Meeting The Author Of The Bible As A Child ...

[joko]

that age old question - what would you do if you went back in time and met Hitler as a child ...


i wonder what people would do if they met the person/people who invented Christianity and wrote the bible etc - or any god for that matter - or who wrote the koran etc too, before they did it ...

would you kill them? try to talk them out of it? try to change what they write?


i wonder if they could have had any ideas of the horrors it would cause?

i wonder if they totally believed it was good thing and would make the world a better place?

[Peter Pedant]

my turn my turn !

can I point out, that it is entirely possible that Jesus Christ WAS referred to as Christos - not as the anointed one - but Chreestos ( eta and not iota)
which was a common Slave's name and means 'useful'.

The difficulty about archelogical evidence is the usual one - if one finds a graffito such as Paul preached here - one can't be sure that the Paul referred to was the Paul we 'know'. I cringe a bit therefore to use the phrase in this thread and say and so 'Paul was here' is therefore "anonymous". Wow

Just trying to help

[tamborine]

Odd that's its ALL men, usually sucking on hookahs, laying about on plump cushions in tents in a desert. Where are the women - busy cooking, rearing kids & cleaning up after the fat, idle, hallucinating men.

[WaldoMcFroog]

Had you read my post properly, Clanad, you would have realised that I didn't claim the Annals as a whole were from the 15th Century but the specific passage under discussion, the implication being that the passage was an interpolation. In support of this are the fact that in the early 3rd century, Clement of Alexandria, specifically charged with searching non-Christians sources for passages in support of the historicity of Christianity fails to cite what, if real, would be a significant piece of evidence. Tertullian made have made the claims you cite above, yet he did not cite Tacitus, with which he was familar, in support. Nor did Eusebius, as mentioned previously.

Your claim that Tacitus did use the term 'Christus' is circular reasoning if it is an interpolation, but given you hadn't understood my post correctly, you're forgiven for this error.

Moreover, the claim within the specific passage goes on to say, "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." Given Tacitus' reputation for measured language, the claim that "an immense multitude" was convicted is at odds with the known spread of Christianity.

I think your point about the Pilate stone is stretching it a bit. While this information may well have been lost over the centuries until the discovery of the stone, it's unlikely that this was information unknown to an Imperial historian writing a relatively short time after the events. A later interpolation does explain the confusion of terms (although I'm not suggesting that this alone proves that is what had occured).

I don't recall your request for a CV and can't be bothered to see if I can find either it or what your point in requesting it might have been, though I'm sure it definitely would have been astonishingly clever and devastating to me to have had to do so. I'm sorry to discover you've been anticipating its posting all this time. If I ever feel the need to justify myself to you, I will certainly post it and alert you to its presence.

[chakka35]

In deference to joko, Clanad, we should stop it there. I'll start a new thread.

[naomi24]

^^ Reluctant to join in. Good thinking.

[jim360]

joko - the problem with simple hypothetical questions is that if they're going to have any meaning about them you quickly get bogged down in technical and long-winded debates. In my opinion you kind of have to do that. Otherwise any answer is meaningless. Perhaps the posts in this thread were going to technical but even so the fact that there is so much scholarly debate about this still shows that your question doesn't have a simple answer.

I'd be interested to travel back to the time of Jesus so that I could see the events (or, as I suspect, lack of them) for myself. And only after that would I decide what to tell people like St. Paul.

Personally I don't see any benefit to erasing religion from humanity's history. As much evil as has come from it, there have also been many genuine and deep acts of kindness and charity that sprung from people of faith. Although perhaps this is a poor defence of religion one should also remember its role in early Science, "To know the world is to know God."