dog-on

Perhaps they didn't, originally.

Perhaps this happened later for other, more mundane reasons.

bacht

Right, the "new Israel" was supposed to be faithful to one God. Maybe the early Christian leaders saw some advantage in monotheism vs pluralism, leading eventually to the official state cult :huh:

spamandham

Under the assumption that the history is essentially fake, I tend to agree with this. What I would like to see, is a development of that idea from those promoting it. How and why did Christianity *really* begin, if the history we have is not true?

rcscwc

Permit me to correct myself. Trials were on Mondays and Thursdays.

See.

Why Jews Can't Believe in Jesus
http://judaism.about.com/od/jewishvi...esus_trial.htm

dog-on

I still favor the idea that at a certain point in time, Christians wanted to distinguish between their "real" god and the other "false" gods.

The way they seem to have gone about it is that they made the claim that, not only was their god real, but that, indeed, the other gods were just myths and fables.

A "real" history, for your preferred god, would come in very handy, for someone making that particular argument.

spamandham

But why? Christianity sprang from a pluralistic society.

rlogan

This is the theory of the anti-jesus. In sincerity and without malice, it is ludicrious into the realm of fantasy if we take you literally.

The entire point to Jesus is that he is extraordinary. So you can't pose the anti-jesus (ordinary man) as Jesus and say "this is the historical Jesus".

This is the classic bait-and-switch of the Historical Jesus school, in fact. We're going to explain why this extraordinary man went without notice: he was a normal man. The exact opposite man to the Gospel portrayals - which is not that he was unnoticed, but instead this mega-superstar.


Then the burden of proof by the HJer becomes "prove that an ordinary man did not exist"

And the implied logic is that since you cannot prove ordinary men did not exist, therefore there must have been an extraordinary man who existed.

spamandham

From a Christian perspective, that's true, but I'm not a Christian. I'm just interested in the history of it.

From a historical perspective, there's nothing ludicrous about ordinary people being remembered as larger than life. It was common practice in the ancient world to attribute godlike characteristics to leaders, or even to remember them as gods. It's feasible that's what happened in the case of Jesus - an ordinary cult leader who was later turned into a god by the religion he founded....or for that matter, there may well have once been writings by people who knew him personally, and they've been lost to the ravages of time. We just don't know, and the lack of such documents is not interesting in and of itself.

That said, feasibility is not the same as actuality, and I see no reason to presume there was a historical Jesus. There are several competing hypotheses I find equally plausible.

bacht

Yes, it's a nice bit of twisted logic. Christ disguises himself from non-believers, and non-believers involved with Jesus' life and death never guess his real identity. After ascending through the clouds the truth is revealed, but only by preaching.

aa5874

The TONS of evidence from the NT and church writings depict Jesus as myth.

To satisfy your two questions additional evidence is necessary since I hate to speculate.