Why would the apostiles have lied?

I don't know that lying is involved. The myths of William Tell, Robin Hood and King Arthur are all built upon kernels of truth embellished over time.On the other hand, lying *might* be involved. Consider Oral Roberts' announcement that God had visited him and told him he was calling him home unless he raised seven million dollars. Oral Roberts was a major figure in the evangelical movement right up until his death. Did you believe him? Do you think he believed himself?--Percy

Oral Roberts lied to forward his ministry.The apostles lied to forward their ministry.Or, more likely, the apostles never existed. They were symbolic of the 12 tribes of Israel created by the authors of the gospels to forward their ministry.--Percy

Hanno writes:

---

So, how can we be sure there was a king called Nebucanedzer of Babylon? You declare historical documentation invalid, for the sole reason that a religion is based on it.

---

No one is declaring historical documentation invalid. It is valid to question the historicity of a source, which is what we're doing for the Bible.We have documentary evidence from many sources and multiple civilizations (his own plus ones he battled with) for the historicity of Nebuchadnezzar.Outside the Bible, what is the evidence that the apostles said what the Bibles says they said, or even that they ever existed?--Percy

Hanno writes:

---

The letters of the Apostiles EXIST. The letters tells that they have been WRITTEN by the apostiles.

---

The gospels were not written by the apostles. Paul was not an apostle, so the letters of Paul were not written by an apostle. What letters are you thinking of?--PercyPS - Could you please learn to spell apostle so my spell checker can get some rest?

Hanno writes:

---

If you actually read some of his letters, then you would've seen that he refers to himself as "the least worthy of all apostles" (Sorry about the spelling) He is an apostle, because of the revelation he recieved on his way to Damascus, which turn his live 180 degrees around.

---

If you're going to include Paul among the apostles then we'll need some terminology to distinguish among them. How about "Paul" for the Apostle Paul, and "the 12" for the twelve apostles who Jesus actually called apostles in the gospels.If when you ask, "Why would the apostles lie?", you're referring to accounts about the 12 in the synoptic gospels such as where they witnessed the risen Christ at the tomb and again later along with hundreds of other witnesses in Jerusalem, then my answer is that the gospel accounts were not written by the 12, nor even by eye-witnesses to these events.On the other hand if when you ask, "Why would the apostles lie?", you're referring to Paul, then my answer is that he is speaking to his faith just as any religious adherent would. What is there in Paul's writings that lends them any more or less credence than the writings of Islam, Hinduism and Buddhism?--Percy

Hanno writes:

---

There are Christian and non-christian historical documentation referring to Jesus.

---

Historical documentation? Really? Such as?--Percy

Hanno writes:

---

There are non-religious sources indicating that Jesus had a following which survived His death.

---

There are very few. Josephus (2), Tacitus (1), Suetonius (1), Thallus (1). They are so few we could quote them all in full in a short post. Revisit this link that John posted earlier:Scott Oser Hojfaq » Internet InfidelsAnd these sources indicate very little about Jesus. At best they confirm that a man named Jesus began a religious movement known as Christians, that he was credited with great works and miracles, and that he was executed by Pontius Pilate. None provide any confirmation, not even any mention, of Jesus's miraculous conception, his birth, the three wise men, his ministry, the apostles, the journey to Jerusalem, the last supper, the betrayal, the crucifixion, the entombment, the rising on the 3rd day, or the appearance of the risen Jesus to the apostles and to hundreds in Jerusalem. None of this is mentioned in any sources. Nor is there any archaeological support for any of these events. All the information for these events comes from a single source: the Bible.

---

That means that many first generation Christians that actually spoke to the apostles were still around. Do you really think they wouldn't have noticed that these accounts are not falsified? Rememder, there were thousands of christians already by that time. If some of the first generation Cristians would've wanted to falsify history, surely others would've noticed?

---

The Christianity that comes down us today is Paul's Christianity, not the apostle's Christianity. Paul disagreed violently with the Jerusalem church represented by Peter and James. Paul was responsible for the conversions to what eventually became the Christianity we know today. Whatever became of the Jerusalem church is not known, and certainly it didn't survive the fall of Jerusalem to the Roman's in 70 AD. The gospels were written by religious communities who were followers of Paul, not of the Jerusalem church. And the gospels were all written after Paul's epistles, explaining why they never mention the gospels, and also why Paul's letters reflect almost no knowledge of Jesus's life beyond a few details like the crucifixion and resurrection.

---

This arguement just doesn't add up for me. There is no evidence available that the apostolic letters weren't written by the someone else.

---

This is the same confusion that was already explained in Message 20. No one is claiming that Paul didn't write the Pauline epistles. We're only saying that none of the writings of the 12, if indeed they composed any, appear in the Bible.

---

Besides, that Christianity spread like wild fire, is a historical fact. Someone must have taken the burden to spread it. Is their names really relivant?

---

This looks like bad grammar, but "is" is actually the correct verb, because it wasn't a "them" who spread the gospel but a "him". As described above, Paul spread the Word of what developed into modern Christianity.

---

I delt with this before, but I'll do it again. If they had lied to garther suport for their religion, it would mean that they didn't really believe that it's Gods religion, and that it's the Holy Spirit that plants faith into ones hart. That would mean that their entire story is a lie.

---

The account in the gospels of the apostles spreading the Word, indeed even the apostles themselves, is likely all fiction, a mythology created by early Christian groups to satisfy their curiosity about what their early church and its founder were really like, and about the events surrounding the early ministry. The apostles weren't lying because the events in the gospels are fictional, or perhaps even the apostles themselves were fictional.That being said, fear of persecution and death has rarely deterred the religiously devout or fanatical. You only have to look back a year to see evidence of to what deeds religious devotion can drive men.--Percy

Hanno writes:

---

Those sources only confirm the existance of Jesus. And since most of them are hostile towards Christianity, so you wouldn't expect them to expand to the story. I have already provided the reason why the apostles words can be trusted.

---

Have you forgotten your original claim? You were chastising everyone for being unaware of all the extra-Biblical sources verifying the Biblical accounts of Jesus. Turns out such sources are very few and are very sparse on information. All the information about Jesus is non-contemporaneous, being written long after his death. Your claim of extra-Biblical historical support is untrue.The Bible stands alone as the only source of almost all information about Jesus and his ministry. It was written long after Jesus died, and the only author of whose identity we're certain persecuted Jesus during his lifetime.

---

Also, He did not "violently disagree" with Peter and James. The story is that Peter and James did not want to be seen associating with non-jewish believers, and Paul corrected them.

---

Corrected, yes. Convinced, no. Paul and the Jerusalem church agreed to go their separate ways, and there was a schism that never healed.

---

There is 3 letters of John, 1 of Jacobus, 1 of Peter, and in the book of acts, you hear from other apostles as well.

---

The letters of John are not by John the apostle.

---

Once again, very convinient. The earliest copies of the new testament are found within the livespan of 1st and 2nd generation Christians. They KNEW how they were converted, they did not have to think up stories.Besides if Paul didn't convert them, someone else had to. And if the DID make up stories about him, they would make him say that which they believe, and what they believe was told to them by whoever converted him. This arguement of the non existance of the apostles doesn't really achieve anything.

---

The fact remains that outside the Bible there is no evidence of the apostle's existence, nor even of Jesus. The extra Biblical references at best talk only of a tribe of Christians whose movement was founded by a great religious leader and worker of miracles named Jesus who was crucified and resurrected. These are second-hand accounts of the groups beliefs, not historical documentation. At worst the Josephus reference is a later Christian insertion.

---

Fair enough. But they believe only that what was passed on to them. They believe blindly without any proof. The apostles was eye witnesses, and for goodness sake, how many times do I have to repeat this.

---

You are just like them, believing blindly without any proof. You accept the Bible on faith as they accept the Quran on faith. The Bible alone tells you there were apostles, so you not only believe there were apostles, but you argue strongly and repeatedly for their existence.As I mentioned elsewhere, Jesus is not mentioned in any contemporaneous accounts of the period, as opposed to John the Baptist. That details of Jesus's life and ministry increased rather diminished with time is typical of mythology. There is no way of knowing for sure, but it is possible that Jesus and the apostles are fiction, though I don't believe this myself. However, I do believe that the gospel accounts are largely fiction. If you visit a synopsis you can see the contradictions side-by-side.--Percy

nos482 writes to Hanno:

---

And how do you know the bible is telling the truth, because the bible says so? They are not even sure that the Apostles actually wrote the gospels attributed to them.

---

No gospel was written by an apostle. When they first appeared the gospels had no authors' names associated with them, this came later. Matthew and John are the names of actual apostles, while Mark and Luke are not. Christian tradition holds that Mark's account came by way of Peter, whom he met in prison in Rome. Luke was supposedly a physician.--Percy

Hanno writes:

---

For this reason, I'm ending my participation in this debate, because it is going nowhere, and is a waste of time.

---

Learning and discussing viewpoints with others is a waste of time? I'll have to remember that. Maybe it's best you leave while your misimpressions are still intact:

---

Atheism is just as much a religion that any other.

---

Boy, do you need a dictionary.Just because I don't accept a literally inerrant Bible doesn't make me an atheist. I believe in the same God you do, we only differ in the threshold of credibility we apply to the evidence for Christian mythology.--Percy

Percy wrote:

---

Maybe it's best you leave while your misimpressions are still intact:

---

Hanno replied:

---

Boy, you guys can be nasty.

---

Note the colon at the end of my sentence, meaning that it referred to the quote from you which followed that conveyed your misimpression that you're conversing with atheists. Among the evolutionists here we have atheists, agnostics, theists and deists. I'm a theist.

Hanno writes:

---

How can you say in one sentence you worship my God, and in the next call Him a Myth?

---

I didn't call God a myth. I referred to the stories in the Bible as mythology. Sometime it seems as if rather than worshipping God and Jesus that Creationists worship the Bible with some form of idolatry.

---

If you do not believe that Jesus Christ is God, who came to earth, to pay for our sins, you cannot call yourself a Christian. And there is a difference between believing in "a God" and believing in the Christian God.

---

Ah, yes, I know, there is but one path to God, and that is by accepting Jesus Christ as lord and savior. And how do we know this? Because the Bible says so. And how do we know the Bible is true? Because the Bible itself says so.The passage supporting this view of Jesus as the pathway to God is John 14:6:

I am the way, and the the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.

The Reverend John Killinger has this to say about the passage:

That sounds unequivocal enough, and would be, if we could accept the literalist point of view that everything in the Bible means exactly what it says and carries the divine imprimatur on it. But it overlooks completely the semi-fictional character of the Gospel of John and the rhetorical situation in which Jesus speaks these words. Actually, the saying is one of the famous "I am" sayings of Jesus in the Gospel e.g., "I am the bread of life," "I am the good shepherd," "I am the true vine" all of which serve to establish a Christology considerably higher and more supernatural than that of the other three Gospels.

​

John's Gospel begins on an exceptionally high note, proclaiming Jesus as the Word of God who existed with God from the very beginning and helped to create the world, and proceeds with the story of a savior always a little more divine than human to a dramatic series of Resurrection accounts at its end. The Jesus of this Gospel always appears more self-aware than the Jesus of the other Gospels, if not transcendently arrogant. Unlike the Jesus of the other Gospels, he doesn't bother to teach in parables and collections of sayings. Instead, he regards it as enough that he speaks to people at all, and almost everything he says and does is heavily freighted with symbolism. For example, his ministry opens with the story of the wedding at Cana, where he changes water to wine, connoting the improvement of his spiritual gift over that of Judaism, for the water stood in six vats (a number suggesting incompleteness) and was used for ceremonial cleansing under traditional Jewish law (John 2:1-11). Then Jesus cleanses the temple in Jerusalem, denouncing the money changers and sellers of sheep, cattle, and doves for making his Father's house a marketplace (John 2:12-22).

​

Why has John moved this story of the temple from the end of Jesus' life, where it was placed by the other Gospel narrators? Because it seemed to him a fitting public act, after the story of the water and wine, for commencing the ministry. It served notice on the spiritually crass and greedy merchants who occupied the holy city that something higher and better was about to displace them!

​

The point is, this favorite saying of the conservatives about Jesus' being the only way to God the Father occurs in a completely histrionic and somewhat unreliable Gospel unreliable from a factual standpointwhere it is obviously the product of an evolution in Christian teaching from the simpler, more unretouched portraits of the earlier Gospels to the iconographic picture of this one.

Hanno writes:

---

But please don't repeat the lies/non existance theory again. It cannot be proofed.

---

One more time, the traditional scholarly approach is to accept those ideas that have supporting evidence. One doesn't go about accepting any and all ideas simply because they can't be disproved. You can't prove the apostles existed and I can't prove they didn't, but the onus falls on you.--Percy

Hanno writes:

---

Ok one last try. But after this, no more merry-go-round, ok?

---

The merry-go-round nature of this thread is because you keep restating your initial premises instead of moving the discussion forward by replying in some substantive way to the replies. Stop making declarations of "this is fact and that is a fact" and instead address the points we're making about why we don't consider them facts.For example, do you understand that it is the presence of evidence for something, rather than the absence of evidence against, that causes ideas to become accepted? You haven't replied to this directly, but what you write indicates that you don't understand this. You keep asking us to prove the apostles didn't exist. That can't be done. You can't prove such negatives. Try proving that there aren't little green men living on a planet in a galaxy far, far away and you'll get an idea of the problem.Or for another example, do you understand that the Bible cannot attest to its own veracity? I'm telling the truth, here, trust me?

---

Here are the facts:
-Jesus was a real person.

---

Was Jesus a real person? Perhaps, but Paul never explicitly claims to have laid eyes on the living Jesus, and he's the only Biblical author of whom we have any knowledge.

---

-No scrips refuting the existance of the apostles and documentation of the "actual" beginning of christianity exists.

---

As explained several times, this is backwards. Refutation of such things isn't possible.

---

-If the teachings in the bible were indeed not that of those who spreaded Christianity, then this drastic change in Christianity had to spread drastically across the entire empire before the first litriture was produced.

---

Nobody here is saying anything like this. We're not saying that stories about Jesus were spread by the early Christian ministry and then were replaced by a different set of stories later on. The stories developed once and were spread once.

---

-Unless all of Europe suddenly had a blow of amnisia, I do not find it likely that the apostles were dreamed up.

---

There was nothing for "all of Europe" to forget. Before the Christian ministry reached their area they had never before heard the stories of the apostles.Remember that Paul split with the Jerusalem church because he wanted to evangelize to the Gentiles. The growth of Christianity was due to Paul's ministry to the Gentiles, and not due to the apostles work among the small Jewish population of Palestine. When they made the bargain in Jerusalem (Gal 2:6-10) Paul got by far the better deal. He got almost the entire world, while the Jerusalem church got only the Jews. After the fall of Jerusalem there was nothing left of the Jerusalem church's ministry. In effect, the ministry of the 12 reached an evolutionary dead end. --Percy

Percy wrote:

---

Was Jesus a real person? Perhaps, but Paul never explicitly claims to have laid eyes on the living Jesus, and he's the only Biblical author of whom we have any knowledge.

---

Hanno replied:

---

What about during his conversion on the way to Damascus?

---

Reread the part from me - "the living Jesus"? I don't think Paul's vision on the road to Damascus was of the living Jesus.And what of the evidence for Paul's vision? All we have is Luke's story in Acts in the Bible. Is it true? Or was it made up by Paul and elaborated upon by Luke? What test can we devise to determine the truth or falsity of Paul's vision? I confess that I cannot think of one. Can you? Your argument for accepting such stories is that the apostles wouldn't lie, but men lie all the time, and with much less motivation than promoting or preserving their position as head of a budding religious movement.Take as an example another religious vision. Before an important battle, Emperor Constantine had a dream about Jesus, and he had the sign of the cross emblazoned across the shields of his soldiers. They won the battle and Constantine converted the Roman Empire to Christianity.Did Constantine really have this dream? Like Paul's vision, there is no way to know. But unlike Paul's vision it makes little difference to history, while to Christianity the truth of Paul's vision means everything. Since it's not possible to verify or confirm such personal experiences people simply have to accept it on faith. No historical verification is possible. And ultimately religion is an matter of faith, not proof.

---

But a religious tale is held as holy truth, and people will not easily add to them.

---

How can you say this, when you believe the religious tales of all other religions are false? How could these false tales which other religions hold holy have grown if people did not "easily add to them?"

---

The reason would propably be because Europeans compiled the Bible, and that was the area in with Paul worked.

---

The Nicaean conference where the Biblical canon was fixed was attended by bishops from Europe, Asia and Africa. Paul's ministry was conducted primarily in Asia minor and Greece, and so it extended but a little into Europe.

---

At least you do recognize that there must have been a Jesus, and that there must have been apostles, spreading the news of Jesus. I'm not sure, but I believe that is as far as the non-biblical evidence can take you.

---

Sorry if I wasn't clear, but I'm certainly not sure that there must have been a Jesus and apostles. And I'm certainly not sure there that there weren't. The evidence from which to draw conclusions simply isn't there. What I believe is that the roots of modern Christianity trace back to Paul, who I trust no further than I could throw.--Percy

You could just cut the irony with a knife:

Hanno writes:

---

True, but they believe that which was passed down to them.

---

As you believe that which was passed down to you. Just as those you criticize didn't come to their beliefs from firsthand observance of events, neither did you.You believe the accounts in the Bible that describe an unbroken chain of information from Jesus to apostles to gospels and Bible are accurate, but there are too many broken links in that chain.According to the Bible Jesus's ministry was far greater than John's, yet John is mentioned in contemporaneous accounts and Jesus isn't. How do you explain this?The Bible recounts a slaughter of the innocents. All other sources: complete silence.The Bible describes a star bright in the sky which stopped over the baby Jesus's manger. All other sources: complete silence.The Bible describes angels dancing around Herod as he died at a public display. All other sources: no angels.The Bible describes great unrest in Jerusalem leading up to the events surrounding Jesus's death. All other sources: complete silence.The Bible describes 12 apostles evangelizing Christianity to the world. All other sources: complete silence.This is the kind of documentary evidence I'm considering when I conclude that Paul made it up. Paul created Christianity by establishing small communities of followers throughout Asia minor and Greece.I think you are correct that some people have "believer" in their makeup. Had you been born in the Iran, Iraq, Pakistan, India, etc, you more likely would have been a believing Moslem, Hindu or Buddhist. I have "skeptic" in my makeup.--Percy

Hi Mark!

---

Jesus has this evidence...

---

Do you believe this because of the Josephus, Tacitus, Suetonius, Thallus evidence? These accounts were all written long after Jesus's death and at best merely represent descriptions of what was then known about Christians. And the primary Joshephus reference is widely believed to be a later Christian insertion.I'm not saying that Jesus never existed, just that I don't believe the evidence for Jesus is any better than for the apostles.My personal speculation is that Jesus *did* actually exist, that he led just one, and a minor one at that, of the many sects comprising the cauldron of early Jewish religious beliefs from which eventually developed modern rabbinical Judaism. Jesus was too minor a figure to come to the attention of any contemporary commentators, but he did come to the attention of Paul, a devout and traditional Jew who played some role in religious enforcement. I believe Paul did persecute Jesus.At some point Jesus somehow came to the attention of the Roman authorities and was crucified, though why isn't clear. Shortly thereafter Paul experienced a religious conversion, possibly on the road to Damascus. He began an evangelical movement to convert gentiles throughout Asia Minor and Greece, and gradually built up a community of churches in the region. He found it convenient to maintain a facade of agreement with the Jerusalem church, even though he differed with them on many points, because he found the connection with Jerusalem helpful in drawing converts. I believe the apostles existed because Paul mentions them in his letters, but beyond Peter and a couple others we know little of who they were or what they did or said.The gospels themselves are fictions based on speculations on Paul's sparse accounts of Jesus's ministry. They were composed not only long after Jesus's death, but even long after Paul's death.I believe it is possible that Paul spun Jesus from whole cloth, but this isn't the view I currently adhere to.--Percy