xaxxat

Evidently few in his home town fell for his bullshit...

Mark says:
6:4 But Jesus, said unto them, A prophet is not without honour, but in his own country, and among his own kin, and in his own house.
6:5 And he could there do no mighty work, save that he laid his hands upon a few sick folk, and healed them.
6:6 And he marvelled because of their unbelief. And he went round about the villages, teaching.

Just maybe they were on to his game, having known him for awhile... :wave:

Splarnst

Everything you say about Christianity, HL, cab be applied to many other religions which you reject.

Chris Weimer

So really, as Tacitus claims, Augustus did heal people too. And heck, even Asclepius raised people from the dead. We are to believe that he really did such things?

Jabu Khan

Lets assume the sky is blue while we're at it.

leviathanken

The difference between the christian bibles and history books is theres no proof of the bible being true and most history books can be proven true, I guess.

Chunk

I basically agree with everyone here.

The only thing for me, is the fact that it all seems to have happend so recently and that it actually took off.

Look at David Koresh, less than 30 years after his death and 99% of people (that have actually heard of him) think he was nut case. Jesus, whatever he did, made an impact.

He also lived very close to the time of his followers, and the things he did were set in the present. Look at Hubbard, the wacky stuff he was "teaching", is set way back in the past, therefore gains some "credibility", because its impossible to prove it wrong.*

The Egyptian and Roman Gods etc were set in the past and were mythical. Jesus lived so close to his followers and it all seemed to develop so quickly.

*Note: I dont consider the ideas of Scientology at all credible. :P

Diogenes the Cynic

The same was true of Jesus 30 years after his death.

Odin2006

I consider Jesus the leader of a dissident Jewish sect who simply wanted to keep his fellow Jews from distroying themselves from revolting violently against Roman rule (and the realization of this probably hit him so hard that he probably though the idea was divine relavation), and so preached that the Kingdom of God wasn't of this world, and then intentionally pissed of the Jewish high preisthood so he would become a martyr to make his otherworldly message clear (unfortunately it didn't work, as the Jews revolted and Jerusalem got razed by the Romans). When his sect spread to the Hellenized parts of the Roman Empire his message got contaminated with the beliefs of other eastern cults, such as Mithraism, leading to the virgin birth and ressurection stories.

David B

I also tend to believe that here was some sort of historical Jesus - if only on the grounds that most myths I've come across seem to have got some sort of reality behind the myth, like King Arthur, Troy, even the flood, what with the flooding of the Black Sea area somewhat ctastrophically.

I tend to speculate that Jesus was a Jewish nationalist, a member of of a Jewish messanaic sect, with some sort of claim to be a pretender to the Jewish throne.

When I say that there is reality behind the myth of the Trojan Wars, I don't mean to imply that I have any credence that the supernatural events described in Homer had any reality.

Nor credence of supernatural claims in the Bible.

But, back to my speculation. I see it as plausible, but there are lots of people here, in this forum, much better informed about middle eastern history, culture etc than I am. Perhaps they know something I don't, that makes it implausible.

If so, I'd like to know about it, so that I can readjust my working hypotheses.

David B (hopes for comment from the experts)

Skeptical

None of my history books claim anyone performed any miracles. If they did I would throw them out.

But, more to the point all history is at least somewhat questionable, it's just that some of it is more questionable than others. Healing the sick is a gimme, anyone can do that depending on the illness, it's in the mind of the believer.

Walking on water would be a real trick, not to mention rising from the dead. Seriously, if you read that in tommorows's newspaper and it said "thousands witnessed it", would you think "JC's back!" or would you think "what a neat trick! Wonder how he did that?" I saw a guy climb through a closed window without breaking it on "MindFreak", but I didn't run off to join his religion.