Freethought & Rationalism Archive

mata leao · 10-29-2005, 09:39 PM

spin, if as you say, "there is NO way of getting past the problem" then why are you here? Its saturday night: if I knew to an absolute intellectual certainty there really was NO way of getting past the problem, then I would be chasing blonds/brunettes/red heads,etc...... problem solved Q.E..D. /fini!/Out of Ammunition-God Save the Queen!/ REcall all the missionaries, shut down the Christian medical clinics,shut down the Christian orphanages and feeding centers , scrape those damn Jesus fish decals off all our bumpers!, shut down all the seminaries, .... no more military chaplians(sorry boys, no sermon before battle!)....News Flash: Scholars have now decided that the most influential human being in world history-Jesus Christ- never even existed.

mata leao · 10-29-2005, 09:42 PM

apologies to all: I will go to the library and see if I can find any books or articles which support the concept that Jesus Christ might have existed. The library is closed right now but I will go tomorrow.

spin · 10-29-2005, 09:59 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by mata leao

spin, if as you say, "there is NO way of getting past the problem" then why are you here?

Some people like fast cars. I like ancient history.

Quote:

Originally Posted by mata leao

Its saturday night: if I knew to an absolute intellectual certainty there really was NO way of getting past the problem, then I would be chasing blonds/brunettes/red heads,etc...... problem solved Q.E..D. /fini!/Out of Ammunition-God Save the Queen!/ REcall all the missionaries, shut down the Christian medical clinics,shut down the Christian orphanages and feeding centers , scrape those damn Jesus fish decals off all our bumpers!, shut down all the seminaries, .... no more military chaplians(sorry boys, no sermon before battle!)....News Flash: Scholars have now decided that the most influential human being in world history-Jesus Christ- never even existed.

What happened to the Jim Baekker stickers? What about Peter Popoff posters? How about your Jimmy Swaggart inflatable dolls? Commercial interests know how to make money. They'll happily sell lies to make money.

Recall witches of the Albanian mother Teresa ilk. That was all hype. If there are medical clinics, it is because clinics are needed. If some of the staff are christian, then as long as they do their job, what's the problem? Many people involved in doing good around the world don't need to be blackmailed into doing it because of some god. Doing good is a species end in itself.

spin

youngalexander · 10-29-2005, 11:05 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by mata leao

Now what was that OP again..ah yes..."An argument that skeptics shouldnt make:that Jesus didnt exist"......okay:The proponent argues Jesus did not exist: PROVE IT!

Have you actually read the OP? It, ie. noah's post, does not propose that 'Jesus did not exist'. On the contrary, he is reporting that another skeptic has argued that skeptics should not make such a proposal. He, noah agrees with this and puts forward some arguments for a HJ. The skeptic in question is quoted as supporting his proposal and also putting forward some arguments in favor of HJ.

Thus the only proposal is that 'skeptics should not propose that Jesus did not exist'. For the reason that noah gave, and that I endorsed earlier, that it is incumbant upon the claimants of HJ to prove their case, I am inclined to agree with the proposal.

Now, do you wish to discuss the proposal, or put another before us?

Vorkosigan · 10-30-2005, 05:25 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by mata leao

uh Spin, this is the second time now you have tried to lecture me on posting, ...please keep your posting theories to yourself. second, Vorkosigan can speak for himself, I dont think he needs you to tell me what he was/is thinking. And yes, I am responding directly to Vork. And yes, in every profession, including Middle Eastern studies, there are majority (scholar) positions as reflected in the peer reviewed articles and abstracts and as held among tenured academic professionals sophisticated in the field.And yes, that is the prevailing majority position : Jesus was a historical person.

Let's agree that Jesus' historical existence is the prevailing position. Let's go past that. I have asked you for the methodological basis for that assertion. I will gladly aver that no scholars anywhere believe Jesus to be mythical, if you will but supply me with a reliable historical methodology for making the determination that Jesus existed as a historical person.

Vorkosigan

Malachi151 · 10-30-2005, 07:10 AM

I have come around more and more to the camp of not believing that there ever was any "historical Jesus".

I see Jesus much more like King Aurther. I think that KA legend has a lot in common with the Jesus legend really. JC is like KA or even Paul Bunyan.

How do we define what "real person" means anyway?

First of all Jesus was like the second most common Hebrew name in the region at the time I have heard, as determined by the Roman census data, and death accounts, etc, so that people names Jesus lived at the time gos without a doubt.

Is the name really important though?

It can just as easily be that the name was later given to a leader of a movement whose name was not really Jesus.

For one thing I think that the fact that Jesus was one of the most popular names, reveals to me that the name Jesus could have been chosen to represent "Everyman".

The name could have been chosen to signify that he was "one of the people, a common man".

It's like if you wanted to create a movement today and you wanted it to be a popular movement, wouldn't you pick "Bob" as the name of your leader?

So anyway, who would Jesus be, and in what capacity would the account of Jesus in the Bible match up to the "real" person?

Its not like a king, where they had an offical capacity. We can go back and see that yes King X sat on the throne from 500CE to 520CE. We can also determine that various legends about the king are true or false.

"The king killed a dragon with his bare hands" - False
"The king saved the kingdom from beng taken over by demons in 510" - False, but based on the fact that the king led an army againt an invading group of blue painted Celtic warriors.

So, we can do this type of thing in some cases, but what do we do with Jesus and how do we say "he was real"?

Is "Jesus" real only if all of the stories in the Bible attributed to him are 100% true.

If that is the case then we know that Jesus is not real.

The most obvious fake story about "Jesus" is the story of his birth. This just has all the hallmarks of a hero legend. Even if there was a "real Jesus", someone who became a leader, its obvious that a story was made up about his origins after the became will known.

So, I think that any scholar can pretty easily count the Jesus birth story as a complete fabrication that was totally made up much later. Even trying to explaoin the story with things like "maybe Mary just got pregnant and lied about it not to get in trouble" don't make sense, because in all reality there would have been no attention paid to this Jesus person at the time of birth in the first place.

What we also know is that the "Christian" movement was a braod based movement at the supposed time of "Jesus". Even the story of Jesus makes this clear because of John the Baptist.

Also, the first accounts of a Jewish cult that talked about Heaven and salvation preceed the accounts of Jesus, so we know that many of the ideas attributed to "Jesus" were in the process of forming in Jewish society prior to "Jesus".

So, again, how do we identify a "real Jesus"? Yes, there were men walking around saying the types of things that are attributed to Jesus, we do know that that is true.

We do know that there were many people claiming to be miracle workers.

We do know that Jews cast out many people for being false prophets in the centuries surroundig the "time of Jesus."

We do know that there were Jews who cooperated with the Romans and acted as governors over the Jewish territories and that these people brought various Jewish dissenters to Roman courts to be tried for various crimes from theft to treason to heresy, etc.

I mean, so basiclaly we know that all of the various elements of the story of Jesus were things that were really taking place at the time.

How can we say that these stories account or do not account for the real life of an individual?

Also, if the story of Jesus birth is not true, and the miracles attributed to the charcter of Jesus are not true, then is it really "Jesus"?

I think that its safe to say that the figure described in the Bible as Jesus Christ NEVER EVER existed.

Now, did a normal human being exist that led a religious movement in Israel around 33 BCE? Yeah, that probably goes wihtout saying.

Was that person's name Jesus?

Maybe, or maybe not. Even if it wasn't, was the "fictional Jesus" Jesus based on the life of that individual? Maybe. Was the fictional Jesus based on the actions of several different individuals that were a part of a movement of religous dissent in Israel and Rome? Maybe.

Or, was the real "Christian movement" something altogether different that really began hundreds of years after the so-called time of Jesus and that movement just created Jesus as its hero leading character, like so many other movements have done (Romulus and Remus for example, King Aurther for example, Beowolf for example).

I also doubt the real existance of Moses too BTW. There is even less evidence for Moses than there is for Jesus really and more reason to think that he was also made up. Not the least of which the fact that according to the story he was adopted by a Pharoah and led a rebellion against the kingdom, which would have been noted if a "son of the King" had rebelled and led a mass exodus of slaves against his own "father".

Also, the name Moses is supposedly Hebrew, which doesn't make any sense since his name would have to have been Egyptian, unless he took a new name, but the story of Moses claims that the wife of the Pharoah is the one who gave him the name, so the whole thing is justa crock if you has mee, Moses is just another Romulus and Remus.

NewtonPooton · 10-30-2005, 07:34 AM

wow... this goes perfectly right after the false jesus birth post...
yay! i can use it!

it's just a cut and paste... but good stuff none-the-less...

http://www.geocities.com/paulntobin/paganrising.html

Quote:

The Pagan Origins of the Resurrection Myth

The new cult of the dead and risen messiah originally had a purely Jewish following. It was when the apostle Paul (not one of the original disciples of Jesus) started preaching around AD40 that the number of Gentile convert starts to swell. We have seen that in the letters of Paul the belief about Jesus' death and resurrection was very basic and undeveloped. In his first epistle to the Corinthians (15:3-8), all he said was that Jesus died, buried and rose again on the third day in accordance with the scriptures. Paul further added that Jesus was seen by Peter, the apostles, James and finally by himself. Nothing was mentioned as to the day of the week that Jesus rose. Nothing was mentioned of the discovery of an empty tomb by the woman. Where did all these ideas come from if they were not historical?
As with the case of the nativity, these ideas came from pagan beliefs that were permeating the world of the early Gentile Christians. The new religion preached by Paul had to compete with the class of mystery religions that were popular among the Gentiles during that period. [1]

Christianity's biggest rival during the first few centuries of its existence was Mithraism. Mithraism, the most popular of the mystery religions, had Persian roots and involves the worship of the Sun God, Mithra. [2] During this time, Mithraism was virtually the official religion of the Roman Empire, being very popular especially with the military. [3]

Many rituals and beliefs of Mithraism seemed so closely related to the Christian one that it becomes impossible to deny its influence on nascent Christianity. The Mithraists had a special day dedicated to their god. It was the first day of the week, which they appropriately called Sun-day, the "day of our Lord". [4] Mithra was the God of the upper and nether world and it is he who will judge men's deeds. [5] The Jewish thinker, Philo had already identified the Logos with the Sun, it was therefore natural and inevitable that the early Christians should identify Jesus with such a symbol. Sunday became established as the Lord's Day for the Christians as well. [6] From this observance of Sunday, the myth eventually evolved to connect the rising of Jesus with that day. It is worth noting that the Mithraist ritual involve the liturgical representation of the death, burial (also in a rock tomb!) and resurrection of the god Mithra. [7]

Other contemporary mystery religions no doubt contributed to the evolution of Christian mythology. The Syrian cult of Adonis also had a large following during the time of early Christianity. Adonis, which means The Lord (Hebrew: Adonai), was represented in the liturgy as dying and then rising again on the third day. And in this liturgy it was the women who mourned his death and who found him risen on the third day. [8]

The Egyptian cult of Osiris had a similar belief; for it was Osiris who was dead and rose again on the third day. [9]

Early Christian liturgy was also clearly absorbed and imported from the mystery religions. The Greco-Roman cult of Dionysius had their God, born of the virgin, Semele, being torn to pieces by the Titans. He was then resurrected by his mother. In commemorating his sacrificial death, the devotees ate bread and wine to represent his body and blood. The Mithraist too had a eucharistic celebration very similar to the Christian one. And it was also Mithraism who first came up with the sign of the cross, made on the forehead. It was the supreme symbol of their belief. The worship of Osiris too involve veneration of the Osirian cross, the emblem of their god. [10]

In fact the beliefs, rituals and liturgy of the mystery cults, which antedated Christianity [a], so closely paralleled the Christian ones that the early Church Fathers insisted that the devil must have had a hand in these cults! [11]

The historical origin of the central events of Christianity did not begin with the actual resurrection of a Galilean Jew. It began when Jewish religious philosophy was grafted onto Greco-Roman paganism.

Notes

a. A typical fundamentalist apologetic sleight of hand is to claim that it was the pagan mysteries who copied the Christian story. In The Case for Christ, Lee Strobel quoted a fundamentalist apologist stating that "given the timing involved" it should be the pagans who plagiarized Christianity. [12] Neither Strobel nor his chosen scholar, gave any further evidence for their claim.
Yet this claim is demonstrably false- for a couple of reasons:

It is well known that these mystery religion preceded Christianity by at least a few centuries. The myth of Adonis was known to the Greeks as early as the fifth century BCE. The Egyptian myth of Osiris dates back to at least 4,000 BCE and was recorded in detail by the Greek biographer Plutarch (c46-120 CE). The Persian Sun-God Mithras was mentioned in the writings of the Greek historian Herodotus (c480-c245 BCE). The cult of Mithraism reached Rome in the first century BCE. [13]

The way the early church fathers defended against the mystery religions showed that they knew these pagan myths antedated the Christian ones. Justin Martyr (c160-165) claimed that the devil plagiarized Christianity by anticipation with the pagan religions in order to lead people from the true faith. He claimed the myth of the virgin birth of Perseus, an ancient Greek legend that preceded Christianity, was pre-copied by the "deceiving serpent" (Dialogue with Trypho: 70). Similarly he asserted that the cultic rites of Mithraism had a diabolical origin (Apology 1:66). Tertulian (c160-c225) made the same claim: that it was the devil that provided this "mimicry". That the church fathers would resort to the absurd theory of pre-mimicry (i.e. the copy coming before the original) means that they could not make the claim that the pagan mystery religions copied from Christianity! Why couldn't they? Because it must have been well known to them and to their audience which came first! [14]

mata leao · 10-30-2005, 10:00 AM

Malachi 151, you say the idea of Jesus as a historical person is analogous to the Paul Bunyon myth. I assume you mean the Paul Bunyon who had a giant Blue Ox named Babe, etc etc. Can you prove this or is this just your belief?

Malachi151 · 10-30-2005, 02:32 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by mata leao

Malachi 151, you say the idea of Jesus as a historical person is analogous to the Paul Bunyon myth. I assume you mean the Paul Bunyon who had a giant Blue Ox named Babe, etc etc. Can you prove this or is this just your belief?

I'm just saying that the Jesus myth is one that is like a half true myth. I mena, yeah, there could have beena guy named Paul Bunyon who was a lumberjack, but does how does that relate to the myth.

Or, there were lumberjacks that were big and strong and had oxen, again, does this mean that Paul Bunyon was real, or in what way does the myth reflect a reality?

All myths reflect soem reality, but to what extent can you say that a description of a person in text "describes a real person that existed"?

RUmike · 11-08-2005, 08:44 PM

I think what convinced me personally of Jesus' likelihood as an historical figure was the fact that his followers claimed he was crucified. If people were trying to invent a Messiah, I see it as incredibly unlikely that they would have said he died by crucifixion. That fact alone convinced most Jews of the 1st century that Jesus could not have by any possibility been the Messiah, and rightly so.

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10-29-2005, 09:39 PM	#41
mata leao Banned Join Date: Oct 2005 Location: tampa,florida Posts: 342	spin, if as you say, "there is NO way of getting past the problem" then why are you here? Its saturday night: if I knew to an absolute intellectual certainty there really was NO way of getting past the problem, then I would be chasing blonds/brunettes/red heads,etc...... problem solved Q.E..D. /fini!/Out of Ammunition-God Save the Queen!/ REcall all the missionaries, shut down the Christian medical clinics,shut down the Christian orphanages and feeding centers , scrape those damn Jesus fish decals off all our bumpers!, shut down all the seminaries, .... no more military chaplians(sorry boys, no sermon before battle!)....News Flash: Scholars have now decided that the most influential human being in world history-Jesus Christ- never even existed.

10-29-2005, 09:42 PM	#42
mata leao Banned Join Date: Oct 2005 Location: tampa,florida Posts: 342	apologies to all: I will go to the library and see if I can find any books or articles which support the concept that Jesus Christ might have existed. The library is closed right now but I will go tomorrow.

10-30-2005, 07:10 AM	#46
Malachi151 Veteran Member Join Date: Jul 2003 Location: Colorado Posts: 8,674	I have come around more and more to the camp of not believing that there ever was any "historical Jesus". I see Jesus much more like King Aurther. I think that KA legend has a lot in common with the Jesus legend really. JC is like KA or even Paul Bunyan. How do we define what "real person" means anyway? First of all Jesus was like the second most common Hebrew name in the region at the time I have heard, as determined by the Roman census data, and death accounts, etc, so that people names Jesus lived at the time gos without a doubt. Is the name really important though? It can just as easily be that the name was later given to a leader of a movement whose name was not really Jesus. For one thing I think that the fact that Jesus was one of the most popular names, reveals to me that the name Jesus could have been chosen to represent "Everyman". The name could have been chosen to signify that he was "one of the people, a common man". It's like if you wanted to create a movement today and you wanted it to be a popular movement, wouldn't you pick "Bob" as the name of your leader? So anyway, who would Jesus be, and in what capacity would the account of Jesus in the Bible match up to the "real" person? Its not like a king, where they had an offical capacity. We can go back and see that yes King X sat on the throne from 500CE to 520CE. We can also determine that various legends about the king are true or false. "The king killed a dragon with his bare hands" - False "The king saved the kingdom from beng taken over by demons in 510" - False, but based on the fact that the king led an army againt an invading group of blue painted Celtic warriors. So, we can do this type of thing in some cases, but what do we do with Jesus and how do we say "he was real"? Is "Jesus" real only if all of the stories in the Bible attributed to him are 100% true. If that is the case then we know that Jesus is not real. The most obvious fake story about "Jesus" is the story of his birth. This just has all the hallmarks of a hero legend. Even if there was a "real Jesus", someone who became a leader, its obvious that a story was made up about his origins after the became will known. So, I think that any scholar can pretty easily count the Jesus birth story as a complete fabrication that was totally made up much later. Even trying to explaoin the story with things like "maybe Mary just got pregnant and lied about it not to get in trouble" don't make sense, because in all reality there would have been no attention paid to this Jesus person at the time of birth in the first place. What we also know is that the "Christian" movement was a braod based movement at the supposed time of "Jesus". Even the story of Jesus makes this clear because of John the Baptist. Also, the first accounts of a Jewish cult that talked about Heaven and salvation preceed the accounts of Jesus, so we know that many of the ideas attributed to "Jesus" were in the process of forming in Jewish society prior to "Jesus". So, again, how do we identify a "real Jesus"? Yes, there were men walking around saying the types of things that are attributed to Jesus, we do know that that is true. We do know that there were many people claiming to be miracle workers. We do know that Jews cast out many people for being false prophets in the centuries surroundig the "time of Jesus." We do know that there were Jews who cooperated with the Romans and acted as governors over the Jewish territories and that these people brought various Jewish dissenters to Roman courts to be tried for various crimes from theft to treason to heresy, etc. I mean, so basiclaly we know that all of the various elements of the story of Jesus were things that were really taking place at the time. How can we say that these stories account or do not account for the real life of an individual? Also, if the story of Jesus birth is not true, and the miracles attributed to the charcter of Jesus are not true, then is it really "Jesus"? I think that its safe to say that the figure described in the Bible as Jesus Christ NEVER EVER existed. Now, did a normal human being exist that led a religious movement in Israel around 33 BCE? Yeah, that probably goes wihtout saying. Was that person's name Jesus? Maybe, or maybe not. Even if it wasn't, was the "fictional Jesus" Jesus based on the life of that individual? Maybe. Was the fictional Jesus based on the actions of several different individuals that were a part of a movement of religous dissent in Israel and Rome? Maybe. Or, was the real "Christian movement" something altogether different that really began hundreds of years after the so-called time of Jesus and that movement just created Jesus as its hero leading character, like so many other movements have done (Romulus and Remus for example, King Aurther for example, Beowolf for example). I also doubt the real existance of Moses too BTW. There is even less evidence for Moses than there is for Jesus really and more reason to think that he was also made up. Not the least of which the fact that according to the story he was adopted by a Pharoah and led a rebellion against the kingdom, which would have been noted if a "son of the King" had rebelled and led a mass exodus of slaves against his own "father". Also, the name Moses is supposedly Hebrew, which doesn't make any sense since his name would have to have been Egyptian, unless he took a new name, but the story of Moses claims that the wife of the Pharoah is the one who gave him the name, so the whole thing is justa crock if you has mee, Moses is just another Romulus and Remus.

10-30-2005, 10:00 AM	#48
mata leao Banned Join Date: Oct 2005 Location: tampa,florida Posts: 342	Malachi 151, you say the idea of Jesus as a historical person is analogous to the Paul Bunyon myth. I assume you mean the Paul Bunyon who had a giant Blue Ox named Babe, etc etc. Can you prove this or is this just your belief?

11-08-2005, 08:44 PM	#50
RUmike Regular Member Join Date: Oct 2003 Location: NJ Posts: 491	I think what convinced me personally of Jesus' likelihood as an historical figure was the fact that his followers claimed he was crucified. If people were trying to invent a Messiah, I see it as incredibly unlikely that they would have said he died by crucifixion. That fact alone convinced most Jews of the 1st century that Jesus could not have by any possibility been the Messiah, and rightly so.

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