fordy said:
Egann said:
Yeah. Not buying it. Christian scholars have fragments from texts quite early in the first century, which is about as early as you can reasonably expect. They have enough early documents to definitively identify Gnostic gospels as written later, and that is not an easy task.
If you were trying to pick a religion to make a cult from in the first century, Judiasm would be the last thing any Roman aristocrat would have thought of. The people were obsessed with tradition, laws, and their own cultural history. All of those make them difficult to manipulate. Compare this to Rome's own religions and mythology, which were shamelessly revisionistic to the needs of the present, and would have been ideal for starting cults. Regardless of whether or not Christianity is true, for any Judiasm-based cult to take root as a religion would have required many well educated Jews who genuinely believed what they were saying.
I will buy, however, that it's an author making an outlandish claim in an attempt to sell his book.
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If this is ture, keep in mind that Rome was not the only culture that dabbled in throwing away the old religion in favour of monotheism. Take the Egyptian sun disc Aten for example. Given the arguments at the time between polytheism and monotheism (where multiple gods can be influential on other gods and sometimes make mistakes over it, compared to monotheism's concept of a all-knowing, can-do-no-wrong being), the texts of Abraham were most likely giving the believers of the Roman gods a hard time trying to justify their beliefs. If it happened, Rome merely emulated what it already knew of a monotheistic culture.
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Oh, it's true. Large stretches of the modern bible are literally census documents. It takes a special breed of crazy to put a census document into a holy text.
