gdeering

Just for kicks, I'd like to know the ToR's identity and the evidence for conclusively placing the him in history. Is it stronger that claims made for Jesus?


Gregg

show_no_mercy

I'm not sure I follow what you mean by "believed what he had been told". I'm saying that Mark is 100% fiction aimed at discrediting the Christians who only followed the human Jesus. Like the Judaizers (Ebionites or some sort of proto-Ebionites). Mark wasn't "told" anything.

Later gospel writers like whoever authored Luke mistakenly thought that Mark was history instead of theology/polemic and simply corrected Mark to make it more orthodox. Of course "historicists" are making the same mistake as Luke, Matt, etc.

PhilosopherJay

Hi aa5874,

In a certain sense, the arguments are pathetic in that if one does the research about each of them, one finds that serious doubts and problems can be raised about each. On the other hand, we can assume that 99 out of 100 people will not be inclined or have the time for such research, so to the casual observer I think it is a persuasive series of arguments.

It does argue the case in a number of different ways, from authority, from tradition, from probability, from reasonable assumptions, from historical texts from specific quotes and textual analysis.

Looking at each argument separately, I think anybody who has spent a month or two seriously investigating the evidence can find good arguments against them.

This means we can simply put a "no" or a "not" in front of, in the middle of, or at the end of each of these arguments. However, for the 99%, that only gets us back to a neutral position.

I would like to see some kind of positive mythical formulation. Here is a possible solution showing how a phrase may change into a literary character (or how a word becomes flesh, so to speak):

The name Jesus means Joshua which means Yehweh (the later Hebrew deity) Saves. Christ means anointed one or King. Thus the phrase Jesus Christ is analogous to the phrase King Yahweh Saves. The phrase seems to have been a magic phrase used in healing and a concept (e.g. "We have no king, but Jesus Christ") before becoming a series of narrative texts about a God/man named Jesus Christ.

In a similar fashion, George Bernard Shaw in 1903 translated Nietsche's phrase ubermensch as Superman. The Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin wrote in 1905, " Down with unpartisan litterateurs! Down with the superman of literature!" (perhaps referring indirectly to Shaw himself). In her 1913 response to the Futurist Manifesto of Marinetti, called “Manifesto of Futurist Woman," Valentine de saint point wrote,

"Every superman, every hero, no matter how epic, how much of a genius, or how powerful, is the prodigious expression of a race and an epoch only because he is composed at once of feminine and masculine elements, of femininity and masculinity: that is, a complete being."

In 1919, John Spargo (socialist turned conservative Republican) in "the Psychology of Bolshevism" attacked Lenin and his Bolshevik Party saying, "There is a god-like detachment in the attitude of these cold-blooded supermen." In 1932, the Dadaist painter, John Heartfield did a photomontage attacking Hitler called "Adolf the Superman Swallows Gold and Spouts Junk. In the 1935 movie, "Footlight Parade," an overworked choreographer played by Frank McHugh declared, "I'm no superman." Thus "Superman" was a phrase and concept from 1903 to the 1930's.

In 1933, Jerry Siegel turned the phrase and concept into a character, a bald-headed villain in "The Reign of the Super-man". In 1934, he revised it into the more familiar hero in a story called "The Superman". It was not until 1938 that he became widely known when the story was published in Action Comics.

One non-parallel aspect in the hypothesis is that Superman was never accepted as historical, whereas Jesus Christ was. We may account for this by saying that the technological ability to distinguish fiction from non-fiction was far greater in the Twentieth Century than in the First Century. The nearly universal belief in mythology as historical fact indicates that the communication technology was not sophisticated enough to distinguish between the two. The two Jewish-Roman Wars 67-73 and 132-136 also contributed to the decrease in the level of communication technology. That explains why the character of Jesus Christ was accepted and Superman, so far, has not been.


Warmly,

Philosopher Jay

aa5874

Well, I did a little research and I find that arguments for HJ do not really make much sense. The arguments for HJ are fundamentally illogical and contradictory based on fallacies, half-truths, inconsistencies and absurdities.

I find it beyond all normal reason for some one to use a Canon that clearly depicts Jesus as a God to prove or claim he was only a man. To claim Jesus was a man while depending on a source which claims Jesus was a God is to utterly discredit your own source.

This is like having a known pathological liar as a witness and after introducing him to the jurors as a pathological liar his credibility is destroyed by his own attorneys with the hope that the jurors are all suffering from amnesia.

If Jesus was just a man, then HJers need to exam the Shroud of Turin for evidence not the NT and Church writings. The NT and Church writings are fundamentally about GOD'S SON JESUS CHRIST.

PhilosopherJay

Hi aa5874,

I don't disagree with you. I think you make an excellent point. Jesus in the gospel text never appears as a man but as a God/Man.

This allows the witness to theorize that God/Man text must come from a man. In other words there was a transformation of man to God/man in/through the text.

What I am putting forward is an alternative to that theory. I am putting forward the idea that there was a descriptive phrase/concept to character transformation. I think there is enough evidence to synthesize a strong argument that this is what took place.

Besides "Superman," we may take "Sleeping Beauty" as another example. There was no historical person named "Sleeping Beauty," and no individual historical person that the character was based on, although there have been many historical beautiful women who slept.

From Wikipedia:
While the story predates him, it was French author Charles Perrault who first used the phrase/concept Sleeping Beauty in the title to the story: La Belle au bois dormant (The Sleeping Beauty In the Wood). Note that Perrault uses the term as a description, the character in the story is "The Beauty" or "The Beautiful One" In the same way, Madame Gabrielle-Suzanne Barbot de Villeneuve used the description term "The Beauty" in her 1740 fairy tale La Belle et la Bête (Beauty and the Beast).

Jesus Christ, or "Jesus, the anointed one", or "The anointed Jesus", or "King Jesus" is a fictional Jewish King created the same way that Superman and Sleeping Beauty were created -- through literature. This is an alternative mythological Jesus hypothesis.

Warmly,

Philosopher Jay

storytime

From reading the text my understanding of the story is to what it says. That preaching came by way of hearing and hearing by the word of God. This translates into being told by mouth to another and the hearer then repeating the same to others. The "voice" of God was thus in the mouth of his people in spreading the words[preaching]. So Luke for example simply repeated what he had heard from his brethren that he believed to be the truth.

"Forasmuch as many have taken in hand to set forth in order a declaration of those things which are most surely believed among us, (2)Even as they delivered them unto us, who from the beginning were eyewitnesses, and ministers of the word; (3) It seemed good to me also, having had perfect understanding of all things from the very first, to write unto thee in order, most excellent Theophilus,(4) That thou mightest know the certainity of those things wherein thou hast been instructed." (Lk.1:1-4)

The myth is evident within this exchange of belief passed from one person to another. What Luke received from his brethren, he believed and passed it on to others. He believed it to be truth because somewhere sometime someone had claimed to be eyewitnesses of all those things. And from that long line of storytellers (the myth makers), people believed and were expected to believe what they were told to be the truth. And Luke wants to reassure Theophilus that what he has been instructed in, namely the god-man, resurrection of the dead, is most certainly truth.

The entire NT is a myth making project that took many years to develop, progress and become believed as truth. I don't think educated men of Rome were stupid but I think they were as men are now who hold high public office, teach in universities, etc., they submit their minds to rising and dying hero's as they have been told to do. Why can't they let go of the myth of Christ?

aa5874

And to reinforce your point Justin Martyr would declare "What we propose is nothing different."

If you can believe in the Sons of Jupiter you can believe in Jesus the Son of God.


This is Justin Martyr with his "nothing different Jesus" in First Apology"XXI.

See http://www.earlychristianwritings.com

Jesus was a story no different to existing stories.

storytime

Agreed. I'm also curious as to how or from whom the disciple character names originated as gospel writers. Did the first scriptual stories have names attached or did names become an addition to chapters later on? I know that chapters and verses as we read them today were not the way "it is written" in at the start of record keeping. I think a continuous flow was used without a break-up or several scripts in paged flow. If Christians want to claim "God-breathed" in inerrancy then maybe they should claim the first writings on whatever was before papryus?

mountainman

Hi there Philosopher Jay,

Quite appropriately you keep going back to Superman and Clark Kent as a parallel to the New Testament stories, and have accumulated a great deal of information concerning the history of the publication of stories related to Superman. Another publication along these lines is one of Aurobindo's entitled Superman which was published in the year 1915.

Publication of ideas generated a great deal of interest for those to whom the publications are circulated and who have the capacity to read and study them, but the question concerning the original date of authorship concerning these stories has not been adequately addressed by your treatment.

The analogous question to ask is simply whether the "Superman" stories were authored and in circulation for three hundred years prior to the 20th century. In other words, do we have any evidence that the stories about Superman were being authored in the 17th century, perhaps around the time Giordano Bruno was being burnt at the stake by the Catholic Church who were the centralised agency of the Jesus stories.

I do not find it very likely that a bunch of Jewish ex-Galilaean fishermen, tax-collectors and itinerants would have either the means, intelligence, capability or indeed physical resources to have authored in Greek the stories we find in the New Testament, published three hundred years after its purported events by a very rich and influential Roman emperor, who is known to have executed his son, his wife and other innocents and the head of the Greek Academy of Plato.

spamandham

This seems to me to be a well thought out and fair summary of the arguments posted.