"he is not on a bulletin board site where thousands of people INTERACT in a rather personal and emotional manner."
LOL, don't flatter yourself. There are a handful of people at most, who read this thread and none of them would have access to your email address.
"He displays a contemptible arrogance and a smarmy disdain....Your answer (am I surprised?)is to make a personal attack."
Spoken by a true master of the art of personal insults.
You did not respond to one point in the article by Nash or Holding or Craig for that matter. I can only assume that you have no response.
As for a specific all three make the same point; namely that Christianity is based on historical facts not myths.
"Jesus’ death was an actual event in history. The death of the mystery god appears in a mythical drama with no historical ties; its continued rehearsal celebrates the recurring death and rebirth of nature. The incontestable fact that the early church believed that its proclamation of Jesus’ death and resurrection was grounded in an actual historical event makes absurd any attempt to derive this belief from the mythical, nonhistorical stories of the pagan cults. (Nash)
Message 19811715
The point you keep willfully mything is that there are no "PROVEN" (do caps make a statement truer?)"linkages between Zoroaster, Mithra, Krishna, Buddha, Christianity,".
"I refer to the frequency with which their writings evidence a careless, even sloppy use of language. One frequently encounters scholars who first use Christian terminology to describe pagan beliefs and practices, and then marvel at the striking parallels they think they have discovered. One can go a long way toward “proving” early Christian dependence on the mysteries by describing some mystery belief or practice in Christian terminology."(Nash)
Message 19811715
The supposed "linkages" don't hold up under scrutiny and in the case of Mythra, it is entirely likely the it was Christianity that did the influencing not the other way round.
"The chronology is all wrong. Almost all of our sources of information about the pagan religions alleged to have influenced early Christianity are dated very late. We frequently find writers quoting from documents written 300 years later than Paul in efforts to produce ideas that allegedly influenced Paul. We must reject the assumption that just because a cult had a certain belief or practice in the third or fourth century after Christ, it therefore had the same belief or practice in the first century." (Nash)
"If there were any historical evidence for the myths of "Jesus", then every educated person in the world would be a Christian!" (Solon, or whatever his real name is)
People deny the Holocaust happened even though there are still surviving witnesses to this day. The willfully blind will stay that way regardless of evidence.
"Even the most critical historian can confidently assert that a Jew named Jesus worked as a teacher and wonder-worker in Palestine during the reign of Tiberius, was executed by crucifixion under the prefect Pontius Pilate and continued to have followers after his death." (Craig)
Message 19787162 |
