The Church of the Holy Sepulcher which was first built by Saint Helena, includes the traditional site of both the tomb of Jesus, and Golgotha. A number of years ago I read an article in the Biblical Archaeological Review that said that the traditional view is also the contemporary scholarly consensus.

Little can be known about what happened two thousand years. Much can be surmised. Few scholars of the time have any doubt that anti Christian persecution began during the first century AD.

 

DL, are you even reading the whole of the conversation or are you just looking for sentences to cherry-pick in a vain attempt to "win an internet debate"?

I already answered Tacitus above. Seutonius and Cassius Dio both write about Nero's fire; Seutonius blames Nero and Cassius Dio also places Nero in Rome. Tacitus, on the hand, claims Nero was away from the city when the fire happened. Neither of them mention Christians, but Cassius Dio specifically describes the persecution of Jews in the book following his book about Nero's fire - so, at least, Dio wasn't ignorant in his writing to state persecutions of minorities.

So, fine - whatever. For argument's sake, let's accept Tacitus despite his contemporaries contradicting him. Christianity had a REALLY BAD night in 64 CE and 150 years of peaceful coexistence afterwards until Thrax. LOL!

 

Prove it! Google "Persecution of Christians in Rome" and provide some links. They don't exist. Do the converse for "Religious Tolerance in Rome" and you'll find a host of articles. The fact that "we don't know" isn't evidence that Christians were persecuted. Christianity has had a persecution complex that survives to this day.

Here's a great article, from a Mormon scholar (who actually KNOWS what religious persecution is), outlining Roman religious tolerance, juxtaposed with Christian persecution and eventual Christian absorbtion:

http://www.meridianmagazine.com/ideas/050110rome.html

 

The point I made earlier is that little or nothing can be proven about what what happened two thousand years ago. Nevertheless, the writings left by Tacitus, the New Testament, Eusebius, and others provide powerful evidence that persecution against Christians existed from the first century AD to the reign of Emperor Constantine in the fourth century. During this time persecution varied in intensity, but Christians were discriminated against.

You make a valid point that religious persecution was out of character for the Romans. Christians were persecuted because they refused to burn incense to the Roman Emperor. This was considered to be a sigh of submission.

 

Yes I did exist...Do...I do exist

 

"Cannot be proven" does not mean we default to "Assume persecution happened." That's the difference: We CAN prove that lots of persecution happened after 200 CE. That we can NOT prove that persecution happened before 200 CE is an argument IN FAVOR of persecution not happening.

Not corroborated, and even contradicted by his contemporaries - as you continue to ignore. However, this does prove that certain viewers saw Christians as independent of Jews in the 2nd century. Yet, no evidence of mass persecutions of Christians in the 1st or 2nd century exists beyond Tacitus - which even more strongly favors the argument that persecution did NOT happen until Christianity posed a sufficient threat to the Empire to warrant it.

,

Biased and non-descriptive. Are the Hebrews even being persecuted by Rome? Are they being fed to lions or is the local potentate demanding they kill a pig on Saturday?

Eusebius was a Christian bishop who acknowledged he was not a historian, and he wrote after 300 CE, when remembering martyrs had become fashionable in Rome.

Who? And I would never argue that Christianity wasn't persecuted widely in the 3rd century, because it was.

So were Gauls and Carthaginians. They were literally the boogey-man come alive in the Roman eye.

This is the crux of my argument. Christians weren't persecuted because they were Christians, they were persecuted when they refused to idolize the Emperor. If we can infer that persecution happened absent evidence of it happening, then we could just as easily infer that for every martyr'd Christian there were others that lit a candle in the window and the Praetorian marched right on by.

 

My strong impression is that the Romans were, for the most part, remarkably tolerant of other religions. You get the feeling that they didn't give much of a damn what people thought or who they worshiped, as long as they didn't become too organized and too rebellious, or worse, didn't pay their taxes. Jesus and his followers would not have posed a significant threat, nor did Christianity until long after his death.

 

I am a believer that Jesus did exist and is the Son of God. It is that simple, at least for me. i don't need someone else trying to convince me either way, it is just my belief. Whether others believe as I is of no importance to me.

 

:awesome:

 

View attachment ​

 

Jesus is a Jewish zombie

 

yes

 

Jesus brings us the light:excited:

 

...so?

And it would be very very simple to conjure up a man who never existed, especially back then. Peisistratus dressed a woman up as Athena and became king of Athens when the people thought the gods favoured him...given that, is it really so hard to believe some dude somewhere could have just came up with a story about a guy who did crazy shit and got people to listen to him?

And as for the bible not being a work of fiction, King James rewrote the Bible chopping and changing as he went along, so our "bible" is very different to the original one.

 

"Sophistry"? Well; if you wanna go all "Aristotelian" on me, then no, your argument would not be logical. Your argument is an appeal to ethos, since both of your teachers are acknowledged peers with the respect of their students. However, this is not logical.

If your teacher went to the sea and measured the meniscus of the horizon at dusk and dawn and claimed the world was round, then that would be an argument that appealed to logos. This would be a logical argument.

If your brother's teacher claimed to have walked from Athens to Pella and the world stayed flat, this would be an appeal to pathos. This would be sophistry.


A better simile would be this scenario:

Your teacher is trained in religion, but teaches you history instead. Your teacher teaches you that a Jew got nailed to a tree 2000 years ago because you're special, despite a complete absence of any evidence. The "evidence" he claims is a book written by other teachers who were trained in religion, but pretended to teach history. You believe your teacher.

Your brother teacher's has similar training and teaches him that a dude with four arms taught another dude how to bend his body like a pretzel 2500 years ago. The absence of evidence is similar, with a similar book written by similar teachers with similar training. Your brother believes his teacher.

These are both appeals to ethos and pathos; not logos. THIS is sophistry.

If you accept your teacher's claim for reasons of ethos and pathos, then yes; you have to also accept your brother's teacher's claims. But you wouldn't do that, because you're a smart guy and you know your brother is a moron. :excited:

 

Dude, you know I have a lot of respect for you and I think you’re a pretty smart guy but… do you even know the meaning of the Greek words you’ve been using?

At this point I’m thinking you’re just trying to keep the debate going by confusing the hell out of the issues. I don’t remember everything I learned in my philosophy classes but I know enough to see when I’m being hustled by the use of flimflam rhetoric.

Yes I did call your arguments sophist. The reason for that is right in the definition of the word sophistry. When I try to match the actual meanings of the words you’ve been using with the meaning you’ve been assigning them in your argumement, I can’t make any sense of your arguments.

Listed bellow are Merriam-Webster’s definitions for the terms you’ve been throwing around.

Logos: 1 : The divine wisdom manifest in creation and often identified with the second person of the Trinity 2 : the reason or controlling principle in the universe.

Ethos: The distinguishing character, sentiment, moral nature, or guiding beliefs of a person, group, or institution.

Pathos: An element in experience or in artistic representation evoking pity or compassion

Sophistry: A Plausible but misleading or fallacious argument.


Let’s get past all this bull and get to the merits of the actual debate.

HD