Ms. Ordway's academic studies apparently failed to detect that virtually everything in the New Testament has been recycled from legends, myths and parables about the gods of older cultures, without the support of even a shred of contemporary corroborative evidence.

"If we can create a society where it's clearly beneficial for everyone to be peaceful and respectful than it will be easy to confer those traits on to future generations"
Why not eliminate people with disabilities then. A blind, mute, physically impaired person doesn't really benefit society according to that logic.
What is then beneficial for society? We had several societies thinking that what they were doing was beneficial but it turned out to be genocide.
What is the basis on which a society considers something beneficial or not? Is there an absolute guide or is it up for grabs?

What moral sense do we really have? People have to learn to consider other people's feelings and thoughts just like we have to learn everything else. If we can create a society where it's clearly beneficial for everyone to be peaceful and respectful than it will be easy to confer those traits on to future generations. Conversely we can also take ourselves in the other direction. But being a good person usually results in social experiences that lead us to feel good. There is a positive feedback loop. It's no mystery.

As for efforts falling short of ideals. Life is a process of learning and growing. You focus on where you want to be and you keep at it and eventually you get there. We start out not even comprehending that other minds exist and keep moving forward from there. All we can expect of ourselves is to keep getting better. What is so confusing about this situation?

"My atheist view of the world was, in comparison, narrow and flat; it
could not explain why I was moved by beauty and cared about truth."

Attraction and repulsion are necessary elements of survival. The by-product of this benefit is that certain things are naturally pleasurable, we can learn to produce things which instinctively tickle these carnal pleasure centers to great effect. Why we should expect that the mere rejection of an idea (atheism) should explain this is beyond me. I don't believe in the Easter Bunny either, but that is hardly a basis upon which I could make any reasonable assertions about the functioning of the human brain.

Why do we care about truth? Seems like having a natural curiosity and wanting to understand the world around us is a major trait which was (evolutionarily) successful because it made us successful. Beyond that I want people to be honest with me so I am honest myself, and am therefore more easily able to surround myself with people who have this trait.

"so that I grasped the meaning of the Incarnation and saw its importance not as an abstract idea, but as something that impacted my life."

Why do I want my sins to be forgiven? I take it that is the supposed impact on someone's life when they accept Jesus? I may have made mistakes in ignorance but I take pride in answering for them myself. I take full responsibility for my own actions. I do not accept that I was made a sinner and that I will sin for that just sounds like a dangerous self fulfilling prophecy. I will do (my best to do) what's right because I choose to, and because no person or God can absolve me of my own conscience. I pick this out because I cant fathom how it is a good thing to believe, as far as people taking responsibility for their actions and being good people. Maybe I misunderstand what this author is getting at here. I think the point stands regardless.

First about history being written by the winners. Christians were not the winners until the 4th century. So we have quite a few generations where pagan Rome controlled all the significant resources.

It would be interesting to see what a pagan writer of the third century would have said about Christianity's history up to that point if he had chosen to write a book on the subject. But as far as we know, that book never got written.

Data embarrassing to Christianity did survive.

Yes, and I'm using some of it in my analysis.

I was using a cliché to make a point, and like most clichés, that one is not entirely accurate. For just one counterexample to a strict interpretation, Civil War historians have a great deal of historical documentation produced by people who were on the losing side of that conflict. But, precisely because we have those accounts, we know a great deal more about the Civil War than we would have known if we had to rely solely on what the South's adversaries had to say about it.

Secondly you seem to rely a lot on Christian sources being unreliable because they are Christian.

No, not because they are Christian. Because they are human. I don't privilege them. I don't trust them less than I would trust anyone else, but I don't trust them any more, either.

Most Christians I know are honest and fair.

So are most of the ones I know. But honest and fair people make mistakes. Honesty doesn't make anyone infallible.

It seems that you have to think that believing in Christianity means they would falsify things to make Christianity look better than it was.

I assume that Irenaeus and Eusebius believed everything they wrote. Their belief is not, by itself, reason enough for me to believe it.

So Christians are urged not to fix God's truth.

They are told what God's truth is.

This describes a religion so so different from Christianity. We have been over this before but you show no signs of grasping it. It means early Christianity has nothing to do with late Christianity.

There was certainly a relationship. Late Christianity evolved from early Christianity.

It is an evidence-free assertion of a completely new theological animal.

I gave you some of the evidence I'm using. I don't expect you to find it persuasive, but the evidence exists. And I don't see you denying that evidence. You're just disagreeing with me about what the evidence implies. Reasonable people can do that.

So aside from the fact that this just does not seem plausible when reading the gospels we have to believe in a strange discontinuity just to avoid encountering the powerful claims they make.

You may attribute whatever motives you wish to my skepticism about those powerful claims.

Thanks for that. It is helpful. A couple of comment. First about history being written by the winners. Christians were not the winners until the 4th century. So we have quite a few generations where pagan Rome controlled all the significant resources. So dogs could have been barking a lot and we would not know it. Even after the 4th century people were hardly of one mind. The church was never really very competent at controlling world-wide information flow. Data embarrassing to Christianity did survive.

Secondly you seem to rely a lot on Christian sources being unreliable because they are Christian. Eusebius and Irenaeus stand out. I don't see a lot of reasons to doubt them. Most Christians I know are honest and fair. I read them and they seem that way. It seems that you have to think that believing in Christianity means they would falsify things to make Christianity look better than it was.

Yet Christianity does not explicitly or implicitly encourage this at all. On the contrary, we are taught that what seems embarrassing to the faith often turns out to be our finest moments.The cross being the obvious example. So Christians are urged not to fix God's truth.

By fiction, I do not mean fraud. I mean only that the writers of the gospels narratives neither (a) believed they were writing factual history nor (b) expected their readers to regard the narratives as factual history.

This describes a religion so so different from Christianity. We have been over this before but you show no signs of grasping it. It means early Christianity has nothing to do with late Christianity. It means early Christianity has nothing to do with second-temple Judaism. It is an evidence-free assertion of a completely new theological animal.

So aside from the fact that this just does not seem plausible when reading the gospels we have to believe in a strange discontinuity just to avoid encountering the powerful claims they make.

We know the canonical gospels must have been written before Irenaeus mentioned them around 180 CE, but how long before? I shall argue that (a) we don't really know, but (b) it is reasonable to believe it was not before 100 CE.

My first encounter with scholarly work in support of this position was around the year 2000, when I discovered Earl Doherty's The Jesus Puzzle, a defense of the hypothesis that Jesus of Nazareth never existed. Doherty mentions the opinion of some scholars, whom he does not identify, that the gospels are all from the second century, only to disagree with them. His own dating is later than the consensus, but he still assigns early versions of at least Mark and Matthew to the turn of the century. Not long afterward I discovered the works of Robert M. Price, who, while agreeing with Doherty about Jesus' nonexistence, thinks he was too conservative about the gospels' dates. In arguing for a second-century provenance for all of them, Price identifies some scholars on whose work he bases his opinion, but I do not recall their names. I have several of Price's books, and the names are in at least one of them, and I can find them, but it could take a few hours of re-reading the books. I will do it if I must and come back with the relevant citations.

What follows is my own thinking on the issue. Considering what I can remember having read in Doherty's and Price's works, I have no reason to believe that any of it is original. But my argument must stand or fall on its own merits, not on the scholarly credentials of whoever first made it. Insofar as I appeal to facts, I either have the facts correct or I don't. Insofar as I make any inferences from those facts, my inferences are either logically valid or invalid.

Substantial portions of what follows are lifted from an article on my website, titled "Why the Gospels were Probably Works of Fiction."

The conventional dates are based, it seems to me, on certain presuppositions about the general reliability of orthodox Christian history, as that history was presented by Eusebius. The conventional thinking in our own time about Christianity’s origins, even among secular historians, seems to be based largely on Eusebius's Ecclesiastical History. Some scholars have called it the “big bang” theory of Christian origins. In this scenario, one Jesus of Nazareth, a charismatic Jewish preacher, was executed by Judea’s Roman governor, Pontius Pilate, around 30 CE. Soon afterward certain of his disciples, known later as apostles, having become convinced that Jesus had risen from the dead, formed a religious sect based on his teachings and claiming that he was the son of God and the fulfillment of Jewish messianic prophecies. The sect’s original membership was overwhelmingly Jewish. Shortly after the sect’s founding, a Pharisee called Saul of Tarsus was converted and commenced a missionary campaign among gentiles under the new name of Paul. He was successful while the original apostles had little success in converting other Jews. After the First Jewish War, Christianity in effect severed its connection with Judaism while maintaining that it was the legitimate heir to the parent religion. As the sect’s founders died off, numerous competing versions of Christianity arose and had to be resisted by adherents of the original apostolic teachings. The dissident sects were eventually suppressed and labeled heretical while the purportedly apostolic teachings survived as the historic orthodoxy.

One problem is that this account is itself just the historic orthodoxy. We are getting our history from the winners, and the winners, for nearly a thousand years, were the sole custodians of the documentary record. With almost no exceptions, we have no writings from ancient times except those that the church regarded as worth preserving. But we can use no evidence except existing evidence. Hypothetical facts, such as speculation about documents that might have existed but failed to be preserved, can never prove anything. The only facts we have are that certain manuscripts exist containing writings of a certain nature. They appear to be copies, several times removed, of certain original documents, concerning which the authors of certain other documents claim certain things about their provenance. It is not a fact, but only an inference based on presuppositions about the reliability of those claims, that the gospels’ authors intended their works to be biographical sketches about the founder of their religion.

The Ecclesiastical History was written mostly if not entirely after the conversion of Emperor Constantine. The Roman version of Christianity, with which Eusebius was aligned, was calling the shots now: from this time forward, orthodoxy was whatever the church in Rome said it was. And according to the church in Rome, its authority was derived from the apostles’ authority. More than once in his history, Eusebius identifies orthodox belief with apostolic belief—not “Jesus said X” but “the apostles taught X.” Christians are supposed to believe whatever the apostles believed, but if you then want to know what the apostles believed, you have to ask the church in Rome. Even Protestants say this, except they don't tell you to ask the church in Rome. They tell you to ask whatever church they belong to.

Precious few facts about Christianity’s origins are truly uncontested by all competent authorities. However, a substantial fraction of the competent authorities are adherents of Christianity, and we are not committing the genetic fallacy if we take that into consideration when assessing their judgments. I think that the handful of facts that actually are uncontested—the data disputed by nobody—are best explained by supposing the gospels to be fiction—perhaps historical fiction, but fiction nonetheless.

By fiction, I do not mean fraud. I mean only that the writers of the gospels narratives neither (a) believed they were writing factual history nor (b) expected their readers to regard the narratives as factual history.

For no ancient document is a presumption of historical reliability the correct default position. Evidence of the author’s intention to write history must be adduced from other pertinent facts. Testimony may suffice, if we know the basis on which the witness gives such testimony. In the case of the gospels, not even their existence is clearly and unambiguously attested before Irenaeus, ca. 180 CE. He tells us nothing about his sources of information about two of the authors, Luke and John, and for the other two he simply construes a vague offhand comment by Papias as proof that Matthew and Mark wrote them. No other patristic writer adds a single fact that provides any additional support to the historical orthodoxy about the gospels’ provenance. On that basis alone, a great deal of skepticism about their historical reliability would be justified. That does not yet rule out the possibility that the authors intended to write history, and I don’t claim that anything rules it out altogether. All things considered, though, I think there is sufficient evidence to establish reasonable doubt.

Ever since the Enlightenment, among even non-religious and even atheist historians, it has seemed perfectly reasonable to assume that, regardless of one’s biases about religion in general or Christianity in particular, the church must in some general way have gotten its own history right, especially considering the witnesses of Josephus and Tacitus. I’m not arguing that the assumption is unreasonable, just that it really is only an assumption, and a dispensable one at that. There is nothing prima facie improbable about its being incorrect. Its denial does not oblige as to accept any conspiracy theories or other improbable alternatives. It presupposes nothing extraordinary. It presupposes nothing at all but ordinary human fallibility.

A common (though not invariable) indication of fictional intent is the absence of any claim of reliance on sources. We might call this the pretense of omniscience. The writer simply says, “These things happened,” and the narrative includes information that nobody whom the author is likely to have conversed with could have known about. The author tells us what certain people were thinking. He gives the reader verbatim accounts of private conversations. The gospels are full of such incidents without any hint of how the authors found out about them. Of course this doesn't mean there is no way they could have known. Participants could have told people later, “This is what I was thinking when . . . .” Private conversations don’t have to stay private. Pilate’s wife could have told some people what she told Pilate about her dream. There are ways the authors could have found out about everything they put into their narratives. But we must ask what it is most reasonable to believe, taking into consideration that they don’t tell us how they found any of it out, and that three of them don’t mention even making any effort to find out.

I have discussed the fiction hypothesis at such length because the conventional dating presupposes the contrary, that the gospel authors intended to give what they believed to be a true account of Jesus' ministry, death, and resurrection. This raises the question of why they believed the things they wrote. According to Eusebius (in reliance on Irenaeus), they believed it either because they witnessed those things (Matthew and Luke) or because they had talked with people who had witnessed them (Mark and Luke). Modern scholarship, for the most part, doubts that Eusebius was correct on that point, but it substitutes oral tradition for the eyewitness testimony we all wish we had. It says that the authors were not themselves eyewitnesses and did not personally know any eyewitnesses (or else they'd have said so), but they had to be getting their information somewhere (since they weren't just inventing the story out of whole cloth), and the only plausible remaining source was oral tradition.

And if the gospels are to provide any historical information, as this account assumes they do, then good historiography demands that they be written as early as they could have been written. Irenaeus gives us a terminus ante quem in the late second century, but what about a terminus post quem? There is a broad consensus that Mark's gospel (whoever the author actually was) was the earliest, but how early? The author seems to include a reference to the destruction of the Jerusalem temple, so it could have been written around 70 CE. It could have been written even before then, for all we know, but if we want to avoid arguments about predictive prophecy, we'd rather not say it was, and so the scholarly community, wanting the gospels to have been written as early as they could have been written, has settled on an agreement that Mark's author got the gospel ball rolling around 70 CE.

And maybe he did. Or maybe it was even earlier. Nothing in the text itself tells me that he could not have written his gospel within a few weeks after Jesus died. I don't have a problem with Jesus predicting the temple's destruction 40 years before it happened, considering that (according to the story) he didn't say anything about when it would happen. I don't believe that an intelligent person living in 30 CE needed any divine inspiration to realize that at some time in the indefinite future, the temple would no longer be standing.

But neither does anything in Mark's or any other gospel tell me that it had to have been written during the first century. And neither does anything in any other surviving document known to have been written during the first two centuries. We do not have a solid terminus post quem for any of the canonical gospels other than sometime shortly after Jesus' death.

But why then do I claim a probable terminus post quem of around 100 CE? Because I think it likely that we would have better evidence if they had existed earlier. I think their existence would have been unambiguously attested long before Irenaeus confirmed their existence, and I think he would have had more to say about how he thought he knew who wrote them. I do not think Justin would have referred to them so vaguely as merely "the apostles' memoirs." I believe Clement of Rome would have identified the documents he was quoting, if he had been quoting any documents. I believe that Ignatius, had he been quoting any sources he thought reliable, would have identified those sources. Before sometime during the second century, it seems to me, the gospels were a pack of dogs that weren't barking.

haha. Mr skeptic finds the bible laughable. This is laughable in itself isn't it?

Millions and millions and billions of people believe and have done so for 2k+ years. Your skepticism is yours and yours alone. Live with it.

Here is part of a series of posts looking at the dating of Acts, and it mentions at least one person who puts it at 130 ce:
http://vridar.org/2007/09/09/dating-the-book-of-acts-6-the-late-date-reconsidered-5/