aa5874

But, you claim is False. Not every one considered that the son of God actually existed as human.

Athenagoras did NOT consider that the son of God was human.

Marcion and the Marcionites did NOT consider that the Son of God was human.

You seem NOT to fully understand the meaning of "historical Jesus".

HJ does NOT mean that people merely believed Jesus existed. It means that Jesus did EXIST ONLY as human or that the Jesus stories were based on a single human being.

Once you are claiming Jesus did exist and was RAISED from the dead, then you are a PROMOTING mythology.

You are wrong. You KNOW that the Gospel writers presented Jesus as a God/man.

Does NOT Matthew 1.18 claim Mary was with child of the Holy Ghost?

Does NOT Mark 6.49 claim Jesus looked like a Spirit when he WALKED on water?

Does NOT Luke 9.29 claim Jesus ALTERED his countenance?

Does NOT John 1 claim Jesus was the Creator of heaven and earth and EQUAL to God?

Do NOT ALL the Gospel claim Jesus was RAISED FROM THE DEAD?

The Gospel writers presented Jesus as a God/man.

Now every single Greek/Roman God of antiquity are NOW considered MYTHS.

Jesus became a God of the Romans in antiquity. Jesus is very likely to be a MYTH.

MJers do NOT have to ASSUME that Jesus was presented as the child of the Holy Ghost and the Creator. We have the Gospels and each version is CAST in Stone. See Matthew 1.18. and Mark 16.6.

gurugeorge

No, only some thought back then - and the OP uses the term in the modern-day sense, as one of several possible explanations for mythic origins.

You've done this a few times now - you claim to be interested in what people thought back then, but you keep trying to shoehorn what people thought back then into whatever category it amuses you to toy with in order to try and discumbobulate mythicists (and don't think we don't notice ).

Toto

How does this help? Mark could have been a work of intentional fiction, understood as such, but later misinterpreted as history.

GakuseiDon

Those fables appear to be related to fantastic sea voyages and the like. Educated pagans had an 'euhemeristic' view of their gods' myths, so I suspect Lucian would have held those views also. It comes back to the question, then: did people write bioi about characters who they didn't believe existed? Can we at least rule this out from the pagan side?

No, but as 'bioi', ancient biographies that exalted their subjects. I don't see an issue with them including a story about Jesus withering a fig-tree as symbolic for the withering of Jewish Messianic expectations, or using midrash to provide details about Jesus. That would be in range of what we would expect.

I understand your point: We see some symbolism in there, so why can't the whole thing be allegorical or symbolic? What remains to be seen though is whether an ancient biography would be crafted around a person that the author didn't believe existed on earth. It doesn't seem to fit the pattern of those times.

Juststeve

Can we know anything of the ancient world against the claim that whatever source we chose could have been a deliberate work of fiction, understood as such at the time, and subsequently misinterpreted as history?

Steve

aa5874

You just MAKE stuff up. You have NO source at all from antiquity, internally or externally, to corroborate anything you say.

Please state when the original ANONYMOUS writing now called "according to Luke" was written?

And please do not make reference to Irenaeus. He did not KNOW when Pilate was governor of Judea or who was the procurator of Judea during the reign of Claudius and that all the Gospels were ANONYMOUS.

Your admission is a big joke. You are discrediting your ONLY sources that mention Jesus.

Once you admit that John the supposed disciple did NOT write gJohn then you are accepting that gJohn may be a work of fiction.

In gJohn 21.24, the author claimed he was a disciple and it was he who wrote these things in gJohn.

The Pauline writers did NOT really claim the world was about to end. The Pauline writers claim Jesus would come back like a thief in the night at an unspecified time. The Pauline writers did not claim Jesus was coming back in "this generation".

It is in the Synoptics where a character called Jesus claimed that the Sanhedrin would see him coming in the clouds and immediately AFTER the Fall of the Temple they would see him in "this generation".

Such a view is not really logical. Why did you ASSUME only an actual Jesus could have made a claim in a story of the second coming of a God?

People today say Jesus is coming soon and some have even given dates.

In the Jesus stories, Jesus was NOT a mere man. There is no corroborative external evidence that there was a Messiah called Jesus, there is no external source that claimed Jesus wrote anything in the Gospels, not even Church writers claimed Jesus wrote any of the Gospels.

For sure it was some ANONYMOUS person who wrote about the second coming and that is a clue that can be used to help deduce when the initial Jesus story was possibly fabricated.

Toto

Yes, of course. We have archaeology. We have inscriptions. We have original writings, official records, etc. We have documents that were clearly written as history, which we can validate against the hard evidence.

All these sources need to be treated skeptically, but some things can be known with some degree of certainty.

gurugeorge

That's not the claim I don't think, at least for most mythicists. There are some people who think it was fiction in the strict sense, but for most mythicists here AFAIK, "fiction" is used loosely - mainly as simply opposed to "history". Fictional examples like comic books are used simply to highlight, starkly, the fact that some of the techniques proposed in biblical scholarship to draw history out of the texts (e.g. the criterion of embarrassment) could be used to draw "history" out of fiction (and are therefore useless as criteria to draw out real history - unless of course you have some external evidence of a Jesus person, to ground the texts with some externally-corroborated historicity).

But don't get confused. These people weren't necessarily lying or consciously writing what we would call, literally, fiction. Many of them probably believed this divine entity had been incarnated on earth at some point. They were doing what we moderns would call "making stuff up", but that's not necessarily how they would have seen it (they would probably have understood what they were writing as truth, inspired by God or visionary/mystical experience).

IOW, the earliest Christians may have believed in this entity because they interpreted Scripture as telling them that he had existed in some not-too-distant past, and that this interpetation of Scripture revealed something that had been hidden, that nobody had known about before. (Kind of a reversal of Messiah tropes - past, not future, has been, not is to come, has already won, not yet to win, spiritual not military.)

THEN they confabulated, filled-in, and eventually (for reasons I mentioned in a previous post, and probably some other reasons too) the myth was firmly fixed at a time shortly before the Diaspora.

aa5874

But, we have what appears to be a well-known case where a religion was based on fabrication or a Bible or writings were copied from non-existing PLATES.

The Jesus story in gMatthew and gJohn are so different that at least parts of the story MUST have been made up.

If Jesus was just a man by what means did the author of gJohn confirm that Jesus was equal to God and the CREATOR of heaven and earth?

If Jesus was just a MAN who actually had a mother named Mary by what means did the author of Matthew confirm that Jesus was the offspring of the Holy Ghost?

There MUST have come a time when the authors themselves KNEW they were writing FICTION.

Joseph Smith must have known that MORONI and the PLATES were inventions.

It only requires ONE person to invent a story that people, for some reason, believe.

mountainman

This forgery was dedicated to "Diocletian and Constantine".
That it was fabricated in a Constantinian scriptoria has a good chance of being true.


The oldest Nicaean Oath's to Constantine (ie" Creed) exhibit the five sophisms at the basis of the Arian controversy.
These each look suspicious enough to answer this question with the Council of Nicaea 325 CE.

* There was time when the Historical Jesus was not.

* Before the Historical Jesus was born the Historical Jesus was not.

* the Historical Jesus was made out of nothing existing.

* the Historical Jesus is/was from another subsistence/substance.

* the Historical Jesus is subject to alteration or change.

The problem is that nobody is taking the case of a piously forged historical jesus too seriously. The Christ Myth was obviously perpetuated by the publication of the NT Canon. The NT Canon may well be all about literary figures the author(s) knew never existed, and that the author(s) intended his readers to be deceived. Did Nero really win all the Olympic Games?