Jesus

Mazikeen

Kevin_rc_ie wrote:

I'm not sure what you call people from Iraq/Iran etc. in terms of their "colour".

Jews and Arabs are termed racially Semitic. Historically Jews are just another Arabic tribe that adopted monotheism earlier than the others.

Iranians are Persian. While there may be Semitic influences to their racial makeup, they also have strong Aryan linage and are generally considered a different to Semites. Indeed, unlike Hebrew, Aramaic and Arabic, they speak Farsi, which is an Indo-European language.

Kevin_rc_ie

Yep that explains it very well but what "colour" are they. I think the poll is highly flawed.

They don't speak Iranian? or Persian?

Mazikeen

Kevin_rc_ie wrote:

They don't speak Iranian? or Persian?

Parsi is Iranian/Persian.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persian_language

Kevin_rc_ie

Farsi Parsi, thanks for that.

rsynnott

THE DUDE....... wrote:

do ye believe dat dere really was such a person called jesus?

catholicireland wrote:

Well what do you call the bible?! Do you think people just made that up!! Jesus is the son of God..

Well, obviously some religious books aren't founded in the truth; after all, there is more than one religion.

However, I'd say it's moderately likely he existed all right; it's just debatable whether he was the son of a god or not.

Stabshauptmann

catholicireland wrote:

Well what do you call the bible?! Do you think people just made that up!!

To be brutally honest, yes. I think that the Old Testement started out as with all other religions. An attempt to rationalise what cant be understood. thats all my beliefs are too if I analyse them, an attempt to rationalise a higher power I cant begin to understand. Some would argue that there is no hiogher power, that that itself is an invention born out of my ignorance. But I digress.
So the old Testement comes up with stories like Adam and Eve, Noah etc with an underlying moral message. This moral message is an attempt to interpret the will of God but I dont believe god actually told these stories to someone, I believe some one divined them / made them up.

As for the New Testement. I believe that Jesus did exist and I can believe in his miracles. But what I dont believe is that the gospel is an accurate and complete account of his life. I know it was written after his death, by those who didnt know him and that they're accounts contradict each other. I believe that there was another version written by the aposthels that hasnt survived. I believe that Paul's vision telling him that he was to become leader of the church directly contradicts "Simon (Peter) you will be the rock upon which I found my Church" (sic).

So I belive in Jesus, but I dont belive the Bible.

Dades

Kaptain Redeye wrote:

I believe that Jesus did exist and I can believe in his miracles.

So I belive in Jesus, but I dont belive the Bible.

When you say you believe in Jesus, do you just believe that he existed, or that he was the son of GOD? If you believe he performed miracles I guess you must believe he had some kind of divinity.

So what I can't understand is how you believe the the Old Testament was "made up" yet put some weight to the argument that Jesus perfomed miracles in the name of that fictional God.

Just interested.

Stabshauptmann

I dont believe God is fictional, but I belive that the Old Testament is an attempt to understand God, not the word of God.
All this being said, Im not exactly a Christian, however I do believe in a higher power which Im as happy to call God as anything else. For me the name is arbitrary.
Why do good works have to be in the name of anyboy. Again this is comming back to the message of the old Testament which says everything should be devoted to God. Cant ppl just do good for the sake of doing good.

Dades

I guess that's fair enough.
As usual different definitions of the term "God" lead to confusion.
As you were!

ps Atheists/Agnostics or Christians who want to see the back of us - click HERE

Excelsior

Kaptain Redeye wrote:

So the old Testement comes up with stories like Adam and Eve, Noah etc with an underlying moral message. This moral message is an attempt to interpret the will of God but I dont believe god actually told these stories to someone, I believe some one divined them / made them up.

No one can read the Gospels deeply without realising that Jesus believed that the Old Testament was in some real way a set of divinely inspired texts.

Kaptain Redeye wrote:

As for the New Testement. I believe that Jesus did exist and I can believe in his miracles. But what I dont believe is that the gospel is an accurate and complete account of his life.

Have you any rationalisations for this belief?

Kaptain Redeye wrote:

I know it was written after his death, by those who didnt know him and that they're accounts contradict each other.

You know what isn't to be known then since the Gospel of John and of John Mark were probably written by people who followed Jesus' ministry.

K R wrote:

I believe that there was another version written by the aposthels that hasnt survived.

Most biblical scholars agree and they call it Q, for the german word for "source", quelle. The reason they call it source is that it seems to be the largely shared foundation for the first 3 gospels. Should it ever be found (should it ever exist) it is likely to offer a few new insights but not to differ substantitively in any way from the canonical gospels.

K R wrote:

I believe that Paul's vision telling him that he was to become leader of the church directly contradicts "Simon (Peter) you will be the rock upon which I found my Church" (sic).

Such a Pauline vision doesn't exist.

K R wrote:

So I belive in Jesus, but I dont belive the Bible.

With all the respect in the world, I ask you what Jesus you are believing in, seeing as the NT record is by far and away the strongest historical source (almost to the extent of being the only historical source).

One of the other historical sources might be interesting for those posters who seem to consider it possible for Jesus to be a fabrication is a letter sent from prison by a Syrian names Mara Bar-Serapion to his son Serapion, encouraging him to follow wisdom and to remind him that great men are often persecuted. He cites Socrates, Pythagoras and then Christ;

Mara Bar-Serapion wrote:

What advantage did the Jews gain from executing their wise King? ... nor did the wise King die for good

Scholars agree that this letter, possessed by the British Museum, can't have been sent much later than 73AD, which makes it only 40 years after Jesus' death. This is clear non-Christian witness to the existence of Jesus and to the common belief that he was a man of great importance.

solas

took me a while to get this done, apologies for dragging the thread up would like your opinions if any.



..I may have romaticised slightly.

Beer is Life

Seaneh wrote:

The fact that The Emperor of Rome became a christian less than 200 years after Christs Death kind of implys that the man lived.
After all its not hard to trace historical fact back 200 years and the Roman emperor was hardly like to be the most gullible person on the planet.

Correct me if im wayyy off the mark here, but could it not be said that Christianity was adopted by the Romans purely as a form of mass control? Chrisianity with its 10 commandments as laws, and people would police themselves (or so it was hoped) because they believed there was a God always watching their actions? Just a thought.

Excelsior

It seems like a good idea at first but it turns out you are way of the mark since Rome had a very excellent pluralistic religious system with complex moral codes. I think a very strong case can be argued that official Rome's adoption of Christianity was a cynical move to delay the imminent collapse of the empire but it would be important to realise that that does not suggest anything about the 290 years of history the churches had already amassed.

robindch

> I think a very strong case can be argued that official Rome's
> adoption of Christianity was a cynical move to delay the
> imminent collapse of the empire

...which is, perhaps, a slice of Gibbon's view too. See the notorious or scintillating (according to taste), chapter 15 et seq, of Decline and Fall:

http://www.ccel.org/g/gibbon/decline/volume1/chap15.htm

> it would be important to realise that that does not suggest
> anything about the 290 years of history the churches had
> already amassed.

About which history Gibbon had few good words to say. Here he is in top form from the head of chap 15, bending himself backwards -- or is it forwards? -- in the service of History:

The scanty and suspicious materials of ecclesiastical history seldom enable us to dispel the dark cloud that hangs over the first age of the church. The great law of impartiality too often obliges us to reveal the imperfections of the uninspired teachers and believers of the Gospel; and, to a careless observer, their faults may seem to cast a shade on the faith which they professed. [...] The theologian may indulge the pleasing task of describing Religion as she descended from Heaven, arrayed in her native purity. A more melancholy duty is imposed on the historian. He must discover the inevitable mixture of error and corruption which she contracted in long residence upon earth, among a weak and degenerate race of beings.

Our curiosity is naturally prompted to inquire by what means the Christian faith obtained so remarkable a victory over the established religions of the earth. To this inquiry an obvious but unsatisfactory answer may be returned; that it was owing to the convincing evidence of the doctrine itself, and to the ruling providence of its great Author. But as truth and reason seldom find so favourable a reception in the world, and as the wisdom of Providence frequently condescends to use the passions of the human heart, and the general circumstances of mankind, as instruments to execute its purpose, we may still be permitted, though with becoming submission, to ask, not indeed what were the first, but what were the secondary causes of the rapid growth of the Christian church? [...rest of chapter...]

Excelsior

Sounds like great history where the author is striving towards that elusive stance of the unbiased Robin. Seriously though, I got a lovely copy of the book in the Penguin issue of their Great Ideas series. You should track it down.

Secondary causes are a vital place of study. I whole-heartedly embrace organisations like Evangelical Alliance Ireland that seek to develop a thourough ecclisiological sociology in Ireland. But whatever impact they have (which is large) on the receptivity to the primary causes (the truth claims of Christianity to encapsulate them), people become Christians when they are convinced by Jesus.

But all of this and the sections of Gibbons you have quoted are, to my mind, a little irrelevant (though fascinating) because regardless of why people became Christians, when they did, their lives changed and it affected those around them. Wether you describe this as a political or social or some other kind of movement or you describe this as a religious frenzy or whatever you like, lives were valued, equality was reached for and individual people seem to have been cherised within community.

So what I'm saying is that the early church bore a remarkable resembelance to a meeting of Irish Skeptics.

robindch

> I got a lovely copy of the book in the Penguin issue of
> their Great Ideas series. You should track it down.

Ach, twice in ten days, I find Excelsior and I agreeing on a point. This will have to stop, lest I find myself sheepishly (how else?) returning to the warm bosom of the mother church!

Regardless, a short collection of worthy Gibbonalia can be found at:

http://www.his.com/~z/gibbon.html

Actually, while praising topic-relevant books, I can't let William Dalrymple's outstanding From The Holy Mountain slip past (reviews here and here). While recounting his journey from Greece's peculiar orthodox monks on Mount Athos to some equally antediluvian copts in Egypt, he tells the story of some parts of the early church, and its exotic present-day remnants up and down the Middle East. It's a thoroughly absorbing read by a sympathetic author (he's a scottish catholic).

> lives were valued, equality was reached for and
> individual people seem to have been cherised
> within community.

Not from any attribute of the early church that I'm aware of, but rather, I suspect, from the nature of the roman empire itself, as mentioned in another recent thread.

> So what I'm saying is that the early church bore
> a remarkable resembelance to a meeting of Irish Skeptics.

Hey, we're a friendly bunch of folks -- and we don't even have an impenetrable, yet inerrant, holybook to tell us how to do it!

Anyhow, to demonstrate this, do feel free to come along to the next public lecture, where Dick Taverne (an English Lord, no less, and author of the recent 'The March of Unreason - science, democracy and the new fundamentalism') will speak on some enlightening topic or other. Takes place at 8pm on Wednesday, November 16, probably in the Davenport Hotel, close to Trinity College.

Excelsior

I would love to come along and will provisionally pencil it in. Davenport Hotel, you may be aware of already, began life as a Wesleyan revival hall.