Archaeology of the New Testament

[Ichabod Stain]

I like the United Methodist Church.

I like my oatmeal with more bland.

 

[Cypress]

What kind of weirdo never played dodgeball?!

I don't ever remember playing it. Throwing a ball at people seems like a lame sport. I preferred the skill sports. I remember playing little league baseball, pee wee football, little league soccer, flag football, basketball, tennis.

 

[ZenMode]

This is basically freshman level literary analysis...
The accounts of Jesus are authored in the mid to late first century by eyewitnesses or people who knew the eyewitnesses. Jesus is a historical person, as confirmed by multiple independent sources from Christian, Roman, Jewish, Greek, Gnostic, and Syrian authors.

The Torah is stories compiled by scribes a thousand years after the events they narrate. There is nothing remotely close to witness testimony/accounts in the Torah.

Jesus' existence isn't in doubt. How many people do you think have been eyewitness to the miracles of Benny Hinn? He performs miracles all the time! There was a documentary about all the people who had serious physical problems and begged those around Hinn to have him cure them. He performed all of his miracles on a stage in front of thousands of people. You can watch YouTube videos of his miracles! So, if all it takes is eyewitness testimony, we may just have the modern day Jesus in the US right now.

So, where do you draw your line between fact and fiction? Is Passover just a story or not, and why? If it's not a story, then why is the Christian God murdering children when he has unlimited alternatives at his disposal? If Jesus' resurrection is confirmed by (alleged) eyewitness testimony, then is Benny Hinn a prophet of God? What about Apollonius? He was the Pagan equivalent of Jesus. After his death, his followers wrote books about his miracles, believed he came back from the dead and went to heaven with gods.

God doesn't author or edit books.

He's God. He could do literally anything he wants.

Humans write stories or narratives that describe their understanding, or lack of understanding, of God. Anyone who is remotely familiar with Job or Ecclesiastes knows that humans thought God was, in some sense, inscrutable, and God that did not give them all the answers.

Why is Job or any other book trustworthy as a source for reliable information?

Fine, so you almost exclusively base your animosity about Christianity based on a few cherry picked passages in the Jewish Torah. While stealing Christian ideas about objective morality to express your moral outage about them.

There's no "object morality". What Christians advocate is devine preference, not objective morality. And the preference of your divine being have included incest, genocide and slavery.

 

[Melchizedek=Tecumseh]

I like the United Methodist Church.

Can they get the Passover Angel of Death to Passover you at the Harvest?

 

[Cypress]

So, where do you draw your line between fact and fiction?

By literary criticism and evidence.
Noah's Ark is not a historical biography. It does not pass any of the literary tests of historical narrative. The Gospels strictly speaking aren't historical biography either, but they contain historically verifiable content written in the first century by eyewitnesses or people who knew the eyewitnesses.

Benny Hinn is widely suspected of being a fraud, and nobody is willing to die for the belief he is authentic.

Even the foremost atheist scholar Bart Ehrmam says that the apostles genuinely believed they saw Jesus after the crucifixion.
Then, the only question you have to answer is whether they all experienced a mass hallucination; whether Jesus didn't die on the cross; or whether Jesus was actually who he claimed to be.

You are as much a strict biblical literalist as a fundamentalist Pentecostal. The only difference is the Pentecostal believes in literalism as a genuine matter of conscience. You cling to literalism out of a cynical ulterior agenda.

You allow without hesitation thsty scientific, arististic, engineering knowledge has evolved and advanced since the 1st century AD. Religious knowledge has also evolved and advanced since the 1st century.