Solitary Man

I'm the wrong person to ask.

Depends if you're serious or not.

Depends if we were debating whether it happened or not. If we were debating something else, I doubt it would come up. I don't have the ire in me to correct every wrongheaded belief, much less your spaghetti fetish.

Say what?

Solitary Man

What in the world are you talking about? Where did Jeffrey ever say he believed everything anyone said? Why do you have such a hard time keeping up with the conversation?

Toto

I am not in the habit of comparing people to creationists, except for that one thread where I argued that believers in the HJ were more comparable to creationists than mythicists, just to show you where that argument would take you.

Solitary Man

And quite fallacious logic you sure did use there!

Toto

No more fallacious than the logic that you were using. But I guess it didn't get the point across quite forcefully enough.

Please stay on topic.

spamandham

It IS worth mentioning, but it's also worth mentioning that nothing like this shows up in Mark (or less importantly, John), and that the quoted verbiage is exactly identical in Luke and Matthew, and very similar to the same saying in the Gospel of Thomas.

Ben C Smith

Wikipedia has a list of nuclear power plants listed by country; are any of them in a town named Springfield? (I do not know; I am asking.)

If such a family as you describe happened to have been the inspiration for the Simpsons show, then the Simpsons on the show would be a fictionalization of the real Simpsons (option A). The relevant parallel would be the Jesus of the gospels being a fictionalization of the historical Jesus.

If, OTOH, such a family was not even known to Matt Groenig when he created the Simpsons, then the similarities would be merely a coincidence (option B).

But, really, is it the same Jesus is an epistemological question that the historian is not obliged to answer in a philosophical fashion. Just historically trace the tradition as far as it goes, and the question never even comes up. If the trail fades out, then we may have option B; if a plausible connection can be made between some Galilean preacher and the gospel events, and if those events are determined to be fiction(alized), then we probably have option A.

Ben.

ETA: Let me put it another way. Suppose three different analysts have published arguments for three different relationships between The Simpsons and a family by that name in some town called Springfield:

1. Matt Groenig had no idea this family existed when he created and developed the Simpsons.
2. Matt Groenig had no idea this family existed when he first created the Simpsons, but he learned about the family very early on and modelled some of the episodes from season 1 after the real-life family.
3. Matt Groenig knew about this family all along and freely based his Simpsons on the real-life Simpsons.

In which of these are the Simpsons on the show the same Simpsons as in real life? In which of these are they different?

The point is: It does not matter. One can argue for any one of these scenarios, and even debate which exact details derived from a real-life family, without that question ever coming up.

jules?

some questions; inspired by your helpful comments


When did Joshua become Jesus? Did Mark and Paul specifically use a spelling that disassociated the common Jewish name to make the 'Jesus' they were talking about unique? Was the original term simply 'saviour' only to be corrupted later?

Flesh; yes flesh, what is the Jewish term old and ancient and how was it translated into the Greek? It seems to me that much hinges on interpreting this word in the context of Paul's idea of Jesus. As the Passover Lamb sacrificed for the sin of people JC does not actually transmute into a little furry lamb. It is metaphorical as is the flesh of Jesus consumed as bread. So tell me more about Jewish ideas of flesh/bread and how they were reinterpreted by the Greco-Roman world.
THXs

rizdek

I have accepted the likelihood of a HJ for most of my life. While I was a christian, I believed him to be the son of god. After realizing there was no god, I decided "jesus" must have been a composite of two or more revolutionary charismatic people that lived between ~150BCE and maybe up to 60CE. Among these may have been some sort of well intentioned but deluded (in CSLewis phraseology a lunatic) revolutionary who thought he was a god, but who was eventually murdered for his beliefs. I thought the miraculous aspects of the story were either made up, extracted from ancient scriptures or borrowed from other god-man myths that were were being shared orally at that time.

But lately I have been wondering why christians are so adamant that there had to have been a physical, human, historical jesus in order for their religion to work. Why do they take the gospel stories literally? Here is the basis for my puzzlement.

I must digress to make my point. We have all read/heard debates about "absurdities" in the bible. A non-believer in the bible would take the more literal meaning of a scripture and ask the christians if their god actually did the things it says. In order to show that their god isn't foolish, manipulative, unjust or just barbaric, they "laugh" at the niave fundamental interpretation, and assure the challenger that this particular scripture is not to be taken literally, but must be interpreted in light of how they wrote things then. For example:

Q: Did their god actually harden pharoah's heart after pharoah had been convinced by plagues to let the Hebrew slaves go as it says repeatedly in Exodus? The implications are that god "imposed" himself on pharoah's free will to force him to "not" let them go so that god could implement the ultimate punishment by "killing the first born" of Egypt.
R: Because most christians see the literal translation as suggesting god did something unjust (affecting a change in pharoah's free will) they say the wording is an idiom, and not to be taken literally. That when it says "god" hardened pharoah's heart that really god allowed pharoah to harden his own heart. I found 2 websites "explaining away" that absurdity.
http://www.mountainretreatorg.net/bible/pharaoh.html
http://www.apologeticspress.org/articles/2259

There are other examples. Some include the persecution of Job by satan, the Flood, animal sacrifice in the OT and sometimes even the garden of eden story. To varying degrees, some christians will shy away from literal interpretations of these stories because of the unfortunate implications if taken literally. IE God made a deal with satan over Job, god flooded the earth killing all humans (including innocent babies) because they were too sinful, god wanted people to slaughter and burn livestock because he liked the smell of burning flesh and the blood appeased him for sin and god "set up" adam and eve in the GOE to be tempted and fail so he could implement his plan of salvation.

But then we come to another bigger absurdity, at least in my mind.

Q: Did the christian god actually require human sacrifice in the form of jesus the god-man so that the blood of said jesus could atone for sin? Over and over, jesus and the epistle writers expound that it is jesus' blood that cleanses from sin. And it is clear from scripture that jesus was supposed to take the place of the blood sacrifice of the old covenant under which the Israelites thought that the blood of slaughtered livestock had atoning qualities. The implications are that this means the christian god desired human sacrifice, and that invoking/consuming the blood of this sacrifice is the means to atone for sin. The word desire applies, because being omnipotent, god could choose anything to atone for sin. He could have chosen sun rays, water molecules or winged bats. But he just happened to pick human blood....why? Because the christian god is a blood-thirsty human- sacrificing demon?

R: Surprisingly, the response from most christians is NOT, "Oh no, that is a figurative allegory, an exaggerated myth that built up around the spiritual battle that god and jesus fought with the powers of evil in a spiriual realm where jesus eventually triumphed over sin." In otherwords, NO to the mythical jesus. Most christians are adamant that this really happened just the way it is written. God really did require a human sacrifice to atone for man's sins. This sacrifice had to include shedding of blood first by beatings and a crown of thorns, then by nails into the hands and feet, then by spear stabbing. All to extract the blood from the veins of jesus that will atone for sins. And even to this day, at the admonition of jesus, christians regularly pretend to drink jesus' blood in celebration and in remembrance of its atoning qualities in their communion rituals. And that is what they want everyone to believe. That a physical human jesus served as a scape goat for all of mankinds sins.

Note the words of the old hymn:
"There is a fountain filled with blood drawn from Emmanuel's veins; and sinners plunged beneath that flood lose all their guilty stains. Lose all their guilty stains, lose all their guilty stains; and sinners plunged beneath that flood lose all their guilty stains."
How much more vivid can you get?

I would think it would be the atheist/agnostic/other non-bible believer throwing the literal "human sacrifice jesus" in the face of christians and them shying away from such horrendous barbarity demonsrated by their otherwise "good" god.

http://www.gotquestions.org/animal-sacrifices.html
http://www.mcfarland.co.uk/andrew/ex...ons/2000-12-17

Solo

....which then I assume is an I-don't-know to my query as to what "non-ontological" existence might be.

Jiri