I'm sorry if this is blunt, but your ignorance of the subject matter and your blind allegiance to both the Bible, and to highly questionable claims by Christian apologists whose paid job is to convince you that Christianity is true, is very worrying. But it is also very much par for the course among fundamentalist Christians. Thank you for the dialogue, it's been a while since I interacted with this material and it was a good reminder why I'm no longer a Christian.
Ah, I see now from the link you provided. So the citation is to a work by Ludemann in 1994. Do you know who Ludemann is? He is a NT scholar who started out a Christian, and eventually left Christianity because he realized over time how baseless the claims of the religion are. In 1999 he came out with a book called, "The Great Deception: And What Jesus Really Said and Did," "in which he argued that only about five per cent of the sayings attributed to Jesus are genuine and the historical evidence does not support the claims of traditional Christianity."
Gerd Lüdemann - Wikipedia
So the reference is out of date, and appears to have been disavowed by the very scholar who said it. Thanks for asking me to check the references, that was helpful.
Paul explains what the gospel is in 1 Cor 15: it's the death, burial, and resurrection of Jesus. He says explicitly in Galatians that he received the gospel from direct revelation, not from any man. So yes, he may have been
aware of the
claims of Christians prior to his conversion, but what actually convinced him was not "historical evidence," but a vision of Jesus talking to him from heaven.
Again you misunderstand the burden of proof. It's on you, not me.
My whole point was that they provided no evidence to examine. If they had provided it, I would have examined it. But they didn't.
My comments were that these gentlemen aren't taken seriously outside of conservative Christian circles. This is true. Sorry to break it to you.
You do know that we don't know who wrote the Gospel of John, right? And that it appears to have gone through a couple of editors to get the version we have now, right? And that it was written decades after the Synoptics, which were written decades after the alleged events in question, right?
Sure. Compare Mark 1:1-11 and Matthew 3, as one obvious example (there are many).
Not my job. If you claim there
was a virgin birth, it's your job to demonstrate it. For the 20th time.
LOL wait a minute. You think that a virgin claiming they supernaturally got empregnated by God
isn't a fantastical story? That's totally mundane and expected, to you? What in the world does a fantastical story look like, to you?
You're just projecting because your evidence is poor. So you're shifting the burden of proof to me. Sorry, won't work.
I'm sorry, you think we
do have access to a non-Markan source that informed Matthew? Where is it? Send me a link so I can read it.
If you can explain why John's unique content had to come from somewhere other than the author's head, please tell me.
For the 25th time. Justin Martyr is not a Jewish account. It's a Christian account of what one Jew said, maybe. That's not a Jewish account. And it's 100 years too late to be relevant.
The TY is centuries too late to be relevant.
The audience can be the judge of that, I suppose. I've responded to everything you've said, point by point, while you've ignored whole portions of what I said. I'll leave it to the reader to decide who's ignoring things.
I would strongly recommend that you do some peer-reviewed academic reading of Biblical studies literature and lay off the apologetics. Thanks again.