spin

Joshua, Samson, Wisdom wandering the streets preaching, the suffering servant. And then all you need is a messianist with that undergrowth who decides that they missed the messiah's coming.


spin

Chris Weimer

Please expand.

Why, yes it is. You see, most gods weren't described as living on earth, with few exceptions.

I'm sorry, spin, did you have a point here?

Antedating Paul does not make them secondary to him. Q is most conservatively dated with Paul, and liberally to before Paul. Paul speaks of a James tradition which antedates him. Lost, it still exists. Hand waving it all you want doesn't make it disappear.

Which ones? All of them? The most informed? What about Mormon scholars?

Anyone OT3 is certifiably insane. Your honor, Tom Cruise... I rest my case.

Because L. Ron Hubbard wrote it down and said it was so. Because we have earlier works which were only science fiction...by the same author. And because when you get down to it, it's logically, physically, and scientifically impossible, while Jesus ain't so.

But I smell an anti-Christian bias by singling out Jesus and not Mohammed.

Put some cheese on it.

No, I just deny existence based on implausibility, and then give ancient texts their proper credit until evidence is procured to the opposite.

You're arguing apples and oranges.

Because the evidence ain't that simple. We don't merely have some tradition which grew out of a mistaken identity. We have the encapsulation of an actual person whose disciple later deified. There's precedence, and no amount of "it doesn't have to be" can excuse the evidence. Deal with it.

Aspects of gnosticism and gnosticism as a religion itself (which in itself is a challenged notion) are two different things. Not everything gnostic had to have a separate tradition than Orthodox Christianity.

I never said there wasn't a need for it, and for the record, the post you replied to doesn't say that either. I think you imagined that into there.

youngalexander

Trouble is, we only have Paul's side of the story.

Not according to Paul.

Whatever Paul believed, James & Cephas also believed. Or, at least something acceptably like it, according to Paul.

Chris Weimer

Can this messianist of yours be verified the way Jesus cannot? Otherwise, that's a clear double-standard.

spin

As Jesus cannot be verified in any historical sense, what do I have to do with the messianist?


spin

Chris Weimer

In other words, your theory is built upon the faithful assumption that this religion, Christianity, had to have a founder, who, in your opinion, was some messianist who thought he "missed the messiah's coming", but there's no textual support for him, no archaeological evidence for him, and no outside corroborating evidence from secular historians.

Odd, huh?

spin

Paul missed the messiah. Odd, huh?


spin

spin

Just add water. Some jesuses were gods. Some gods walked on the earth.

Why concentrate on the novelties?

It was called historical methodology.

You don't know when or if Q was written. A James tradition doesn't necessarily antedate Paul, but what relevance is an undefined messianist in your argument here. What did this James actually believe? You just don't know.

Were there any scholars back in Paul's time?

Sanity has not been talked about before in this thread, your honor. Defense is trying to introduce new and irrelevant materials.

When you cherrypick the Jesus you feel comfortable with.

This is only you muddying the waters. I was looking at the focus of the religion, not the perceived originator.

Along with your overdose of ketchup.

So Jesus walking on water being implausible you deny, or Jesus raising Lazarus you deny, then you invent another Jesus. Very convenient.

You're avoiding responding to the issue:

Non-entities can be reified whether you like the fact or not. It doesn't matter whether someone believes in them or not. It is sufficient that someone believed they existed, which plainly Tertullian and Epiphanius did. You don't need reality behind a figure to give them life.

Unless you can get to the realia of your writer to give him some measure of reliability, you are talking rot.

You make things easy when you assume your conclusions. To do so, you cherrypick your source texts to get the figure you want in order to retroject him into the text as "the encapsulation of an actual person whose disciple later deified." That's convenience store religion.

Just cut the crapology and supply me with some evidence to deal with.

Do the Jesus aspects of gnosticism come from a real person or do the plausible aspects of Jesus came from gnosticism, or do they both come from earlier traditions? What were the other gospels that Paul knew about? Paul's religion is different from them, like it is different from the "Jerusalem church". How different?

We are trying to get to origins here. You assume your origin and then work from it. I can't afford that luxury. The fact that you don't need to "experience[..] the claimed originator to believe in the person" must be considered in the discussion, as you are working from the fruits of people who had no first hand experience of the reputed originator of the religion.


spin

Solo

I don't think that is true. Much of the NT scholarship (theologically oriented) at the break of the 20th century was quite resigned to the finding that most of Jesus, if not all of him, was mythical. Bultmann had an antidote to abandonment of Christianity with finding it was just another myth: look at Jesus existentially.

The idea that someone who died some two thousand year ago for your or my flawed nature seems preposterous to a modern mind. But it isn't once you admit that our nature is flawed, that we are corruptible. All of us. Then look at Paul again and try to clean him of the pile of pious drivel heaped on him later. What do you get ? A self-admitted fool who held that the world and life were a brutal joke unless one finds a God that had love. Paul's God did not send his Son to the world to be killed. He sent him "for sin", to deal with our flawed nature. God sent his Son in the likeness of a foolish blasphemer who thought he could forgive sins and create God's kingdom on earth (actually in Israel, but the cosmopolitan Paul took a more general view). And the powers of this earth killed him for it. They killed him but could not kill the idea of universal brotherhood that God told Paul the fool represented. They could not kill the spirit. This original Christ of Paul can withstand any historical revision.

Jiri

Chris Weimer

So you're alleging that Paul founded Christianity. I wonder what the heck were the pillars then...?