History of slavery, dating back 3500 years

I'm still waiting for the purported facts you claim to have.
Actually I did present it, but in a post to stiggy (post #73) so perhaps you missed it. It comes from the Bible.

The author of Mark is clear that he believed the risen Jesus was first seen in Galilee, not Jerusalem.

Mark 14:27 And Jesus *said to them, “You will all [m]fall away, because it is written: ‘I will strike the shepherd, and the sheep will be scattered.’ 28 But after I am raised, I will go ahead of you to Galilee.”
Mark 16:6 But he *said to them, “Do not be amazed; you are looking for Jesus the Nazarene, who has been crucified. He has risen; He is not here; see, here is the place where they laid Him. 7 But go, tell His disciples and Peter, ‘He is going ahead of you to Galilee; there you will see Him, just as He told you.’”

The reason he believed that, I think, is the Jerusalem appearance had not been made up when he was writing.

I did however note something from an atheist on another forum.

They're claiming that the contradiction they see makes it difficult to take seriously.
Yes... And your response to that?

To me, these contradictions indicate the texts were not inspired by God, but written by fallible men. This particular issue, the Jerusalem appearances, indicates to me that the early Christians would just make stuff up.

I am not suggesting they were liars; I am sure they all were pious Christians. But stories were garbled, wishful thinking led them to believe things that were not true, and they just assumed that supposed predictions in the OT actually happened, and so recorded them as fact.

What we have today is the mythology that developed over the few decades after Jesus died.

What really happened was probably that the disciples fled Jerusalem after Jesus was arrested, and later saw something they believed was the risen Jesus, in Galilee, possibly as recorded in John 1 and the gospel of Peter.

It became clear to me that the contradictions aren't the bible's.
How did you determine that Steve?

How do you reconcile Mark believing the risen Jesus was first seen in Galilee with the accounts in the later gospels?

How do you reconcile Mark saying the women told no one, and Matthew saying they immediately told the disciples?

They're the beliefs of people, who believe themselves over what the bible says.
What the Bible says is the women who found the empty tomb told no one and that they immediately told the disciples.

So, in fact, the contradictions you perceive are due entirely to your beliefs about truth and not the bible.
So all you really have is your faith. Your faith tells you there are no contradictions, so you turn a blind eye to them.

I'm not the one who needs to win arguments.
I think you are. You have been proven wrong so many times and just cannot admit it. Remember when you said positron bounce off electrons? You utterly refused to admit you were wrong. I think you have a big problem with needing to win arguments. And okay, maybe I do too, but at least I can admit that.

Ironically, from my observations, you have definitively discounted them, and focused your entire attention on seeking to prove your own beliefs.
Right. How is that different to what you do?

What you have clearly failed to grasp is that I've been reading the bible since 1977. Last I checked, it's 2022. So, we're almost at 45 years that I've been at this.
So have you worked out why the Bible says is the women who found the empty tomb told no one and that they immediately told the disciples?

Or do you just skip the awkward bits?

It'll be far easier to simply give you a list of books and let you read for yourself.
It is up to you. You can either address the issues, and, for example, explain why the Bible says is the women who found the empty tomb told no one and that they immediately told the disciples.

Or you can take the easy road, and evade the question; just give a list of books that might, or might not, address the issue, without you having to actually think.

And we both know which of those you will choose.

I agree that it's tedious for you, but you need to understand that I've been at this for almost 45 years now. Longer than many of you have been alive. And I started as an older teenager.
You seem to think that makes you some kind of authority. It does not. I do not care how long you have been reading the Bible. What I care about is how well you can answer the issues in it.

Can you explain why the Bible says is the women who found the empty tomb told no one and that they immediately told the disciples?

If not, your 45 years reading the Bible was a waste of time.

So, in your mind, neither Matthew, Luke, nor John exist and if Mark doesn't say it, it didn't happen!
Of course Matthew, Luke and John exist (whether you people the gospels or the authors). I have no idea where you get that from.

Any event that is not in Mark, but is in a later Gospel is suspect - it was likely made up later. The most likely reason Mark omitted it is that he did not know about it, and the most likely reason for that is that it was made up later.

Jesus' sayings are different; an argument can certainly be made that Jesus taught his disciples to memorise his saying, and they were regarded almost (but not quite) as scripture, carefully passed on by both oral and written tradition. Verses common to Matthew and Luke are usually of this nature, and may well be authentic.

I'm sure grateful that I am not dependent on your beliefs to know the truth.
Right, because you have faith that tells you to ignore the facts, and just blindly believe what you are told to believe.

Going back to my window/house analogy....

You have gotten stuck on focusing on a single character's story, and have been excluding yourself from recognizing that there are many other windows on our house.
What is the point of this Steve? Why do you need a house analogy? You could as easily say "You have gotten stuck on focusing on a single character's story, and have been excluding yourself from recognizing that there are many accounts in the Bible." Making this into an analogy serves only to obscure.

You're looking in the window to Mark's room.

We don't all hang out with Mark all the time.

We move from room to room, at various times. We like to go into different rooms, talk with John, sometimes we like conversing with Matt. Luke has some interesting ideas. We also hang out in the older rooms of the house. I've been blown away by the really old rooms, which describe the same truths Jesus explained, but in different ways.
I am looking at what Mark said because he wrote his account when the witnesses were likely still alive, and so there was at least some quality control in play.

By the time the other gospels were written, they witnesses were likely dead, and that control had been lost. They were free to make up dead saints walking around, Jesus buried with ridiculous amounts of myrrh and aloes, and all those appearances in Jerusalem.

As an outsider, it's not wise to impose your own bias on things that you have been told by other outsiders. It does more to embarrass you than to make you appear intelligent.
You feel that as an insider, you get free rein to impose your bias?

How would you like it if your life was studied from an outsider perspective and then made fun of in really nasty and vicious ways? Keep in mind that our house has been in existence for 1990 years now.
If you object to people dissecting Christianity, why are you posting on a forum set up to do exactly that?

Well then.

We'll make sure that YHVH documents every single pico-second of your life, every thought, action, word spoken, including all those really secret things you'd never want to be known by anyone for any reason whatsoever.
What on earth are you talking about now?

Will that make you feel better about this? Obviously, you have a problem with the manner in which history was documented. So, we'll make sure that you are not so poorly documented.
Besides the simple fact that it is not history...

If the gospels were inspired by God we would expect them to all get it right. The fact that they contain contradictions tells us they are not inspired by God. In fact, it looks like later authors changed facts as they found convenient. The author of Matthew did not like that the women told no one, so chose to record that they immediately told the disciples. It never happened, but it made for better apologetics.
 
WRONG! Verses 9 to 20 do not appear in the oldest manuscripts, and virtually all Bible scholars agree that they were a later addition. They were not written by the author of the rest of the Gospel, who we may suppose was Mark.

Hilarious. In that other thread in which you're getting trounced, you whine about how "most Bibles say 'forever'," but here you dismiss what most Bibles say. Flip-flopper Pixie strikes again. It's in the Bible. You were proven wrong. Deal with it.
 
Hilarious. In that other thread in which you're getting trounced...
Seriously?

Hilarious. In that other thread in which you're getting trounced, you whine about how "most Bibles say 'forever'," but here you dismiss what most Bibles say. Flip-flopper Pixie strikes again. It's in the Bible. You were proven wrong. Deal with it.
I think you are missing the point here. I am an atheist, I do not think what the Bible says is necessarily true.

I think that the vast majority of Biblical scholars translate that word as "eternity", but I do not myself believe God exists, so I do not believe that God tortures people for eternity. If you want to believe it means for an age, that is fine. It is still morally abhorrent. However, the implication is that Christians only get to live for an age, not forever.

The Bible includes verses Mark 16:9-20, but many translations note that older manuscripts do not include those verses. Again most Biblical scholars agree that they are a later addition, not written by Mark. You may still consider them to be canonical, but the point here is they were written significantly later, and represent later beliefs.

There is no flip-flopping on my part stiggy, just your failure to understand.
 
I think you are missing the point here. I am an atheist, I do not think what the Bible says is necessarily true.

Sorry, pal, but your being an atheist does not change what the Bible says. You made an erroneous clam about what the Bible does not say, and I corrected you.

I think that the vast majority of Biblical scholars translate that word as "eternity", but I do not myself believe God exists, so I do not believe that God tortures people for eternity. If you want to believe it means for an age, that is fine. It is still morally abhorrent. However, the implication is that Christians only get to live for an age, not forever.

Wrong. Your erroneous INFERENCE is not an IMPLICATION. You need to learn the difference between those two words.


The Bible includes verses Mark 16:9-20, but many translations note that older manuscripts do not include those verses.

Problem is that even if we accept your erroneous and oh-so-convenient conclusion about what Mark said, you're still wrong regarding your post-resurrection claim about Jesus in Galilee.
 
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Sorry, pal, but your being an atheist does not change what the Bible says. You made an erroneous clam about what the Bible does not say, and I corrected you.
That would be the same "error" the vast majority of Bible translators made. Right...

Wrong. Your erroneous INFERENCE is not an IMPLICATION. You need to learn the difference between those two words.
I did not use either word. Why are you pretending I do not know the difference?

Problem is that even if we accept your erroneous and oh-so-convenient conclusion about what Mark said, you're still wrong regarding your post-resurrection claim about Jesus in Galilee.
Whether it is convenient or not is irrelevant. It is just a fact that most Biblical scholars believe Mark 16:9-20 was a later addition, and they do so because it is absent in many early manuscript.
 
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