The Mudcat Café TM
Thread #112434   Message #2384625
Posted By: GUEST,Gerry
09-Jul-08 - 09:24 AM
Thread Name: Was 'Lord of the Dance' anti-semitic?
Subject: RE: Was 'Lord of the Dance' anti-semitic?
Pip, guilty on all six counts, but with the mitigating circumstance, as regards e), that when there are 30 of them and only one of me, it is hard to engage with all of the arguments put to me. If there is any particular argument you'd especially like me to engage, please name it, and I'll do my best to engage with it.

As far as trolling goes, I have begun to wonder about Len Wallace, who started this thread, but has never returned, not even to thank the rest of us for expending so much energy on his question. Perhaps we have all been well and truly trolled by Mr Wallace.

Howard, the main point of several of my recent long posts has been to build the case that involvement of Jewish entities in the death of Jesus is not a matter of historical record. The sole evidence for involvement, so far as I know, is the gospels, and I am trying to show that for all their greatness as spiritual testimony they cannot be taken seriously as historical documents. The arguments I have brought up so far are

1. taking the Bible as a whole as a true historical document commits you to the absurd positions taken by the fundamentalists - and if Genesis is not literally true, why believe that Mark is?

2. the positions taken by the gospels can't be understood without an eye for the political situation of the day, which favored trying to patch things up with the Romans,

3. the gospel description of Pilate as weak, indecisive, manipulated by the Jewish elite and bullied by the Jewish mob, is in stark contrast to the historical description of Pilate as a monster.

You know, Kolmogorov, one of the greatest mathematicians of the 20th century, started out as a history student. He found indisputable evidence that the taxation system in 13th century Moscow was very different from what all the experts thought it was, and proudly told his supervisor that he had disproved the older theory. His supervisor was not so impressed, informing Kolmogorov that one proof wasn't enough - he'd need ten to overturn the accepted beliefs. It was soon after that that Kolmogorov left history for mathematics, where one proof is enough.

But we're doing history here, not mathematics, so I must present more proof. It comes under two headings:

4. impossibilities in the gospel accounts (such as one I've already mentioned, convening the Sanhedrin on the greatest holiday in the Jewish calendar), and

5. inconsistencies between the various gospel accounts.

I'll get to these.