Gamer4Fire

Birth records, medical records, dental records, high school transcripts, voters registration, credit rating, block buster movie records, bank records.

For someone who isn't in the least famous (AFAIK), there is a lot of evidence that he existed, eh. Now someone famous who could performs miracles? You can find flyers, press releases and entire volumes devoted to Siegfried and Roy, good and bad.

J-D

What makes you confident that there was a flesh-and-blood Saul of Tarsus? What makes it appear to you that he invented Christianity?

And if he invented Christianity, doesn't it necessarily follow that there couldn't have been any believers before him from whom he received his doctrines? Is that the way you want to tell the story?

J-D

Possibly. But if so, the concerns of the more philosophical sort of Christians are irrelevant to this thread.My precious darling, are you prepared to back up this claim with evidence?

Toto

But the founder does not need to be the god of the religion.

Would you count Judaism? If there was a founder, we don't know who it was, and Moses seems to be a mythological construction.

Taoism has no known founder. Confucianism may or may not have any relationship to anyone named Confucius.

spin

Someone wrote the letters (just as someone wrote the gospels), so there's no problem with the existence of the author. Maybe he wasn't Saul of Tarsus as he claims, but that's irrelevant. He specifically claims that he got his revelation not from people but from Jesus, well, maybe he did, maybe he didn't. According to him people believed his word and he told them to listen to no-one else, "people who taught another christ".

There were messianists before Paul. He didn't invent the idea of a messiah (christ).


spin

spin

J-D conflates founder with central figure. Mohammed was the founder of Islam, but not its central figure. Mormonism was founded by Joseph Smith, but is not its central figure. The problem is that the central figure of christianity is presented as a human, so that helps the conflation. Paul's christ is not presented as an itinerant teacher, as the gospels show him. Paul's is a mystical figure, while the gospels' is a more human one. It would seem that J-D is retrojecting the gospel christ into the foundation of the religion, which seems unfounded from the evidence, and in so doing helps to conflate founder with central figure.


spin

J-D

Of course. It can't be, since there are no gods.

Possibly what you mean is that not all religions believe their founders to be divine. This is true, but irrelevant to the point at issue.It is not known how Judaism originated. Hence, we can't say that it's confirmed that it originated without a founder.

It is not known how Taoism originated. Hence, we can't say that it's confirmed that it originated without a founder.

I am surprised at what you say about Confucianism, but if you're right, then you know what follows: it is not known ...

J-D

There is a problem in supposing the singularity of the author. What is the basis for that supposition? What makes you think that some one wrote the letters, rather than some two, some three, or some fifty? And if there was more than one, which of them invented Christianity?And even if there was only one person who wrote 'the letters' (which letters do you include in that, anyway?), you still haven't answered the question: what makes it appear to you that that person invented Christianity?Sheshbazzar's assertion, which I was responding to, is that it appears that Saul of Tarsus invented Christianity. Do you agree with that? If not, who do you think did invent Christianity?

J-D

Obviously I have failed to make my position clear.

Some people believe the following to be true: that about the fourth decade of the first century, a man called Jesus preached a messianic message of some variety to the Jews of Palestine; that some accepted him as their leader; that they continued to acknowledge his leadership and preach his message after his execution, and gathered more followers; and that from this group progressively evolved (with doctrinal differences developing over time) the various groups subsequently identified as Christian.

I see nothing to make this account impossible. In this respect, it differs both from the account of Christ given in the Gospels and from the account of Christ given in the epistles, both of which contain many elements which could not possibly be true.

On the account just given, I think it would be reasonable to describe the historical Jesus it refers to as the founder of Christianity, although the present doctrines of the various Christian churches may differ to a greater or lesser extent from his original preaching.

If you have a different account to offer of the foundation of Christianity, I would like to see it set out with the same degree of concrete detail, and also to see what reasons you have for it.

aa5874

Absence of Evidence is Mandatory to show that non-existence is very likely. It is extremely critical that no evidence be found for Jesus in the 1st century to provide a compelling case that he was likely fabricated. I absolutely need silence. Without silence I have no case. These conditions have been met in Philo, Josephus, Tacitus, Suetonius, Pliny the younger, Theophilus and Athenogoras. No evidence can be found in any extant non-apologetic source to support Jesus.

If a person claimed that unicorns do not exist, then it is mandatory that no-one can find evidence anywhere for such a creature. Absence of evidence is a must to support non-existence. Silence is critical.

Once it can be shown that there are or were religions whose deities are now considered mythical or to have never existed, or there were Christians who had no knowledge of Jesus at all, then these facts are very helpful is augmenting the case for non-existence.

The implausibilty of the life of any entity strenghtens the case for non-existence. It is extremely helpful when the entity under investigation is described as the son of a Holy Ghost and was last seen flying through the clouds on his way to heaven.

[

When seemingly plausible events about Jesus turn out to be unrealistic, like his trial where Pilate finds him not guilty and allows Jesus to be crucified, when the women go to anoint the body of Jesus after he was buried contrary to Jewish custom, when his body vanishes and then re-appears as though he was never dead, all these events add up and indicate to me that it is more likely that Jesus did not exist and was fabricated fiction.

And further the history of the Church as written by Eusebius with respect to Jesus can be shown in many instances to be totally erroneous.

The case for an HJ is unsupported and baseless, it can only be maintained by faith in the words of Jesus' followers or as a follower of him.