CADRE Comments

"The Apostle Paul throughout his undisputed epistles, which also date earlier than the gospels, frequently refers to the crucifixion. Paul’s first hand testimony is given further credibility since he had met with Christ’s brother James and Christ’s disciple Peter of whom he discovered held to the same beliefs concerning the major events in Christ’s final week. The crucifixion is also found within the book of Acts. Acts is the historian’s most comprehensive account on the historical movements of the early church subsequent to Christ’s death and resurrection appearances. According to Acts, “When they had carried out all that was written about him, they took him down from the tree and laid him in the tomb” and “When they had carried out all that was written about him, they took him down from the tree and laid him in the tomb.” The 1st century historian Josephus Flavius provides the most important extra-biblical attestation to Christ’s crucifixion which is accepted as an authentic re...

    Peter Kirby is a talented armature,Fine researcher (a skeptic) and well known to the apologetic community for many years, He makes a straw man argument saying this is the best he can do to argue for belief the tearing it down. U pick up where he leaves off and make it into an honest argument. I am not going to deal with any of the Pagan historians who document Jesus existence, such as Tacitus. Tacitus is defensible but it's not really the best evidence. Going by the best I've done Kirby's attempt at making the case on Josephus, Here I will deal with his  straw man on the Talmud . [1]  Then on NT and Church "fathers." Remember Kirby is doing a straw man argument, making the alleged "best case" for Jesus historicity so he can tear it down and say "I made the case and it doesn't stand up to my fierce onslaught." That's what I expect from a coward who is so threatened by better scholars that he chases them off his m...

excavation first century Nazareth Richard Carrier wants us to think the matters written about in the four Gospels are fictional and therefore did not happen.  What he is really saying is this: The Gospel writers do not write like modern historians, nor do they write like ancient elite patricians. Since those are the only two groups blessed as academic historians what the gospel writers write is not history, if it is not history then it is a lie. There's another obvious possibility that he's merely pretending doesn't exist but obviously it does. That is partially literate people who were not historians but who nevertheless wrote about true events. He wants us to forget that possibility and to think it is not possible.I will present a few off-the-cuff realizations that occurred to me while listening to his lecture, " Why the Gospels are Myth "  [1]    The first thing to note is his use of language. It is designed to divert and conceal. When he uses the ter...

"Throughout Jesus’ ministry we see some very interesting examples of interactions that seem to make far more sense if they happened in Greek. For example, Jesus’ conversation with Pilate at his interrogation (Mark 15:2-3, Matthew 27:11-14, Luke 23:2-4, John 18:29-38), his conversation with the Roman centurion (Matthew 8:5-13, John 4:46-54), or his interaction with the Syrophoenician (or Canaanite gentile) woman (Mark 7:25-30, Matthew 15:21-28). These examples make the most sense if, taking into considering both the flow of the conversation (as it’s recorded in the Greek gospels) as well as who these individual Jesus is speaking to are, speaking Greek specifically and not Aramaic or Hebrew. Either way, the language spoken at that time was a bit of a mix. For example, in Matthew 5:22 it is recorded that Jesus says “But whoever says to his brother' ‘Raca’ will be liable to the Sanhedrin.” If Jesus spoke these words in Aramaic, he used the Greek-origin word “Sanhedrin” in the s...

"ASHKAR-GILSON 2 is a Torah scroll sheet possibly dated before 800 C.E. Unlike the new Library of Congress manuscript, this fragment is not fully legible without the help of modern technologies. [...] Nevertheless, the oldest complete Torah manuscripts are in the codex form; the most authoritative being the famous Aleppo Codex, dating to about 920 C.E., and the St. Petersburg Codex (formerly, Leningrad Codex), which dates to 1009 C.E. The few surviving Torah scrolls that are this old are all very fragmentary and almost illegible. It is thus exciting to find a very old, well-preserved Torah scroll, even if it’s only a fragment, a single sheet. One such treasure has recently augmented the collection of the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. As Gary Rendsburg, Chair of Jewish History at Rutgers University, explains in the November/December 2019 issue of Biblical Archaeology Review, this Torah manuscript is the oldest complete Torah scroll sheet fully legible to the naked ...

The major objection to the universality argument stems from a vast movement that has arisen just since the turn of the century, the rapidly expanding field of Neuro-theology (or Cognative Science of Religion): In recent years a number of books have been published in the United States which argue that religious experiences and activities can be measured as neural activity in the brain...these theories purport to explain why there are common patterns of religious behavior and experience across culture which are observable in the field of comparative religion..Most such theories assert that as our understanding the brains activities develop through exploration of its underlying structures and mechanisms so the origin of religious experiences and ritual behavior will be revealed...These theorioes purport to explain why there are common paterns of religious behaviors and experience across cultures. [1] R. Joseph states, “that The brain underlies all experience of living human b...