Oldskeptic wrote:

IanS wrote:

Oldskeptic wrote:

Ducktown wrote:
If you are going to argue for an HJ you must have one.

Your HJ is a cult member/leader, most likely obscure, who's friends/family/followers told his story after he was whacked by the authorities. Later the story got embellished by writers. Is that basically it?

Please feel free to add/clarify.

Yep, that's basically it. Well maybe not obscure, but not widely know or world famous.

OK, so your belief is this (to quote what you just agreed to) -

"Your HJ is a cult member/leader, most likely obscure, who's friends/family/followers told his story after he was whacked by the authorities. Later the story got embellished by writers. Is that basically it? "

So where did you ever get that belief?

Nice try, but it's not a belief it's an opinion.

Where does that story come from?

What story?

That is the biblical story isn't it.

Not that I know of. The biblical story is much longer with all sorts of hard to believe details.

All non-biblical writing is, according to bible scholars and all HJ posters here, later than the biblical writing. So the only known primary source, i.e. the first know original source, is the bible.

Sources, it's a compilation of stories.

But the biblical writers had never known Jesus. And if they had never known any human Jesus then it's literally impossible for them to have provided direct personal evidence of a human Jesus who was unknown to any of them.

Does it really take knowing someone personally to have knowledge of them?

Instead all that the biblical writers could provide as evidence, is evidence of their own beliefs in whatever they claimed other earlier anonymous people were said to have told them about Jesus.

Oral histories are not so easily disposed of, especially at that time.

That is evidence only of the biblical writers beliefs. It is not, and cannot be, actual evidence of Jesus himself. It's evidence only of belief in Jesus.

Belief in a human Jesus at the time is not worthless. I find it informative in how consistent it is. Even the gospel of John, that starts out with how Jesus was the word of God and was there from the beginning and through him all things were made, swiftly becomes the story of a physical Jesus. A Jesus with a mother. A not so perfect Jesus with something of a bad temper.

Also, since everything the biblical authors ever wrote about Jesus was about their religious messiah beliefs, the evidence which you have from the bible (and you have nothing else), is not merely evidence of belief, it's evidence of religious belief.

Yes, it's evidence of a belief in a human Jesus that is then further evidenced by non-Christian historical writers.

In fact it's evidence of religious beliefs from unknown anonymous religious fanatics writing in an age of almost unimaginable superstitious ignorance, where all of them spent their entire lives all day every day consumed by beliefs in all manner of historic religious superstitions of the supernatural.

That's quite a statement. Do you have any evidence for that? All of them spent their entire lives all day every day consumed by beliefs in all manner of historic religious superstitions of the supernatural? Do you really think people were that different from us just two thousand years ago?

That's what your Jesus evidence actually is. It's not evidence of Jesus himself at all. it's only evidence of religious belief in an age of fanatical religious superstitious ignorance on a monumental level .... that's what you are actually peddling here.

I'm not peddling anything here. I have an opinion that given a view of all the relevant writings from the mid 1st century to the early 2nd century that a coherent explanation emerges that the Christian Jesus the Christ was based on an actual Jewish Jesus. From selecting the not so nice supposed sayings of this Jesus I come away with the opinion that he was a cult leader preaching an impending apocalyptic theology. I am not opposed to a hypothesis that some of the supposed miracles where tricks of a charlatan and have some basis in reality. No magic, no real miracles, just a charismatic man that fooled and tricked people into thinking he was the son of God. The promised messiah promising life beyond this life.

No.

Your evidence is only evidence of religious beliefs written in the preaching of the bible. And you are calling that "evidence of Jesus".

You have no evidence of Jesus.

As I have just patiently explained to you in words of one syllable. All you have is evidence of the religious messiah beliefs written by unknown anonymous religious fanatics who wrote about a figure they had never known, and who's stories they were fabricating from OT scripture.

You have absolutely no way around that. That is your source, i.e. the bible, and it's evidence is only evidence of religious belief in the supernatural.

That is actually the case you are peddling.

IanS wrote:

Oldskeptic wrote:

IanS wrote:

Oldskeptic wrote:

Yep, that's basically it. Well maybe not obscure, but not widely know or world famous.

OK, so your belief is this (to quote what you just agreed to) -

"Your HJ is a cult member/leader, most likely obscure, who's friends/family/followers told his story after he was whacked by the authorities. Later the story got embellished by writers. Is that basically it? "

So where did you ever get that belief?

Nice try, but it's not a belief it's an opinion.

Where does that story come from?

What story?

That is the biblical story isn't it.

Not that I know of. The biblical story is much longer with all sorts of hard to believe details.

All non-biblical writing is, according to bible scholars and all HJ posters here, later than the biblical writing. So the only known primary source, i.e. the first know original source, is the bible.

Sources, it's a compilation of stories.

But the biblical writers had never known Jesus. And if they had never known any human Jesus then it's literally impossible for them to have provided direct personal evidence of a human Jesus who was unknown to any of them.

Does it really take knowing someone personally to have knowledge of them?

Instead all that the biblical writers could provide as evidence, is evidence of their own beliefs in whatever they claimed other earlier anonymous people were said to have told them about Jesus.

Oral histories are not so easily disposed of, especially at that time.

That is evidence only of the biblical writers beliefs. It is not, and cannot be, actual evidence of Jesus himself. It's evidence only of belief in Jesus.

Belief in a human Jesus at the time is not worthless. I find it informative in how consistent it is. Even the gospel of John, that starts out with how Jesus was the word of God and was there from the beginning and through him all things were made, swiftly becomes the story of a physical Jesus. A Jesus with a mother. A not so perfect Jesus with something of a bad temper.

Also, since everything the biblical authors ever wrote about Jesus was about their religious messiah beliefs, the evidence which you have from the bible (and you have nothing else), is not merely evidence of belief, it's evidence of religious belief.

Yes, it's evidence of a belief in a human Jesus that is then further evidenced by non-Christian historical writers.

In fact it's evidence of religious beliefs from unknown anonymous religious fanatics writing in an age of almost unimaginable superstitious ignorance, where all of them spent their entire lives all day every day consumed by beliefs in all manner of historic religious superstitions of the supernatural.

That's quite a statement. Do you have any evidence for that? All of them spent their entire lives all day every day consumed by beliefs in all manner of historic religious superstitions of the supernatural? Do you really think people were that different from us just two thousand years ago?

That's what your Jesus evidence actually is. It's not evidence of Jesus himself at all. it's only evidence of religious belief in an age of fanatical religious superstitious ignorance on a monumental level .... that's what you are actually peddling here.

I'm not peddling anything here. I have an opinion that given a view of all the relevant writings from the mid 1st century to the early 2nd century that a coherent explanation emerges that the Christian Jesus the Christ was based on an actual Jewish Jesus. From selecting the not so nice supposed sayings of this Jesus I come away with the opinion that he was a cult leader preaching an impending apocalyptic theology. I am not opposed to a hypothesis that some of the supposed miracles where tricks of a charlatan and have some basis in reality. No magic, no real miracles, just a charismatic man that fooled and tricked people into thinking he was the son of God. The promised messiah promising life beyond this life.

No.

Your evidence is only evidence of religious beliefs written in the preaching of the bible. And you are calling that "evidence of Jesus".

Just keep telling yourself that

You have no evidence of Jesus.

So you keep repeating.

As I have just patiently explained to you in words of one syllable. All you have is evidence of the religious messiah beliefs written by unknown anonymous religious fanatics who wrote about a figure they had never known, and who's stories they were fabricating from OT scripture.

You have absolutely no way around that. That is your source, i.e. the bible, and it's evidence is only evidence of religious belief in the supernatural.

There's a bit more to it than that.

That is actually the case you are peddling.

I'm not peddling anything, only expressing an opinion and exposing the fucked up dishonest tactics of mythers. You can go on forever about no real evidence while ignoring and dismissing real evidence, but myther hypotheses simply come off as convoluted conspiracy theory driven by ideology.

The myther movement has all the earmarks of imagined conspiracy theory. From the constant cherry picking of sources and quotes to the misrepresentation of what others say, attacks on experts and recognized authorities as biased or themselves part of a conspiracy. Constant changes in the details of the supposed conspiracy is also prevalent here.

Josephus was talking about Jesus the son of Damneus when he mention James the brother of Jesus.

According to Josephus Jesus was alive in AD64.

Josephus' mention of Jesus was an interpolation.

Josephus was a complete forgery.

Josephus helped the Flavians and the Piso family invent Christianity.

Josephus meant Titus was the Christ.

When it's all put together you guys make about as much sense as Alex Jones interviewing David Icke about lizard overlords from outer space and Queen Elizabeth bathing in the blood of murdered virgin girls.

You guys easily put Dan Brown to shame in the religious conspiracy category. The Romans created Christianity to pacify the already defeated Jews? It can't get much better than that.

Oldskeptic wrote:I'm not peddling anything, only expressing an opinion and exposing the fucked up dishonest tactics of mythers. You can go on forever about no real evidence while ignoring and dismissing real evidence, but myther hypotheses simply come off as convoluted conspiracy theory driven by ideology.

You are peddling the Christian Bible as a credible historical source.

You are peddling the Christian Bible that is used in the Christian Church which states Jesus was born of a Ghost and was God Creator as a history book.

You talk about dishonesty but DISCREDIT the very same Christian Bible which you ACTIVELY use for the TRUE BIOGRAPHY of your Jesus.

Your HJ argument does not make sense.

It is universally completely unacceptable at any level to use admitted sources of fiction and mythology as credible historical sources.

IanS wrote:Your evidence is only evidence of religious beliefs written in the preaching of the bible. And you are calling that "evidence of Jesus".

Oldskeptic wrote:Just keep telling yourself that

Is that all you've got, OS?

IanS wrote:You have no evidence of Jesus.

Oldskeptic wrote:So you keep repeating.

Is that all you've got, OS?

IanS wrote: All you have is evidence of the religious messiah beliefs written by unknown anonymous religious fanatics who wrote about a figure they had never known, and who's stories they were fabricating from OT scripture.

You have absolutely no way around that. That is your source, i.e. the bible, and it's evidence is only evidence of religious belief in the supernatural.

Oldskeptic wrote:There's a bit more to it than that.

Is that all you've got, OS?

Oldskeptic wrote:I'm not peddling anything, only expressing an opinion and exposing the fucked up dishonest tactics of mythers. You can go on forever about no real evidence while ignoring and dismissing real evidence ..

But you never provide any "real evidence", OS..

Oldskeptic wrote:but myther hypotheses simply come off as convoluted conspiracy theory driven by ideology.

The myther movement has all the earmarks of imagined conspiracy theory. From the constant cherry picking of sources and quotes to the misrepresentation of what others say, attacks on experts and recognized authorities as biased or themselves part of a conspiracy. Constant changes in the details of the supposed conspiracy is also prevalent here.

Josephus was talking about Jesus the son of Damneus when he mention James the brother of Jesus.

According to Josephus Jesus was alive in AD64.

Josephus' mention of Jesus was an interpolation.

Josephus was a complete forgery.

Josephus helped the Flavians and the Piso family invent Christianity.

Josephus meant Titus was the Christ.

When it's all put together you guys make about as much sense as Alex Jones interviewing David Icke about lizard overlords from outer space and Queen Elizabeth bathing in the blood of murdered virgin girls.

You guys easily put Dan Brown to shame in the religious conspiracy category. The Romans created Christianity to pacify the already defeated Jews? It can't get much better than that.

You've said "conspiracy" six times there. And whined about vague references to Josephus.

Is that all you've got, OS?

Owdhat wrote:

Briton wrote:

Owdhat wrote:

dejuror wrote:

The Christian Bible was used in antiquity to ARGUE AGAINST an historical Jesus, a man with a human father.

If Jesus did not suffer on the cross as a human mortal it kinda takes the whole point of the thing away. Without a human who existed there is no substance to it, which is probably what you want, except that without this substance there is no reason for this contrived tale to have ever started.

You provide no examples of anything remotely similar having ever happened. You expect us to believed they invented a god then had him made human then turned him back into a god.

Enjoy your backward somersaults and try not to miss them hoops

There are other examples of mythical celestial beings being given a human form/history, there's even a term for it; Euhemerism.

Not in such close proximity to the emergence of the first text and when the event was supposed to have happened - about 50 to 100 years.

I don't know if there are any similar examples, but in any case, that is shifting the goalposts.

Is not goalpost shifting, it's an important factor in why for this particular case, myth being transposed into actual happenings is unlikely

Owdhat wrote:Is not goalpost shifting, it's an important factor in why for this particular case, myth being transposed into actual happenings is unlikely

Tertullian's On the Flesh suggests otherwise: see http://www.ccel.org/ccel/schaff/anf03.v.vii.i.html

(and my posts on the previous page (p1986))

Oldskeptic wrote:

IanS wrote:

Oldskeptic wrote:

IanS wrote:


OK, so your belief is this (to quote what you just agreed to) -

"Your HJ is a cult member/leader, most likely obscure, who's friends/family/followers told his story after he was whacked by the authorities. Later the story got embellished by writers. Is that basically it? "

So where did you ever get that belief?

Nice try, but it's not a belief it's an opinion.

Where does that story come from?

What story?

That is the biblical story isn't it.

Not that I know of. The biblical story is much longer with all sorts of hard to believe details.

All non-biblical writing is, according to bible scholars and all HJ posters here, later than the biblical writing. So the only known primary source, i.e. the first know original source, is the bible.

Sources, it's a compilation of stories.

But the biblical writers had never known Jesus. And if they had never known any human Jesus then it's literally impossible for them to have provided direct personal evidence of a human Jesus who was unknown to any of them.

Does it really take knowing someone personally to have knowledge of them?

Instead all that the biblical writers could provide as evidence, is evidence of their own beliefs in whatever they claimed other earlier anonymous people were said to have told them about Jesus.

Oral histories are not so easily disposed of, especially at that time.

That is evidence only of the biblical writers beliefs. It is not, and cannot be, actual evidence of Jesus himself. It's evidence only of belief in Jesus.

Belief in a human Jesus at the time is not worthless. I find it informative in how consistent it is. Even the gospel of John, that starts out with how Jesus was the word of God and was there from the beginning and through him all things were made, swiftly becomes the story of a physical Jesus. A Jesus with a mother. A not so perfect Jesus with something of a bad temper.

Also, since everything the biblical authors ever wrote about Jesus was about their religious messiah beliefs, the evidence which you have from the bible (and you have nothing else), is not merely evidence of belief, it's evidence of religious belief.

Yes, it's evidence of a belief in a human Jesus that is then further evidenced by non-Christian historical writers.

In fact it's evidence of religious beliefs from unknown anonymous religious fanatics writing in an age of almost unimaginable superstitious ignorance, where all of them spent their entire lives all day every day consumed by beliefs in all manner of historic religious superstitions of the supernatural.

That's quite a statement. Do you have any evidence for that? All of them spent their entire lives all day every day consumed by beliefs in all manner of historic religious superstitions of the supernatural? Do you really think people were that different from us just two thousand years ago?

That's what your Jesus evidence actually is. It's not evidence of Jesus himself at all. it's only evidence of religious belief in an age of fanatical religious superstitious ignorance on a monumental level .... that's what you are actually peddling here.

I'm not peddling anything here. I have an opinion that given a view of all the relevant writings from the mid 1st century to the early 2nd century that a coherent explanation emerges that the Christian Jesus the Christ was based on an actual Jewish Jesus. From selecting the not so nice supposed sayings of this Jesus I come away with the opinion that he was a cult leader preaching an impending apocalyptic theology. I am not opposed to a hypothesis that some of the supposed miracles where tricks of a charlatan and have some basis in reality. No magic, no real miracles, just a charismatic man that fooled and tricked people into thinking he was the son of God. The promised messiah promising life beyond this life.

No.

Your evidence is only evidence of religious beliefs written in the preaching of the bible. And you are calling that "evidence of Jesus".

Just keep telling yourself that

You have no evidence of Jesus.

So you keep repeating.

As I have just patiently explained to you in words of one syllable. All you have is evidence of the religious messiah beliefs written by unknown anonymous religious fanatics who wrote about a figure they had never known, and who's stories they were fabricating from OT scripture.

You have absolutely no way around that. That is your source, i.e. the bible, and it's evidence is only evidence of religious belief in the supernatural.

There's a bit more to it than that.

That is actually the case you are peddling.

I'm not peddling anything, only expressing an opinion and exposing the fucked up dishonest tactics of mythers. You can go on forever about no real evidence while ignoring and dismissing real evidence, but myther hypotheses simply come off as convoluted conspiracy theory driven by ideology.

The myther movement has all the earmarks of imagined conspiracy theory. From the constant cherry picking of sources and quotes to the misrepresentation of what others say, attacks on experts and recognized authorities as biased or themselves part of a conspiracy. Constant changes in the details of the supposed conspiracy is also prevalent here.

Josephus was talking about Jesus the son of Damneus when he mention James the brother of Jesus.

According to Josephus Jesus was alive in AD64.

Josephus' mention of Jesus was an interpolation.

Josephus was a complete forgery.

Josephus helped the Flavians and the Piso family invent Christianity.

Josephus meant Titus was the Christ.

When it's all put together you guys make about as much sense as Alex Jones interviewing David Icke about lizard overlords from outer space and Queen Elizabeth bathing in the blood of murdered virgin girls.

You guys easily put Dan Brown to shame in the religious conspiracy category. The Romans created Christianity to pacify the already defeated Jews? It can't get much better than that.

All completely untrue; yet again!

I have not said any of those things you claim about Josephus. Please quote me saying any of those things.

What I have said about Josephus, and what afaik even bible scholars like Bart Ehrman say about Josephus as evidence of Jesus, is that firstly - Josephus was not even supposed to have been born at the time of Jesus, so he could not possibly know himself anything at all about Jesus except for what he had heard as hearsay from earlier unknown unnamed believers. And the only known earlier source for any of those non-biblical writers, was the bible itself.

But secondly, the writing of non-biblical authors such as Josephus and Tacitus, is in any case apparently not known until the 11th century and later, i.e. a whopping and quite absurd 1000 years after all those authors had died! That sort of time gap alone renders any such writing, especially as Christian copies from Christians who are known to have been in the habit of altering any passages they did not like about Jesus, utterly useless and totally inadmissible as credible evidence.

To repeat the inescapable fact of this matter - what you are calling "evidence of Jesus", is actually only evidence of religious belief in Jesus, written anonymously in the bible, by authors who make clear that they had never known any such person as Jesus.

That is only evidence of religious belief. And that belief was belief in the overtly and constantly supernatural.

It was also a belief that was being taken from the scripture of the Old Testament, as authors like Randel Helms have shown.

What I am giving you above are all indisputable facts. They are not mere opinion. On the other hand, you have actually stressed many times that you are only offering your own personal opinion. But your opinion is not based upon any actual evidence of Jesus, because you don't actually have any evidence of a human Jesus. Your opinion is actually a matter you placing your faith or trust in the religious faith of ignorant 1st century religious fanatics who believed in a supernatural messiah that they had never known, but who they thought was promised by God in ancient scripture.

RealityRules wrote:

Owdhat wrote:Is not goalpost shifting, it's an important factor in why for this particular case, myth being transposed into actual happenings is unlikely

Tertullian's On the Flesh suggests otherwise: see http://www.ccel.org/ccel/schaff/anf03.v.vii.i.html

(and my posts on the previous page (p1986))

It just shows doesn't it, Tertullian et al had a real problem dealing with the situation of Jesus having been real when they actually wanted him to be devine. How else could a mess like the trinity have otherwise been conceived.

IanS wrote:
OK, so your belief is this (to quote what you just agreed to) -

"Your HJ is a cult member/leader, most likely obscure, who's friends/family/followers told his story after he was whacked by the authorities. Later the story got embellished by writers. Is that basically it? "

So where did you ever get that belief? Where does that story come from? That is the biblical story isn't it?

It’s the biblical story, so either it happened to someone or someone made it up from scratch. I do think anybody inventing a mythical supernatural leader from scratch might have come up with a more inspirational life history than the one in the Gospels. This cult leader goes round for 2 or 3 years with a dozen followers proclaiming he's the one and only Messiah, and performing the kinds of tricks like walking on water and turning water into wine that were done by professional magicians. Then he starts collecting more of a mob of followers and gets hauled in by the colonial authorities as a troublemaker; they think he's hardly worth bothering about but execute him as a common felon anyway at the insistence of the local priests. This depressingly realistic scenario probably happened to various people in Roman colonies at the time, a similar one would have been fairly common in the history of European colonization (e.g. the Mahdist War in Egypt was a bid for freedom under a religious leader; most attempts were stopped earlier.)

Owdhat wrote:It just shows doesn't it, Tertullian et al had a real problem dealing with the situation of Jesus having been real when they actually wanted him to be devine. How else could a mess like the trinity have otherwise been conceived.

Tertullian's On the Flesh strongly suggests Tertullian was willing Jesus to have 'flesh' and was berating Marcion for not believing Jesus was human.

Oldskeptic wrote:

IanS wrote:

Oldskeptic wrote:

Ducktown wrote:
If you are going to argue for an HJ you must have one.

Your HJ is a cult member/leader, most likely obscure, who's friends/family/followers told his story after he was whacked by the authorities. Later the story got embellished by writers. Is that basically it?

Please feel free to add/clarify.

Yep, that's basically it. Well maybe not obscure, but not widely know or world famous.

OK, so your belief is this (to quote what you just agreed to) -

"Your HJ is a cult member/leader, most likely obscure, who's friends/family/followers told his story after he was whacked by the authorities. Later the story got embellished by writers. Is that basically it? "

So where did you ever get that belief?

Nice try, but it's not a belief it's an opinion.

Where does that story come from?

What story?

That is the biblical story isn't it.

Not that I know of. The biblical story is much longer with all sorts of hard to believe details.

All non-biblical writing is, according to bible scholars and all HJ posters here, later than the biblical writing. So the only known primary source, i.e. the first know original source, is the bible.

Sources, it's a compilation of stories.

But the biblical writers had never known Jesus. And if they had never known any human Jesus then it's literally impossible for them to have provided direct personal evidence of a human Jesus who was unknown to any of them.

Does it really take knowing someone personally to have knowledge of them?

Instead all that the biblical writers could provide as evidence, is evidence of their own beliefs in whatever they claimed other earlier anonymous people were said to have told them about Jesus.

Oral histories are not so easily disposed of, especially at that time.

That is evidence only of the biblical writers beliefs. It is not, and cannot be, actual evidence of Jesus himself. It's evidence only of belief in Jesus.

Belief in a human Jesus at the time is not worthless. I find it informative in how consistent it is. Even the gospel of John, that starts out with how Jesus was the word of God and was there from the beginning and through him all things were made, swiftly becomes the story of a physical Jesus. A Jesus with a mother. A not so perfect Jesus with something of a bad temper.

Also, since everything the biblical authors ever wrote about Jesus was about their religious messiah beliefs, the evidence which you have from the bible (and you have nothing else), is not merely evidence of belief, it's evidence of religious belief.

Yes, it's evidence of a belief in a human Jesus that is then further evidenced by non-Christian historical writers.

In fact it's evidence of religious beliefs from unknown anonymous religious fanatics writing in an age of almost unimaginable superstitious ignorance, where all of them spent their entire lives all day every day consumed by beliefs in all manner of historic religious superstitions of the supernatural.

That's quite a statement. Do you have any evidence for that? All of them spent their entire lives all day every day consumed by beliefs in all manner of historic religious superstitions of the supernatural? Do you really think people were that different from us just two thousand years ago?

That's what your Jesus evidence actually is. It's not evidence of Jesus himself at all. it's only evidence of religious belief in an age of fanatical religious superstitious ignorance on a monumental level .... that's what you are actually peddling here.

I'm not peddling anything here. I have an opinion that given a view of all the relevant writings from the mid 1st century to the early 2nd century that a coherent explanation emerges that the Christian Jesus the Christ was based on an actual Jewish Jesus. From selecting the not so nice supposed sayings of this Jesus I come away with the opinion that he was a cult leader preaching an impending apocalyptic theology. I am not opposed to a hypothesis that some of the supposed miracles where tricks of a charlatan and have some basis in reality. No magic, no real miracles, just a charismatic man that fooled and tricked people into thinking he was the son of God. The promised messiah promising life beyond this life.

Really well said, and pretty much what I would guess most HJers think.

Tertullian's solution required Jesus to have suffered as a human. Marcion wanted him to have always been a god. A lot of theological gobbledygook over a problem that need never have arisen with a myth

zoon wrote:

IanS wrote:
OK, so your belief is this (to quote what you just agreed to) -

"Your HJ is a cult member/leader, most likely obscure, who's friends/family/followers told his story after he was whacked by the authorities. Later the story got embellished by writers. Is that basically it? "

So where did you ever get that belief? Where does that story come from? That is the biblical story isn't it?

It’s the biblical story, so either it happened to someone or someone made it up from scratch. I do think anybody inventing a mythical supernatural leader from scratch might have come up with a more inspirational life history than the one in the Gospels. This cult leader goes round for 2 or 3 years with a dozen followers proclaiming he's the one and only Messiah, and performing the kinds of tricks like walking on water and turning water into wine that were done by professional magicians. Then he starts collecting more of a mob of followers and gets hauled in by the colonial authorities as a troublemaker; they think he's hardly worth bothering about but execute him as a common felon anyway at the insistence of the local priests. This depressingly realistic scenario probably happened to various people in Roman colonies at the time, a similar one would have been fairly common in the history of European colonization (e.g. the Mahdist War in Egypt was a bid for freedom under a religious leader; most attempts were stopped earlier.)

Well whether you think it's a good story or not, the fact of the matter is that the bible is not by any stretch of sane educated imagination, a credible source of factual history for what it's unknown anonymous religious authors believed about an unknown messiah of their past, who was constantly supernatural on almost every page, and where the OT was certainly being used a source for their stories anyway (not to mention the "fact" that all the extant biblical writing is centuries after the fact, from Christian believers themselves, who were apparently in the frequent habit of changing any earlier texts when they no longer wished to believe what was originally written).

Despairing societies are prone to believe that profound changes for the better are within their reach if only if . The French Revolution, the Bolshevik Revolution and the Reformation were some of those people caught in the teeth of hope.


Jesus (to make it personal) was one of the leaders of a society inventing hope to overcome the inertial mass of the past and he succeeded in transforming society. The kingdom of god meant nothing more than the liberating intervention of god in the history of Israel.

Divine intervention in the affairs of humanity , in support of the righteous, is a common expectation in the history of most religions, Islam, Judaism, Christianity, Hinduism to mention a few.

Jesus expected Hashem to intervene and liberate Israel, hence his personal suffering when the end was near and his bitter complain at the cross: "And at the ninth hour Jesus cried with a loud voice, 'Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachthani?'

Hope is a force for change, but the result never replicates the utopia of the blueprint. The locals forgot him because they had been part of the dream. But the kingdom of god was easily transformed into a reward for the dead by the outsiders who had never been disappointed.

Briton wrote:

Owdhat wrote:

Briton wrote:

Owdhat wrote:
If Jesus did not suffer on the cross as a human mortal it kinda takes the whole point of the thing away. Without a human who existed there is no substance to it, which is probably what you want, except that without this substance there is no reason for this contrived tale to have ever started.

You provide no examples of anything remotely similar having ever happened. You expect us to believed they invented a god then had him made human then turned him back into a god.

Enjoy your backward somersaults and try not to miss them hoops

There are other examples of mythical celestial beings being given a human form/history, there's even a term for it; Euhemerism.

Not in such close proximity to the emergence of the first text and when the event was supposed to have happened - about 50 to 100 years.

I don't know if there are any similar examples, but in any case, that is shifting the goalposts.

This arbitrary time limit over how long it takes religious fanatics to write bullshit stories - especially when we have evidence everyone and their grandmother was doing it for 50 to 100 years - is just another ad hoc argument with about zero reason to lend it any credence.

Special pleading is one of the hallmarks of the amateur would-be historian willing to defend their hypothesis with just about anything that pops into their heads.

zoon wrote:

IanS wrote:
OK, so your belief is this (to quote what you just agreed to) -

"Your HJ is a cult member/leader, most likely obscure, who's friends/family/followers told his story after he was whacked by the authorities. Later the story got embellished by writers. Is that basically it? "

So where did you ever get that belief? Where does that story come from? That is the biblical story isn't it?

It’s the biblical story, so either it happened to someone or someone made it up from scratch. I do think anybody inventing a mythical supernatural leader from scratch might have come up with a more inspirational life history than the one in the Gospels. This cult leader goes round for 2 or 3 years with a dozen followers proclaiming he's the one and only Messiah, and performing the kinds of tricks like walking on water and turning water into wine that were done by professional magicians. Then he starts collecting more of a mob of followers and gets hauled in by the colonial authorities as a troublemaker; they think he's hardly worth bothering about but execute him as a common felon anyway at the insistence of the local priests. This depressingly realistic scenario probably happened to various people in Roman colonies at the time, a similar one would have been fairly common in the history of European colonization (e.g. the Mahdist War in Egypt was a bid for freedom under a religious leader; most attempts were stopped earlier.)

Welcome to this tin-foil-hat thread.



Stein

Owdhat wrote:Tertullian's solution required Jesus to have suffered as a human. Marcion wanted him to have always been a god. A lot of theological gobbledygook over a problem that need never have arisen with a myth

Except the nature of the myth was still being worked out, with generational change and changing theologies.

So Stein, which James was the James in Antiquities 20?

The one who had a brother John, or one of the other James?

or, was it James, the son of Judas of Gamala (a zealot, aka Judas of Galilee), & brother of Simon; executed by procurator Tiberius Julius Alexander ~46AD (sometimes mistaken for the Emperor Tiberius).