Why Believe in Christianity over all other religions?

[Rust]

Originally Posted by medicforlife

What books and resources have proven that Tacitus and Livy haven't got things quite right?

http://www.infidels.org/library/mode...in/jesus.shtml

There's a link that covers some of the questioning historians have done regarding the accounts of ancient historians, Tacitus included.

However, what's important is that they do not think Tacitus or Livy where either infallible or inspired by gods. They were fallible human beings, and thus it's no surprise that they would use imperfect journalistic practices.

That has never been my position. I never once said that we have Jesus' final words. Please read all my post again. I never made that claim.

You are right. I apologize. I assumed that was your position. Allow me to detail what the two positions are, and how they both are bad ones for the Christian side:

1. The accounts, when taken in full, pain the full picture of Christ's death and his exact words.

That is a claim that has no substantiation, for all you know there could be yet another gospel that fits between the ones we know about, that adds other occurances or other words that differ from these four.


2. The accounts do not paint the full picture of Christ's death and his exact words.

My point is then made! Why are we to trust what they say, when they paint an incomplete picture. Are we to base our lives and our salvation on incomplete, possibly incorrect, accounts?


Which one is yours?

If the four gospels had been exactly the same, or word for word, you would raise the charge that the writers had conspired among themselves to coordinate their stories in advance, and that would have cast doubt on them. In otherwords, if the gospels were too consistent, that in itself would invalidate them as independent witnesses. Simon Greenleaf of Harvard Law school, and author of an influential treatise on evidence; after studying the consistency among the four gospels gave this evaluation:

"There is enough of a discrepancy to show that there could have been no previous concert among them; and at the same time such substantial agreement as to show that they all were independent narratiors of the same great transaction." Furthermore, classical historian a German scholar Hans Stier has concurred that agreement over basic data and divergence of detials suggest credibility, because fabricated accounts tend to be fully consistnet and harmonized. "Every historian," he wrote, "is especially skeptical at that moment when an extradordinary happening is only reported in accounts which are completely free of contradictions."

Yet that is only true of human accounts that are not infallible, and have not been inspired by gods! Historians would say that the inconsistencies are an indication that they were not coroborating to make it seem as if the accounts were legitimate. However inconsistencies, contradictions and mistakes are not things we would expect from an infallble source, or something that has been inspired by an omnipotent god either!

In other words, historians are indeed suspicious of an absence of contradictions, but only because we expect them from fallible works from fallible people that weren't inspired by an infallible source!

No...I'm saying that the gospels are extremely consistent with each other by anceint standards, which are the only standards by which it's fair to judge them. In the event that a new claim of infallibilty were to surface today, then a modern standard would be fair to impose on that new writing.

No, you are saying more than that. You are claiming these gospels contain the word of god. That automatically implies a much higher standard. God isn't supposed to do shoddy work. To treat a godly source as weakly as we treat a human source is utterly ridiculous.

As of now, I do not have a good answer in regards to Hazor. I will have to study this further. However, I will say this; within the last hundred years archaeolgy has repeatedly unearthed discoveries that have confirmed specific references in the gospels, particularly the gospel of John. The gospel that's supposedly so suspect.

So there are still some unresolved issues, but those are a tiny minority compared with the number of examples of corroboration. As far as I'm concerned Hazor my be one of those unresolved issues, I don't know.

1. Let's be honest here please, you have no answer because there is none that you find satisfying. You do not want to admit the inevtiable: The Bible claims no man would live in Hazor. Man lives in Hazor. The bible has been contradicted by history. Period.


2. The discoveries that have confirmed accounts in the bible have been of natural and historic accounts. I don't know of any atheist or non-Christian that does not admit the Bible can be, and has been, a source of political and social history of the time. It has. It has been a source of the location of ancient cities (like Hazor, which is how we can refute the ridiculous claim made in the bible that no people would live there), a description of wars, trade, and political figures. That's not the problem.

The problem is it's claim of the supernatural. Show me proof that these things actually occured (not that people were convinced they did). That's what we doubt.