Featured Christians can you be certain your bible is trust worthy?

Is there any evidence outside the Gospels to indicate their reliability?

Luke 3:1, 2
Tiberius - Wikipedia
Tiberius (/taɪˈbɪəriəs/; Latin: Tiberius Caesar Divi Augusti filius Augustus; 16 November 42 BC – 16 March 37 AD) was Roman emperor from 14 AD to 37 AD, succeeding the first emperor, Augustus.


The tribute penny mentioned in the Bible is commonly believed to be a Roman denarius depicting the Emperor Tiberius.


Silver denarius of Tiberius 14CE 37CE found in India Indian copy of a the same 1st century CE Coin of Kushan king Kujula Kadphises

 

Great post ! Few scholars doubt that Daniel was written during the time of the Babylonian captivity of the Jews. Skeptics must twist themselves in copious numbers of knots to say otherwise. Why ? Because Daniels prophecies can be historically shown to be true.

As in all things with skeptics, the foregone premise is " these things cannot happen". Filtered through that premise ANYTHING, SOMETHING, must be presented as supporting that premise.

 

absolutely bro

 

A post from AngelOfLight

The general consensus among scholars is that Daniel is a pseudepigraphic work, that is, a work that was was written much later than the text claims.

• Numerous historical errors and anachronisms. The book starts by claiming that Jerusalem fell in the third year of King Jehoiakim. This contradicts all known historical evidence, including the timeline from Jeremiah. There are also a number of indications that the author confused Nebuchadrezzar with Nabonidus. One of the more important characters from the book, Darius the Mede, is totally unknown to history and appears to be either a complete fabrication or a conflation of several other people.
  
  
• The succession of nations in the book appears to be wrong. According to Daniel, it was Babylon, Media, Persia and Greece. In reality, Media fell to Persia about 15 years before the fall of Babylon.
  
  
• There is ample evidence from the text that the author expected the Greek Seleucid king Antiochus IV to be the catalyst that sparked the final battle between God and ad his enemies. The author expected that this battle would end with the the destruction of the earthly system and the institution of the literal Kingdom of God.
  
  
• When read in context, all of Daniel's prophecies point to Antiochus IV. The author thus expected him to be the last King of the Seleucid line, and that the 'time of the end' would therefore be about 164 BC.
  
  
• The book of Daniel is totally unknown prior to about 150 BC. There are a number of lists of books considered sacred by the Jews - Daniel is not among them.

The original purpose of the Book of Daniel was to comfort and encourage persecuted Jews during the Maccabean revolt. It all began in December of 167 BC, when the Seleucid emperor Antiochus Epiphanes desecrated the Temple in Jerusalem with an idol bearing his likeness. He went on to force his Jewish subjects to abandon the Sabbath, circumcision, and food laws, torturing and killing all who opposed him. At this outrage, the Jews revolted under Judas Maccabeus, driving the Seleucid armies out of Palestine and recapturing the Temple. In December of 164 BC, they rededicated the Temple to Jewish worship on the first Hanukkah.

During the revolt, pious Jews began to circulate an anthology of stories allegedly written four hundred years earlier by a Jewish hero named Daniel. These stories relate how Daniel and his friends, while serving as officials in the courts of pagan kings, risked their lives to avoid breaking Jewish food laws or worshipping false gods. When the mightiest kings on Earth tried to force them to compromise their religious principles, they passively waited on God's miraculous intervention to save them. The success of Daniel's prophecies of events up to and including the atrocities of Antiochus supposedly demonstrated that God would miraculously intervene on schedule to rescue the Jews from Antiochus as well.

The prophet Daniel supposedly predicted that four great empires were to rise and fall in succession between his day and the end of the world: Babylonia, Media, Persia, and Greece. Alexander the Great's Greek Empire was to break up into four smaller empires, the most important being the Seleucid Empire in Syria to the north, and the Ptolemaic Empire in Egypt to the south. After seven Greek kings ruled in succession, the eighth was to snatch the throne from three candidates who had more right to it than he did. This king, Antiochus Epiphanes, provoked the Maccabean War. The Book of Daniel predicted that God would miraculously destroy Antiochus Epiphanes, resurrect the righteous dead, and set up an everlasting, worldwide Israelite Empire three and a half years after the desecration of the Temple; in other words, the Messianic Empire should have begun in June of 163 BC. Since these predictions largely came true until the middle of the war and failed thereafter, we know that the author lived in Seleucid times, not Babylonian times.

A good read on the subject...
The Failure of Daniel's Prophecies

 

1st line of my posted was "Science viewpoint"..

Miracles and science are not compatible because miracles are supernatural and do not follow the laws of nature. Declaring something a miracle would mean you would say "The universe didn't follow the laws of nature during this event". Science doesn't do that. If it observes an event that it cannot explain with the known laws of nature, it assumes that said laws are flawed or incomplete and must be amended to include the new event.

If science were to declare an event a miracle, they would be effectively saying "We will never find a natural explation for this event". Or, to put it more bluntly, declaring something a miracle is the epistemic equivalent of giving up.

What would be the status of laws of nature if miracles were actually to occur? First, would they cease to be genuine laws? If we say that a generalization that is violated by some event cannot be a genuine law of nature, then it would follow that miracles are logically impossible.

Following that "seeing or knowing perfectly the future" as in prophecy, is in itself a miracle. If time is following a script or is circular then free will is a false assumption, else history is created at the moment because we have free will and prophecy is a false assumption because is is impossible to be seen. And if you cant see it then its impossible to 100% reliably predict it, you can make a calculated guess only.

All that said, if "miracles" is a false assumption then so is half of the bible.

BTW. The science viewpoint is the only viewpoint that manifest hard evidence. Christian viewpoints seem to have a problems with that, seeing by faith and not facts.

 

Since my education, training and experience is in the law, specifically criminal law, I see the term evidence differently.

There are types of evidences, all given value based upon certain criteria. Many scientific hypothesies and theories are based on little evidence, or none. They are held by faith. The singularity before the big bang, the brane theory of the universe, the first living organism from non living chemicals, are just a few. Science has itś faith, I have mine.

 

Misunderstanding of the books... again.
It is a fact that we have people reading in a book and believing they understand it, and then projecting their views into the reading.
How could one not find problems when they do so.

It is like those who read the books, and then date them based on what they read. Why? They just don't like the idea that anyone is a true prophet - telling the future before it happens.

There will always be unbelievers, who have opinions, and there will still be believers. Nothing changes by opinions.

 

The DS scrolls have nothing to do with the gospels being reliable. They do however show the Christianity was much more diverse than we knew and Gnostic Christians (many who believed the resurrection was only a metaphor) was at least 50%.

The leading scholar on the scrolls is Elaine Pagels and in her book The Lost Gospels she clearly shows that the now orthodox Christians were considered heretics and was formed by power hungry bishops.

The RC church completely lied when they came out with that statement in the 1990s about how the scrolls supported modern Christianity. Scholarship finally told the truth once they got a chance to study the gospels.

 

Yeah yeah, I meant 2nd century BC. Obviously the OT is from OT times.
It's silly that people think the NT wasn't written and taken directly from the OT.
Of course prophecies from the OT were fulfilled? The NT was written to look like that?

We know the NT was a re-write of he OT.

Here we can see where Luke borrowed material from Kings:
at 23:00

 

I don't get it?

First they just said "commonly believed", not proven.

But also, so one of the anonymous NT writers mentioned something real? In superhero movies they often show NY city as well as many other accurate cultural references. That doesn't mean that Iron Man is a real person?

Again, every single possible mention of Jesus is covered here by experts, including a pastor who believes in some form of Christianity:


the consensus is clear, we cannot know if the gospels are reliable by historical fact.

 

All of those science ideas are based on mathematical realities. No scientist has faith in them. They look for predictions that the model makes and then find ways to test them.
Once a theory fails in it's predictions or is replaced by a more likely theory scientists abandom the old theory.

What they never do is say "I know science is telling me this theory is probably wrong but I'm going to keep having faith in it". That never happens. Even if one scientist holds onto an idea for emotional reasons the next generation has no such attachments. Like with Hoyle and his steady-state universe.

Conjectures and possibly hypothesis could be based on little or no evidence but a theory has to have some formal backing. If it doesn't it isn't a theory, it's a conjecture and treated as such.

 

Did I say anything about the Dead Sea Scrolls having anything to do with the reliability of the Gospels? I don't recall saying that.
Are you certain you read the post carefully?

 

We cannot know a lot of things, that's why atheist believe what they do, and Christians believe what they do.
However, the opinions of atheist are not the Christian Greek Scriptures. Did you read the information I posted?
It can be confirmed.

 

What is that?

No doubt there is some believing or putting faith in a hypothesis, and there be many of scientist or professors who will not admit that there is a thread of faith or belief in their work. Many of those in the end abandon a fruitless endeavor realizing they put more faith than reason and wasted valuable time. Read biography of Einstein, he had to abandon alot of work and change alot of his thinking. Science doesn't claim to be infallible, it's ever evolving with new discoveries as they come into the light as you might say. That's a major difference between sciences faith and religions faith.

 

Richard Carrier is way to far radical on the side of mythisist trying to prove Jesus never existed. He nauseates even atheists listening to him because of his obsessed hatred of Christianity. I would recommend to read or watch lectures of Bart Ehrman, you'll get a lot more church and manuscript history from a scholarly perspective.

 

As one example, the Bible predicted Israel would be a Jewish nation again in (inside the Gentile calendar) 1948 CE.

 

Faith isn´t evidence. Evidence leads to faith.

 

Science uses a set of rules as to how and why a certain piece of information has evidentiary value. Using those rules, an eyewitness account of a bank robbery would be of no value. Science and itś methodology leads to certain interpretations, within the framework of that methodology. Science is not the measuring stick of the entire human experience.
Tell me, do you believe abiogenesis occurred ? If so, why ? It has never been observed, itś mechanism is unknown, the environment in which it allegedly occurred is unknown, the alleged precursor chemicals are unknown as is their mixture proportions. Thousands of scientists believe in it with fervor, with not one reason to do so other than faith.

 

The alleged lost Gospel are all newer than the canonical Gospels, in some cases by centuries.

There is no doubt that all she postulates doesn´t apply to the Apostolic Church, detailed in the Bible, nor the immediate Post Apostolic Church from which letters show the canon about 80% in use.

Gnosticism always was a minority sect, proclaimed heretical by Paul an Apostle, acknowledged as being so by the other Apostles.

The issues at the council of Nicea were between Arianism and Trinitarianism, Gnosticism had virtually ceased to exist. c. 300 AD

Yes, as predicted in the NT, the Church began radically changing for base reasons, it would have been unrecognizable by the Apostles earlier than 300 AD.

 

The Church actually didn't change that much except for the fact that since it became the official religion of the Roman Empire, and because it grew so rapidly it had to make some pretty significant adjustments.

Where the Church really got into trouble is especially when it aligned itself with the secular powers, often for good reason, but still that created serious problems both in terms of secular influence but also materialism as it became a way for all too many clergy to acquire wealth and power. Centuries later the Church countered by insisting on celibacy and, eventually, limiting income. The monastic orders also helped along this line by setting examples, including many that took vows of poverty.