I had a fascinating conversation with Bing’s Chatbot (there’re all fascinating until the novelty wears off). I asked it the following question: Give me 20 reasons for believing that Jesus is the Son of God. That Bot spit out those 20 reasons in about a minute and cited their books, chapters and verses. There was hesitation at times, but I think that was the data coming faster than the mechanics of typing. It wasn’t in a form I could copy or print, however. I asked a follow-up question: Jesus is an historical figure; how can you prove he existed? The Bot quickly came up with 4 extra-biblical references to Christ and Christianity. 1. Josephus Flavius, a 1st C. historian, who, in “Antiquities of the Jews,” referred to Jesus as a wise man. Atheist historians dispute this remark, saying it was an interpolation. 2. Tacitus was a Roman historian of the 1st C. In “Annals” he wrote that Jesus was executed by Pilate during the reign of Tiberius. 3. Pliny the Younger was a Roman governor of the 1st C. who wrote to the Emperor Trajan about Christians, and that they worshipped Christ as a god. 4. Lucian of Samosata was a 2nd C. Greek Satirist who wrote the “Passing of Peregrinus,” which described how Christians worshipped a crucified man and believed he rose from the dead. There are hundreds of Christian scholars by the end of the 1st C. and the beginning of the 2nd C. There were bishops to lead groups of Christians. There is a firm connection from Jesus to Peter and from him to the early church and the church fathers and on to the Council of Nicea in 325, where Christ’s nature was agreed upon.
Richard Price deconstructs Christ on a level where Christians imagine they have a “relationship with their Savior, himself largely an amalgam of Sunday School illustrations and Holman Hunt paintings, stretched rigid on the rack of christological dogma.” He says it’s impossible to reconstruct a historical Jesus from the scanty evidence we have. Price seems to have a grudge against Christians who speak of “accepting Jesus Christ as one’s personal Savior.” Ironically, Jesus didn’t come to Earth to save humanity from its sins or anything else, and he didn’t shed his blood to make us clean. The Creator Son, Michael, was created, along with hundreds of other Creator Sons when the Father and the mother side of the Eternal Son formed the same idea. These Creator Sons were specially made to be rulers of the local universes. Michael was Creator Son of Nebadon after it was carved out of the superuniverse of Orvonton. Michael and his Co-Creator created everything in the universe. To become the Sovereign God of Nebadon, Michael had to live among the people on 7 planets. Earth was his 7th Bestowal. He could have gone back to his capital planet and HQ, Salvington after his baptism, but he chose to remain for a while. I think it was after his baptism that he wanted to teach people about the kingdom of heaven. After he left Earth, he expected his disciples to teach about the kingdom of heaven, but they preached about him instead. This resulted in a Christ cult, just like every pagan mystery cult in the ancient world. I suppose that’s a reason some people don’t join the church. I, on the other hand, love the cult aspects, even though Hays says it’s Satanic. More about Hays in the other blog.
I often receive an unsolicited email called “Cold-Case Christianity,” which I never opened until today. Today there was an essay titled “Yes, the Christian Worldview is Supported by the Evidence.” This is apparently a large Christian business founded and directed by a former detective named J. Warner Wallace. He uses the same techniques that are used in solving a cold murder case to show that the case for Christ can be solved or proven. I will get to this in the next blog, but it’s kind of clever. In the essay just quoted, Det. Wallace quotes Richard Dawkins, a biologist and no lover of Christ, who says: “faith is a cop-out and the faithful ignore the need to evaluate the evidence.” He thought at one time “that faith was “a harmless nonsense,” that had no evidence to support it. But for Dawkins 9/11 changed all that. Sam Harris is also one who believes that an honest appraisal of the evidence and logical arguments are necessary in proving Christianity. There can’t be a different standard of intellectual integrity in evaluating Christianity as there is for anything else.
Wallace then asserts that Dawkins doesn’t know anything about EVIDENCE. In civil and criminal trials anything can be assessed evidentially. Wallace says there are only 2 categories of evidence, and Christian Case makers use both types of evidence when making a Case for Christianity.
Category One: Direct Evidence (Eyewitness Testimony)
Category Two: Indirect (Circumstantial) Evidence
This is a topic in itself, so I’ll leave it for the next blog. But you might as well know that they are given equal importance in civil and criminal trials.
The Good Guys and the Bad Guys 