spin

I must agree with Petergdi. The infidel works from evidence. If you prejudge it, then you can't work with it.


spin

aa5874

Why do you think that you have the "best guesses."? You have just become a victim of your own imagination. You must first provide known historical sources for your Jesus before you can even begin to guess.

aa5874

Abe implies that he is guessing, and has the "best guesses".

avi

Thanks Peter and spin for your comments. I disagree with your assessments.

Abe, here is the proper, creative writing forum, for your thread.

What is an "infidel"? To my mind, if no one else's, the "in" of "infidel" represents "contrary", or "anti", and not "unsure", or "maybe", or "perhaps", or "gosh, could be".

Another way of writing the same concept is to write, "not faithful". A better way, in my opinion, is to write: "without faith". The logic of the word, infidel, is this: a person who does not accept a premise on faith, but rather requires evidence, when seeking to explain some phenomenon.

This is not a knitting club. It is not a gentlemen's club with cigar smoke and leather chairs arranged in front of a fireplace, with elderly men discussing in appropriately hushed tones the recent separatist movements in Eastern India, near the border of Burma. It is most certainly NOT a place "to discuss Biblical criticism and history". This forum, rather, is a fountain of exploration aimed at revealing the untruthfulness of the Bible. There are literally hundreds of web sites devoted to discussing the Bible, from a fidel perspective. This web site is unique in approaching the subject from an infidel perspective.

Hegel, mindful of the traditions of ancient Greece, defined thinking as the act of negating that which is before us. His wonderful metaphor for thinking, a fruit tree, observed in winter, is very appropriate on this day, the first of January. I urge you to read his wonderful analogy to the thought process. We are not here to "discuss" criticism. We are here to criticize.

Abe's contribution, creative, and interesting though it may be, is focused neither on exposing a contradiction within the texts of the new testament, nor on generating a working hypothesis concerning a particular issue from that "sacred" text. His thread is really geared towards self aggrandizement, not exposing a contradiction within the synoptic gospels, or elaborating an alternative explanation for one of the many other texts of the new testament.

If I wrote a new version of Paul Bunyan and Babe the Blue Ox, introducing new gadgets, like chain saws, and fork lifts, and skidders, would that help us to clarify the origin of the legend, or the means whereby the legend spread, or the role of politicians in aiding the spread of the legend?

Finally, I do not believe that I am "prejudging" the evidence. I do not associate Abe's submission as "evidence". His contribution, admittedly skillful, is fiction, not evidence. I find that spin's admonition, while surely correct, is inappropriate in this circumstance. I prefer his bowl of cherries.

Happy new decade;



avi

Solo

Whatever non-mystery hounds were, did they mean the same thing by resurrection as those who believed literally that Mary was a virgin when she gave birth to Jesus ?

But you just quoted a church father who was not very happy that some people had different beliefs about Jesus than the church, namely that he was not conceived by the HOLY GHOST, but that he was a regular pisszeugzusammenstecken-made guy until a pigeon dropped on his head that made him think he was Christ.

Well, that's the problem with your reading my text: I said 'at some later point, the Christian mystery hounds created a tale of the miraculous birth of a "baby Jesus", out of beliefs of midlife spiritual birth. If you had read that sentence carefully you would have seen right away that I have no problem with Cerinthus/Carpocrates et al being Christian mystery hounds.

Good question, aa5874. Better question though, reading the passage of Irenaeus, would be, what sort of experiential evidence made the early or gnostic hounds think that Christ was an impermanent and detachable part of Jesus.

That's one point of view; but again you are presenting a text which contradicts that.

You have just blown my cover, man !

Jiri

Solo

It looks like year-end fire sale of self-respect, spin. :huh:

Remember what the Lord said: "Do not strike or provoke back thoughtlessly: when whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, weigh carefully thy options."

Jiri

spamandham

This is why it's important to try to discern the intents of the authors. If the intent was to record the life of Jesus and puff him up, then you're right, it does't make sense. There's nothing interesting about him once you remove the puffery.

On the other hand, if they are foundational stories....stories invented to explain a cult and its particular beliefs and practices, then there's nothing particularly improbable about the cult having originated with a historical Jesus. On the other hand, he is no longer necessary at that point either.

For example, suppose early Christians engaged in a ritual meal of bread and wine, but no-one really knew the origin of the practice. Well, you just put a contrived explanation into the mouth of Jesus and have him command it to be done and viola! Problem solved.

ApostateAbe

To expose and explain the reasons why the gospels are untrue is a trivially short and easy task, and it is not the point of this forum. I think it is better to take it a step further and find what the most likely truth is. But maybe since it is not the probable truth, only the attempted most likely truth, nobody else here values it, and I guess that is fine. Different people have different values.

aa5874

But, isn't your statement contradictory or illogical ? You seem to be saying that You have produced what is likely NOT probable, but most likely true.

Now, you have invented a most fictionalised or imagination based "Gospel", completely unsupported by any historical sources and using the very Gospels that you have discredited.

Your "Gospel" is BAD NEWS to 21st thinkers and "GOOD NEWS" to the fundamentalists even as far back as the 2nd century.

You have confirmed that there are those who mutilated the Gospels and fabricated their own Jesus.

According to the Church Marcion mutilated gLuke and claimed Jesus was only the Son of a God, but you have mutilated all the Gospels to claim Jesus was a just man.

gurugeorge

But hang on, why should the truth be a naturalised version of the myth?

We have a story about a fantastic being. You need a reason to think that the most reasonable explanation for the existence of the story about a fantastic being is that there was a person who had roughly the same biography, only without the fantastic bits. Why should that be the go-to explanation?

There are other options - have you ruled them out? Clearly, stories about fantastic beings can just made up, and "made up" can cover a multitude of categories in itself. Or the beings and their biographies might be sincerely believed in, but don't exist and never happened. In this plethora of possible explanations for the existence of scraps of texts about a fantastic being, "there was a man who was mythologised" is merely one candidate jostling among many. What are the reasons to think it's the best candidate, the best explanation?

This was highlighted to me just a few minutes ago when I was reading the entry at Vridar about popular novels and the gospels.

I mean WTF? So many of the tropes that are in the Christian story ...

So how could you tell - how could you tell that the Christian story didn't start off as a novel, or was competing as a novel, or in the same literary context as those novels, or ... ?

Another interesting point: if the Christian gospels competed, as it were, in the same milieu, what does that say about them? I mean, suppose the authors were sincerely trying to promote a religious message, but saw fit to promote it in the popular fiction market? (Reminds me a bit of Scientology, actually, the leading figure of whom was a tolerable second-rate s-f writer before he created his cult.)

Anyway, don't want to derail with the novels thing, but it's just an example - it seems we don't even know what the texts actually were. Religious stories promoting a Messiah figure, cast in the forms of Stoic exemplary biographies and popular, Mysteries-themed romantic novels? What?

In which case, if they fit a genre, how much does that tell us about how much truth we can expect to find in them?