bacht

What's so complicated about the Golden Rule? A child can understand it. What's so complicated about honesty? Nothing, it's just hard to do. Morality isn't hard to explain, it's hard to practice. Siddhartha was more of a genius than Jesus imo, his message was truly universal (and practical).

The early Catholics had the right message at the right time: salvation plus Jewish ethics. The Hellenized Romans were ready for this. If anyone was brilliant it was the 2nd C church fathers who smelled a new phenomenon and created the official gospel.

gupwalla

Fascinating suggestion. I think it would be more likely to happen in the oral tradition as Aramaic gets translated into Greek, and then Greek gets backtranslated into Aramaic, and so forth. By the time this game of telephone makes a few circles around Palestine, one title has become three, and after a few more cycles the original title had been transferred to a place name.

Fenris_Wulf

I am assuming Aramaic as the original idea was created via exegesis of the Hebrew scriptures. At its earliest core the Jesus myth seems to have originated in Palestine and spread as an idea. The whole gospel tradition comes late enough for the two varients to have seperated and each achieved a life of their own (Jesus the Christ v. Jesus the Nazorene) In this case I would argue that even Paul was latish vis a vis the formulation of the Christ concept.

(sorry if not clear...typing in truck)

No Robots

You're missing the point. Christ is the anti-moralist, the nihilist and spiritual anarchist whose life was a revolt against every attempt to coerce the individual conscience. Those of us who sincerely seek inner freedom can do no better than to attach ourselves to this man and his project of human emancipation.

It is Buddha who is the mythological figure, not Christ. Buddhism does not open the way to spiritual/intellectual freedom, but confines it to formalism and ritual. The churches tried to do the same with Christ, but they have failed, as will their secularist inheritors.

Toto

This is not the position of any mythicist, and your insults are not appropriate for this forum.

The position of a "Jesus agnostic" might be that since there is no credible source of information, that you cannot claim that Jesus existed with any reasonable degree of certainty.

Mythicists base their case on positive indications that early Christianity started with a spiritual savior.

Your position seems to be that you trust people who call themselves experts.

Fenris_Wulf

exactly my thought pending Spin's answer on the probability. I think paul was among the first to date the story to "the time of Pilate" based on the seven weeks of years. If so he must have been late enough to make that phrase sensible

sharrock

Yeah, all the people who lived prior to the "extraordinary man" presumably knew nothing, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hillel_the_Elder included.

No Robots

John Cournos, an Orthodox Jew from Czarist Russia, hated both Christ and Christians, until he read the New Testament for himself, and came to see that "Russian Christianity", so-called, had little in common with the teachings of Jesus. He later wrote an "Open Letter to Jews and Christians", from which the following excerpts are taken:

There is a fundamental, dignified reason for the Jewish reclamation of Jesus. A very simple, very honest reason. And that is that Jesus was a Jew--the best of Jews.

That Jesus was essentially and even quintessentially a Jew, must not for an instant be lost sight of. Jesus was not only a Jew. He was the apex and acme of Jewish teaching, which began with Moses and ran the entire evolving gamut of kings, teachers, prophets, and rabbis--David and Isaiah and Daniel and Hillel--until their pith and essense crystalized in this greatest of all Jews.

For a Jew, therefore, to forget that Jesus was a Jew, and to deny him, is to forget and deny all the Jewish teaching that was before Jesus; it is to reject the Jewish heritage, to betray what was best in Israel.

Our rabbis should frankly and openly affirm that Christ is our own, our very own, flesh of our flesh, and bone of our bone, and he came not "to destroy the Law or the prophets... but to fulfill." He is our prophet, our greatest prophet.

show_no_mercy

Pseudo-Paul places Jesus during the tenure of Pilate in the Pastoral Epistles. I think that it's Mark who actually is the first witness that we have that places Jesus during Pilate's prefecture.

I'm not sure how the NZR could make sense of the situation. Maybe it might make sense of Matt (and subsequent witnesses) to use ΝΑΖΩΡΑΙΟΣ with its connection with oil -- as a misspelling of Nazirite -- but I'm not sure how it fits in Mark's Nazarenos.

I think that's the bigger question: what is a Nazarene?

bacht

Okay, so you're a gnostic. You've perceived the esoteric message hidden from the masses. Congratulations.

There's no such thing as perfect freedom. We are social animals, we can't survive alone outside human society, and we consciously and unconsciously conform to varying degrees.

The real freedom is freedom from ignorance. I don't see how Jesus especially advanced this cause in his exoteric teachings.