ApostateAbe

If there are at least some qualified writers who do NOT have an apparent social/political/religious agenda, then they are the ones we should be paying attention to. Such people do exist, and anyone else is a waste of time. The lack of crosses in early Christian artwork can be explained in any number of ways. The first explanation that comes to my mind is that the crucifixion would seem by most outsiders to be a horrible embarrassment and nothing to advertise in art work. It is normally best to answer historical questions with phenomena that have already been proved, and creating wildly new theories should be a last resort.

IamJoseph

The terms christian or chrst also do not appear till 2 centuries later. All of these belief premises emerged much later, and were not even seen with Paul. It does appear all of Paul's writings is a retrospective work [no original writings exist], and the two groups which followed jesus, Ebonites and Nazerites, never subscribed to the later Gospel beliefs.

It appears Christianity was forced onto the people of Europe via 2nd and 3rd hand reports, and none dared ask for proof. That the Jews are so terribly villified with the most absurd and unprovable charges imaginable appears subsequent to their knowing the first hand truth.

In actual fact, the truth appears totally antithetical of everything said in the Gospels - and its way too late to upset the cart anymore. A desired falsehood is preferable to a disdained lie. If this becomes borne out - the real victims are hapless christians whose belief in the creator has been hijacked by Rome.

ApostateAbe

I believe as I do largely from evidence and scholarly authority. I have no good reason to doubt that half of the Pauline epistles are written by Paul, and he uses the word "Christ" plenty. Why do you believe as you do about early Christianity?

Huon

A symbol does not kill anybody. The image of a dog does not bark, and does not bite anybody. To respect a symbol is meaningless. Those who deserve more or less respect are persons, who can kill, or be killed or left alive.

IamJoseph

Symbols of crosses on pre-chrstian jewish tombstones, and historical writings describing their significance, are not meaningless.

youngalexander

Not only does jesus not appear upon the cross, he does not appear at all in early christian art!
Neither does his mum?

spamandham

After a bit of searching around, I'm having a hard time finding a good reference for the earliest Christian art. Do you know a good one?

Toto

IamJoseph's digressions and replies on arabs and jews have been split off here.

DCHindley

The important distinction is whether the author is writing to make a specific point or to analyze and understand the subject. That doesn't mean those who do the latter type writing are unbiased or have no ideological agendas that get incorporated into their analysis and interpretations, but the former surely do.

The saying is true: "Seek and you will find." Scholars almost always find what they think is there. Stephen Carlson is a case in point wrt Morton Smith's "forgery." On the other hand, I love John Kloppenborg's work on "Q," even though I do not necessarily agree on where he now seems to be taking things, because he tries to look at the source material as neutrally as he is able. Only after exhaustively analyzing the source material is he now attempting to explain it in historical context. John Dominic Crossan on the other hand thinks he has it all figured out, and in the process of explaining it has fabricated his own peculiar and rather complex social-scientific theories (the "Lenski-Kautsky" model) to demonstrate it by cherry-picking from this or that social anthropologist/sociologist until he got what he wanted (Jesus forced by socio-economic pressures to play the part of a social revolutionary who by pure chance closely resembles a 1960s era campus radical - from the very period when Crossan was in graduate school).
Crossan Seminar Cross Cultural Anthropology, question #18

Peas, baby

DCH

bacht

I think this dubious distinction might belong to the Communist hammer-and-sickle, with the Nazi swastika in second place.