Koyaanisqatsi

I agree about the pre-existing myths being applied to Jesus, but I'm not sure he was entirely fictional. The primary reason I say that is because of Mark's trial sequence. The author goes to great lengths and makes several contradictory, illogical mistakes to turn what appears to have been an actual event into a ridiculous revisionist history for the express purpose of shifting the blame from the Romans onto "the Jews."

If it were entirely fictional, then there would be no need at all to even include Pilate or the Romans in any of it and it could have ended with Jesus being brought before the San Hedrin to be tried and found guilty of blasphemy and stoned right then and there. The Jews killed their own savior. Samey samey. If you'll recall, they supposedly tried twice before and Jesus cowardly ran away, so we have no false issues of how Roman law didn't allow for the Jews to kill one of their own already acknowledged in the same mythology.

So, it makes more sense (to me anyway) that a Roman propagandist writing thirty or forty years after a real trial where the Romans crucified an insurrectionist leader (and thereby turned him into a martyr for their cause against the occupation) would go to such tortured lengths to revise that event in order to shift the real blame from the Romans to "the Jews," instead of a fictionalist including such a tortured scenario for no reason.

:huh:

Yes, well, again, see above.

Doesn't this contradict what you admitted to about Arthur? You could indeed arrive at reality that way, assuming an actual historic person as I think I've made a good case for.

If it's entirely fictional, then why the trial sequence? If the intent were solely to write a story of Jews killing their own god, then all of the convoluted nonsense that goes on in the trial sequence would be completely unnecessary. If, on the other hand, the trial were a real event in "recent" history in the region and it had backfired on the Romans, creating the martyr Jesus, then the Roman propagandist would have to come up with a revision of that event to explain what "really" happened in order to shift the blame from the Romans to the Jews as Mark does.

Then (and only then, IMO) it makes sense to consider why the Romans would have held an actual trial, conviction, mockery and execution and the most likely answer is that Jesus was the leader of an insurrectionist movement (as well as a radical, non-orthodox Rabbi, but that would be entirely secondary to the Romans).

Take the mockery of Jesus and the crown of thorns and the "King of the Jews" nonsense. All of that makes no sense at all if you take Mark's story as "gospel," since Pilate, the Roman leader, had publicly declared Jesus to be completely innocent of all crimes and had set him free. He supposedly even asks "the crowd" if Jesus is their "King" and they supposedly answer "We have no king but Caesar."

So, in Mark's story, Jesus does not claime to be the "King of the Jews," Pilate publicly declares he can find no crime that Jesus has committed (which would include the old chestnut of Caesar's decree) and his own people shout en masse that they don't consider Jesus to be the "King of the Jews."

So why in the hell would the Roman soldiers then dress him up in kingly robes, put a crown of thorns on his head and nail "King of the Jews" on his cross? Nobody called him or considered him to be the "King of the Jews," so, what, from a fictionalist Mark's perspective is the point of having Roman soldiers mocking what their own commander has proclaimed to be an innocent man, guilty of no crime and not a King of the Jews, unless that actually happened?

All of that makes sense historically if Jesus were the leader of an insurrectionist movement who was finally captured, tried and sentenced to death by Pilate for sedition against Rome, but makes no sense at all if there were no actual Roman trial and crucifixion.

Propaganda is all about taking the truth and spinning it; not about making up total lies out of whole cloth, so, again, if it were just all fiction, then Mark should have ended with the San Hedrin stoning Jesus to death the night before and there would be no need to include any of the tortured references to OT prophecy, other than enough to establish Jesus' divinity, so that the Jews kill their own god/savior.

Koyaanisqatsi

The current remnant, yes. And an argument can be made that it is still just as powerful in that hundreds of millions of its "citizens" all across the globe obey its edicts and pay their taxes on a weekly basis; they're just called "tithes."

Biff the unclean

Not very well, but they at least have something. Robin Hood is traced to Robyn Hode, son of Adam Hode, husband of Matilda. He was from Wakefield and was for a time a yeoman of King Edward II. Records show he earned 3 pence a day which was a substantial sum at the time.
Arthur is even sketchier but the historic Arthur’s name was Rigothamus Artorius who was a warlord in Armorica in the 470’s CE.

spamandham

...which makes little sense if any of this actually happened, but makes perfect sense from the perspective that the entire passion was derived from mixing together Psalm 22 with Isaiah 53 while sprinkling in pagan symbolism of a cross and a god who rises from the dead.

So sure, it's possible that there was some Jesus character who was killed by Rome, but it certainly isn't necessary, and if there was, then you have to explain why the details of his actual death were replaced with mystical symbolism by the very cult that is said to have sprung up around him. It just doesn't make a lot of sense without a whole lot of speculation to harmonize it.

But then it wouldn't be a mystical reinterpretation of the old testament. An important detail of the FJ position is not simply that it's a work of fiction, but that it's a mystical interpretation of Jewish scriptures, that happens to be a work of fiction.

It's not coincidental that the story appears scripted, if in fact it was.

Koyaanisqatsi

I disagree, but go on...

Well, other than the fact that neither actually can be mixed and that's one of the tell-tale signs that Mark was written by a non-Jew who evidently only comprehended the first century equivalent of the Cliff's Notes to the Torah, why mix Psalm 22 and Isaiah 53 together and sprinkle in pagan symbolism of a cross and a god who rises from the dead if the point is to create an anti-Judaic cult from the ground up; i.e. a fiction rather than an altered mythology? Just to appeal to the fringe, non-orthordox "Hellenized" Jews that did not represent any kind of direct threat to the Roman occupation of Jerusalem? Or to the Gentiles that didn't represent any threat at all?

Or are you saying that the fiction was created hundreds of years later and not as most scholars attribute to at least Paul and Mark; say under Constantine?

I'm not arguing necessity; I'm arguing likely real world deconstruction of obvious Roman propaganda and how it could be traced back to any semblance of reality.

When would the total fiction have been written and verbally disseminated and why? If the original intention behind creating an entire pro-Roman, anti-Judaic fiction cult extention/revision of Judaism wasn't to undermine Judaism by the Romans during a time of Jewish revolt, then who wrote it and why?

In Paul's writings you can plainly see how he labors at convincing and manipulating and changing his story (aka, "Jesus' story") to hook converts; converts that do not even buy the totality of what he's selling. You can see the desperation of the attempt to blame the killing of Jesus on "the Jews" (always plural, non-specific) while at the same time if inadvertantly exonerating the Romans. Why the total fiction of Paul's letters revealing his character flaws and lack of ability to convince and admition that he would lie to do so if there was no Paul actually trying to convince anyone as a "double agent"?

You can actually see him plotting and planning as he implements his anti-Judaic agenda, promoting himself more than any Jesus mythos, manipulating and angling himself to be the "humble" high servant and master. He's hiding in plain sight.

Why, if there weren't an existing need to intervene and subvert or otherwise channel the beliefs of such a movement away from hating the Romans and toward hating "the Jews"?

I'm sorry, but that's pure Machiavelli; Goebbels; Nixon; Rove; Cheney; Carville; you name it. And I would argue pure Roman; the archetypes for all subsequent Western governance and political machinations and, again, the victors who re-write the history. But that's the distinction; re-write, not necessarily re-create.

Indeed, if one imagines Paul to be the Karl Rove of his day, perhaps my point will be driven home?

I thought I did. An actual event happened; an actual popular insurrectionist leader was crucified for sedition against Rome by the Romans; by Pilate. His public death sentence included appropriate insurrectionist-oriented mockery meant to be a horrific message to all other such would be kings as crucifixion was designed to be.

His "cell" was obivously disrupted by his capture and trial and subsequent death and they fled, finding safe harbor among friends to the insurrectionist movement. Sound familiar?

While they regroup and recruit, they start telling stories about their fallen leader; the first myths arise. They're all Jews, so questions about Jewish messiah prophecy are raised. He died on a cross, is that like he died hanging on a tree? Could he have been a messenger from God? He was, after all, a Rabbi and a humble son of a carpenter, I hear. Surely he was some sort of messenger sent from Jehovah to strike down our enemies?

Insert all martyr mythology heavily influenced by Jewish prophecy myths. This would have been, after all, a popular, raddical Jewish Rabbi killed by the enemies of the Jewish people who preached that everyone was the son of God (if you believe Thomas) and therefore inherently free and that no man was a slave to the Romans.

Remember who we would be talking about here in the audience of any alleged surviving "disciples" who were actually members of a "terrorist/freedom fighter" underground movement against the Roman yolk. They would believe anything such "freedom fighters" would tell them. Again, sound familiar?

Hell, by the time of Paul and especially Mark (some thirty to forty years after any actual crucifixion) the entire "Christ" mythology could have been and most likely was just percolating under the surface; again with Paul coming in to augment it and ostensibly organizing it into a Roman shape before it had time to fully coalesce in the minds of profoundly ignorant dessert nomads that the "disciples" first recruited.

Stories had sprung up and been embellished about all of the incredible Old Testament things this martyr--this Jewish messiah sent by Jehovah to destroy the Romans, the enemy of Jehovah's chosen people--had done.

Makes sense. The disciples were, of course, Jewish first and foremost, so any stories they would tell about their fallen martyr would naturally take on Jewish archetypes; Jewish memes. Not yet coherent, however, until Paul, the Roman Karl Rove infiltrated the movement and took ideological control over it all; focusing it toward an anti-Judaic conclusion to Judaic prophecy already sporadically being tested and applied.

:huh:

Well, speculation is all that we can have in regard to an historic or fictional Jesus either way you slice it and I think I'm slicing it the closest to the bone as possible under the circumstances.

Neither is the NT. Particularly not to any Jew worth his or her flavorless salt .

So, if Mark was actually written around 70 C.E. and Paul's writings can be accurately dated to around 63-65 C.E., who the hell were they writing these fictions for, if not to undermine Judaism in a classically Roman, propagandist, anti-Judaic way?

Except that it isn't. Mark is so blatantly non-Jewish and gets so many obvious things wrong about Jewish prophecy it's not even funny. And, again, if it's all just an appeal to the Hellenized Greek Jews, what's the point? To make them pro-Roman?

I don't doubt that it was. I only posit that it necessarily was in order to revise what had by then become an anti-Roman "jihad" movement due to the fact that they fucked up and publicly humiliated/tortured a beloved leader that the Romans, of which, in their Imperial Ignorance/Arrogance, didn't fully realize the consequences until it was too late.

And then they had to do something and that something started with basic military "black ops" of infiltrate and propagandize; i.e., what we call "spin," or, in Vietnam, "winning of hearts and minds."

IOW, Mark, for a tortured analogy, represented the leaflets we drop as a last resort in the months before we send in the Stealth Bombers and clusterfuck the indigenous population into submission.

Historically learned by? The Romans? I would obviously argue, "yep."

:huh:

ETA: We also did the exact same thing to the native American Indians; destroy their religion and their hearts and minds will follow. Now, where would a predominantly Christian ethos have derived the idea of subverting and destroying a "conquered" people's religion prior to finally just wiping them out and dissipating them to the four "ungodly" corners of the nation if not innately from what the lies of the NT reveal and the subsequent lesson of the destruction of the Temple by the Romans (who, again, should have been the losers if actual Jewish prophecy had come true) confirm?

aa5874

You mean co-incidental events occured and that the story of Jesus, so-called son of God, was based on these co-incidences.

I don't know if you are aware that Josephus, in 'Wars of the Jews', claimed that John the Baptist was executed because it was feared he would cause an insurrection. Josephus also claimed many people were crucified by the Romans, even three of his friends were crucified and he managed to get one revived.

And if all the writings of Josephus is read, it can be seen that a story about Jesus could have been fabricated using his knowledge of Galilee and the surrounding region, the experiences of Josephus himself, his knowledge of the high priests, the Pharisees and Saducees. Josephus also wrote about the rulers and kings of the Jews, however, he failed to mention anyone named Jesus the son of Joseph or Mary who was deified and called The King of the Jews and was crucified.

Biff the unclean

That would make a lot of sense except we don’t have a humiliated beloved leader who this might be.

Maybe I’m just looking at this with my zoologist glasses on. But in zoology when you take a legend of an animal and deconstruct it, filtering out what is pure fantasy and saving only the parts that are possible in a given environment and come up with an historic creature this is called crypto-zoology and it’s pseudoscience.
You can do field research and find an actual animal that fits the legend. The coelacanth springs to mind. But you can’t actually deduce one from a legend.

You need to actually find historic Robyn Hode and be able to compare his history with the Robin Hood stories; you cannot just deduce his existence from them.

Historic Jesus has been arrived at by the very same method that historic big foot has.

spamandham

Who says the idea was to create an anti-judaic cult? The idea is that the original concepts were an attempt at syncretization, not division.

From a nonreligious perspective, a forshadowing of an event is strong evidence that at least that part of the story was written after the event. Jesus provides forshadowing of the fall of the temple. But since the forshadowing seems to be integral to the story rather than an afterthought, this indicates the story was concocted after the fall of the temple. Since the first gospel fragments show up around the mid 2nd century, this indicates the ORIGINAL story was concocted sometime after 70 CE, but well enough before 150 CE to allow for the various other known gospels to have been generated at least in part. If I were a betting man, I'd guess that the fall of the temple is what spawned the original story. The urgency of some of Jesus' passages would indicate the story was written in close proximity to the fall.

Further, the Gospels seem to be based off a prior written source, not a verbal tradition. The idea is that some joker wrote a book, which basically created/coopted a new religion, L. Ron Hubbard style.

Paul is not involved in the gospel story. His beliefs could have been predecessors to the story (i.e., the story was influenced by them), or the other way around. The historical concensus is that Paul wrote in the mid first century. I see no inconsitency with that and the FJ position, since Paul says virtually nothing about Jesus. If Paul did live in the mid 1st century, as is generally accepted, then we know Paul did talk about Jesus the Christ, who was crucified for the salvation of man. Under this scenario, it seems likely the original author of the gospel Jesus story borrowed from whatever concepts of Christ were already floating around. I'm sure others here will point out that the evidence supporting Paul in the first century assumes a HJ, and is thus in question, but I'm not going to propose that.

The theory is that there is a work that preceded the gospels, which was a work of actual fiction, and that Jesus as we know him is a fictional character. This does not imply the author invented all these ideas wholesale.

This could support the idea that Paul is anti-Jew, and it could support the idea that Paul is angling to make himself the return of Jesus, and it could support the idea that Paul is actually the author of Christianity. That which proves too much proves nothing.

All this is certainly possible, but now we have to argue either 'coincidence' or 'self fulfilling prophecy' regarding Psalm 22 and Isaiah 53. Are the allusions back to these simply coincidence as far as you are concerned?

The Jesus character himself indicates this is all just an allusion back to Psalm 22 in his final words on the cross. How can you simply ignore this blatant attempt by the author to tell you where the story came from!?

Koyaanisqatsi

No, I mean what I've written; that an insurrectionist leader named Yeshua/Jesus was killed and martyred by the Romans and it backfired, leading to the eventual need on behalf of the Romans to instigate ideological damage control as a second stage effort, before inevitably concluding, "Just kill them all."

Basically.

It's a theory that attempts--at its heart--to apply actual human "psycho-history" (to borrow from Asimov) to the mythology.

Look, people are people and evolution isn't linear; at least not on the comparatively blink of a timeline we're encompassing in all of this. Look at our current "belief" status; our present cult "alert" level. It's orange, which means 90% of the entire global population still believes in Santa Clause in one form or another.

How is that qualitatively different from a mere two thousand orbits around the sun ago? The same amount of believers that exist today existed back then, give or take more believers back then.

And what do we see in the majority of believers today? Well, judging purely from those that voted in the last election, I'd say they aren't ignorant enough to accept a total fiction, but they are ignorant enough to not be aware of how they're being manipulated into accepting a total fiction based on partial truths.

Until the Bush cabal, of course, in which case we're talking about a penultimate shift/inevitable conclusion of the lies that started some five thousand orbits around the sun ago.

Not to mention that Josephus was a member of the Jewish insurrectionist movement in the late 60's C.E. before he was captured and miraculously "turned" into a Roman glorifier and given a veritable Roman paradise to live in, which is when and where he wrote and not before.

Make's one wonder if he was Mark, or at least Mark's "Deep Throat." And it also makes one wonder if perhaps he didn't want to keep the fact that he was a "disciple" (aka, "terrorist") of the second (or maybe first) generation of the actual Jesus movement a secret from his now Roman benefactors in his late, "turncoat" age when he wrote his memoirs of those earlier days? You know?

Maybe, just maybe, the same kind of socio-political/personal "demonic" pressures that prevent even retired ex-Presidents and statesmen from telling the whole, unimitigated truth in their memoirs about their actual affiliations and associations might have been upper most in Benedict Arnold.....sorry....Josephus' time?

And maybe, just maybe, since he was a part of the San Hedrin of Jerusalem prior to his enlistment in the revolution against the Roman occupiers in 67 C.E. he knew that the San Hedrin did indeed betray the young insurrectionist leader and turned him over to the Romans (or thought they did) as a political move to keep the peace?

And maybe, just maybe, he watched, or was told by his father, or brother, or Uncle, or older friend, or mentor about how the Romans tortured and crucified this popular, brave freedom fighter betrayed by the San Hedrin (aka, "his own people") and that got picked up by whoever Mark was as something Mark could use in his propaganda? After all, Josephus clearly and mysteriously renounced his Judaism apparently while incarcerated in a Roman P.O.W. prison just prior to writing his histories, so is it any shock that he might either protect his "good" name one way or the other; either by selling out, or by omitting any reference to his actual martyrd hero, or both?

I agree that he was a man who perhaps was uniquely qualified to fill in any missing gaps in Mark's revisionist history propaganda, but it's also possible that he was a man who could also lay some rather obvious "Jewish" traps within that narrative and perhaps that, too, is "stripped down" evidence of a revisionist take on actual events around a real man (not a god; just a man) named Yeshua who was crucified by the Romans?

Seems entirely plausible to me, no matter how you slice the actual Josephus .

Tiberius

The question shouldn't be "Why would the disciples die for a lie?"

The question should be "Why would people say the disciples died for a lie?"

When the question is phrased like this, the answer becomes very easy.

Why would people say the disciples died for a lie? To add a feel of authenticity.