It turns out that I got my date of September 11th 3 BCE for birth of Jesus in a commentary on the Book of Revelation. However, if you had just done a little research on your own you could have found two videos by Christian ministries that show how they arrive at that same date.
Just Scripture Ministries
Jesus Birthday: Sept 11, 3 BC
Revelation 12, Astral Prophecy and the Birth of Christ on 911
Both of those ministries hold to a belief that Jesus was a real person.
Also, there’s short video by Age of the Storm which specializes in Astrotheology and holds to the fact that Jesus is a metaphor for the sun.
Jesus (sun’s) Birthday - September 11th (9/11) EXPLAINED! Revelation 12:1 Astrotheology. 2020
So what we have is an agreement on the exact birth date for Jesus among believers and unbelievers. So there you have it.
All three of the websites you list are run by cranks, Christian or pagan, so their agreement doesn’t prove anything. If you read anything by real scholars, they will tell you we don’t have a clue what day Jesus was born on – and that it doesn’t matter anyway.
The cranks are New Testament “scholars” not the people who debunk their deceit. 99% of these “scholars” are afraid to question Christian dogma and doctrine because they’ve been brainwashed to think doing so will send them to hell to be tortured for all eternity. Then we have the agnostic cranky cranks like O’Neill and Ehrman who’s giant egos won’t let them admit that they could ever have been so wrong about the supposed historicity of Jesus. “He must exist because I wrote about what he said and for me to have written about what he said he must have existed.” LOL! The classic example of circular reasoning. New Testament scholars are obsolete and have no place at the table with adults.
I notice that Ehrman was asked to edit the two-volume Loeb edition (Harvard University Press) of the Apostolic Fathers, not you. Do you have any hypothesis regarding why one of the world’s greatest university presses would have passed over someone with your brilliance? Or did they offer it to you first, and you turned them down?
Where’s Ehrman going to get his information on these fictional Apostolic Fathers? Not from the secular historical record because Clement, Ignatius and Polycarp are not mentioned by any real historians. All we have are forged letters and fake stories of martyrdom invented by the Catholic orthodoxy. Any dolt can copy what the Church wrote about these fictional characters and it looks like Harvard University Press picked one.
The fact that you are writing in the future tense, when Ehrman’s Loeb set came out 20 years ago, indicates how little work you actually do in the field of early Christianity. Every scholar of early Christianity has Ehrman’s set on his shelves, but you weren’t even aware it existed.
Maybe it’s time you sent us another photo of your bookshelf, only this time, instead of a photo of your Greek grammar books, a photo of your selection of New Testament commentaries and reference books. It should be good for a laugh to see so many sub-academic books, written by cranks from the 18th century through to the present, all assembled on one shelf.
I don’t need any guidance reading the Bible or the crap the early Church published. That’s your mistake letting someone bop you in the head with it and convince you that you must believe every word is true or burn and be tortured for all eternity before you ever sit down to read it. I do not care what Bart Ehrman has to say- he’s a crank and a liar. We do not have Aramaic texts that predate the gospels that talk about Jesus as he said in a moment of desperation. I do have Lost Scriptures which I think he translated. Other than that Bart Ehrman is as worthless as teats on a hog. Your opinions and those of New Testament hoaxers are even more worthless. What they say if believed will induce a stupefying psychosis. They know less than nothing.
Do you honestly think that everyone who disagrees with you (or even the majority) believes this? Most of the people disagreeing with you here aren’t even theists, let alone Christians who accept eternal conscious torment.
Why should that matter for the historicity of Jesus of Nazareth? The gospel accounts are certainly evidence enough for the existence of such a figure, even if (for the sake of argument) the traditions they convey about him are inaccurate. By the way, if Q or some other sayings-gospel existed as a source for the canonical gospels, as seems to be the consensus of NT scholarship, then there are texts that predate the gospels which talk about Jesus.
First, we have no evidence at all that Nazareth even existed in the First, Second or Third Century. Nazareth is not mentioned in any Old Testament books or Josephus, which both mention a lot of other cities and small towns. The Talmud names 63 Galilean towns but not Nazareth, and neither does any rabbinic literature. The rejection in his homeland story requires at least a synagogue but we don’t even have that. These problems exist because the nativity was a late addition to the story. Here’s how we know that: In Matthew 13:53-55 when Jesus is finished preaching in the synagogue the townsfolk are amazed. “Is this not the carpenter’s son? Is not his mother called Mary? Are not his brothers James and Jospeh and Simon and Judas? And are not all his sisters with us?” Where then did this man get all this?" What they should have been saying is, “Is not this is the child who was visited by Magi who brought him royal gifts, the one the soldiers were looking for when they killed all the male children?” This is a pretty good clue that the birth narrative in Matthew is a later addition because the author of chapter 13 seems completely unaware of it. Also, super apostle Paul never mentions Nazareth. No ancient historian or geographer mentions Nazareth. It is first noted at the beginning of the 4th century. It’s truly the town that theology built.
The gospels are not evidence - they are the claim. What we don’t have is evidence that supports anything in the gospel narratives. Your argument here is the same old circular argument that the Bible is true because it says it is. That may work on the gullible frightened believers who are fearing for salvation. No intelligent person is going to buy into that nonsense. New Testament “scholars” buy that hook, line and sinker which clearly illustrates the intelligence level of these people. And Ed wonders why nobody of sense can take them seriously.
We really only have two gospel accounts and they are written in third person. None of the writers claim to have met Jesus or to have witnessed any events in the tales. There is another YUGE problem with the reliability of the gospels as history because they are anonymous. The fact that we do not know who wrote them or when makes them the equivalent of Trump claiming “people are saying”. The Gospel According to Mark is the most important of the synoptic gospels because it is the primary source for Matthew and Luke. Seventy six percent of Mark is reproduced almost word-for-word in both Matthew and Luke. An additional 18% of Mark is reproduced in Matthew but not in Luke, and an further 3% of Mark is in Luke but not in Matthew. This means that 97% of Mark is reproduced in Matthew and/or Luke. Matthew contains 606 of Mark’s 661 verses. Luke contains 320 of Mark’s 661 verses. Of the 55 verses of Mark which Matthew does not reproduce, Luke reproduces 31; therefore, there are only 24 verses in all of Mark not reproduced somewhere in Matthew or Luke. Eyewitnesses don’t have to copy and then embellish stories which is exactly what the four to six different authors of Luke and Matthew did. There were at least two authors making up the stories in the Gospel of John.
The fictional Q document is a great example of how New Testament “scholars” just make stuff up. There’s no need for such a thing because there’s nothing in the words, parables and speeches the New Testament writers put on the lips of Jesus that is original. And I shouldn’t have to point out that it was quite easy to put the prediction of the destruction of the temple on the lips of Jesus decades after that occurred. All biblical prophecies are post hoc. It should not surprise anyone that the life and death of Jesus seems to be reflected in the verses of Isaiah 53 and other parts of the OT. This is not a coincidence. We have to remember that the Hebrew Scriptures came before Jesus. The authors of the New Testament used images of the Jewish Messiah they found in the Hebrew Scriptures and created their stories about Jesus to fit those images.
I don’t believe that, but don’t let facts get in the way of your projections. (Where is Faizal when we need him? Surely a psychiatrist, rather than a Bible scholar, is the right man to figure out why Boris says what he says, and does what he does.)
Well, let’s see, since the “hoaxers” (= scholars) know “less than nothing,” let’s give them a -10 on the number line. But then, since the scholars know 100 times as much as you, that puts you at -1000 on the number line.
Irrelevant. The claim is that a historical Jesus existed; that he supposedly was born in Nazareth is an unimportant detail.
Already proved false earlier in this discussion; the author of John claims to have known Jesus and for all practical purposes to have been his most beloved disciple. Boris can’t seem to master even elementary reading skills.
It’s of course interesting that Boris constantly rails against “scholarship,” when this entire body of points is straight out of standard, mainstream, New Testament scholarship. Had Boris lived in Calvin’s day, he never would have written anything like the above. It is New Testament scholarship in the intervening period that has produced the “Mark first” consensus, and the historical/textual approach Boris is using. Boris is utterly dependent on the scholarship that he hates.
You didn’t say Sept 11th 3BC was the birthdate of Jesus, you said it was the beginning of the Age of Pisces. You got your date for the beginning of the Age of Pisces from a commentary on Revelation.
It’s no wonder you didn’t want to tell us how you knew when the Age of Pisces began.
Jesus being born on the first day of the Age of Pisces would be a huge coincidence, and grounds for either awe or suspicion.
Choosing the first day of the Age of Pisces to match when Jesus was born and neglecting to mention it when asked is grounds only for derision.
What they don’t know is what’s important. They don’t know Jesus and his Merrymen never existed and if a person doesn’t know that whatever else they think they know about the New Testament is irrelevant.
That is your claim. You are interpreting the gospels in terms not shared by the authors. That the gospels might create expectations among readers of the tradition does not define their intended function. What reliable evidence is there that Jesus actually existed? Name it and claim it™.
Au contraire. No, it wasn’t proved false at all. I just showed a painting of the zodiac on the floor of a synagogue. That is physical evidence of sun worship. You have nothing like that to support any of your claims or superstitions. Your standards of proof vary wildly depending on what you’ve been preconditioned to believe. Like the synoptics the gospel of John is anonymous. We don’t know the names of the authors or who or how many redacted it, added or subtracted to or from it or when that happened. Like the synoptics John is written in third person and the authors never place themselves in the narratives. Even if we accept the early dating of apologists, it’s still too late to be written by an eyewitness. The words μαθητων αυτου in 20:30 and the entire verse 31 do not appear in the oldest manuscripts. They were added later. In 21:24-25 the author differentiates between himself and his source of information, “We know that his testimony is true.” This author is not a witness because he claims to have gotten some of his information from someone else. So, without historical evidence of the existence of John or any of them your claim falls flat. “That which can be asserted without evidence, can be dismissed without evidence.” ― Christopher Hitchens
Unlike you, I’ve never been dependent on Bible scholarship. It’s a joke and there’s never been a bigger ship of fools. It doesn’t take any training at all to see that Mark has no birth narrative, no description of resurrection appearances, no zombie invasion and so on. That nonsense was added to them later in the obviously copied and expanded synoptic gospels. New Testament scholars know this as did Constantine’s lackeys which is why they deceptively put Matthew at the beginning of the New Testament. Many New Testament hoaxers still try to argue that Matthew is the oldest gospel. That’s poppycock and you know it.
Calvin’s day? Yes, it’s well documented that John Calvin’s interpretation of the Bible (Leviticus 24:16) justified the murder of his theological opponents. I bet you wish you could live in those days when criticizing religion was a crime. Sadly, for conservative Christians those days are gone forever. When we atheists are the majority, which should be sometime between tomorrow at noon and 2030 at the latest, no one is going to pay a penalty for believing in religious dogma and following religious doctrine. People can be free to practice their intellectual perversions at will. However, I think it will soon be illegal to poison a child’s mind with religion just as it is to poison them with porn, drugs, alcohol and cigarettes. Once that happens the Christian religion will disappear in less than twenty years.
This is what I said in my original post about that: This particular conjunction is the beginning of the Age of Pisces which occurred on September 11th 3BCE. So that is the birthday of Jesus.
Only after the Church got its grubby fingers on the texts and forced a literal interpretation on them and the masses. The Gnostics and the other older sects would have understood that Jesus was a metaphor for the sun. That is why the church had to do away with them and their ideas, often through violence. Again: “My point, once again, is not that those ancient people told literal stories and we are now smart enough to take them symbolically, but that they told them symbolically and we are now dumb enough to take them literally.” - John Dominic Crossan, Who Is Jesus?
I know that is what you said in your original post, and so does everyone else, because I quoted it.
Everyone else can also see that you’ve only quoted half of my sentence, and by restoring the rest it’s not hard to see why:
Such deceptive quoting is a sign that you don’t have a legitimate response.
Once again you’ve omitted the text that followed, which affected the meaning of the extract you did quote.
It doesn’t matter what the church did with its grubby fingers if it’s not a huge coincidence because Jesus wasn’t actually born on the first day of the Age of Pisces. Jesus couldn’t have been born on the first day of the Age of Pisces on the 11th of September, because the Age of Pisces is defined based on the position of the sun during the vernal equinox in late March, and in any case the Ages are difficult to define precisely due to constellations not having obvious boundaries. You’ve simply divorced the Age of Pisces from it’s original meaning, defined it to start when Jesus was born, and are pretending that this is in some way significant.
Now if you were to use the constellation boundaries defined in 1930 to go back and determine exactly when the precession of equinoxes crossed from Aries to Pisces, and it happened to be in September 3BC, that would be significant. If you had some ancient works that had defined the boundaries of the constellations and determined that the vernal equinox would first be in Pisces in 3BC, independently of anything Jesus-related and preferably before that date, that would also be significant. But defining the Age of Pisces as starting when Jesus was born and then using that ‘coincidence’ is not.
It seems that every time I delve deeply into one of your claims[1] I find a massive disconnect between that claim and the available evidence. Your attempt to use Philo’s writing to show Philo lived in the Jerusalem area, when Philo was actually writing about Agrippa, is a perfect example. I don’t know whether that error came about because you didn’t notice that Philo wasn’t writing about himself, or because you foolishly relied on some-one else’s use of Philo’s writing and didn’t check the context for yourself - you never did explain how you made that mistake - so I can’t tell whether you are sloppy or gullible, but the effect is the same: your claims are unreliable. This, combined with
your tendency to brush off or ignore refutations, rather than acknowledging and learning from them;
your habit of using posts as springboards for unrelated claims;
your repeated straw-man that even the atheists here believe the gospel stories are accurate;
your apparent inability to realise that showing that Jesus as described in the gospels didn’t exist doesn’t qualify as showing that Jesus as a person didn’t exist; and now
your quote-mining
all mean that you aren’t worth taking seriously.
You have quite a way to go before you reach the ignorability of @colewd or @Meerkat_SK5, but you are catching up fast. You’ve just overtaken @Eddie.
Or even shallowly, as per your quickly-abandoned attempt to claim we wouldn’t be using the Gregorian calendar if Constantine hadn’t adopted Christianity, ↩︎
If you are following them sufficiently to be able to rank their level of “ignorability” accurately, then I’d suggest that you are paying them too much attention.
Irrelevant what the authors thought, for the purpose here. Your current claim about Jesus is not a claim about authorial intention, but an absolute historical claim: No person Jesus ever existed. And that claim is not proved by the fact – if it is a fact – that Nazareth did not exist in the first century. I see that Logic was not one of the courses you took at that bush-league college you attended. By the way, what was that college again?
A painting of the zodiac in a synagogue postdating the birth of Christianity by 200-300 years tells us nothing about the origin of Christianity. You keep moving the goalposts, but everyone here can see you doing it.
I never denied that it was anonymous. I denied your claim that no Gospel claims to be written by anyone who knew Jesus. That’s just false. The Gospel we call “John” does claim to be written by someone who not only knew Jesus, but was one of the Twelve. He does not call himself “John” in the Gospel, but he does say he knew Jesus. So you’re just plain, flat-out wrong, for all your erudition; and any simple churchgoer who knows his Bible knows you’re wrong.
I see your arithmetic is as bad as your Greek, your logic, and your historical scholarship. The disciple whom Jesus loved might have been only 16-18 years old when Jesus was crucified in, say, 26-29, and in the ancient world, if one was fortunate enough to escape disease, one might live to be 70 or 80, as the Old Testament testifies, or even in rare cases 85 or 90. The disciple could have been alive into the early to mid-90s. A date in the 90s for John’s Gospel is not impossible, so that disciple could, at least in principle, have written it.
This sort of reasoning is exactly the sort of reasoning mainstream Biblical scholars use when deciding authorship and which parts of the text are later additions. So again, even if you are correct here, you’re dependent on the methods of Biblical scholarship – the very enterprise you condemn. You can’t have it both ways, arguing that the Gospels are allegories and the scholars are out to lunch for not seeing this, but then turn around and approve of the methods scholars use which presuppose that the Gospels are at least partly historical. Your methodological discussion is incoherent mush. Grad school would have helped you there, but you were too proud to take instruction from people who knew more than you, so after your BA, you ducked out, declaring yourself better than all the scholars, and launched your career of self-publishing on websites when you discovered that no academic publisher wanted to touch your work with a ten-foot pole.
Again you rely on a university-based Biblical scholar, Crossan. Interesting that all Biblical scholars are fools and idiots who know less than nothing, unless they agree with you, in which case they suddenly are authorities.
On the contrary, virtually every true statement you make was established by Biblical scholarship before you were even born, and the methods you are employing were developed by Biblical scholars starting about 300 years ago. Of course, the nonsense in your posts, which occupies the greater part of them, doesn’t come mainly from bona fide Biblical scholars but from lonely cranks, but we’ve already covered that point. (Well, if one wants to be technical, some of them were once Biblical scholars but later became cranks, like Tom Harpur.)
I’ve now been promoted to “better than Boris,” which is no great accomplishment, but since left-handed compliments are all I’m ever likely to receive from Roy, I’ll accept this one.
You seem to think that the history of Rome is so well covered by ancient historians that anything not written about contemporaneously didn’t happen.
But in reality, we don’t have many histories available, many of the histories we know existed have been lost, there are plenty of events that are barely recorded, and very few accounts of contemporary events. There is (IIRC) only one account of the Pelopponesian war, for example, and only one account of the eruption of Vesuvius that destroyed Pompeii.
So who would have written about the 3rd servile war earlier than Plutarch and Appian? Who might they have used as sources? There are some excellent candidates: Julius Caesar, Livy, Sallust, Diodorus, Tacitus, Suetonius, etc.
But the are also problems with those candidates.
Julius Caesar’s surviving works are all war diaries, and he doesn’t appear to have been involved in quelling the uprising.
Livy’s Ab Urbe Condita might have covered Spartacus, but the sections that covered 170BC to 42BC haven’t survived.
Sallust’s Historiae, which would have covered that period, is mostly lost. So are the later sections of Diodorus’s Bibliotheca historica.
Tacitus focussed on more recent history, and his extant works don’t cover that period.
Suetonius might have covered Spartacus’s revolt in The Twelve Caesars if Julius Caesar had fought in it, but not otherwise.
Dionysius’s antiquities only goes up to the Punic Wars. Quintus goes further, but not quite far enough. Ditto for Valerius.
Pliny the Elder’s histories haven’t survived. Nor have those of Strabo, Claudius, Posidonius, Pamphile, Cluvius Rufus, and Thallos.
Memnon wrote about Asia Minor. Curtius Rufus wrote about Alexander. Dio Chrysostom wrote about politics and morality.
Velleius didn’t write about Spartacus’s revolt. Although he concentrated his second book on events after 45BC, he might have mentioned Spartacus. So you can have one writer, who wasn’t alive at the time. One. That’s not much of a case.
Unless you have anyone else in mind?
We have very very few birth dates or places for anyone in that era. So it’s expected that we wouldn’t have those details for a slave gladiator.
Spartacus himself was wounded by a spear-thrust in the thigh, but went down on one knee, held his shield in front of him, and fought off his attackers until he and a great number of his followers were encircled and fell.
So that’s just one more claim you’ve made that fails under scrutiny. Since you’re so fond of Hitchens, try applying his standard to yourself.
