Sheshbazzar

And around and around the merry-go-round it goes.
Which? Well something in there might be.
What? I really don't have any idea, but something in there could be.
Where? whatever happens to strike my fancy. (but I'm not willing to defend it)
And thus comes another thousand posts. icardfacepalm:

aa5874

Your statement has ZERO NEGATIVE effect on the MYTH Jesus theory.

If Jesus was MYTH than then the NT is compatible with MYTHOLOGY, that is , there are details about Jesus that cannot be historical accurate.

The MYTH Jesus theory can ONLY be defeated if all the things said about Jesus were historically true.

So, Jesus MUST have been a Child of Ghost, God the Creator that was on the PINNACLE of the Temple with Satan who WALKED on water, Transfigured, Resurrected and Ascened.

Those are the historically inaccurate details of Jesus REPEATED multiple times in the Canonized Gospels.

Those historically inaccurate details can NEVER EVER DEFEAT the MYTH Jesus theory.

Myth Fables are considered Historically inaccurate.

The Canonised Gospels are considered Historically inaccurate with respect to Jesus.

The MYTH Jesus theory CANNOT be DEFEATED at all based on the Gospels.

If the NT is historically true Jesus was the Child of a Ghost, God and Creator.

If Jesus was NOT a child of a Ghost, God and Creator then the NT CANNOT be trusted.

The HJ theory CANNOT be argued using sources that MIRROR Myth fables.

The HJ argument is imagination based.

J-D

That is an indefensible misrepresentation of my position. I have already given you specific examples of the kind of statements I'm referring to, and you have not yet given adequate grounds for the conclusion that those statements cannot possibly be literally accurate reports of events that actually took place; if you do not want to deal with specific examples, that's not my fault.

J-D

If what you mean by 'the myth Jesus theory' is 'the theory that not all the things said about Jesus were historically true', then I am not trying to defeat it, because to me, as I have said as plainly as I can, that much is obviously true: but I must say that if that's what you mean, then you have made an extraordinarily stupid choice of name for the theory.

archibald

Using reasonable dating methods, it appears that Mark may have been written around 70AD. That would be only 30-35 years after Jesus' supposed death. Using similarly reasonable dating for Paul, he appears to have started his preaching about 3 years after the alleged death. You may query the datings of course, and I'm not claiming certainty, but they are widely accepted as being the best estimates by academics, secular and non-secular, so I don't believe I'm taking an unreasonable position.

Moving on to non-christian sources, Tacitus, arguably writing in 110AD, records an event from 66AD which relates to Jesus supposed death, and Josephus, 20 years earlier does similar. Neither of these would be considered late by the standards of reports from ancient history.

So, the actual evidence does seem to have a pattern to it, as regards the time in question.


All of this can be queried, of course. The question is, why prefer a set of explanations which require so much (mostly speculative) remoulding of the actual evidence?

The other possible indicator is that it makes more sense for the eschatological trigger to have been recent if the eschatological event had already started. Which, in a very fundamental way, appears to be the scenario we are dealing with. An end of the world cult who think the time has come, essentially. The fact that the world didn't end is not especially relevant, because it isn't immediately apparent and when it doesn't pan out, such cults almost always just rephrase the expectation, as seems to have happened with christianity.

Sheshbazzar

Excuse moi, But what do you think this was?
Specific example #1.
Your wah wah simply evaded any discussion of the actual specific text.

Specific Example #2.
You have stated; To which I replied;
THAT IS MY STATED basis for deciding with regards to the question.

It is thus quite disingenuous of you to attempt to imply that I am the one here that does 'not want to deal with specific examples'
When you are the one that immediately turns wishy-washy when it comes to actually discussing the probabilities of any of these specific text as being (or not being) an accurate report.

Or that I have failed to, and 'have not yet given adequate grounds for the conclusion that those statements cannot possibly be literally accurate reports of events that actually took place;'
When I have most clearly and concisely stated that these isolated verses are of no better quality, and of no greater validity than that of any of the surrounding ridiculous texts.
(Obviously you can always continue to hide behind the old 'not adequate' dodge no matter how much rebuttal is supplied. I believe others here can also discern when this is the case.)

As the contexts these verse snippets are presented in cannot be possible, there is no valid reason to elevate these isolated snippets of verse to some imagined but unsupportable position of being of some better value, or 'historical' significance than the rest of the religious horse-shit that they are embedded within.
To wit; The content of Mark 1:10-11 effectively cancels out any view of Mark 1:9 as being any accurate accounting of any real historical event, it simply becomes part and parcel of an entire line of similar religious horse-shit.






.

Kapyong

Gday tanya,

Well, pardon me, but that's not an accurate representation of the Jesus Myth theory, at least Earl Doherty's theory, which is the prominent JM of the day.

A Real Being

The issue is that it's NOT all "make believe" at all.
Paul's Jesus is not "make believe". Paul believe Jesus REALLY existed. Paul believed in Jesus as a spiritual being, a real spiritual being, who really existed.

Sadly, these days, people rarely meet spiritual beings, and we generally do not believe in them.
But in Paul's time, everyone believed in the Gods, and he wrote of a godly being, commonplace for his day, uncommon in our day.

In a nutshell, Earl's JM theory posits that Paul believed in Jesus as a real spiritual being (one who descended from heaven to a lower realm within the sphere of 'flesh'.)

The Source of Paul's Jesus

Secondly -
"make believe" implies it's all "mere fiction" just "any old thing" that the author "made up" "on the spot" "out of thin air" "from whole cloth". All phrases often uses here.

But again, that's not what the Jesus theory is about. Earl points out that much of Jesus' story is re-tellings of episodes from the Tanakh (the Old Testament.) In the JM view - Paul's Jesus is spiritual, but he would never agree that Jesus' story is "make believe".

Paul would argue that his knowledge of Jesus came from :

1. Personal revelation of the holy spirit
2. the scriptures (i.e. the Tanakh)

When Paul says Jesus did so and so "according to the scriptures",
he doesn't mean "a historical Jesus recently fulfilled the prior prophecy of scripture"
but he really means "I learned from my recently inspired understanding of the scriptures that the time-less and spiritual Jesus did this".

The two other prominent Mythical Jesus theories of the day are:

• AcharyaS' astro-theology - claiming Jesus and apostles etc. are based on the sun and Zodiac.
• the classical argument that Jesus is an echo of all the other pagan dieing

and rising nature Gods.
Both of these have Jesus' story clearly rooted in prior beliefs, not "make believe" either.

Pardon me for going on tanya, but this mis-understanding occurs here over and over - even from ol' regulars :-)

tl;dr-
Two key planks of the Jesus Myth theory are -
1) Jesus was a real being,
2) Jesus' story is rooted in prior art.
Calling it "make believe" is just plain wrong, sorry :-)


Kapyong

Toto

40 years (the number is significant in some theories.)

Do you know what those dating methods are? Do you know how flimsy they are? But the key thing is that Mark was written after the destruction of the Temple, a cataclysmic event.

Actually, the methods for dating Paul are not at all similar. (You can check the archives.) But that doesn't matter - Paul didn't meet Jesus in the flesh.

Even accepting your dates, which have been forced to the earliest possible dates, I still contend that we have no record of anyone from Jesus' generation who knew him.
Tacitus, even if you accept the passage, does not record an event that relates to Jesus' death. He records an event that relates to Christians, and repeats that they are named after someone who was crucified under Pontius Pilate. There's still no one who knew Jesus.
The Testimonium is a patent forgery.

You are repeating a claim made by Christian apologists, but I don't think it is true. Many events in ancient history can be traced to contemporaneous reports or eyewitnesses.

The pattern is that contemporaneous evidence is missing.

Why should you naively accept the evidence at face value? Evaluating evidence is what historians do, especially in the case of a religion that has a history of inventing its own history.

The eschatological cults that we have evidence of seem to date to later than Jesus' supposed date. I don't think that this helps you.

mountainman

g'day K,

Both of these seem to imply an authorial invention of the NT and Jesus. The spectrum of Jesus Myth theories you are listing here also does not include those which deal with "make believe fiction", such as those of Joe Atwill and Francesco Carotta. Is this purposeful?


I have a problem with 1) Jesus was a real being, unless you mean to say that Jesus was a real spiritual being and not a real historical being. What do you mean by the claim "1) Jesus was a real being"?

maryhelena

Spin's great chart re types of JC

[T2]{r:bg=lightgray}{c:bg=slategray;ah=center;b-b=2,solid,black}Type of Jesus
|
{c:ah=center;b-b=2,solid,black}Status of Jesus
|
{c:ah=center;b-b=2,solid,black}Characteristics
|
{c:ah=center;b-b=2,solid,black}Worth of the gospels
|
{c:w=45;ah=center;b-b=2,solid,black}Use of Myth
|
{c:ah=center;b-b=2,solid,black}Published Proponents
||
{c:bg=#80C0C0;av=top}Maximal
|
{c:bg=#00C000;av=top}Existed in real world
|
{c:av=top}The gospels are seen as reliable documentary evidence and record the known events in the life of the man who started the religion.
|
{c:bg=#0070B0;av=top}Basically historical material
|
{c:bg=#ffe4b0;av=top}Minimal
|
Joseph Klausner, Birger Gerhardsson, Luke Timothy Johnson, N. T. Wright, James Tabor
||
{c:bg=#80C0C0;b-b=2,dashed,black;av=top}Historical
|
{c:bg=#00C000;b-b=2,dashed,black;av=top}Existed in real world
|
{c:b-b=2,dashed,black;av=top}The record is problematical, but literary records--gospels, church fathers and even pagan sources--contain vestiges of real world knowledge of a preacher, who was crucified.
|
{c:bg=#0090D0;b-b=2,dashed,black;av=top}Historical data obscured by transmission problems
|
{c:bg=#f6d480;b-b=2,dashed,black;av=top}Some, causing source problems
|
{c:b-b=2,dashed,black;av=top}Marcus Borg, J.D. Crossan, Burton Mack, E. P. Sanders, Paula Fredriksen, Helmut Koester, Stevan L. Davies, Raymond E. Brown, Mark Goodacre, J.P. Meier, Bart D. Ehrman, & Jesus seminar
||
{c:bg=#80C0C0;b-b=3,double,black;av=top}"Accreted"
|
{c:bg=#A0FFA0;b-b=3,double,black;av=top}A core figure behind the gospel Jesus existed
|
{c:b-b=3,double,black;av=top}Jesus was the product of various sources including knowledge of a real person, as can be found in "Q". This position does not see the crucifixion as historical.
|
{c:bg=#60B0FF;b-b=3,double,black;av=top}Little of historical value
|
{c:bg=#F0C060;b-b=3,double,black;av=top}Yes
|
{c:b-b=3,double,black;av=top}G.A. Wells, Robert H. Gundry
||
{c:bg=DarkOrchid;b-b=3,double,black;av=top}Spiritual realm
|
{c:bg=#FF2050;b-b=3,double,black;av=top}Existed in spiritual realm, not the mundane world
|
{c:b-b=3,double,black;av=top}Purely theological in origin, Jesus died in our stead not in this mundane world, but in a spiritual realm. Later this spiritual being became reconceived as having acted in this world and reified.
|
{c:bg=#E060C0;b-b=3,double,black;av=top}Embody a complex myth & reflect honest belief distorted by reification
|
{c:bg=Orange;b-b=3,double,black;av=top}Full
|
{c:b-b=3,double,black;av=top}Earl Doherty (*)
||
{c:bg=#B05070;b-b=2,dashed,black;av=top}Mythological composite
|
{c:bg=#F00000;b-b=2,dashed,black;av=top}Authorial invention
|
{c:b-b=2,dashed,black;av=top}Jesus was the product of mainly pagan mythological elements, be they solar myth (Acharya S) or dying & resurrection myths of Osiris/Dionysis (Freke & Gandy).
|
{c:b-b=2,dashed,black;av=top}Nothing but cobbled myths
|
{c:bg=Orange;b-b=2,dashed,black;av=top}Full
|
{c:b-b=2,dashed,black;av=top}Acharya S, Freke & Gandy
||
{c:bg=#B05070;b-b=2,dashed,black;av=top}Fictional
|
{c:bg=#F00000;b-b=2,dashed,black;av=top}Authorial invention
|
{c:b-b=2,dashed,black;av=top}Jesus was the product of purely literary activity. In the Atwill version, it was the policy of the emperor Titus with the aid of Josephus who tried to gain control over the unruly Jews.
|
{c:b-b=2,dashed,black;av=top}A tool for deceiving & manipulating people
|
{c:b-b=2,dashed,black;av=top}[-]
|
{c:b-b=2,dashed,black;av=top}Hermann Detering (*), Joe Atwill (*)
||
{c:bg=#B05070;b-b=2,solid,black;av=top}Transformed
|
{c:bg=#F00000;b-b=2,solid,black;av=top}Did not exist
|
{c:b-b=2,solid,black;av=top}Jesus was the product of corrupted retelling of events relating to Julius Caesar. Under Vespasian the story was developed into a new religion.
|
{c:b-b=2,solid,black;av=top}Underlying history garbled beyond recognition
|
{c:b-b=2,solid,black;av=top}No
|
{c:b-b=2,solid,black;av=top}Francesco Carotta
||
{c:bg=RoyalBlue;av=top}Traditional
|
{c:bg=#D0D0B0;av=top}Unknown (tradition doesn't permit clarification)
|
{c:av=top}Tradition doesn't distinguish between real and non-real. It merely takes accepted elements ("accepted" -> believed to be real) and passes them on with associated transmission distortions.
|
{c:bg=#D0D0B0;av=top}A complex of traditions with complex transmission, making veracity unverifiable
|
{c:bg=#D0D0B0;av=top}[-]
|
{c:av=top}[-]
||
{c:bg=RoyalBlue;av=top}Jesus agnostic
|
{c:bg=#D0D0B0;av=top}Unknown
|
{c:av=top}Due to the nature of available information there is insufficient evidence to decide on the existence of Jesus.
|
{c:bg=#D0D0B0;av=top}No current way of evaluating for veracity
|
{c:bg=#D0D0B0;av=top}[-]
|
{c:av=top}Robert M. Price[/T2]Notes:
1. Degrees of affinity between the various Jesuses (as indicated by the divisions between them): Single: close; Dashed: further; Double: little; Solid: none
2. Quotes around the types of Jesus indicate labels needing improvement.

[hr=1]100[/hr]

http://www.freeratio.org/showthread....85#post6656385