I was conceding that it isn't known one way or the other whether he did or didn't since no primary source from the time period exists, however based on historical context, it was known that the disciples said it far more often than Jesus did, according to primary sources from them, letters they sent to people they were trying to convert and such.
I still have a sneaking suspicion you've confined yourself to a particular subset of books about Christianity, due to personal prior bias (I am not sure if you are aware of your tone, but you consistently sound like you have an underlying emotional bias going on here against Christianity).
Just to be clear, I grew up within Christianity but am currently WAY undecided about my faith, due to my own criticisms of what beliefs are involved and what can be said with certainty vs. not said with any certainty. I feel like I have been cast in the role of the "mainsteam Christian" position because you are much further on the anti-side... but if you're going to picture my actual stance in your mind, you should consider it more "agnostic."
I don't care whether or not you call them priests or not, Jesus called himself a rabbi,
Doesn't
rabbi mean "teacher" -- not a priest per se -- and aren't those different things?
The writer of Hebrews (anonymous) compares Jesus to Melchizadek, a mysterious priest figure from the Old Testament who is seemingly the representative mediator priest and a supposed foreshadowing of Jesus. But I don't remember off-hand that Jesus refers to himself as a priest, merely as "God's son" and/or equivalent to God (he calls himself "I Am" at one point -- that means little to us nowadays, but was very blasphemous stuff to the Jews at the time, Jesus was calling himself Yahweh!).
It might be a small point; but since I have no good way to evaluate your very very broad statements (there's little to react again), it weakens your credibility in my eyes in terms of background knowledge of what you are criticizing, so I'm not inclined to just accept your other statements.
my point is that there is evidence Jesus 1st disciple was Mary Magdalene and that the other male disciples couldn't handle it, especially Peter and that is why she was removed from the bible as a prominent figure.
That's complete conjecture on your part. Every so often, another such "theory" is floated in the press like some new wonderful revelation, making a splash, and a few years later it fades away without much impact on anything whatsoever. (Are you going to quote Dan Brown next?)
If you'd to give a VARIETY of sources for such a supposition, feel free -- and I would hope they are sources that would cover a spectrum of scholars (from the conversatives to the liberals).
The four gospels, by the way, usually refer to women in very positive terms and as exemplars of faith. Progressive for the time, at least.
I don't care how you decide to define a word, the English language has survived because there is a consensus on what a word means, otherwise we don't have a language if the words are definable in any way we choose.
Yes, I see. You're the defender of the English language now... which has
what bearing exactly on this discussion?
You're claiming only that the observable is real. I'm saying that the observable is a subset of the real (and it could even be the totality of the real, true, if it's really "all there is"), and that the real includes both the observable and the unobservable... and that the unobservable unfortunately isn't really open to the scientific method and could be only discovered by process of revelation. (In that sense, it's an "irrational" process.) THat's what we were discussing.
You know, we're trying to get on common ground here, so we can both understand what each other is saying. People who want to converse usually say, "Oh, I see now what you mean; I don't particularly refer to it that way or might use different words, but okay, here's my issue with your supposition... etc."
Instead, you just dicker with me about the dictionary definition. That doesn't give me a good feeling about the validity of your viewpoint.
You can call it negatively charged, but how to other religions describe each other especially, "primitive" ones as superstitious, time to turn the mirror back on yourself.
Excuse me -- Did I do that? Or are you lumping me into a category without bothering to figure out what category I'm in first? You apparently are reading a LOT into my comments.
If someone wanted to say something "new" then I would be willing to consider it, so far all I have heard are arguments I have heard before. So I am responding to them in the ways I have determined to be logical, if you think I am close minded then show me something I haven't considered before and I will ponder it and see how it actually relates to logic and whether or not it makes sense.
I'd suggest actually going into things with an open mind and seeing why lots of scholars might actually approach scripture differently than you do.
I was just in Borders picking up a title on the development of the church (and Christian doctrine) from the time of Christ until today [I am currently exploring what views are held today in Christian doctrine that actually evolved over time, rather than being held by the original members of the faith] and there was an entire row of books there, any of which could help give you a broader viewpoint. I don't need to list them all for you, you need to make some sort of effort on your own.
(I would wager that not
all of the scholars represented there are complete imbeciles or stooges or proselytizers -- I'm betting a fair number could probably argue circles around both you and me in regards to these topics.) So go look, if you're interested.
First of all, I was a history major in school, and I understand "historicity" of something quite well. The Old Testament was written, 300 years after Israelites came to Greece, it was originally written in Greek, and therefore is not a primary source due to the fact that it was written after the time it was chronicling.
Hmmm, I see. The Old Testament scriptures were written in Greek (the Septuagint, I assume you mean?) and then translated into Hebrew.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Septuagint said:
The
Septuagint (
IPA: ['sɛptuədʒɪnt]), or simply "
LXX", is the name commonly given in the West to the
Koine Greek version of the
Old Testament, translated in stages between the
3rd to
1st century BC in
Alexandria.
It is the oldest of several ancient translations of the
Hebrew Bible into
Greek. The name means "seventy" in Latin and derives from a tradition that seventy-two
Hellenized Jewish scholars (LXX being the nearest round number) translated the
Pentateuch (or
Torah) from
Hebrew into Greek for one of the
Ptolemaic kings,
Ptolemy II Philadelphus, 285-246 BC. As the work of translation went on gradually, and new books were added to the collection, the compass of the Greek Bible came to be somewhat indefinite. The Pentateuch always maintained its pre-eminence as the basis of the
canon; but the prophetic collection changed its aspect by having various
hagiographa incorporated into it. Some of the newer works, those called
anagignoskomena in Greek, are not included in the Hebrew canon. Among these books are
Maccabees and the
Wisdom of Ben Sira. Also, the LXX version of some works, like
Daniel and
Esther, are longer than the Hebrew.
[1] Several of the later books apparently were composed in Greek....
You can take it up with wikipedia.
The same can be said about the New Testament, the first recorded copy with it in it is from the 4th or 5th century, so again not a primary source.
Curiouser and curiouser....
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_testament said:
Most critical scholars agree on the dating of the majority of the New Testament, except for the epistles and books that they consider to be
pseudepigraphical (i.e., those thought not to be written by their traditional authors). For the Gospels they tend to date Mark no earlier than
65 and no later than
75. Matthew is dated between
70 and
85. Luke is usually placed within
80 to
95. The earliest of the books of the New Testament was
First Thessalonians, an epistle of
Paul, written probably in
51, or possibly
Galatians in
49 according to one of two theories of its writing. Of the pseudepigraphical epistles, Christian scholars tend to place them somewhere between
70 and
150, with
Second Peter usually being the latest...
To give you the benefit of a doubt, I am going to assume you mean a "compiled copy of the New Testament" rather than the individual books, which were all written at different times and passed around and transcribed on numerous occasions and eventually became a canon that was codified sometime in the mid/late-300's ... although it was informally accepted before that.
Did you read any of the proof I provided? There is compelling evidence for the bible being a collection of myths, especially the Old Testament, check into ancient Sumerian and Mesopotamian myth you will see quite a few parallels between the two.
I've actually read some of these myths. There's still argument apparently over what preceded what, whether something is truly derivative or simply developing on parallel tracks, and so forth.
As I've said, some of the writing of the OT IS very mythic in nature, or a moralistic story (such as Job or Jonah -- both seem to be satire describing extreme situations in order to make a point). But why on earth are you lumping Proverbs (a book of wisdom) and 1&2 Kings /Chronicles (history books) and other books together into the "myth" category. If you didn't mean to, you should clarify -- you refer to the Bible [i.e., the WHOLE Bible] to be a collection of myths, and don't make any mention of the non-mythic elements. Do you really mean to do that?
None of the ideas I am expressing are mine alone, many other historians have come to these conclusions based on the facts...
Yes, the veritable "cast of thousands" who support your viewpoint. I stand corrected. (And the "countless other historians" -- whee, I can do this too! -- who disagree with your anonymous cast apparently are hacks?)
... no one yet has been able to refute without question, that the bible is anything more than a collection of parables designed to help a society get along better together. There are cultural, political, and religious stories and laws in it. So there are some historical uses for the bible in studying a culture as they saw themselves, but as a literal historical document, that is just ridiculous.
Well, I never said every jot and tittle of the Bible was a literal historical document, nor do I think any serious scholars (even the conservative ones you seem to lump in with the fundamentalists!) say such things. It's obvious that the different books comprise many different forms of literature. I just wish you'd take a finer-toothed comb to your research and delineate more clearly between what seems plausible and what doesn't, rather than making sweeping criticisms that weaken themselves.