Clearly any discussion which does not refer to Jesus Christ as god seems to upset you. If you wish to convert people to your way of thinking, you should be prepared to further explain and reason what you call facts. I do not agree that your "facts" are indeed earth shattering proof, as I have said. Instead of saying that you proved me wrong, you should try and elaborate. Your method of discussion leads me to believe that you won't make it far as a representative of your faith trying to bring in new converts.

Sure, and for various religions those defined meanings are established by the usual prejudice that jesus was a god or son of god, so therefore any scrap of writing by any man who calls him a god is apparently proof that he was in fact god.

Perfect example is how upset martureo seems to get that others don't accept a threadbare written statement written 2000 years ago by a man as ironclad proof.

It is evidence that people back then, as now, believed Jesus was God.

Not at all.

It means if someone continues to repeat falsehoods after being corrected, the conversation is no longer fruitful.

JB3 can't even keep his dates straight. Why should I bother talking to someone who's assertions cannot be validated or falsified?

Because you seem not to understand.

Except you know as well as I do, that these are false statements.

I provided evidence in the form of the Gospel of John and the Carmen Christi (Philippians 2:5-11). Both of which are well within the bounds of a century.



Then again, we have this.

And if you remember I got no answer.


Then further...
Finally, an apology.... except it's still full of error.
It seemed the matter was closed.... but then nope, he continues with the same error.

So, Kerry, how many times does a person need to be corrected on several points before conversing with them is unfruitful?

Actually, at the point that Constantine had his death bed conversion, Arians pretty much ran the empire. Immediately following his death Athanasius (the great Trinitarian champion) was exiled and Arianism became the state religion. Arians then persecuted the Trinitarians and killed off the pagan priests as well.

So how does this bear on the issue of whether Arians were Christians?

I never said it did.

I am a Trinitarian. Historically Christianity has always been Trinitarian.

Arius declared that "there was when he [Jesus] was not". In doing so he declared that Jesus was a creation rather then the Creator. To do so he had to ignore a great part of the NT and tradition.

Furthermore, Christianity has always asserted strict monotheism (one god). Since Arius believed that Jesus was created and deified he was effectively violating monotheism.

I would also not consider gnostics, Marcionites or the Ebionites as Christians either. They all reject Christian beliefs, thus they are not Christians. Christian describes what you believe about Christ, not just that you believe anything about him (otherwise Muslims could be called Christians).

You're imposing your own narrow normative definition of Christianity on a huge range of differing versions of Christianity, excluding those Christians who fail to meet your narrow definition. Obviously Christianity has not always been Trinitarian because it took Christian church councils many years to hammer out Trinitarianism and then impose those developed ideas on a diverse movement by excluding those Christians who didn't accept the conclusions of those councils. The Muslim analogy is off base. Muslims don't consider themselves Christians. Gnostics, Marcionites, Ebionites, and Arians did consider themselves Christians and it was only due to the fact that they ended up being the losers in internal theological/power conflicts within Christianity that they were excluded from further development.

I understand this is your secular view on the subject.

However, yes it has always been Trinitarian. The apostle Paul was already fighting proto-gnostics in his letters and the Council of Nicaea condemned Arianism.

Yes, it took several councils to formally hammer out all the final details, but you seem to think that this stuff was up to debate. It wasn't. Councils were held to fight heresy, and most of the time the vote was unanimous if not a landslide. The bishops gathered together to created a statement removing ambiguity (not adding doctrine) from the known canon of beliefs.

The creeds that were created held their effectiveness in what they negated, not what they asserted. Heresy was the only reason many creeds existed. And in fact, if there were no heresies we'd know much less about the early Christians than we do now in a historical sense, as they wouldn't have written out the many creeds and councils wouldn't have been necessary. But they do believe something about Christ. So why aren't they Christians? So the criteria is "anyone who considers themselves a Christian is a Christian"?

Puleeze Kerry. That's absurd. Not really. We still have gnostics and pseudo-Arians today.

I really cannot believe you're buying into this garbage. Do you really believe that the gnostics developing their pseudopigraphia in the 2nd and 3rd centuries really are the original believers? The Marcionites flagrantly abandoning and editing the text for their own purposes are the original believers?

It's quite fun to watch Martureo display his knowledge and understanding. It's not really a fair fight though. Shows that the power of knowledge and understanding will overcome those without it every time.

Yes, exactly. Instead of setting up some method of exclusion, I think that people who say they are Christians should be taken at their word. The fact that they don't meet your standard or some council's standard or that they choose to ignore, add or interpret an ancient text in a way that gets your shorts in a knot, is not a reason to say they are not Christians. Christianity always has been a diverse and multi-faceted phenomena and to try to reduce it to what some small group thinks is ideologically correct (even if that group consists of a single person--St Paul) is a failure to understand the nature of human religious traditions.
It's also true that there are lots of Christians who find existential satisfaction in conforming themselves to 'orthodoxy'. They like creating sharp ideological limits and then seeing how they can fix their own ideas within those limits. You're one of those kinds of persons. Had you lived in the time of Jesus, you never would have been a Christian, instead you'd have been a Pharisee unless you had a seizure and fell off your horse.
My view has nothing to do with secular/sacred. There are tons of Christian believers who view Christian history the way I do.

Except in all your hurry to be dismissive, you don't seem to understand that you are simply reinforcing my point because we see things so differently, though Ive been a bit less rude than you. You seem to be completely incapable of putting yourself in someone elses shoes to try and see their perspective.

Some christians call jesus god within the bounds of a century are somehow proof of what? That it was suddenly a major religion? They said that as he was nailed to a cross and before when it was more of a cult, im not sure what your confusion is on this point, apart from being so blinded by your own faith that you are functionally incapable of discussing this with anyone who does not share in your exact interpretation of that faith. Let alone someone who does not believe in any god.

We view history differently, as said repeatedly. I think of christianity as not a major religion UNTIL a few hundred years went by after jesus died. Plenty of time for deification to take place, for the acts of a man to become the acts of a god in the writings of men and living memory to die. Thats how it appears to me with the concept that jesus was a man alone, and that there are no gods but the ones that we make.

I suggest you calm down and let it go, we will not agree on this point.

says the 31%

This criteria is stupid. One could believe that Jesus was a 50ft tall spider in Siberia and yet be categorized as a Christian if they simply claimed to be such.

Do you not see the problem? Would you apply the same standards to any term?

Muslims? Pacifists? Jews?

Anybody who claims they are simply are? I agree Christianity has always been mulit-faceted, but it's always been monotheistic and Trinitarian. There are some things which preclude you from being a Christian if you reject them. Otherwise the word is meaningless. Since Pharisees were only Jews... I don't think so.

Bad analogy poor chap. And they would be just as misinformed and confused as you are. Appeal to population is a fallacy btw.