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And all of the minor points that people cling to…all of em’…pale in comparison to the reality that Jesus predicted His own death and resurrection ~ and pulled it off…! So when He tells us all of the things that He does…especially that He’ll walk through this life with us, and that we can spend eternity in His presence…I believe Him. My trust and my confidence are in Him.

Foreshadowing in a story does not make the story true.

Keep in mind, the Gospels were not written at the time of the alleged events, but decades later by anonymous authors. A lot of story elements can change during decades of re-writes.

It is interesting the deniers changed BC and AD to BCE and CE. They still use the same person, Jesus Christ, as the delineation between the two erras.

Jesus is a Greek word. his real name was Yeshua or as we call it, Joshua. he did exist, Romans have the name and He was known troublemaker (Jewish priesthood). he was against the established religion.

The Emperor Constantine called the Council of Nicea, the first general council of the Christian church, 325 A.D.—primarily because he feared that disputes within the church would cause disorder within the empire. Concerning manuscripts that were burned at the order of Constantine, there is really no mention of such a thing actually happening at the order of Constantine or at the Council of Nicea. The Arian party’s (look up Arianism) document claiming Christ to be a created being, was abandoned by them because of the strong resistance to it and was torn to shreds in the sight of everyone present at the council. Constantine, and the Council of Nicea, for that matter, had virtually nothing to do with the forming of the canon. It was not even discussed at Nicea. The council that formed an undisputed decision on the canon took place at Carthage in 397, sixty years after Constantine’s death.

21 books were acknowledged by all Christians (the 4 Gospels, Acts, 13 Paul, 1 Peter, 1 John, Revelation). There were 10 disputed books (Hebrews, James, 2 Peter, 2-3 John, Jude, Ps-Barnabas, Hermas, Didache, Gospel of Hebrews) and several that most all considered heretical—Gospels of Peter, Thomas, Matthaias, Acts of Andrew, John, etc.

During the fourth century, several church synods, such as the Councils of Rome (382), Hippo (393), and Carthage (397), accepted all 27 books of the New Testament as canonical. In 1604, England’s King James I authorized a new translation of the Bible aimed at settling some thorny religious differences in his kingdom—and solidifying his own power.

But in seeking to prove his own supremacy, King James ended up democratizing the Bible instead. Thanks to emerging printing technology, the new translation brought the Bible out of the church’s sole control and directly into the hands of more people than ever before, including the Protestant reformers who settled England’s North American colonies in the 17th century. Published in 1611, the King James Bible spread quickly throughout Europe. Because of the wealth of resources devoted to the project, it was the most faithful and scholarly translation to date.


what happened to the Disciples that didn't get canonized? were they telling the truth of the Church? why would the Gospels that were not canonized be burned? makes you wonder about the "established religion".

Amen!!

I cant believe this line of bs has dragged on this long. The bible is bs cover to cover.

Still hoping some Bible literalist will explain this model of the universe to me.

I only know of one way of deciding which of anything to believe, and that is on the basis of evidence. There’s some confusion about faith; a lotta folks have accepted Richard Dawkins definition of faith as believing where there’s no evidence. And that’s just nonsense. Faith is an ordinary word; it’s not just a religious word. It’s an ordinary word that means trust. Most of us don’t trust people or facts without having evidence. Your bank won’t trust you with a loan unless you provide evidence of collateral.

Christianity is an evidence based faith. But the word has been spread around by the likes of Richard Dawkins and his ilk that faith is a vice because…according to him and his ilk…it’s believing where there’s no evidence. And again, that’s just nonsense. That’s blind faith. Christianity is evidence based.

The Apostle John said that Jesus did many other things in the presence of His disciples that aren’t written in this book (the one that John was writing); but the one’s that are written are so that we might believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that in believing we might have life in His name. In other words, here’s some of the evidence on which this faith is based.

Now someone might complain that’s John who is in this book called the Bible so he’s biased and verboten. But the fact is that John, when he wrote that, didn’t even know that there was gonna be this canonized collection of books called the Bible. He was just a real person who saw and experienced real events in history and was simply proclaiming the reality of those events to the original audience.

Sometimes folks put the cart before the horse in terms of quickly discrediting an eyewitness to events in history.

I don't buy into it. Just doesn't make sense to me and I grew up Catholic. To even consider the earth to be 6000 years old is ridiculous at best. The 2 M's....miracles and magic just aren't something I can believe in.

Even if one doesn’t believe in miracles, and even if one doesn’t believe in the Gospel, I do think that following Jesus makes one’s life better and makes one better at life.

As I said, Josephus had never seen or met Jesus personally and was not a witness to any of the events described in the gospels, Josephus commented on what he had heard.

Jesus is a container word. You can pour what ever you want into it, and no two believer pour exactly the same stuff into that container.

Not even close. Nor is the dispute so much about the existence of the man 'Jesus' (Yeshua Ben Yoseph) as a charismatic rabbi, but the supernatural stories that grew with retelling as the movement grew.

Christianity is an evidence based faith. And that’s exactly what the early ekklesia of Jesus knew. Apostle Paul said that if Jesus didn’t rise from the dead then His followers are the most pitied of all because they’ve placed their hope in an illusion. But He did rise from the dead, and there’s evidence of this in history.

Now if you listen to someone like Matt Dillahunty, an atheist activist, he claims there’s no evidence; he claims there’s just claims. And what he means by evidence is specifically scientific evidence. He demands the type of evidence that you can put under a microscope and say “that’s evidence.”

But that’s not the kind of evidence that exists in history. History is a different category of evidence. And the manuscripts that comprise the New Testament are historic in nature, and they contain the exact type of evidence that exists all throughout written ancient history.

So if you don’t accept the reality and the historicity of Jesus based upon this history, then you might as well throw out Alexander the Great and Tiberius Caesar and Aristotle and Plato and all of the other ancient historical figures. You might as well throw out all of ancient history because you can’t really ‘know’ anything and it’s ‘all’ mythology. Just put your head in a hole in the ground about all of it.

But if you look at it on its own face value…we know Jesus was alive at point A, and we know He was dead at point B, and we know He was alive again at point C…based on countless eyewitnesses, and based on many transformed lives, and based on Peter attesting to it, and based on James (the brother of Jesus) attesting to it, and based on all of His closest followers attesting to it, and based on a great many people giving their lives for it to say that, “yes, this really happened,” and, “yes, this is true,” then there really are significant historic reasons to believe that it did happen.

Christianity is a matter a fact. It’s not blind faith. I simply invite people to investigate the evidence. And then make up their own minds.

Faith by definition is a belief held without evidence.

That's why 'faith' is needed to believe. If evidence exists, it can be examined, checked and tested.

Some believers tend to have a very loose definition of 'evidence.'

Me, I believe.

Like Dr Kindell says, "If we had a lot more serious sceptics, we would have a lot more Christians. They tend to prove themselves wrong."

OK, I'll bite. What do you believe? Please be specific.

It is interesting that Christians deny significance of the days of the week, and calendar months, named after Roman gods, yet they still use them anyway. If that's not a big bitch slap to the gods, I don't know what is.

Except that it demonstrabally doesn't. If you believe in absurdities, you can instigate and perform attrocities.