Kevin's Watch

Rawedge Rim wrote: I'm not assuming anything. I merely stated that it is likely that a 30 year old or so Rabbi named Yeshua who was probably crucified sometime around the year 30 AD or so by the Romans, possibly at the behest of the existing Jewish authorities.

As for Exodus, well, a party of Hebrews might have revolted and ran off back then, but I doubt it was the hundreds of thousands as decribed in the Old Testament, as I believe that that many wanderers in the desert might have been noticed by others in the area.

Some have suggested that the town of Nazareth did not actually exist in the first century when the Gospel record indicates Jesus and His family lived there. It is true that the Jewish historian Flavius Josephus does not mention Nazareth in his Jewish history. Fortunately an archeological discovery made in 1955 under the foundations of the Church of the Annunciation in Nazareth indicated the town was inhabited before the Christian era. A third century marble inscription found at the seat of Roman government in the city of Caesarea appears to be a tablet naming the town of Nazareth.

in Nazareth-The Town That Theology Built was wrote:1955-1960 Excavations conducted by Father Bellarmino Bagatti (Professor, Studium Biblicum Franciscanum at Flagellation, Jerusalem). Beneath his own church and adjoining land, Bagatti discovered numerous caves and hollows. Some of these caves have obviously had a great deal of use, over many centuries. Most are tombs, many from the Bronze Age. Others have been adapted for use as water cisterns, as vats for oil or as 'silos' for grain. Apparently, there were indications that Nazareth had been 'refounded' in Hasmonean times after a long period when the area had been deserted. Yet overwhelmingly, archaeological evidence from before the second century is funerary. Obliged to admit a dearth of suitable evidence of habitation, none the less, Bagatti was able conclude that 1st century AD Nazareth had been 'a small agricultural village settled by a few dozen families.'

With a great leap of faith the partisan diggers declared what they had found was 'the village of Jesus, Mary & Joseph' – though they had not found a village at all, and certainly no evidence of particular individuals. The finds were consistent, in fact, with isolated horticultural activity, close to a necropolis of long-usage.

Cybrweez wrote:Watch out kins, you're about to face the wrath - links to other books!!

Seven Words wrote:I didn't take Rawedge as angry. Mildly annoyed,yes, and justifiably so. I unintentionally misrepresented his position. He clarified, and I felt an apology was due. Said apology has been rendered, discourse never became uncivil. Courtesy and mutual respect for the win.

Rawedge Rim wrote:...I find it unlikely that so many apparent followers of someone who actually didn't exist as a human man would have martyred themselves for his teachings if he had not existed.

Kinslaughterer wrote:That's the funny thing about archaeology...no matter what someone wishes to hide, whoever they are or whatever banal little item it can tell us a great deal about a culture, a period of time, or even an individual.

Take the Garbage Project for instance. Bill Rathje (I think he's still with us) out of Arizona began recording the garbage of modern folks. He had grad students take the trash from suburban Phoenix and Tucson (The GP was much larger and long term, this was just a small piece) and then spoke to and recorded information about the people. One of the questions was "How much alcohol do you consume in a week?" Nearly everyone lied and underestimated some significantly. On average they were drinking 3 to 5 more beverages of beer, wine, or harder stuff.

Interestingly, virtually no archaeological evidence of the Hebrew enslavement in Egypt exists. 3500 years is a long time but the arid climate and stone, metal, and bone would remain. Its looking more likely that the Hebrews were in fact the Hyksos who invaded Egypt and ultimately defeated as the first noticable Hebrew peoples appear about 100-200 years after the Hyksos defeat.

The point of this book, in other words, is that the next best thing to being really inside Christendom is to be really outside it. And a particular point of it is that the popular critics of Christianity are not really outside it. They are on a debatable ground, in every sense of the term. They are doubtful in their very doubts.

It was the anti-clerical and agnostic world that was always prophesying the advent of universal peace; it is that world that was, or should have been, abashed and confounded by the advent of universal war. As for the general view that the Church was discredited by the War--they might as well say that the Ark was discredited by the Flood. When the world goes wrong, it proves rather that the Church is right. The Church is justified, not because her children do not sin, but because they do. But that marks their mood about the whole religious tradition they are in a state of reaction against it. It is well with the boy when he lives on his father's land; and well with him again when he is far enough from it to look back on it and see it as a whole. But these people have got into an intermediate state, have fallen into an intervening valley from which they can see neither the heights beyond them nor the heights behind. They cannot get out of the penumbra of Christian controversy. They cannot be Christians and they can not leave off being Anti-Christians. Their whole atmosphere is the atmosphere of a reaction: sulks, perversity, petty criticism. They still live in the shadow of the faith and have lost the light of the faith.

Now the best relation to our spiritual home is to be near enough to love it. But the next best is to be far enough away not to hate it. It is the contention of these pages that while the best judge of Christianity is a Christian, the next best judge would be something more like a Confucian. The worst judge of all is the man now most ready with his judgements; the ill-educated Christian turning gradually into the ill-tempered agnostic, entangled in the end of a feud of which he never understood the beginning, blighted with a sort of hereditary boredom with he knows not what, and already weary of hearing what he has never heard. He does not judge Christianity calmly as a Confucian would; he does not judge it as he would judge Confucianism. He cannot by an effort of fancy set the Catholic Church thousands of miles away in strange skies of morning and judge it as impartially as a Chinese pagoda. It is said that the great St. Francis Xavier, who very nearly succeeded in setting up the Church there as a tower overtopping all pagodas, failed partly because his followers were accused by their fellow missionaries of representing the Twelve Apostles with the garb or attributes of Chinamen. But it would be far better to see them as Chinamen, and judge them fairly as Chinamen, than to see them as featureless idols merely made to be battered by iconoclasts; or rather as cockshies to be pelted by empty-handed cockneys. It would be better to see the whole thing as a remote Asiatic cult; the mitres of its bishops as the towering head dresses of mysterious bonzes; its pastoral staffs as the sticks twisted like serpents carried in some Asiatic procession; to see the prayer book as fantastic as the prayer-wheel and the Cross as crooked as the Swastika. Then at least we should not lose our temper as some of the sceptical critics seem to lose their temper, not to mention their wits. Their anti-clericalism has become an atmosphere, an atmosphere of negation and hostility from which they cannot escape. Compared with that, it would be better to see the whole thing as something belonging to another continent, or to another planet. It would be more philosophical to stare indifferently at bonzes than to be perpetually and pointlessly grumbling at bishops. It would be better to walk past a church as if it were a pagoda than to stand permanently in the porch, impotent either to go inside and help or to go outside and forget. For those in whom a mere reaction has thus become an obsession, I do seriously recommend the imaginative effort of conceiving the Twelve Apostles as Chinamen. In other words, I recommend these critics to try to do as much justice to Christian saints as if they were Pagan sages.