Everyone on Scored whom I've asked about the synagogue of satan (no need for caps) is unable to explain why they're not contradicting Jesus when he says it's not Jews and they say it's Jews.
They try to point to something in history that is nebulous and undocumented, and I have a new framing that has so far shut up everyone who tries the argument: If we Americans have the right to tell Jews they're not true Jews and we know who the true Jews are, then Jews have the right to tell us Americans that we're not true Americans and they know who the true Americans are. Golden Rule.
Ordinary exegesis implies that Jesus is deliberately linking three other works of satan by using the word "satan" again, and three others by referring to direct contradictions in the same way as he refers to the non-Jews; his other patters of seven in this passage suggest this is intentional design. Do you know what the other six works are that I described in the comment above, with the same degree to which you "know" about the synagogue? This is an elite research board, not a stable for one-trick ponies.
Hi Simon, what lovely insults. Would you like to give any rational demonstration of your propositions, or would you like me to go on believing I'm right for your lack of substantive response while you go on believing you're so right you need give no substantive response? Because either way you end up confronting the need to commit to truth at all costs, very quickly.
u/Vlad_The_Impaler and I have been working out these issues a long time. I'm willing to help him with the difficulty he describes if there's something we can agree that I can do. I see you interacted with my suggestions. Do you think there's something wrong with the idea of each of us recognizing our own and others' spheres of sovereignty, and deigning to respect each others' rules and we ask people to respect our own? Because Vlad likes making preemptive judgments against others (there do exist ways to do that), I would think he shouldn't complain when others preemptively judge him. Did you have some substance to contribute or did you just want to be a 100% doomer? You can answer that directly rather than having me guess by consulting your profile.
who are you
where is your book
So you're good with your account remaining opaque too. Got it. I still want your book in print, but that seems to put a damper on your sales prospects.
Oh, you're thinking of Israelolatry. That's not evangelism because it often agrees to cut out the evangel entirely in the hopes that giving lots of money without any strings attached will earn virtue signals. Ayn Rand pointed out that "selfless" altruism is self-destructive, but one's neighbor's actual good is pursued alongside one's own good. Love your neighbor as yourself means both are pursued by pursuing God as Love. Therefore to love my fellow man I seek to give him good things in a way that he can receive them for his benefit: not money divorced from grace, but good news that they agree in their idiom improves their lives. Christians need to lay off a few messages that fight good news to every creature, and Jews need to lay off their own belligerence and resistance to their own culture about Messiah, which they've suppressed for themselves as well as any other history for others. When those are both held back (by the sword in fact), the theater of creative evangelism (i.e. underground contact that builds bridges) can be engaged. Then we get to your end goal by means of "there is neither Jew nor Gentile in Christ": Jews disappear as Jews because they've become completed Jews, just as my own nationality disappears in Christ.
rooted in Christianity
Like a weed, yes.
based on Help Thy Neighbor
Like the devil's confession of God's existence, yes.
Nazis "help" neighbors by binding them to a fasces (fagot).
The trick; ian
Pre-Christ.
Death doesn't end motion; it ends the transfer of each particular matter.
Death ends matter transfer. Life (being) goes on.
Natural dominance gives free will of choice .... Perceivable dominates free perception.
So free will is given by dominance over perception. Free and dominant are not split.
Suggested "always" .... Wins vs loses implies an endurance conflict
Patience endures this way:
Nature endures
Every tongue will confess, but not every heart will turn.
Scored is the most transparent platform I'm aware of, because its admins are more in favor of account privacy than Gab and so they are more conscious of what they reveal by their platform's public data. And they leave it to the anons to bake the bread about how the platform works. It's conceivable they could be more transparent, but that's not necessary for their purpose. Nor for yours: would you like to dox yourself before I dox myself?
u/free-will-of-choice is a pre-Christian. Think of middle-aged John Nash. "Pre-" does not suggest "pro-" or "anti-".
God was perceptible. What will be has not been made known. Death is an end. u/free-will-of-choice is tempted to split free and bound. Patience always wins.
I love Belisarius with a broey love
More literally, the waters "brought forth abundantly" (teemed with) the tanninim ("dragons" 21x but, when embarrassing like it is in Gen. 1, "serpents" and "whales" 6x). Not a few!
If abiogenesis once is mathematically impossible given the size of spacetime, then so is abiogenesis myriads of times. So God created very large numbers of many species, then pointed out that he uniquely created one human for all humanity (with a mate via a cloning coding). The atheist narrative on one LUCA for all life is as ridiculous as their (contradictory) former narrative that many hopeful monsters sprang forth at once from the chaos (which has been applied to humans as if suddenly many interfertile humans appeared at once and no leader was discernible). In reality, large numbers arose at once because "chaos" is actually hidden order, while only one human arose at once because mankind reveals order out of chaos.
Great work fren. Your interlocutor is probably thinking of the Black Plague, which we now know (like the Spanish flu) was exacerbated and aggravated by doctors deliberately spreading the disease to keep themselves raiding the fortunes of the innocent, and some of those doctors I'll note were Jewish.
However, Christians were warned about the black plague in advance if they paid attention to the developmental prophecy of Rev. 2-3. If they had realized the first three churches reflect phases in prior church history, they would see that Jesus prophesied that when the church in its fourth phase is seduced by an adulterous Jezebel spirit (as it was in Rome), it is visited by a literal "Great Tribulation" of STDs and deathplagues, and that was fulfilled in 1346 and following. Ordinary Christians (and Jews) practiced good hygiene already and were largely unaffected by the Plague, which is why they were accused of spreading it, but it was the Gentile and Jewish doctors' guilds that were actually doing what they accused others of doing.
Canaanites were from Ham and his wife, who were not traditionally white.
There is a report of white genotypes in the region long before the flood, which is useless for establishing priority.
Canaanites were a cursed race for their unprecedented abuses, and their contemporaneous giants were part of that curse.
All lore about giants, including the European, goes back to Gen. 6 Nephilim, which goes back to the distortion of the Gen. 3 protevangelium about salvation via seed.
So the original is the one human family, and every attempt to dehumanize other Homo sapiens is an attempt to judge the innocent (usually including children) alongside the guilty, exactly as Abraham the father of the Jews rejected in Gen. 18:23.
We overcome the Jews by creative evangelism, not the sword.
I hope these brief notes are sufficient to indicate the scope of the much greater destiny you have than what you realized. Verbum sat.
We've had several other real, regular accounts of the same kind for 4+ years, primarily GlobalFilter and CommunityFilter. They're not apps, they're accounts. Scoredinternal is the same but appears to be used as a human-directed bot rather than fully automated. No need to advertise bots in the sidebar (which is about human contacts) when they're advertised in the public logs.
Positive Christianity was defined as national socialism, not as Christianity (just like national socialism is not defined as socialism, ooh, the duckspeak is precisely the same). The 1937 definition followed the decisive actions of the Reichskirche in arresting 900 confessing-church pastors at once and permitting only the gospel of Hitler as savior. If Hitler was a (confessing) Christian, then he was also a (Marxian) socialist.
I apologize for thinking you didn't understand Christianity at all. You do understand us a little bit. When you come around to pursuing the truth about us at all costs you will begin to understand us more. Keep working that angle of attempting to parodize what we believe because you might accidentally hit upon more truth.
Getting back:
Richard Carrier is the author of many books and numerous articles online and in print. His avid readers span the world from Hong Kong to Poland. With a Ph.D. in ancient history from Columbia University, he specializes in the modern philosophy of naturalism and humanism, and the origins of Christianity and the intellectual history of Greece and Rome, with particular expertise in ancient philosophy, science and technology. He is also a noted defender of scientific and moral realism, Bayesian reasoning, and historical methods.
Contributor to John Loftus, Christianity is Not Great, The End of Christianity, and The Christian Delusion. Author of Why I Am Not a Christian, Not the Impossible Faith: Why Christianity Didn't Need a Miracle to Succeed, On the Historicity of Jesus: Why We Might Have Reason for Doubt (Revised Edition), Sense & Goodness Without God: A Defense of Metaphysical Naturalism, The Obsolete Paradigm of a Historical Jesus, Jesus from Outer Space: What the Earliest Christians Really Believed about Christ, and Hitler Homer Bible Christ (he'd fit right in here).
He did the meme!
Oolon Colluphid is the author of the "trilogy of philosophical blockbusters" entitled Where God Went Wrong, Some More of God's Greatest Mistakes and Who is this God Person Anyway?. He later used the Babel Fish argument as the basis for a fourth book, entitled Well, That About Wraps It Up For God.
So, point 1, he has a bit of axe to grind and is a great segue from the concept of unnoticed bias toward atheistic higher critics. Point 2 is that his evidence, the Hopper report, is an outlier in a steady stream of consensus that the Josephus passage is essentially authentic, either in its core or in all but 2-3 words. He says that "You Can’t Cite Opinions Before 2014" (Hopper) which is a neat way of excluding all contrary evidence, but interestingly most all opinions after Hopper continue the same track of trusting Josephus even recognizing Hopper's opinion.
Textual evidences to favor Jewish outsider vs. Christian insider:
-
Passage exists in all Greek manuscripts.
-
Josephus is not noted for any other interpolation (both he and Eusebius are conservative copyists).
-
"Wise man" is outsider language and used by Josephus (Luke 24:19 "prophet").
-
"If indeed one ought to call him a man" is a natural introduction to state merely that Jesus's wonders were unexplained without taking a position why.
-
"Wonder worker" is an outsider concept (albeit "worker"/poietes aka Oseh/Essene is an internal word taken from Luke 24:19 "mighty in deed").
-
"Teacher of such people as accept the truth gladly" is outsider language (Luke 24:19 "and word before ... all the people").
-
"Jews" and "Greeks" is outsider language, especially in that later insider language doesn't focus on Jewish followers but only Gentile (Luke 24:19 "all the people").
-
There was no polemic reason against reading "He was 'the Christ'" as an outsider quotation of others (i.e. most notable Christ to that point; Luke 24:26 "the Christ").
-
"He was 'the Christ'" is the more unexpected text, indicating "He was thought to be the Christ" is the later variant; editing in the opposite direction toward greater polemic is silly because Eusebius would be disposed to keep a text about Christ pure.
-
The "first men" "among us" is outsider language and used by Josephus for his personal contacts in the Sanhedrin and priesthood (Luke 24:20 "the chief priests and our rulers").
-
"Condemned him to a cross" adds detail to Luke 24:20 "condemned to death".
-
Those who loved him not ceasing is consistent with Luke 24:21 "we were hoping that it was He".
-
"Spending a third day restored to life" is consistent with Luke 24:21 "today is the third day"; this is described by Josephus more distantly as "appeared".
-
The prophets foretelling these and a thousand wonders is consistent with Luke 24:25 "all that the prophets have spoken" and 27 "all the Scriptures the things concerning Himself".
-
"Tribe" is outsider language and used by Josephus (Van Voorst).
-
Mention of "Christ" is further consistent with Josephus's desire to explain the origin and currency of the name "Christian".
-
The entire passage is consistent with paraphrase of Luke 24, which would have been accessible to Josephus and paraphrased by him like many other sources.
-
Passage omits deicide or Jewish blame, indicating outsider status.
-
The dissimilarity of the passage with its context indicates reliance on a Lukan source and supports authenticity.
-
Josephus 20:9:1 "who was called Christ" presupposes he testified of Jesus earlier.
-
Origen (on Matthew 10.17 and Celsus 1.47) read Josephus and found his testimony not accepting Jesus as what Origen understood Christ fully to be, which is consistent with the paradigm of Josephus paraphrasing Luke 24 but remaining neutral about its conclusions (i.e. the interpretation that "the Christ" is a quotation of others), not consistent with complete forgery. Though Origen created ripples of doubt that extend to the present, the simplest resolution is that Josephus was rightly understood as passing on the testimony without agreeing with it.
-
Eusebius quotes accurately and total forgery would upend his entire purpose of scrupulous history.
-
Arabic version by Agapius, 10th century, is admitted by Whealey and Carrier to derive from Eusebius, because they think this supports Eusebian origin, but since it actually removes variants from the pre-Eusebian strain it strengthens Josephan originality and Eusebian trustworthiness.
-
James Dunn reviews "broad consensus" on John Meier's reconstruction.
-
Robert Van Voorst says most modern scholars agree.
-
Bart Ehrman and John Meier believe the original was neutrally toned, consistent with my proposal he is quoting Luke, with Ehrman saying Meier's version is the most accepted.
-
Geza Vermes reconstruction is consistent with Meier.
-
Garry Goldberg: Luke 24:19-21, 26-27 "more closely resembles the Testimonium in its phrase-by-phrase outline of content and order than any other known text of comparable age" (related in origin).
-
T. C. Schmidt 2025 finds the language is statistically Josephan; Andreas Kostenberger agrees more generally.
Arguments to reject the whole passage:
-
Silence in Jewish Wars (no parallel passage).
-
Silence about any broader scope of the single paragraph about Jesus compared to other Josephan sketches.
-
Silence in 12 mentions of Josephus prior to Eusebius that don't mention this paragraph.
-
Silence between Eusebius and Jerome.
-
Silence in selective contents of Josephus written ca. 500.
-
Silence in Photios's 9th-century broad review of Josephus.
-
Kenneth Olson finds similarity between the testimony and Eusebius in Demonstrations of the Gospels.
-
Louis Feldman argues, with challenged methods, that three clauses of the testimony appear only in Eusebius (but "wonders" and "tribe" are common enough in variation and "still to this day" is very generic).
-
Finally, Paul Hopper 2014 argues for creedal style rather than historiographic style. Carrier's blog indicates (1) aorist verbs feel different from other Josephus, which is explicable by Lukan source hypothesis; (2) obliquity of reference to Pilate feels different, which is consistent with Lukan source and with the historical fact that Pilate's known reticence about Jesus (cf. Talmud) is not his ordinary brash character as e.g. in the Golden Eagles incident; (3) event structure feels different, which is consistent with the data being only a Lukan source and a later extant "Christian" people; (4) absence of plot, again consistent with the idea that Josephus is avoiding Luke's greater plot while using the historical data from it; (5) dissimilarity to Josephus's purpose, except it's perfectly fitting for a brief gloss on Luke that indicates the historical artifact of Christians existing by reference to his knowledge of Pilate and the Sanhedrin. That is, all Hopper's points are well-explained by Goldberg's responsive Lukan hypothesis and Schmidt's statistical confirmation thereof. Carrier is so skeptical he introduces the novel theory that Josephus's other reference to James and Jesus is wholly forged too!
TLDR: I appreciate the challenge! Conclusion, Josephus paraphrased a version of Luke 24, accounting for all slight style differences, and he toned down the polemic to attempt neutral description that Jesus was "surprising", took the name "Christ", and "appeared" after death. Josephus's testimony then is entirely consistent with communicating (1) Christians exist, (2) Jesus founded them, (3) Jesus's narrative is unexplained and his meaning in history unknown, (4) Christians are distinct from primary Jewish sects and thus need no more special treatment than any other unexplained claims. It comes from his Pharisee and Sanhedrin sources and from a version of Luke 24, paraphrased like his other sources. The problem arises because, via later distance, people read his intent as more startling and less neutral than his context clearly intended, and people read Origen's distaste for him as more divisive than Origen indicated. "He was the Christ" was not an endorsement but a claim in process: later Christians read it as a make-or-break testimony, but Josephus intended it merely as journalistic reportage of others' testimony and his own permission that Christ did so many wonders he must have been specially "anointed" to do them. At that time acceptance of a Jewish Jesus as someone special was not regarded as a hardline boundary between peoples, because the character of Jacob the Healer in the Talmud is very similar: Jacob lived c. 100 and healed in Jesus's name but was accepted as a marginal Jew in relatively good standing, because nobody had yet made confession of Jesus a boundary on either side of the divide. The same is true of Josephus. All data for the passage being completely spurious amount to either argument from silence or speculation from cherry-picked similarities that don't account for the whole context.
Thank you for strengthening my faith in the Josephus testimony! Before this analysis, I had previously believed the original was the minimalist core of about half the text, but now I believe, because I have much more evidence, that this centrism was proposed as a feint and the original was so close to Eusebius's words as to be regarded as fully authentic (i.e. only with quibbles about two words that don't affect sense). I appreciate your allowing me the opportunity to add all this evidence to my understanding.
Since I misread Bill, I'm going to watch the debate with gusto, but I go with Moses on it: he said cover the lower half of your face only if you're sick, not if you're asymptomatic, so there must be a difference between common but benign to the healthy, and deadly but intransmissible to the healthy.
The point of u/ImBillCurtis is that SARS-CoV-2 has never been isolated, purified, and published. I don't think he's speaking about all viruses, because every other coronavirus is either so common as to be harmless to healthy people, or so deadly as to be untransmissible to healthy people. The attempt to paint SARS-CoV-2 as both common and deadly was the psyop.
Mary/Miriam is a noun from prefix m- and H7355 raham "love compassionately". Etymology from H4843 marar "bitter" or H4784 marah "rebel" are suggested by others including Mara.
So did Hitler not authorize the statements that he was not committed to Catholicism and that his religion was independent of the Catholic Apostles' Creed, faith in Christ as the Son of God, and the old Catholic revelation? Are you playing Charles Manson divide-and-conquer again?
The word Jew was first used in the 900s as French "Ju" as an elision of Latin "Judaeus" meaning exactly the same Israelite people. The Ioudaios have been a continuous people with continuous polity all this time and peoples are in charge of their own identities.
If Americans can tell Jews they're not Jews but someone else is, Jews can tell Americans they're not Americans but someone else is.
https://scored.co/c/Conspiracies/p/1ARK57sVTK/top-pinned-post-at-catheist/c