mountainman

This question relates to the voters of the topical poll
Was Jesus ever an actual human being?

Please, if you have not voted, or read this poll,
take the time to brief yourself on the results.

As at today at least 57 people have noted NO.
I would like this thread to be reserved for those
who voted no, in order to gauge opinion as to the
credible explanation for the ancient historical account.

(Well, ideally anyway)

If Jesus was not ever an actual human being then
we have a failure in communications on a rather
large scale. How did it happen? And specifically
when did it happen? That something so "historical"
got twisted beyond recognition.

What sub-options are there here?
And can the puzzle be solved?

HJ = Historical Jesus is no longer an option

We are left with one or more of the following
set of options, or are there more?

MJ = Mythical Jesus
FJ = Fictitious Jesus
DJ = Docetic Jesus
TJ = Traditional Jesus


Best wishes,


Pete Brown

Sheshbazzar

My position would require a L J= Legendary "Jesus"<sic>
The "WATCHWORD" of 2 Maccabees 13:9-17 "The Help of YAH" or "Victory of YAH" was taken up (or rather CONTINUED) by the nationalistic pre-christian "messiah expecting" Jews, the "Watchword" being similar to the name YAH 'hoshua, became accepted among these early messianic Jews as a NAME for their hoped for Jewish messiah, and through the process of midrash it was given a semblance of being an actual personality.
Preserving the Jewish national cultural identity, religion and unity in the face of overwhelming Hellenistic religious syncretism was the original understood purpose of the preaching of this "watchword" in Jewish synagogues throughout the then known world, hence Saul, ("Paul") the traveling Jewish preacher bearing the "Word" from synagogue to synagogue
The "chrestani" ("oiled ones") who were the pagan initiates of a variety of Hellenic "Mystery cults" were quick to adapt this somewhat sketchy Jewish framework to their philosophical teachings, Hellenizing the the name and the character of the Jewish "messiah", while fleshing "him" out with many additional stories, and dressing "him" up with garments borrowed from the Greek philosophers.
Constantine when he arrived on the scene, saw and understood the perfect political opportunity that was being presented to him in the popularity of the "christian" craze to further consolidate and leverage his power and his authority over the masses. The rest as they say, is history.

Timetospend

A recent report stated that 1 in 4 Bretons did not believe that Churchill ever existed. How could this happen?

Once something is outside one's line of sight, it becomes easy to deny it. The bigger question is: Why don't more people deny that Jesus existed?

Thanks,

purple_kathryn

Bretons as in people from Brittany? Or do you mean Britains?

I find that a bit odd. You can see churchill on film, you can hear voice recordings never mind the numerous pictures

Ahh this survey
http://news.sky.com/skynews/article/...303814,00.html

It's usually best to take surveys like that with a pinch of salt. All they show is that 1 in 4 people are total morons.

Toto

But the interesting part of that survey was that more than half of them think that Sherlock Holmes did exist.

This is a good indication that people have trouble separating historical figures from legends.

Keith&Co.

I get about ten emails a week from my father.
A third of them are simply obscene, but another third concern outrageous, fantastic or marvelous events. About a third of those are circulated with the note 'This really happened! I checked it on Snopes!'

For the most part, no, they didn't really happen. And the links to Snopes are to the home page, not any sort of verification for the event. But Dad, and the 32 email addresses embedded in the page would like to think that the 13 folds of the flag honor the christain outlook, or the melody of a particularly emotional tune was found by a civil war Union officer on the body of his Confederate son. They like to feel outraged by what happened to the young mother who was abandoned on the highway, to feel their faith reinforced by the wisdom of a precocious 5-year-old with an atheist teacher, or to feel that the liberal media isn't reporting a parade held at the Pentagon.

Stories that give them an emotional charge are passed on without any sort of critical evaluation. And the FWD function prevents any loss of data or change of details in the transmission.

So if so much utter bullshit can be passed around as gospel, with verification yea/nay only a google away, how hard would it be to imagine that tales get taller in the telling a couple thousand years ago?

mountainman

An interesting question.

As some of the responses have already indicated
it would appear that many people simply have become
uninterested, in the question, or un-educated.

Any general and objective assessment about
the ultimate creation/publication/transmission
of the New Testament literature mandates that
all the emotional baggage associated thereto
must be layed (perhaps temporarily) aside.

When the dust clears after this event,
the ground is that of ancient history IMO.
C14 did not exist a while back. etc

If the question becomes important enough, only
then will people go looking for an answer, perhaps.

Best wishes,


Pete Brown

mountainman

On the positive side, can you see that there are valid
methodologies by which the past may be retrieved by
the development of technology?

I think we can all see that the remoter the past the
remoter our chances to reconstruct it accurately.
Do you read the books of ....

* historians
* ancient historians
* biblical historians
* all of the above
* none of the above

Do you separate these author types?

Best wishes,


Pete Brown

Keith&Co.

I believe that there is a real history, which would have left some sort of record behind, if not quite an indexed Rockipedia chiseled out by some neighbor of Fred Flintstone. Sure, investigation into the past should reveal the past.

But the question was asking how could history hand down a story of Jesus if there was no Jesus in the first place. Or something to that effect.
My experience is that humans toss fabrications around as or more easily than objective facts.
People are arguing about Huckabee's legislative record right now, and that's not even the distant past. With the internet, a record of his time in office is available to virtually every citizen and people still attribute some of his actions to Clinton because they hate Clinton.

So, sure, historians are, or should be, or at the very least should be expected to be, careful to sift fact from fancy, literal from litany, fabrication from objectification. But to fully evaluate a work, you have to know who wrote it, when, and what their likely agenda was.

Julius Cesar wrote horrible things about the Druids, compared to what Greek Traders reported about them. But JC was trying to drum up support to invade Gaul. As a historical character, there's probably more than a little historical fact in his writings, but it must be taken with a grain of salt. Or a salt lick.

With the Gospels, we don't really know for sure who wrote them, or when. Makes it difficult to be sure why. And how to weight them as historical records.

purple_kathryn

Apparently the survey was of people under 20

so 1 in 4 teenagers are complete morons

Which is a lot less than I thought