Didymus

It cannot be said with absolute certainty that 22:16 was the "inspiration" for the notion of a crucified messiah. Nor is it certain that the crucifixions of Zealots served to "connect the dots" between messianic hopes and crucifixion. But either or both scenarios are well within the realm of possibility, notwithstanding the fallacious "criterion of embarrassment" that's used by inerrantists and other historicists to wave off mythicist views.

Too bad we don't have time travel - you could warn Paul that he was wasting his time by preaching a crucified savior.

Straw man stuff. Sorry, but repeating a bad argument doesn't improve it.

Less "tricky" than the radical re-construction that's required to downgrade a divine miracleworker/messiah into an ordinary man.

Ben C Smith

That kind of reconstruction (downgrading a miracle man) is not tricky, not radical, and not uncommon. Historians have to do it all the time with historical figures.

Ben.

jakejonesiv

You left out the "divine" part of Didymus' statement. It is pertinent here. Perhaps Jesus was downgraded from a god to a man (or at least a god man) when the gospel genre was invented, presumably by Mark, by placing the Jesus character in an historical setting for the first time. From that low point, Jesus was subsequently deemed to be more and more divine by later evangelists, esp. the authors of GJohn.

Let's start with the christological hymn of Philipians 2. It descibes a divine being who takes on the docetic appearance of a man, obediently submits to death, which was perhaps subsequently intepolated to specify death on a cross. He is then highly exalted and given a name above every other name.

It is arguably the earliest extant Christian writing we possess. This is all myth, even the ambiguosly descibed death. there is not a bit of history in it. When we asked, who executed Jesus, again we are stimied in the pauline corpus.We read that he was crucified by Archons of the Aeon. Who were these mysterious archons? It doesn't say. When did this occur? It doesn't say. Where? Again, no information is given. There is no historical peg to afix historicity. You will have to wait until the gospels are written to hear a word about Pontius Pilate.

Jake Jones IV

Ben C Smith

Then the thread I recently started was for naught. The dovetailing indications of recency are just coincidence.

Ben.

Ben C Smith

Then let me remedy that oversight. That kind of reconstruction (downgrading a divine figure) is not tricky, not radical, and not uncommon. Historians have to do it all the time with historical figures (the divine Augustus, for instance).

Ben.

Didymus

There's no comparison. The primary material on Augustus (Tacitus, Cassius Dio, Suetonius) contains relatively few minor supernatural incidents, mostly presages, omens and the like. This is in sharp contrast with the gospels, which consist primarily of tales of the supernatural.

Didymus

Ben C Smith

It is a matter of degree. Augustus was regarded as divine. Jesus was regarded as divine. If claims of divinity count against historicity, Augustus was no more historical than Jesus. Augustus was credited with a few miracles. Jesus was credited with many. Where should the line be drawn? Francis of Assisi was credited with just as many miracles as Jesus, if not more. Is Jesus is mythical because of the dominical miracle claims, then Francis is mythical because of the Franciscan miracle claims.

I agree that it takes more effort to get at the historical Jesus than it does to get at the historical Augustus. I am willing to put in that effort.

(I also notice that you call Tacitus, Cassius Dio, and Suetonius primary material on Augustus, though the oldest of those wrote nearly a century after his death.)

Ben.

Doug Shaver

That particular detail might not be as obvious as the notion that you have to speak in tongues to be a real Christian, but I don't think Christianity was just a matter of somebody reading Jewish scripture and coming up with a novel interpretation of it. It seems to have been a complex process involving several sects that were active in that part of the world at the turn of the Common Era. Christianity did not originate among a single group of oddball fanatics. Doherty put it well: "Christianity was born in a thousand places, in a host of different forms, growing out of the broad, fertile religious soil of the time."

Malachi151

This is completely beside the point. The quality of his argument against the pagans has nothing to do with it, and of course one expects the Chrisitan arguments to be poor and ill-conceived, the Chrisitans were idiots. All of their arguments about everything was stupid if you read the early Christian writers, they were complete assholes and dumbasses, who took over Rome through violence, intimidation, and by gaining a majority in the military.

The point of the of the quote from Tertullian is that #1 it demonstrates that there was no popular association between Jesus and the cross, #2 the Chrisitan defense fo worshiping crosses had nothing to do with Jesus, which #3 shown that Chrisitans worshiped the cross for reasons that had nothing to do with Jesus.

If Jesus were real, and he really had been crucified, then the reason for cross worship would have been known by all Chrisitan to be worship of the cross because it was the symbol of Jesus' death, but clearly that is not the case, and its not the case because there was no Jesus story about crucifixion at this time, and people worshiped the cross for reasons that had nothing to do with any crucifixion stories.

Malachi151

I'm not sure what yoru claim is here. I HAVE had other apologist stell me that the "tree" mentioned in Acts is a reference to the cross, not that it translatess to cross, but that it was another way of saying cross, which is of course absurd.

Other than that, I'm not sure what you are saying.

There are clerly three or fourth completely different accounts of how "Jesus" was killed. 1# The Talmud says he was stoned ot death and hung from a tree. #2 The Greek gospels say he was hung from a pole. #3 Sections in the Bible say that he was hung from a tree. #4 Sections in the Bible say he was crucified on a cross.

Clearly there is no consistency here and thus the story smells very strongly of myth and fabrication, not based on any historically observed event.

AT BEST, the Christian position can only be that there was a real Jesus, but we don't know for sure how he was killed.

Here is another problem for the "historical Jesus" people.

I immidiately deny the posibility that Jesus ascended bodily into heaven, which means that if there were a "real Jesus" then something would have to have been done with his body after he was killed. Either he was killed and buried somewhere, in which case, wouldn't his followers have marked his grave and worshiped his grave if he had any kind of following at all?

Or, he wasn't killed and he went about on some kind of "DaVincie Code" trip, in which case, the entire story of the ressurection is false anyway.

The only way to try to prove the real historical existance of Jesus is to deny his divinity, but even this fails, becuase you can't prove his existance and every new fact shows more and more the correlations beteween the Jesus myth and existing myths of other gods that were told before the Jesus myth emerged.

Face the facts, this religion is acomplete sham that destroyed the world.

The rise of Christianity is the single more destructive event in all of human history.