I do believe in God

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I see no reason why Paul's letters would be considered forgeries. And I'm not asking you to accept that the resurrection had occurred; just that Paul believed that it had.

Pauline Authorship

As to Paul believing in the Ressurection of course he did, all Christians do. What I am saying is most early Christians saw Jesus as being exulted at his Ressurection. Paul saw him as a Devine being who prior to the Ressurection was subordinate to God, this then allowed for the concept of the Redemption for which the angelic Jesus was exulted to the stature of God

John is the only one who describes Jesus as god almighty, most Christians ascribe to his view even though his is the latest of the gospels and non of the earlier writings support his claims.

The point of my posts on this issue stems from the inability of Christians to view their bible with a critical mind. When you do this it becomes apparent that from the death of Jesus everything is man made theology, even prior to his death there are glaring contradictions between the various accounts, but unlike his life, we do have a lot of historical records which show how the Trinity became formulated by the minds of Men.

Last edited by DentArthurDent on 22 Jul 2014, 11:04 pm, edited 2 times in total.

Firstly I am not being critical of the early believers in Christ. I fully get the context in which the oral tradition was passed down. I am critical of people who accept the stories in the bible at face value and do not investigate their origins.

Secondly the stories were not written by simple under educated people. They were written by well educated people who could not only read and write but could do so in a nuanced form. These people wrote down the oral tradition of the simple, under educated........

And this brings in another point. Oral tradition is not a reliable source as it is well understood and documented that a story will change and become embellished with each subsequent telling.

Culture had a different weighting system in how they handled social hierarchy than we do today, or at least pronounced in different manners even if fundamentally the same. For us it's more financial and we generally feel like we have a lot of access to information with the world-wide web, to a large extent that's quite true.

I think one of the most eye-opening things to me was finding out just how much interplay there was in how Hebrew and Greek alphabets had their letters double as numbers and the number of words that connect by common sum goes a ways beyond what I'm comfortable with calling random chance. They really seemed to have one religion for the common people, another for the educated, another for the ruling class, and yet another for the elite priests. For efficiency they'd put it all in a public teaching but everyone had their own sort of 'level' of seeing the cypher (put there by man). If the bible feels like a very slippery and cryptic book deliberately written to be a rubics cube by people who had a lot of practice at that sort of thing - it seems that way because we're looking at how a different society socially managed itself. Moral of the story - if we ever feel like our society is professionally constipated with it comes to playing keep-away with proprietary information, its even tougher to imagine living in those times.

Another reason why I don't think such things bugger the imagination - read some in-depth stuff on the druids in the British isles and their specific flavor or synarchy. Seeing the ends that early societies went to with this stuff it doesn't surprise me much at all that similar ideas would have either already existed in the middle-east (especially with the Egyptians and Babylonians nearby as already very ritually sophisticated societies) or even getting imports from the British Isles. People like Pythagoras apparently went as far as India to learn the things they did so it wouldn't shock me if ideas from Britain didn't travel to Syria, Syrian ideas to Britain, etc. etc..

I have no argument with early Christians having differing perceptions of who and what Christ was - as one of my old college instructors had said, as there is more agreement among Christians today than there was in the 1st century, all believers had to say was "Jesus is Lord." But to say that all Christians of that time didn't believe in any trinitarian theology, I believe, is a mistake.

^^ I am having trouble undertanding the message you are trying to put accros, sorry

I think your message was directed at someone else.

There is a very well documented progression from Exulted Man or Exulted divine being, to the trinity and it took several hundred years. To my knowledge there are no early Christian references to the concept of Jesus as God Almighty. This is not to say that NO Christian held this view, but as far as historical evidence goes, it can be stated that if some did, they were not numerous and there is no surviving evidence of their belief.

The earliest indication that some Christians believed in Jesus as a pre existing divine being (but not God) comes in the letter to the Philippians in what scholars believe is Paul quoting earlier oral tradition. Philippians, 2:6-11

The reason there is relatively little debate among contemporary Christians is due to the Council of Nicaea and other councils a few years later. these declared any other creeds to be heretical and therefore punishable

John clearly believes Christ was an eternal, divine being made human.

Undeniably, as I have said many times he is the ONLY one of the Canonical Gospels that does. So why does it differ so much from the Synoptic Gospels, why is it that the last to be written differs so much from earlier writings and why is it that Christians favour this version over all others? Again one needs to look at the context and time when it was written and the manner in which oral tradition is passed down and gets changed. I would suggest that in a time when Christians were attempting to gain a foothold and were facing persecution it helped to believe that Jesus was not only an exulted man, not even an exulted divine being but was in fact God Almighty incarnate. The gradual heightening of His exultation helps demonstrate this, Even after John wrote his gospel, debate raged for centuries as to the nature of Jesus and the potential paradox of having Two Gods. Maybe John was the first to see the need for a solution to this paradox, and therefore removed the Exultation narrative altogether.

The reason I have pressed my points is simple. As I said at the start of this, you and a multitude of christians display play a more than adequate ability to see the OT with a critical eye, yet you seem to take the NT at face value. Which seems a strange posistion to take given the known history regarding how the NT was compiled.

On a further note, I assume you are aware that all of the Canonical Gospels were written anonymously, their Authorship was attributed some time in the 2nd Century, Mpst scholars are in agreement that Mathew and Luke use Mark as their primary source and they also share another source not used in Mark which is known as Q (from the German word for Source Quelle) Authorship

Yes, I know about the Q Gospel.
As far as taking the NT at face value - that's where faith comes in, not a matter of reason.

So then why apply reason to the OT. Surely if you take the NT at face value and Jesus is said to have held with the old laws etc why then not accept the OT on faith based upon the teachings of Jesus as told in the NT?

Fun.... your critical thinking backs you up against a wall. You use the word critical alot. Then you explain that stories are embellished. You understand that an educated person from 2000 years ago really was not all that smart. You understand that it was written as a story that was told by undereducated people. You want to get the stories straight? That would be like finding a poison dart made of bone, that has been buried in wet dirt for 100 years. It is not going to happen.

You are missing the point sir. Religion is not about critical thinking. It is not about getting stories straight. It is not about proof. It is about faith. If you believe, and have faith, the truth unravels itself. Some things are not made to be questioned for a reason. Either you like it, or you dont. You believe, or not. There is no middle ground. No changing. It is someting that is here to stay. To be added to. To be developed.

That is the best I can explain it for you. There is no no. No questioning, no yes buts, no definition changing, no critical thinking, and no scientific evaluation.
If you like, you can think of things in ways to suit you. That's it.

So in other words you will believe whatever you have faith in, regardless of how nonsensical it sounds, or how much it disagrees with evidence and experiment, what a sad state of affairs. Hmmm best I go pray to the sacred orbiting T-Pot.

Oh and by the way I am almost beside myself in anticipation to learn just how my reliance upon critical thinking and evidence has me "backed up against a wall".

Would this be the same "backing up against a wall" that has led us to the technological age, that is allowing us to converse in the way we are?

Oh and by the way at no point did I even intimate that an educated person from 2000 years ago was "not really that smart", those are your words so keep them to yourself and do attempt to put them into my mouth.

Last edited by DentArthurDent on 23 Jul 2014, 8:43 am, edited 1 time in total.

You cannot have faith in something that sounds nonsensical to you, or if it disagrees with you silly.

Your back is up against a wall, because you are contradicting things. To the point where you are doing it to yourself. Embellished to the point where the things you say may not be true, or are pushed out of context. That is the best I can describe it.

You are missing the point.

I need to slow down.

I am sorry for being me.

Now I get to hear some other story about something you have to say, because making sence to yourself is a really important thing.

Thats the best you can do, and I was hoping for sooooooooomuch more.

Here are some pointers, looks like you need some. Where am I contradicting myself, and give examples of where I have stated any thing as fact that cannot be backed up with evidence, or or where I have embellished something that may not be true, the hole story is a bloody embellishment and that is kind of my point. Anyone who has fatih in this story ahs faith in what is quite conceivably nonsense

Last edited by DentArthurDent on 23 Jul 2014, 8:51 am, edited 1 time in total.