Iskander

This makes no sense at all. What are you trying to say?

spin

Are there any terms that you don't understand?

If not, do you have problems understanding that the christian tradition developed the notion of apostolic succession?

If not, do you know about various christian views referred to as early heresies? These are competing views of the religion.

If we get here without problems, then we're half way there and there actual is enough sense in what I've said.

We have no indications of any Jesus believers before Paul from the earliest writings we have, ie Paul. He tells us nothing about the beliefs of the people in Jerusalem that he had relations with, so we cannot say that they were in any sense christians. We know that Paul saw his gospel as the only one, which suggests that he wasn't dependent on earlier ideas, a notion reinforced by Gal 1:11-12. If christianity then came through the efforts of Paul with no gospel of the living Jesus, but of the dying Jesus, pre-Pauline ideas of christianity are post-Pauline and retrojected before him.

And finally, "The late book of Acts tries to sell the story." The book of Acts tells the story of wonderful deeds by apostles before the time of Paul. None of those deeds reflects any content we find in Pauline writings that deal with the people he had relations with in Jerusalem. In fact Paul finds nothing to say recommending the Jerusalem crew. The rosy Acts is merely a sales exercise for a later version of christianity.

Please make more meaningful criticisms in the future, otherwise you'll just get ignored.

Iskander

You write words at random.

Tradition –when have you decided that a Christian tradition exists?
Which competing religious views, what and how do you know about them?

What does “handle” mean here?
And much more

Robert Tulip

Thanks Iskander. My view is that an understanding of ancient cosmology is central to understanding how the story of Jesus Christ emerged, but this cosmic dimension has been neglected for a range of cultural reasons. These reasons are very pertinent to explaining why the clash between historical and mythical readings of the Bible is becoming so sharp.

A good starting point to understand the cosmic Christ is the text from the Lord’s Prayer “thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” Although traditionally read against a supernatural vision, this text can actually be better understood as purely natural. Heaven in the Bible refers to the manifest unchanging glory of the visible firmament, as for example when Jesus “looks up to heaven” in order to perform miracles.

Against this natural framework, “thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven” is a prayer that the events of history should reflect the observed slow movements of the sky. This interpretation is grounded in the Gnostic Egyptian axiom ‘as above so below’. It recognises that history is a part of the whole of cosmology, and that the part always reflects the whole.

The Cosmic Christ can therefore be found in an understanding of how the ancient church imagined history as reflecting the movement of the stars. In terms of traditional Christology, Jesus Christ is the union of time and eternity, a person in whom the eternal truth of the cosmos is incarnated in history.

The Nazarenes, or Watchers, interpreted eternity against their vision of heaven as the actual firmament, seen in the unchanging positions of the fixed stars. From two centuries before Christ (and probably much longer), these celestial watchers knew that the apparent stability of the stars concealed a very slow movement, producing what we now call zodiac ages, with the signs shifting against the seasons by one degree per lifetime.

Since before the time of Moses, the spring point at Passover had historically occurred with the sun in Aries and the full moon in Libra. But the spring point was shifting, so at the purported time of Christ Passover happened when the sun was in Pisces and the moon was in Virgo, a new celestial axis. The precise moment when the spring point visibly moved into Pisces was 21 AD.

These ancient observations from naked eye astronomy were summed up in the myth of a cosmic Christ, an imagined man who incarnated the shift of the ages, marking the turning point of time as alpha and omega.

By my analysis, this cosmic interpretation provides a lucid and powerful scientific explanation of Christian origins, an elegant and parsimonious reading of the evidence that enables coherent understanding of the jumbled evidence that has survived. Paraphrasing Voltaire, Jesus Christ did not exist so he had to be invented. Jesus Christ encapsulated the observed movement of the cosmic order into a simple story.

Precession of the equinox provides a compelling heuristic to explain the New Testament. This story has survived only in cryptic fragments. As a secret oral mystery tradition, the understanding of precession was vulnerable to destruction by the politics of imperial orthodoxy, who found the cosmic vision incompatible with their central myth of the Historical Jesus. All early gnostic literature was targetted for burning. The eradication campaign successfully concealed almost all traces of the crime, but the gnostics were able to insert encoded statements of their original ideas into the surviving New Testament.

Forensic analysis of these surviving traces of gnostic cosmology enables us to reconstruct a plausible and persuasive story of Christian origins. The Nazarenes imagined Jesus Christ as the pre-existent logos, or cosmic reason. The moment when the signs matched the seasons in 21 AD marked a point of cosmic attunement, explained by the myth of God coming to earth. This observation of the shift of ages was obscure and difficult to understand, so gave rise to popularising stories. For example, the shift of the Passover moon from Libra to Virgo gave rise to the story of the replacement of the covenant of law (Libra) by the new covenant of grace (Virgo). Over time, these popularising stories came to be viewed as historical, and the cosmic ladder which the church had climbed to create these historical stories was kicked away, leaving us with the fragmentary remains of the New Testament.

Iskander

Thank you, Robert.
I am reading Christ in Egypt and I suppose that should help.
Thanks again for your informative reply.

spin

That is certainly the sort of vacuous nonsense that causes you to be ignored.

:wave:

Iskander

You are more intelligible when you use those ridiculous icons you are so fond of: RIP, crapping horse, shit spreading fan, galloping horses and plain direct aggressive insults.

Csec contribution to this thread was good, but you had to spoil it!! That is all what you do here, worse than nothing

Robert Tulip

Not true. The canonical epistles of John contain the following strong dogmatic endorsements of the notion of a historical Jesus. This idea has been central to Christian faith since early times. Its denial was the Docetic heresy, the idea that Jesus Christ only seemed to be the Son of God. The Christian notion of incarnation, meaning embodiment in the flesh, is purely historical.

These texts illustrate the aggressive bullying intimidatory attitude propounded by Christian orthodoxy against anyone who questioned the historical existence of Jesus Christ in the flesh. The author tells us this intimidation was necessary to confront the "many" critics who rejected the Historical Jesus. Such critics were called "antichrist", "wicked", "deceivers", "liars", "from the world", who should not be welcome.

This early political assault on Gnosticism provided the imprimatur for the destruction of all conflicting opinion, which is why we have so little surviving material from writers who were not in agreement with the dogma of Christ in the flesh.

Chili

Not Christ in the flesh nor Jesus in the flesh. The first Adam was not in the flesh, so how can the second Adam be?

First Adam is self awareness Created in the TOK only that we call ego opposite to image in the TOL and there is two of them right there.

spin

People will never, ever fucking learn, will they? Really, without even at least a potted historiography there is no hope to have a historical any-fucking-thing. This just seems too hard for people who are used to misusing words with such gay abandon.

:banghead:

It's not enough that someone thinks something happened or someone existed in the past. To be historical requires more than the thought that the subject happened or existed. The reasoning for this didn't emerge until about two centuries ago. Historicity is a modern concept.