Freethought & Rationalism Archive

spamandham · 09-05-2010, 10:59 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Solo

as I said, you may disagree with the premise that Mark`s readers believed in the reality of an imminent cosmic catastrophy and the coming of parousia. :huh:

I really don't know if they viewed Jesus' words in Mark 13 as past, future, or some of both. I can see arguments for all these perspectives.

Quote:

This premise, together with the two propositions you have agreed to, are my argument for the dating of Mark no later than 90-100 CE (contra Detering, etc.).

Only if you start with the assumption that Mark's audience understood the story literally can you draw this conclusion, and that assumption is simply not valid. Good lord. Even *modern* Christians claim "this generation" is today. What a pathetic argument for early dating.

Solo · 09-05-2010, 12:55 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by spamandham

Quote:

Originally Posted by Solo

as I said, you may disagree with the premise that Mark`s readers believed in the reality of an imminent cosmic catastrophy and the coming of parousia. :huh:

I really don't know if they viewed Jesus' words in Mark 13 as past, future, or some of both. I can see arguments for all these perspectives.

Ach so...., you 'really don't know' whether Mark's readers believed parousia (Jesus' second coming, 13:27) was still ahead in their time..... you can see that as a point of contention, hmmm...:constern01:

Now, the only question I have is whether calling this kind of posturing 'stupid' would be undeserved flattery.

Jiri

aa5874 · 09-05-2010, 06:18 PM

The claim by HJers that "Jesus was just an itinerant preacher" is no more valid than "Jesus was the offspring of the Holy Ghost".

All claims of the historicity of Jesus will FAIL or is Flawed.

Claim 1. Jesus Christ was a REAL God who live in Galilee for about 30 years during the reign of Tiberius.

Claim 1 FAILED...No external corroborative source wrote about a REAL God and Messiah called Jesus in Galilee during the reign of Tiberius and before the Fall of the Temple.

Claim 2. Jesus Christ was a just a Messiah who was BELIEVED to be a God in Galilee.

Claim 2. Failed....No external corroborative source wrote about a Jewish Messiah who was BELIEVED to be a God before the Fall of the Temple.

Claim 3. Jesus Christ was just an itinerant preacher.

Claim 3 has Failed.... Not even the internal sources made such a claim and no external source corroborates such a claim. And the word "Christ" implies that Jesus was supposed to be a Messiah not just a preacher.

Future Claims:. Jesus Christ was a just a PLUMBER, a slave, a madman, a deaf-mute, blind, .........a nobody but he did live in Galilee before the Fall of the Temple.

All Future claims will fail for the very same reasons. Once no external source of antiquity corroborates that there was a Messiah called Jesus who a plumber, a slave..............a nobody.

It would appear to me that HJers do not even understand that their Historical Jesus MUST have been a Messiah in the very least, or else they RENDER the NT, the non-Canonised and Church writings as FICTION.

The Pauline writers claimed JESUS was the MESSIAH over 180 times.

It is either HISTORY or MYTHOLOGY.

There are NO EXTERNAL historical sources for Jesus the Messiah, just MYTHOLOGY.

mountainman · 09-05-2010, 06:39 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Kapyong

Quote:

Originally Posted by Juststeve

Toto:
You're right. The exitence of Christians in Rome doesn't prove the existence of Jesus. It just proves the existence of Christians which is what I understood Kapyong to be doubting.
Steve

No no.
I think there WERE Christians in Rome "many years" before Paul.

The issue is how? Who started it? When?
Did it have anything to do with a historical Jesus?

Were there Hobbits in Rivendell and The Shire "many years" before Bilbo Baggins was born? What do the archaeologists have to say about this question?

mountainman · 09-05-2010, 06:48 PM

Thanks Steve,

Quote:

Originally Posted by Steve Weiss

Quote:

Originally Posted by mountainman

Let's assume for the moment that you and I are correct in assuming that the books of the canonical NT are simply and commonly fictions. My opinion is that if this is the case then there may be evidence of this fraud outside on these ancient texts, and ascertainable by means of the analysis of other texts and other evidence from the field of ancient history.

Of course they are fiction but when were the stories actually authored?
The case is to be made not for the authenticity of the stories,
but for the fraudulent misrepresentation of history by the publisher.

The possibility exists, and cannot be immediately ruled out by the available evidence, that the Christ Myth may have been imperially sponsored. If this is the case, then it is not a time-waster to try and revisit the evidence with a view in mind to sketch a revisionist history in which the Christ Myth appears for the very first time, for example, at the Council of Nicaea in the year 325 CE.

I take your point that historical research can shed light on how the fraud was perpetrated and by whom, and there is a need to set the record straight, so the time may not be wasted from that point of view, as I think that I indicated.

There is a great need I think to set the record straight.
It is called finding out what was the historical truth of the epoch.
We just need to get specific about the epoch and examine the real evidence and its patterns.

Quote:

My point is that internally the texts that are held to be holy doctrine are entirely without substantiation and are obvious fiction. There is little point in trying to figure out "what Jesus actually said" when, in fact, there was no Jesus personage to make any statements.

I agreed that this is a very real historical possibility.
We need to ask the question .... "who first published the Jesus story"?
Surely this is not a difficult question to answer.

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Find the bastards who falsified the record, smoke them out and condemn them and the institutions that they represent, by all means.

The evidence appears to lead us to the epoch of Constantine and the "Council of Nicaea".

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But we know that the whole body of work is phony from start to finish before we even get started.

We may assume this, but the better approach IMO is to present the evidence by which this conclusion becomes self evident to every man and his dog. We need to ask the question "What really happened in the rule of Constantine"? And why did Arius say "the Historical Jesus was created out of nothing existing" and other relevant sophisms about Constantine's version of Jesus.

An Example of Such an Alternative Historical Theory

For example have a read through the Foreword to Bernard's Apollonius of Tyana the Nazarene

Quote:

Two centuries after Domitian, the arch-murderer and degenerate Constantine sat on the throne of Rome. While former Roman emperors hated Apollonius because of his revolutionary and "communistic" activities, Constantine especially hated his Pythagorean teachings -- his strict advocacy of vegetarianism, abstinence from alcohol and continence. Constantine enjoyed the red meats, the flowing wines and the beautiful women of his midnight revels too much to be willing to accept the religion of which Apollonius was the recognized head -- a religion which he imported from India, based on the doctrines of Chrishna and Buddha and bearing the name of Essenian Christosism. It was for this reason that Constantine directed his armies to exterminate the descendants of Apollonius's Essenian followers, who were known as Manichaeans.

Finding that the religion of Rome was in a state of advanced decay and was daily losing hold on the masses, while the cult of Apollonius and the communistic communities of his Manichaean followers, in spite of the severest persecution, kept spreading, threatening the vested interests of Rome, Constantine's henchmen - the pagan priests of the Roman religion - decided to hold a convention at Nicea in the year 325 A.D., for the purpose of establishing a new religion. They decided to take over the popularity enjoyed by the followers of Apollonius, appropriate its essential doctrines (altering them so that they might be acceptable to Constantine), and to replace the philosopher Apollonius, whose abstemious Pythagoreanism was too well known and too much hated by their emperor, by a super-natural messiah whose teachings would be less radical and more acceptable to him.

So in place of Apollonius of Tyana, they put their newly created savior, whom they named "Jesus Christ," who, THEN AND THERE, was first conceived and created in the minds of Roman priests who were later known as the Nicean Church Fathers.

As soon as Jesus was put in the place of Apollonius, the task of the Roman churchmen was TO DESTROY ALL RECORDS concerning Apollonius and his Essenian Early Christian followers during the first three centuries, so that the world might forever be kept in darkness concerning this COLLOSAL DECEPTION, and be made to believe that Jesus and the Christian religion, which they originated at the BEGINNING OF THE FOURTH CENTURY A.D., antedated their creation by three centuries. It was for this reason that the Alexandrian and other ancient libraries were burnt, so that all books written during and pertaining to the FIRST THREE CENTURIES OF OUR ERA MIGHT BE DESTROYED.

And so well did the churchmen succeed in obliterating such records, that, for nearly two thousand years, the world has been kept in darkness concerning the fact that Apollonius of Tyana was the recognized world teacher of the first century, and that during the first three centuries, before he was created at the Council of Nicea, as an alternative messiah to Apollonius, no such man as Jesus Christ was known to or mentioned by ANYONE.

NOTE: The epoch of Constantine may be appropriately termed a "Black Hole" of ancient historical evidence.
It is as if it has been swept clean by the brooms and buring fires of the Constantinian Church since that time.
The Vatican made a big play for the DSS and finally lost control after centuries of "thanks very much".
The control of the securement and publication of such evidence discoveries has moved away from the "Chruch".
The publication of the Nag Hammadi Codices represents a breakthrough from this archaic "Chruch Control".
The most recent publication of the "Gospel of Judas" by Nat Geographic is an absolute precedent.
Ancient historical evidence is turning up AND IS NO LONGER CAPABLE OF DIRECT CENSORSHIP by the Vatican and its wealthy pockets.

Quote:

No greater cultural loss ever occurred than happened when the Christian mob set fire to the books and manuscripts of the Alexandrian Library, in order to destroy all records of Apollonius of Tyana, so that the world might forever be ignorant of his existence and of his replacement by the previously non-existent and unknown Jesus, which occurred at the Council of Nicea, in the year 325 A.D. But fortunately, a certain book survived - the FORBIDDEN BOOK - of all books in that great library - that was most feared. It was "THE LIFE OF APOLLONIUS OF TYANA", by his biographer, Philostratus. The book was secretly carried to the Near East for safety and for over a thousand years it was preserved among the Arabians, in spite of all efforts of the crusaders -- in the interest of the Papacy -- to destroy it.

Somewhat over four centuries ago, this forbidden book was first brought into Europe from the East; and it was not until 1801 that the first complete English translation, from the Latin, was made, in spite of the opposition of the clergy, who, when no longer able to suppress its publication, succeeded in rendering it oblivious and in maintaining the same popular ignorance of Apollonius and his historical significance as existed during the Dark Ages. So well did they succeed, that, though while after the appearance of Blount's first English translation of Philostratus's biography of Apollonius at the commencement of the nineteenth century, his name was on every cultured Englishman's tongue; today, over a century later, he is almost completely unknown, even in academic circles, mention of him having been omitted from historical works and from the educational curricula -- so that, paradoxical though it may seem, the greatest man of the western world during the past two thousand years has been completely removed from the pages of history.

It is the purpose of this book to present the life and teachings of this man.

Toto · 09-05-2010, 11:31 PM

Dr Raymond Bernard is mentioned here

Quote:

In 1964, Raymond W. Bernard published The Hollow Earth - The Greatest Geographical Discovery in History Made by Admiral Richard E. Byrd in the Mysterious Land Beyond the Poles - The True Origin of the Flying Saucers. The book is out of print but available on the Internet. Bernard also authored Flying Saucers from the Earth's Interior. His real name was Walter Siegmeister. His doctoral dissertation was entitled "Theory and Practice of Dr. Rudolf Steiner's Pedagogy" (New York University, 1932). In his Letters from Nowhere, Bernard claims to have been in contact with great mystics in secret ashrams and with grand lamas in Tibet. He was, in short, another Gurdjieff. Dr. Bernard "died of pneumonia on September 10, 1965, while searching the tunnel openings to the interior of the Earth, in South America."* Bernard seems to have accepted every legend ever associated with the hollow Earth idea, including the notions that the Eskimos originated within the Earth and an advanced civilization dwells within even now, revving up their UFOs for occasional forays into thin air. Bernard even accepts without question Shaver's claim that he learned the secret of relativity before Einstein from the Hollow Earth people.

Any further mention of Dr. Bernard will be split off and moved to the appropriate forum, which appears to be pseudoscience.

mountainman · 09-05-2010, 11:56 PM

Other authors who have alluded to a FICTIONAL MYTHICAL JESUS include the following:

* Emperor Julian's Invectives Against the Galilaeans" (c.362 CE)
* Jean Hardouin (1646-1729)
* Edwin Johnson's "Antiqua Mater: A Study of Christian Origins" (1890)
* Joseph Whelas's "Forgery in Christianity (1930)
* Hermann Detering's "THE FALSIFIED PAUL - Early Christianity in the Twilight" (1995)
* PRF. Fernando Conde Torrens' "Simon Opera Magna" (2005) [nb: SPANISH]
* Joseph Atwill's Caesar's Messiah - The Roman Conspiracy to Invent Jesus (2005)
* Francesco Carotta's Jesus was Caesar - On the Julian Origin of Christianity – an investigative report (2005)
* Jay Raskin's "The Evolution of Christs and Christianities" (2006)
* R.G. Price's Jesus Myth Spectrum and Jesus Myth - The Case Against Historical Christ

Quote:

(8) Pious Forgery

"The Gospels are completely fabricated stories that were intentionally crafted to deceive people, and there is no historical person at their core. The Gospels were really written anywhere from the 2nd century to the 4th century and much of early Christian history has been fabricated. The writers of the Gospels knew that there was no Jesus and the whole crafting of the religion was part of a political tool by Roman Emperors or others of a similar kind.

andrewcriddle · 09-06-2010, 11:23 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by GakuseiDon

Can you recommend any texts that discusses ancient fiction? It might be interesting to follow up on its evolution, if that period was the start of that type of writing.

You could try Did the Greeks believe in their Myths ? (or via: amazon.co.uk) by Veyne.

Andrew Criddle

spamandham · 09-06-2010, 09:46 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Solo

Ach so...., you 'really don't know' whether Mark's readers believed parousia (Jesus' second coming, 13:27) was still ahead in their time..... you can see that as a point of contention, hmmm...:constern01:

I really don't know what your point is.

Quote:

Now, the only question I have is whether calling this kind of posturing 'stupid' would be undeserved flattery.

If that's directed at me, I'd call it "extremely rude and a blatant violation of board rules".

aa5874 · 09-06-2010, 09:57 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by mountainman

..The evidence appears to lead us to the epoch of Constantine and the "Council of Nicaea".

But, who attended the "Council of Nicaea"?

Who were invited to the "Council of Nicaea"?

ONLY Non-Christians?

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09-05-2010, 06:18 PM	#353
aa5874 Contributor Join Date: Feb 2006 Location: the fringe of the caribbean Posts: 18,988	The claim by HJers that "Jesus was just an itinerant preacher" is no more valid than "Jesus was the offspring of the Holy Ghost". All claims of the historicity of Jesus will FAIL or is Flawed. Claim 1. Jesus Christ was a REAL God who live in Galilee for about 30 years during the reign of Tiberius. Claim 1 FAILED...No external corroborative source wrote about a REAL God and Messiah called Jesus in Galilee during the reign of Tiberius and before the Fall of the Temple. Claim 2. Jesus Christ was a just a Messiah who was BELIEVED to be a God in Galilee. Claim 2. Failed....No external corroborative source wrote about a Jewish Messiah who was BELIEVED to be a God before the Fall of the Temple. Claim 3. Jesus Christ was just an itinerant preacher. Claim 3 has Failed.... Not even the internal sources made such a claim and no external source corroborates such a claim. And the word "Christ" implies that Jesus was supposed to be a Messiah not just a preacher. Future Claims:. Jesus Christ was a just a PLUMBER, a slave, a madman, a deaf-mute, blind, .........a nobody but he did live in Galilee before the Fall of the Temple. All Future claims will fail for the very same reasons. Once no external source of antiquity corroborates that there was a Messiah called Jesus who a plumber, a slave..............a nobody. It would appear to me that HJers do not even understand that their Historical Jesus MUST have been a Messiah in the very least, or else they RENDER the NT, the non-Canonised and Church writings as FICTION. The Pauline writers claimed JESUS was the MESSIAH over 180 times. It is either HISTORY or MYTHOLOGY. There are NO EXTERNAL historical sources for Jesus the Messiah, just MYTHOLOGY.

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