It's why farm and ranch girls are so much fun; they've seen the cycle of life and seek to enjoy it.
Click to expand...

The fear of dying has us seeing the "Great Njght" approaching.. our hardwired brains seek to find something that it "knows" is there, even if our minds know it isn't likely.
 
PostmodernProphet said:
then you are dumber than I thought.......you have my actual admission that God would have brought it about in a different way if he hadn't chosen to do it the way he did......
Click to expand...
Unfortunately, you have exactly zero tangible evidence that God had anything to do with Paul and Constantine.

What the historical record shows is that without Paul and Constantine, the Gentiles and the Empire would barely have ever been aware of Jesus, of the obscure subsect of Judaism he led, or the religion based on him.

I would say your garden variety Roman citizen never even heard about Jesus until about three centuries after his death.

Which speaks to my insight about Jesus not being a profound part of history until centuries after his death, and his historical legacy depended on the efforts and decisions of other important Roman citizens
 
Cypress said:
You would likely never have heard of Christianity or Jesus without Paul's missionary work to the Gentile communities, or without Constantine deciding to give the Empire's blessing to a minor and fairly obscure religion.

Without Paul and Constantine, Christianity might well have remained an obscure and tiny sect of Judaism and might have faded away with time.

That is what I meant that in the context of history, Jesus would never have been of profound historical influence without Paul and Constantine, and the events surrounding them over the course of three centuries.
Click to expand...

Isn't it amazing how God works.
 
iolo eto said:
Hebrew? He was presumably a regular attender, and shows all the signs of connection with progressive groups who would need to have known the Scriptures very well.
Click to expand...
Scholars seem to think that illiteracy rates in the Jewish world of the first century was about 98 percent.

As a historical fact, it seems highly unlikely that a child born to peasants, in a tiny village in the obscure backwater province of Galilee would have went to school or been thoroughly trained to read and write. He purportedly trained to be a woodworker.

Anything is possible, we will never know with any certainty. To me, it does not matter if he was literate or not. He obviously had a message and a charisma that appealed to people. I merely was pointing out that a person of such lowly standing in the eyes of the Roman authorities would not have inspired them to keep and maintain written records about Jesus
 
Cypress said:
Scholars seem to think that illiteracy rates in the Jewish world of the first century was about 98 percent.

As a historical fact, it seems highly unlikely that a child born to peasants, in a tiny village in the an obscure backwater province of Galilee would have went to school or been thoroughly trained to read and write. He purportedly trained to be a woodworker.

Anything is possible, we will never know with any certainty. To me, it does not matter if he was literate or not. He obviously had a message and a charisma that appealed to people. I merely was pointing out that a person of such lowly standing in the eyes of the Roman authorities would not have inspired them to keep and maintain written records about Jesus
Click to expand...

My grandfather was supposed to be trained up as a woodworker, but he was highly literate in two languages and turned into a headmaster because someone in the teachers' union suggested a different career. Cultures vary.
 
What priest means?

: one authorized to perform the sacred rites of a religion especially
as a mediatory agent between humans and God specifically :
an Anglican, Eastern Orthodox, or Roman Catholic clergyman
ranking below a bishop and above a deacon.

 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top