I had the most amazing interaction with a Village Atheist in an internet forum.
This person was going on about how the New Testament documents were written so long after the events they described, and therefore it was all made up.
I mentioned the recent discovery of a fragment of Mark's Gospel that has been dated to the 1st century. The Village Atheist kept arguing and telling me the earliest document was from AD 150, so I posted a link to prove him wrong. In fact, this fragment is confidently dated to the mid-1st Century, and that proves Mark's Gospel is an early document that rivals 1st Corinthians. I offered that the fragment is from a copy, meaning the original is much earlier.
The atheist kept arguing that it was still written 50-75 years after Jesus' death and he was getting pretty snarky about it. I kept asking him how he came to that conclusion, and then it dawned on me: this atheist thought AD meant "after death". I started laughing, because I couldn't imagine that in today's information age, anybody wouldn't know that AD stood for Anno Domini, the Year of Our Lord. This guy was calling me an idiot over this.
It gets even better. After I established that AD 50 was only 17-20 years after the Resurrection, this guy tried to tell me that this Gospel only proved that none of them were written until at least 75 years after Jesus' death. To make a long story short, this brilliant atheist thought the fragment was from the ORIGINAL, in fact, he thought all the surviving NT papyri were the autographs. Unbelievable.
I pointed out this guy's errors, and predictably he went ballistic and tobogganed straight into a tirade of 4-letter words and high school insults. No matter how many times I linked things and showed him that there were no surviving original NT autographs, he would hear none of it and he just kept up with the sputtering. Finally, he just stopped posting.
I still can't believe that, as smart as atheists think they are, that there was one who didn't know what AD meant and that there are no NT autographs (usually that alone is a foundational atheist argument: "Well, since there are no originals, how can we know that the New Testament is even accurate?")
The Moral of the Story here is: never assume your opponent is smarter than he really is.
There's a reason I call these people "Village Atheists".
'Nuff said.
3 comments:
I have heard that nonsense from Atheists.
On You-Tube, I saw a video where this Atheist was making fun of a Fundy. This Atheist guy said that the New Testament documents weren't written until centuries after Jesus "supposedly existed".
This Atheist is a good guy, and I like his political views, but he is confused as heck about Christianity.
Not only that, but there is excellent evidence from the Apostolic Fathers that the New Testament was nearly complete and in circulation by the end of the 1st Century. The "centuries after" atrgument is ignorant and lame.
I think that the Passion narrative came out around 50 A.D.
What Atheists don't seem to get is that the gospels went through several drafts before they arrived at their final form. It is like when you had to write a term paper, and you had to turn in your first drafts. That is how it worked with the Gospels.
Also, I think that the Christian communities were the authors of them. Here is a post from DOXA that talks about this:
http://www.doxa.ws/Bible/Community.html
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