You know God exists. Now thats either true or its not. Your opinion matters.

Hotblack Desiato wrote: »

Ah, the old deathbed conversion myth again...

What reason is there to believe that anything in the bible is true? We know much of it to be false, and much else to have been written decades after the events described by people relying on hearsay, then very selectively edited later still.

So, apart from the circular "it's true because it says it is" argument, do you have anything at all to go on?

Yes many things in life are still a mystery to us, but that is no reason to pick any particular unsubstantiated explanation over any other. This is why atheists often refer to the thousands of gods that you don't happen to believe in, and what your basis for rejecting those gods is when your own god fails the same tests.

How do you know much of it is false? Certainly Jesus is not. Yeah there will be this and that debate about whether he existed in here but I won’t engage with that. He clearly existed because the world was so irrevocably changed by him that the human race still actually use his birth as our calendar.

In the end he converted the Empire that had him sentenced to death destroying their polytheistic faith with incredible thoroughness. You can still visit the Temple of Saturn today in Rome but who worships Saturn now? Even Jesus own people and the fanatical Pharisees that led them were utterly destroyed within a generation after his crucifixion. Only in the last generation have they returned to Judea as the Bible prophesied..Too many things line up for me to believe he never existed or was a fraud of some sort...As CS Lewis writes Jesus was either a bad man, a mad man or the Son of Man. People will talk about the other religions but no religion comes near the widespread appeal, the sheer egalitarianism of Christianity.

As regards the mysteries of life, I suggest you read Eugene Wigner “ The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences”

God is clearly a mathematician and in his own image he made us. Which is why we can perceive tantalising glimpses of his engineering in our studies of physics and mathematics but ultimately our understanding breaks down at any meaningful level.

Bannasidhe wrote: »

.. . . If the authors of the Gospels were educated men (and they would have been men) the probability is they would have dictated to scribes, and given the time period the likelihood is those slaves would have been Greek. Which could have informed the 'colloquial' Greek you referred to having been used.

Bannasidhe wrote: »

A thought occurred to me on this *conjecture warning* - it may have been that 'Mark' chose to have his narrative in what he considered to be the language of 'the common man' to make it more accessible and may have learned it from listening to Greek slaves/scribes.

Similar to what Lady Gregory did when translating the Ulster Cycle, her Cuchulain of Muirthemne is written in what she called 'Kiltartanese' after her homeplace. She employed the local English dialect which contained a lot of Gaelic syntax in an effort to reach a wider audience. Gregory herself would have had an 'Ascendency' accent and may have felt if she wrote in this it would not be 'true' to the material and/or alienate her audience.

Some like it but personally I find it patronising and fairly annoying tbh, but then I am not the audience it was aimed at.

Still more conjecture coming up - and ignorant conjecture, since you know much more about this than I do. But that doesn't usually stop me . . .

I'd assume that a slave/servant/secretary taking dictation was expected to write as dictated, and not to paraphrase into his own style/dialect/argot. Thus most stylistic choices would be attributed to the author, not the scribe.
Presumably many or most of the literary works we have from antiquity were dictated by their authors and transcribed by slave-secretaries. Do many of them feature a literary/linguistic style more characteristic of the slave-secretary class than of the slaveowning-author class? I wouldn't have thought so.

If Mark is written in a casual, demotic style , it seems more likely that the explanation for this is that (a) this was Mark's usual style , or (b) as you suggest, it was a style he thought would suit his intended audience, or possibly (c) both of these.

Which raises the further thought, if Matthew is written in much more formal, more elegant Greek, does this suggest that Matthew himself was a better-educated, more Hellenised person, or that he was writing for an audience with these characteristics, or both?

Usually when people write or speak using a register which is not their own, they get it wrong - just think of an English comedian trying to imitate Irish speech. It may sound Irish to an English audience, but all we hear is where he gets it wrong, and it sounds really jarring. Lady Gregory's works may have been well-received in Dublin and further afield, but I don't know what they thought about them in Kiltartan. And I think something similar may hold here - Matthew and Mark needed to be competent and experienced in the registers they wrote in, or what they wrote would sound false to their intended audience. And, while we don't have any first-hand evidence of how it did sound, the fact that their gospels were received and eventually canonised while so many others were rejected and largely forgotten might suggest that they are more likely to have got it right than wrong.

Bannasidhe wrote: »

My knowledge is sketchy as best - It was the 'reading' art part I was there for tbh - but I suppose (:eek:) that generally the scribe/slave was simply a secretary writing down what the boss had dictated.

But, more supposing (:eek::eek:), much would depend on the relationship between owner/slave as it would between boss/secretary. There can be huge variation.

I am on a surer footing here : Keep in mind the Roman view of a slave was not the one we would be familiar with which is the race based bondage of African Americans. Roman's never claimed their slaves were less than full humans for a start. Greek slaves -especially ones who could write - were highly valued and trusted with a lot of important work.
Which could lead us to conjecture that Mark was not poor, or even middle income. He seems to have been a well educated man with access to a high value slave who could write in Greek.

Constantine hadn't shifted the Empire east to Byzantium yet meaning Rome was still very much the powerhouse centre so we can be somewhat certain that the scribe was a man in Rome who spoke and wrote in Greek. Scribe was, as I said manual labour, so unlikely to be a freeman, far more likely to be a household slave who acted as secretary.

It is not outrageous to posit that educated Mark could have learned both 'classical' Greek and 'colloquial' Greek from slaves in the household he grew up in - perhaps had a Greek tutor which was the thing to have. Being a Roman fluent in Classical Greek during this period was the sign of high status/wealth.
We can be certain he wasn't a slave himself as he was educated.

He may also have had the kind of relationship with his scribe where he could ask for advice on how to make the narrative more palatable for common folk.

Now we can all contemplate Mark saying in perfect Classical Greek “Behold, I send my messenger, and he will prepare the way before me.” and the scribe doing intake of breath before saying 'bit posh... how about “I will send my messenger ahead of you, who will prepare your way.” Punchier innit". :pac:

Couple of points, in no particular order.

There were educated slaves. As you point out, there were high value slaves, trusted with important work. And of course there were slaves who could write (and, necessarily, read). There were slave-tutors. All of that points to a class of slaves who were educated to an above-average degree. (Above average not just for a slave, but for the community at large.) Mark was educated, but that’s not inconsistent with him being a slave. (Though, so far as I know, we have no reason to think he was a slave.)

I agree that Mark could have been comfortable in two (or more) registers of Greek, and indeed in other languages. I don’t think that would have been at all unusual at the time. This doesn’t necessarily mean that Mark would have been a high-status person who acquired a demotic register from contact with slaves; he could just as well have come from relatively humble origins but acquired a socially superior register from contact with/dealing with higher-status people, and because it was useful to him. (Think of all those stereotypes of well-spoken household servants in “Upstairs Downstairs”-type shows, or young men who rise in their careers partly because they can speak proper.)

I take the point that the Roman elite had household slaves who would write, and take dictation. But as you point out many more people could read than could write, and there must have been a significant class of people who weren’t wealthy enough to own highly-skilled slaves but who had occasion to write letters or documents from time to time, on matters of business or family affairs or whatever. Hence it must have been possible to retain the services of a scribe on an occasional basis, in much the way that we might hire a plumber or a mechanic to do work that we aren’t competent to do ourselves. (In my case, this is a very wide range of work.) My guess is that those scribes-for-hire were probably still slaves, owned not by the persons doing the dictating but by someone running a business that (among other things) would provide scribes-for-hire.

Another possibility is that a slave-secretary might have been permitted to earn a few shillings on the side by doing occasional jobs for others. Even if you own a slave-secretary and are entitled to demand his full-time attention and/or to take from him any money he does come by, it’s generally in your interests that he should be happy, feel well-treated, remain motivated, etc. Often slaves were permitted to do things like this, so long as it didn’t interfere with the performance of their duties to their master.

Finally, specifically in the case of Mark, it’s not impossible that he could have been provided with a scribe for the purposes of writing his gospel by being loaned one by a wealthier member of the Christian community. Paul depended on patrons to support his mission, as indeed did Jesus; so why not Mark?

All-in-all, I don’t think we can draw too many inferences about Mark’s wealth or social status from the fact that he is the author of a gospel written in a demotic register. It is plausible that this gospel could be the work either of quite a high-status person or of someone in a more humble position.

pearcider wrote: »

Read Wigners book and come back to me. You are the definition of a boring and uneducated troll. I won’t be responding to you again.

I have read Wigner's book. It's interesting but it has little to do with the discussion here.
Wigner was also an atheist, as is clear from letters to Bohr and others. He's using "god" as a metaphor for an objective perspective or the universe. Similar to many writers at the time.

pearcider wrote: »

How do you know much of it is false?

Well it starts off with the utter nonsense called the book of Genesis, and goes downhill from there.
We know that the Earth was not created in a week, populated by humans within a week, that humans are not descended from two individuals, that snakes don't talk, that people don't live to 900 years, that there was no global flood, that all creatures of the earth cannot descend from the inhabitants of an ark, that the global population cannot be descended from Noah's incestuous family, etc.

Certainly Jesus is not.

Certainly? Show us your evidence.

Yeah there will be this and that debate about whether he existed in here but I won’t engage with that.

Guess I was wasting my time then. You believe, we're all stupid, and that's that. :rolleyes:

He clearly existed because the world was so irrevocably changed by him that the human race still actually use his birth as our calendar.

Not all of it.
We use pagan gods for the days of the week to this very day - does that make pagan gods true?
The QWERTY keyboard is not the best way to organise a keyboard, actually it's one of the worst, but we're stuck with it because it's too much hassle to change it. Its continued use is not proof of its virtue.
And there are many fictional stories and highly dubious or damaging ideas which have nonetheless had a profound impact on the world - doesn't make them true.

In the end he converted the Empire that had him sentenced to death

He didn't, he was long dead by then, and (like the English reformation) religion was a tool of political power.

You can still visit the Temple of Saturn today in Rome but who worships Saturn now?

I'd be very careful of employing this line of argument if I were you. It's argumentum ad populum really. Saturn's followers could no doubt have made similar claims about the gods he superseded.
Proof of nothing except that religious allegiance is built on very shaky foundations and shifting sands.
Islam is newer, has more followers, and is faster growing, so does that "prove" christianity to be false? I'd say that would be nonsense but it's the claim you are making on behalf of christianity vs. religions which went before it.

Only in the last generation have they returned to Judea as the Bible prophesied..

So people regarded something in their religious book as a goal, and when they had the ability to achieve that goal they did so. Hardly a prophecy- and modern Zionism has been a thing since the late 19th century, and the state of Israel for over 70 years; a lot more than a generation.

Too many things line up for me to believe he never existed or was a fraud of some sort...

God of the gaps / argument from ignorance. Two fallacies for the price of one.

As CS Lewis writes Jesus was either a bad man, a mad man or the Son of Man.

Well we know which one anybody claiming to be god today is, so why would it have been any different 2000 years ago?

People will talk about the other religions but no religion comes near the widespread appeal, the sheer egalitarianism of Christianity.

Yes, that's why it has gilded shrines to wealth all over the world, and its biggest leader lives in the world's largest art gallery. Egalitarianism.

As regards the mysteries of life, I suggest you read Eugene Wigner “ The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences”

I suggest you read "The God Delusion" or any work of Carl Sagan or any decent book about evolution and cosmology, really.

God is clearly a mathematician and in his own image he made us. Which is why we can perceive tantalising glimpses of his engineering in our studies of physics and mathematics but ultimately our understanding breaks down at any meaningful level.

Appeal to ignorance again.

Bannasidhe wrote: »

MOD

Pearcider is taking a couple of days break from this forum guys so cannot respond.

I'm sure he'll enjoy catching up when he gets out of the sin bin.

Dawkins does not claim to be a philosopher, theologian etc. I expect that his publisher chose the title, too. It would more accurately be called "Atheism for Dummies" but its target market clearly isn't those who have put much, or indeed any, thought into the question of belief.

antiskeptic wrote: »

But he's a pretty shyte theolgian, sociologist, psychologist and philosopher.

Hard to say until he attempts to write a book on any of those subjects. Just like if I were to write a book on the history of cakes, it would be difficult to guage my skills as a pastry chef.

In other words, you speak of arrogance, but the only arrogance I see is the straw man attack on an author about credentials nothing to do with the book the author actually wrote.

What he did write, and what his stated aims early on after the publication of the book were, was a book targetted at A) the lay man to religion people who have not thought much about whether or not they actually believe in a god or why they do and C) raising consciousness on the subject and getting more people talking about atheism and more people around the world who are/were atheists to come out and be honest about that fact. The book did little more, nor was it meant to, than address some of the more common fallacies that people thinking there is a god have fallen for.

And he seems to have been moderately, or better, successful at all of those targets. Which is likely why people such as yourself feel safer attacking him and his book for what it is not, and was never meant to be, rather than acknowledging it for what it actually is and he hoped it to be.

Another user put it well by suggesting it would have been better titled "Atheism for Dummies". Some good authors have written books int he "For Dummies" series and I would find it nothing but idiotic for me to comment on the credentials (or lack of them) of those authors because of the target audience of their book(s).

But what can we expect from someone who is ANTI skepticism in the first place? Likely your definition of a "Good theologian" under the rubric of you wanting your position to be default and skepticism to be stamped out and derided...... is that a good theologian is any one who concludes, like you, based on zero evidence at all that you have ever been able to present when asked directly..... that there is a god in the first place. If thinking there is a god....... even though there appears to be ZERO reasons (least of all from you) to think there is a god.... constitutes a good theologian.... then you can keep "good" theology. I have no time for it. I will stick to facts, evidence, data, arguments, and reason.