The Ethno-Zionist-Revisionism-Old Testament-Bashing Megathread

[The Brain]

I'm coveting my neighbor's wife's ass.

[Martinus]

B.S.  Lots and lots of stories are taken at face value.  I don't know of any biblical literalistic who refuse to believe in say, Spartacus or the Pharaoh Sneferu.  While lots of people will go on about "sky fairies" rave about "wingnuts" who believe in parts of the bible but, for some reason are incapable or are unwilling to use that same skepticism on other parts history.

If you say so.  Seems to me lots of historical debate exists about basically everything, to the extent that there are people spending their careers studying Sneferu.  Further I fail to see the proof that the scholars studying ancient history are the same people going on about "wingnuts" and "sky fairies" so that seems like a completely bizarre criticism to level at them.

Think he's talking about regular folks, particular on the internet, not the actual scholars.

Ah well I have not seen any internet debates about Egyptian Pharoahs so I have no idea what level of skepticism they might have.  Religious discussions come up about every 5 seconds so...

There is no debates on Egyptian pharaohs or whether Spartacus was a real person.  It's simply accepted by most people.  And it's accepted by the enlightened people who love to bully other about believing in "Sky fairies" or argue that there is no proof that Jesus existed.  Their celebrated skepticism has a rather enormous blind spot for the majority of human history.  It's a mindset I find quite annoying.  It's not just layman.  There are scholars who argue that there once was a King of Uruk named Gilgamesh, despite the only accounts of a such a person are depict obviously impossible events.  I don't know of any scholars that claim there was no slave named Spartacus who led an slave uprising despite the fact that the only accounts of him were written over 50 years after he was dead and contradict each other.

You are mixing tons of different shit here. First of all, the ancient Egyptian period is a completely different animal than Roman period around the times of Spartacus and Jesus - the latter having numerous historians and the concept of history as a field of study. Spartacus' rebellion is well documented by Plutarch and Livius, both of whom were scientific historians. There are no primary sources concerning Jesus (as I already said, the only part of the Bible that is a primary source are the letters in the NT, and Paul never met Jesus - the gospels were all written decades after Jesus's alleged death and they were religious, not history texts).

[Martinus]

And I'm surprised there are people who did not hear about historians who claim Jesus never existed. America is really weird with its religious delusions.

[garbon]

And I'm surprised there are people who did not hear about historians who claim Jesus never existed. America is really weird with its religious delusions.

I see only two people who mentioned Jesus before you and only one of those people questioned about that road regarding Jesus. How do you expand that to all of America?

[Razgovory]

You are mixing tons of different shit here. First of all, the ancient Egyptian period is a completely different animal than Roman period around the times of Spartacus and Jesus - the latter having numerous historians and the concept of history as a field of study. Spartacus' rebellion is well documented by Plutarch and Livius, both of whom were scientific historians. There are no primary sources concerning Jesus (as I already said, the only part of the Bible that is a primary source are the letters in the NT, and Paul never met Jesus - the gospels were all written decades after Jesus's alleged death and they were religious, not history texts).

Uh, no. Plutarch and Livius were not "scientific historians".   They don't exactly have bibliographies and cite their sources.  Nor is what I'm talking about "well documented".  There are no primary sources.  You are also making distinction between religious texts and history that did not exist in the period.  For instance Livy starts out talking about the Trojan war and recounts the mythical beginning of the city including Romulus accession unto heaven.

[dps]

You are mixing tons of different shit here. First of all, the ancient Egyptian period is a completely different animal than Roman period around the times of Spartacus and Jesus - the latter having numerous historians and the concept of history as a field of study. Spartacus' rebellion is well documented by Plutarch and Livius, both of whom were scientific historians. There are no primary sources concerning Jesus (as I already said, the only part of the Bible that is a primary source are the letters in the NT, and Paul never met Jesus - the gospels were all written decades after Jesus's alleged death and they were religious, not history texts).

Uh, no. Plutarch and Livius were not "scientific historians".   They don't exactly have bibliographies and cite their sources.  Nor is what I'm talking about "well documented".  There are no primary sources.  You are also making distinction between religious texts and history that did not exist in the period.  For instance Livy starts out talking about the Trojan war and recounts the mythical beginning of the city including Romulus accession unto heaven.

And keep in mind that in modern times up until the 1860s most historians considered Troy to be a pure myth, i.e., that Homer made the whole thing up.  Despite what Marti seems to think, there are still huge holes in our historical knowledge of Classical Greece and Rome (though he is correct in saying that those times are much better documented than prior eras).  Heck, there are events much later then Classical Rome that we have minimal documentation about.

[derspiess]

And I'm surprised there are people who did not hear about historians who claim Jesus never existed. America is really weird with its religious delusions.

I see only two people who mentioned Jesus before you and only one of those people questioned about that road regarding Jesus. How do you expand that to all of America?

That's his thing.  He's a chronic extrapolator.

[Malthus]

You are mixing tons of different shit here. First of all, the ancient Egyptian period is a completely different animal than Roman period around the times of Spartacus and Jesus - the latter having numerous historians and the concept of history as a field of study. Spartacus' rebellion is well documented by Plutarch and Livius, both of whom were scientific historians. There are no primary sources concerning Jesus (as I already said, the only part of the Bible that is a primary source are the letters in the NT, and Paul never met Jesus - the gospels were all written decades after Jesus's alleged death and they were religious, not history texts).

Uh, no. Plutarch and Livius were not "scientific historians".   They don't exactly have bibliographies and cite their sources.  Nor is what I'm talking about "well documented".  There are no primary sources.  You are also making distinction between religious texts and history that did not exist in the period.  For instance Livy starts out talking about the Trojan war and recounts the mythical beginning of the city including Romulus accession unto heaven.

And keep in mind that in modern times up until the 1860s most historians considered Troy to be a pure myth, i.e., that Homer made the whole thing up.  Despite what Marti seems to think, there are still huge holes in our historical knowledge of Classical Greece and Rome (though he is correct in saying that those times are much better documented than prior eras).  Heck, there are events much later then Classical Rome that we have minimal documentation about.

As noted above, Pontius Pilate - a much more significant figure in his own day than Jesus, bering the official in charge of an entire Roman province - has exactly one contemporary non-Biblical bit of evidence for his existence: a stone dedicating an ampetheatre in Israel.

[alfred russel]

And keep in mind that in modern times up until the 1860s most historians considered Troy to be a pure myth, i.e., that Homer made the whole thing up. 

They could have been right if they adjusted slightly and considered Homer a made up myth.

[Siege]

Why does Hollywood insists in rewriting history?
This exodus version is the most liberal to date.

Do you like The Ten Commandments, Siege?

Of course. They are the base of everything I believe in

Oh, you mean the movie. I haven't seen it since I was a kid. I remember my grandpa bitching it had a Christian bent.

[Razgovory]

I think Marty inadvertently demonstrated part of the problem I'm talking about when he stated something about "Scientific historians".  History isn't a science.  It's a method inquiry that is distinct from the Scientific method.  "What was Julius Caesar's first word?", is not a valid scientific question.  It's not a question that science can answer.  However, simply because science can't answer this question doesn't mean he didn't have a first word.  The man is recorded as speaking so logically one of his words would have to be first.

Marty, who likes to go on about "Sky fairies" and "Bronze age books", seems to hold to an idea that non-Biblical history of the time period is well recorded and scientific, which it is neither.  His scrutiny is reserved only for that part of history this touch the Abrahamic faiths and thus creates a false dichotomy the "obviously mythical" and the "scientific historians".  I have noticed that such a viewpoint is unhappily common.

[Berkut]

Also, to define terms: "more or less myth" does not mean "did not happen". It means that there is no way to determine whether it happened or not, other than evidence internal to the story itself: one can discard the obviously supernatural elements, but what you are left with is stuff than cannot be proved or disproved - what you will be talking about is probabilities, and a certain amount of arguing from absence of evidence.

Take for example the Exodus story. Eliminate the supernatural and you are left with an account of a mass escape of a class of slaves from Egypt. The strikes against this theory are - the physical difficulty of a mass of slaves living for any length of time in the desert (this can be overcome by posing that the numbers of slaves escaped in the Bible were greatly exaggerated), the lack of any contemporary mention of a mass slave escape (this can be overcome by noting that the historical record of Egypt is very spotty - for large stretches we don't have more than a list of kings), and the fact that ancient Egypt did not, as far as we know, use a large class of slaves for labour to build things, preferring to conscript peasants for corvee labour instead (this can be overcome by posing that the enslavement of Hebrews was a special case).

Ultimately, there is simply no way of knowing whether the story is literally true in some sense (that is, has a kernel of truth that was mythologized by adding supernatural elements and greatly exaggerated numbers), or was simply a myth pure and simple - until some further evidence is uncovered.

Indeed.

Those who argue that there isn't any real proof that Jesus existed are not, I don't think, arguing that he didn't exist. They are only arguing that there are no cooroborative accounts of his existence, therefore we should take the account we do have with a rather healthy grain of salt, since it rather clearly has a very specific agenda associated with it beyond an interest in "history".

I don't think anyone really believes that the entire Jesus story was simply made up from nothing - that seems rather unlikely. Rather what IS likely is that Jesus, like David, existed on some fashion or another, and the myth of Jesus was created in order to advance an agenda long after he was gone. There is nothing inherently wrong about that, it is rather common after all, but at the same time we should not just assume that what the bible says about Jesus is factual. The bible itself is evidence (albeit not great evidence) that there was SOME dude who existed. Most contemporary history however notes that Jewish rebels were not entirely uncommon at the time, and one theory is that Jesus was just one of several Jewish "saviors" who led or were used by rebel groups.

At the end of the day, there simply isn't any real evidence to draw any kind of firm conclusions about the particulars. The only details we have are sourced by a religious text that clearly was likely never even intended to be particularly factual.

Comparing Jesus to Spartacus is an interesting comparison. There is, of course, plenty of historical evidence that a former galdiator led one of the slave revolts during the Third Servile War. Those accounts contradict one another in some details. Does that mean we should simply throw them all out and conclude that he was made up? Of course not - that would be stupid. Instead we see what they do agree on, what "fits" with other known accounts of the context of the time (for example, we do know that slave revolts were happening, hence it is not much of a stretch to conclude that one of their leaders was this ex-galdiator - had we noted that there were no contemporary accounts of a war of servile insurrection at that time, then stories of a slave leader of such a rebellion would be met with a bit more skepticism).

This is where the Jesus story gets in trouble - there are accounts that ought to have been mentioned elsewhere had they been factual. If Herod had really killed hundreds of newborn children, for example, we would expect to see some mention of that elsewhere. The lack of such a mention makes that part of the story rather suspect. Doesn't mean Jesus never existed though.

I don't find the Jesus thing really very interesting. I think what is known about him, and what is not, is well understood by scholars. It is only the fundy religious who have any problems with the overall consensus about the "historical Jesus".

[Siege]

Bottom line. Homosexuals suck.

[The Brain]

I think Marty inadvertently demonstrated part of the problem I'm talking about when he stated something about "Scientific historians".  History isn't a science.  It's a method inquiry that is distinct from the Scientific method.  "What was Julius Caesar's first word?", is not a valid scientific question.  It's not a question that science can answer.  However, simply because science can't answer this question doesn't mean he didn't have a first word.  The man is recorded as speaking so logically one of his words would have to be first.

History as it is conducted today isn't a science, but that's by choice. You can do scientific history, if you're interested in actually learning something.

[The Brain]

Bottom line. Homosexuals suck.

This.