rlogan

This is adopting the methodology of taking the only Jesus we are told about and removing the fantastically stupid things said about him - which is everything important about him religiously in the first place.

It's really the anti-jesus. Any one of a hundred vagabonds wandering around Judea. Not the guy drawing crowds as big as cities and representing a threat to the religious authorities.

The list above is an indictment of the frauds who were behind Christianity. Obviously, if it was written anywhere near contemporaneous to the alleged Jesus, then they are bold faced liars.

The premise behind the above is absurd: remove from the story told by bold-faced liars only those things easy to disprove. Like miracles. What you have left must be "historical"

What a joke.

If one is going to claim this then at least pay attention to the theory. It means Christians are pathological fairy-tale spinners. How can you take anything they have written as factual? Pilate existed we know because there are records confirming it. Not because we pared down some hysterical cartoon God to his "historical kernel".

Haw! The "Historical Easter Bunny". Its just a rabbit. Pretty hard to reject a historical rabbit. Lived in a hole. Ate grass. Got eaten himself by a wolf. There is just too much there. Too much history. There must be a rabbit.

You are not confirming a specific Jesus who existed with this "historical jesus" approach. You are just trying to posit one that can't be rejected. But it is one drastically different from the Biblical Jesus.

On the other hand, if you can see where all this stuff about Jesus came from: by quote mining the Hebrew Bible and peddling it to people remote in place and time from the alleged events - it makes sense.

He is born in Bethlehem because it says so. But comes from "out of Egypt" so we have to get him there via the re-telling of the slaughter of the innocents myth, and he must be from Galilee and also a Naza-something. On and on. Whole scenes lifted from Isaiah 51, etc.



Good job conflating the existance of Pilate with the existance of superman. All we have to do is say superman met Pilate! Now you can't reject "everything" about superman stories.

FathomFFI

Dude ... "bared-faced liars?" Or "honest, serious, believers?"

You do realize that attempting to rationalize all this from a 21st century perspective is fruitless, don't you?

Put yourself in the shoes of a Jew in 1st century Jerusalem, and GOD IS A REALITY BEYOND ANY DOUBT. In Rome, gods were everywhere. They had statutes all over the place. Their religion ruled and was 2nd to none.

Religion ruled supreme in the 1st century, and religious wars raged for hundreds of years. Romans vrs Jews took down 2 million lives, all over religion.

If someone told you Jesus walked on the water, there was a damn good chance he did as far you would be concerned, as a Jew in 1st century Jerusalem. He was the expected Messiah with unlimited godly power, as far as many were concerned. THE ROMANS COULDN'T KILL THE MESSIAH, BECAUSE HE WILL DEFEAT THE ROMANS AND RISE FROM THE DEAD, would yell a herald. And a legend was born.

Get into its history dude, get into their heads. Understand what it is you are actually reading, because it's an awesome history, and far more valuable as a history than this petty bickering over what is true or false.

Faithful history rules. It just does.

Toto

The discussion of Tacitus has been split to a new thread here

perfectidius

"faithful history?"

If you enjoy a highly ambiguous "history" of questionable events, as some do, than have all the fun you want with it. But you would admit that there are more interesting histories than this, no?

Daniel