Saul Luizaga wrote:
> Man, you don't even understand what I mean by mentioning the movie, your 
> appreciation is too shallow and deny complexity, plus is not well 
> informed about the History about Jesus: what non-religious experts 
> (Paleontologists, Historians, Anthropologists, Archaeologists, etc.) 
> have discovered and documented about it.
> 
> I suggest you see: Banned from the Bible, History Channel documentary.
Sigh.. You are missing the point. First you have to prove the man even 
existed at all. The problem with all the people you list here is that 
not **one** of them can present history, (Uh.. just why would 
paleontologists be involve with this???), artifacts, or writings 
**earlier** than the known date of publication of the parts of the NT 
they are using as primary sources. This is a bit like claiming that you 
found evidence at a convention site, showing that people actually 
dressed up as Jedi last year, and therefor you concluded that George 
Lucas merely "recorded" events, instead of making them up. After all, 
too many people have, at this point, by such logic, written about, 
dressed up as, joined a fake religions based on, or otherwise treated as 
semi-real, Jedis, for them to have been made up in the 1970s...

It doesn't work that way. You first have to establish that **someone** 
actually new the guy existed "prior" to 50-100 years after the fact. You 
have to find actual records of the person, of his family, a 
**convincing** reason why anyone would believe he was born in a town 
that didn't **exist** when he is supposed to have been born and raised 
there, etc.

So what if "some" of the stuff in the movie was glommed off of people 
looking at things written 200, or 300 years after the fact? You first 
have to convince people that the stuff written only 50-100 years after 
describes a real person, and ***no one*** has done so, despite 2,000 
years of following the religion, and probably 50 years of the most 
intense study of records, artifacts, and records, all **dedicated** to 
proving that he actually existed in the first place.

This, for skeptics, and even for *many* Biblical scholars, is a 
**serious** problem, and makes the movie (and I laugh at the idea that 
you pick the movie as a better authority than the book it is based 
on..), basically a Biblical equivalent of, "The illustrated encyclopedia 
of more stuff people made up, to fit into the Harry Potter universe." In 
short, its interesting, but you have to prove the central point *before* 
you start getting excited about other stuff people made up even later 
on, to support the original story. It makes no more sense than if you 
tried to defend the validity of the gospel of Judas, by pointing out the 
existence of the KJV Bible (which doesn't, as none of them do, contain 
it). You can only prove that people that believed in the original story 
told other stories about the central character, until/unless you can 
prove the existence of the character *first*, and that requires more 
than, "So and so thought X was true about him, but we have no record 
linking that belief to *any* original document, from his own time."

-- 
void main () {

     if version = "Vista" {
       call slow_by_half();
       call DRM_everything();
     }
     call functional_code();
   }
   else
     call crash_windows();
}

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