ApostateAbe

1 - Esseniens had their teacher of righteous who might have been taken for the founder of the sect.
But the world is full of new fictional stories every day which have no antecedent.

I think that is a great point, and it is for that reason that advocates of the JM need to establish, with evidence, exactly what sort of myth they have in mind with Jesus. Did he begin as a fictional character for the purpose of entertainment? If so, then it is more likely that he was invented without evolutionary precedent. Did he begin as a religious character? If so, then it is much more likely that he evolved from previous legends, just as Jupiter descended from Zeus. Without details, then the theory seems to have little substance.

2 - There is no rebuttal on anything against Moses, Abraham, Noah ...
Attis, Adonis, Mithra, Osiris, Demeter, Dionysos ...
Hercules, Theseus, Romulus, Oedipus,
Tom Sawyer, Jean Valjean,
or Peter Pan, James Bond, Spider Man, Superman, Batman.

Again, what sort of myth are we talking about? Do you really think that Jesus began something like Peter Pan or Batman, in that he was an entertaining character in a story? If so, then we should be able to find elements that closely match the patterns of storytelling.

So what about Noah, Attis, Mithra, etc? Whether or not there were religious attacks against those figures, there is plenty of evidence of harsh attacks against Jesus in the second and third centuries, including from Celsus and Poryphryr. Both claimed that critical tradition held that Jesus was an illegitimate child trying to pass himself off as being born of a virgin. They don't question the idea that Jesus existed. They simply assume it.

Of course, that isn't evidence that Jesus existed. But that is a lost opportunity for evidence in favor of the JM position.

3 - But if Jesus was a mythical character, and all Christian knew it very well,
it would look stupid for someone to 'accuse him to not have met Jesus'.
They could only accuse him to not have received the lord, or heard him, or had vision of him.

Well, then, if you say that all Christians KNEW that Jesus was a myth and not a human being, then it helps in that it provides details for the sort of myth we mean, but it seems to make the theory much more unlikely than it was before, since the earliest Christian writings, including the Pauline epistles and the synoptic gospels, seem to treat Jesus as a fleshly human being with fleshly human family and associations, at least in part. If your theory holds true, then I think we should expect to find evidence of divisions within the early church, the myth-Jesus adherents on one side and the flesh-Jesus adherents on the other side. Like, maybe Paul was a myth-Jesus adherent and Peter was a flesh-Jesus adherent. We might find an argument in the Pauline letters reflecting that division, the same as we find an argument about whether Christians should be circumcised according to Jewish law. We find Christian apologetic and theological writings in every period of time. When do you think the transition from myth-Jesus to flesh-Jesus occurred?

aa5874

duplicate

GakuseiDon

What makes this post any different to your other ones???

aa5874

But, your statement is not really true.

Why do you refuse to acknowledge that the supposed earliest writings claimed Jesus was a God/man or simply was not a man who was raised from the dead?

Paul claimed he was not the apostle of a man and that he did not get his gospel from man but from Jesus who was raised from the dead. See Galatians 1

And in John 1, the author claimed Jesus was God, THE CREATOR, and later was made flesh.

The NT and Church writings are about a GOD/MAN, NOT JUST FLESH.

But, there is no such thing as myth-Jesus adherents. Jesus believers do not refer to their own Jesus as a myth. Marcion and the Marcionites did not consider their Jesus as myth, they may have considered that the GOD/MAN Jesus was fiction.

Marcion's Jesus was on earth, in Capernaum of Judaea, during the reign of Tiberius.

The GOD/MAN Jesus sect may have called the Phantom Jesus a myth and the Phantom Jesus sect may have returned the compliment.

ApostateAbe

For anyone interested, I am not arguing with aa5874, so please don't let him argue for you.

Solo

It's to the point.

Jiri

bacht

That's an interesting point. I think the simplest MJ argument is that sometime in the 1st C the mystical/spiritual Christ was revealed to certain apocalyptic Jews open to a different kind of messiah. After the bar-Kochba revolt in the 130s the Christian movement became dominated by gentiles who preferred an HJ story. This seems to be the basic sequence for Doherty.

As you say one might expect an echo of conflict between these perspectives to survive somewhere in the literature.

ApostateAbe

Thank you, I am not too familiar with Earl Doherty's theory. I would love to know what he takes to be evidence for the division and transition in doctrine.

dog-on

The original ending of Mark, though I do not know Doherty's view.

Quote:

8Trembling and bewildered, the women went out and fled from the tomb. They said nothing to anyone, because they were afraid.

ApostateAbe

Hmm, I don't know what the argument is exactly.