*cough* That is why I chose that word as my random example.

1. That's an exaggeration propagated by Christians. Persecution of Jews wasn't really in full swing until after Jesus' time, and was in part motivated by Christians giving Judaism a bad name with the Romans..

2. By definition, AD 33. There is no reason to believe the gospels were written earlier than 70 CE or later; they are obviously not accurate, legitimate accounts of someone's life, but rather a mythical look at someone's life. They are to Jesus what the Odissey is to a possible historical Odisseus.

3. Someone being called Jesus is almost reasonably proven, given we have a couple of artifacts with his name. After all, nobody would have been named after him; all he did was found a popular religion. At any rate, there is no independent proof of anything related in the Bible, so yes, evidence of Jesus (A religious leader, as opposed to some random shmuck called Jesus) does not exist.

4. Point being, Christianity had a pretty reasonable "grace period" to spread, during which it was viewed as just another Jewish sect instead of another, distinct and possibly dangerous religion.

Wrong. Natural selection selects for physical characteristics (Not necessarily "deformities" or anything really different from the rest of the population) and also for behaviour. Dog breeders know that; some breeds of dog are friendlier, some are more aggressive. For example, I used to have a Labrador retriever who, unlike every other dog I've ever had, would gladly jump into a swimming pool to grab a toy or a ball someone tossed. He was never trained to do that; it just came naturally to him. Because retriever dogs are bred selectively to be good at retrieving dead waterfowl from the water, and also for friendliness and companionship. Akita dogs are quiet, but aggressive when someone tries to leave their territory, even without training, because they were bred for that behaviour. It is clear that numerous psychological traits humans have were selected at some point in our evolutionary history (Particularly, various ones which are currently not very helpful, but which we carry over from a remote evolutionary past).

Actually, whether quanta are both waves and particles, or neither but just happen to behave like them is a meaningless question. It's somewhat like asking whether a chameleon is green or red.

You don't understand science. Science breaks reality down in two piles: "Known", and "Todo". Religion just puts everything in the "Goddidit" bin. Just because science can't explain something now, doesn't mean it won't ever be able to explain it.

Oh, and we don't really know how gravity works at a quantum scale, and you're just being disingenous and/or ignorant of what Physicists understand about the Big Bang. The singularity is both a quantum and a relativistic event, so really understanding it without the TOE is complicated. At quantum scales, gravity doesn't really manifest; at the scale of relativity, it manifests, but we understand that it doesn't really behave as a force, but rather as variations in the continuum of space-time (Not just base and simple attraction like magnetism).

However, science can put a man into orbit, and I very much doubt the average Christian, or even a fundamentalist Christian, would think that the choice between praying to Jesus for healing and having a pacemaker installed is any choice at all. Science provides results; if religion provides any results at all, they're inside people's heads and can be replicated through psychology.
Not really, no. If you ask "Why are starfish the way they are," the only applicable answer is that they are that way because natural selection favoured starfish-like creatures at some point in time (This is a gross simplification of how starfish actually evolved - Which is difficult to know for sure; unfortunately, a lot of the information about that has been lost. Starfish fossils are unusual to say the least). If you ask me why a mountain is the way it is, then I can go into geology and explain how it came into being. Why should the Universe be any difference? Why should we expect an explanation for why something is the way it is to involve a personal entity, or your own preconceptions about how the Universe should be? Reality does not cater to your delusion.

I don't see science being elevated to the status of religion; it can, and does provide a sense of awe and wonderment which many people identify with religious experience, but it's wholly different from religion. Thinking that science will eventually have the answer to some mystery is nothing more than having hope and faith in humanity, and trusting that tendencies will continue. People who said "I believe science will discover the mechanism of genetic inheritance" 100 years ago have been proven to be right, and I can say the same about people making similar claims throughout history. It makes sense to assume this won't stop anytime soon.

Except one means "I don't know how that works; I guess I'll try and find out" while the other means "I don't know how that works, but I'll assume that there is a personal God and he knows what he's doing". The first someone honestly stating that he doesn't know; the second is someone pretending that something which he cannot prove exists is the answer to all of life's mysteries, and so nobody needs to think for himself.

Again, Daganev, quit assuming I get all my information from the Internet. In fact, quit assuming you know anything at all about my life; if I were to make the same sort of baseless assumptions you make about me about yourself, I'd be saying some very unflattering things. But I assume, for the sake of my sanity, that what I can see of you through the Internet is not necessarily representative of who you are, what you do, or how you act.

This is done all the time in science. Mathematicians are infamous for using the words "...the of this are left as an exercise to the reader" when the author himself doesn't know the answer. I prefer being honest of my ignorance instead of pretending some magical sky-fairy exists to fill the gaps in my knowledge.

I don't need to make baseless statements, I can bring up the blogs and websites written years ago with your exact questions and arguments, memes that I see continuously repeated as if nobody has heard them before. It just gets boring hearing the same thing over and over again, I gave you plenty of references to read and you appear to have either not read or ignored all of them.

*sigh*...

Someone being called Jesus, would have been called "YeshU" which is a name going back to the days of Joshua "Yehoshua." Here is a nice link all about it.

http://judaism.about.com/od/beliefs/a/jesus.htm

http://www.thejewishweek.com/news/newscont...php3?artid=8530

http://talmud.faithweb.com/articles/jesusi.html

In reply to Daganev:

1. Yes, most of my arguments have been around before, but there is no correlation between original thinking and being right. What people say in blogs and discussion boards on the web was said before on the Usenet, and was said before that in personal conversations, letters, and books. The memes you are arguing from are vastly older, at any rate.

2. Yes, I know Jesus was originally called something which sounded more or less entirely distinct from "Jesus", but we don't speak Hebrew, and Emperor Constantine wasn't spelled that either. Deal with it.

Again, just spend 10 seconds of your time to click on teh links I provide. If you did you would realize that is not at all what I was talking about.

Your assertion about who Jesus was and his name, is just blatantly false and ignorant.

There were at least 2 people named "Jesus" who started heretical sects in Judea in that 500 year period.

The links also provide clear evidence the Roman persecution of Jews existed well before any Jesus was in the picture.

Sorry, I'm really not used to arguing with people who consider themselves to be original but instead of making a point just post links and smile smugly to themselves when we mere mortals fail to think there's anything deeply insightful behind them.

Also, I make no assertions about who Jesus was; the Christians do that. I assert that there is a spotty amount of physical, independent evidence for someone called "Jesus" (Yeshua) having lived in Judea during the more or less appropriate time period.

Who needs to be original when the questions and answers are both well over 200 years old?

So when I happen to use an argument someone has used before, I'm repeating the same old memes; when you do the same for old Jewish apologetics which predates modern archeological techniques, that's just fine.

wouldn't it be weird if Jesus was just an alias he used?

Please quote me what you are referring to, I am very curious.

I am curious though how something that predates "modern archaeological techniques" can be apologetics's for questions which became popular -because of modern archaeological techniques" in the late 1800s.

Another thing I just though about while driving home... You repeating certain known misonceptions, as if they are your own arguments, is very different than someone like myself quoting quotes and giving refrences of places to look at information.

Heh, not all that far fetched either.

I am remembering quite few places in the bible where a person's name is mentioned and the books say "That was his nickname, his real name was X"

heh, like
"Jesus? Nah, that was his nickname, his real name was Tyrell"

perhaps.. perhaps...

Very very very interesting. Not sure where to begin. Oh I know, I will begin by going into detailed information about how we historically know, and archaeologically know.

First off, Archaeologically, we have no body for Jesus, but if the bible is to be believed that makes sense, and even if it is not to be believed, then it is not a surprise considering how hard burials are to find, and identify. However, we do have artifacts, and such which match up to the description in the people. We would probably have more if we some European Cathedrals would let us take a look at their relics. (While most are fake, some have proven to be real.) Outside of these facts, I do not know much of the Judea-Christian Archaeological Record, as sadly for the purposes of this argument, this is not what I specialize in.


HOWEVER, I do specialize in the Romans, and I know they were absurd in record taking. Harrod also loved to write about his life. If we take just Pontius Pilots correspondence with Rome, Harrods writing, AND the tax records, and criminal records, we can actually confirm to the letter, the events described in the bible as the crucification of Christ. We know there was a man named Jesus, who preached things in which the Jewish church did not like. We know that this Jesus was punished by the Roman Government, and I quote (translating it into English for you non-latin speakers) "gross counts of non-violent disturbances of the peace." Pilot refers to the crucification with, "the punishment for this was not within our legal code, but I acted in the interest of serving the republic, and had the man punished, as directed by the puppets of Judea, so as to subdue the hot ember."

To deny that Jesus existed is to be blind to science, and history. To question if he is God's son or not, is good. In fact it is exactly what you are supposed to do.

Now to this mysterious prevalence of Christians you refer to in Rome, and how people became Christian to rebel. When Constantine ended the oppression of Christianity, from our archaeological and historical projections, about 20% of non-Roman citizens were Christian, and about 40% of Roman Citizens were Christian. (Funny that the people who would 'rebel' were less likely to be Christian, huh?) Furthermore, the center of Christianity in Europe WAS ROME. They did not encroach on Rome, that is where it started. (The Catacomb system under Rome is almost as complex as the one underneath Paris, but the majority of the Roman Catacombs were built BEFORE Marcus Aurelius.)

As to why the rebels were less likely to rebel through adopting a religion, is simply that the idea that 'resistance through belief' is a very very modern concept. It is only recently that people use religion as a form of rebellion, and in most cases it is isolated to 1st teenagers. All in all, most people tend to take religion fairly serious and don't use it to rebel with.

There is very little evidence regarding anything more than there being some guy called Jesus in Judea during the early first century CE; less evidence, but still not unreasonable evidence, that he was an itinerant preacher who ended up nailed to a cross for saying stuff which didn't agree with the Jews or the Romans. There is zero evidence for what he actually said, except for the Gospels, and there is, once again, zero evidence to suggest any of them were written before 50 CE.

And, there is nothing special about beliefs causing people to die for them - Some sets of memes are just like that. Early Christian martyrs are no more evidence for Christianity than Muslim suicide bombers are evidence for Islam, or than willing ritual sacrifice victims were evidence for Quetzalcoatl.

I thought there were no surviving Roman records of Jesus ?

There are a couple. It's mostly passing stuff, sort of like "I heard something the other day about a guy called Yeshua (They say his real name is Tyrell). I think he's leading some sort of sect, called it 'Crusty-amity' or something. Sounds silly. Anyway, on to my detailed and hopelessly long records of everything happening in parts of the world that are not Judea..."

There are plenty of surviving records. What most people do not realize it that the Romans loved to record everything, and further more they were always writing small little histories. Most of them are of no import, because they were later compiled by another Roman into a larger history, but a lot were still left out, simply because they were written about, or on the fringe of society.

And yes, I have seen these documents. I have photos of some of the more readable ones in front of me, as my research is centered around method of spread of information. There are three documents that I have access to (I do not have any of the 'unreadable' documents, which are actually readable, just they have not been made so yet.) that make direct reference to Jesus, the crucification, and the events surrounded his death. Those documents are, Pilot's personal account, written in 'lower' latin, which probably means this was a letter to a friend or close peer. It does not detail the event to much, but the line I quoted in my other post, was translated and drawn from this document. The next is a record of criminals, this just lists names, and punishment. Jesus' name however does have, in greek, messiah added to it. This is generally assumed to be a 'sarcastic' edition by the Jewish leaders. And the last document is a soilders letter to his wife in Veii. This last one has recently had some credibility issues brought up, and we currently avoid it in this research. It was written in Roman times, but the dating of it puts it around 160AD.