Pagan Roots? 5 Surprising Facts About Christmas

blackascoal said:
I'm a real person with a real birthdate. The biblical Jesus was not a real person.

Therein lies the difference.

Christianity is a belief. There is nothing factual about it.
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"There are those who argue that Jesus is a figment of the Church’s imagination, that there never was a Jesus at all. I have to say that I do not know any respectable critical scholar who says that any more." in Jesus Now and Then by Richard A. Burridge and Graham Gould (Apr 1, 2004) ISBN 0802809774 page 34
 
"In recent years, 'no serious scholar has ventured to postulate the non historicity of Jesus' or at any rate very few, and they have not succeeded in disposing of the much stronger, indeed very abundant, evidence to the contrary." in Jesus: An Historian's Review of the Gospels by Micjhael Grant 2004 ISBN 1898799881 page 200
 
In a 2011 review of the state of modern scholarship, Bart Ehrman (now a secular agnostic who was formerly Evangelical) wrote: "He certainly existed, as virtually every competent scholar of antiquity, Christian or non-Christian, agrees" B. Ehrman, 2011 Forged : writing in the name of God ISBN 978-0-06-207863-6. page 285
 
blackascoal said:
I'm a real person with a real birthdate. The biblical Jesus was not a real person.

Therein lies the difference.

Christianity is a belief. There is nothing factual about it.
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This is fucking hilarious. What kind of douchebag would deny historical facts like this?
 
Socrtease said:
"There are those who argue that Jesus is a figment of the Church’s imagination, that there never was a Jesus at all. I have to say that I do not know any respectable critical scholar who says that any more." in Jesus Now and Then by Richard A. Burridge and Graham Gould (Apr 1, 2004) ISBN 0802809774 page 34
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Belief in the biblical Jesus .. quite honestly is moronic .. but it's a BELIEF, thus it doesn't require facts.

Real critical scholars believe in science, not superstition and fairy-tales.

The real Jesus never called himself the son of god.

The Council of Nicea determined that.
 
Damocles said:
That's possible, but unlikely. It is extremely unlikely that Tacitus would have written about Jesus' execution, nor that a burgeoning new religion would have such an impact had he not existed. All Rome would have had to do to end the religion is simply point out that Jesus was fictional, which never happened. The people who executed him and hated the new religion never once denied his existence, they only denied his divinity.
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Tacitus wrote of Christ in 116 AD. He did not witness Christ's supposed persecution, it is not likely he interviewed anyone that did and he did not provide a source. Just as with Josephus, it is still possible that he was simply echoing what he heard from Christians.

It's enough for a reasonable person to find his existence compelling but not without question or doubt. It's not as well established as the existence of many other historical figures from earlier dates who did not, reportedly, have the power to perform miracles.
 
Damocles said:
That's possible, but unlikely. It is extremely unlikely that Tacitus would have written about Jesus' execution, nor that a burgeoning new religion would have such an impact had he not existed. All Rome would have had to do to end the religion is simply point out that Jesus was fictional, which never happened. The people who executed him and hated the new religion never once denied his existence, they only denied his divinity.
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COUNCIL OF NICEA, 325AD.

The biblical Jesus was not a real person

Are you unaware that there is a difference between the mythical biblical Jesus and the real one?

How the Council of Nicea Changed the World

When Constantine became the first Christian leader of the Roman Empire in the 4th century, his vast territory was populated by a hodgepodge of beliefs and religions.

Within his own young religion, there was also dissent, with one major question threatening to cleave the popular cult — as it was at the time — into warring factions: Was Jesus divine, and how?


It's hard to imagine riots in the streets, pamphlet wars and vicious rhetoric spawned by such a question, but that was the nature of things in A.D. 325, when Constantine was forced to take action to quell the controversy.

That summer, 318 bishops from across the empire were invited to the Turkish town of Nicea, where Constantine had a vacation house, in an attempt to find common ground on what historians now refer to as the Arian Controversy. It was the first ever worldwide gathering of the Church.

The Christianity we know today is a result of what those men agreed upon over that sticky month, including the timing of the religion's most important holiday, Easter, which celebrates Jesus rising from the dead.

Young religion

Christianity was young and still working out the kinks when Constantine took power over the Roman Empire in A.D. 306. Christian doctrine at the time was muddled and inconsistent, especially when it came to the central question of Jesus' relationship to God.

Jesus was as eternally divine as the Father, said one camp led by the Archbishop Alexander of Alexandria. Another group, named the Arians after their leader Arius the preacher, saw Jesus as a remarkable leader, but inferior to the Father and lacking in absolute divinity.

Supporters on both sides scrawled graffiti on town walls in defiance while bishops from across the empire entered into a war of words as the controversy simmered to a head in 324.

Fearing unrest in his otherwise peaceful territory, Constantine summoned the bishops to his lake house in Nicea on June 19, 325.

Savvy move

In a savvy move that would put today's shrewd politicians to shame, the compromise proffered by Constantine was vague, but blandly pleasing: Jesus and God were of the same "substance," he suggested, without delving too much into the nature of that relationship. A majority of the bishops agreed on the compromise and voted to pass the language into doctrine.

Their statement of compromise, which would come to be known as "The Nicene Creed," formed the basis for Christian ideology. The bishops also used the Council of Nicea to set in stone some church rules that needed clarification, and those canons were the reference point after which all future laws were modeled.

As a final order of business, the bishops decided upon a date for the holiest of Christian celebrations, Easter, which was being observed at different times around the empire. Previously linked with the timing of Passover, the council settled on a moveable day that would never coincide again with the Jewish holiday — the first Sunday after the first full moon on or after the vernal equinox.
http://www.livescience.com/2410-council-nicea-changed-world.html
 
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blackascoal said:
The real Jesus never called himself the son of god.....The Council of Nicea determined that
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technically, he called himself "God"....John 8:58....which the First Council of Nicea confirmed....
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Council_of_Nicaea

John 10:33
33 The Jews answered Him, “For a good work we do not stone You, but for blasphemy; and because You, being a man, make Yourself out to be God.”
 
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PostmodernProphet said:
I'm sorry, but Constantine did not write the book of John....you are simply embarrassing yourself with your comments......particularly when you deliberately misstate what the Nicean Council decided.....
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NOT arguing with your faith, but, to use the Gospel of St. John to prove that Christ said anything is hard on an evidentiary level. John is typically viewed to have been written in the very last decade of the first century or in the first couple of decades in the second century. If you read a copy of the Gettysburg address that was not written until 1910 you would not think that it was a verbatim writing and probably would question its accuracy. Mark is the earliest written Gospel but it is written at least 30 years after Jesus death. Without some supporting documents dating back contemporaneously with Christ, it is hard to use the Gospels as evidence of what Jesus said or who he was without falling back on faith.
 
blackascoal said:
MORONIC

Like most so-called christians, you don't know shit about it.
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and yet, I'm the one who's been proving links to back up everything I've said, and you've been the one lying and not providing jack shit......by now I believe everyone else has come to the conclusion I know what I'm talking about and you can't lie successfully....
 
Socrtease said:
NOT arguing with your faith, but, to use the Gospel of St. John to prove that Christ said anything is hard on an evidentiary level. John is typically viewed to have been written in the very last decade of the first century or in the first couple of decades in the second century. If you read a copy of the Gettysburg address that was not written until 1910 you would not think that it was a verbatim writing and probably would question its accuracy. Mark is the earliest written Gospel but it is written at least 30 years after Jesus death. Without some supporting documents dating back contemporaneously with Christ, it is hard to use the Gospels as evidence of what Jesus said or who he was without falling back on faith.
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are you denying the strong oral history that people used back then?

if i write a memoir about something 30 years, is it not to be believed, but by faith, simply because i wrote about it after the fact?
 
Socrtease said:
NOT arguing with your faith, but, to use the Gospel of St. John to prove that Christ said anything is hard on an evidentiary level. John is typically viewed to have been written in the very last decade of the first century or in the first couple of decades in the second century. If you read a copy of the Gettysburg address that was not written until 1910 you would not think that it was a verbatim writing and probably would question its accuracy. Mark is the earliest written Gospel but it is written at least 30 years after Jesus death. Without some supporting documents dating back contemporaneously with Christ, it is hard to use the Gospels as evidence of what Jesus said or who he was without falling back on faith.
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sorry to disagree with you, but the majority of authorities agree that the gospel of John was written by John as well as agreeing that the gospels ARE supporting documents written by men contemporaneous with Christ.......a handful of atheist detractors notwithstanding.....
 
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