The Historicity of Jesus - The Spread of Christianity in the 1st Century

[Swing low, sweet chariot. Comin' for to carry me home.]

Yes and whoever wrote Corinthians was facing the same debates I'm giving you! Of course they paint those who don't follow Christianity or have "heretical" views as deficient! It's not like anyone read that anyway with the literacy rate between 3%-5%. Those who heard the gospel and letters simply heard and didn't read it. Therefore, those passages were spoken in ways of swaying listeners rather than what we are capable of reading today.

  So, the letters mean something different depending on whether you have them read to you, verses reading them yourself?!

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can a mod please check this guy's ip?...he is displaying Derekish tendencies.

[Swing low, sweet chariot. Comin' for to carry me home.]

  So, the letters mean something different depending on whether you have them read to you, verses reading them yourself?!

You just spun what I said. If it's read directly to you yes, but it wasn't read word for word.

and the hits just keep on coming...You know, for someone claiming to be educated, your imagination sure does lead you to make a lot of wild and baseless claims.

[Swing low, sweet chariot. Comin' for to carry me home.]

 So, the letters mean something different depending on whether you have them read to you, verses reading them yourself?!

You just spun what I said. If it's read directly to you yes, but it wasn't read word for word.

and the hits just keep on coming...You know, for someone claiming to be educated, your imagination sure does lead you to make a lot of wild and baseless claims.

The base is obvious to anybody who's ever made any study of information dissemination in primarily oral societies at all. Even if the ruling class is literate, a society that's 95-97% oral is primarily oral for purposes of looking at the spread of a populist religious movement.

 Yo, doesn't matter if the society is 99% illiterate, doesn't mean the letters can't be read word for word.  before my kids could read, I read their books to them word for word.  the only time I didn't is when a book's vocabulary was over their heads...but there are many oral discussions documented in the NT (the gospels and Acts are full of quotes from these types of discussions), and they’re all at the same level as the written epistles.  

After all, relaying the Gospel doesn’t require a highfalutin vocabulary…unless of course, you’re trying to explain the Gospel to a bunch of theological “scholars” who are blind to the scripture and can’t argue their way out of a paper bag.

1Cor 2: 1 “When I came to you, brothers, I did not come with eloquence or superior wisdom as I proclaimed to you the testimony about God. 2 For I resolved to know nothing while I was with you except Jesus Christ and him crucified. 3 I came to you in weakness and fear, and with much trembling. 4 My message and my preaching were not with wise and persuasive words, but with a demonstration of the Spirit’s power, 5 so that your faith might not rest on men’s wisdom, but on God’s power. 6 We do, however, speak a message of wisdom among the mature, but not the wisdom of this age or of the rulers of this age, who are coming to nothing.”

Colossians 4:16 After this letter has been read to you, see that it is also read in the church of the Laodiceans and that you in turn read the letter from Laodicea.

1 Thessalonians 5:27 I charge you before the Lord to have this letter read to all the brothers and sisters.

In other words, the gospel was given in the every day language of the common man, and the letters were to be read to all believers.

Don’t you hate it when the scripture has every argument against it already covered?!

[Swing low, sweet chariot. Comin' for to carry me home.]

They COULD have been read word for word, but the odds of this occuring in every case is so low that its absolutely impossible. Even if every literate missionary did the word for word duty (again, even if optomistic, you have to say at most 99% did; someone had to have skipped out on something somewhere or else you're saying there is no such thing as human error or free will), the remaining 95 percent of illiterates would not have spread it the same way. A man listening to the missionary who goes home and tells his brother, his wife, and his kids about it would only remember the juicy details (the cruxification, ressurrection, and promise to return soon) and none of the rest.

granted, but Tidewater was saying there are different meanings to the epistles depending if someone read it as opposed to having it read to them…as if the words somehow take on different meanings.

[Swing low, sweet chariot. Comin' for to carry me home.]

  So, the letters mean something different depending on whether you have them read to you, verses reading them yourself?!

You just spun what I said. If it's read directly to you yes, but it wasn't read word for word.

and the hits just keep on coming...You know, for someone claiming to be educated, your imagination sure does lead you to make a lot of wild and baseless claims.
 

This is rhetoric. The problem is you keep using the Bible to argue points that it was never meant to argue.

In other words, the attitudes of the Apostles as expressed in their own words within their own letters, don’t match the attitudes required by your half-baked alternative-motive theories, which you studied during your years of “education”.

What next?  Are you going to accuse me of murder simply because my rebuttal is killing you?

[Swing low, sweet chariot. Comin' for to carry me home.]

It's worth pointing out that (this is second-hand info from two of my friends who have learned Greek) while the Gospels are written at a very low reading level (the Gospels are apparently very beginner-friendly books in Greek due to rather simple structure), St. Paul used a considerably more advanced vocabulary and structure.  I've seen this repeated elsewhere and it makes a lot of sense if you accept St. Paul's background as a highly-educated member of the provincial elite as compared to a far more humble background for the Gospel writers.  

granted, but that doesn't mean Paul's choice of vocabulary was too advanced for his letters to be read aloud verbatim within the churches.  

And since Paul explicitly instructed to have his letters disseminated to the common Christian, and since he was schooled as you yourself admitted, you don’t think he was smart enough to write in a manner understandable to the whole church, especially after making the point that he did NOT preach with eloquence speech?

So, here you have Paul: highly educated, trained in debate and communication within the Sanhedrin, yet after his conversion to Christianity stating explicitly that he purposely does not preach using eloquent speech in order not to lead people into putting vain faith in man’s intelligence, and writing letters that he himself said were intended for consumption by the entire church…

…obviously, this man is going to be smart enough not to write with vocabulary over the heads of common Christians of his day.

[Swing low, sweet chariot. Comin' for to carry me home.]

my pastor is a lot like Paul - my pastor is extremely articulate (the most articulate person I have ever met) and an extremely good speaker...yet he is just as comfortable giving seminars to the management of the Fortune 50 companies as he is in talking to common laborers who attend his church.

but he never comes across as pretentious, and never uses unnecessarily high vocabulary, and he is always thinking from the standpoint of his audience.  But, even when he is lowering his vocabulary, the intelligence behind the structure of this speech is always present.

And if you read Paul's letters and his antics in the book of Acts, you'll see Paul acutely aware of the need to communicate effectively to his audience, and repeatedly bends over backwards to do so.  In fact, Paul even repeatedly instructs the church to make sure they are speaking in a manner which clearly communicates the gospel.

For Tidewater to say Paul’s letters are too lofty for the common illiterate is contrary to the attitude Paul presents in his letters, the stated purpose of his letters, and the actual content of his letters.

[Swing low, sweet chariot. Comin' for to carry me home.]

Tidewater, let me walk you through how I see your argument, from my own standpoint…

To me, there is a night and day difference between A) actually being a student of the bible and B) having a degree in theories about the history of the writing of the bible.  Now, you would think A would be a prerequisite of B, as it should be.  But, from my experience dealing with people like you, that is almost never the case.  

And, to me, it would seem most logical that if you’re going to come up with theories to explain the motivations of NT writers, you would FIRST study the attitudes that the writers expressed in their own writings, since, after all, their own letters are the most direct evidence of their own attitudes.

I’ve been on this forum for 10 years this coming April, and as many of the regulars can tell you, I spend a lot of study examining the logical tendencies of Jesus and the Apostles in regard to what they thought about scripture, how they formulated their arguments, and how they attempted to communicate across a diverse church audience that was dispersed in geography as well as in language.

So, when you come on here claiming a motivation and attitude of the NT writers that is completely contrary to the motivation and attitude I’ve witnessed while studying the letters of those writers within the NT, it’s a pretty trivial task for me to point out the inconsistencies between the attitude of what they actually wrote and what you’re claiming their attitude was.

And the ironic thing is that you claim your education is of value, but when I point out their attitudes engrained within their own letters, you object claiming that their letters weren’t intended to be used that way:

The problem is you keep using the Bible to aruge points that it was never meant to argue.

... It’s as if gleaning the attitude of the writers directly from their letters is a complete foreign concept to your educational process.

Since there are no surviving eyewitness accounts to their attitudes, why wouldn’t their own letters be the cat’s pajamas to your study of their motives?!

Do you understand what I am saying?

[Swing low, sweet chariot. Comin' for to carry me home.]

Are you saying that the scriptures were read word for word outside of perhaps worship? That wouldn't catch an audience like preaching would. I'm just saying realistically that it's highly unlikely that the early Christians read anything to the laity unless of course they were in church on Sunday mornings and it was used for worshiping purposes.

I don’t know how you stretched this into the context of the reading of the letters in the public realm, but even in your stretch you are wrong, for it was COMMON for the early church to read to the public:

1 Tim 4:13 “Until I come, devote yourself to the public reading of Scripture, to preaching and to teaching.”

If they read to the public, would they not have read to their own congregations?!

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I'm both a student of the Bible and a scholar

You claim to be a student of scripture, but you’re not even aware that the practice of reading to the public that was instituted by Moses (Deut 31:10) was also followed by the NT church!  This is a prime example of you being soo completely unaware of what the NT actually says, you think it odd that the church leaders would even read to their congregations!!!

Again, refuting your idiotic claims regarding the attitude of NT writers is a trivial matter for any student of the NT, even for a novice.

[Swing low, sweet chariot. Comin' for to carry me home.]

It's not my argument that the gospel writers or NT writers had different intentions than what is seen in scripture. It's my argument that they have different intentions from what has been thought for the majority of 2,000 years because alot of it has been covered up by the church. This leads into the topic of "Orthodox" Christianity vs. Gnostic Sects but is way off topic.

I haven't said too much about the letters but the Bible as a whole was never meant to be understood the way it came to be understood by the church. Take for exmaple the "Red Sea" was actually Sea of Reeds in Hebrew or the fact taht the word "almah" in Hebrew actually means young woman or newly married woman. When translated into the Septuagint, the word became parthenos which refers to virgin as we know it. Then again without this poor translation, we wouldn't have Christmas.

I take nothing at face value in ancient literature. Claiming to be the Word of God is suspect at best. Now I'm not against Christianity but I am against how people understand and use/misuse the Bible.

But we’re not discussing the use/misuse scripture by Christian sects, rather we’re talking about our own personal views of the intent of the writers. 

If you attempt to tell me the gospels are slanted for political advantage post70AD, then I’m going to compare the narrative of the gospels to Paul’s letters, which you accept as pre60AD.  If there is no difference in the narrative between Paul’s letters and the gospels, I’m going to refute your claim as baseless.

If you attempt to tell me the NT wasn’t meant for the consumption of the laity, then I’m going to compare the letters engrained instructions for how they were to be disseminated.  If there is a difference between those instruction and your claims, I’m going to refute your claim as baseless.

You’ll have to sell it to someone who hasn’t actually read the NT, because I take the NT as the primary witness to the attitude of the NT writers.  In fact, the attitude of the NT writers has been my primary focus of study since I became a Christian in Oct 92.  Their attitudes became a focus of mine because I witnessed much doctrinal disagreement between Christian are due solely to their attitude towards scripture, so I set out to discern the attitude of the NT writes and to mimic their attitude.

I studied how they approached scripture, how they pieced together their arguments, the settings in which they argued in public, how they won new converts, how much religious ceremony they needed to function, how they expected a church service to be conducted, how they taught their congregations, their attitudes toward church hierarchy, the amount of control they exhibited over the laity, the processes they expected new converts to go through, their church structure, what they expected from the laity, how much value they placed on human intelligence, which instructional methods they deemed to be of educational value, the logical limits of what they allowed to be taught, etc, etc, etc.

Added to this study of the attitudes of the NT writers, I also studied the Law of Moses and its relation to the New Covenant (I was witnessing to friends bound up in a legalist church which was requiring them to observe the Law of Moses).  But even though my study of the Law of Moses has trailed off (my witnessing to that legalistic church ended ~ 1995), my study of the attitudes of the NT writers has never ceased.

[Swing low, sweet chariot. Comin' for to carry me home.]

It's worth pointing out that (this is second-hand info from two of my friends who have learned Greek) while the Gospels are written at a very low reading level (the Gospels are apparently very beginner-friendly books in Greek due to rather simple structure), St. Paul used a considerably more advanced vocabulary and structure.  I've seen this repeated elsewhere and it makes a lot of sense if you accept St. Paul's background as a highly-educated member of the provincial elite as compared to a far more humble background for the Gospel writers. 

another note on Paul's writings:

2Cor 1:12 "Now this is our boast: Our conscience testifies that we have conducted ourselves in the world, and especially in our relations with you, in the holiness and sincerity that are from God. We have done so not according to worldly wisdom but according to God’s grace. 13 For we do not write you anything you cannot read or understand. And I hope that, 14 as you have understood us in part, you will come to understand fully that you can boast of us just as we will boast of you in the day of the Lord Jesus."

so, even though Paul was highly educated, he made sure not to talk over the heads of his audience