Nox really wasn’t fooling around with this one! It’s that time again, folks: Prepare to be educated about the buybull and what’s wrong with it (except if you’re Daniel, who also has a giant Biblical brain). Take it away, Nox:

“(3)
If Matthew (assuming for a moment that the author of Matthew is the same person as the apostle Matthew) did not meet Jesus until Matthew 9:9, how was he able to create such a detailed transcription of the sermon on the mount in Matthew 5,6, & 7 (one of the 3 longest red letter passages anywhere in the 4 gospels)? And how does he know what Herod said to the jewish priests, or what the angel said to Joseph, or what the Devil told Jesus in the wilderness?

Even after Matthew hooks up with Jesus, the book tells us that Matthew was not with Jesus during the trial, the crucifixion, the transfiguration, or all those private talks Jesus had with Peter, James and John. The popular christian answer to this question is that “Matthew” and the other biblical authors were working under the inspiration and guidance of the holy spirit. But if this were the case, I have to wonder, why does Matthew get so much sh*t wrong?

Right out of the gate the first words in the first gospel are a bastardized reading of the old testament. Matthew devotes the first 17 verses of his first chapter to a genealogy (of Joseph for some reason) which retells a genealogy from 1st Chronicles 10 except it leaves out 4 generations of the Chronicles genealogy. Immediately after this Matthew (1:22) tells us that Jesus was born of a virgin and that this was a fulfillment of Isaiah 7:14.

But if you read Isaiah 7, Jesus is absolutely ruled out of this prophecy. In fact Isaiah makes it very clear that the prophesied child would be born 600 years before Jesus (according to Isaiah 8, he was and his name was Mahershalalhashbaz). The “prophecy” in this case was not even that the virgin would conceive, the young woman conceiving was meant to be a sign of the prophecy. The prophecy itself was that King Ahaz of Judah would be successful in an upcoming battle (according to 2nd Chronicles 28, Ahaz lost that battle and was killed in the aftermath).

Right after this (Matthew 2:5) we get another fulfilled prophecy. Herod asks the priests where the messiah is to be born and they quote Micah 5:2 to him stating that he is to be born in Bethlehem. The 5th chapter of Micah does make mention of Bethlehem, but clearly states that the person who fulfills this prophecy must be a military leader. According to Micah this promised redeemer “shall waste the land of Assyria with the sword, and the land of Nimrod in the entrances thereof: thus shall he deliver us from the Assyrian”.

By the time Jesus arrived, the Jews were a lot more worried about Romans than Assyrians. The next 2 prophecies come back to back in Matthew 2:15-18 claiming that Jesus living in Egypt is a fulfillment of Hosea 11:1 which is not a prophecy but a past tense statement about the Jewish exodus from Egypt (“When Israel was a child, then I loved him, and called my son out of Egypt”). 3 verses after this Matthew tells us that Jeremiah 31:15 is a prediction of Herod’s slaughter of the innocents.

Jeremiah seems to think differently, and if one reads the chapter in question he is quite explicit that this is a description of the Jewish exile in Babylon (see the book of Daniel). In Matthew 2:23 we are told that Joseph moved to Nazareth “that it might be fulfilled which was spoken by the prophets, He shall be called a Nazarene”. This one is not a mere misunderstanding. There is absolutely nowhere in the old testament that anyone is called a Nazarene, nor is it predicted anywhere that someone will later be called a Nazarene.

It is either a made up prophecy or it is attempting to quote Judges 13:5 where an angel tells Samson’s parents that their child (Samson, not Jesus) will be a Nazarite (Not even close to the same thing as a Nazarene). There are a couple dozen more of these scattered throughout the 4 books. Every one of them falls apart when you read the passage it claims to be quoting from.”

You can find the first two parts here and here.

Thanks again to Nox for the serious amount of wor and research that went in to his giant wall of text; I wish I could say that it inspired an original response from NAoC, but alas it hasn’t yet.

More to follow….

Over in the forum we have a relatively new theist to debate. Unlike most who visit our quiet little corner of the blue nowhere, NotAshamedofChrist isn’t a drive-by poster and isn’t a troll. S/he seems genuinely interested in debating our lack of faith, and honestly curious as to how we have come to have views so completely different to his/her own. Kudos, NAoC.

Somewhat inevitably, though, NAoC fell back on an old Christian argument in the face of adversity:

“[The] Bible is not biased the apparent contradictions actually confirm its truth take the gospels for example you have four different eyewitness accounts of the same events its unlikely that each person from a slightly different standpoint would come up with exactly the same details.”

Regular poster Nox is something of a Bible scholar, and in response to that assertion he produced what I can only describe as an epic wall of textual ownage, proving beyond a shadow of a doubt that all ur bible r belong 2 him. Because he put so much work into it and covered so much ground, I decided to reproduce it on the blog for all of y’all. Note that this wall of text is part of an ongoing discussion, so at times it addresses NAoC directly and references earlier posts. The link above is to the whole discussion if you need context.

Now, I’m usually guilty of dismissing epic posts as tl;dr – in this case, however, I recommend making yourself a cup of your favourite hot beverage, settling yourself down and having a good read. You’ll learn a lot.

Over to Nox:

“(1)
Welcome back NotAshamed,
I’m glad to see you decided this wasn’t a waste of time. And I hope you are getting something out of it. I always enjoy a good discussion. Sorry I wrote you off a bit early. You understand we do get a lot of drive by posters here. But I do give you credit for still being here and being willing to discuss these issues. As a former christian I am familiar with the discomfort that comes from having one’s faith criticized. But I honestly am trying to help you, and I do hope you’ll stick around for awhile.
“Besides, all the new Testament books were written down only 40 years after Jesus died.”
Where do you get this figure? Mark, the first gospel is believed to have been written down around 70 AD (about 40 years after the estimated date of the crucifixion) with Matthew and Luke showing up about 10 to 20 years later. The gospel of John was almost certainly written in the 2nd Century, around 90 years after the estimated date of Jesus death. There is however, pretty solid reason to believe that some of Paul’s letters (ie Galatians) were written less than 40 years after 33 AD. These dates aren’t controversial. They are accepted by the majority of biblical scholars (both secular and christian).
“Everyone believes that Julius Caesar came to Btitain in 55 BC but we have only 9 or 10 manuscripts to support this, and the earliest was written 900 years after the event!”
We have Caesar’s own account of his campaigns in Gaul and Pompey, written by Julius Caesar while Julius Caesar was alive (that may sound redundant but it is an important distinction). We have nothing that was written by Jesus. Nor do we have one thing that was written about Jesus during his lifetime. We have only the gospels, which show themselves to be historically inaccurate, and the letters of Paul (who never met Jesus) which give us almost nothing in terms of biographical details. And we have the unanimous silence of contemporary historians about a guy who would have been noticed if he did the stuff the gospels describe him doing. And while there may be thousands of “manuscripts” from the middle ages, it is worth noting that we do not have the original manuscript of any of the 4 gospels.
You said earlier “its just that I genuinely wonder how people do not believe in God when, in my mind anyway the wonders of creation the human body and brain shout out the existence of God”. We could get into how cosmology makes the deist god unnecessary. Or how natural selection explains the complexity of life without needing to invoke an extra party. Or how a modern understanding of electricity calls into question the existence of Thor. But what we are really talking about here is yhwh, the god in the bible. And the reason I don’t believe in the god in the bible is because I’ve read the bible. And really when you get down to it, there isn’t really any other source for the claim that yhwh exists (this is why I wanted to make a point of clarifying that yhwh is the god we are debating).
Let me give you a few examples of what I mean and why I can’t buy the bible as a historical document (at least not as an accurate historical document), and certainly not a reliable enough source to upon which to base belief in any entities which have not thought to give us any other reason to suspect their existence. There are scientific and philosophical issues as well, but since the bible is the topic that’s come up (and its kinda a hobby of mine), and since for me personally the bible was what convinced me that the bible was not true, then what I’d like to talk to you about today is the bible. ”

To be continued – I couldn’t post the whole lot at once because it’s gigantic – I’ll post more over the next couple of weeks. Thank you, Nox, for having a gigantic brain and sharing it with us!