The Holy Bible is Perfect and Proves that Christianity is True (Take 3)

I have no expectation of my opponent returning to this debate, It seems that my opponent has a habit of taking on debates and then abandoning them. However, I will take this opportunity to continue with some points of interest that have in the past moved me to believe that the New Testament is an unreliable source for any Christian beliefs. I have previously posted five questions that show discrepancies/ contradictions in regards to the last few hours of Jesus. I will post four more points at this time and continue to the end of the debate that I am not having with my opponent. If you take the time to read through all this, or at least up to this point, I ask that you vote CON for the simple reason that my opponent forfeited this debate and secondly because he made a poor attempt to bring evidence that was easily refuted. 6. The Gospels are not Historically Reliable: We need not demonstrate Biblical errors solely through appeals to internal consistency. Doing so only tells us that something in the "word of God" is awry--but not necessarily which word is wrong. In order to perform Biblical analysis that actually broadens our view of what is true and false in the "good" book we need to bring in external sources. From these external sources we learn that the Bible makes claims that cannot stand up to even the most cursory historical examination. A. In the Gospel of Luke the story is told of a census enacted by the governor Quirinius (Luke 2:1-7). The census, according to Luke, required everyone to return to their ancestral homes to be counted. Thus Joseph, being in the line of David, travels from Nazareth to Bethlehem where--after unadvisedly traveling ninety miles with a woman in the final days of pregnancy--Mary gives birth. The Romans, being meticulous record keepers, did take censuses. However, because of this meticulous record keeping, we know that the only census conducted during Quirinius' governorship took place in A.D. 6-7--a time over ten years after Herod was king of Judea (Luke claims they are contemporaries). However, aside from this fact we can use common sense to realize that the story is totally unbelievable. Luke invents an empire-wide migration for a simple tax registration: millions of people traveling hundreds or thousands of miles to go to their ancestral home of a millennium past (David predates Joseph by approx. 1000 years) in order to sign a simple form. Imagine this happening today. Imagine the cataclysmic disruption of societies resulting from the masses of people crossing boarders and oceans in order to sign a form. This, of course, supposes you could even find your ancestral home of a millennium past. No, something is wrong here and it isn't that the Romans liked to periodically enact sadistically cumbersome legislation. [a] 7. Did Herod slaughter the innocents? A prophecy related to the birth of Jesus is the claim that the Messiah would be born at a time when King Herod was killing children. Only the gospel of Matthew (2:16-18) makes this claim, quoting a prophecy of Jeremiah (31:15) which states that "A voice was heard in Ramah, weeping and great mourning, Rachel weeping for her children; and she refused to be comforted, because they were no more." There are two problems with this alleged messianic prophecy: it is not a prophecy about children being killed and it is quite doubtful that there ever was such a slaughter of innocents by Herod. "Rachel weeping for her children" refers to the mother of Joseph and Benjamin (and wife of Jacob) weeping about her children taken captive to Egypt. In context, the verse is about the Babylonian captivity, which its author witnessed. Subsequent verses speak of the children being returned, and thus it refers to captivity rather than murder. The slaughter by Herod is also in doubt because the writer of Matthew is the only person who has noted such an event. Flavius Josephus, who carefully chronicled Herod's abuses, makes no mention of it. [b] 8. The Lost City of Nazareth The Gospels tell us that Jesus's home town was the city of Nazareth: And in the sixth month the angel Gabriel was sent from God unto a city of Galilee, named Nazareth, To a virgin espoused to a man whose name was Joseph, of the house of David; and the virgin's name was Mary. (Luke1.26,27) And all went to be taxed, every one into his own city. And Joseph also went up from Galilee, out of the city of Nazareth, into Judaea, unto the city of David, which is called Bethlehem; because he was of the house and lineage of David: (Luke 2.3,4) But when he heard that Archelaus did reign in Judaea in the room of his father Herod, he was afraid to go thither: notwithstanding, being warned of God in a dream, he turned aside into the parts of Galilee: And he came and dwelt in a city called Nazareth: that it might be fulfilled which was spoken by the prophets, He shall be called a Nazarene. (Matthew 2.22,23) And when they had performed all things according to the law of the Lord, they returned into Galilee, to their own city Nazareth. And the child grew, and waxed strong in spirit, filled with wisdom: and the grace of God was upon him. (Luke 2.39,40) The gospels do not tell us much about this 'city' " it has a synagogue, it can scare up a hostile crowd (prompting JC's famous "prophet rejected in his own land" quote), and it has a precipice " but the city status of Nazareth is clearly established, at least according to that source of nonsense called the Bible. However when we look for historical confirmation of this hometown of a god " surprise, surprise! " no other source confirms that the place even existed in the 1st century AD. Nazareth is not mentioned even once in the entire Old Testament. The Book of Joshua (19.10,16) " in what it claims is the process of settlement by the tribe of Zebulon in the area " records twelve towns and six villages and yet omits any 'Nazareth' from its list. The Talmud, although it names 63 Galilean towns, knows nothing of Nazareth, nor does early rabbinic literature. St Paul knows nothing of 'Nazareth'. Rabbi Solly's epistles (real and fake) mention Jesus 221 times, Nazareth not at all. No ancient historian or geographer mentions Nazareth. It is first noted at the beginning of the 4th century. [c] 9. Retroactively Fulfill Prophecy The evangelists poured through the Old Testament and found "prophecies" that predicted Jesus' life. After all, there had to be grander reasons why their great teacher had been executed like a common criminal. In the pages of Jewish scripture they found those reasons. They then consciously wrote their gospels in order to retroactively fulfill prophecy. That this happens at all is beyond dispute. Sometimes, while stumbling over themselves to "fulfill" prophecy, they get it horribly wrong: Mark (1:1-3), using shoddy sources, begins his gospel with "prophecy" that mistakenly conflates two Old Testament versus; Isaiah 40:3 and Malachi 3:1. Matthew (1:20-23) uses a mistranslated Old Testament, in which the Hebrew almah, (meaning "young woman") was changed to the Greek parthenos (meaning a physical virgin), as a justification for the immaculate conception. Matthew (21:1-7) so wants to fulfill a "prophecy" from another shoddy source that has combined Isaiah 62:11 and Zachariah 9:9, that he misinterprets the passage--which only speaks of one animal (with subsequent qualifiers)--and has Jesus ride into Jerusalem, in some bizarre act of balance, on two animals. (The other gospel writers are quick to correct this grievous error.) Thus, we begin to see that not only is it a manifest absurdity to believe the Gospels are history, it becomes tenuous to believe they are even accurate. [a] http://trevorburrus.newsvine.com... [b] (www.infidels.org/library/modern/jim_lippard/fabulous-prophecies.html) [c] http://www.jesusneverexisted.com...