Was Jesus for real?

[Ming]

gunkulator...

See you in 24 hours.

[Boris Godunov]

Originally posted by Imran Siddiqui
*bump* For my question if Boris believes in the existance of Socrates

I will be responding to the other posts later...but to this, while it's not a subject I am well-versed on, I will say that while there is circumstantial evidence as to the existence of a man named Socrates, I accept the academic notion that much of what Plato attributes to Socrates is his own fabrications. I certainly don't know if he was real or not, but that doesn't matter so much, since he's not someone anyone worships as a god.

[Az]

Now I have an image of St Paul on his mobile sending a text message to the Corinthians.

hehe. well, I've noticed how "text messages" can be interpreted, when I read the post later.

On the authenticity of the local events described in the bible: there are some things that don't make sense.

Why would a Roman governor try to spare Jesus' life, while the jews would want him to die, when it seems that he was respectable and beloved?

[Dauphin]

Originally posted by Azazel
Why would a Roman governor try to spare Jesus' life, while the jews would want him to die, when it seems that he was respectable and beloved?

I'd imagine a lot of people today would do something just because the Jews wanted them to do the opposite.

[orange]

I think he was real, but I think what they say about him is myth.

[Az]

I'd imagine a lot of people today would do something just because the Jews wanted them to do the opposite.

. The key word is 'today'.

[monkspider]

Were there two Old Testaments?
New interpretation of Dead Sea Scrolls poses a puzzler

https://www.msnbc.com/news/480683.asp

ASSOCIATED PRESS

SOUTH BEND, Ind., Dec. 17 — The Dead Sea Scrolls, hidden away in Holy Land caves 2,000 years ago and unearthed after World War II, are often rated the 20th century’s greatest archaeological find. The chief reason for most people: the rediscovery of 230 texts of biblical books, which have begun to change details in the Scriptures read by millions.


‘If it could be demonstrated we have two biblical traditions arising independently of one another ... then which one are you going to call God’s Word?’
— JOHN WALTON Moody Bible Institute

FOR INSTANCE? The height of Goliath. “He’s barely tall enough to make the All-Star Game,” said Frank Cross, a Harvard University expert on the official team working on the scrolls.
That is, in 1 Samuel 17:4 most English translations say Goliath stood “six cubits and a span,” meaning a towering nine feet plus. But a damaged Dead Sea scroll can be read as saying “four cubits and a span,” a mere six and a half feet. That’s why the official U.S. Catholic Bible gives Goliath the shorter stature.
Or consider Psalm 145, an acrostic in which each verse begins with a successive letter of the Hebrew alphabet. This chapter was always a head-scratcher because the verse for one letter is missing in the standard Hebrew text. But a phrase with that letter turned up in a Dead Sea scroll and is tacked onto 145:13 in most recent translations: “God is faithful in his words and gracious in all his deeds ...”
Further rewordings are expected, and some of them could shift meaning. In all Bibles, Deuteronomy 8:6 speaks of “fearing” or “revering” God, but a Dead Sea scroll says “loving,” instead. Should scholars consider this change?
To those for whom each word of the Bible was inspired by God, even such small alterations are significant.
Still, as Cross puts it, “There is no 11th Commandment.” The rewording prompted by the scrolls does not challenge basic beliefs.

SWEEPING IMPLICATIONS

But a fellow researcher, Eugene Ulrich, professor of Hebrew at the University of Notre Dame and chief editor of the Dead Sea biblical materials, sees far more sweeping implications for the Old Testament (the Christian term for what Jews call the Tanakh).
“I feel like the person who put the last stone atop the pyramids,” Ulrich said. “I’m as weary as can be, but I’m glad I did it.”
Ulrich was polishing the last volume on biblical texts for the official scholarly series from Oxford University Press, which will be a landmark in this painstaking and highly technical project. The overall effort hit the headlines in 1991 when two independent groups, frustrated with the slow pace of the official scholarly team, rushed unauthorized editions of the texts into print so all scholars could begin assessing them.
Dead Sea Scrolls

Sample differences between the Dead Sea Scrolls and the standard Old Testament:
• JEREMIAH: Although manuscripts are fragmentary, it appears a Dead Sea version of the book was 13 percent shorter than the Masoretic one. For example, verses 10:6-8 are missing (“O Lord, there is none like you ...”).

• 1 SAMUEL: Before verse 11:1, the scrolls include a paragraph on an Ammonite eye-gouging rampage that standard Bibles omit.

• DEUTERONOMY: In verse 8:6, one Dead Sea manuscript has conventional wording and tells us to “fear” God, but another text says to “love” God.

• ISAIAH: In a poetic passage on the fall of Moab, a Dead Sea manuscript omits half the wording of verses 16:8-9.

Ulrich’s assessment? He repeatedly encountered scrolls that “did, and didn’t, look like what we call the Bible.”
His conclusion: In ancient times, two or more contrasting editions of many biblical books existed side by side and were all regarded as Scripture. In other words, back then, the Old Testament was far different from what we think of today.
He concludes that there were multiple editions for at least these books: Genesis, Exodus, Numbers, Joshua, Judges, 1 and 2 Kings, 1 and 2 Samuel, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Daniel, Psalms and Song of Solomon. Ulrich spelled out his theory in “The Dead Sea Scrolls and the Origins of the Bible.”
An example of the problems he and others ponder: In two of the Dead Sea Scrolls, Psalm 33 directly follows Psalm 31, skipping number 32. Did the scribes who wrote those manuscripts believe 32 was not God’s Word?
And the opposite situation: Various scrolls include 15 psalms that are not found in standard Bibles. Sample: “Blessed be he who has made the earth by his power, who has established the world in his wisdom ... .” Was this Scripture that was later lost, or did Dead Sea scribes merely collect devotional poetry and mix it with biblical psalms?
“If Ulrich is on the right track, we’ve got some major thinking to do,” said John Walton, a conservative professor at Chicago’s Moody Bible Institute. The problem as he sees it: “If it could be demonstrated we have two biblical traditions arising independently of one another, instead of one being a revision or corruption of the other, then which one are you going to call God’s Word?”
Walton said Ulrich’s conclusions are premature and professed himself untroubled by any findings to date.
The scrolls, which include parts of all books except Esther and Nememiah, were written between 200 B.C. and 70 A.D. In that same period, rabbis began establishing the standard Masoretic Text, the basis for all Old Testaments since the early Middle Ages.

DON’T CHANGE ALL THE BIBLES
Should the Bibles used in churches, synagogues and homes be thoroughly revised to reflect all the variations? Not necessarily, said Ulrich, a lay Roman Catholic. But at least serious students should be reading a Bible with multiple options. And he insisted that future Bible translations should be less wedded to the Masoretic Text and rely more on the alternate renditions.
Scholars have just begun work on an “eclectic Bible” to show these textual variations, which will take years to complete.
But Ulrich, with co-editors Martin Abegg Jr. and Peter Flint, has taken the first step with “The Dead Sea Scrolls Bible.” The book presents new English translations of the Dead Sea biblical manuscripts (the scholarly Oxford volumes have the original Hebrew) with user-friendly explanations of how they differ from standard Bibles.
The book is billed as “the oldest known Bible.” The reason: The scrolls are a millennium older than the surviving Masoretic Hebrew manuscripts that provide the basis for all modern Old Testaments, which date from about A.D. 1000.
Specialists know that this puzzle of different Old Testaments, raised anew by the scrolls, is not really new. Before the scrolls were discovered, scholars were aware of three main editions: the Samaritan, which included only the first five books; the early form of the Masoretic Hebrew; and the Septuagint, a Greek translation from a different Hebrew version.

‘There’s nothing in the scrolls that could possibly have any interest.’
— LAWRENCE SCHIFFMAN
New York University

Catholic and Orthodox Bibles follow the Septuagint in including seven extra books that Jews and Protestants do not recognize as part of the Bible.
Various scrolls provide evidence of all three traditions, as well as a fourth group of texts unique to the Dead Sea community.
In understanding the complex situation, it’s important to remember that in ancient times there was no single bound “Bible,” but separate scrolls for each biblical book, and that Judaism did not fix the final list of biblical books until the period after the Dead Sea Scrolls were written.
Lawrence Schiffman of New York University, co-editor of Oxford’s “Encyclopedia of the Dead Sea Scrolls,” said that for Judaism, Ulrich’s theorizing is “irrelevant. No other Bible besides the Masoretic Text has any authority.”
He says flatly: “There’s nothing in the scrolls that could possibly have any interest” in terms of revising the biblical canon.
Schiffman is an Orthodox layman, but he said his attitude is shared by more liberal Jews. He said the variant editions are an issue only in Christianity, in which scholars try to reconstruct the best text from whatever source.
If the Masoretic version is the one and only true Old Testament, then the Dead Sea Scrolls are good news for Bible believers, Jewish or Christian. The Masoretic manuscripts among the Dead Sea Scrolls are astonishingly similar to the standard Hebrew texts 1,000 years later, proving that Jewish scribes were accurate in preserving and transmitting the Masoretic Scriptures.

SEEKING THE AUTHOR
Who originally wrote the scrolls, and who preserved them? Those issues are raised by a leading conservative Protestant scholar, Walter Kaiser, president of Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary in South Hamilton, Mass.
‘Truth should never upset anyone. If we think God is a God of truth, real evidence ought never be shunned.’
— WALTER KAISER Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary

Although experts are unable to agree, it appears that the Dead Sea community was a marginal group, he said.
“So we can’t figure out from what perspective they were writing. That has to be factored in,” Kaiser said. “Should cultic groups set the norm?”
He warned relying on non-Masoretic manuscripts could be “like going to the Branch Davidians” of Waco, Texas.
A related issue is “who decides what is authoritative.” The ancient rabbis, “those closer to the scene, obviously had a better shot” in determining the best text, said Kaiser, who contends that many of the Dead Sea Scrolls are simply too fragmentary to support Ulrich’s sweeping conclusions about conflicting Old Testaments.
Kaiser recalled the late Harry Orlinsky, the only Jewish translator on the Revised Standard Version, who used the scrolls to make 13 last-minute changes before that translation was issued in 1952. But he later told Kaiser and other students that 10 of those changes were too hasty and that the Masoretic wording would have been preferable.
Similar caution comes from Ulrich’s Notre Dame colleague James VanderKam, co-editor of the scrolls encyclopedia. “To say that one or another version is more original is very difficult,” he said. “We have very early evidence for all of them.”
VanderKam said the Masoretic Bible “is the one we’ve always had, and that’s unlikely to change.”
In analyzing the various editions, “at the meaning level, most of the variants are not important,” VanderKam said. “I don’t know that any issues of faith are involved.”
The implications of Ulrich’s view fall most heavily upon evangelicals and fundamentalists who believe, as the creed at Kaiser’s seminary defines it, that the biblical books “as originally written were inspired of God, hence free from error.”
If so, which version of Jeremiah or Psalms was original? The technique of deciding that, known as textual criticism, has long been recognized and practiced by conservatives, said Walton of the Moody Institute, although until now most energy has been applied to manuscript variations in the New Testament.
Kaiser said some implications of the scrolls’ variations could become unsettling, but he insisted: “Truth should never upset anyone. If we think God is a God of truth, real evidence ought never be shunned.”
Will all of this ever be settled? Assessments of the ancient texts develop slowly. But now that the Dead Sea manuscripts are becoming fully available, specialists expect that within a decade there could be broader consensus on what they mean and how they should be applied.

View some of the Scrolls at the Library of Congress

https://www.ibiblio.org/expo/dead...intro.html

------------------------
Something new to consider.

[Imran Siddiqui]

I accept the academic notion that much of what Plato attributes to Socrates is his own fabrications.

Why would Plato make up this 'genius', which in the end makes Plato seem simply like a mere pupil and not the 'genius'.

[Boris Godunov]

Originally posted by Imran Siddiqui

I accept the academic notion that much of what Plato attributes to Socrates is his own fabrications.

Why would Plato make up this 'genius', which in the end makes Plato seem simply like a mere pupil and not the 'genius'.

Maybe Plato wasn't interested in personal glory? The academic model is that Plato used Socrates as an educational tool. Perhaps there was a political reason for doing so. Who knows? Maybe he didn't and Socrates is completely real. With the amount of evidence we have, it's impossible to say for certain.

[Ben Kenobi]

Azazel:

what do you mean by "difficult passages".

See the other thread where AH brings up some passages that are unclear in the Gospel accounts of the resurrection morning.

Obiwan: do you really think that Jesus was directly quoted?

In what sense? I believe the Gospel writers received testimony from eye-witnesses to Christ. Christ was dead by the time they compiled the Gospel accounts, so they would have to go by what people remembered and any other written sources of which we no longer have copies.

Why would a Roman governor try to spare Jesus' life, while the jews would want him to die, when it seems that he was respectable and beloved?

Good question Azazel.
As the custom of the times, Jews had Jubilee years where a prisoner would be set free, by the Romans. Abiding by the Jewish custom, Pilate offered to release either Christ or Barabbas, and the Jews chose to have Christ crucified.

Pilate, without the Jewish authority, had no cause to keep Christ arrested, since Christ refused to proclaim himself as the Messiah the Jews expected. The Jews wanted a political Messiah who would free the Jews and overthrow Rome. Jesus never claimed this political threat to the Emperor, hence Pilate had no cause to hold Christ.

I am GUESSING that he did, because by far and large, people don't ressurect, therefore, my guess that this part is wrong.

I admit, it's unusual for someone to rise from the dead, no different now then from 2000 years ago. Read over the claims, see for yourself.

Boris

Maybe he didn't and Socrates is completely real. With the amount of evidence we have, it's impossible to say for certain.

So Boris, you are willing to acknowledge that Socrates never existed? By the same standards you are applying to Christ, we cannot believe in a Socrates?

[Ben Kenobi]

monkspider:

Thanks for the source.


The title's a little sensational considering the content.

"The scrolls, which include parts of all books except Esther and Nememiah, were written between 200 B.C. and 70 A.D."

That's a fact I did not know. I was not sure of the extent of the OT covered by the Dead Sea Scrolls.

"Still, as Cross puts it, 'There is no 11th Commandment.' The rewording prompted by the scrolls does not challenge basic beliefs."

"Walton said Ulrich’s conclusions are premature and professed himself untroubled by any findings to date."

Probably the most imporant points to take from the article. Details may change, but the core remains.

"Truth should never upset anyone. If we think God is a God of truth, real evidence ought never be shunned."

Indeed.

[Imran Siddiqui]

Maybe Plato wasn't interested in personal glory? The academic model is that Plato used Socrates as an educational tool. Perhaps there was a political reason for doing so.

A man not interested in glory writing such an immense body of work? I find that a little hard to believe.

To make up this idea of Socrates, even as an educational tool, seems incredibly strange.

[Ned]

I do not doubt that Jesus lived, gave the sermon on the mount and was crucified.

I do not know whether he rose from the dead. But certainly, his tomb was empty. This much probably is true.

As to the ascension. Even if it did happen, it does not prove that Jesus was God, the Son of God or a god. After all, the Bible says we are all going to "ascend" into heaven one day.

One has to understand the context of the times. Rising from the dead was common at the time. I am not so sure just how dead some of these people really were. Vespasian, commanding the Roman troops in Judea in '67, also raised the dead. This is stated in the history books. Does this make Vespasian a god?

The Romans had a concept that people who went to heaven were "gods." We now call these people saints. It is possible that we got the Roman concept of god mixed up with the ascension to say that Jesus was god, and therefore was God - the universal, all powerful, perfect entity.

Well anyway, these debates took place in the early Church, and are "settled" from the Catholic's point of view. However, if we are ever going to unite all monothesistic religions into one, I suspect we may have to revisit some of these settled doctrinal issues. Otherwise, each religion will simply accuse the others of being infidels. We can see where that has gotten us.

But getting back to the topic of the thread, yes Jesus was for real and was one of the most important people in the history of this planet.

[Ben Kenobi]

Rising from the dead was common at the time. I am not so sure just how dead some of these people really were.

Good question Ned.

Just how dead was Christ?

John 19:32-34

"The soldiers therefore came and broke the legs of the first man who had been crucified with Jesus, and then those of the other. But when they came to Jesus and found that he was already dead, they did not break his legs. Instead, one of the soldiers pierced Jesus' side with a spear, bringing a sudden flow of blood and water."

This flow of blood and water is very strong medical evidence that Christ has died. Now, if Christ were still alive, it seems reasonable that his captors would have broken his legs to prevent him from lifting his body to breathe, hastening death.

Also, just a bit later, John 19:39-40

"He was accompanied by Nicodemus, the man who earlier had visited Jesus at night. Nicodemus brought a mixture of myrrh and aloes, about seventy-five pounds.[4] Taking Jesus' body, the two of them wrapped it, with the spices, in strips of linen."

75 pounds of spice? That would crush Christ if he were not already dead on the cross.

[Ned]

I take it that one dies on a cross by water filling the lungs.

My god, but the Romans were cruel. But, it was Christianity that took the rough edges off and transformed a violent society into a society very much more like the West today than the Rome of Christ's time.

To me, it makes absolutely no difference whether Christ was a god, God or just a man. He, and the people who followed him, transformed the world for the better.