steve_bnk

I have not read either of the two authors you cited.

You only have to look at the religious-political power stuggles in Islam today to see what the polical-relgioius comflicts were in the time of JC., differnt players of course.

According to the NT JC kept kosher so to speak. he never stopped being a Jew. Christianty as what we have now should be called Paulism, he relaxed the Jewish requirements such as circumcision and diet.

JC refers to Noah and I believe the flood, Moses, and other prophets. In the NT the tone of the wording in some places are pretty serious when he disccuses spefcic sins and offenses.

Historicaly Jewish propets did not have long life expectancies.

The way I see it huamn nature hasn't fundamntaly changed much. Science has replaced the supernatural and our politcal system has evolved. I take god to be in the realm of the supernatural.

Amaleq13

That seems to smuggle in your conclusion as an initial assumption. The story is not a package deal if a real man has been almost completely overshadowed by a myth. The evidence requires more nuance than such a simplistic approach of all or nothing.

There is nothing arbitrary about recognizing the significant difference between magical claims and mundane claims.

steve_bnk

As to 'literalist', there in lies the rub for many of us here. Chritains freely and on an indivdual basis dtermine what to take lietraly and what not to.

For example, JC very clearly states that divorce is unaceptable, and that divorce and remarriage with sex is adultry, and in those days aduktery was a serious offense.

And that is the problem with Chritainity, unlike Isalm there is no specifc code that was put down that defines what a Chritain is, and not unexpectd considering JC was a Jew who never abandoned his faith.

rlogan

Hi Again Amaleq13 - I think we can do some work here. First, we need to have the evidence in front of us instead of asserting what it is. Pliny's description of their beliefs and practices, after a lot of interrogation including torture of two deaconesses - not that I support torture, but they were obviously extremely serious in discerning the exact nature of Christianity. There was an edict against political associations and they were rooting out secret societies as possible sources of unrest:


Look at the disconnect between the assertion Jesus was executed as some kind of troublemaker by Pilate on the one hand - and not long after in a relentless rooting out of troublemaker-associations there is no link to those very followers of Jesus.

There would obviously be one if there were in actuality - and really Amaleq13 this is a signal of how reasonable you are: don't you even find it odd in the least that Jesus is allegedly executed as a troublemaker, and then the linear descendants are thoroughly investigated and no link whatsoever is established (despite your claim for there to be one)?



Why no name of Jesus, even - but the name Jesus then appears later?


You keep leaving out that "Jesus" does not appear in any actual evidence until later. Please start working with the evidence.


I am counting Paul and the gospels explicitly in my discussions so this is a curious claim I am not.

I do not see them as existing before Pliny/Trajan. Otherwise he is an awfully stupid man to be doing investigations without discovering all this documentation.


uh - Gods are myth. So we know there is a myth circa 90 CE - because some Christians have been practicing that long. Living memory of the alleged historical Jesus.


You are entirely missing the point, obviously. They do not at the funeral forget he had a name or was born and died, etc. They remember where grandfather was executed and buried, etc. if it actually happened.

Please show me a grandfather being mythologized at his funeral as you pose - where people forget his name and although at his funeral at that very moment people do not know where he is buried. Don't you see how the examples, on inspection, are pretty incredible?

It isn't that mythologizing is something I do not understand. A bit patronizing to imply that. It is the forgetting of every detail, including his name, within living memory that is unreasonable.


I see you cannot understand why the founder of an outlaw movement who was executed would be relevant to an investigation of his followers.

Pliny saying to Trajan "These are the followers of the troublemaker Pilate executed" - you think that is completely irrelevant?


In friendly discourse, I see this as dodging the issue.

First of all, I do not see a crucified Christ in evidence at this time and so I do not assume it.

When it comes, a crucified christ in the spiritual plane has no earthly details to remember whereas a crucified Jesus sure as hell does. There is a place, time, person, reason, and all of the ancillary history.

These are stories that come later - unless you are alleging that in Pliny's pretty thorough investigation of Christians he was too incompetent to uncover their literature.


The reason I do not see your version as coherent, and this is in kindness and good spirit - is that you seem to be saying on the one hand there is no relationship whatsoever between the historical Jesus and Christianity.

That is what you use to explain away zero details being known at the time of the Pliny-Trajan exchange: like the name Jesus. His name might not even have been Jesus in your version.

But on the other hand the examples you use and the stories you tell for other explanatory purposes have a grandfather who is mythologized at his funeral - well such a thing would certainly be uncovered in a systematic investigation like Pliny undertook. The person is in living memory for Christ's sake. There were lists published of accused Christians, and Pliny undertook interrogation of them. It is just preposterous that not a whit of the guy who actually founded the movement, and who was executed for it, fails to be discovered.


He does describe their practices positively - so this is wrong.


But it is clear he did very thoroughly investigate what they believed and did.



I see all of this is as reading into the text what isn't there. I think we will just have to disagree on this. You see Paul's Jesus as a flesh and blood person who actually existed.


I do hope you take this all in warm terms. Especially with the Hapkido and all.

aa5874

You cannot ignore evidence that clearly shows Jesus was a myth and then declare he was historical. That is absolute madness.

One cannot ignore that Achilles was the offspring of a sea-goddess when trying to determine his historicity.

Every single piece information must be used.

It is just absurd to make a diagnosis if you ignore the symptoms.

Now, you have it totally opposite. It was Jesus who was in bed with the Romans.

He told the Jews to pay taxes. To pay dues to the Romans. To bless those that curse them. And to turn the other cheek.

Only a man in bed with the Romans would tell the Jews those things.

Simon Barcocheba, the Messiah, would never tell Jews what Jesus said to them.

Jesus in the gospels was never counter to the Romans. Pilate was not looking for Jesus, it was the Jews who was looking to kill him. Pilate, in the story, found no fault with Jesus and even offered a criminal in exchange for Jesus.

Jesus was trying to emulate the Romans he wanted the Jews to deify him but the Jews got him crucified instead, according to the story.

Jesus was in bed with the Romans, he wanted to be god and man just like the Emperor of Rome.

In Judaea, that's automatic death for a Jew in the 1st century.

rcscwc

Xians claim that Jesus was a rabbi. He went to temple of jews and objected to their demeaning the house/temple of his god. He claimed that he wanted to uphold the law!

Sans birth certifates, everything exists.

That was a quantum jump. But then many of his ideas were far removed from Jewish beliefs. He borrowed the Hindu concept.



Lols. When jews were being persecuted they had a spree of genocides.


They share the OT.


NT is modelled more on Hindu and Buddhist teachings.

maryhelena

My conclusion, my bias is that the gospel Jesus of Nazareth is not a human man but a mythological creation, a mythological man. From that position, there is no rational reason to assume that a Jewish carpenter's son lies underneath the mythology, that a Jewish carpenter's son has been mythologized.

Indeed, there is nothing arbitrary about recognizing the difference between magical claims and mundane claims - that is if we are talking about a normal human man - however, the 'man' under consideration is not a normal human man but a mythological man....

rlogan

I don't see how one can conclude otherwise, once you reject orthodoxy and just look at the evidence.

Obviously Isaiah and other Jewish literature was quote-mined for Jesus at the same time a wholesale rejection of Jewish Doctrine is in evidence.

It was necessary to have a pedigree. That is inarguable. It is what they did.

Christianity no more sprang from Judaism than Black Muslims do from Islam.

maryhelena

I like that, thanks.......a "pedigree"......

lpetrich

That's what I mean by grasping at straws. Looking for tiny things that seem to support one's position.
Did he say so?

The must be desperate for converts from Hinduism.
Can any of these alleged Krishna prophecies be shown to be before-the-fact?
I can agree on that.
Where's that prophecy, and how did its makers come up with that?
However, both of them have the sort of hero-mythology features that Lord Raglan had noted in his Mythic-Hero profile.
The Gospels of Matthew and Luke give somewhat different versions of events around his birth. But Matthew tells us that
Not quite blank. Luke tells us about about what a child prodigy he had been in the Jerusalem Temple, and the noncanonical Infancy Gospels go even further -- they picture Jesus Christ as having worked lots of miracles when he was a little boy.
I'm not very familiar with that subject, but I would not be surprised if different authors contradict each other about Krishna.
I don't see how that follows.