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Quote by: jascowhiz0  My first post was a quick reaction and I don't know much about all this stuff and maybe what I was taught in school (Catholic school) is a bunch of BS. So I stop and re looked at the whole thing. This whole idea about the God who wasn't there is based on the dating of the Gospels as a given, then goes on from there to say its folklore and Paul has no idea whats going on. |
You've got that backwards.
Christianity is based on dating the gospels as a given... that they were written much earlier than they actually were. The evidence doesn't suggest this.
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Well their explanation for the dating of the Gospels is that Mark is first and he mentions the destruction of the temple so it must be after 70AD. They don't go into any detail about why they came to this conclusion and we must accept it as a given for them to go on.
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It's a given that Mark's mention of the destruction of the Jewish temple cannot happen before 70 ce. Apologists like to claim Mark was written much earlier and was documenting a prophecy, but there's absolutely ZERO evidence of this. The other gospels very obviously build from Mark.
I'm really at a loss for why you posted this. It doesn't give us anything to go on and is more than a little dishonest. First, it relies heavily on the idea of "internal evidence". This is the straw apologists grasp at when it comes to dating the bible. It goes something like this:
If we encounter a handwritten phrase in an undated journal that reads "I'm really looking forward to going to New York and climbing to the top of the world trade center" we'd conclude (using internal evidence) that the document was written before 9/11/2001. The glaringly obvious problem here is anyone who wants to create a document of this nature need only write as though 9/11hadn't yet happened and voila! Internal evidence dictates a pre-disaster date.
The dishonesty of the article came here:
"Another French scholar, the noted authority on the Dead Sea Scrolls Father Jean Carmignac of Paris (d.1986), has also re-evaluated the dating of the Gospels."
I see your author doesn't go out of his way to point out we have actual physical documents in the form of the DSS. We don't have any gospels earlier than the second century. None. Not one. 90 generations of scholars have been unable to unearth one.
The apostles were individuals in their adulthood in 33ce. When do we "learn" the most about them?
One of the earliest of these are the writings of Eusebius, 'The History of the Church,' (to A.D. 324). These were written in ca A.D. 325 and include perhaps the most complete history of the apostles.
About
300 years after the fact.
About Eusebius and Mark (John Mark):
Though neither Clement of Alexandria (?153-215), nor Origen of Alexandria (182-251) seem to have noticed, Eusebius of Caesarea (c.263-339) relays the news that the apostle Mark had been "first bishop" of Alexandria and had suffered martyrdom in the "eighth year of Nero." This would have been 61 AD – rendering the apostle dead before the death of Peter whose memoirs Mark supposedly wrote up as the Gospel of Mark. "Dragged to death", or maybe not. His bones – well, someone's bones – turned up in 9th century Venice.
Welcome to Enlightenment! Religion–the Tragedy of Mankind - Articles by Kenneth Humphreys
I'm sorry, but the disciples are every bit as fictional as their mythical teacher. The people who your article mentions aren't impartial 3rd parties. They're members of the church inventing history to benefit the church... and not doing such a good job of it.