Ravi
Diamond Member
Bingo!As you are not Catholic, then Catholic commitments do not bind you.
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Bingo!As you are not Catholic, then Catholic commitments do not bind you.
It was built by priests and the architectural designs were Roman and Greek---as were all of his buildings, aqueducts and the port. He was made a vassal king--via the Senate. All he had to do was to pay taxes directly to Rome. And petition if any moves were made to place anything that interfered with Jewish law. He wasn't well liked as he was primarily considered too Roman and his buildings were too Hellenized and, of course, the taxes which cause many people to sell their ancestral land. But he built more than anyone for both ego and to appease.Ok hold on...I haven't even read the rest of your post yet, although I am looking forward to the entertainment value. The Temple was not destroyed in an effort to eradicate Judaism and establish paganism among the Jews. It was destroyed as a "fuck you" to the Jews for rebelling. As I said...the Roman's didn't give a fuck so long as the Jews paid their taxes and didn't start shit. Well guess what....they started shit, didn't they? And the Romans did what the Romans did best. They said "oh...you are going to get bitchy, well how do like THAT mother fucker?"
I never claimed otherwise. You're making shit up. The point was: who had it built?
Wait...wait...wait!!!!! Are you suggesting that the Romans built the Temple of Jerusalem or any part of it?!?!?!?!? This just keeps getting better and better!!! It would have desecrated the Temple for a Roman or any non-Jew to have any part of that at all including funding it!!!! This is precisely why Pilate met with the Sanhedrin on neutral ground. His mere presence in the Temple would desecrate it and if they went inside his palace they would desecrate themselves. This is why money had to be changed out during Passover...so Roman coins would not desecrate the treasury. OMFG what a total dolt!
Ok now where was I? Oh yes.....
Lack of literacy =/= lack of textuality.
Ahem....so you are suggesting that while there were virtually no schools and only 3% of the population could read and they were the rich, that Jewish peasants were well versed in the classics (Homer, Plato, etc). How? Who is going to teach it to them? Or are you suggesting that the family would get up at sunrise, go out and tend the fields or lay brick, or whatever...work all day long, come home, have a meal, and then with the small amount of time they had before it was time to go to bed, Dad (a Jewish peasant with no education) would sit the kids down and start teaching them Plato. He wouldn't teach them Jewish history. He wouldn't teach them Torah. he wouldn't teach them stuff that had real impact in their lives or had to do with their own culture...no...he would teach them Greco-Roman culture. The culture of the occupiers. The traditions of the occupiers. Dad, the uneducated, Jewish peasant was teaching them advanced Greco-Roman philosophy.
Good Lord! I am wondering just how far you will go to defend this little fantasy of yours. I would suggest you have been brainwashed but a pre-requisite for that is a brain.
Most of it is psuedepigraphy. Scholars still accept the undisputed epistles of Paul as being authentic. At the very least they appear strongly to have been written by the same guy where the Pastoral Epistles and the others clearly were not.
Regardless, this does nothing to establish your claim that Catholicism is the original form of Christianity. Catholicism was defined according to the Church under Constantine and subsequent Emperors. Yet the New Testament as we know it today is what they endorsed. If they are all pseudepigraphic, as you claim, and are completely historically inaccurate as you seem to be implying, then what you are saying is that Catholicism got it totally wrong because Catholic doctrine is based in large part on those books. If Catholicism got it wrong, then it means is is in contrast to what the disciples believed and taught, meaning it was not the original form of Christianity.
It was built by priests and the architectural designs were Roman and Greek---as were all of his buildings, aqueducts and the port. He was made a vassal king--via the Senate. All he had to do was to pay taxes directly to Rome. And petition if any moves were made to place anything that interfered with Jewish law. He wasn't well liked as he was primarily considered too Roman and his buildings were too Hellenized and, of course, the taxes which cause many people to sell their ancestral land. But he built more than anyone for both ego and to appease.
First of all, you have at best a guestimation for 3%. It is disputed and utilizing sources that simply repeat the same arguments advanced by the primary authors does not advance your cause. Second you are trying to equate school with literacy because you can't manage to think of this era beyond the world that you live in today. The underlying theory here is that writing requires an organizational thought process that would be considered intellectually superior to the knowledge that was known at that time. I say that specifically because the later arguments proposed are that one could read but not write.
Greco-Roman philosophy is only considered advanced NOW. Why? Because you don't have daily contact in any recognizable form. It isn't necessary for dear old dad to crack books open after dinner. By your standards these people are one step shy of drooling idiots.
So, we know that that these people are not as isolated as you make them out to be. They could speak more than one language and would have encountered this language continuously. Speaking a language is vastly different from the rules for writing. We also know that there were Jewish-Greek marriages and divorces. We have established contact via occupying forces, trade, markets, marriage, pilgrimages, travel etc.
All of it is psuedepigraphy. I can find an equal amount if not more scholars that support that. You don't have any disciples. You don't have any of that. No historical Jesus. Nada. Peter travels from Antioch to Rome for Rome to be considered a higher rank. There is no Peter. Constantine added militarism and nationalization. Catholicism was already in existence. The arguments are Greek arguments. You don't have any disciples to contrast......at all. They don't exist. They most definitely are historically inaccurate.
Pick up a book outside of the bible.
So he built Greek style complexes. So what? He was an Arab and Edomite and he was rich. He was a Roman ass-kisser who wanted to show he was just as good as them. What the hell does that have to do with what the common Jew knew about Greek philosophy? NOTHING!
I would say that most people today are one step shy of drooling idiots (and you are doing little to dispel that opinion) and they are far more educated than people in antiquity. So what does that make them?
We know nothing of the sort. You have merely made that claim. If they spoke more than one language it would have been very rudimentary. For example, I can speak enough Spanish to make my desires and expectations known to my Spanish-speaking employees, but there is no way I could have an in-depth conversation with them on even a basic topic in Spanish, let alone write an entire book in Spanish. That would be the degree of command that most rural Jews had of Greek. They might be able to say "I will sell it to you for five bucks" but they sure aint going to be able to engage in discussion or write a book.
OH! I get it now...you are a mythicist! Why didn't you just say that to begin with? Now I know what I am dealing with....which means we have just advanced to a new level of comedy from Dsir. So according to you...none of it existed. Jesus was a myth, Peter was a myth, blah, blah, blah. Even Bart fucking Ehrman (who is generally considered a religious antagonist) wrote an entire book saying essentially "ok, let's not go too far. The mythicist claims are bullshit too".
Scholarship overwhelmingly accepts the undisputed epistles of Paul as authentic. Paul writes that he was persecuting those who were preaching Christianity. Well that means SOMEONE was preaching it. Well who might that be? Who is going to make that up? See the problem with mythicism is that they don't understand how embarrassing Jesus was to the Jews. The Messiah got killed by the Romans?!?!? This is totally opposite of what the Messiah was supposed to do. The Criterion of Embarrassment gives a level of legitimacy to the historical Jesus because no Jew is going to make up a story about a Jewish Messiah who got killed by the Romans. On top of which, Polycarp apparently knew James, the brother of Jesus, and if James didn't have a brother named Jesus I imagine James would have been aware of that.
Sigh...mythicists are nearly as bad a fundamentalist Christians.