Okay, fine... 1,960 years ago there was a guy named Steve who said that 50 years before that there was a guy named Bob who could fly. If it's not true, how come no one exposed it 2,010 years ago?
Because, Steve never actually claimed it. You made him up. You never hear any Bobians going to churches on Sunday, do you? You never hear about Bobians going far and wide to preach their gospel and dying horrible deaths about it, do you? The disciples are definitely not made up, and neither is their testimony.
There isn't any historical evidence of the apostles dying for Jesus, and, even if there was, they could have just been crazy. There have been people who have jumped off buildings thinking they could fly. Why would they do that if they couldn't really fly? Maybe because they honestly believed that they could fly because they were out of their freaking minds.
Here's a link for you. This one contains a list of how the 12 disciples died and cites sources. (Along with some other prominent 1st century Christians and other stuff)
http://www.bukisa.com/articles/3714...christ-died-and-what-it-means-to-be-christian
I can't believe you just made me go all the way back to post #21 to find out that your argument is that the prophecies came true because the Bible says they did. You can't use the Bible to prove the Bible.
You completely misunderstood the argument. Again. Let me lay it out one more time.
1) The Bible accurately represents history. (I've gone through this at least 4-5 times in the thread.)
2) Jesus satisifes the Biblical prophecies about the Messiah.
3) Jesus is the Messiah.
No. My first guess would be that they were doing some sort of trick; not that they had some kind of magical ability to see into the future.
The trick WOULD count as special knowledge, wise guy.
Yeah, because not believing that someone can have a magical ability to see into the future makes me gullible.
Whatever.
I predicted the outcome of 100 ball games in a row 100% accurately, and my evidence for doing this is that I say I did it. Do you believe I'm God now?
No. Let me say this just one more time. There. Is. Evidence. If you held every single scrap of history up to the same standard you require the Bible to meet, we wouldn't know anything about history! If you predicted the outcome of 100 ball games in a row 100% accurately and there were 1000 people or so who testified that you did it, I'm sure you'd get plenty of converts.
We shouldn't believe any of them. They're all equally ridiculous.
Your problem is that you're ruling out the supernatural from the start. How do you expect me to prove anything regarding God to you when one of your assumptions is that he doesn't exist?
I'm not trolling. I'm staying completely on topic and I made a completely legitimate point. There is just as much evidence that people could find out the future from the Fates as there is that they could find it out from God. If you don't have an argument against this, you should show a little integrity and admit that I'm right, instead of trying to dismiss me as being a troll.
Give me one scrap of evidence behind the Greek Fates. Now go back through the thread and look at the multitude of evidence I've given about the New Testament. QED.
The Hebrew word for Heaven and sky were the same. Heaven basically was the sky, originally. That's where people believed that God was. Heaven didn't become a separate thing until we started finding out that there was much beyond earth's sky, and that we could actually go up into the sky and see that God wasn't there. It basically became a separate thing as a result of theists moving the target rather than just admitting that Heaven doesn't exist.
Do you have any historical quotes or evidence behind that, or did you just make that up?
Why does God allow airplanes and space shuttles?
Because there's no way of reaching Heaven with those. The only passage to Heaven is through death: It's in another universe, if you will.
Then that's another thing that you're wrong about. There isn't any evidence of a tower that goes beyond the moon.
You're the one who made up the beyond the moon crap. I never said in any way that the tower went even close to the moon. That might have been what the people were aiming for, but they never finished it. Or did you not actually read the story? For all we know they might not have even finished the second level.
Because anyone who's bothered to study the history of languages at all knows that that's not how different languages came about. Languages naturally change over time. People naturally convert to a way of communicating that blends in with the culture around them. That's why people from different areas have different accents and different words for certain things(like pop instead of soda). It's also why people pick up accents that they didn't originally have if they live in a new area long enough. If you took a bunch of English speaking people and put them on their own island where they had no contact with anyone else for 1,000 years, by the end of the 1,000 years they would speak a completely different language than their ancestors who inhabited the island originally.
*Epic yawn* And I suppose you have sources to back all this stuff up? Yes, languages change over time, (just look at anything written in the old-style English 500 years ago), but not too drastically. You'll get accents, you'll get new phrases, you'll find some old ones erased, but if you were to remove Texas from the rest of the world for 1000 years or so, you'd find that Texans and other English speakers could understand each other on at least a rudimentary level.
Even that makes no sense. How can the devil give Jesus the world? Isn't Jesus supposed to be God? Doesn't God already have the world? That's like someone trying to sell me my own car.
There's this little thing called free will. Every human (whether they realize it or not) is serving either God or the devil at any given time. God could quite easily wipe the devil and all of us out at any given time, but he'd rather redeem us than crush us. Now, as every human being is in a struggle between God and the devil at all times, the devil could have easily given up the struggle and let God have them all. (As to why the devil would have made such a bargain: God has as all under judgement for breaking his laws, and the point of Christ was to live a perfect live and take our punishment. Had Christ sinned at all, his sacrifice would have become completely useless, as he would have deserved the crucifixion.)
Then stop saying that anything in the Bible that makes it look bad wasn't translated correctly.
If you try to pick up the intended meaning rather than harping on any and every tiny semantics error you can imagine, than I won't have to bring it up.
No, it's more like if I were to tell you that I was going to sell you a whole candy bar for a dollar, and then I take your dollar and only give you half of the candy bar. Would you feel ripped off, or would you think that I meant "half" even though I clearly said "whole" originally?
What does any of that have to do with my point? The devil would have given Jesus the whole world.
What I want to know is how you're able to tell which parts of the Bible are meant to be allegorical. You said that some of the Bible isn't meant to be taken literally. How did you find this out? You must have gotten this information from somewhere. Or did you just make it up on your own?
It's easy. You use the thing called
a brain. If the meaning is totally absurd when taken literally, (like when Jesus says his words are like a double edged sword, that doesn't mean he'll decapitate people by talking to them!) then it's symbolic. Else, it isn't. And don't you dare respond with the standard "The miracles are absurd" crap.
Well, you're wrong, because you can't. You're out of your mind if you think that you're going to convert a single non-Christian person by saying that the Bible is correct because it says so in the Bible.
All you're proving is that you didn't bother to try and read my argument.
Prove that they died for it or stop using this argument.
Covered it above.
Also, as I mentioned earlier, they could have been crazy. Also, just because someone lies about knowing something doesn't mean that they don't still believe it to be true. If I claim to have seen Bigfoot and I'm lying, I can still believe that Bigfoot exists even though I know that I didn't actually see him myself.
So, are you really saying that a group of 12 crazies managed to convince thousands of other people to the point where they'd die for a lie when the community leaders were completely against the crazies? That's just absurd.
Likewise, I could claim to have seen Jesus in person, and even if I knew I hadn't really seen him I could still believe that he was the son of God. So if I really believed that Jesus did resurrect, even if I didn't see him come back myself, I could still lie about seeing him even at the cost of my own life because I believed that giving my life for that lie would result in me going to Heaven.
You know, Jesus died as painfully and shamefully as the Romans could contrive. That's not anything to rally behind. The disciples DID believe that Jesus came back from the grave.
How do you know that they didn't expose him? How do you know that Jesus even had anything to be exposed? Maybe he never even claimed to be the son of God, or a prophet, or anything. There isn't a single writing by Jesus himself. How do you know he ever really claimed any of these things? Or that he even existed at all?
The fact that Jesus existed has been documented by Josephus and Tacitus in Roman writings I've quoted in this very thread. The fact that he did miracles is documented by the Jewish leaders in the Talmund, AGAIN something I've quoted in this thread. (They accused him of being a magician and demon-possessed.) The fact that he claimed to be the son of God also has support from the Talmund, because else the Jewish leaders would have thought him to be the best thing since King David. (I mean, if someone went around healing the sick and raising the dead, that would usually qualify as a good thing, right? The only explanation is that Jesus did something the religious leaders absolutely hated, and claiming to be the Son of God would qualify.)
Again, where is your evidence that thousands of Jews converted to Christianity during Jesus' lifetime?
Actually, I believe most of the converts came after his death. After all, the crowd was yelling "CRUCIFY HIM!" at the time of his death. Anyway, as for the evidence that tons of people converted...
"Nero fastened the guilt and inflicted the most exquisite tortures on a class hated for their abominations, called Christians by the populace. Christus, from whom the name had its origin, suffered the extreme penalty during the reign of Tiberius at the hands of one of our procurators, Pontius Pilatus, and a most mischievous superstitution, thus checked for the moment, again broke out not only in Judaea, the first source of the evil, but even in Rome....Accordingly, an arrest was first made of all who pleaded guilty: then, upon their information, an immense multitude was convicted, not so much of the crime of firing the city, as of hatred against mankind."
It doesn't explicitly say Jews, but it's reasonable to assume that a good portion of them were.
Why would you expect them to have left it out? I'm not even sure what your point is here.
If you were to make up a story about Bob the flying man, would you include hard-to-explain details like "He could only fly in direct sunlight"?
You haven't been able to demonstrate that a single prophecy has come true. "Because the Bible says so" is not a valid argument.
The new testament is a collection of the most reliable books about Jesus. To say I can't use those to prove things ABOUT JESUS is absurd!
). On the surface, this seems like a contradiction. However, it's easy enough to explain. Jewish law says that touching a dead body makes you ceremonially unclean. So, what people did was: They'd take a sword or something and cut the rope.
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