outhouse

Your failing to realize one important point


the jesus story revolves around a poor peasant traveling teacher who went up against the man [the romans] and was fighting the outrageous taxation and the corruption of jewish priest due to romans in the temple during passover

This was witnessed by 400,000 poor hard working jews who were already fed up with the oppression to the point of committing suicide by fighting the romans knowing they would be mowed over.


Thats quite the popularity due to one day of a heroic act against the powers that be with almost half a million witnesses.



truthful statements like that chokes out 99.99999% of the mythers there are, and its exactly what scholars all know, mythers dont have a clue about

outhouse

yes it started out with his martyred death, and was short lived among judaism

paul stomped out the jewish movement, and stole the religion and took it to the romans were it took off.

romans were already worshipping yahweh in the synagogues before the fall of the temple, they were easy targets for paul

Logical

The fact that Paul was persecuting the church doesn't prove that it was a burgeoning movement at that point. It could just have been the tens of followers Jesus had, and Paul was just persecuting all heretics at the time (nothing special about the Christians).

The "big bang" we're looking for obviously didn't happen when Jesus was alive (since no one noticed it), but it could have started shortly after his death. It seems plausible that Jesus' scared and cowardly followers were so shaken by his courageous stance and ultimate sacrifice that it had a dramatic transforming effect on them. And things began to click and they put two and two together, as it were.

Even today governments always worry about the aftermath of killing an important terrorist, possibly empowering his followers driving them to action.

The amount of contemporary historical evidence for Jesus is precisely the amount we should expect for a historical Jesus: zero.

Well that's unfalsifiable, you say? Not really. We still have to explain the Christian movement. That's where we have the indirect evidence for a historical Jesus. In other words, the hypothesis would be falsified if Christianity as we know it did not exist. This is similar to those who demand unreasonable evidence for Evolution. Due to real factors on the ground, the amount of evidence for Evolution is exactly the amount we'd expect to have if evolution were true. What Evolution leaves behind is often indirect evidence.

To me, it's more plausible that Jesus was just a man whose story was exaggerated, than a deity who kept getting downgraded! The former possibility seems to match the general trend of myth-making.

steve_bnk

By all mens,feel free to pose new topic for discussion.....

Some of us need to undserstand the foundations of Christianity nd iys supporting rguments.

It is interesting as an historical debate.

Logical

By the way, remember the Tunisian man who burned himself to death? No one gave a damn about him when he was alive. He was less than insignificant. But his death started a movement that involved millions of people and toppled several governments in the Middle East.

His death started a movement that he couldn't have started while alive, and it motivated people to find in themselves the drive to act.

Imagine a thousand years from now people claiming that that man never existed and that the revolutionaries invented him to tell a story about the oppression of those governments and the suffering that caused, all exemplified by this mythical man.

Grog

I think you are making stuff up.

Horatio Parker

Because Christians have tied their theology to a historical figure. No figure, big problem.

Grog

You are making stuff up.

That's a convenient artifact of the unfalsifiable hypothesis you have constructed.

So your hypothesis is only falsifiable in a parallel universe in which Christianity did not exist?

Come on. Evolution could easily be falsified. We could find dragon with six limbs. We could find a real Onate man (google Onyate man). there are literally innumerable possibilities that would cause serious problems for Evolution. We don't find any of them. We consistently find exactly what we predict. Darwin said we would find pre-humans in Africa...we did. Shubin didn't just happen to find Tiktaalik, he knew where to look and in what layers. Evolution consistently makes good predictions of what we will find.

The Jesus to Christ myth is confounded on its very first steps out of the gate: What we would expect to find in Paul, we don't. Enter the ad hoc explanations for why Paul doesn't support the paradigm. Paul falsifies the Jesus to Christ hypothesis (assuming that at least some of Paul is authentic, which I do).

Except your hypothesis works backward: It starts with a myth Jesus in Paul then becomes a man story in Mark (no, not really, as AA points out!). What you are proposing is that the earliest followers of Jesus made up clearly false stories about Jesus of Nazareth...that, in fact, they were liars. Where, anywhere, between 30 AD and 80 AD when gMark was written, do we find any traces of this Man to God evolution? Paul does not talk about a mere man. He talks about a God who transcends, conquers death. Who told Paul these lies?

outhouse

you call that a rebuttle please atleast try and refute or show a statement ive made wrong. your giving mythers a stereotypical view, your better then that.

outhouse

what if only his fight against the roman corruption in the temple in front of 400,000 poor hard working oppressed jews tired of the roman accupation, started teh fire that spread through judaism before paul took it straight to his roman brothers?