Kosh

I think Doubting Jesus' Ressurection.... (or via: amazon.co.uk) provided a convincing explanation of how it started.

rlogan

Because there isn't one.

Christianity started as a secret society, and these were banned by the Emperor Trajan when we first see Christians spoken of in the historical record, and this is early second century not first.

By the time you get to Mark, which announces itself as the beginning of the Gospel, it is long enough and far enough away (nearly a century later and outside Judea altogether) that you can fabricate (back-date) a "founder" into existence who coincidentally fulfills an interpretation of Hebrew Bible works.

Sheshbazzar

According to the account given in the Gospels it would be John the Baptist when he officially made the announcement "Behold! The Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world!"
Before that, Jebus evidently was just another semi-employed Joe lunchbox who allegedy occasionally performed a bit of free magic on the side to amaze and entertain his family and friends.

With his formal introduction as the headliner in Jonny the B's act, he took his magic show on the road, and the rest as they say, is history.

Dave31

outhouse,

Ah yes, of course, another biased attack without ever actually addressing a single argument. Just omit the fact that your own highly respected scholar, Dr. Robert Price, has acknowledged his own agreement with her. Your prejudice against Acharya S remains even though you haven't read a single book of hers. Obviously, you're still repeating the trash you read on the net from others who also haven't studied her work.

Richard Carrier influences people like Rook (and you) to smear others work Carrier himself has never read. Carrier has never read a single book by Acharya S so, if intellectual dishonesty is what you prefer then, Carrier will do.

Acharya S has responded to Carrier's trash demonstrating he made sloppy and egregious errors in his criticism of her work. Carrier simply doesn't have the integrity to admit his errors. Carrier has never been a reliable or credible source on the work by Acharya S as his unscholarly and unprofessional biases are transparent as glass. Anybody with intellectual honesty and objectivity can see that. Carrier's fanboys will continue to follow his lead in dishonestly trashing others works they've never read regardless of how pathetic that tactic is - not something to be proud of. I feel sorry for you.

"Carrier has mistakenly dealt with the substantially different Hatshepsut text (Brunner's "IV D"), demonstrating an egregious error in garbling the cycles, when in fact we are specifically interested in the Luxor narrative (IV L)"

Parallelophobia, personal attacks and professional jealousy: A response to Richard Carrier's 'That Luxor Thing'

Is Jesus's nativity an Egyptian myth?

outhouse

slow down.

while he has amazing knowledge on many topics, I dont know id call him highly respected.


he has a very small following at best and carries no credibility with most scholars.



I still like him for the knowledge he carries in certain areas. As a whole no.



dont you mean he quit attacking her work??

Atheos

While identifying the originator of a myth (assuming for the moment that we're dealing with one here) is an interesting intellectual exercise, I'd be really surprised if any supportable theory could be presented at this point regarding the story of Jesus.

Hell, we don't even know who wrote the four canonical gospels.

It's like trying to identify who it was that invented the urban legend about the kidney black market shanghai scheme or the first person who made up stories about Thor. The best we can ever hope for at this point is to come up with an approximate location and time-frame. An individual? Highly unlikely.

mountainman

Eusebius describes Constantine as a new Moses. Everyone took clear notice of Constantine, the publisher of the Official Gospel Series and Authoritative Canonical Letters, except Arius and the Arians.

gurugeorge

In my own little theory, the first creators of the myth are the Jerusalem people (Cephas, James, the Pillars, etc.), who hypothesized (and also probably had religious visions) that the reason why the Jews (as they felt at the time) had won a spiritual victory over the Romans (specifically over Caligula - him threatening to desecrate the temple then being assassinated in 41CE) was because the Messiah had already come, albeit not in the way people had expected (secretly instead of with fanfare, winning a spiritual victory by self-sacrifice instead of a military victory by conquest). They searched for evidence of this in Scripture (as a prophecy), thought they found it, and the rest is history.

DCHindley

Guru,

Your willingness to be specific about historical circumstances that may have precipitated the Christ myth from existing flux is welcome. We just don't get a lot of that here. In chemical terms the spiritual victory is a catalyst, the introduction of which causes blended chemicals to react and form new molecules.

You mention "prophecies" in Scripture, but what about Jesus? Where does he come in the mix? As a charismatic military messiah whose defeat mystified his followers?

Self re-definition, it seems to me, is certainly what occurred.

The Israelites did it several times, starting as polytheistic tribes with a common hero god, resurrecting on account of the exile and return under the Persian kings as Judeans with a distinct national identity in the 5th century BCE, resurrected again through the catalyst of the attempt of a Syrian king to assimilate the Judeans into Hellenic culture, that prompted the creation of a popular theocracy madly in love with their national religious traditions in the 2nd century BCE, to the kind of "modern" Judaism of today precipitated by the destruction of the temple and more or less fully defined by the end of the 2nd century CE.

Why can't Christians do that as well?

DCH

Grog

It's like asking who was the first human? Myths do not hatch full-blown from a duck egg.