aa5874

There is really no strong evidence for Jesus as a man. The extant information in the NT and Church writings depict Jesus as the offspring of the Holy Ghost of God, born of a virgin without a human father, the Creator, the Logos, who walked on water, transfigured, resurrected and ascended through the clouds.

There is STRONG evidence or information that Jesus was MYTHOLOGICAL.

The HJ is extremely weak or non-existent.

The non-historical miraculous and unlikely events CANNOT SUPPORT the historicity of Jesus. You MUST use historical sources to support history.

You are using your imagination as an historical source for your HJ.

Your statement cannot be shown to be true.

You cannot name one single historically-accurate element about Jesus in the NT or Church writings.

You have NO corroborative source of antiquity to support such a claim. You have no historical source that can show that Jesus Christ was just a man and that he started a cult in the 1st century before the Fall of the Temple.

Again, you are RELYING on your imagination as a corroborative source for your HJ.

You will notice that the Pauline writer, although claiming to have met Peter and James, did NOT write that he met JESUS CHRIST alive before he was raised from the dead.

The Pauline writer is NOT a witness to a living human Jesus but a resurrected non-historical Jesus.

It is absurd and illogical call INDIRECT or second-hand information "direct evidence". Even if Paul met someone who claimed to be a brother of Jesus, such a claim is NOT direct evidence of Jesus at all.

It is not true at all that MJ advocates discard religous sources since it is those sources that contain the information of the MYTH.

It is the HJers who reject or ignore all the MYTH and claim Jesus was just a man.

You claim that Jesus was just a man is DIRECT EVIDENCE you have discarded or ignored the religous sources that presented Jesus as a God/man.

Christians claim Jesus was the offspring of the Holy Ghost of God who walked on water, healed incurably diseases instantly, transfigured, resurrected and ascended through the clouds.

You can easily construct a MYTH with the information from Christians if you did not discard all the MYTHOLOGY.

It is absolutely not true that the prophet Muhammad has the same MYTHOLOGY as Jesus Christ, the offspring of the Holy Ghost of God.

Muhammad was described just as a prophet. Jesus Christ the Holy Ghost of God was described as God, and of God, the Creator of heaven and earth.

You have discarded the information from the Christian writers of antiquity. The Christian writers did not claim Jesus was a sage but the offspring of the Holy Ghost of God.

You have accused MJ advocates of discarding information but it is you who MUST DISCARD the MYTHOLOGY presented by the Christian writers and the NT.

Why don't you accept the witnessed statements in the NT and Church writings that Jesus was a God/man born without a human father who was raised from the dead and ascended through the clouds?

Because you have discarded the evidence of the MYTH.

ApostateAbe

gurugeorge, I appreciate your judgments. When I say that there should be no default position, that includes the position of there being a historical Jesus to explain the Christian accounts. I take the theory of a historical Jesus to best explain the evidence, not because we automatically try to explain every mythical character with a historical human being. If a post-apocalyptic archaeologist were to find a Superman comic book, then ideally he would try to find the best explanation for Superman, be it with a historical person or a purely fictional character. The evidence would probably suggest a fictional character, given that it fits the patterns of fictional comic books--he is set in a completely fictional setting and the comics seem designed purely for entertainment. Jesus, in turn, fits the patterns of historical people--a cult leader who became the figurehead of a religion. Not only that, but there is a religious adherent who attests to meeting Jesus' brother and disciple--the brother as if it was nothing unexpected and the disciple as if the writer hated the disciple's guts. We could not possibly expect to find such a thing for Superman or any other merely mythical or fictional character. So I say that we do know that Jesus was a historical person, or at least we should know, and it is only a matter of facing that probability for what it really is. We should be saving our uncertainty for matters that are genuinely uncertain.

ApostateAbe

Thank you, spin. I figure there are already ways to validate the traditions in the text, at least with probability that I find sufficient, but the problem seems to be that the postmodernists and the minimalists simply do not accept those ways because they are not done with the certainty the postmodernists and the minimalists demand. This would mean that we have little or no useful information about history, so I dismiss that philosophy for about the same reason that I dismiss the criticisms of religious Biblicists. It is a dead end, and useful knowledge can not be gained from it.

spin

This is all very mantric and all, but what evidence? How many times can you be asked to supply actual evidence? You tap dance around the contents of christian literature like a bird collecting shiny things for a nest. Stop for a moment and and try to do history. You claim that Jesus being historical is the best fit, yet you don't understand what it fits, so you have no "historical" for this Jesus.


spin

spin

So what is good for the goose isn't good for the gander. I have to do the hard work of showing that there is history behind Tacitus but you don't have to do so for the christian literature. We know that there is fact supporting Polybius, Josephus, Thucydides, Suetonius, etc. We know it because we can link it to reality. Get that idea? Link a text to reality? There might be a lot of crap still in the text given authorial ignorance, error, or bias, but you have a starting condition of linking a text through hard evidence to the time under consideration. Think of it as though you have a foundation to work from. Without it you can't build anything historical.

The simple fact is you know fuck all about the circumstances of the christian literature. You have proved this frequently, being asked to go beyond text manipulation, and you never can. Text will always just be text until you can tether it to reality. You may as well manipulate fairy tales for the good you are doing. You can't separate real from dross. You have no yardstick.


spin

aa5874

But, you are making your HJ the default position when you have no idea how the NT Jesus was derived.


People presently do not worship Superman as a God and further the inventors of Superman did not claim that he did actually exist in reality.


How could Jesus fit the pattern of historical people when there is no known historical record of Jesus, the offspring of the Holy Ghost?

Jesus fits the pattern of MYTHS perfectly.

1. Virtually all information about Jesus are non-historical or implausible.

2. His birth and conception is improbable.

3. His deification in Jerusalem is improbable .

3. His purpose for coming to earth "to save mankind from sin" is mythological.

4. There is no history of Jesus outside the NT and Church writings.

5. No contemporary of the supposed Jesus wrote that they saw Jesus alive, before he was raised from the dead, not even the supposed contemporaries, the Pauline writers.

6. The only mention of Jesus called Christ in Josephus are forgeries.

But the same religious adherent CLEARLY claimed Jesus was NOT a man.

Look at Galatians 1.1 &11-12 And in this is the religious adherent in Ephesians 1.19-20 You just completely ignore or discard all the MYTHOLOGICAL information from the religious adherent to continue with your claim without any external historical source.

The religious adherent is telling you quite CLEARLY that the so-called brother of James was the Son of God who was raised from the dead and ascended to heaven.

Chili

If you put the Intelligent Design inside the species just as the gospel does with the upper and lower room in man that originates between 'God' and 'like god' of Gen 1 and 3, you will soon find that 'Lord God' of Gen 2 is it . . . before the fall and again after redemption.

All beings are sentient beings and all have a subconscious and a conscious mind wherein they also are "God an "like god" (except maybe evolutionsts who think that nature has a mind of its own), and it is in 'like god' conscious mind that they are co-creator with their own God subconscious mind, and that is how the Intelligent Design is self contained = inside the specias.

Chaucer

We needn't even hang everything on this Galatians encounter -- even if we choose to zero in on the 7 authentic Paulines only. We needn't even circumscribe ourselves to considerations of James only. For there is also the telling passage in 1 Corinthians 9:5, where, among other things, Paul is careful to separate out the apostles from the siblings of Jesus -

5 Don't we have the right to take a believing wife along with us, as do the other apostles and the Lord's brothers and Cephas?

There isn't just James, then, as far as Paul is concerned, but at least two siblings of Jesus whom Paul clearly views as siblings of Jesus since he's careful here to term the apostles as apostles. I'm surprised that HJ-ers don't use this verse more than the verse in Galatians, since it strikes me as the more straightforward. (In any case, all of 1 Corinthians, for its trio of direct Jesus quotes plus its additional references to the Lord's brotherS and to a crucifixion "in this age" [yes, yes, I know the "demons" reading -- yawn], seems worth a separate niche all its own among the authentic Paulines.)

Chaucer

gurugeorge

But how do you know it isn't also a story designed purely for entertainment, or a lie, or any of those other possibilities? You can have an entertaining story about a religious cult leader.

OK, I'm stretching it, but you get the point - there's a whole swathe of possible contexts for those texts that could instantly make them NOT EVIDENTIARY AT ALL, of anything.

I think you have to separately justify why you are taking the story elements as evidence of something.

The story in the gospels fits the story of a cult leader, sure - but the historicist still has to show that the story is evidentiary of fact. Knowing that a character in a story met and talked to another character in a story is totally different from knowing that the story about one character meeting another actually happened.

It's like this: sure, we have some writings that are part of a tradition that couches them in a way that makes them seem evidentiary (they're supposed to be written by eyewitnesses).

But we are under no obligation to follow that tradition, and treat them as evidentiary in any way, until we know (to some grain of detail) who wrote them, when, and (hopefully) why. Until then, they're in a sort of limbo. You can certainly imagine what it would be like if those texts really are eyewitness accounts, or sufficiently connected to eyewitnesses to serve as evidence - then you'd get some variation on the HJ theme. But I don't see any strong reason to believe that they actually are eyewitness acounts, or connected with eyewitnessing.

The strongest example you've given, the "brother of the Lord" one, just isn't convincing enough, given the arguments I've previously given you about that subject. As I've said before, it's the eyeballing connection that's needed to prove historicity - not the eyeballing of one character in the story by another (although that might be supportive), but some reason to believe that the story contains eyewitness testimony.

That was the whole point of the gospels - for generations, they were sufficient proof for most people that Jesus had existed, because most people trusted the Church's hype, that they were eyewitness accounts.

But when you gut them of that traditional elevation in epistemological status - well, they could be anything. Whether they are eyewitness accounts is one of the first things we would need to analyze. Because if there's no evidence of the eyeballing of a biological human entity in them, there's no evidence of a historical person.

aa5874

Actually there is a default theory on Jesus and it must be that he was MNYTHOLOGICAL.

The information provided by the NT and Church writings depict Jesus as the offspring of the Holy Ghost of God, born of a virgin without a human father, tempted by the Devil on the pinnacle of the Temple and on mountain tops, instantly healing incurable diseases with spit and mere commands, talking to storms, walking on water, transfiguring with resurrected prophets, being raised from the dead and ascending through the clouds.

That is the DEFAULT DESCRIPTION of Jesus. That DEFAULT description cannot be altered without first acquiring some other credible historical source of Jesus.

Homer's description of Achilles is the DEFAULT description of Achilles unless there is some other credible historical source for Achilles. The DEFAULT description of Achilles provides information for the DEFAULT theory that Achilles was MYTHOLOGICAL.

Assuming or imagining that Homer's description of Achilles must be wrong or was not true cannot alter the DEFAULT description of Achilles.

The DEFAULT description of Romulus and Remus provide the information to support the DEFAULT theory that they were MYTHOLOGICAL. Simply assuming or imagining that Romulus and Remus were historical does not in any way alter the DEFAULT description of MYTHS.

No-one can alter the DEFAULT description of Jesus as found in the NT and Church writings without FIRST finding some credible external historical source.

Matthew 1, Luke 1&2 and John 1 are the DEFAULT descriptions of the origin, conception and birth of Jesus. The NT is a DEFAULT source for Jesus. No-one can change that until they can provide an alternate credible historical source.

All entities considered Myths are directly based on the information provided by their sources and those are the DEFAULT source on which the MYTHS are based.

Achilles is a Myth by default.

Romulus and Remus are MYTHS by default.

Jesus of the NT must be MYTHOLOGICAL by the same means.

Jesus must be A MYTH by default. No one can change that by imagination and belief.