joedad

The earliest renditions of Jesus are things like the good shepherd, a borrowed pre-christian symbol associated with philanthropy and gentleness. From this humble beginning Jesus eventually gains royal stature, becoming an exalted ruler. And a crucified Jesus takes centuries to show up.

Much of the iconography that we today deem Christian or proto-christian was most likely something else. But Christianity was certainly around as part of the culture wars, unless of course one is a conspiracy theorist. But there was no Christian big bang as is commonly taught, at least not if the historical record is to be believed.

aa5874

[QUOTE=SLD;5432135] It is a complete fallacy to claim there is a lot evidence for an historical Jesus. The information available indicate fraud and fiction.

The evidence indicate that believers in Jesus were fed erroneous information by unknown authors which they believed to be true. The believers were simply duped.

Just believing a plausible event is true does not make the event actually true. It was plausible, 2000 years ago, for Jesus to transfigure, resurrect and ascend to heaven, now those events are unversally regarded as fiction and folklore, except by believers.

Again a plausible story is not the measure of its veracity. The veracity is dependent on corroboration by external non-apologetic or credible sources.

The entire NT, including the Pauline Epistles can not be accounted for external of apologetic sources.

You cannot use Paul to corroborate Paul, complete nonsense.

You cannot read the Pauline Epistles alone to make any confirmed determination about Paul, bearing in mind, Paul's conversion is fiction ,as decribed in Acts, Paul's revelations as described in the Epistles are false, the author of the Epistles was alive after Acts of the Apostles was written as late as the 2nd century, and there were more than one author with the name of Paul.


Believers of the Jesus story were just duped, they thought that the stories were true, today we know that they were not.

patcleaver

Even though there are hundreds of ancient documents of the Cinderella story, including ancient versions long before the first century, but nobody believes that its true.

We have far more historical evidence for the Greek Gods and the Egyptian Gods and the Hindu Gods. The Christian stories are no more valid then the Hindu myths or the Egyptian myths or the Greek myths or the Moslem myths.

Christians claimed that about 50 gospels and over 100 early epistles, that were not included in the NT, were fictions and forgeries. Gospels and letters were selected to be included in the NT mostly on theological grounds, and partially on early Christian traditions that have no more validity than urban legends. There is no reason to believe that the entire NT is not later fictions and forgeries just like the non-canonical gospels and epistles.

The vast majority of all narratives are fiction. There are tens of thousands of ancient religious stories from all over the world that are fictional. Hardly anybody believes in historical Greek Gods or historical Egyption Gods. Why do you think that the Christian story is any different?

There are lots of better explanations for the Jewish roots of Paul and the Gospels.

We know that some ethnic Jews in Judea worshiped pagan gods. Some ethnic Jews worshiped Greek Gods like Heracles and Venus, some worshiped Persian Gods like Tammuz, some worshiped Egyptian Gods like Isis. It is estimated that almost twice as many ethnic Jews lived in Pagan Cities such as Alexandria then lived in Judea. Paul and the gospels could be the Scriptural based apologetics of some mystery cult of ethnic Jews that worshiped a pagan god they called Jesus Christ. These ethnically Jewish pagans mined the Jewish Scriptures for justification for their pagan beliefs about Jesus Christ. There were pagan temples in Jeruslem at the time of Jesus including one to Venus.

The gospels could have originated as Jewish written anti-Roman propaganda in which the Romans are blamed for killing the Jewish messiah who will soon return with his heavenly hosts to destroy Rome. Later the Romans revised Paul and the gospels to blame the Jews for killing their own messiah.

The gospels could have been anti-Jewish propaganda, written by Jews or Samaritans who were commissioned by the Romans, which blamed the Jews for killing their own messiah, so that the Jews would stop inciting insurrections over false messiahs.

A Judean living Jew did not write the gospels because a Judean Jew would not have made all the errors in the gosples aobut Judean geography, culture, rituals, customs, and institutions, .
1. There are errors in geography that a Judean would not have made:

• Gadara is not near the sea,
• nobody would travel from Tyre to the sea of Galilee by way of Sidon,
• the sea of Galilee is too small to produce large waves in a storm;
• Nazareth was a farmhouse and did not have a cliff or a synagogue;

2. nobody had to return to their ancestral home for a Roman census;
3. Josephus lists the abuses of Harrod, but does not mention murder of all the babies in Bethlehem;
4. Only Rabies had to wash their hands before they ate;
5. the gospels mention public Jewish rituals, ceremonies and customs that were different from Roman customs but never mention any private Jewish rituals, ceremonies or customs that were not in Josephus;
6. Mark knows which Jewish customs are not Roman because he explains them;
7. Mark refers to the Jews in the third person - he was not a Jew;
8. Mark has Jesus discussing women divorcing their husbands when Jewish women could not divorce;
9. Mark has Jesus quoting things in the Septuagint (Greek) version of Isaiah which was not in the Hebrew version;
10. Jesus trial violates the rules of the Sanhedrin which Judean Jews would have known:

• they could not meet at night,
• they could not meet on Passover,
• they could not meet outside the temple;

11. the charge against Jesus is nonsense because claiming to be a son of god or a messiah was not blasphemy under Jewish law and not treason under Roman law;
12. it is impossible that the Romans released a prisoner every year to the Jews;
13. Pilot is portrayed as decent and merciful, but he was known for his cruelty;
14. it was a violation of several Jewish laws to crucify someone on Passover;
15. two thieves could not have been crucified with Jesus because stealing was not a capital offense;
16. it took a couple of days for someone to die of crucifixion, but Jesus was taken down after a few hours.
17. rolling stones were not used to seal individual tombs until after 70 CE.

spamandham

...I wonder if that was to prevent getting infected with rabbis.

:Cheeky:

(couldn't resist playing with your typo)

mountainman

The only securely dated "early christian art" citations are the explosion of emperor-centric christ figures in the fourth century, along with the crosses and the basilicas, and the tax-exemptions, amidst masses of forgeries.

Best wishes,


Pete

bopot

Meh, I allowed myself to be convinced by the explanation for Jesus given in Zeitgeist. I didn't apply the usual standards of proof, because it made me smile and is fun to believe (heh, I sound like a theist). Whether accurate or not, it's several orders of magnitude more plausible that the Biblical story. I haven't delved too deep in search of a well-reasoned position to hold, because the subject is hopelessly murky. The "amalgamation of previous deities and extrapolation of sun worship" hypothesis works for me.