Posted by:
Green Potato
(
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Date: April 20, 2013 10:00AM
1. Seriously this is news to me. Give a guy one job in life, only one job, and he can't even do that (re John the baptist and his FAILURE to establish the baptism ritual). What a waste of space!
I am a little concerned by what I have just read: "The theology of baptism attained precision in the 3rd and 4th centuries".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baptism_in_early_Christianity#Baptism_of_JesusI never realised that baptism was so complicated that it took centuries to perfect! If Jesus had actually been baptised then it would have been a lot simpler. Just do what John did to Jesus!
So when scholars say they are certain that Jesus was "baptised", what they really mean is that they are certain that Jesus underwent a ritual that nobody understood for another 200 to 400 years. They have no reliable accounts of what actually happened on the day of Jesus' alleged baptism.
2. Watched the first minute and got bored. Not going to watch the whole 52 minutes. If you have a point to make then make it. The big bang is an immensely complicated topic yet physicists can explain it to the general public in relatively easily understood terms.
No-one seems to be able to explain WHY scholars are so sure of the existence of a historical Jesus. All anyone can do is parrot that it isn't disputed by scholars and no, we don't need to explain why we haven't asked archaeologists or scientists and no, there is no need to do any actual surveys of scholars, and no, nobody has done a chi squared test to calculate a probability of the historical Jesus theory being true, and no, we don't need to define a historical Jesus because that might make the theory falsifiable.
The whole thing seems very strange... it is as if scholars believe everything the new testament says to the extent that it hasn't been proven false yet... a "Jesus of the gaps" so to speak. Given the quantity of false information in the new testament, isn't it about time scholars threw the whole thing in the bin?