cainabel

Even in recent times, there are people who engage in weird behavior like mass suicide, under cult influence. Sad to say, but human beings are "malleable" and can be brainwashed to believe it some things, and would even die for what they believe in.

funinspace

I understand you are asking a serious question, but how about if we take it from a different angle. Why did Joseph Smith make it all up, what was wrong with David Keresh (Waco) and a thousand others like him? Why did Mohammad make it all up? Why did the Watch Tower Society make it all up? Why did Martin Luther question the western xian canon a thousand years after it was established? And why was it ok for him to do so?

Second, why do you think we have very much of what the Apostles ever thought left? Even many Xian scholars question whether Matthew, Luke, and John were actually written or even read over by any of the original Apostles. Let's just say for giggles sake, that Mark was actually written by an Apostle. What would we actually know of J(Y)oshua without any other Gospel? We would have no miraculous birth and no majestic ascension. So we don't really even need to say "they told blatant lies". There's plenty of room for decades of verbal embellishment. The NT books seam to clash at a plethora of points, which doesn't sound too godly.

Thirdly, why did some xians change the contents of Joseph Flavious's writings to add references to Joshua? Why did some xians add a bigger, better ending to Mark?

A more minor note: Why do followers of Joshua associate the name of their church to people like John Calvin who condoned the murder of heretics? I find that an odd thing to honor.

And welcome to the forum.

blt to go

Albafan2020, welcome to ii.

People lie to get something. Like avoiding punishment, getting the girl, make money, etc.

In order to know WHY they lie, we need to know:
1) Who said it?
2) To Whom was it said?
3) When was it said?
4) What was the context in which it was said?

All of these are unknowns in the questions posed. But in an attempt to answer them, I would recommend you read some of the books on this link.

Welcome to a long exploration of exactly who said what when.

Koyaanisqatsi

Let's deal with this first and foremost, because, as others have pointed out, there are many unknown assumptions going into this question (i.e., it's loaded), so caveat.

An understanding of culture, period and context is necessary before such a question can be addressed. As almost all writings from that era and location suggest, there was no "secular" worldview at all. Everybody, it seems, believed in gods and demons and ghosts and ghouls and talking bushes and donkeys and snakes, etc. In other words, 99.9% of the entire world population at this time did not question that such things as gods and ghouls and resurrecting from the dead, etc., existed. To them, gods and miraculous healing and resurrection from the dead and all that childish nonsense were as common and absolute as oxygen.

And don't forget that oral tradition was the primary method of communicating and mythology/morality tales were the primary method of oral tradition. In other words, historically accurate facts and non-embellished events were not the primary method of communicating cult dogma. Hell, it wasn't even the primary method of communicating day-to-day events. A warrior who kills three men in a battle, for example, has killed a hundred men in the middle of Allah's greatest sandstorm by the end of the day.

While that would certainly be technically a lie, it is understood that the message being imparted is, "an heroic deed was done by one of our own in a bloody battle, come celebrate with us." Aggrandizement is commonplace and replete and never questioned. This is partly because it is an accepted form of storytelling in the day and primarily because the people we're talking about were not educated in any way to question what they were told. Not exactly Rhodes Scholars these.

Now, having said all of that, I firmly believe that the book of Mark was a deliberate fraud, but for very different reasons (that I won't get into here yet again), but your question seems to be more along the lines of, "These people knew the difference between what happened and what didn't happen and they deliberately lied in order to create something that didn't happen," yes?

As evidenced in your follow up:

Contrary to apologetic spin, there is no reliable evidence that any of the Apostles lived, let alone lived horrible lives or died because they believed Jesus resurrected.

Regardless, all Jews, in particular, were being persecuted back then and members of the Jesus cult were all Jews, too. In fact, anybody who wasn't true blue Roman was being persecuted, but you don't ever hear that side of the story from Fristian apologists. Fristians only paint their own martyrs as having suffered, but that's just not true. That's like claiming that because Irish immigrants were persecuted in America, only Irish immigrants were persecuted in America.

But back to the question that every cult member is conditioned to ask, all it takes in a cult is one cult leader and a group of gullible, ignorant, innocent, desperate followers to believe the first lie. If anyone was a liar, it was Paul (and whoever wrote the propaganda).

How do we know this? Well, beside the fact that he as much as said so (again, assuming the works we have can be legitimately attributed to him), you have the other obvious cult nonsense, such as convincing people that faith is more important than evidence; that their god deliberately made wisdom foolish to man, so that anyone questioning any of the cult mythology is automatically wrong by the very fact that they are questioning it; and the whole contradictory, doubletalk about what actually did Jesus and therefore mankind become after death (spirit, body, spiritbody) etc.

In other words, his words. They are words specifically designed to pre-emptively address all of the holes in the theology; holes he knows are there because he made it all up (or those he was in cohoots with), IMHO, of course.

Look, as a one time cult member, now deprogrammed atheist, I would know exactly how to create, maintain and control a cult. It's remarkably easy to do, all the way to the point of mass murder and/or mass suicide. The problem you appear to be having is, you're not one of the extremists and therefore think that there aren't any extremists or that the amount of extremists is, on average, relatively low.

But think about the region we're talking about and remember that Jesus, if he existed, was first and foremost described as a radical. He was allegedly preaching non-orthodoxy (I would call it anti-orthodoxy) and the mainstream elders supposedly hated him so much that they conspired to have him killed.

This would be the equivalent of a David Koresh (who was also conspired against). His followers were few and radical. They all had to hate their mothers and father and sisters and brothers and own lives also and they were repeatedly told that they ran the risk of being killed or imprisoned, etc., etc., just for listening to Jesus; just for being seen with Jesus.

If any of that were actually true, then that means that Jesus could not possibly have been a calm, cool, rational, loving Rabbi. He would have had to have been what he was ultimately crucified for; a seditionist against Rome. What they would have called, a terrorist (freedom fighter to you and I).

To be crucified, in real life, that would have probably meant he either led raids against the occupying forces (sound familiar) or instructed his cult to strike back at the Romans or the like. In other words, the exact same things that are going on right now in that region would have been going on back then, the only difference being costume and heavy artillery.

So, at best, when you read the NT, you're reading the glorification of Jesus through the eyes of the blind extemist followers of the cult and in no way an objective, dispassionate, unbiased historically accurate chronicle of facts and only facts.

Are they lies? Yes, of course they are. Does that prevent followers from believing them to be true? No, of course that doesn't.

But most importantly, have humans the unnerving capacity to give their lives for things they believe to be true, but aren't actually true? Well, you tell me whether or not those Saudis who slammed two planes into the WTC three years ago are right now getting down with their 72 virgins.

The sad, horrible truth about humanity is, by and large, they're (we're) sheep and sheep are shorn, blunt force trauma killed and eaten. Hundreds of millions (if not billions) have done so smiling and willingly and all it takes is the desire to manipulate that quality.

History is replete with such desire and such manipulation, so, finally, the answer to your question is, most likely nobody would die for something they knew was a lie (i.e., they, themselves made up); but untold millions will die and have died for lies that they believed were actually true.

That, however, does not make them any more true.

Oh yeah and welcome to the snake pit...........um, boards....

Vorkosigan

Matt, when you make an assertion like "go to their deaths" and "live totally horrible lives" for their lie, you need to provide support for these statements. As for the first, no solid evidence exists that even a single early apostle was martyred; the only information is in later, apocryphal histories (the death of Stephen in Acts reads like a piece of fiction) or letters like 1 Clement whose date nobody can pin down with any certainty. In other words, it is only a tentative conclusion that anyone died for the faith.

As for living totally horrible lives, can you supply us with evidence for that?

Self-sacrifice for one's social identity is very common among individuals of the primate Homo sapiens. In war, where soldiers are often extremely cynical about the politics, they nevertheless will go out to die. Why? Small unit cohesion and unit social identity motivates them. Nobody wants to be seen as letting the others down. The same dynamics operate in many social situations.

Additionally, while I am personally certain that at least some of the early inner circle were complete hypocrites and knew the whole thing was a joke, since that is common in the history of religions, it seems they were all experiencing visions of the Risen One. So why should they regard it as a lie? As far as they knew, they were speaking truth. We know now that they were simply going through an experience common in early religious movements, especially those taking place in a colonial matrix. In addition to James the Righteous, both Nxele of South Africa and Hong Xiu-quan of China thought they were the brothers of Jesus, and founded religious movements based on that. In Hong's case his adherents also had visions -- in fact, as the movement's powerful officials intrigued against each other, claims of visions were used to legitimate the elimination of rivals. We see a bit of that in Paul ("Have I not seen him too?")

This is a common and extremely weak apologetic argument, Matt.

Vorkosigan

Chris Weimer

If you take the Islamic approach to it, Jesus switched with someone else to die on the cross and then went into hiding. My theory is that Jesus really was the Righteouss Teacher James the Just.

Steven Carr

Money and power.

They earned a living for themselves and their wives.

Better than fishing, an occupation where a mere 153 fish is regarded as a huge catch, and where they were in danger of dying daily.

I wonder why the disicples went back to fishing after receiving the Holy Spirit and seeing and touching the resurrected Jesus.

Perhaps they were waiting until nobody could produce a recognisable corpse of Jesus before making claims.

After all, they had seen many people fall for the claim that John the Baptist had been resurrected, so they knew how easily people could be duped.